High-calibre ebook management
Aug 12, 2011 GMT
One of the delights of free software are the applications that do everything I can ever imagine in their general category. Sometimes I may long for leaner or simpler apps, but I know, for example, that K3B will give me everything I need for burning DVDs, or digiKam for managing and editing photos. Now, as I start getting into ebooks, I'm looking at calibre as potentially another of these ultimate apps, destined to be to ebooks what Amarok is to digital music.
Currently at version 0.8.14, calibre is in rapid development,... more »
From LibreOffice to ePub
Aug 04, 2011 GMT
As someone contemplating ebook publishing, I found the LibreOffice / OpenOffice.org extension Writer2ePub worth investigating. After all, while GNU/Linux has a couple of apps that can read the popular ePub format -- Calibre and Lucidor -- about the only way to actually produce ePub content is to export from DocBook. However, I'll have to wait a version or two before relying on... more »
Google+ and the right to use an alias
Jul 25, 2011 GMT
Until a few weeks ago, I hadn't thought much about the use of pseudonyms online. At times, I use "nanday" -- the species of parrots I live with -- but a pseudonym has never really been an option for most of my online presence, because, rightly or wrongly, editors assume that my name has some value on an article. So far as I had thought, pseudonyms seemed a childish remnant from the early days of the web. But the growing complaints about Google+'s anti-pseudonym policy have made me reverse my thinking.
The matter came to a head a few days ago, when Google+,... more »
Free software isn't a single school of thought
Jul 20, 2011 GMT
"Brian: Look, you've got it all wrong! You don't NEED to follow ME, You don't NEED to follow ANYBODY! You've got to think for your selves! You're ALL individuals!
The Crowd: Yes! We're all individuals!"
- Monty Python, "The Life of Brian"
"Would it be immoral for me to write a program and then to sell it without providing the source code?" Someone asked in response to my more »
Where Did All the Idealism Go?
Jul 13, 2011 GMT
"You say the little efforts that I make will do no good; they never will prevail to tip the hovering scale where justice hangs in balance. I don’t think I ever thought they would, but I am prejudiced beyond debate in favor of my right to choose which side shall feel the stubborn ounces of my weight."
- Tommy Douglas
As a writer, I am more comfortable reporting the news than making the news. For that reason, I'm reluctant to encourage the discussion started by my article, "more »
A small taste of the Maker movement
Jun 26, 2011 GMT
When I was growing up, I used to dream about magic shops -- stores filled with wonderful and precious objects. Since then, I've occasionally found close analogies in a craft or antique store and happily wandered about, not spending but simply enjoying the strangeness and diversity. But I don't think I ever found an experience as close to my childhood dreams as meandering through the Vancouver Mini Maker Faire this afternoon. At times, I could almost believe that I was moving through a steampunk magic... more »
KBookOCR 2.0: Baseline OCR at Last
Jun 23, 2011 GMT
Every year or so, I need to convert a printed page to text. It's not oftener, because, while I do have a collected letters project that would benefit from optical character recognition (OCR), I only work on it sporadically. When I have to sign a publisher's agreement or some similar document, I can generally just send a scanned image.
But every year or so, only OCR will do for one need or other, and I plunge into a quick survey of the available free software tools. The results have always been fairly dismal and more trouble than they're worth. However, with the 2.0... more »
