[Sat Sep 28 09:11:35 CDT 2013]

After my parents and my sister gave me an iPad Mini as a gift, I have been making an effort to see if I could read more books in digital format, instead of the traditional ones. You see, I have been an avid reader since I was in my early teens, and it reaches the point where carrying physical books around is a true pain in the rear. When I moved from Spain back to Minnesota a couple of years ago, I just selected a few of them to bring with, and left most of them (over 1,000 books) at my parents' home in Seville. Yet, every now and then, I wish I had some of those books here with me, so I can quickly read that particular poem or short story, or refresh my mind on the ideas espoused by such or such philosopher. Since I'm the type of reader who likes to dive into the books, underlining and writing notes on them, the old physical book still has a good amount of appeal with me. However, I must acknowledge that the e-book is starting to look more and more convenient.

In any case, I'm starting my personal experiment reading e-books on the tablet with free books that are in the public domain, for the most part. That way, if I end up not liking the media much, I never made a heavy investment in the first place. Also, there is no risk of ever needing to purchase the same book both in the traditional and the new format. However, the problem started when I noticed that some of the free books I had were in PDF format, so they had to be, first of all, converted into a different format and, second, transferred somehow to the iPad. The first part (the conversion to another format) is greatly assisted by Calibre, an open source tool that is a true gem. However, if you use the Amazon Kindle reader or application, there is an even easier way to accomplish this (read more below). As for the second task (i.e., transferring the files to the iPad), I ran into all sorts of issues. Certainly, Apple doesn't make it easy to perform any sort of uncommon operation with any of their products. With them, it always seems to be "my way or the highway". Needless to say, I don't like that approach but, since the iPad Mini was a gift, why look a gift horse in the mouth?

So, the fact was that transferring my files to the iPad was not easy, or at least not as easy as it is in the case of Android devices, that do allow users access to the underlying filesystem. The next step was to search around and, sure enough, I came across the document titled Transferring, Downloading, and Sending Files to Kindle 2nd Generation, published on Amazon's own website. It truly is quite easy. Simply send an email to your own Send-to-Kindle email address (the document explains how to find it), and include the file as an attachment. Additionally, if you want to convert it to Amazon's own file format, make sure the subject line includes the word "convert" in it. Now, regarding this latter issue (file conversion), I must say that my experience both with Calibre and the Amazon service has been quite mixed. If the PDF document is very simple, it will work. Otherwise, it will be totally mangled to the point of being unusable. In that case, you will have to read the document in PDF format on your reader. {link to this entry}

[Tue Sep 24 16:51:36 CDT 2013]

While reading an email thread on one of the Debian mailing lists last week, I noticed that someone was asking about WYSIWYG HTML editors to run on Linux. Admittedly, it is easier to find WYSIWYG HTML editors for Windows or Mac than for Linux, where there are plenty of editors (some of them quite good) to write the actual HTML code, but a clear scarcity of good WYSIWYG applications, to be honest. As far as I know, the only ones that used to be available (i.e., Amaya, NVu and Kompozer) cannot be found in the default software repositories anymore. I am not sure why, but I seem to remember having read somewhere that they lagged behind and never updated to the newer graphics libraries being used by most distributions. Yes, I believe it is still possible to download the tarballs from their websites and try to install them on your own, but that may quickly become a nice mess. In any case, the fact is that I noticed how someone recommended using Maqetta, a web-based WYSIWYG HTML editor. It looks pretty good, but I still have to spend enough time running it to see if it is worth using on a regular basis. In any case, here is a short video introducing the application:

{link to this entry}

[Fri Sep 13 17:10:59 CDT 2013]

Do you feel a bit guilty because, although you work in the technology field, you also consider quite wasteful that so many people switch to a new smartphone every other year? Yes, it's not very environmentally-friendly, is it? Well, the folks at Phonebloks came up with a nice idea. Watch the video.

{link to this entry}

[Tue Sep 10 15:41:37 CDT 2013]

After upgrading my laptop to Debian Wheezy with GNOME 3, I encountered a little annoyance: the special configuration I used via xmodmap to remap certain keys on my keyboard for Spanish characters had to be reloaded from the terminal every single time I logged in. Or, to put it a different way, the gnome-session was failing to read my changes. I tried multiple approaches to solve the problem, including the use of a ~/.xinitrc file, but nothing seemed to help. In the end, the article titled How to apply Xmodmap permanently from the AskUbuntu website did the trick. Basically, it just entails configuring your own "start-up application" to run the xmodmap command upon logging in. That's all. Easy enough, and it worked like a charm. It still bothers me that the more traditional ways to configure things (for example, the already mentioned ~/.xinitrc file) didn't work. But, hey, whatever works, right? {link to this entry}