Specialization is for Insects

Wearable computing, I find it utterly facinating.  I wants one!  I’ve been designing a system for myself since about the age of 14.  Most recently I’ve been thinking of a low profile backpack / wrist screen platform.

I ran into this link via Makezine today.  It involves salving Prius hybrid batteries.  The formfactor of the battery says to me that it would fit perfectly in a backpack of some kind… and other than extreme voltages/current, they seem pretty safe chemically.  NiMH batterys are okish, not like LiON’s *shudder*.

Seriously, Grub is a boot to the head.

I rarely shut down my computer.  It’s linux, and is pretty low powered, so I don’t really have to.  Last night I did shut down my machine before I went to bed. I had been playing with and cleaning up my grub config last night.

For those of you who are new to Linux/Ubuntu Grub is the program that allows your computer to boot.  It’s pretty important. And I broke mine

And it turns out that it’s pretty hard to fix grub when you can’t boot your computer far enough to manipulate the grub configuration files.  There is a simple built in command line, but it’s pretty difficult to wrangle things in.

find /boot/v <–tab–>

The above command actually gives you a lot of really useful feed back, both in the tab completion and the result.  It *should* spit out something like (hd0,5) which equates to hda5.  My entry in my /boot/grub/menu.lst had (hd1,5) instead of (hd0,5).  And that’s what prevented me from booting.

Luckily I had a livecd handy to get online and diagnose and find that find / command.

So don’t touch grub unless you read up on the matter first.  Seriously.  It will kick you in the head.  With a boot…

Let me state this up front.  I hate PDF
’s.  I’ve worked in graphic design and print design blah blah blah.  And I’ve had to deal with every lame application’s specific intrepretation of PDF more times than I would like.

PDF’s don’t do well in web browsers, they are far larger than the componant text file, don’t really provide any security, are hard to flow text in (or out of), don’t work well with screen readers (depends), and very often are awful for professional CMYK printing.

Tonight, I discovered:

1. PDFs function roughly the same way in GNU/Linux as in the Windows world (weird)
2. That in FOSS there are AMAZINGLY powerful tools to do PDF’s

When I helping edit the release
notes for Hardy Heron (which were re-written in plain english?
) I found out that the latest version of Inkscape
could edit PDF’s natively I was estatic.  I have since used Inkscape (which I now love more than life itself) on a spree of projects.  Inkscape is FANTASTIC, download it now.

But Inkscape doesn’t handle image based PDF’s as well.  Image based PDF’s (probably a better name for them) are basically just a big scanned image, usually a series of documents that have been cramed into a .PDF and then emailed back and forth.  Working in real estate I’ve cleaned up an awful lot of these when they finally degrade beyond the point of legibility (at least it’s better than faxes).

Tonight I was forced to deal with the issue of an inproperly formatted scaned document (PDF) using only Free and Open Software!  It’s True!  And it CAN be done, quite handily I might add.

The scanned document at 300dpi (and quite awful quality I might add) was 145MiB and merely 6 pages of simple text.  Being in a hurry, I was able to 7zip the document down to about 9MiB and email it to myself back home.

Once home, I unzipped, and started poking at it with Inkscape.  Well inkscape didn’t quite know what to do with 6 pages, and doesn’t quite handle images natively.  So I fired up The GIMP to see what it would do with 145MiB of PDF.  The GIMP didn’t even hiccup.  It ate that pdf and spit out 6 .eps’ at 150dpi like they were nothing.  This cut the total filesize down to about 18MiB.

EPS’s are well and good.  But I need a single PDF to send.  So I use the pdftk (apt-get install pdftk) to convert and concatenate the six files.

gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=contract.pdf -dBATCH Contract1.eps Contract2.eps Contract3.eps Contract4.eps Contract5.eps Contract6.eps

That left me with a single file called contract.pdf.  That file? was only 700KiB in size.

…

There has to be an easier way to do this.  But all the same, I’m glad that I learned how to do it this way first.  Were I to do these in batches, The Gimp takes scripts very well, and I would likely even find a command line program (imagemagic?) that would do this even easier.

My blag software has been down for some time.  But it’s back now.

Newness?

I now live in ellensbouguise again, and am going to CWU.  I’m trying to finish my degree, eventually.  Degrees actually.

I’m going to be here for another month, and then to Boston for the summer.

More to come

I’ve been very very busy as of late.  I have been volunteering with the One Laptop Per Child Project, doing content and grassroots type stuff.  Its a great project, and I love it very much, but it takes a lot of out me.  I haven’t really had time to post here or any of the other blogs I’ve set up.

I am going to make an effort to document the work that I am doing at my blog on the OLPC: www.Whyxo.com.   My fist post is about some of the work that I’ve been doing, namely a Dinosaur Ebook.  OLPC is always looking for more volunteers, so drop me a line if you want to help out in any way, even if you don’t know how.

Mine write apparently.

I went to bed last night with a pen and a notecard on my bedstand. Between klaxons from my alarm (I hit snooze a few times) I wrote the following:

I felt paused. Was this clock still driving the ship of my time? Or had it abandoned me for it’s own purpose.

&

As I write this I use short–straight–strokes. Just like Joe.

I think that they qualify as flash fiction–microfiction perhaps.

To understand the use of the em–dash, I suggest you visit Grammar Girl.

Before you get all grossed out and stuff. It’s in reference to

aanway. Platonic-friend becky are talking about hanging out this weekend, and that we’d better have something to do, or we’re gonna have to whip out the Crisco.

The creepy part is how my gmail processed the message.

A little backstory, google reads your mail. In gmail they read your messages and give you advertising based on the contents of your email. Weeeeell I got this ad…

5 star saddle pad
Up to 75% discount, $9.99 Cotton, quilted, wither protection
www.mwsaddleryinc.com

Does google equate crisco conversations with riding someone like a horse? Where in the entire history of my gmail account have I ever expressed a need for a saddle blanket? Really?

Either Google or mwsaddleryinc.com have figured out that Crisco + Me = being ridden like a horse…

This disturbs the hell out of me.

I haven’t been posting much, but that should change once I again have interweb at my homestead.

In the meantime, please consider my flickr account to be my home.

In other news, censorship sucks, and the internet re-routes around it like a bad trunk-line.

http://b-heads.blogspot.com/

are you awake, where you are?

Originally uploaded by PatrickKErby

are you awake
are you dreaming
sleeping
scheming

where are you walking

where are you running

on this mandolin i’m strummin

on this guitar i’m playin

in this song i’m singin

in this tune i’m hummin

when you awake
where will you be

?

Curses to this Mirage, a bottle of Ancient Shiraz!

Originally uploaded by isforinsects

Ok, not so ancient. But open long enough to be a tad vinigery. Ah well, it went well with my novel. The background is my new home, a place I a buying from my grandmother. It needs some work, and a bit more moving in to do, but it’s homey, and it’s going to be a great hang out for my friends. Also, Sleepovers!

The kitchen is large enough for Z Chef to do his work, the shed large enough for l’Animator to have some working room, the office large enough for the Dude to have his computers, the patio large enough for get togethers, and the lawn just right for a pet duck (I’m thinking Millicent?).

Next step, wireless interweb!