Audience of Strangers

hbgjnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn Angus says, walking on my laptop as I try to post.

Is anyone else having trouble with GMail? I can get in on my phone, but not my computer, and I'm not sure anything on my phone is actually making it out to anyone.

(Steam is asking people to rate possible games. Things I would like to see: Dorian Gray Syndrome.)

My crème fraîche didn't work out; it's a bit too runny, and I don't know why. It's still useable, and I may nuke some of the frozen berries and have it on that, but it's not what I was hoping for. It worked last time, and I'm going to try again, but damn.

My computer's been a bit crunchy lately (and my laptop needs to go in for repairs), and I did manage to clear a few dozen MB off my hard drives, which since one of them was down to 3% free may help things run a bit more smoothly. Not sure, can't hurt. I've been trying to get my PDFs and ebooks organized. It's... a bit daunting. There are somewhere over five hundred, and I haven't even finished getting all the ones off the Cemetery Dance site.

It feels like a day where not much got done, on balance. Not a bad one, just unsatisfying, and busy.

Anyway, Piper has had a cheerful one-hour walk through places that are interesting because she hasn't been there since all the smells changed, so that at least is productive. And I suspect I am going to have relatively little trouble getting to sleep. (Memo to self: I need a book light. Reading before sleep is important. So is not waking people up.)

Also need to e-mail local computer store, since my laptop screen now flops through a roughly 20° arc and I am sure that should get fixed. (Possibly I will look at a new battery, too.)

Have been scanning a lot of books into Goodreads lately, and am starting to feel that my initial estimate of our owning ~12-1300 might have been low. This is a bit unsettling. I love my books, and am happy to be a forever home to them, but... Well. If there was a fire, I think that some of the ones I lost I would not worry about replacing, and that suggests to me that some of them might be better suited elsewhere. Will look at weeding things out next month, maybe.

I got a Kobo on Saturday. I like it, particularly for reading individual books.

I am not just dealing with the individual books. As you would expect for a device that brags about storing up to a thousand books, I am dealing with a library.

There are four categories; Books, Previews, News and Mags, and Shortlist. I don't have any periodicals, but I currently have 86 books-and-(non-Kobo)-previews in the Books category, and 75 Kobo previews in the Previews category. And the Shortlist is, as the name suggests, a favourites list. Each of these categories can be sorted alphabetically (by title), alphabetically (by author), or according to "Recent Reads".

(Close your eyes, Gentle Reader. Imagine your library, the shelves and shelves of books. Actually, if you're like me, that is way too much for the purposes of this example, so imagine one bookcase.)

(Now imagine all these books being subject to either the alphabetical, the other alphabetical, or the last-picked-up sorting strategy--and nothing but. Always. And you can see five or six of them at a time.)

I am having a few serious problems with the organizing at this point.

(1) The "Recent Reads" sorting isn't. It's actually sorting by file most recently accessed or modified. Downloading a book therefore counts as "reading" it. This would only be mildly annoying except that

(2) I can't mark books as unread. If I look at a book (or a non-Kobo preview) in my library, that book jumps to the top of my booklist. If I download a book I want to read later, that book's now at the top of my booklist. If I am browsing the library and accidentally open a book[1], that book's now at the top of my booklist. If I mark a book that I opened but didn't want to read as finished, it doesn't jump to the top of the list but it doesn't go to the bottom of the queue, either.

Did I mention that the library shows books six to a screen at most--five if you want to read the title and author name instead of just see a thumbnail of the cover? And that I have eighty-six books and seventy-five previews?

This actually makes me twitchy about letting other people see the damn thing, because they're probably going to poke something[2] and then I'm going to be doing the scroll through library/open book/back to library dance until all my books are back at the top of the list where I'd rather they were.

(3) I can't create or assign categories, tags, or what-have-you. I'm not looking for something hugely complex here (although if it was there, I'd probably happily use it), but it's starting to really annoy me that I can't even distinguish between short stories and novels, or between fiction and non-fiction. And speaking of tags,

(4) It doesn't display or allow you to modify the attributes that do exist. I can't tell my Kobo Touch not to display books I've already read. I can't tell it to only display books I haven't read, or only display books I'm reading. I am pretty sure it's tracking what I've finished and what I currently have open--the Calibre records show "Im_Reading" and "Finished" Categories on books as appropriate, and lack any tags for ones I haven't opened yet.

Hell, I can't even change books from Books to Previews. (There was one item in the Kobo store which was essentially a half-dozen excerpts of novels being published in the coming months. It's filed under Books. It is so a Preview. >.< )

Loosely related;

(5) The non-Kobo books get the short end of the stick. Can't highlight text or do a dictionary search in them, which I can live without, and they are all filed as books. Doesn't matter if they're previews, or magazines, or previews of magazines.

