carbonel

When I installed Calibre on the new computer, I accepted all the defaults.

When I moved over the files a couple of days later, my 900+ books in Calibre didn't show up. Turns out that's because I didn't use the default for my book files back on my old computer. The files are there, but Calibre isn't seeing them. Possibly I could tell Calibre to use the other location, but the default location is actually more sensible. (The old one was buried a couple of levels down.)

I discovered by experimentation that moving a book folder from the old location to the new location and restarting Calibre doesn't make that book show up.

My instincts, which are not necessarily to be trusted, say I should do a mass import of books from the old location to the new location, then delete the old location entirely. But I've always done imports one or two books at a time, and I'm not sure if all those author folders will sort themselves out properly.

Any advice before I try it?

ETA: Migration successfully accomplished, thanks to timill.

Ants

Not giant ants from White Sands, but little ants that appear in the spring (un-tra-la). It's ant season. The problem with ants in my house is that I generally discover them by checking the dish of dry cat food and seeing that it's covered by a swarm of ants. No matter where I put the cat food dish in the kitchen, the ants find it.

I called the exterminator in a few weeks ago, and he spritzed his nasty stuff along the baseboards where I'd seen ants. That lasted for a couple of weeks, but now the ants are back. Apparently he can't do anything more permanent until the ground thaws more. The last time he dealt with the invasion, the treatment lasted almost four years.

In the meantime, the cat is learning to jump up to the chair where I've been putting the food. She really wants me to hoist her up there. We've compromised; I do it once when I first put food in the dish, but if she comes back later, she's on her own.

I'm hoping it'll be warm enough for a longer-term solution soon.

Waterbed

For the last week or so, I'd been sniffing something untoward in my hallway. I thought perhaps the cat had found a mouse and it had not been completely disposed of, but I hadn't found anything to account for the odor. Then on Saturday, as I was getting to bed way too late and just putting on the CPAP, I realized that the CPAP hose smelled untoward in a different way, like cat pee. But it wasn't cat pee. It was a leak in the waterbed, and apparently the leak had marinated enough to get entirely funky. I abandoned the bed, went to the office, and place and order for a new waterbed mattress, liner, and mattress pad. I made up a bed on the living room couch, and finally got to sleep around 3:30 am.

On Monday, Lydy came over, and we emptied the waterbed and managed to wrestle the slimy odiferous object to the trash. She is a hero. Luckily, the liner did its job, and nothing escaped. That also went into the trash.

The new mattress and liner have arrived, and once I vacuum the accumulated dust and fluff out of the waterbed frame, I'll be able to fill the new mattress and sleep in my own bed again. In the meantime, this sleeping on a couch and making up the bed every night is getting old quickly.

Hello Fresh

This is the quotidia part -- nothing has gone wrong so far. I signed up for Hello Fresh a couple of weeks ago. It's a service where you pick meals from a bunch of options, and get enough for a week. It's more cooking than I'm used to doing (and more dishes), but out of three meals, two have been winners and the third was okay. It's really intended for two people, but I am willing to eat the same thing two successive days, possibly for lunch the second time. If anyone is interested, I can give you a discount code and I get a bit of a kickback, but you can also get the same discount just by going to the website, I think.

Pat WINOLJ has been doing the vegetarian option of Hello Fresh for almost a year. The vegetarian version only has three options per week, so no choosing from a bunch of options. I wish it was possible to mix and match, because some of the veggie meals look tasty and more creative than the regular ones. But it's an either-or thing.

I hope everyone had a pleasant weekend, with or without Christmas celebrations.

Mine was quiet but enjoyable. On Saturday, 1crowdedhour came over and we watched several episodes of The Great British Bake Off, including the 2016 Christmas masterclass episodes that fortuitously were in the right order at the right time.

On Sunday, I spent most of the day spinning, and watched the DVR'd Vikings game from Saturday (they won). I had my traditional December 24 (Erev Christmas) dinner at McCormick & Schmick's with friends. I also made chicken stock and a batch of peddernodder. It was my first time making them, but they turned out well. Though they're more properly peddernotter, I suppose, because the recipe calls for cardamom, and I discovered I didn't have any after being sure I did, so I substituted some clove and allspice instead. I'm very happy with them, and this is going to be keeper recipe.

On Monday, I spent most of the time spinning and reading Yuletide fan fiction. Greg, who has been storing his motorboat in my garage for the past several years -- and never actually used it -- finally sold it, so it's out of there. He still has a big thingie (something to do with trains) that's in there, so I still get to ask him for handyman help as needed. (I don't charge him, but he takes care of minor household emergencies in trade.)

