“Like many systemd modules, it was developed to solve the problem of it not being built into systemd.”
— fahrbot-botCover 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.
Someone really didn't like Gakuen Kino...
In Kino’s Journeys, the title character is a teenage girl who travels the wilderness on her talking motorcycle, stopping only briefly in each isolated city-state she finds, observing life while reserving judgement, surviving unpleasant encounters using her wits and pistols.
Gakuen Kino is a parody spin-off, featuring magical girl Kino and her talking cellphone strap, fighting monsters in a not-so-ordinary high school.
I’ve read several of the Kino stories, and have finished about 33% 68% 98% of the first novel, but I found the mere existence of Gakuen Kino so amusing that I bought it on sight, and hope to read it at some point. Sadly, while it has been scanned in, no OCR’d, proofread edition is available, so I can’t run it through my scripts to speed up the reading experience. It will have to wait.
I grabbed the scans to get the interior illustrations, but I noticed something a bit unusual about them. The zip file correctly lists it as 学園キノ by 時雨沢恵一, but when you unpack it, the directory claims to contain 面白くないキノ by オナニ沢ケーイチ.
For the kana-deprived, the title has been changed to Omoshirokunai Kino (Boring Kino), by Onani-sawa Keiichi instead of Sigusawa Keiichi. Onani means masturbation. The scans match my copy of the book, so it’s just editorial commentary rather than vandalism, but still a bit of a surprise.
Anyway, here’s one of the color plates from inside the book. No onani, please!
Dear Amazon,
Presenting some random guy’s download from Project Gutenberg as if it were the Kindle edition of an in-copyright book by a respected translator is not acceptable. I can’t safely order anything from your listing of Jay Rubin’s translation of Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories, because there are clearly several different books here. Even the featured editorial review refers to someone else’s translation. Worse, the page changes slightly each time I reload it, apparently due to different indexing on different servers.
If I ignore the official link from his author page, and search by his name or by its ISBN, I find the real book here. But if I trust your listings, I’m screwed.
(yes, I sent in feedback; hopefully someone will clean up the mess)
Visit Beautiful Sidzd!
I have recently developed some sympathy for 19th-Century cartographers. In 1815, Japan was a rather mysterious place, and making a detailed map with romanized placenames can’t have been easy.
Sidzd was apparently Settsu Province.
Map detail extracted from this item at the Library of Congress’ American Memory site. (you’ll need JPEG2000 and MrSID decoders to work with the largest available images; yes, they chose encumbered, poorly-supported formats to store everything…)
