At the appropriate time (as regulated by the US Congress and kept accurate by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the US Naval Observatory) I get into my National Highway Traffic Safety Administration approved automobile and set out to work on the roads built by the local, state, and federal departments of transportation, stopping to purchase fuel of a quality level determined by the Environmental Protection Agency using legal tender as issued by the Federal Reserve Bank. On the way out the door, I deposit my mail to be sent out via the US Postal Service at the drop-box beside the local public school.

After work, I drive my NHTSA car back home on DOT roads, to a house which is still standing and structurally sound due to the state and local building codes as well as the fire marshal’s inspection, and which has not been robbed thanks to the protection of the local police department.

I then log on to the Internet which was developed by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration and write a long post on Facebook about how SOCIALISM in health care is bad, and the US government can’t do anything right…

That being said, the first PC to get the upgrade was my work PC (thanks Mr. Virus man!).  Amazingly, the install went incredibly smooth, and all of my old files remained intact.  Many programs had to be reinstalled, sure, but that’s par for the course.  Very nicely done though, as I didn’t even have to consider where to get my drivers as the install took care of that all for me.  Good job, MS, good job.

Net was my new home PC, the Acer Aspire Revo 3610.  I could go on for days about how cool this little box is, but I won’t right now… that’s for another post.  Sure, this box came with Win7 already on it, but it was bloated as all hell, so I wiped the disk clean and installed a fresh copy.  Glorious.

To top it all off, the Windows 7 interface is nice.  I like it.  It makes sense, and most importantly it works.  I never had the problems with Vista others had, and I’m not having any problems now.  Must be my awesome personality.  I don’t get bugs. (HA!)

Shifting over to anti-virus programs now: TrendMicro is ace with me.  It’s not like I kept the install disk around all these years from when I first got Internet Security 2006, but who cares… you don’t need it.

I got a 3-license kit back in the day, and TM knows this.  I can log into their site, download the software (personalized with a slipstreamed serial key! w00t!), and install it in a matter of minutes.  “OH NOES!” I hear you say… “WHAT IF YOUR 3 LICENSES ARE ALREADY ACTIVATED?!?”  Well, first off stop showting, and second: that also doesn’t matter.  Once the install completes, you can transfer the license to your new PC from your old without ever bothering to turn on the old pc.  This is a great idea, and it works very well.

The game is simple. Left thumb moves, right thumb shoots in traditional 2d “Smash TV” fashon. Arenas are small, and zombies are plentiful, as is the blood. Rock. It’s free for a while, so why not give it a shot?

Long story short, there’s a lot of software out there that claims to do this all for you, but a lot of them jsut don’t cut it when it comes to images. The books I’m interested in are of a technical nature mostly, so there will be diagrams.

After testing out all of the free alternatives, I cam across Calibre. Calibre is an open source ebook management program that reads just about every format you can imagine, and can convert from one ebook format to another.  It’s also free and open source, so woot!

Calibre CAN do PDF to epub, but you lose a lot of formatting and all of your bookmarks.  In other words, no table of contents.  That sucks.

To make a long story short, I tried a few combinations of softwares to get this working, and here is the most reliable way I have found to convert PDF to epub while retaining the table of contents, images, and MOST of your original formatting (some will still be lost, but if you’re a freak about stuff like that you can always fix it before the last step).

First, the requirements:

• Adobe Acrobat – $300.00 - No, not Acrobat READER, that’s something else.  You need to have Adobe Acrobat, or some other program that can export PDF’s as compliant HTML 3.2.  I’m sure there’s something free out there, but this is what I used as I had it at work
• Calibre – FREE
• Notepad++ (optional) – FREE – this is used for some code cleanup if needed (for you formatting freaks)

Process couldn’t be simpler really:

1. Load the PDF in acrobat
2. FILE > EXPORT > HTML > HTML 3.2
3. Click on “SETTINGS”
4. uncheck “Generate Bookmarks”
5. check “Generate tags for untagged files”
6. check “generate images”
7. uncheck “use sub-folder”
8. click OK
9. Save
10. OPTIONAL – Edit the exported HTML file in Notepad++.  get rid of any style tags in the body element, and any font colors, as they will mess with some readers (like stanza)
11. Open Calibre
12. Click “Add Book”
13. select the exported html file
14. Right click on the imported book and select CONVERT E-BOOKS > CONVERT INDIVIDUALLY
15. Input format will be ZIP, output will be epub
16. edit meta info as needed
17. On the “Structure Detection” tab, set “detect chapters…” to //h:h1
18. On the table of contents page, set level 1 to //h:h1, level 2 to //h:h2, and level 3 to //h:h3
19. Click OK

That’s it.  the PDF will be converted to an epub that you can view in Calibre, or save to another location and read in another reader, or send to a device.

Note that all PDFs are not created equal, so some of these settings will need to be tweaked for different books, but this is what worked for me with a quality I was happy with.

