Miscellany

[kaberett]

1. I want the AO3's download-this-work-as-an-ebook option to be better. Specifically, I want to be able to download an entire series as a single ebook (why could I possibly want that, I wonder); and, more trivially achievable, I want chapter breaks to actually act as chapter breaks where the downloaded format supports navigation-by-chapter. Unfortunately it does not look like getting involved with dev work has got any easier or more sensible since last time I checked.

2. I have made smitten kitchen's apricot-pistachio thing again, this time with vanilla sugar-lemon pastry as previously threatened. I also glugged some rosewater into the pistachio frangipane this time, and will report back on same. ETA I am actually indifferent to the rosewater, sebastienne will probably be pleased to hear. ;)

3. I am tentatively not hating the combination of Wunderlist and Regularly for managing my mental stack of shit-that-needs-done. I am still slightly suspicious. I will let you know how things progress.

4. This week I am mostly subsisting off half-arsed shakshuka. Recipe herewith for sebastienne and shortcipher in particular.

1 large onion, diced
as much garlic as you feel like dicing
optionally a pepper
~750ml tomato misc (two cans, a large jar, two half-litre tetrapacks, whatever)
cumin
paprika
(chilli)
(parsley)
eggs

Fry onion and garlic with spices until softened. Add pepper if using; let soften a little. Dump on tomato, rinse out container with water, dump rinsing water into pan. Stir. Simmer down some (but you don't want to get it all the way down to a thick sauce). Preferably leave it overnight at this point to get happy, but regardless: bring to boil, break in as many eggs as you want to eat, and then keep boiling (covered) for three to five minutes to poach the eggs. You may need to spoon tomato liquid over the top partway through this.

Garnish with chopped parsley and feta. Is good with toasted bread product.

5. ... there is probably in principle a thing five. In practice I think mostly I am sleepy.

Comments

[batdina]

that thing about downloading whole series' in a single file? yeah. that thing. for the same reason.

[kaberett]

Someone in comments just below you has flagged up that there's a Calibre plugin called FanficFare that does this! It is findable via the plugins menu inside Calibre and I am getting it RIGHT THE FUCK NOW.

[batdina]

ok. this is the best reason I know for attempting to navigate calibre again. I may poke you for instructions when I get stuck, which I promise you I will do.

[snakeling]

Hi, here from the network.

There's a Calibre plugin (FanficFare) that'll download an entire series as one ebook :) It's my most used Calibre plugin ;)

[pipisafoat]

I have never before heard of Calibre or (as you might then expect) this plugin; I will have to give both a try! thank you for sharing!

[kaberett]

(Calibre is super-awesome and I love it and have been using it for ages!)

[pipisafoat]

(lol apparently i've had it for three years and just forgot about it)

[kaberett]

AWESOME. THANK YOU.

Another Victory For Whining In Public. >>;

[kaberett]

Hmm, FanficFare doesn't appear to support AO3 URLs of the format */series/* -- do you have to give it the URL of each part of the series invdividually? (Obviously you showed up to be helpful by chance and do not have to provide tech support! But if I ask the question someone else might answer.)

[snakeling]

Ok, I'm at work, so I don't have access to Calibre, and I can't remember off the top of my head the name of the options in the menu, but there's one that's something like "Make Anthology Epub from Web Page". That's where you should feed it the */series/* URL. It's possible that you might also need to install the EpubMerge plugin for that option to work.

There used to be a really nice tutorial about setting up Calibre with FanficFare (or FanficDownloader, which is the old name of the plugin) to read fics, but I can't find it now. If you want more help, you might try asking in ebook or in the official thread on MobileRead. :)

[kaberett]

Aha, "Get Story URLs from webpage" appears to be the dialogue to drop e.g. http://archiveofourown.org/series/132585 into - thank you!

[kaberett]

okay, that's got me all the stories but downloaded as separate ebooks, which is I will grant something but is also not quite what I was after. *pokes with stick*

ETA oh RIGHT, the solution is to then install EpubMerge (plugin by same author) and to go through the merge dialogue. FINE. Good. Excellent. :D AND once you've done that, the "Get Stories from URL" dialogue gives you the option to automatically anthology that shit right up instead of having to do it as a separate step. Awesome.

