Blog
Changing my sleep habits
I’ve been trying to fix my sleep for the last several weeks. The last few days have been mostly normal.1 In that I’ve been going to bed around midnight and waking up with my alarm at 8:30. I’ve felt much better, and I don’t need a mid-day nap so often.
This has been good and a welcome change. But I’m finding that the wake up time is just not working for me. 8:30 is just late enough that it screws up my preferred lunch time, 1 p.m. For some reason that time feels right for a mid-day meal. It’s also early enough so that dinner won’t come too late and send me to bed on a full stomach.
Ulysses ePub fix – Script Update
This morning I received an email from the Ulysses developers about the ePub bugs I reported. One thing that surpised me was a request to update my script that fixes the playOrder incrementing.
So I did!
Now the script can be run with a zip and unzip options.
Managing Receipts with Smart Folders & Hazel
Managing receipts is a necessary evil for anyone that needs to track tax deductions. I wanted a way to keep my receipts in one place on my computer, and have an easy way to mark the ones that are deductible.
Keeping track of emailed and downloaded receipts is usually much easier than having to file paper copies. Usually. The one advantage of paper is that it can be glanced at. A folder full of PDFs isn’t something that be looked through with a quick riffle of the thumb.
The permanence of Twitter
In 2010, the Library of Congress announced it had started archiving all of Twitter.
That’s right. Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. That’s a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions. §
Word Count — Week 8
It’s time for my weekly word count check-in. At the end of every week, I post a screen shot from my writing results spreadsheet. This shows the current week and the three before. My week starts on Monday. The numbers are current through Sunday night. I also only average over six days. This allows me one day of no writing that doesn’t impact the weekly totals.
I spent the first part of the week learning about how to make eBooks. But for writing, this was a week of poor concentration. I wasn’t able to focus on much of anything. It wasn’t writer’s block. It was more of a feeling that I just didn’t have anything worth writing inside me. Instead I spent time on Twitter. Overall, a poor showing.
Exploiting the Superfish certificate
With a $35 pocket computer, you can read SSL (🔒) traffic from a Superfish infected Lenovo laptop.
Flash Fiction—A Day's Work
I stopped at the penthouse window to watch the lava. It came down the mountain like God pouring molasses from the sky. A fast moving flow had erased the road. It had been there when I started up the stairs. The hotel was cut off from the highway. I stuffed a watch into my front pocket. “Time to roll,” I said to the empty room.
The lava came with the dawn. The tourists and businessmen left with the first alarm. They flooded the street in pajamas and robes. Without time to pack, the riches of a small city were left laying for someone to pick up. Today, that someone was me.
More on Ulysses and ePub
Ebook publishing seems to be my theme of the week. It’s something I didn’t know much about. I’ve managed to learn quite a bit this week. The most important thing I learned is about workflow.
There are lots of ways to make an ePub file. Amazon KDP will take just about any file and convert it to their .mobi format. Smashwords has a converter (“Meatgrinder”)that take a Word (.doc) file and do the conversion to ePub. These are convenient because they’re an all-in-one solution. But for the most part require a lot of work on the input file to avoid the garbage—in-garbage-out problem.
Ulysses III export - ePub repair
This is what seems to be the second in a series about making ePub format eBooks with Ulysess III. Yesterday, I compared a few options for making eBooks. I found the least troublesome way was to just simply export from Ulysses using a custom stylesheet. Today’s post is about how to fix an annoying export bug.