Adventures in epub

Been playing with the epub format that the current crop of readers - including my Cool-er, the Sony readerss and the iPhone Stanza app - use. Epub is a fairly new standard, and it's intended to be easily reflowable (in the way that PDF is not) so that different kit can present it well. It shares a lot of technical heritage with HTML at first glance (it's basically HTML + styles + images + provision for DRM all zipped into a container), and that's fine by me.

Epub is so much better than PDF that it's worth converting your PDFs into epubs. Sites like epub2go make that easy. Like any machine-driven PDF conversion you'll get occasional layout quirks; for regular books they're trivial (occasional line-breaks where some numpty used hard returns to control layout) but you'd want to proof-read the thing first. To edit epubs, I've been using the open-source Sigil editor and it's just dandy.

Vendors take note: offering only PDFs is lame. Adobe Digital Editions offers all the DRM you'll ever want for epub, so get with the programme. Kthxbai.

I had a crack at converting comic books for readers too. Technically it's easy: Extract the CBR/CBZ file into images (it's just a ZIP with a different name), resize to something sane (most readers' native res is 600x800), and then make an epub document that has the images in a row - since it's HTML you could easily build a toolchain to do the grunt work. Rich, colourful stuff like the modern DC and Marvel offerings turn into goopy grey even w. Must try on some line-art. Can anyone recommend a manga to rip?

10:10 - 2009 Audit, 2010 Commitment

10:10 is a simple challenge: cut your emissions by 10% in 2010. It ain't a huge leap but it's big enough to matter and small enough not to hurt. Now, long-term, this sort of personal effort isn't going to do it: it's not going to effect the infrastructural changes, but it might highlight where those changes are really needed.

It's close enough to the end of the year for me to audit my emissions:

• Transport: According to my training diary I had 200 drive days in 2009 (ouch!). I'm committing to no more than 180 in 2010. I actually want way more bike days, but running and weights both kill my legs and gumption - and if that's the case then I should look at the bus and carpooling as well.
• Food: I'm reliably informed that if a vegan diet is a baseline carbon intensity, veggie is double that and meaty is triple. A shift from "plenty of meat" to "meat is a treat" should take the edge off that. I've already downloaded a couple of veggie ebooks.
• Domestic power: Pretty green already here, but I'll try to run the heaters less. If any appliances explode, they'll be replaced with A+ energy savers.
• Work: Okay, I'll turn my PC off on weekdays. Running BOINC really isn't an excuse for laziness, is it? ;)
• Leisure: Hard to do triathlon without a vehicle, but sharing will help. Didn't fly in 2009, not planning to fly in 2010.

This is the future

Have a drool over the VSS Enterprise, Virgin Galactic's first SpaceShipTwo. The mothership, Eve, was unveiled some time back; now it's Enterprise's turn. Yes, Enterprise. Don't worry, that tear of pure nerdy joy? I'm wiping away one just the same.