tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23004830122934809712024-03-14T08:11:26.167-07:00James R. Strickland's BlogJRShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17544359854042628120noreply@blogger.comBlogger299125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2300483012293480971.post-16544728221604931442024-02-29T21:14:00.000-08:002024-02-29T21:14:12.437-08:00Toolchain changes<p> Skimming back over my blog entries, I realize I left out something important—at least to me. In addition to switching to Obsidian on the front end, and Pandoc for first-stage back-end (it's getting complicated), I dropped LaTeX in favor of Typst.</p><p>What is typst, you ask?</p><p>Let me back up.</p><p>My goal is to write a novel once, and debug it once. This never happens. </p><p>Instead, I write a novel in Obsidian (Markdown), turn it section by section into .docx for my writing group. They respond with the track changes and comments feature in Word, or any of the other word-ish programs they use. I use TextMaker for this. So I go through their comments and changes and manually apply all the changes, and any other changes I see fit to make.</p><p>Then, when the novel's done, I compile the whole thing into a .docx and send it to E.C. Tobler. She corrects and comments, and I go through the entire novel, all 392 pages for Dead of Winter, and implement her corrections and most (if not all) of her suggestions.</p><p>Then the fun really starts. Once the book is ready, I make it into an epub, which Amazon can digest into a Kindle book, and into PDFs, which Amazon can turn into MoD books. If you're keeping score, that's five different output formats: single-chapter docx for the writing group, huge honking docx for E.C., EPUB, pdf for paperback and pdf for hardback. (though the last two are identical except for the internal ISBN number.)</p><p> Then, after I release it, I find typos. Sometimes they're editing scars, things I introduced during the preceding steps. Sometimes they're search/replaces run amok. Sometimes they're things I missed in E.C.s edit comments. Doesn't matter. The point is, I have to regenerate three of those five formats again.</p><p>If I were to typeset the PDF versions with conventional typesetting software (InDesign, Affinity Publisher, etc), change tracking would be the bane of my existence. Did I fix the comma on page 205 in both print versions? It would only get worse as I add more MoD houses and Ebook sellers. </p><p>I have to have, must have, for sanity's sake, I need one source of truth for my novels, one place I can make a correction and propagate it to all the different output formats in a completely automated format. For me, that source is the markdown file.</p><p>Pandoc can translate markdown into HTML, and thence into epub in one step. I can control what it looks like, to the extent that the Kindle App respects what I tell it to do (not much) by twiddling the Pandoc template file and the CSS file. These are the same for all the novels in this series.<br /></p><p>For the PDFs, I used to use LaTeX. LaTeX is ancient. LaTeX is vast. LaTeX is poorly understood. I've described writing LaTeX code as "write code, sacrifice a chicken, and hope for the best, and sometimes it just breaks, even with the same input." </p><p>This is where typst comes in. Typst takes a markdown language (its own, naturally) and writes it out into pdf, according to code logic. In short, it does exactly what LaTeX does, except that it's new, written in Rust (so stability is good), well documented, with coding paradigms that don't seem like you need a grimoire to understand them No chickens need be sacrificed.</p><p>Even better, pandoc has support for typst. So I can make a change, bake the document together (from individual scene files) in obsidian, pandoc it into typst source according to a very customized template, and compile *that* into a PDF. This is repeatable. Which is good, because I wind up repeating it. A lot. For my hardcopy books, both Amazon at the moment, these come from one amazon 5.5x8.5 pandoc template. All the novels in the series should use the same template here, too.<br /></p><p>Typst has a few warts. Like LaTeX, it tends to go bananas with hyphen-breaking words. You can turn that off. The biggest wart for me is that it does not yet have the ability to make page blocks in a spread the same length. In fact, its widow/orphan/slug avoiding code will *always* break equal page lengths any time it cycles. I'm looking forward to when they fix that. But I can live with it.</p><p>I see I've put the sly implication above that I might be releasing books through more venues than just Amazon/KDP. I have to lay some groundwork for that. Right now, my books all have Amazon ISBN numbers, among other things, and there are a lot of moving parts I have to take care of before I can fix *that*. Once I do, this toolchain will become even more important. Everyone's EPUBs are different. If I'm doing MoD, their formats are probably subtly different. With one source of truth, the markdown files, I can live with that.</p><p>Way more info than you wanted? Probably. But maybe it will help someone else trying to put together a similar toolchain. If you are putting such a thing together, and you'd like to see my template files, pop me an email or comment.<br /></p><p>Links here:</p><p><a href="https://obsidian.md/">Obsidian</a> with the following plugins: Advanced New File, April's Automatic Timelines, Easy Bake, Enhancing Export, File Order, Force Note View Mode, Global Search and Replace, LanguageTool Integration, Linter, MonoNote, Note Refactor, Novel Word Count, Outliner, Shell Commands, Smart Typography, and Templater.</p><p><a href="https://pandoc.org/">Pandoc</a></p><p><a href="https://typst.app/">Typst </a></p><p><a href="https://dev.languagetool.org/http-server.html">Languagetool (The desktop server) </a></p><p><a href="https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/publisher/#top">Affinity Publisher (Which I use to typeset my covers) </a></p><p><a href="https://www.canva.com/">Canva (Where I create my cover art)</a><br /></p>JRShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17544359854042628120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2300483012293480971.post-11922077352964696322024-02-27T13:57:00.000-08:002024-02-27T15:12:43.519-08:00Dead of Winter<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_0bMmkX_fL0Rbvb1sHoF2GMYOT9xiWsFJhGG6v-dC2Q980Af1EClnHkTez-fGl7nKeUPjfwrx4HUGhuGxdDaZKz49o2EWJLO86bBhiSzTBCOa0eKTf3QIsiU1BJcpxAU1XHi95CAcISP1gBemmEfrgZwuj3Zkn6BrTX_tz1nBSFUBonGy1Khe8waKKd0/s2560/Cover-Master(EPUB).tiff" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;">New Book Out!</a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Poltergeist-Dead-Winter-James-Strickland-ebook/dp/B0CVZV77SR/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2WIPERS17JTNY&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.rVXc3amuCuqBcmMS7qUVg1CIST4gjd8byiL43oPc5_RLB-n_yFIQn_2qHih20Ytp.VpMm5H9qM_PI_mvnc-GBCVL5PDsDTE_NrHJbbCdu1OM&dib_tag=se&keywords=dead+of+winter+strickland&qid=1709071216&sprefix=dead+of+winter+strickland%2Caps%2C135&sr=8-1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2560" data-original-width="1600" height="558" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_0bMmkX_fL0Rbvb1sHoF2GMYOT9xiWsFJhGG6v-dC2Q980Af1EClnHkTez-fGl7nKeUPjfwrx4HUGhuGxdDaZKz49o2EWJLO86bBhiSzTBCOa0eKTf3QIsiU1BJcpxAU1XHi95CAcISP1gBemmEfrgZwuj3Zkn6BrTX_tz1nBSFUBonGy1Khe8waKKd0/w349-h558/Cover-Master(EPUB).tiff" width="349" /></a></div><span style="color: #04ff00;"> I’m not your ordinary gumshoe.</span><span style="color: #04ff00;"> </span>
<p class="BodyText tm8"><span style="color: #04ff00;">My name’s Nina Cohen. Born: 1898, died: 1912.
I’m a poltergeist in a human body. I work from home as a private
investigator. I watch entirely too much TV, and I talk to my cat. Say
hello,
Djinn.</span></p>
<p class="BodyText tm8"><i style="color: #04ff00;"><span class="tm9">Meow</span></i></p>
<p class="BodyText tm8"><span style="color: #04ff00;">My cop buddy Cronenberg talked me into this case. I’m just saying. <br /></span></p>
<p class="BodyText tm8"><span style="color: #04ff00;">Nikita Zapata had everything to live for:
friends, teammates, good grades, a volleyball scholarship to college.
