While reading Boingboing today, I came across two consecutive posts that made me really itch to do something.

The first one was about a grad student who posted an instructable for building a $300 book scanner. The second is how the US Chamber of Commerce is trying to derail the rights of individuals to digitize their own copy of books, typically to an accessible format.
Does anyone in the Seattle area want to team up and build this? I think it would be a cool service to offer friends and family. Need a book in DAISY or e-book format for your Kindle? Just send it to us with return postage, and we will send it back together with a CD.
I don’t see this as strictly an accessibility issue. I am reading Another Country by James Baldwin now. I could not find a digital copy for it to read on my Kindle. Or more correctly, it exists, but I would need to live in Europe to purchase it. Isn’t that crazy?
So, who is up for this?

The month of November has been a month of news. That is new in plural, not information about recent and important events.

New Home and house mates

We all moved together into a new green house, with a new chore wheel and a new pergo floor. It’s quite fantastic, I just need to update my mailing address across the board for the third time in 6 months. My house mates are all sorts of fun, and cooler than peppermint patties.

New E-mail

After 15 years with the same e-mail address, I decided it is time to graduate from my dad’s domain name into my own. My new address is eitan at this-blogs-domain-name.

New Bank Account

I have been getting tired of Bank Of America’s mediocreness, especially when it comes to online services, so I started transfering to BECU, a local credit union.

New Bike

I have a new red bicycle. It’s a real head-turner, which makes me concerned about theft. But I am just going to enjoy it anyway. I have almost completely stopped walking to places since I got it. Capitol Hill is just an 8 minute ride away.

I have been an eMusic subscriber for quite a while, before DRM-free music was cool. It’s always been a bit clunky when purchasing music, you download some weird XML file that is supposed to be handled by their download manager which is a full-blown app. I always ended up downloading the file to my desktop, running a Python script called dromanova.py which would download the MP3s to ~/media, and then import them manually into Banshee.
No more!

It is fun to spend a few hours on small projects that yield immediate results.
I use Tomboy for essay writing, I often need to know how much I have already put down, so I will typically paste the note into a terminal and run wc on it, or I will paste it in to gedit and use Tools->Document Statistics. So here is a new extension called ‘Note Statistics’ and it looks eerily like the gedit tool. Below is a screenshot, screen cast, and git clone URL in that order.

git clone git://github.com/eeejay/tomboy-notestats.git
Browse source on github