Schinckel.net

Jaq bought an iPod some time ago, and I noticed at the time Adelaide was missing from the timezone properties. Should report this to Apple.

Letters & Symbols I keep getting wrong on my Palm. Comma - becomes a J, or S, or even a CR or BS, but mainly a J. D - often becomes an A. T - either an F followed by a space, or an L followed by a <menu swipe>. 2 - 7. ( or ) - 1. E - Q. (If slack!) I also run into problems on words ending with L, or when 5 is followed by a 1. (I’ve changed the $ setting in Graffiti Prefs.) And every now and then, H doesn’t appear.

The whole idea of Diplomacy is about kissing the right arses. Whether you suck poo out is another matter.

2 Chopped Onions, Garlic, Ginger Cook in oil for 5 min. Add 1 tspn curry paste. Add 1 cauliflower, cover with chicken stock. Cook. Mash. Add 2 cups full cream milk. Serve. Eat. Warning! Untested!

I just went shopping for SD cards, expecting to have to pay around $90 for a 256Mb one. My Zire 31 has an SD slot, and I thought I might need more than the measley 16Mb internal RAM it comes with. Anyway, after spending an hour or so searching through every shop in Rundle Mall, I went into Diamond’s, on Rundle Street. The girl behind the camera said “Oh, about $105 for the 512, and about $70 for the 256”. That put the price as 74 less than a 256 from DJs, for a card with twice the memory. So, I went out, checked out Ted’s ($119) and returned. The guy who served me said the computer showed $130ish, but she had quoted me at $105. Since he’d kept me waiting for about 10 min while he dealt with a customer on the phone, he knocked it down to a round $100. Woo-hoo!

Well, I went down to Robe & saw the folks, and Baby Jack.

I kinda like the juxtaposition of these two photos together.

I went through a couple of revisions of Blog with ecto the other night. I’ve now added the following feature:

• Allows posting to multiple blogs, where the closest match to the folder name is used as the blog name.

There is a small issue - the date I set (using set entry_date to date date_stamp) doesn’t seem to be respected by ecto when it posts. I’ll do a bit more testing, and possibly issue a bug report. Anyway, the link for it is Blog with ecto.scpt.

I’m still toying with the idea of writing a “What If?” novel about John Lennon, but I’m stuck for ideas about what would have changed. One idea is to write a “Butterfly Effect’’ story resulting in Chapman’s suicide, therefore Lennon’s survival.

I am wearing my Adelaide High School “Non Scholae Sed Vitae” lanyard, and a woman just wanted to know if she could buy one, as she is an Old Scholar.

I found a heap of Palm TEXt REAd documents, but I don’t like the way they appear as (Doc) in PalmReader. So I wrote a script to convert them to PML, the format used by DropBook to make PNRd PPrs documents.

Basically, I found that on OS X the translation of txt2pdbdoc -d (decode back into text) wasn’t so good; a heap of characters needed to be changed.

I did have them all listed here, but if I edit them, ecto fucks up the encoding!

I also changed the === to an 80% horizontal line.

The [[[ - ]]] blocks were indented, and a footer line [* <Text>] is indented also.

I assumed the only use of a / was for italics, and _ for underlining.

I also assume the first non-empty, non === line is the Title, and the Author line starts with By. I use this info to create a ‘Title Page’.

The tricky bit was getting the Chapter Heading sorted, I needed to break the text into a list of strings to do this, and scan through. This slows the script down a lot, but it still works okay. I might profile it a bit and see where the slowdown is.

Anyway, here’s the latest version I’ve uploaded: txt2pml.py

I plan to make a version to process Project Gutenberg texts, but that’s on the back burner.