Archive for January, 2012

Hiking ebook finished!

Sunday, January 29th, 2012

kindle logoI finished the ebook project! When I started with this, I just got all of the files together and pressed “convert” in Calibre (an ebook manager). That crashed my PRS-T1 though :s.

After the holidays, despite it being too late to be of use now, I still had an itch to scratch. Well, I scratched it :) Took me a while and it got me back into sed-scripting (this page was a wonderful resource). Why sed-scripting? Well, I wanted to basically do “batch”-vi – that is, use the power of search-and-replace with regular expressions over a group of files. Roughly, there are 3 straightforward options: Perl, sed, and awk. Of these, I picked sed — it allows you to just type your regexps just as you would in vi :) Of course, they got a little more complicated after a while:

# row for total distance
/Total distance:<.td>$/ {
	N
	N
	N
	s/\n/ /g
	s#\s*\(Tot.*tance:</td>\) \(.*\)#<tr><td>\1<td>\&nbsp;</td><td>\2</tr>#
}

Not much, just a little. Near the end, several times I figured to be done when the lay-out on the devices themselves would be rather bad. But: no more crashing — definitely an improvement. And then, finally, the last tweaks were made, the last sed-script was run, and it was over! Hooray! To celebrate, I made two versions: one for my Kindle DX version (mobi) and one for my Sony Reader version (epub). (No clue if there’s any specific tweaks Calibre adds based on the device, but you can select specific devices for the “output profile”, and I did.)

If you’re interested in a copy of the book, drop me a line.
And, as a bonus, here’s the cover of the book: a photo of La Palma from the International Space Station.

cover

Tuxguitar working :)

Saturday, January 28th, 2012

playing guitarFor my birthday (a while ago, I admit it :), Aga thought about getting me Guitar Pro – a piece of software that can help you with guitar playing. Somehow. The trial version on Aga’s laptop looked pretty cool, but I had two hesitations:

  1. Will it run under Ubuntu?
    That’s kind of paramount for me…
  2. Will I actually use it?
    If people are going to spend money on my behalf and I get a say in it, I’d like to make sure they get value for money.

The first point is easily settled with a quick Google… except it isn’t. As in: the company says “yes”, plenty of users complain. Hmms. But, in the course of googling, I stumble upon TuxGuitar, a freeware project doing roughly similar things. (Note that development seems to have ceased 3 years ago…). Installed it, but: no sound. For a tablature editor (or any musical score editor, for that matter) lack of sound is of course the death knell. Tweaked around with the various settings, unplugged and replugged cables, but to no avail. Left it alone for a long while, and then realised I didn’t do the obvious: complain to google. I do, and indeed, the first hit solves my problems! Turns out Ubuntu doesn’t come with midi support by default. Makes sense, probably. Anyway, let’s add some!

In a nutshell: install TiMidity, a piece of software so finished it hasn’t been updated since before 2005 ;-). Then, run TuxGuitar, tweak the settings to use a TiMidity midi port as output, test, et voila! (In case of absence of Voila!, choose a different midi port and repeat).

Now to find out what this TuxGuitar thingy actually does

Current project: compile hiking e-book!

Thursday, January 26th, 2012

kindle logoAga likes hiking trips. My kindle DX, awesome though it is, is too heavy and bulky for light-weight travel. So, for our recent visit to the Canary islands (perhaps see a blogpost in the near future), I bought a new reader, the Sony PRS-T1. Extremely lightweight, as it happens (not the reason I bought it — it was the only model the store had that I found acceptable :)

But then, in preparing our trip, Aga found an online hiking guide to La Palma. It is fantastic! It has a lot of info you want when tracking… so how to take that?

I figured to try and convert it into an ebook and take it. Tried, but miserably failed. There was some flash going on on the pages, which crashed the ebook. So, we went without. But ever since then, the idea of having the hiking guide there caught me, and now I’m in the grips of it. While most of it is rather straightforward (basically, cleaning up the HTML and removing cruft), it is quite a bit of work. Or at least, it is the way I’m doing it :)

Still, the project is progressing slowly. Moreover, I’m taking the opportunity to add some notes — e.g. to underline the error found in some maps (they list a mountain hut where there is none, not even a place to get water). Fun!

Will keep you up to date.
PS: Since I’m not looking to infringe upon someone’s copy right, I’ll probably not distribute it publicly.

Happy New Year!

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

A quick look back on 2011: personal highlights.

  • Meeting Aga
  • Visiting Tenerife, Corsica, Darmstadt, Graz, Vienna, South Africa, Canary Islands
  • Teaching crypto :)
  • Kindle and PRS-T1 (oh yeah I love gadgets)

Well, it’s brief, but there’s plenty of stories behind those things. Some of them ended up here. Not all of them though, and I doubt they will (too much backblogging is not good for the back ;-)
Anyway: best wishes for the coming year!