Then she went missing.</span></p>
<p class="BodyText tm8"><span style="color: #04ff00;">Jenny Thordarson had nothing: abused, trafficked
from a young age, family history of drugs, you name it. She went
missing last summer. <br /></span></p>
<p class="BodyText tm8"><span style="color: #04ff00;">On the face of it, these two high school girls
have only one thing in common: they were both Morgan Whitney’s best
friends, and Morgan’s not talking.</span></p>
<p class="BodyText tm8"><span style="color: #04ff00;">My job was to find Nikita. There were fifty-thousand dollars in it for me. That’s why I’m undercover in high school. <br /></span></p>
<p class="BodyText tm8"><span style="color: #04ff00;">Now I’m hip deep in ancient powers beyond
anything I knew about, the spirits of serial killers, teachers that
don’t like me, and snow. Lots and lots of snow.</span></p>
<p class="BodyText tm8"><span style="color: #04ff00;">Nobody said the life of a high school girl was easy.</span></p><p></p><p class="Normal"><span style="color: #04ff00;"> Dead of Winter, available on <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Poltergeist-Dead-Winter-James-Strickland-ebook/dp/B0CVZV77SR/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2WIPERS17JTNY&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.rVXc3amuCuqBcmMS7qUVg1CIST4gjd8byiL43oPc5_RLB-n_yFIQn_2qHih20Ytp.VpMm5H9qM_PI_mvnc-GBCVL5PDsDTE_NrHJbbCdu1OM&dib_tag=se&keywords=dead+of+winter+strickland&qid=1709071216&sprefix=dead+of+winter+strickland%2Caps%2C135&sr=8-1">Amazon</a> now!</span><br /></p>
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Still working my way through editing this one. Hopefully I'll get it out there soon.<br /></p><p><b>Bikini Body: <br /></b>Angel <br />Sarah Mclachlan<br /><i>Mirrorball</i></p><p>I'm only 20,000 words in to this one, so I'm not going to talk about the plot as though it's a done deal yet. Even the title's not a done deal yet. I set out with the theme being truth, but it's drifting toward bodies and family. We'll see what happens.</p><p> </p>JRShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17544359854042628120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2300483012293480971.post-45519455927617701142024-01-15T15:04:00.000-08:002024-01-15T15:05:22.973-08:00SoftMaker Office<p>I liked SoftMaker FreeOffice enough that I went ahead and bought SoftMaker Office. After all the years of using never-quite-finished open source software, SoftMaker Office and FreeOffice have a level of polish that I'm not used to on my Linux box. (It fits right in on my Mac, and there's a Windows version too.)</p><p>The only serious complaint I have with TextMaker—the word processor—is that it doesn't have a wordcount field you can put in the document and have it live-updated.<br /><br />Seriously? Seriously.<br /><br />Wordcount is readily available, right down in the status bar of TextMaker, and I can copy-paste it into the document readily enough. It's just <i>weird</i> that it's missing. That's been my experience with TextMaker (and FreeOffice) to date: works great, stable, but sometimes there's an odd thing missing and it takes time in Google to either find the allegedly missing feature, or devise a workaround. It also takes probably thirty seconds to a minute to load a 98000 word novel. This is acceptable, if not ideal. Once the novel is loaded, performance is fine.<br /><br />Still. A hundred dollar one-time-payment for an office suite? Worth every dime. Strongly recommended.<br /></p>JRShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17544359854042628120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2300483012293480971.post-81853101401617531182023-12-30T17:48:00.000-08:002023-12-30T17:51:37.308-08:00FreeOffice Textmaker<p>I've been a LibreOffice user for years. It works well enough, is feature rich, and does everything I need.</p><p> <br /></p><p>Until now.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>I loaded the edited draft of Dead of Winter (Nina Cohen #2), to go through it change by change, comment by comment, and apply those comments to the master manuscript in Obsidian, just as though it was the old days, and we were all still dealing with typed manuscripts. With a 98000 word document, plus many, many comments (E.C. Tobler is a <i>great</i> editor), LibreOffice staggered under the load. Cursor movement was choppy, rendering took visible time, and was often glitchy. In all respects, it behaved like the steaming pile of Java it is, asked to do some significant computing.<br /><br />This was on my desktop machine, a Core i7 4790K, 32GB of ram, video accelerator, and everything. It's not a heavy breathing gaming machine anymore, but it's no slouch.<br /><br />So I started looking for a word processor that was better, ran on Linux, and was inexpensive, ideally free.</p><p><br />The pickings were pretty thin. They seem to fall into three camps: mediocre markdown editors, online office suites on JoeBob's server company for twelve bucks a month, and LibreOffice. There was one standout: Softmaker's FreeOffice suite.<br /><br />So I tried it.<br /><br />It loaded the file without a hiccup. It displayed all the comments with no issue, and somehow made it easier to read than LibreOffice. And... well, it's free. As in beer, not the other kind. <br /><br />Like free beer, there's a catch. It's small. Freeoffice TextMaker is an older version of Softmaker Office, which is available as a subscription service*, or as a pro version for a one-time payment. FreeOffice is their way of advertising to the world, "Hey, we sell a nice office suite!" Occasionally, it advertises that fact when you first start it. I'm okay with that.<br /><br />In truth, I've not asked a great deal of FreeOffice yet, and I've not yet purchased SoftOffice Pro, but on the face of it, if you have corner-case problems with LibreOffice like mine, it's definitely worth checking out. The price, as they say, is right.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>*Every time I see "Software as a service," a line from <i>Starter Villain</i> goes through my head: "Imagine testicles as a service..." I can't take them seriously anymore. Thanks Scalzi. :)<br /><br /> </p><p>-JRS</p><p> </p><p>Links:</p><p><br /><a href="https://www.freeoffice.com/en/">FreeOffice</a></p><p><a href="https://www.softmaker.com/en/products/softmaker-office">SoftMaker Office</a> </p><p><a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780765389220/startervillain">Starter Villain</a> </p><p> </p><p> <br /></p>JRShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17544359854042628120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2300483012293480971.post-14478064896823734892023-10-02T17:57:00.004-07:002023-10-02T17:57:34.941-07:00Markdown Tools, Revisited<p> I've switched to Obsidian for my markdown editing. With the right plugins, it can compile my books into a single wad of markdown that pandoc can ingest comfortably. With the right plugins, and some luck, it's got a grammar checker that will even catch my habit of forgetting closing quotes. (Yes, this makes programming a special joy too.) It's even cross-platform.</p><p><br /></p><p>Is Obsidian the most wonderful software ever? No. I don't much like the license (for companies larger than 1 person, you have to rent it, otherwise it's free.) I don't really like the UI that much. The plugins are all written in javascript, which I don't know, and it's an electron app, so it's huge. But what Obsidian does is most of what I need, and the plugins make up most of the difference, so for the time being, Obsidian is it.</p><p><br /></p><p>IA Writer is a lovely thing, but I had a data-loss argument with its library management system. Really, I don't understand why software (to include Obsidian, but less irritatingly so) insists that it has to manage *all* the documents. I am not taking notes. I don't need to graph the interconnections between notes. I am *WRITING A NOVEL*. Sheesh.</p>JRShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17544359854042628120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2300483012293480971.post-8053351830298898142023-09-16T16:43:00.000-07:002023-09-16T16:43:33.601-07:00Poltergeist 2 is written.<p>At long last, I've finished the writing of Poltergeist! The Dead of Winter (or Winter's Fury, as it may be renamed to.) It was supposed to be a 50,000 word novel and take about six months to write. Instead it's a 92,000 word novel and took about ten months to write. (A three hour tour, a three hour tour. :P) Nina's back, Cronenberg's back, and of course, Djinn is back. We have an all new cast to meet, new badguy, new friends, new awkward situations.<br /><br />So what now?<br /><br />Well, the next couple weeks, I'll be doing a read-through edit. Some of these scenes have been sitting in their files for most of a year, and they need to mesh well with the scenes I wrote *today*. I'll also be reviewing the new sections with my writing group. They make me a better writer. And then, the whole shebang will go to my editor, almost certainly E.C. Tobler again. She's a *very* good editor, and a friend. Cover art is coming along. I'm using new tools to do the cover layout: Afinity Publisher 2, to be exact. I could typeset the whole book in it, obviously, but I doubt I will. I have a *lot* of experience and automation with LaTeX.<br /><br />When will it be out? It depends. My original goal was to have it out before Christmas, but that assumed six months or so from the time it was done to the time it went into print. The release may be late. I will not rush my 'back end' processes, nor will I rush E.C. Quality before quantity.<br /><br />How many books am I planning?<br /></p><p>Ok, here's how I number them. P1 is Poltergeist! Ask the Dust. P2 is Poltergeist! The Dead of Winter (or Winter's Fury, whichever.) P3 is the one I'm going to start next, tentatively titled Bikini Body. Px is the last book. It already has has several interesting scenes already written. That one seems likely to get written, but no promises. I have an idea for P4 that isn't Px, and there may be more. Px is flexible, and pulls in stuff from previous novels, so I can adapt it to however many there are between then and now.<br /><br />Clear as mud?<br /><br />Yeah, it is to me, too. :)</p><p><br /></p><p>Anyway, watch for more news on the second Poltergeist! novel, coming soon/eventually to an Amazon near you.<br /><br />-JRS<br /></p>JRShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17544359854042628120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2300483012293480971.post-2858025182059056972023-07-28T13:05:00.002-07:002023-07-28T16:17:14.764-07:00Things that were Vanishing that are Trendy Again<p> Friend Jeff has now posted two lists of "Things That are Slowly Vanishing."</p><p><a href="http://www.contrapositivediary.com/?p=4834">Things that are Slowly Vanishing</a></p><p><a href="http://www.contrapositivediary.com/?p=4983">More Things that are Slowly Vanishing (Or Gone)</a> <br /></p><p><br /></p><p>I was going to reply to the second one, but my own list got too long, so I'm posting it here.