Looks like Library Genesis has been hit hard by some courts. And so we turn to Anna's Archive. Libgen and related news Publishers Ramp Up Pressure vs. Anna’s Archive, Sci-Hub, Z-Library & Libgen (Torrentfreak) Pirate Libraries Are Forbidden Fruit for AI Companies. But at What Cost? (Torrentfreak) Copyright reform is necessary for national security (Anna's ... Read more
Manga being a Japanese word, there are several other words (in other languages) for this kind of thing: Japanese: Manga Korean: Manhwa Chinese: Manhua English (US, CA, UK, etc.): Comics, Graphic Novels French: Bande dessinée Note the main differences between Manga, Manhwa, and Manhua. In Japan, the light novel -- akin to YA fiction in ... Read more
Printing is easy but making a nice binding is not as simple or easy. Many people use comb binding / spiral bound, which also make it easier to lay the book pages flat and to turn them. Useful when using the book as a reference, or simply having multiple readers. Lumbeck Bookbinding Lumbeck bookbinding is ... Read more
Exporting Images with Inkscape 1.1 The image export functions of Inkscape have improved significantly with the release of Inkscape 1.1. The menus for this feature are not elegant, and even image export is still labeled Export PNG Images. However, the functionality for a variety of export filetypes and settings are now in Inkscape, and there ... Read more
A middle eastern string instrument played with a bow (and also can be plucked), this is a gorgeous sound. I see Kamancheh (and Daf, a middle eastern drum) played along with hang drums, and also the oud (a plucked string instrument similar to a lute).
The Theramin was invented in 1920 by Leon Theremin (Lev Sergeyevich Termen). Introduction to the Theramin The Ecstacy of Gold Introduction to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Moog Theremins Moog Theremins Moog Theremini Open Theremin Open Theramin Open Theramin kit on Ebay
Phantasms of past sins Slip into dreams shimmering Victory short-lived Procrustean chimes Punctuate the dawn enfolding
Markdown Extra Unofficial is a WordPress plugin supporting Markdown Extra the parser by Michel Fortin. There are several markdown plugins for WordPress, however most require that markdown be put in a block or a shortcode. This plugin is meant to be used with the Classic Editor and parse all text in pages and posts, excerpts, ... Read more
Nurtureshock by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman is an amazing read that challenges so many preconceptions we have about children and child-raising. As the parent of a 3-year-old and a 5-year-old I can say that this book has had a big impact on my thinking. There are so many insights across the chapters, that for ... Read more
Sibilant whispers Far afield the breeze beckons Rustling smiles sing Cold promises of seasons' Sussuration of sorrows
Where I get my news, besides the usual suspects such as Twitter, Bloomberg, NYTimes, Washington Post, etc. Cooking & Food Hngry Once upon a chef Stained page news Economics The Atlantic Council Marketing and Product Demand Curve Directive Consulting SASSmarketer The Beautiful Mess (product development) Parenting Janet Lansbury Kavanaugh Report Screen Free Parenting The Montessori ... Read more
Here are some highlights from my reading from 2020, though certainly the books were not all published in 2020. Because I didn't produce this list for 2019 I will cheat and include a few from the second half of the year in this list. I get my reading list from several sources: firsthand recommendations from ... Read more
To my daughter Amanda, > We can be knowledgeable with another man's knowledge, but we cannot be wise with another man's wisdom. -- Montaigne Is Advice Even Possible First off, it seems to me, reflecting on my own 25-year-old self (of thirty years ago), that advice is nearly impossible, unless one can actually see into ... Read more
This book is badly in need of an editor. That is not surprising as it appears to be a collection of blog posts, but the redundancies and useless repetition truly get in the way of the important points. Also, stylistically the first person voice is also a bit pedantic. Agreed, the author points out that ... Read more
EPUB documents are essentially a kind of html document as a collection of files which are zipped, and include html, css, images, and some XML pages. There are several ways of organizing these, but the most straightforward is one html document for each chapter (or section), a set of images organized in a subfolder, and ... Read more
Size matters, and the smaller the better, when it comes to generation, modification, transmission, and storage of information. The vast amount of unoptimized documents and images on my very own local storage, much less what we send and receive all the time, is astounding. The idea that we need 100gb or 1tb of storage (thank ... Read more
H1 and Content Boundaries on the Web and EBook Publications NOTE: H1 isn't really a problem, the thing is that it defines a chapter, not a work (though a chapter could be considered a work in the sense of songs being considered works that are part of a collection). H1 is a problem when using ... Read more