I'm almost two-thirds done spinning the second half of the cobweb Shetland/silk that I started last Monday. If I had the rest of the week off of work, I could be sure I'd have it done before the end of the year. I'm still hoping I'll have the spinning done, but the plying is going to probably bleed into next year. There may be some difficulties with the plying, because I had a broken thread on the skein as I spun, and I think I connected up to the wrong bit. I hope I'll be able to find the other loose thread when I get to that point. It's really a challenge dealing with plying uber-fine singles.

Today, alas, it's back to work, and there's a bit of a speedbump. Yesterday, my left front tire was a bit low, and Greg used an air device to pump it up. This morning, it was totally flat. I'm not sure whether to hold Greg responsible or not. Also, my garage, which opened fine for me to drive out, wouldn't open again to let me back in. It goes up a few inches, then goes back down again. It's probably not actually Greg's fault, but everything was under control before he started changing things.

There's a Boxing Day party this evening, but only if I can get there.

Is anyone here on Ravelry? I'm having all sorts of weird problems.

It's ungodly slow, and displaying improperly. And I can't reply to messages.

I've had problems like this before when the browser (or computer) ran out of memory, but in this case, a) I shut down and rebooted, and b) I'm having the exactly same problem on my iPad, which is an entirely different operating system.

I checked the Rav status Twitter feed, and it doesn't seem to think there's anything wrong. So it might just be me, but I can't see how it would happen on both a desktop computer and a tablet if it's just me.

Help?

ETA: I checked with Pat WINOLJ, and she's having similar problems, so it's not just me. If there's anyone who isn't having problems and would be willing to make a quick post on my behalf, please let me know. I have to reply to a thread in the next six or seven hours or I'll lose a swap I'd like to have. But at the moment I can't post, and I can't even access profiles to see if any of the mods' addresses are on their profile.

ETA2: Seems to be fixed now. I wonder what the problem was.

Stanza, my beloved but orphaned ePub reader, no longer works properly after the recent iOS 10 update on my iPhone and iPad. Instead of going from page to page as it ought, it only displays the first page of each chapter.

I could understand an update breaking the app entirely, but I'm totally boggled that it could cause such a minor but disabling bug.

I've been investigating other options, and the good news is that (unlike the last time I tried this), there are options I can stand. My wish list isn't that large, but in the past, most ePub readers have failed on at least one of the requirements. I want the ability to define font, specify font size to a fairly fine granularity, define paragraph indent, define line spacing (leading), define space between paragraphs (should be zero, with paragraphing indicated by indents), set body text to ragged right with hyphenation, and have formatting from the original document (bold and italic) display properly.

Shubook fails on the bold/italic display, and even the large margin setting is just a bit too narrow for my taste.

iBooks fails because the leading isn't configurable, and there's too much space between lines. Also, the font size granularity is too coarse.

Ebook Reader fails because almost nothing but font and font size is configurable. Also, it may have the world's most generic app name. I think I tried it once before, but if so, I'd forgotten. As is likely to happen with generic things.

Bluefire Reader fails because it has a horrible interface and minimal configuration options. Or at least it did the last time I tried it, a couple of years ago. The one thing I have to say in its favor is that there were a couple of badly formatted fanfic works that were readable in Bluefire and totally not in Stanza, at least not without a reformat of the ePub file.

Megareader fails because it doesn't allow indented (not "intended," you silly fingers) paragraphs with no space between. I actually paid for this one (all of $2) back when an iOS upgrade broke Stanza completely (it got better), but never used it regularly.

Gerty is totally new to me since the last time I looked at apps. A first look was very promising, but I soon realized that a) the text scrolls vertically, not page by page (which may be the most sensible way to do it, but my eyes aren't used to it), and b) there doesn't seem to be a way to enable hyphenation. I'm using the free version, and am not inclined to pay the $4 to upgrade, because vertical text scrolling appears to be the only option.

I don't remember why the original Marvin didn't work for me, but I just downloaded the free version of Marvin 3 -- it's apparently an entirely new app optimized for iOS 10. The reviews are quite uneven, but it's looking like the best possibility of the bunch. All of the required features are there, though I'm not sure, once I've tweaked my current eBook to the way I want it, if there's a way to set that as the default for all other books I read on the app. The other annoyance is that the bottom eighth or so of the screen is currently filled with a red bar that promises to go away if I pay $5 for the full version. I can have a day free to check out the full version, but I'm not going to do that tonight.

So if there's no way to bring Stanza back to life, I'll probably settle on Marvin 3. But I expect I'll continue to mourn Stanza for quite a while.

