I have started a visual book list. Looks quite nice, though the numbers of unfinished books worries me slightly. Will get round to writing little reviews at some point for each one.
Reading
Chain Reading
Chain Reading. It’s like a social booklist keeping thing. Kind of.
You select the book you are reading, and have read, and will read. Recommend them to people. Maybe they will recommend some to you. Fairly interesting.
Google Print, Firefox, Google Portal
A day off work today. A few quick things before I get on. Maybe more later…
- Google Print is online. Had a quick play, looking for H.G. Wells’ The First Men on the Moon. Sadly that text is still under copyright so not all of it is available. Plenty of other classics are there in full though. Haven’t had a chance to see what options are available for printing – I am guessing that it is probably just an on screen thing.
- Firefox has reached a 10% share of the browser market, according to ZDNet, linked to by John Naughton. This is good news, not least because the more people using FireFox means that they can’t be ignored, and web sites will have to start complying with standards to ensure their sites are displayed proplerly.
- Google’s personalised portal is now released for the UK. Has a few new links for UK related stuff, like news and even the London Review of Books! Sadly, the UK-centric weather service focuses only on a select band of cities – the closest to me being Wolverhampton, which is almost completely useless!
Gutenberg formatting
Palimpsest’s Book Group is reading two H.G. Wells books at the moment. Being a skinflint, I thought I would download them from Project Gutenberg, a library of free books available in ext format, and sometimes HTML.
The two novels are:
The trouble is that often the HTML option isn’t there, and the text files are formatted with hard line breaks, which means that the lines break at that point whether it needs to or not. So if you load them into a word processor and change the font and text size to get the page count down for printing, the results look terrible.
Surely, I thought, it must be possible to automatically remove these line breaks, somehow? I asked in various places:
- Palimpsest’s Ono No Komachi suggested using EReader, but that costs money!
- The guys at South Cheshire LUG had a go at producing some Perl to convert the text files – but they didn’t quite work, and I don’t have a linux box to run these on yet
- Blixa on Palimpsest came up with some VBA script for MS Word to reformat the text, but it doesn’t quite work either, and it involves Word and VBA (but is very clever)…
All to no avail!
Until Carfilhiot suggested a tool called GutenMark, a command line tool for linux or Windows which takes the text file and reformats nicely it to HTML. It is released under the GPL, so it should be possible to have a look at the source and see if it can be persuaded to produce just text files, though it may be possible to cut and paste from the browser to a text editor to see what results from that.
Carfilhiot has hosted the reformatted versions of the Wells texts:
Excellent – and the copy-and-paste to text file seems to work too!
Stating the Bleeding Obvious
As reported in The Guardian: I’ve never read a book, says Posh.
I would have thought that should anyone have actually wasted their time considering this issue, they would have assumed that was the case anyway?
Baby, Scary, Ginger, Sporty and Bookish probably wouldn’t have had quite the same ring to it. Despite penning a 528-page autobiography charting her rise to the top, Victoria Beckham has admitted that she has never read a book in her life.
The revelation emerged in an interview with the Spanish magazine Chic. Although the issue in question has yet to the hit the shelves, details were leaked to the Spanish press over the weekend.
“I haven’t read a book in my life,” Beckham confesses. “I don’t have the time.” However, the 31-year-old former Spice Girl does shrug off suggestions that she is a philistine. “I prefer listening to music, although I do love fashion magazines.”
She also admits that having given birth to three boys – Brooklyn, six, Romeo, two, and six-month-old Cruz – she would like a daughter and could imagine “painting her nails, putting on make-up and choosing clothes” with her. Beckham also said she was not jealous about the attention paid by other women to her husband.
“I know what other women think and I say to myself ‘He is very good looking, he dresses very well, he is great with children and he has an enormous heart’. I am not jealous and when people look at him, I think it’s because he’s great.”
Her library-dodging confessions may come as a surprise to fans impressed with the literary style of her autobiography, Learning to Fly.
In the book, she recorded how seeing the film Fame encouraged her to seek stardom. According to the blurb, “A line from the theme song stayed with her – ‘I’m gonna live for ever, I’m gonna learn how to fly’. With this amazing book she gives us the chance to fly alongside her on her journey from lonely teenager to international star…”