Spring Garden

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Ah spring. The temperatures have warmed enough to work outside, but have not soared into triple digits as they so soon will. Rain still happens occasionally, and after it does the soil is allowed to hang on to the moisture for awhile. The sun is our friend, not yet that merciless bitch that will fry our skin, our plants and homes.

Time to do some digging!

Clearing off what’s left of the mulch before I dig.

Some clay, but not bad.

Smooth it out…

Add verbena.

Replace the mulch…

And on to the next section.

And with canna.

Check this shit out, bitch

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This is some awesome shit right here.

Converting old books to EPUB

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I have to admit, I love converting my old books to a digital format. I generally covert to EPUB as it seems to be a standard for digital publishing. EPUB easily converts to other formats (such as mobi for the Kindle) using calibre.

Here’s how I currently convert.

First I find one of the many old paperbacks I have. I start with a favorite, one I won’t mind reading again. And I have to read it again, the output has to be be proofread and corrected.

Once I have it selected, I break out my Canon A590. I hold the book awkwardly as I try to snap a shot of a flat page. Then I turn the book or the page, depending, and take the next shot. The last book I worked on was short stories, so I only processed a story at a time. Snapping pics of a curling book is a crazy way to do it, but until I get my book scanner completed it will have to do! Mine will be based on one of Daniel’s older designs.

Once I’ve got everything converted to pixels, I open Scan Tailor, a free “interactive post-processing tool for scanned pages.” Scan Tailor is invaluable for moving the project along from pictures to something that can be OCR‘d.

After running it through Scan Tailor, I’ve got .tiff files that can be easily read by the OCR software. I like Abbyy FineReader, although my version does not have the EPUB option that can be found in version 11. Abbyy does a good job of recognizing the text, and highlights items with which it had difficulty. These difficulties are mostly from the way I held the book and the camera at the same time. Abbyy let’s me edit the text to fix these issues.

However, Abbyy is not a full-fledged word processor; I usually end up saving the output as a plain text file (.txt), then opening that with Microsoft Word. Abbyy does have an option to save directly to a Word file, but I find the output needs additional and unnecessary work to clean up the formatting. Something I don’t need to worry about with a text file. However, with a text file, any special formatting is lost. For me, the special formatting is mostly italicized words. I usually do a scan through the book later in the process to find these words. Or go back to the Abbyy file. Or even save one version from Abbyy to Word and use that to find the formatted words using the advanced search options.

I find Word the easiest way to work with the document, as I’ve used Word for years. I can often spot things like unintended line breaks, extra spaces, etc. Also, Word’s spell-checker is easy and fast.

From Word, I’ve found the best export option is copy/paste. I’ve tried saving as HTML, but oh my, Word adds a ton of HTML code to each and every paragraph. I like my HTML to be minimal. From my clipboard, it’s easy to paste into Sigil, an excellent (and free) EPUB editor. I could also open the text file directly from Sigil, but mine always open as one big paragraph instead of breaking the paragraphs as it should. If there’s any final formatting, this is where I like to do it. “Sigil is a multi-platform EPUB ebook editor” (from their website) and it works really well.

Once I’m satisfied with my EPUB book (Sigil has a nice option to validate your EPUB format, as well as a ton of other useful features), I bring it in to calibre. calibre is a wonderful program, I use it to organize all my ebooks in addition to using it for conversion purposes. I also prefer calibre’s metadata editor over Sigil’s.

So that’s how I convert to digital. Feel free to chime in with your methods in the comments section.

Adding the grout

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More Tiles

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It took a few tiles, but I finally got the hole cut for the pipe. I used my RotoZip with a circular blade. It occurred to me later I should have used a tile bit, but no more trips to store.

The extra 1/2″ of bull nose tile will not be affected by overhanging on the wallboard.

Now I need to grout. I’m looking for a matching caulk, but so far can only find acrylic. And acrylic caulk just doesn’t last!

Bathroom Tub Tiles

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A few weeks ago, I picked up supplies at Lowes for continuing the bathroom renovation. I didn’t include the bullnose tiles on that trip, but I did leave room for their placement.

Here’s the first few tiles on a ledger board. The wall on the left just isn’t straight, so I ran into a few difficulties. Actually, I had to trim all the tiles on that side. (Yeah, let’s blame it on the wall.)

Green spacers everywhere.

And almost to the top.

And the back wall.

And front.

Now I’m ready for the bullnose. I pick it up today (last box), and what do I discover? It’s 3.5″, not 3″! Blah.

Perspective

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After having lunch with an old friend the other day, we were chatting in the car. Ahead of us in the parking lot, we saw two birds with their backs to us that looked like they were having a disagreement.

The bird on the left was hunched away from the bird on the right, but its head was looking back over its body and screaming in its bird voice. The bird on the right was upright, but its head was simply turned away from the raucous left. They maintained this for some minutes before flying off.