The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? by Jared Diamond My rating: 5 of 5 stars Wow, very interesting. If the past helps us understand the present, and help informed decisions on the future, then this work is an important one, and a fascinating read. There is an amalgam of different ... Read more
Telegram is a great chat app, but there is more, and less to it, than say Twitter and Facebook. The first thing is that a lot of this gamification of likes/thumbsup is gone. Want to know if someone read your post? That has to be done either via direct message, or in a group (and ... Read more
Marie Kondo is an expert on tidying a house. Her Netflix series Tidying Up with Marie Kondo and two books (both of which are worth reading, best in chronological order) are best-sellers: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up) Spark Joy: An ... Read more
Set to 24p Set ISO Set Exposure (no over expose) Do color grading (with LUTS) Note: Shotcut only accepts 3D LUTS (?) so have to convert from other format, perhaps... Set Fstop Use lights/lighting Good audio 12 db Steady (not shaky) Music (edit to music, rather than just dropping music in) Story (not random or ... Read more
Podcasting is growing (slowly) and offers a great opportunity for brand engagement. Generally free, the idea is to be where the audience already is, and have a reliable host for content and the rss feed. Media and RSS Hosting Soundcloud for Podcasting Google Podcasts and Google Play Music Podcasts Note, these are two different things: ... Read more
The book is "Sapiens" and it is all about humans. Fascinating and eye-opening, it provides enormous perspective for us humans today. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari I agree that there are things to disagree with in the book (my Kindle version is littered with notes where he is wrong, or possibly wrong) but the sweep ... Read more
Read This Book on Sleep (2020) Bill Gates recommends the book Why We Sleep, and it is excellent. All of my notes above need to be revised with this book in mind. I highly recommend reading it, to get more science, less psychobabble. How Much Sleep is Enough? (2018) Now that my eldest son is ... Read more
Tools change over time, but it seems that in the Epub world we have more of the same. As of November 2018: - Calibre's Epub Editor is pretty nifty - Sigil development stalled, then picked up again - Pagina Epub Checker is still under development and useful - Pandoc with or without some kind of ... Read more
Dokuwiki, over the last 10 years, has become the canonical wiki. By this I mean that Dokuwiki is the go-to wiki for most uses. While there are many other wikis which are popular and in use (e.g., Xwiki, MoinMoin, TikiWiki, etc.), the competitors (other than Mediawiki) do not exceed half of Dokuwiki's popularity. The only ... Read more
Caret the Chrome App vs. Caret the PC App -- not sure which came first, but they are very different (except for the name, and the fact they are open source). Caret the Chrome App Note that Caret may possibly replace Atom in my workflow - Caret in the Chrome Store - Caret website - ... Read more
This post will be frequently (or infrequently) updated. It is meant to help me learn Grav and Gravcart, and in particular migrate off of WordPress and Woocommerce. Related Artices in Debian Services and Applications - Debian on AWS Lightsail - OpenVPN on Debian + UFW Firewall - Nginx and Letsencrypt on Debian - PHP & ... Read more
Current issues The latest version of Inkscape has to be downloaded as an AppImage from the website. An earlier version is available via apt. Interoperability with Adobe Illustrator (AI) still has a fundamental issue with AI using 72ppi and Inkscape using 96ppi (CSS standard). Basically any objects in Adobe SVG files will appear to be ... Read more
There of course is no MediaWiki vs. WordPress in the sense of a battle. As Wiki and Blog platforms go, each is the winner in their category in terms of raw number of users/pageviews. That said, there are definitely (different) concerns with each platform, architecturally as well as accidentally. And therefore, we dreg up the ... Read more
This page is about my on-again, off-again preoccupation with poetry. It started out innocently enough, but then I fell in with the Poets of the Open Range (when living in Denver in the 1980s) and occasionally stalked the poetry readings with the nom de plume Radical Milquetoast. In any case, my father has a much ... Read more
TPP and Copyright provisions There have been several developments regarding copyright law, the most profound being that TPP appears to be dead in the water. TPP copyright provisions would have negatively impacted many countries in terms of costs to consumers, including Canada, Brunei, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Viet Nam. A New Zealand analysis disingenuously ... Read more
Updated 24-Nov-2018 Publishing Toolchain/Workflow Notes Syntax for ISBN .eps ./bookland -o 978-0-9822972-7-8.eps 978-0-9822972-7-8 Syntax for Amazon ASIN (effectively a hyphen-less ISBN-10 of the ISBN-13) encode128 0982297270 Take output and use Code128 Font to display The Amazon Barcode Note for revision: the latest version of encode128 is using different start/stop characters than what is displayed/discussed below. ... Read more
While this is an aspect of a style guide (for the structure of the metadata itself), this is very much a devops document, for use and manipulation of metadata in publishing. The basic point is that certain kinds of information about an image file is most conveniently kept inside the file itself, accessed and manipulated ... Read more
