Smarter Feed Reading

Posted on 2007-10-03 by Stephan Sokolow

For a while, one of the biggest time-wasters I had at my disposal (a bad thing for a person with A.D.D. and a penchant for procrastination) was syndication feeds. Obviously, that’s no longer the case or I wouldn’t be writing this.

The most important part was actually one of those “common sense is anything but common” rules. In this case, it was to take a step back and ask “do I really need this?” for each feed. You’d be surprised how many feeds I dropped just by doing that.

The second step was to realize that, as someone with A.D.D., having a feed reader as a tray icon wasn’t a very smart move. In the end, I ended up using Google Reader with iGoogle to provide a quick way to check both my feeds and my e-mail. (I use GMail)

With the decision to check for updates as less of an impulse action, it became more obvious that time and attention were being wasted elsewhere. My first goal was to make more extensive use of Feed43.com (a free site for generating RSS feeds for sites which don’t already have them) and, while puttering around with that, I discovered my second goal. (via google… ain’t it great? :P)

FeedRinse.com is a little gem that used to have a paid premium version but is now completely free. It’s purpose is to let you customize feeds by filtering out entries you don’t want, merging multiple feeds into a single one, or both. I use it to strip advertising and podcast announcements from feeds where I don’t want to see them. (Once again, distraction is a big problem for me)

Good luck. I hope you find these sites as useful as I have.

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Better comic/manga viewing

Posted on 2007-10-03 by Stephan Sokolow

Like many purists, I always rename my .cbz files to .zip and my .cbr files to .rar. (or, in my case, convert them to .zip) And, like many people, I extract my comic and manga archives before I view them. Well, until now.

I decided that I’d give specialized comic viewers a try and gathered up the two most likely prospects. (The two comic-specific image viewers I found in the media-gfx section of the Gentoo Linux Portage tree) A Python (using PyGTK) tool named Comix for UNIX-like operating systems, and a wxWidgets-based C++ program named Comical which is available for Linux (and probably other UNIX-like platforms), Windows, and MacOSX.

Both readers have the following minimum feature set I desire:

  • Opening both directories (unpacked comics) and zipped comic archives with equal ease. (rar too, but I don’t need that)
  • The intelligence to disable two-page mode automatically when viewing comics with two pages per image file. (optional in Comix’s case. Don’t forget to turn it on in the preferences window)
  • Load and cache the next page in the comic while you are reading the current one.
  • Full-screen mode
  • Two-page mode can be configured for stories which read right-to-left (manga mode, as many call it)
  • Thumbnail sidebar for quick navigation (can be disabled)
  • Customizable zoom and rotation modes

However, Comix also has the following benefits over Comical:

  • Automatically jumps to the previous/next archive when you go back/forward from the first/last image in the current one. (Probably the single most important feature it offers as far as I’m concerned)
  • Reads four times as many image formats as Comical including BMP. (which is notably absent from Comical’s supported list) and SVG (which I have a soft spot for)
  • Quick-access “magnifier lens” so you don’t have to zoom the whole page to read that one tiny bit of text.
  • Searchable “comic library” system which automatically displays covers (first pages, technically) from any comic archives you add.
  • “Adjust Color” option for comfortably viewing yellowed (or otherwise tinted) scans. (Also includes a contrast adjustment feature)
  • Supports archive comments, including treating contained .txt and .nfo files as additional comments.
  • Can open tar-packed comic archives (with or without bzip2 or gzip compression)
  • Built in option for saving the current page to disk outside the archive
  • Built in option to convert the current archive to any other supported format except RAR.
  • Easy toolbar button toggle for “manga mode”
  • More flexibility in the scaling behaviour. (“stretch small images” can be toggled independently)
  • Can optionally overlay a page number on each thumbnail in the sidebar
  • Pure GPL license (Comical links against libunrar rather than using the unrar binary, so it has an added linking exception in it’s GPL license)
  • Bookmarking of images, whether or not they are inside archives.

Comical does have benefits of it’s own, for example:

  • Better page caching (caches backwards AND forwards and you can configure the number of pages)
  • Works on Windows and as a native MacOS X GUI app.

However, Comical is rather bare of configuration options compared to Comix and I don’t like the following design decisions:

  • The scroll wheel does nothing. I’m used to GQView and Gwenview where it changes pages.
  • Comical displays pages two-by-two but provides a confusingly useless “go forward/back by one” pair of buttons which I often click by mistake. (In it’s defense, it is smart enough to cut two-page images in half to keep this working as intended)

Both tools are about the same speed, though both seem to mess up while reading the zip file. I can only assume that they are either not doing enough “extract on demand” or not doing enough of the work using a background thread.