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p><b>Things that were Vanishing that are Trendy Again </b></p><p><br />Mechanical watches: Since they're now strictly a fashion item rather than a utilitarian one. Rolex is still around, and their watches are bloody expensive, and highly decorated, and by all accounts, better than ever. More mechanical watch brands, some classic, some new, many with movements made in China, are cropping up every day to cash in on this trend.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>And I'll be honest, when my Apple Watch dies, assuming they don't have one with a blood sugar sensor in it as they've been working on for some years, I might go that route myself. I feel naked without a watch, but I don't need a 32 bit computer on my wrist for most purposes.<br /><br />Cassette players: Why, god, why?<br /><br />8-Track Tapes: not quite the resurgence Vinyl is enjoying, probably mostly for the antique car world so you have something to put in that big rectangular hole in the dash. But there are new albums being put on rebuilt vintage cartridges. To which I say again, Why, god, why?<br /><br />Vinyl Records: Better bandwidth than the average mp3. This one I get. Even with my dodgy hearing I can sometimes hear the artifacts that lossy-compression music poops all over cymbals and the lack of dynamic range. You can get digital sound that's as good as records, but it takes a lot of storage space.<br /><br />Vacuum tubes: Still manufactured and growing for the electric guitar and high-end audiophile market, both for their distortion properties.</p><p><br /></p><p>To contradict Jeff, neighborhood mailboxes are alive and well, they're just not the old round-topped rectangular things of our youth. The house I grew up in had a mailbox on the front wall right under the address sign, and you certainly did *not* put your outgoing mail in someone else's outgoing mail holder. Nowadays, my house has a mailbox on the corner with a very anonymous and legally protected outgoing mail slot. Neighborhood mailbox? Check.</p><p><br /></p><p>Ice Cream Truck: We have one that prowls our neighborhood every summer, although with as much rain as we've had, I haven't heard its dulcet tones much this summer. Now that it's hot (and we're home) I expect to. Also, you can get high end ones to show up for your favorite party. Not gone, just changed form.</p><p><br /></p><p>Typewriters: Okay, this is a stretch. To my knowledge, they're not being manufactured anymore, but you can still get ribbon cartridges for even weird typewriters like my 1970s corona super 12 with a Google search. Again, no longer a utilitarian item, but for those of us who went from handwriting directly to computer printouts, an interesting curiosity.</p><p><br /></p><p>Knitting, Crocheting, Needlework of all kinds, and Quilting: Hand work is making a comeback. I'm not a practitioner, but M, my wife, does crochet and needlework, and her sister does the other two. She says it's relaxing, forces her to focus, and tune out all the noise in the world.</p><p><br /></p><p>Manual machining: The number of YouTube channels dedicated to manual lathe/mill/drill/shaper(!)/surface-grinder work is truly startling. New tools for this are made with the hobbyist in mind every day, and refurbishing big old industrial iron for the task is a hobby unto itself.</p><p> </p><p>Handwriting: The trend of not requiring cursive in schools is showing signs of reversing. Also, the net is replete with reprints of old handwriting guides, calligraphy supplies, and so on. No longer utilitarian, but as a handcraft.</p><p> </p><p>Pottery: Okay, hand-thrown pottery stopped being how most china was made hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago. Now it's done as a craft and an art form. <br /></p><p><br /></p><p>There's a meta-trend afoot here. Back in the 1980s, I read a book called <i>Megatrends</i>. To some extent, it predicted the technological world we live in today, but it also had an interesting backlash trend. They called it high tech vs high touch. They predicted that the more technology we use, (High Tech), the more hands-on craft we'll see (High Touch.) If you look at the things that have come back, they all fall into that.</p><p><br /></p><p>Consider: Handwriting and even typing with a typewriter force you (the writer) to be much more intimate with the <i>document</i> you're creating, rather than just its content. You're not just putting words together, as I am now, you're putting them together, by hand, on this particular piece of paper at this particular time. These are the crafts I know something about. <br /></p><p> </p><p>Having a wristwatch that goes <i>tick</i> doesn't seem like a hand craft, but the machine itself is, and there are hobbyists who are into fixing them. Sooner or later, hobbyists will be making them from scratch.<br /></p><p> </p><p>Even vacuum tube electronics are a handcraft, really. Sure, you can do pcbs to put a device together, and if all you want is the finished device, that's fine. But for the joy of it, point-to-point wiring is a handcraft. The smell of the solder, the singed fingers, the anticipating watching tube filaments light and waiting for the high voltage circuit to come up to see if your creation will live, that's a hand-craft in my book. There are people out there who hand-make their own tubes, too, but even if you're just using the equipment, the sound is more analog, more human, even if it's less precise. The hands of humans are all over vacuum tubes.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>If <i>Megatrends</i> is right, if it continues to hold true, the more technological we become, the more our handcrafts will matter. And if AI ever takes over, it will be because humans lost interest in technology that didn't let use use our old fashioned, imprecise, primate hands and brains.</p><p><br /></p>JRShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17544359854042628120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2300483012293480971.post-61781085702705435262023-06-30T16:47:00.003-07:002023-06-30T16:49:13.476-07:00To Edit Markdown<p>Why, exactly, do I need a markdown editor? </p><p><br /></p><p>Good question. Almost any code-aware text editor can color-code Markdown so you can see what's highlighted, what's italic, and so on. But having an editor that can and will display the markdown in its final form, tell you when you've goofed up the syntax by not doing what you had in mind, that kind of thing's useful.</p><p><br /></p><p>I've tried quite a bunch of markdown editors. So far, I have *one* winner.</p><p><br /></p><p>iA writer for mac is lovely. It fits my workflow, by having a library manager, a spell checker, a grammar checker, even a usage checker (although it's annoying, so I leave it off unless I'm editing.) It's rock stable. </p><p><br /></p><p>Downside? It's Mac only*, and it's expensive (as this sort of software goes.) I'm looking for software that is similar for Linux. No steaming piles of Python need apply (now watch, that's what makes iA writer go. :P ). Do I *really* have to write my own?</p><p><br /></p><p>Anyway. That's where I am. iA writer can apparently compile individual documents direct to .docx or PDF, but as it does not handle multi-documents directly, I don't think that'll be of much use. Pandoc does it better, and uses my templates.</p><p><br /></p><p>Anyway. That's where I am.</p><p><br /></p><p>*It's not actually mac-only. There are Windows, Android, and IOS versions as well, just no Linux version. So of my platforms, it's Mac only, because writing long work with a touch-screen keyboard makes my hands hurt just thinking about it.</p><p><br /></p>JRShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17544359854042628120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2300483012293480971.post-19519870863718495392023-06-24T17:58:00.001-07:002023-06-24T18:04:03.623-07:00My final words on Manuskript<p>I no longer use Manuskript. Between the usual problems of keeping a steaming pile of Python working on both my platforms of choice, and the Manuskript/QT problems where chapters *disappear* if you move them around in the chapter list, I gave up. I had to restore data too many times by using dropbox's rollback function, and once more by resorting to my NAS backup. I stopped using it for my current writing.</p><p>However, I am in the final throes of getting "Ask the Dust", formerly known as "The Silent Dust," ready to publish, so I figured I could at least use the compiler in Manuskript and add the pieces I needed to the novel to get it ready for printing.</p><p>It lost data on me again.</p><p>It lost a whole *scene* silently. I nearly went to press with the first scene of a chapter unceremoniously hacked out.</p>Worse, I got into a discussion amongst the developers. Apparently the guy who runs the project was rejecting pull requests (new code contributions) because they had too much documentation in the code.<p>Say what? </p><p>I was assured that most of the code was "Self documenting" but there was code that needed special explanation.</p><p>That would have gotten you an F in the computer science I was taught. To my ears, it translated to "I don't know what I'm doing." This made me cringe for my data safety. Am I being unfair? Has computer science perhaps moved on since 1986, when I first studied it at the college level? Undoubtedly. Still. It's a problem for *me*.<br /></p><p>I've poked around in the code a little, mostly to try to understand what the compiler was actually doing. It's not like it's documented *anywhere* that I could see. I finally wrote a bash program to have it masquerade as pandoc and tell me what flags were really being sent. Here's what the mighty Manuskript compiler really does, albeit not in any particular order:</p><p>1. For document file in the project, push every heading tag down one level. Basically find every # tag (how markdown spells <h1>, and add an additional # to it, so the <h1> becomes an <h2> and so on..</p><p>2. Pull the chapter name from the custom metadata for each markdown document and put that in as the top level heading. (The <h1> equivilent.)</p><p>3. Add a blank line at the end of each markdown document.</p><p>4. Concatenate all the modified markdown documents into one big document.</p><p>5. Call pandoc with a bunch of flags and feed it the one big document.</p><p><br /></p><p>It's not exactly rocket science, and it's the only piece I've not been able to replicate with other software. (Mostly vscodium (the Microsoft-free version of Visual Studio Code) with lots of plugins.) You could do it with some bash scripting, a makefile (probably, although my make-fu has become weak). I settled (because I was in a hurry) for using the Manuskript compiler to produce just the combined markdown file, fixing a bug in that file, and throwing it into Pandoc from a bash script, and this was *still* easier and more robust than letting Manuskript do it.