This Document Part of a Complete Set of Style Guides Purpose of an Image Style Guide This Image Style Guide is for all visual communication including photographs, drawings and the like on websites, social media, static images in video, as well as all printed material. Here are some guidelines that should help photographers and photo ... Read more
This Document Part of a Complete Set of Style Guides Purpose of Contact Information Document This Contact Information Document is for all textual communication including email, website and social media as well as all printed material. It is the single source for all communication internally and externally. All changes to the organizational contact information should ... Read more
This Document Part of a Complete Set of Style Guides This document provides guidance on the creation and management of video for social media, as well as advertising on video platforms. In particular, video needs to be optimized for SEO purposes and for particular platforms. Just as written content and image content needs to be ... Read more
This Document Part of a Complete Set of Style Guides Nothing here yet... This Document Part of a Complete Set of Style Guides
This Document Part of a Complete Set of Style Guides Purpose of Brand Style Guide This Brand Style Guide is for all brand communication including in email, website and social media as well as all printed material. This document is the source of typography, color palette, logo and other brand elements. This is the definitive ... Read more
This Document Part of a Complete Set of Style Guides NOTE: figure out how to merge / reference this with markdown Purpose of Text Style Guide This Text Style Guide is for all textual communication including email, website, social media, brochures, ebooks, etc. as well as all printed material. This guide includes markup style and ... Read more
The best part of video is how convenient it has become. However, it is still a lot of work. The tools I like to use also need to be fast... and free. This is an important aspect of liberty. Even for short videos there is usually a combination of images, video clips and audio that ... Read more
A social media style guide is only necessary in a narrow technical sense, as much of what the other style guides include applies to external / public communication, of which social media is a mere element. However, it is always useful to have particular protocols and concrete guidelines so there is no confusion. Social Media ... Read more
Style guides are just that, guides or guidelines to maintain a particular style of presentation. Guides instruct on correct usage. They are essential for maintaining consistency of an organizations and brands presentation across various media. Because of a proliferation of media, as well as media-specific goals on the Internet (aka search and social discovery), style ... Read more
This is part of McNeill and Beyond - a Memoir If we go back far enough, our ancestors are from Africa, as are everyone else's. For Y-DNA (our patrilineal line) this means ~ 110,000 years ago there is what we would call an anthropological commonality. Between the anthropological and the genealogical (stories of families) there ... Read more
Memoir Preface This is an extended essay. It is not complete, the work is ongoing in fits and starts. It contains three parts. The first part is a genealogy and genetic forensics in searching for my male ancestral line. It centers on our emigrant ancestor John McNeill (1680-1765) who emigrated to the American colonies in ... Read more
Audiobooks are generally a neglected/emerging area in much of the world. If one is in the US, of course it is less of a problem, but even Apple has a half-assed approach currently. Apple / iOS / OSX While it appears Apple is trying to get its act together, it is a far distance from ... Read more
While there is quite a bit of literary genre everywhere alive and well, there are certain publication genre which are not. The Chapbook (still popular) and the Almanac(k), as well but we don't hear about it much anymore. Chapbook in the Age of Print-on-Demand The Chapbook seems like a wonder in the age of Print-on-Demand. ... Read more
This is a permanent page about style guides used in writing and for marketing. In particular there two kinds of Style Guides: - Brand Style Guide (for product designers, pr types, and all public and corporate communications) - Publishing Style Guide (for writers, editors, publishers) These two intersect and the Brand Style Guide should refer ... Read more
Visual Studio Code Editor -- aka vscode, code -- is my current editor of choice. I used the venerable Atom editor for a number of years. Both use Electron as the platform for development, aka node/js/css. Atom was a Facebook project which has since been abandoned. It is very similar, and not difficult to switch ... Read more
I use Markdown daily. The flavor I use is Markdown Extra. I use this in WordPress websites with a very old (2013) version of the Markdown Extra plugin, which simply continues to work. I also use this in local files that I then turn into epub and pdf files using Pandoc, which supports Markdown Extra ... Read more