My friend described the bird on the left as an old wife bird, screaming at the spouse while the spouse just turned a deaf ear on the complaints.

I described the bird on the left as beaten down but making his thoughts clear while the wife just turned away, a classic talk-to-the-hand, I-have-spoken posture.

How would you have interpreted it? Perspective.

Footpath

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Last night I had a dream.

I was at a family reunion. Off in the distance was a group of relatives socializing in the field, wandering around, plastic cups in their hands. As we drove past in the van, my father at the wheel and I in the front seat, there appeared more relatives in the field on the other side, warming up for a game of softball. I saw my sister in law Deb lob the ball in a very professional manner to my sister in law Lori. Deb one-hopped the ball with a grin, which Lori snagged with ease. Then we were past, and Deb was in the back with my mother, my wife and kids. It seemed like there we more people in the back, but they shall remain forever faceless.

We drove down the brook as we had so many times before when we came to a bridge. Except there was no bridge. A flood had washed the bridge away, but someone had thoughtfully provided a foot path made of stone, suspended across the water I know not how. Because the bridge was at the crest of a small, man-made hill, we could not see that it was out. To shocked to realize what had happened, we continued across the small footpath with the vehicle; there was simply no time to stop. And, in the way of dreams, the vehicle and the path vanished and we were plunged into very deep river water. I snagged my baby after I surfaced, and she had a big smile on her face, a joyous sight parents would act any kind of fool to see happen on an infant. I said something in the way you talk to babies to make them laugh; something about why she was laughing. There the dream ends, with relatives looking on from the bank of the river.

The bridge that became a stone footpath that vanished beneath me.

I couldn’t get back to sleep after that, this is where I am now; lost in the water without a path to guide me.

DIY Scanner Construction

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Over at DIY Bookscanner, they have the plans for making your own scanner. I started with the latest plans they have. It calls for a CNC router, but some have used a jig saw to create it. I thought I would try that approach. I had the PDF version printed out (for months actually) and taped together; laid out on my plywood.

The first thing I needed to do was get the pattern on the plywood so that I’d have something to follow with the jigsaw. I didn’t want to run the jigsaw over the pattern on the paper, too much danger the paper would rip or move. So I used an X-Acto knife to start trimming, leaving a mark on the surface of the plywood.

After about an hour of this I thought to myself, “Oh hell no.” The previous generation scanner started to look pretty good.

I headed out to the big orange store and tried to pick up the items listed on the shopping spreadsheet for the “new standard scanner.” But this was from two years ago, so I ran into some problems. One item was no longer sold in the store. (On a side note, I printed a photo of the shelf tag from the instructions and brought it to the store. They were able to look it up using that tag, glad I brought it instead of having people search all over the store.) I was able to order it online, but no free shipping.

I got out my circular saw and started cutting according to a list provided. I didn’t really know what the sections were for, but I kept cutting until the list was complete. I still couldn’t see the overall picture when I was done. After I cleaned up for the night, I looked at the instructions again, and then suddenly it did make sense; I got the big picture. I went out and made one more cut; suddenly I had what was starting to look like a scanner!

In the background, you can see the base made of 2x4s.

DIY Scanner

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I’ve become obsessed with building a DIY bookscanner. I recently converted a book using a flatbed, but the DIY bookscanner I have in mind uses point and shoot cameras.

I started with an old book, unavailable on the Internet, that I last read as a kid. But it’s one of those books you just don’t forget – you know what I’m talking about; it’s different for every person but it exists.

I converted that one using a flat-bed scanner, and it just ruined the spine. After I turned the text into bytes, I went to work on it with the skills I picked up at my last job – good for something then I guess. A few hours later and I had a corrected document, then on to epub and lastly .mobi. Perfect!

Then I discovered DIYBookscanner.org. I’ve been obsessing over the forums over there. The idea behind their design(s) is firstly to make a book scanner out of cheap parts, and to use a (minimum 8MB) camera instead of a flatbed scanner. The rigs are built ideally for two cameras. Then use free software to stitch the pictures together, run ‘em through more software for ideal images, then OCR the result.

I’d like to jump right in and create one, but their latest design is built around using a CNC router. I have a few tools in my garage, but that particular machine’s not in the budget. I’ve read where some have laid out the paper on plywood and used it to cut out the parts. I may end up doing this, but it seems to invite inaccuracies. Especially given the non-printing margins on my printer. There are no measurements given in the CNC router plans, except one (1) line that says it’s 12 inches long.

I’m trying to decide if I should use a previous version; and if so which one.

But in the meantime, I did decide on which method of lighting to use! I bought high powered LEDs from Hong Kong that should do the job just fine. Based on recommendations at DIYBookscanner.org of course.