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.

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. One thing that came to my mind: since you already developed a small Ruby script, could you integrate the unzip and zip process within the script, so users wouldn't need this extra step anymore? — Götz So I did!

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. Have you ever sent out a “tweet” on the popular Twitter social media service? Congratulations: Your 140 characters or less will now be housed in the Library of Congress. 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.

Infrared Horsehead

The famous Horsehead nebula has a distinctively dark and dusty horse-shaped silhouette, but when viewed in infrared light, dust becomes transparent and the nebula appears as a wispy arc.

Exploiting the Superfish certificate

With a $35 pocket computer, you can read SSL (🔒) traffic from a Superfish infected Lenovo laptop. Thus, this example proves that this exploit is practical, not merely theoretical as claimed by the Lenovo CTO. Exploiting this was a straightforward application of commonly available tools. §

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.

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.

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. Ulysses is a three-paned editor. The second pane is a list of sheets in the current working folder.