</p><p> Wait, I hear you say. What about Manuskript's outlining, character database, world database and so forth and so on. You can't do *that* with vscodium.</p><p>You're right. That's a job for a wiki. In fact, I use Smeagol-wiki (A tiny little rust wiki server) for exactly that. And a web browser. And a bit of Go code I put together to build the index files in my wiki automatically, because the files change a lot. You can get smeagol here: <a href="https://smeagol.dev/" target="_blank">https://smeagol.dev/</a>, and my make_index program here <a href="https://github.com/jrstrick/Make_Index-for-Smeagol-Wiki" target="_blank">https://github.com/jrstrick/Make_Index-for-Smeagol-Wiki</a> (You'll need to install Go to build it though. Working on that.)<br /></p><p>I think this vast and disparate architecture, even without Python and QT, is the real problem underlying Manuskript. Like Scrivener, it needs to be a suite of tools rather than one big tool that does the whole thing in one (tabbed) window. I think they've got an awful lot of code to maintain, and I've read (from the developers list) that it's horrifically intertwined with QT, so separating the QT horror out and replacing it with something better—if such a thing can be said to exist. Don't get me started about Linux GUI libraries—has proven very, very difficult. I know that Python, by itself, does not make software bad. I use FreeCAD, I use Blender, and probably a dozen other things I don't even know are python every day. But I think python plus QT plus embedded Chromium plus making a program that does too many different, non-trivial things probably is.</p><p>I wanted to love Manuskript. Here was an open source replacement for Scrivener. It worked. Writing fiction in markdown has been a godsend. But I can't love software that loses my data. I can't love software that dies every time I upgrade my system and the python environment gets changed out from under it. I can't love a wordprocessor that is so resource intensive it won't run well on a Raspberry Pi 4 with 8 gigs of RAM. I can't love Manuskript as it is, and because it's in python, I can't even try to fix it.</p><p>So. No more Manuskript for me. I don't see this changing.<br /></p><p>btw: the my current vscode/vscodium addon stack is this: LTEX-LanguageTool grammar/spell checking, by valintįn, Markdown Fiction Writer by vsc-zoctarine, Markdown Links by tchayen, Marky stats by robole, the standard pandoc markdown syntax addon, Simple Markdown Header by sguerri, Markdown Preview Mermaid Support by bierner, Markdown Table by Takumil, and Text Toolbox by carlocardella. Markdown Fiction Writer even has a compiler, of sorts, although it's pretty awkward to use for large scale documents. You may have to download Markdown Fiction Writer separately from the microsoft addon store (it's free) if you're using codium. I'm unclear why, but that's what worked.<br /></p><p> </p><p>I use vscodium for writing, because I have an entirely different addon stack in Visual Studio Code, that I use for, yanno, writing code. Yes, I know about profiles, I just don't do it that way.<br /></p>JRShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17544359854042628120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2300483012293480971.post-45068593665866749422023-06-23T17:22:00.004-07:002023-06-23T17:22:54.006-07:00New Host<p> Migrating the web side of things to a different hosting company. Once DNS cuts over, you'll be going there instead of Dreamhost. Please let me know if, in the next few days, you see anything weird going on with my website.</p><p><br /></p><p>-JRS<br /></p>JRShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17544359854042628120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2300483012293480971.post-3703836833143685602023-05-05T15:22:00.004-07:002023-05-05T15:22:39.358-07:00Un-broke the website<p> Dreamhost apparently changed versions of PHP on me, and broke quite a few things in my admittedly antediluvian PHP, most notably simplepie, which feeds this blog onto my home page.</p><p><br /></p><p>I'm strongly thinking of replacing Dreamhost (for other issues. I'm sure the PHP change was a security thing.) I'm also strongly thinking of replacing my home-grown hodge-podge CMS system with something else.</p><p><br /></p><p>What, I have no idea, but having put PHP aside for what... eight years? I don't think I like it anymore.</p><p><br /></p><p>New novels in the works. That'd be a great time to redo the website. I'll already be reskinning it.</p><p><br /></p><p>Anyway, we're back.</p><p><br /></p><p>-JRS<br /></p>JRShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17544359854042628120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2300483012293480971.post-3149465083048763872022-12-16T19:03:00.001-08:002022-12-16T19:03:29.446-08:00Manuskript, Again<p>So I've written a novel in Manuskript. Sixty-two thousand words later, I think I'm in a position to talk about it a little more authoritatively.</p><p><br /></p><p>The good:</p><p>Stability: <br /></p><p>Manuskript is reasonably stable. It crashes from time to time (I had a poorly behaved font, which I <i>think</i> was the underlying cause) and I've yet to lose data, unlike Scrivener, although there was a close call, and I had to renumber all the scenes in The Silent Dust's metadata at one point to fix a crashing corruption of the file. At least I <i>could.</i><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Markdown:<br /></p><p>Markdown turns out to be a delight to write in. Not only is it faster than type/select/shape and the styles horror of WYSIWIG editors, it's machine readable. This means that Pandoc can translate my novel into an ebook or typeset it in LaTeX <i>right now</i>, at least, once I get the templates set up. I can also translate the novel into a perfectly acceptable .docx file so the folks in my writing critique group (Armadillos! Yay!) can comment on it easily. Do I have to apply the changes to the novel manually? Yes.</p><p> </p><p>Cross-Platform: </p><p>Manuskript runs equally well on my Mac and my Linux box. It runs adequately on my Raspberry Pi 4, more on that later.</p><p> </p><p>Familair Workflow:</p><p>If you came from Scrivener, Manuskript will be familiar to you. Folders of folders with scenes in individual documents at the deepest level. Compile the documents to their final format. </p><p><br /></p><p>Human-readable files</p><p>If you've used Microsoft Word, or any of the other WYSIWYG editors, you know that getting text out of a word processor format into another format can be very painful. Even Microsoft isn't consistent from their mac .docx files to the windows ones. Libreoffice does better, and Pandoc is fairly brilliant about translating from one format to another, but I'm tired of dealing with silly proprietary formats that hide all the formatting and make such a mess of it. This started in the 1970s with Wordstar, and it's been downhill ever since.</p><p><br /></p><p>Open Source:</p><p>At the very least, you should always be able to grab a copy of Manuskript and open your files. There's no company that decides to turn your favorite word processor into a 'software service', or simply go out of business. I've had both. Done with that.</p><p> </p><p>Best in Breed:</p><p>For what it does, Manuskript is the best software out there. It's as good as Scrivener, arguably more stable than Scrivener has been historically, and it runs on all my platforms. And it's free. <br /></p><p>---<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>The good ideas, poorly implimented:</p><p>Side Data: Manuskript has ways to store character sketches, world information, timelines, all kinds of stuff like that. Unfortunately, each one is stored in a different format, and there's no way to make a global set for a series of books. It desperately needs a database behind it, and it hasn't got one. </p><p> </p><p>The editor:</p><p>Text editors are hard. I get it. But for reasons unknown, the Manuskript editor will, after a while, lose its ability to select a point in the text. Inserts are done at the end of the file, and cut and paste doesn't work at all. This is maddening.</p><p> </p><p>Search/Replace: The search function works. It's a new addition, and it's ok. I'd like to be able to select between local (this document) and project-wide, but I can't. There is no replace. The easiest way to do search and replace in Manuskript is to save the file to the un-zipped version of the file format, and open the directory that results in MS Visual Studio Code, which has a brilliant global search and replace. I fear for the metadata every time I do that, however.</p><p> </p><p>The Compiler:</p><p>Great idea. Gather the files and feed them to Pandoc. But there's no way to feed only one scene to Pandoc, nor can you easily pass flags to Pandoc. If the file format you want to compile to isn't already in the compiler's menu, you're on your own, more or less. <br /></p><p> ---<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>The Bad.<br /></p><p>File Format: </p><p>Oh God, the file format. Hidden away in the neat .zip file is a dog's breakfast of markdown files, JSON, YAML, XML, and heaven only knows what else. Metadata is scattered all over the place. You can get at everything, and none of it will make a basic text editor choke, but it's a mess to try and piece things back together if something breaks. Been there, done that.</p><p> </p><p>Metadata:</p><p>The metadata system is, to be charitable, not Manuskript's strongest suit. Even the order of chapters or scenes in chapters is stored in metadata, and if that one number gets corrupted, two documents can wind up with the same order number. If they do, one or both of them will disappear.</p><p> </p><p>Renderer: </p><p>If you look at how Manuskript <i>works</i>, it's really a web app running through a QT webview. While I get it, this makes it whole lot easier to render markdown as rich text/html, and it handles all the really messy issues of text shaping, layout, font handling, and so on, it also means that you have a titanic binary blob that is almost a whole web browser. This murders performance on Raspberry Pis, and the damn thing isn't stable. One misbehaving font should generate errors, maybe even make a document unreadable. It should not crash the entire application every time you change the margins. News flash, it does. <br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Versioning:</p><p>Manuskript has a versioning system. They recommend right in the instructions that you not turn it on. So I haven't.