I tried Calibre when it first came out a little over two years ago (v0.4.83) and was reasonably impressed. It did everything it said it did, reliably and without much fuss. Alas, I didn’t test most of its features back then, especially its file conversion modules. I’ve done a lot more in the past week, [...]
Posts from ‘June, 2010’
How Old Am I Again?
58 today. (I checked.) However, some weeks ago, when Carol asked, “What do you want for your birthday?” I had to think a little bit to remember which one it was. Am I 57? Or 56? Oh yeah, I’m 58. Wait…not yet. 10-2=8. I think… This isn’t a classic 50s moment. I recall the occasional [...]
Odd Lots
Several people have asked me what I think of the Calibre ebook reading, management, sync, and conversion system, and that’s in fact what I’ve been fooling with in recent days. There’s a lot in the package, way more than in any other single ebook reader or manager that I’ve yet seen. A review will follow [...]
Daywander
Well, as a fair number of people have told me, the logo Carol and I saw the other day was the “hatchet man” icon of Insane Clown Posse, a hip-hop duo from Detroit that I’ve never heard and probably won’t. Key to finding the figure online is knowing that what he’s holding isn’t a map [...]
Ursa Muncher
I got home from shopping for tonight’s nerd party an hour or so ago to find a phone message from Collette next door. She told me that there was a very large bear sitting in the trees behind our houses, eating a bag of dog food. I grabbed my V530 and snuck out the back [...]
Query By Sketching
Earlier today, while Carol and I were out on an errands run, we were stopped for a light behind a beat-up pickup truck. On the back of the truck was an emblem on a sticker, and Carol asked me what it was. And in truth, I don’t know, though I’ve seen it a time or [...]
Those Gnarly Duntemann Brothers
A woman contacted me recently who is evidently a fourth cousin; we have a set of great-great-great grandparents in common. She sent me a scan of an old undated photo and told me that the second man from the left was her great-great grandfather, Frederick Duntemann 1846-1927. She thought that one or more of the [...]
Daywander
It’s fawn season again, and yesterday we saw a mother deer leading a fawn that was no bigger than Jackie, if perhaps a little taller. Figure that: A deer the size of a bichon. The poor thing can’t be more than a day or two old, and it’s wobbling unsteadily around the First Curve on [...]
Coding vs. Compiling EPubs
It’s always unsettling to admit that the other side has a point, but it’s good practice and often absolutely necessary. I am the VDM guy, after all, and I’ve never been one for hand-coding what can be generated automatically. As I’ve mentioned here earlier, an awful lot of people take their text and hand-code an [...]
Odd Lots
The rate of toxoplasmosis infection in a given nation appears correlated to the level of neuroticism in that nation. I’ve mentioned toxo before, but it appears that we have better numbers now, and that the UK is nowhere near 50% infected, as the source I quoted in 2003 implied. France, well, now… Here’s a nice [...]