I ended up driving out to where my server is colocated at 8pm last night because my server wasn’t reaponding. I had recently installed APF (advanced policy firewall) and BFD (brute force detection) and wad confident in it’s functionality. Note: I installed and tested it while away from home.

Geeky stuff: APF is a CLI Frontend for iptables. You can deny/allow IP addresses with simple commands. Pair it with BFD and what you have is a nice little security system that scans server logs every few minutes looking for repeated failed logins and other suspicious activity and automatically blocks access to the offending IP (and tells you what it’s done in a nicely formatted email. End of geeky stuff.

Once I had it up and running I walked away confident in the security of my server. I knew of a few IPs that had been hacking away at me for months, so it was only a matter of time before the emails came telling me they were blocked. I added a few manually just to get the feeling for it. Happy with myself I went out with my lovely wife for dinner and a movie.

Then I tried to access my website from home…

No http access, no ssh, no FTP, and no reply on pings. Shit. I call the office and have them reboot my server. Nothing.

I only live about 10 miles away so I drove out to take a look. Looks like it’s running… Better reboot again to make sure it was done right. A few minutes later and we’re back in action! I head home.

Wake up at 6am. No response on my site or email. No FTP. No ssh. DAMMIT!

After a few cups of coffee it dawns on me to try something. I Vpn into my desktop pc at work and pull up my website. Works fine. Try it again from my local browser, fail.

A feeling starts to nag at me.

I use my remote desktop to SSH into the server. Success.

The feeling gets stronger.

I disable the firewall…

Everything magically works again.

The feeling begins to redden my cheeks.

I check the firewall rules.

Out of the eight IP adresses I manually denied, my home ip was first on the list.

The day before I installed the firewall I had forgotten that I had changed my password. There were several failed login attempts due to this.

That feeling? Stupidity. I has it.

This version supposedly fixes a bug where friends were incorrectly matched with contacts. Also something about push notification.

Grab it now in the app store!

UPDATE: It’s still buggy.

“Not at all?”

“No way man, that would be derivative”

“What if no one likes it?”

“Be cool man, we’re OK Go… they’ll get it”

OK Go - Of the Blue Color of the Sky

Normally this kind of attitude would aggravate the hell out of me.  Luckily, I’m used to OK Go experimenting with their sound.  If you’re not, then you’ve only heard their singles.

No, even if you’ve only heard their singles you should know this.  How in the world did this band churn out a top 40 pop hit like “Do What You Want” when EVERYBODY know they’re the guys who cranked out that awesome 90′s post-grunge hit “Get Over It.”  Even then, there’s no WAY it’s the same band that dances around on their patio to “A Million Ways”

OK Go has always toyed with genres on their albums.  It’s hard for me to sit and listen to an album in its entirety without thinking that I’ve accidentally put my iPhone on shuffle.  Not that I don’t love it, because I do.  Any band can be experimental, but only a good band can pull it off, and OK Go usually does.

Give a listen to “Return” off their first album, it’s great but you’d never hear it on the radio.  Not because it’s bad, but because it won’t sell albums.  OK Go is good at that too.  Toss a few “radio friendly” hits on there and fill the rest with what you REALLY want to play.  Think that’s selling out?  The Beatles did it too.  Any great band does.  That’s how they make money folks, that’s how they gain new fans.  Sgt. Pepper would have never happened if it weren’t for “Penny Lane” (even though they ended up not putting it on that album, it was originally recorded FOR it, then released as a single BEFORE it, and placed on an EP AFTER it.  How’s that for an interesting factoid!).

So now here we are with a new OK Go album.  I didn’t know what to expect exactly, but I was hoping for something good.  The music industry NEEDS something good.  I’ve heard the new OG Go album now, and well… It is what it is.

It’s not a BAD album in any way, but it’s lost something.  Maybe the boys are getting old, or maybe they’ve found some peace in their lives or something, but this album doesn’t have the bite they used to have.  All the songs are pretty mellow, and are belted out in that familiar drunken-lounge-singer-with-nothing-to-lose tone that they do so well.  If you don’t like squeaky vocals, don’t get this album.

I shouldn’t be surprised, the album title itself sends a message of “ahh, well, that’s groovy then” so I should have expected a mellow album.  I’m fine with that even, it’s just that… well… I miss the experimentation!

All the songs on the new album sound fairly similar.  Again, this isn’t a game-killer but I just expected MORE from OK Go. 

Maybe i’ve become jaded, expecting the music industry to finally wake up and release a good album commercially (I’m ignoring the indie scene simply because they’ve all gotten so damn pretentious).

::sigh:: a boy can dream, can’t he?

Overall it’s not a bad album at all.  Worth a listen at least, so you can decide for yourself.

When in use, the screen resembles the back of a camera complete with a small viewfinder. Point and shoot at just about anything and the result is usually a pretty sweet lo-fi image that would fit right in with the usual fare at your local coffee shop or art show.

Hipstamatic also upload right to facebook for easy sharing, and saves high quality copies to your camera roll. I dig it.