</p><p><br /></p><p>Python:</p><p>I've been fairly vocal in my disdain for Python over the years. Yes, part of this is ignorance—I don't know Python at all. Part of it is that the idea of whitespace in a program having programmatic meaning makes me itch. Yes, I know there are special editors that take care of that for you. My point is it shouldn't exist. The big problems with Python in this case are 1. It's slow. Manuskript is somewhat marginal to use on a Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GiB of memory. This is embarrassing. Python is also very much a second-class citizen on the mac, where Apple dutifully breaks the python environment routinely. Just getting Manuskript running on the mac sometimes takes me hours. I see in the pull requests on the Manuskript github repo that they have someone doing a proper MacOS build with a proper bundle and everything, but it isn't in the distributions yet.</p><p><br /></p><p>Best in Breed:</p><p>There are so many good ideas in Manuskript, and so many markdown editors out there are nicer and more stable but are missing functionality I use every day that it's very frustrating.</p><p><br /></p><p>---</p><p>Conclusion:</p><p>I'm starting another novel in Manuskript. It's good <i>enough</i>. It has its foibles, as I've tried to make plain above, but as I've also said, it's the best in breed for novel writing, as far as I'm concerned. Does it frustrate me terribly at times? Yes, yes it does. </p><p> </p><p>Am I dusting off my programming skills to try and write something better? Yesss, but nobody should hold their breath on that ever being finished. I have a language, a gui library, and a database picked. That's it so far. </p><p>Mostly what I've accomplished so far is to become much more in tune with how big a project this is, and how hard some parts of it are. Also that I haven't seriously studied code in over 30 years, and GUIs are a pain in the ass to write code for. I've picked on Manuskript a lot in the text above, and I think I'm being fair. That said, I used it anyway, and will continue using it anyway for the foreseeable future.<br /></p>JRShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17544359854042628120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2300483012293480971.post-24906453510619024512022-12-16T18:14:00.001-08:002022-12-16T18:14:11.839-08:00The Ethnicity of Characters, and The New Novels<p>For a long time, I've been reluctant to depict people too far from my own cultural/ethnic stock in my novels, for fear of getting the details wrong, and making essentially a 'blackface' character—an unintentionally (in my case) racist parody. I really try not to offend people accidentally with my work, and making a character like that would be a humiliating failure on my part. <br /></p><p>An online friend of mine (Dale, lookin' at you here,) who is Black, set me straight. He said he would much rather see someone try and not necessarily get the 'details' right than not see characters who looked like himself at all. The implication was that the 'details' that worry me so much assume a monolithic culture of a given minority that isn't really there.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>It's taken me a while to digest this.</p><p><br /></p><p>But I'm trying. The protagonist of the novel I just finished, <i>The Silent Dust</i>, and indeed the whole series, is Nina Cohen. She's Jewish, born in Romania a very long time ago, and her family came to the United States when she was 14. It's part of the plot, part of the character, so I picked her background for her. As the series is set in a fictional city in Minnesota, however, the question of 'what do all the people around Nina look like?' became critical. <i>In The Silent Dust</i>, I tried to keep an even hand. A lot of the characters came out White. I don't think that's necessarily a problem, given the demographics of Minnesota, but darn it, I want to be <i>fair</i>. I keep thinking about what Dale said.<br /></p><p><i>For Dead of Winter</i>, I've a new method. I took the demographics for St. Paul, Minnesota, and made a chart. For any character I don't have a good reason to make them any given ethnicity, I get out my much-worn D&D percentile dice, and roll against that chart. Now, my book will reflect reality. There's a fifty-one percent chance any given character not already assigned an ethnicity will be White. There's a seven percent chance they'll be mixed-race. Culturally, all the characters I know about so far except Nina herself are Minnesotans, the way I remember them from when I lived there. One of the main characters is Black. One is of mixed ethnicity. Is it a challenge for me? Yes it is. But hey. Without challenges, one does not grow, right?</p><p> <br /></p><p> Does this mean I'm writing again? It does. </p><p><i>The Silent Dust</i> is complete. I'm in the process of my final edit. <i>The Dead of Winter</i> is started. They're paranormal detective stories. Above all, the stories are<i> small. </i>Nobody's saving the world, particularly, it's just a poltergeist in an abandoned human body trying to make a living using her abilities to solve difficult cases. There's a lot of humor involved, but I'm trying to write well constructed mysteries, and "because it's funny" is not a good solution to a mystery, in my opinion. The humor is part of the telling of the story. It doesn't control it.<br /></p><p> </p><p>What about the other projects?</p><p>Right now, I'm kind of done with steampunk. I came in late, and it seems like the genre is dying out. Also, the other steampunk stories I've read really haven't been to my taste, so it's kind of hard to want to chase that audience further.<i> Brass and Steel: Inferno's</i> sales were disappointing, to say the least, so there's that, too, and that book took me five years to write. I don't want any more five year missions. that result in epic 'save the world' plots. I lose touch with the characters over that kind of time, and good sequels are practically impossible.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>What about cyberpunk?</p><p>I still love cyberpunk. I still love reading it, it still fires my imagination, and it's very likely I'll revisit cyberpunk at some point. The LookingGlass world is probably a dead end at this point. We now live in the timeline I was talking about when I wrote it. <br /></p><p> </p><p><br /></p>JRShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17544359854042628120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2300483012293480971.post-51956439193272815022022-09-25T12:33:00.000-07:002022-09-25T12:33:18.472-07:00That New Cat Smell<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwytY8x1AuQL4c2IlmWYMWCIxLEsXEVOWUrw_gvAnOlvIDtTRdQ20N_4DWpBYaKlmMkXf09o1LRjql8Fu2dFib-2FGL8bwy5ydHbXU-zgOqQytxAy-M-_6v87q0Jp564qWpK7eaqXjL8x4IE_Sl6Qqv_5SLevkBvTOB-202WUj3ZBBziCGk0SxFShO/s2055/pumasink.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1914" data-original-width="2055" height="298" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwytY8x1AuQL4c2IlmWYMWCIxLEsXEVOWUrw_gvAnOlvIDtTRdQ20N_4DWpBYaKlmMkXf09o1LRjql8Fu2dFib-2FGL8bwy5ydHbXU-zgOqQytxAy-M-_6v87q0Jp564qWpK7eaqXjL8x4IE_Sl6Qqv_5SLevkBvTOB-202WUj3ZBBziCGk0SxFShO/s320/pumasink.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /> Meet Puma Purrman.<p></p><p><br /></p><p>Sunny, our other cat, was not doing well as an only cat, in the wake of Shadow's death, so on Saturday, we went to the Castle Rock Dumb Friends facility to look at cats. Puma (then named Uma Purrman) was first on her list, and the volunteer said "Oh, perfect. She's a doll, I've been trying to find a home for her all day.</p><p><br /></p><p>And she was. </p><p><br /></p><p>Affectionate, inquisitive, practically fearless (except for the dogs when they were looking in the window), with impeccable manners (soft paws, no biting). Also sleek and black, as I've come to prefer in cats. So we brought her home. She's about four months old, with great big paws and a very long tail. IT seems likely she's going to be a big kitty.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>It's been a very long time since we had a kitten. 13 years or so, not coincidentally the length of Shadow's life, since he was the last kitten we had. Still getting used to that. Next steps, get the new cat inspection done, get her spay stitches out, and get her fully introduced to Sunny, who is very curious about her.</p><p><br /></p><p>As I told her (like she listened. Cat.) I'm glad she's here. I wish Shadow could be here too, but he can't.</p><p><br /></p><p>What, you don't talk to your cats? <br /></p>JRShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17544359854042628120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2300483012293480971.post-57064518481047117982022-09-11T16:57:00.000-07:002022-09-11T16:57:21.613-07:00Farewell, Shadow<p>Back in July, you may recall I mentioned Shadow wasn't the athlete he was when he was younger. </p><p>My concerns turned out to be well founded. His age wasn't really the cause. This became clear this past week or so, when Shadow fairly abruptly stopped grooming himself, practically stopped eating, and started drooling. A lot.</p><p>We were hoping this would prove to be a dental issue. Old cats have them, but on close examination by the vet, he had no dental issues visible, and no gag reflex, and his pupils weren't reactive, although he could see. On careful examination, and only the second time in our awesome vet's 20some years of experience, the diagnosis was myasthenia gravis. </p><p>Shadow wasn't the easiest cat we've had. (That would be Oreo, who's been gone for some years now.) He was not the brightest cat we've had. (Also Oreo). In fact, Shadow was kind of dumb, and didn't like being picked up or held as an adult. He was soft, with a shiny black almost-long-haired cat with little white spots on his belly. He was big, a 14-16 pounder with truly enormous paws. Not as big as the aforementioned Oreo, who was as long but much broader and at least two pounds heavier, but still, a substantial cat. He was gentle, and he loved to be near us and to cadge pets and scratches, until he'd had his fill. Even then, he wouldn't go far. He loved to talk, in his Siamese voice, and would answer when spoken to. He loved to supervise contractors when he was younger. We have infrared photos from when we had our house scanned to find out where all the cold air was coming in. One image has a cat-shaped hotspot and is titled "Shadow, inspecting the window."</p><p> I'm writing a new book, so I was spending a lot of time at my desk where his cat bed still is, and in the last couple months, his favorite thing in the world, after being plied with Temptations Purrrrr.ee cat treat paste, was to lie in his cat bed and wrap his arms my foot while I petted him very lightly with my toes. I had misgivings about his health since July, so I was more than happy to indulge him and spend time with my little furry buddy.</p><p>The treatment for myasthenia gravis in cats can arrest the progression of the disease, but not undo the effects. Also, despite decades of experience with cats, we had never successfully pilled Shadow or given him any medication of any kind. We were certain this would shorten his life. Ultimately it didn't. We both agreed that keeping Shadow alive in the state he was in was not good quality of life, so we had him put down on Friday.