Category: blog

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Any Ulysses user knows there’s an ePub export function. It’s right there in the export sheet. Sitting there, throwing shade with it’s little slanted “e.” Mocking me. This afternoon I was thinking about turning my sample chapter into a eBook. There’s lots of ways to build an eBook. The most common seem to be: Kindle Direct Publishing – Many file types can be uploaded and converted by by Amazon. This only makes Kindle books, which go directly to the Amazon bookshelf.

Writing a sample chapter for a possible programming book was quite eye-opening. I’ve never done any serious non-fiction writing other than a magazine article. Writing a programming book is considered non-fiction just as a humor book is. I find the classification funny. “Fiction” is defined as everything not-made-up. It can be anything from a story about a crime in your town to space battles. Non-fiction is everything else. In the sample chapter I realized there was as much fiction as truth.

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. The sample chapter upped the numbers quite a bit.

(This is a sample chapter I put together to see how I felt about writing a programming book.) The Simple Script Before starting to build a more complicated program, let’s start with something simple. We’re going to hack together a short script that works. It will upload a single cat picture to a S3 bucket. We’ll learn the basics of both a ruby script and how cloud storage works. Lesson setup In your working directory create a new branch for this chapter.

By comparing the 1995 and 2014 pictures, astronomers also noticed a lengthening of a narrow jet-like feature that may have been ejected from a newly forming star. The jet looks like a stream of water from a garden hose. Over the intervening 19 years, this jet has stretched farther into space, across an additional 60 billion miles, at an estimated speed of about 450,000 miles per hour. #supernovaSaturday Source: Hubblesite.org