(I've tried editing the Collections in Calibre. I end up with two copies of an ePub in the Books category, one of which is secretly marked "Preview" in some way that makes no difference whatsoever to the Kobo Touch.)

So... yeah. Suggestions about how to make the Kobo Touch something with a sorting scheme that doesn't break once you have more than fifteen books on it would be awesome.

With regards to desktop management of an elibrary: The Kobo desktop app doesn't even see non-Kobo books. Calibre sees them, but is ridiculously slow on my machine and modifying Collections results in duplicate copies of the books appearing on my ereader (and Calibre doesn't wrap tags, so the tag list for any book with more than maybe eight tags ends in an ellipsis and runs off the edge of the Tags column). And I do not see the point of an ereader that carries a thousand books if it's not going to be a library in my pocket, so "just delete things you're not reading" is really not useful to me. If I want to sit down and look over my collection and hem and haw about what to bring along to read...

Hell, for that I have realbooks. More of them than could fit on the Kobo, actually.

Help?
---
[1]It's a touchscreen, I read it on the bus, it happens.
[2] Admittedly the purpose of the Kobo Touch.

Either GMail's down or the library connection has decided there's a problem with it specifically; I can run Google searches, but I will be shot if I can log in.

Out of the office early; I need to do some uploads, but I can't do those without a connection, so I am free, free, free. And four blocks away from the yarn store. And two days after payday. And still not buying any more yarn until I finish my green socks.

(Go me. Really. This fiscal restraint is *thrilling*, I tell you.)

Also! I took a can of compressed air and a vaccuum cleaner to my laptop. It is now running *much* more quietly. Probably a good sign.

ETA: Oh, I can log in through IE. Alright. Distinctly weird, but I have e-mail. Links that need to be pasted into Firefox tabs, but still e-mail.

My laptop's hit the point where it can actually have the lid closed and restart again upon opening. Much glee and delight ensued. (Need to update/reinstall all the programs on it, but for now... Glee.)

Got back to one of the temp agencies, and need to head out for errands in a bit. Suppose it's been a fairly useful morning, all told.

Watching Gangs of New York in a sort of desultory fashion. It has a bad tendency of dropping into travelogues, but it's okay for background. It keeps occurring to me that I could be watching Sharpe instead. Or Brick, or State of Grace.

Everything on my laptop has been switched to my desktop. Not necessarily integrated yet, mind you, but switched. My laptop has been restored to its initial settings.

It is *very strange* poking around on the internet with none of my bookmarks and browsing history.

Shortly, I will be closing the laptop and seeing if it freezes again. I pray not. Wish me luck.

Odd sort of day; feeling as if I have a lot more free time, but having trouble figuring out what to do with it. Or what to do first, which is resulting in not much of anything getting done.

Actually, I suppose the odd thing is that I'm not worrying about this. Usually not getting stuff done stresses me out, which leads to more things not getting done, which (unsurprisingly) ends up in an unproductive cycle that's just embarrassing.

( To do: )

It's cold outside, but I suppose that's not going to improve as the day goes on, so I will try to get Piper out soon.

Other news, I seem to have gotten the number of partially-read books by the side of my bed down to something reasonable. Trying to continue in this vein before picking up any new ones. ...and I really should see about putting up the list of books I want to rehome sometime soon, but I am not going to worry about that today. (There's probably something out there that turns phones into ISBN scanners that produce neatly typed lists of book titles. Which would be kind of cool, and speed things up immeasurably.)

My renewal is in the works, thank goodness.

Mind, this means I really need to fix my desktop. The lack of GChat may drive me mad. Mad, I tell you.

You know those people who destroy their cellphones about once every two-three months? Apparently I am one of them. Leaning over to show Piper how to paddle at the water by the edge of the pool to get the ball closer, and plouf, the damn thing fell in. It's currently battery-less and drying, but I am not optimistic.

The case was closed, dammit. The magnet just didn't hold. And the last one... eh, god knows what broke inside, but it got stuck on camera mode. Very annoying.

On the plus side, Piper has successfully been introduced to the pool and oh my god she is adorable. Also, I used to think of Sierra as a fairly normal-sized biggish dog; now I look at her and she's a damn *ox*. I swear it. She's *freakishly* huge.

Suppose this means I'm getting used to the fur-beast. The more normal-sized furbeast. Who, incidentally, finally got through basic puppy training yesterday. Pics are here.