[pipisafoat]

ah thank you for all of this! using your learning, I have successfully and easily downloaded a series from AO3 in one book! :D :D :D
actually I grabbed more than one haha. must stay entertained!

[kaberett]

\o/!

I reckoned that at least if I wrote it down I'd remember how to set it up in future, and that other people might well find it helpful...

[rmc28]

I think you might be pleased/amused to know that I half-remembered reading about the existence of calibre plugins for AO3, googled, found this entry near the bottom of the first page of results AND have now managed my first test-download of a series anthology.

[kaberett]

I was indeed delighted. :D

[highlyeccentric]

... your A03 downloads don't navigate by chapter? Mine do. Or is "act as chapter break" something more complicated than "be findable in the index"?

[kaberett]

Nope, they're not findable in the index and you can't do the swiping up/down thing to go to the start of the previous/next chapter.

[highlyeccentric]

Huh! Index works fine for me on ibooks and Marvin; used to work on aldiko for android, too. I've never noticed the swipe-up-down thing for chapters: that doesn't seem to be working on either of them. My main problem is since the last update of iBooks (i think? it's happening to other epubs too), the top or bottom line of some pages gets cut off.

[kaberett]

(I'm downloading MOBIs; perhaps I should be downloading epubs and letting Calibre convert them for me, if epubs are put together better than MOBIs...)

[highlyeccentric]

OH! Yes, epubs work better than Mobis - i generally find that true of all sites, not just the AO3, though. Do you have a mobi-specific reader?

[kaberett]

Yeah, I have a Kindle Touch (that was a gift), but I refuse on principle to buy ebooks from Amazon so I tend to buy epubs from other sites, DRM-strip if necessary, then convert to MOBI... which gives me the behaviour I'm after. Sounds like the moral of the story is that AO3 epubs are better than MOBI and I should let Calibre do the conversions for me competently, which is good to know! :-)

(PS re tumblr yesterday/day before -- you are always welcome to hit me up for that kind of thing.)

[highlyeccentric]

Got the info i wanted plus a few other things. Now up to four discrete subsets of character traits* which could all be explained by something else other than ASD but none of which explain more than one of the others. Going to bother my shrink again.

*Excluding "has special interests" because I flatly refuse to use that as a diagnostic category. Some bro who knows infinite football stats is not treated as atypical for it. Pbbbt.

[pipisafoat]

Excluding "has special interests" because I flatly refuse to use that as a diagnostic category. Some bro who knows infinite football stats is not treated as atypical for it. Pbbbt.

THIS SO MUCH THIS BECAUSE FOOTBALL IS CONSIDERED "NORMAL" LIKE THAT NORMAL IS A THING THAT EVEN EXISTS and also? it's gender-typical. so much ew.

sorry just had to pop in and agree loudly.

[tree_and_leaf]

Shakshuka is the best.

[ninetydegrees]

Last time I asked even having download links on a series page instead of having to click on every single story was a big no-no. They just didn't want to risk making it easier to download several files at the same time.

[kaberett]

Thank you for letting me know that that's their attitude!

As it happens a combination of calibre plug-ins has been suggested in comments, so I'm now rolling around in creating single ebooks of series in about four clicks. It is GREAT.

[silveradept]

Calibre for the win in so, so many ways, apparently. May end up having to do that and the merge combo just to be able to have a series at my fingertips. In my copious free time to read fic, that is.

[geekosaur]

In general, with calibre you are best off downloading ePub and then converting when sending it to your e-reader. Its "internal" format that it uses for any ebook manipulations is more or less ePub, so you're minimizing conversion artifacts and making things faster (it's not having to convert to/from for every change).

(technically: it uses OPF internally. ePub is a somewhat simplified OPF in a .zip.)

[kaberett]

That shouldn't actually affect MOBI-downloaded-as-MOBI-then-transferred-directly-to-device-without-editing-the-file-any, though, given that calibre's perfectly capable of converting to MOBI from an ePub with navigation-by-chapter and preserving it; and indeed it doesn't with MOBIs acquired from places that aren't AO3. This one is at least partly on the AO3 (which is fine! but it's good to know it's the AO3 being shit at specifically MOBI, rather than - as was my assumption - shit at ebooks in general).

[davidgillon]

How have I never heard of Calibre?

Downloading now.

It's just possible I was whining about Kindle's inability to organise stuff earlier....