Today was one of those days.

It started normally, I went to order a book for work. I went to the Amazon site, put it in my cart, and went to pay. As normal, it asked me to confirm the login, which I did. Not so normal was the next screen, asking me to confirm (by entering) my Social Security number and date of birth. I almost fell for it, but then I realized the SSN blanks were 3-3-3 instead of 3-2-4 the way they normally are. I also noticed that my firewall was turned off and I couldn't turn it back on again (error message), so I figured I'd fallen to some sort of virus attack. I suspect either a bad file or a bad website.

In any case, I called McAfee (now Intel, I guess) and paid $60 for a one-time fix. The agent opened a session so he could work on my machine, and he asked me to show him the problem. I did, and he said it was a legitimate site. I disagreed, and explained about the blanks, and how Amazon never asks for your SSN. He used a bunch of tools, and apparently generated a list of suspicious programs. Before I could stop him, he deleted Nook for PC and a little utility I use for running trivia games online. After he'd been at it a couple of hours, he and I simultaneously suggested it was time to elevate things to the next level.

He disappeared, then came back and asked if a callback the next day was okay. I said NO (yes, in caps) because I was going out of town tomorrow and needed things handled before then. He went away again, then said I would have a callback in three hours or less. Three hours later (3:30), he called and said it'd be another hour and half or so. At 5 pm, the new guy, allegedly a senior tech, called back. He asked me to show the problem, and again tried to persuade me that it was a real website. He pasted the URL into a website that identifies malware, and because the website identified it as safe, he insisted it was real. At that point, there were more capital letters at my end. He kept doing a couple of things, then going away for long intervals. And he tried to delete my Nook for PC app again (I stopped him) and I did let him delete something that turned out to be a real program that I'll have to reinstall. But finally, at around 7:15, he told me to try the Amazon site again. Amazingly, no request for SSN/DOB anymore. I'd pretty much lost faith, but he did manage to do the job.

And just because today was such a very special day, the story of my car was another saga. I've been planning to drive from Minneapolis to Michigan for a family thing, leaving early Wednesday. I'd had to do a semi-major repair ($900) a couple of weeks ago. The car was making a screeching noise when it started up, though it stopped after a couple of minutes. I called Bobby & Steve's on Nicollet because it was the place I'd taken it to the previous time. It's not my usual garage, but last time was an emergency, and it was close. I took it there this time because it was a similar noise that started the problems last time, and I thought it might be the same repair needing redoing.

The service guy called around 3 pm with an estimate of another $800 and said it was unrelated -- something with the air conditioner -- and I would only be safe driving it to Michigan if I did so without the AC. And he couldn't get it fixed until next week, so it was driving with no AC or another solution. I started looking at other travel options, and probably would have bought a train ticket and rented a car for the rest of the way if I hadn't been so distracted by the computer thing.

And then, in the middle of the computer tech's flailing around, I got a call from the car repair shop. It wasn't a $900 repair after all -- it was a bracket that had probably been damaged by the previous repair. So they fixed it for free, and I have the car back, and I'll be able to drive to Michigan after all. I very much hope there's no drama along the way.

My DirecTV bill is currently $98 monthly. That's ridiculous, especially considering that I'm paying another $25 or so per month for Netflix (the three-DVD-at-a-time package). And that's without any premium channels, just TNT and similar non-premium cable channels.

I finally got my act together to call DirecTV. When the automatic voice asked me what I wanted, I remembered the magic word: "retention."

That got me to Melissa, who switched me to DirecTV's "Select" plan, which is $49/month. It trims out a lot of channels, but I think the ones she listed are all the ones I watch, and the ones I'm losing are the ones that clog up the list when I scroll through. As I said in the subject line, I'll presumably find out if there's anything I forgot about that I'll miss.

I'm also currently eligible for a DVR upgrade, but I'm not sure I see the need. I never fill up the unit except when the Olympics are on, so that gives me another couple of years.

I'd been dithering about buying the Chromecast/PlayOn/PlayLater combo, mostly because I just purchased a Craftsy class, and then was annoyed to discover I couldn't watch it on my TV -- and possibly could, with that setup. Since the cost for that is $69, two months of savings will cover it. I doubt it'll be a complete substitute for DirecTV, but I'm willing to give it a try. (laurel, didn't you have a post about dumping cable providers entirely? I thought I bookmarked it, but I can't find it.)

I did try Plex, but it didn't work very well for me. I hate the interface, and I think my broadband may not be broad enough.

But at least now I'm looking at other options.