</p><p>I held him while he was being put down, and once the tranquilizers took effect, he seemed to like that. There was no clear point where his life ended, really. He was on a big dose of tranquilizer, so his tongue was hanging out and he'd lost consciousness before the vet gave him the surgical anesthetic. He quietly stopped breathing, and his heart eventually also stopped. </p><p>I miss the cat. I miss the conversations I miss having a cat nearby at all times. I miss this cat. Sunny, our remaining cat, is mixed between wondering where her brother has gotten to and taking full advantage of the fact that he's not around, but she's a very different cat, and she's M's, not mine. Although she likes me just fine.</p><p> We've been talking about taking on a kitten. It won't be the same, of course. Shadow was more than a generic cat, and can't be replaced, but whoever the new cat turns out to be will fill the generic cat-shaped hole presently in my life. There are aspects of Shadow's personality I truly won't miss, but he was a good kitty, and he was my boy, and I was his human.</p><p>So farewell, Shadow. I hope you're in a better place, and I hope you'll still remember who I am when I reach the end of my own time. There are some really nice people there, your buddy Oreo is there, lots of other cats, and even a dog. You'll fit right in.</p>JRShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17544359854042628120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2300483012293480971.post-91536060325597121962022-07-11T17:28:00.003-07:002022-07-12T20:49:22.583-07:00Healthcare<p> If you ever think we don't need a national healthcare system, spend some time in an emergency vet hospital. Idiot cat Shadow apparently biffed a landing and was limping, so we took him in to be checked out. (He's fine, just not the athlete he was when he was younger.) There was a man there with a dog who seemed to have had a stroke, and had no money. They were telling him how to apply for a CareCredit (healthcare credit card) while the dog was suffering. If the idea of having to do that with a (human) family member doesn't leave you disgusted and incensed, then I suspect we have nothing further to discuss. It's bad enough with pets.</p><p><br /></p><p>-JRS<br /></p>JRShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17544359854042628120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2300483012293480971.post-52474575057571908122020-03-19T20:02:00.003-07:002020-03-19T20:04:29.998-07:00Pneumonia, Ventilators, and APAP machinesFriend <a href="http://www.contrapositivediary.com/">Jeff</a> was pondering in his blog about the usefulness of autopap (APAP) machines as ventilators to combat the shortage of actual ventilators. Doing some digging, I find that ventilators are used for people with pneumonia (why you need one with Covid-19) are mostly about pushing enough air with enough oxygen into the lungs to reduce the inflammation so the lungs can drain themselves, basically. This is not the same as how we picture it - when they're used to force air into the lungs of someone whose breathing muscles aren't functioning. Apparently, APAP can do that, at least some of the time. To whit, this article: <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3256460/">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3256460/</a><br />
<br />
Food for thought. We may need tens of thousands of ventilators, which might be hard to find, but we may be able to supplement the ones we have with APAP machines, which are considerably more common, and much less expensive. Heck, even I have an APAP machine.<br />
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-JRSJRShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17544359854042628120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2300483012293480971.post-11600719368620517422019-11-02T20:15:00.001-07:002019-11-02T20:15:53.666-07:00Manuskript, RevisitedBack in <a href="https://jamesrstrickland.blogspot.com/2017/02/manuskript-open-source-scrivener.html">2017</a>, I tried what was, at that time, a very young, very raw text editing program called Manuskript. It wasn't that useful to me for a variety of reasons. Fast forward to this year, and <a href="https://www.theologeek.ch/manuskript/">version 0.10 of Manuskript</a>, and that's all changed.<br />
<br />
My single biggest problem with Manuskript was that its editor is a markdown editor. At the time, I hated markdown. For me, it represented a huge step backwards - embedding textual cues instead of WYSIWIG. I'd //used// editors like that, man, back in the bad old days, and I was happy to get away from them.<br />
<br />
That was before I got into typesetting. A long time ago now, when my first novel, Looking Glass, was published, the original typesetter managed to lose all the italics. If you've read that novel, that's a ton, and every one of them was missing. I never understood how that could happen until I tried it myself.<br />
<br />
See, here's the problem. No two WYSIWIG formats are the same. Even Microsoft can't get it right between versions of Word, and even RTF, the de-facto standard for slightly word processed text (and what I was using at the time) changes from implementation to implementation. The translators are never perfect. Having written one to go from Wordstar 3 to rtf, I understand why.<br />
<br />
The short version is that styles are a problem. In an rtf, they're stored at the beginning of the file. If you switch between them in an orderly fashion, never using any of those nice formatting buttons at the top of your screen, all is well and good, although the file is still an atrocious mess inside. If you make any change //at all// to a style, you create a new style. Also, styles have real problems when you apply them to one word. They're really designed to style at the paragraph level. It gets ugly, fast.<br />
<br />
All this is hidden from the user, who can't (normally) see inside the actual file they're creating. It //looks// fine. If one of those styles gets sent over to typesetting software that's missing a font, or doesn't have the exact features of the version of rtf the word processing software did, things get messy, quick. And the typesetter has to clean that mess up by hand. Also, it's hard to search through and find, for example, "everywhere I used italics" because that may be part of three different styles plus in-line changes, and they probably use different codes to indicate these different methods. Worse, the translators have to figure out how to do something the target format may not really understand, which dumps a lot of machine generated formatting into the typesetting software that's usually, to put it bluntly, wrong.<br />
<br />
Which brings us back to markdown. Markdown avoids all this. Basically, it gives you a convenient shorthand for HTML, and the shorthand is designed to be human readable and publishable as it is. I'm not yet fluent in it. By the time I'm done with City of Glass, or whatever Brass and Steel II is called by the time it's done, I will be.<br />
<br />
Manuskript's editor is still a markdown editor, but it also gives you WYSIWIG for the markdown you've added (at least, for the simple stuff I've experimented with so far.) Manuskript is much more stable than it was two years ago, and it has working spell checkers (thank your stars... my spelling is dreadful) It's got what looks like a timeline feature I've yet to use. And. Most importantly. It plays nice with Dropbox. I've lost data because the Scrivener format is really a directory of files with an XML header trying to keep them in sync. If you try to roll one back, you'd //better// make sure you roll back the xml, or you're in trouble. Manuskript does the same thing, really, and the version control (!) system that's built in is apparently not quite ready for prime time (so I haven't used it,) so as an option, it zips the file. Simple as that. One file, Dropbox saves the different versions, and if you want inside to look at your raw files, it's all there, in reasonably named folders (once you unzip the file) in plain text markdown files.<br />
<br />
I don't really know if I like markdown yet. It may get inordinately tedious by the time I'm done with CoG. I may be screaming for stylesheets or //something// by the time I'm done. Or it may be that, in light of the fact that I'm typesetting my own work in separate programs now, that having a word processor with a built in semi-capable typesetter is not the best choice anymore. I don't know. Being able to see what I'm doing is handy, so I know I'm not making gross formatting errors in my markdown newbie phase. If this doesn't work for me... well... I did always want to write my own word processor... but even if I do, it'll probably output markdown and I'll bolt it up to Manuskript somehow. We'll see how it goes.<br />
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-JRSJRShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17544359854042628120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2300483012293480971.post-53290626346218410272019-07-11T15:58:00.002-07:002019-07-11T15:58:53.116-07:00Notes on the Raspberry Pi 4b<br />
<br />
I recently got a Raspberry Pi 4/4GiB. Below and in the comments are my notes from poking at it.<br />
<br />
SSDs are now worth it. My ancient Apple laptop HDD got about 33MB/Sec for both buffered and direct access. My inexpensive (Inland) SSD got about 108MB/sec direct, and 198 MB/sec buffered.<br />
On my big desktop Linux machine with the same $5(US) USB3-SATA interface, I got virtually the same numbers from the Ancient Apple HDD, a bit over 200MB/Sec buffered and about 200MB/Sec unbuffered on the SSD.<br />
<br />
The Pi's USB 3 interface isn't as fast as the one on my big Linux box. I know this. It's been publicly stated. It's still plenty fast. As I do not have a 7200 RPM notebook drive to test with, I'll just say that based on the specs, you //might// touch somewhere close to these numbers with a high performance HDD on a Pi, and if the budget is pinching, or you happen to have a 7200RPM notebook drive lying about, you won't do badly with it, but my experience has been that you will feel the difference with the SSD. Particularly with the Pi, where swapping is a way of life, I recommend the SSD.<br />
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Numbers generated using hdparm -t /dev/sda and hdparm -t --direct /dev/sda.<br />