My final verdict? Comix all the way. Not only is it superior in every personally relevant way I’ve tested it, it’s written in Python so I can make it even better if I can ever find the time.

Now to just add it to the list of non-default tools for opening zip files so that I don’t have to rename my .zips back to .cbz. (Some things never change. My stubborness about matter-of-principle issues is one of them.)

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Custom slideshows easily with GQView

Posted on 2007-10-03 by Stephan Sokolow

Have you ever gone searching for something only to find it was right back where you started? Quick custom slideshows are one such case in my book of experiences. GQView’s ability to quickly build custom slideshows is actually a side-effect of a much more general feature I’d almost forgotten about. Collections.

Simply choose “New Collection” from the File menu, and then drag the images you want into the newly-arrived window. Then, double-click on one of them, and the main GQView window will begin browsing the collection as if it’s a folder. It won’t show up in the sidebar, but try using the scroll-wheel or the slideshow function, and you’ll see that I’m right.

Enjoy. (And a big thanks to the GQView people for anticipating my needs)

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Admin Panel Finally Fixed

Posted on 2007-09-30 by Stephan Sokolow

In case you were wondering, the lack of posts wasn’t because I’d abandoned this blog. It’s because my host’s PHP install is broken and the admin panel wouldn’t load.

I’ve finally managed to figure out how to work around that, so expect to see a large dump of new postings within the next week or two. 🙂

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My new lists

Posted on 2007-05-04 by Stephan Sokolow

Long story short, I wrote up a list of all the gender-bending fiction I knew and had so much fun that I did another one for music with decent lyrics. You’ll probably want the master list though.

Enjoy. I’ll be making more as I find the time and inspiration.

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Resources for the eBook lover

Posted on 2007-03-30 by Stephan Sokolow

So you bought something nice, but now you have no money for eBooks… or maybe you hate DRM and don’t feel right about buying a paperback and then torrenting a digital copy. Well, there’s lots of help out there.

I don’t remember all of the free eBook sites I’ve bumped into and bookmarked over the years, but here are the ones I can remember right now:

And last, but certainly not least, don’t forget about Wikipedia: List of digital library projects. Enjoy them and let me know about any others you find. 🙂

Posted in Geek Stuff, Web Wandering & Opinion | 2 Comments

A new way of examining the size of the IPv6 address space

Posted on 2007-03-26 by Stephan Sokolow

Ok, you’ve probably heard the usual examples for visualizing how big IPv6’s address space is. 7 IP addresses for every atom of every person on Earth gets the point across, but it’s not exactly very useful… so I decided to try something more practical.

Since I like to do my experimentation in a Python interactive interpreter, I’ll share the raw shell session. First, let’s get some data to work with:

>>> people_on_earth = int(6.5e9) # 6.5 billion (approximately)
>>> ipv6_range = 2**128 # 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456
>>> habitable_planets_in_our_galaxy = int(30e6) # 30 million. An estimate from a SPACE.com article I read recently.
>>> cells_in_the_human_body = 10**14 # 100 trillion (Estimate from Science NetLinks via Ask Yakoo!)

Ok, now that we’ve got some frame of reference, let’s see if we can show how huge IPv6’s address space really is. First, there’s the traditional “addresses per person” count:
>>> ipv6_range / people_on_earth
52351133372452071302057631912L

Ok, what if we became galactic conquerors and put 6.5 million humans on every Earth-like planet in our galaxy?
>>> ipv6_range / people_on_earth / habitable_planets_in_our_galaxy
1745037779081735710068L

Oh! We mustn’t forget that some people have lots of computers…
>>> ipv6_range / 4 / people_on_earth / habitable_planets_in_our_galaxy
436259444770433927517L

Nor should we forget the little wireless gizmos like cell phones…
>>> ipv6_range / 16 / people_on_earth / habitable_planets_in_our_galaxy
109064861192608481879L

Hmm… Looks like it’s time to bring out the sci-fi “big guns”. What if every person was host to a colony of Internet-connected nanobots… one for each cell?
>>> ipv6_range / cells_in_the_human_body / people_on_earth / habitable_planets_in_our_galaxy
17450377L

Ok… what if we also had… The T-1000 Butlernator? (assuming 3 per person)
>>> ipv6_range / cells_in_the_human_body / people_on_earth / habitable_planets_in_our_galaxy / 4
4362594L

And in case you’re lost, that number shows how many galaxies could sustain such IPv6 usage before we’d run out. Enjoy!

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