Blog Notes: 2

Look at time flying!

(Yes, it’s earlier than last night’s post. So I messed up! Shut up!)

There are now just two days left to this blog!

Soon my frenetic fingers will cease.

Soon!

Wait until Wednesday before midnight!

ECTACO jetBook And ePub

My curiosity won’t let me rest, of course.

I found out the jetBook is also in China, called the Dr. Yi. (I don’t, however, know if this means the jetBook is of Chinese creation. But I wouldn’t be surprised.)

Of particular interest to me is this:

CPU: ARM9 200MHz

Because look at this for the Sony Reader 505:

CPU: Freescale i.MXL, ARM920T core, 150-200 MHz

That says to me the jetBook should have the horsepower needed to deal with ePub files. I had been wondering about that.

Reference: GutenMark

GutenMark Home Page
Attractively formatting Project Gutenberg texts

What is GutenMark?

GutenMark is a command-line tool for automatically creating high-quality HTML or LaTeX markup from Project Gutenberg etexts. As of April 2008, there is also a graphical front-end called GUItenMark that greatly simplifies usage for casual users. Both Windows and Linux ‘x86 are supported. Mac OS X is also supported, though in some respects it lags the others. Limited iPhone support is also possible.

In combination with other freely-available conversion tools GutenMark aims to convert Project Gutenberg etexts into publication-quality Postscript or PDF, for print-on-demand applications. The goal is for this conversion to be completely automatic, without manual markup or editing, but for the forseeable future some manual intervention will almost always be needed—at least, if your standards are at least as high as mine.

I took the Project Gutenberg plain text file of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and ran it through this.

Amazingly, this:

To Sherlock Holmes she is always THE woman.

was transformed to this:

To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman.

As it should be!

I was impressed with the available options and did some light testing. It could be a very useful tool for Project Gutenberg etexts that have only a plain text version available.

On the other hand, I also downloaded the Project Gutenberg HTML of the same Holmes and it was superior.

But this tool remains a very painless way of changing those text files into a format that can then go on to further processing to create an eBook.

Eejit Geeks. Things Should Just Work!

Ectaco Jetbook downloads

I do not know what a line feed, text editor or DRM is, nor do I know how to convert!

I’ve just wasted a good part of two days playing around with various “tools” to create an FB2 (FictionBook) file format eBook.

I’m no novice, but the task defeated me.

The tools were shit.

1) One converter from HTML to FB2 ignored photos and styled text weirdly.

2) An entire program devoted to creating FB2 eBooks was buggy as hell and the files I thought were perfect turned out all FAIL!

3) A desktop FB2 file reader couldn’t display italic text (but it could display JPEGs — go figure!).

All I wanted to do was see one — just one! — FB2 eBook, even if I had to create it myself!

And here, in the above thread, eBook geeks are trying to convince a member of the general reading public to develop some g33k ski77z in order to do some eBook reading.

That’s just half-assed stupid.

That’s like everyone having to be a frikkin financial expert (and I choose that example to rub your FAIL 401K in your face!).

Now just imagine the general public encountering that Zero-G Toilet of Adobe ePub DRM!

That’s just another formula for FAIL!

TNT’s Leverage: The Team

The introductory character titles I couldn’t show in my original post because of the funny revisionism they did with Parker. That would have been a spoiler.

All this for three reasons:

1) You should be watching the series: TNT Tuesdays at 10PM EST

2) In case I’m not able to post this week’s episode on Wednesday

3) To get you to go to producer/creator’s John Rogers’ blog to read the latest post about the series.

Previously here:

Leverage: The Miracle Job
Leverage: The Two Horse Job
Leverage For TNT Has Wrapped!
New Promos For TNT’s Leverage!
Leverage: TNT December 2008
TV Networks Are Using A Leaking Service?
Leverage: The (Leaked) TNT Pilot
Leverage: Coming Soon To TNT
The Lever That Is The Internet

The Monthly Digital Lifeline Bill

Numbers to keep in mind

$260 a month. That’s how much the average US household is spending each month on digital services that did not exist a generation ago. They include: mobile phone, broadband access, cable or satellite television, personal video recording. This number comes from a survey by the Center for Digital Future, a department of the University of Southern California. Even more interesting is the amount of money spent by the poorest households: their monthly bill of digital services isn’t as low as one would imagine: $180. This suggests two thoughts: one, these services are no longer a luxury but have become as basic as a car; two, given this amount of money, hoping to squeeze a few dozens of dollars more per month for content services is unrealistic. Except for highly specialized premium services (almost never paid by the end-user), editorial on the Internet is very likely to remain free. European spending is lower, but catching up. — FF

Emphasis in the original.

Yeah, I can see that.

I know my book spending will go stratospheric when I go all-e.

Why?

That will end the days of my picking up used paperbacks for cheap. Even if eBooks level out to an impulse-buy price, there’d still be no matching a fifty-cent paperback!

Gerry Anderson: Still Screwed By ITV

Gerry Anderson – ”ITV Has Not Supported Me” wmv

Gerry Anderson interviewed on ‘bbc breakfast’

They just did a retrospective of Thunderbirds — showing All About Thunderbirds again — and kicked off a repeat of the entire series itself.

On BBC.

Not on ITV, which owns the series.

How fucked-up is that?

Chronicles Of Depression 2.0: #482: Keiser

Max Keiser: Predicting the collapse of Iceland

Aljazeera re-aired Max’s 2007 prediction of a collapse of the Icelandic economy.

While the program aired in August 2007, it was filmed in April 2007.

Watch for the scene in the Blue Lagoon in which Max predicts a global Depression to be caused when all these debts driven by low interest rates burst.

Emphasis added by me.

It wasn’t just debt — it was outright fraud. Isn’t that correct, Bernie Madoff, you bastard?

Things will get dramatically worse between now and Obama’s Inauguration.

You’ll have to find your Doom fixes elsewhere, however. I won’t be blogging after Wednesday.