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Archive for May, 2008

May
28

Other than blowing it up with my laptop crash, i’ve really loved Delicious Library 2 so far. And i just found another reason to love it even more.

I’m a big fan of (DRM-free) PDF books, especially for reference books and/or often-updated books. Coverflow is kind of nice, but can be a bit slow and hard to navigate. So i decided to see if it was possible in DL2. And, well, not only is it possible but incredibly easy.

Simply set the URL to a file:// URL pointing somewhere on your system and now the preview icon (the little eye that shows up when you mouse-over a book) will open your PDF in preview. Good stuff!

May
27

It’s still a work-in-progress but being as i’m of the release early and often mindset i figured i’d start working with it as i finish it off. The goal isn’t to make a full-featured theme so it may be missing some of the features you’re expecting of a wordpress blog; if i find i want a feature i’ll probably add it, but who knows.

If anything appears to be busted please let me know in the comments or via email. Please ignore the mess.

Update: Switching back to the default while i work out some kinks and make a few style changes. Thanks to Matt for pointing out some issues with the feeds.

May
26

The battery in my MacBook Pro is all but dead. I get down to around 40% and it’ll just cut itself off. I wasn’t thinking and decided to cary the laptop into the TV room to scan in some movies when, poof, the poor machine dies. Upon restarting and reloading DL2 i’m greeted this rather unhappy message.

I tried all manner of voodoo rituals to attempt to get it back up and running but it looked like something in the library file was corrupted. So i finally managed to get around this in a rather convoluted way and save most of my work spent importing.

  1. Click submit bug report.
  2. Close out the bug reporting window so that you are back in DL2 (presumably you’ve already submitted a copy of the bug so they can track this down).
  3. Select: File -> Export -> Export to another application…
  4. Choose the Delimited Text option.
  5. Check most of the export fields (unless there are some you don’t particularly care about) making sure to check Item Type (near the end of the list).
  6. Click export and close DL2 once it has finished
  7. Under your home directory find the file Library/Application Support/Delicious Library 2/Delicious Library Items.deliciouslibrary2 and either move it out of this directory or delete it. (I suggest keeping a copy around incase a future version of DL2 has a workaround for this bug.)
  8. Open up DL2 again and select File -> Import -> From Text File.. and choose the file you just exported
  9. Make sure the “First row contains headers” box is checked and click import.

Once this is finished you should have your library in tact but without any images. Select all the items in your library (⌘A) and then hit ⌘R to reload information from Amazon (this could take a while). Sadly any time spent finding better quality images for the items in your library are lost as they’ll just be repopulated from the web but at least it’s a start.

May
25

Library

No, not del.icio.us, Delicious as in Delicious Library.

I’ve used Delicious Library for a while but in an unfortunate (read: scatterbrained) move i lost my entire library in a laptop reformat. So, now that Delicious Library 2 is in beta i decided to set off on the rather lengthy task of cataloging my life. Mainly i use it for remembering which of my friends is borrowing what, but the new publish feature is pretty handy as well for allowing people to answer their “do you have x” questions themselves.

Check out my library; i’m going to try to keep it updated as i’m slowly adding things over the next few weeks.

NASA & UA\'s Phoenix Lander

NASA TV will be covering the Phoenix lander live at 6:00PM EDT today.

I grew up with a parent in NASA so i never really grew out of the “space is so cool stage”, so this kind of thing is still exciting to me. Sadly i realize, as did some other gen yers, that my generation is not in the least excited by space exploration (or exploration of any kind?).