“When you attack someone’s character for liking Harry Potter too much that’s called Ad Hermione.”
— David W. PetersWell, at least it's got a catchy title
Can’t go wrong with a title like “Regarding Ducks and Universes”, even when a quick inspection reveals that it’s a first novel published through Amazon’s vaguely-described Encore program.
I’m not recommending it, mind you, and I’m not even using my affiliate code in that link. I just found it interesting that Amazon is aggressively promoting an SF title by a complete unknown, as opposed to the usual “Kindle vanity press” or POD semi-publishing approaches.
How did I miss this?
Donna Barr is putting both Stinz and The Desert Peach online.
Stinz is still in issue 1, before the war, but the Peach is all the way up to issue 21.
Lots of good stuff, but watching The Desert Fox hang ten is still one of my favorite bits.
Dear Recaptcha,
This goes way beyond “not funny”, all the way to “incredibly stupid”. Does someone do even basic quality control on your source images? I’m thinking the answer is a rather firm No.
[Update: Just saw one go by where one word was in cyrillic and the other in hebrew; sadly, I clicked refresh before I could stop to grab the screenshot.]
Cover story
One of the oddest limitations of the Kindle is that you need to jailbreak it to change the screensaver images. There’s a small set of images supplied by Amazon, some nice, some hideous, and you’re stuck with them. Replacing them is probably the single most common reason for Kindle-hacking.
I could use images from my collection of Naughty Novel Cover Art, but people have a tendency to pick up your Kindle and turn it on, and even limiting the selection to safe-for-work images still leaves it a bit spicy.
So, I went digging through my shelves for Paperbacks That Have Known The Touch Of A Lover. That is, battered old books that someone, not necessarily me, made extensive use of. I quickly assembled a stack about three feet high, and whittled it down to some particularly interesting ones. Boosting the contrast and brightness about 25% before downsampling to 16-color grayscale produces decent results, and I’m sure I’ll expand the collection over time.
Small color versions of the current set below:
Appending metadata to a PDF file
The Kindle has generally excellent support for reading PDF files, but absolutely terrible support for displaying embedded metadata. If FOO5419.pdf contains properly-specified Title and Author fields, it will appear on your Kindle as, you guessed it, FOO5419. It might show the Author on the right-hand side of the screen, and it might show Title and Author on the detail screen, but likely not.
It will work if you generate PDF version 1.3 with a self-contained Info dictionary (that is, “/Title(My Book)”, but not “13 0 obj (My Book) … /Title 13 0 R”). It will work if you do an append-only update to a v1.3 file in Adobe Acrobat Pro. It will work if you do a rewrite of a v1.3 file with pdftk.
What should work, for all PDF files, is an append-only update that uses only v1.3-ish features to create a self-contained Info dictionary. I hadn’t hacked PDF by hand since 1993, but I dusted off my reference manuals and wrote a script that correctly implements the spec.
It doesn’t work on a Kindle. Acrobat sees my data, Mac OS X Preview sees it, pdftk sees it, and every other tool I’ve tried agrees that my script generates valid PDF files with updated metadata. However, if I use my tool and then ask pdftk to convert the append-only update into a rewrite, the Kindle can see it (but only if it started out as v1.3).
I therefore declare their parser busted. The actual PDF viewer works fine, but whatever cheesy hack they’re using to quickly scan for metadata, it ain’t the good cheese.
Automagic JIS/ShiftJIS/EUC to UTF8
Finally got sick of constantly dealing with the variety of encoding schemes used for Japanese text files. I still convert everything to UTF-8 before any serious use, but for just looking at a random downloaded file, I wanted to eliminate a step.
less supports input filters with the LESSOPEN environment variable, but you need something to put into it. Turns out the Perl Encode::Guess module works nicely for this, and now I no longer care if a file is JIS, ShiftJIS, CP932, EUC-JP, or UTF-8. Code below the fold.