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<br />JRShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17544359854042628120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2300483012293480971.post-23105935225404134422019-01-05T16:36:00.001-08:002019-01-05T16:36:19.126-08:00Windows 10 from Virtual to RealIn preparation for moving my stepfather's windows 10 installation to an SSD, I was trying out <a href="https://clonezilla.org/">clonezilla</a>. Having booted my virtualbox windows 10 machine to the clonezilla iso, I duped the virtual system drive out to a spare SSD (ye gods. Spare SSDs). Figuring out how to test it was a puzzle, so I tried what seemed like a dumb idea. I took the duplicate of the virtual drive downstairs to the Intel NUC I use down there as a shop computer. It runs Linux normally, but with some bios kicking so it would boot from USB drives, it started reading the drive.<br /><br />And guess what. It booted into Windows 10, with all of my apps in place, no problems. I didn't know it would do that. I had to update some drivers, and I did //not// check to see if it was authorized, and I did //not// plug the SSD into the NUC's one and only SATA port (USB3 was fine) but taking the ship out of the bottle and putting it in the ocean actually worked.<br /><br />Cloning a Linux machine wouldn't have surprised me. They don't have stupid DRM baked in. The fact that playing that fast and loose with a Windows 10 license did work was the surprise.<br /><br />Learn something new every day.<br /><br />Note Bene: My basement machine would be pretty much useless with Windows on it, so once I did a long-overdue BIOS update on the NUC, I shut down, unplugged the windows drive, and everything went back to normal. After some more BIOS kicking so it would boot from the built-in drive again. Bleah. I don't like UEFI bios much. Intel's version, even less so.<br />
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-JRSJRShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17544359854042628120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2300483012293480971.post-89796652883939262882018-12-05T22:57:00.002-08:002018-12-05T22:57:28.903-08:00CondolencesTo President George W. Bush:<br />
<br />
There are circumstances that must supersede politics. This is one of them. My sincerest condolences, Mr. President, for the loss of your father.<br />
<br />
-JRSJRShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17544359854042628120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2300483012293480971.post-20877417957020506732018-09-04T16:51:00.003-07:002018-09-04T16:59:04.660-07:00E-Bikin' it 7: Repair ComedyThings have been busy around here, but back in July (remember July?) I noticed my front wheel stem had bulged out. "Hmm," I thought. "I should probably replace the tube in that this weekend." The stem blew up on that ride, deflating the tire in seconds. I took another walk home.<br />
<br />
You might recall from E-Bikin' It 6 that I'd ordered all the parts for a new wheelset, with Sturmey Archer brakes and heavy duty touring rims. You might be wondering if this was one of the new tubes that had failed. It was not. What happened was that I ordered all the parts, did the measurements, and took the parts in to my favorite LBS (Local Bike Shop) to consult with the tech there on spoke length. Critically, I went with his calculations instead of mine. And the spokes I ordered were the wrong length. This stalled the project for a while. However, when my old wheelset's front wheel blew the stem off (mostly) the project got new urgency. I ran the calculations again, and called around town to find someone that sold spokes that length. Once I had them in hand, the fun began. And by fun, I mean mind-numbing tedium.<br />
<br />
See, I'd never actually done this before. I had Youtube to guide me, in several different approaches, but it still took about 4 tries to get the front wheel built. Four tries getting about half done and finding out that I'd skipped a spoke hole, or gone the wrong direction, or had the tensions so far off I couldn't get nipples on some of the spokes, and so on. The massive size of the hub (90mm) vs the relatively small size of my rim (26 inches) means the spokes are on a pretty steep angle. The rim is drilled for this, but it still complicates building. It makes for a pretty rigid wheel, though, which is what I wanted.<br />
<br />
Eventually, I got the thing built and onto the truing stand for final tensioning, truing, and dishing. I don't actually own a dishing tool, so my dishing method was to get one side running true, and flip the wheel around, until the same truing setting worked for both sides, meaning the rim is centered over the hub. The front hub is not very asymmetric, despite the brake, so it wasn't a huge struggle. Less than truing my old front wheel, that's for certain.<br />
<br />
The rear wheel was easier to build. Much easier. I'd done it before. Also, the rear hub is considerably smaller. The complications didn't set in until it came time to true and dish it.<br />
<br />
Dishing any rear wheel is a pain, since the cassette makes the hub very asymmetric. The spokes on the cassette side have to be considerably tighter than the ones on the other side. My flipping-the-wheel method of dishing does work, but it multiplies the work fairly dramatically. I really need a dishing tool, and a better understanding of how to use one. Of course, I'll need wheels I'm willing to take apart to learn that...<br />
<br />
Anyway. You'd think that once this whole process was done, I'd have been home free. Just stick tubes and tires on, add air, install, and ride. Yeah, I thought that too. I've never dealt with presta valves before. So far as I've been able to tell, they're inferior in every way to Schraeder valves (the kind your car uses), but they're what the rims are drilled for, and having gone to some lengths to get strong rims, I'm not about to weaken them by redrilling the stem holes. So presta valve tubes are what I got. From my favorite LBS. They were having a sale, so I bought four, thinking that since my last tubes lasted ten years, this might be enough for the life of the bike.<br />
<br />
Ha. Hahaha.<br />
<br />
Instead, I was surprised how much presta valves leak. Like, they wouldn't stay pumped up for 24 hours. "Wait," I hear you screaming, "That's not right." I know that //now//... but I had to get a presta air chuck to figure that out. Otherwise I was relying on thumb tests and a 20 year old bike mounted pump...that wasn't actually presta compatible, but could be made to work. Under-pressurized tires? You bet. They were squishy. Didn't like them. When I got the air chuck and ran them up to a measured 55ish PSI, they were a lot better. They still leaked a lot, especially the front one. I was fairly sure that I'd overtightened the retaining nuts on the stems, or perhaps bent the valve cores. I tried swapping out the valve core from one of the spare tubes. Things didn't get any better. Swapped out the whole tube (swapping the cores back). Still no bueno. The new tube leaked as badly or worse than the old one.<br />
<br />
Eventually, we went to Colorado Springs so my wife could see her dentist. (Long story.) I aired up the tires, stuffed the bike in the back of my CRV, and we went there. While she was dentist-ing, I got my bike out of the car, and managed to turn the handlebars (and front wheel) a full turn getting my bike out of my car. I wondered why all the brakes were locked when I tried to ride it. No worries, I thought, I'll just turn it back around. Everything seemed to work. It didn't, but I didn't realize it at the time. Because my front tire was slowly going flat.<br />
<br />
Uncle Google to the rescue. There was, it turned out, a bike shop (another Specialized shop, in fact) about a mile from where I was. Downhill, even. I figured I had enough air left to get there before I started riding on my rims. This was only mostly true.<br />
<br />
At that point, I was annoyed. "Just replace the tube," I told them. I had lots more adjectives in mind for the tube at this point, but it wasn't the bike mechanic's fault, so I didn't share. "And let me watch, so I know how not to screw the tubes up." The mechanic was certainly nice. He asked where I'd had my bike converted to electric. You've seen the pictures. My ebike is not a thing of beauty. When dealing with professional bike mechanics, I half expect the comment to be "Wow, it looks like your conversion was done by a chimpanzee with a pipe wrench." All he said was "Cool." Which could mean anything. I took it as a compliment.<br />
<br />
The new tube went in without a hitch, other than the mechanic forgot to reconnect my front brake cable, which is no biggie. It just snaps in. Fortunately my first stop was from five miles an hour, and the rear still worked. They also sold me a valve core tool. Remember what I said about having the right tools? This is one of those. I think it set me back five bucks.<br />
<br />
The new tube also held air. Like for weeks. I still had to put air in the back tire every ride, but it was workable.<br />
<br />
And then I noticed that my shifting was all over the place. Gears weren't in the right positions, I couldn't reach my largest cog, and I threw the chain a couple times. This isn't normal behavior. I figured I'd knocked my derailleur out of alignment. Adjusted it. No bueno.<br />
<br />
Then I got a good look at the shift sensor for the ebike kit, and all became clear. See, the wire part of the cable runs through the sensor, where it passes (I assume) between a magnet and a hall sensor and detects when you shift. A cable works because the inner wire moves through the jacket. The difference in pressure between the two is what shifts the bike (or stops it, although brake cables have somewhat different jackets.) The sensor still worked fine. The problem was when I turned the handlebars all the way around, and wound the cables around the headstock, I'd overtightened my shifter cable, and crushed the housing of the sensor. My rear shifter cable's jacket was no longer a fixed length, since the two ends of the cable jacket could get closer together through the crushed housing, and then further apart when you shift the other way. With indexed shifting, where it's assumed that the gear is in the same place every time, this is a disaster.<br />
<br />
New sensors are 50 bucks. I didn't really want to spend that, since the sensor itself still worked, so I took a closer look at the bike.<br />
<br />
Most modern bikes have remarkably little cable jacket. They have a length from the handlebars to the nearest fixed tube of the frame, where they pass through a cable stop. Here, the jacket ends, and the bare inner steel cable extends along the tube to another cable stop, where the jacket begins again, and the cable winds to its destination. Because the cable jacket stays the same length (it's supported by the cable stops and the frame) the shifting works as you'd expect.<br />
<br />
My remaining shifter cable is jacketed along its whole length. I had to reroute it to make room for the motor. However, there is a cable stop that originally served the rear derailleur. It was the point where the bare cable ended and the jacket came back for the loop of cable that goes around the derailleur and controls it. Even better, it was right next to the sensor. One end of the jacket's length could be controlled by just re-using this cable stop. Awesome. All I had to do was figure out how to control the other one.<br />
<br />
So I 3d printed another cable stop, from a design I found online, modified to take a beefier ziptie. Yes, my whole bike is held together with zipties. I took the rear shifter cable apart, mounted this new cable stop, threaded the cable through the old cable stop, readjusted everything, and my shifting was solid again. Yay me!<br />
<br />
But wait, there's more.<br />
<br />
Two rides later, the magnet that triggers the speed sensor (on the other side of the rear wheel) fell off somewhere on the trail.<br />
<br />
In truth, my bike could have lived without the shift sensor. It was an addon to help prolong the life of the cogs, by turning off the boost while you're shifting. The speed sensor, by contrast, is mission critical. I've mentioned that my bike is street legal as a class 2 ebike. In no small part, this is because the motor computer cuts the boost at 20MPH. Having no speed sensor also means my odometer doesn't work, which means I have no idea how far I've ridden. Which is a bummer.<br />
<br />
Exasperated by this point, I went to Michaels with my sweetie and bought a six-pack of little 1/4 inch neodymium magnets. They're much stronger than the ceramic magnet that was in the sensor trigger in the first place. After some tinkering (read: more zipties) I moved the sensor a bit closer to the axle and superglued one of those magnets to the hub. Along with significant bits of my fingers, no doubt. I hate superglue.<br />
<br />
This worked great.<br />
<br />
But wait, there's more. I'm not making this up.<br />
<br />
I got a couple rides before my rear tire started going flat in the middle of the ride. Another slow (but not slow enough) leak. By the time I got it home, I was, once again, just barely not riding on my rims.<br />
<br />
"What the heck?" I said. Actually, that's a lie, I have a full and colorful vocabulary of profanity that got exercised on my ride home. It was mostly exhausted by the time I got there. "Perhaps," I reasoned, "the real problem with the front tube was that I bent both the original valve core and the replacement with that adapted hand pump. So I replaced the valve core with my new valve core tool and pumped up the tire. And then left the bike in the garage overnight. In the morning? Flat as a pancake. Exasperated, I took my old front tube (which the bike shop in Colorado Springs had replaced) to test and see what had gone wrong. (The front tire, by this time, was still holding the same air they'd put in it weeks before.)<br />
<br />
The old front tube leaked through a seam. Whether it was defective originally, or whether it had gotten pinched when I first started riding these wheels, I don't know. At the time I was fairly convinced it was a factory defect, and that there was no earthly point in putting tube #4, my last spare, in the rear of the bike.<br />
<br />
More colorful language. With considerably greater care than I really felt like exercising (lest I break something //else//) I shoved the bike back into my CRV and drove it to my favorite LBS, also the source of my "defective" tubes, and explained my sad tale of woe to the bike mechanic there. He examined my rear wheel closely. "Hmm." he said, "your back tire has a thorn." He showed me where it went through to the inside. As a result, he sold me a new, heavier duty tube, and filled both my front tube (which up to that point was still fully pressurized) and the new rear tube with sealant. I should mention that he also removed the thorn.<br />
<br />
Now, finally, the tires held air. They still do. They //may// need a little now, some weeks after that second tube was installed, but they're still pretty tight, exactly how you'd expect. So it wasn't the presta valves after all, and may well not have been defective tubes (though I'll never really know.)<br />
<br />
But wait. There's more. Seriously?!? Seriously.<br />
<br />
On the next ride, the speed sensor magnet fell off again. Apparently superglue+finger skin is not a good substitute for actual mechanical strength. More colorful language. I whipped out the 3d printer this time. After a few iterations, I had a magnet holder that would clamp around a spoke with the magnet in it. Superglue the magnet inside the magnet holder, then superglue the magnet holder together around a spoke. Then smear superglue all over the spoke, the support, and the magnet, just because I'm damn tired of fixing this bike. And finger bits. Let's not forget the finger bits in the mix. I think of it kind of like fiberglass. Resin+strengthener. Only now it's superglue, finger bits, steel spoke, PLA tube, and neodymium magnet #3. (My wife found #2, which I dropped, superglued to the floor in the garage. I kept it as a souvenir, and because you could run DNA traces on it and convict me of being an idiot with tubes of superglue.<br />
<br />
But wait, there's... actually there isn't. The first day I rode the thing after installing the new sensor trigger, I had a good ride, which is to say nothing leaked, broke, or fell off. So far, that's been the case since. I've skipped over some other, more routine maintenance. I've tightened the headset, which had gotten loose enough to *clunk* when leaned on, cleaned and reoiled the chain, returning to my belief that a good bike is a grease bomb below the axles, and replaced all the multicolored zip-ties from when I installed the lights with more dignified (and bigger, stronger) black ones, and so on. The bike's been fairly reliable since.<br />
<br />
So after all that, how are the new wheels?<br />
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Different. First of all, between the hubs and the rims, I've probably added five pounds to the weight of the bike. It's an ebike. I don't notice that so much, really. What I do notice is this: I started riding a 10 speed back in the late 70s, when they were still a thing. These were road bikes, more or less, with narrow little road bike tires. They're //hard//, and I got used to the feel of the road through them.<br />
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My new tires are inch-and-three-quarters wide road-ish tires. They have tread, but they're in no-way knobby. Now that they hold air, I can say that even at 57LBS (the maximum the tires are rated for) they still feel softer, though nowhere near as soft as they were when I first started riding on them. The softness actually goes a long way to making a more comfortable ride, but it does mean the bike //bounces// more when I pedal hard. Where the new wheels are awesome: no broken spokes, and the extra 1/4 inch of tread width makes riding on the trails feels a lot more secure, without adding a lot of drag on the road.<br />
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Was it worth it?<br />
<br />
Yes. I could have done without the tire drama, the speed sensor drama, the shift sensor drama and the spoke drama, but the wheels are a combination you simply can't buy, unless you have them custom made. They were expensive. All told, with two sets of spokes, I probably have three or four hundred bucks in these wheels. But if I'd had them custom made, it would have been easily twice that. If I could have done with one set of spokes, I could have brought that down by almost a hundred bucks. Spokes are expensive - about a buck each for good ones, and 36 spoke wheels eat them up.<br />
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Lessons learned: try to get Schraeder valve rims and tubes. They're more common, the tools to work on them are orders of magnitude cheaper, and prestas are just //fussy//. Also, think hard about tube sealer and/or heavy duty tubes. And finally, keep a little pump on the bike. Make sure it fits the valves you have, or is valve-agnostic. Having to race home before my tire(s) went flat and feeling my brand new hand-assembled wheels practically riding on the pavement themselves was no fun.<br />
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Happy Trails.<br />
<br />
-JRSJRShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17544359854042628120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2300483012293480971.post-38980508949954888032018-08-15T23:11:00.002-07:002018-08-15T23:12:50.806-07:00Raspberry Pi for Arduino UsersSo you might have noticed the site update. In addition to unplugging Google Analytics* (which was the only use my site had for cookies) I have a new book out, as of mid-July called <i>Raspberry Pi for Arduino Users</i>. <br />
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Most Raspberry Pi books assume you're starting from scratch, or that you know some Linux, or that you actually want to learn Python. <i>Raspberry Pi for Arduino Users</i> assumes that you're actually an experienced Arduino user, well versed in writing sketches, but that you want to cross over to build an Internet gadget, or you need more speed, or a GPU, or some other service that just comes with a Pi, but you don't know where to start.<br />
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This book is where you start. It will teach you how to use the Geany IDE to replace the Arduino IDE you're used to, and how to leverage the C++ you learned writing sketches to write Linux programs for the Raspberry Pi, from GPIO code to network socket code to PHP for the Apache web server, to building your own 5 volt Arduino compatible that you can program from the Pi's GPIO pins. I break these topics down into digestible chunks with some classic projects, and a few you simply can't do with Arduino.<br />
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Most of what you've already learned with Arduino can work with the Pi. This book is how you get there.<br />
<br />
-JRS<br />
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*My blog is hosted by blogger.com, so it still has cookies. If you read it on my site, it's fed from the RSS feed that does not.JRShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17544359854042628120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2300483012293480971.post-2902539767446298022018-06-08T11:49:00.000-07:002018-06-08T11:49:09.501-07:00Tony Bourdain is GoneI guess, like so many, I thought that Tony Bourdain had roped in his self-destructive demons, that they'd gone quiet as he aged, as he found success doing what he loved: traveling the world, writing, and making TV about it. Obviously it wasn't so. Much as I enjoyed his TV, I enjoyed his books more, the brash, caustic, obnoxious, but remarkably eloquent and humane writing voice was a treasure. It's a balance that's very hard to strike, and he did it over and over again. Unlike many, I don't see it as a self-absorbed act. I see it as a man who'd been staying one step ahead of his demons for 40 years stumbled again, and this time he fell all the way. I wish he'd gotten help instead. It can make all the difference.<br /><br />My condolences to his friends, his girlfriend, and most especially to his daughter. I can't imagine how awful this must be for you.<br />
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Farewell Tony Bourdain. <br />
<br />
-JRSJRShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17544359854042628120noreply@blogger.com0