converting EPUB files to CBZ, and ripping DVDs

Here’s a follow up to my post from earlier today. I went ahead and decided to see if I could write a PowerShell script to convert an EPUB file to a CBZ file. I thought this would be a quick process, but of course it got a bit out of control.

I started by asking ChatGPT to write one for me, given some fairly specific parameters. I asked it to use the 7-Zip command line tool to zip and unzip the files. And I told it where to find the images in the EPUB, and gave it the steps to follow to complete the process. It spit out a script that looked pretty good but (of course) didn’t work.

Long story short: I spent an hour or two tweaking the script and eventually came up with this one. It worked fine, and I used it to convert about a dozen EPUBs to CBZ.

I gave up on calling 7-Zip, since passing parameters into 7-Zip from PowerShell turned out to be a very annoying process that I could never quite get right. (And which gave me a bit of deja vu, when I remembered that I’d had this problem at least once before, when I was trying to write a backup script for my dev VM at work, probably ten years ago.) I switched to the built-in Compress-Archive and Expand-Archive commands, which was probably the better path anyway.

On a separate (but semi-related) subject, I decided to watch a Doctor Who DVD this afternoon. I was going to watch the second DVD from my A Key To Time box set, which I bought in 2022. I watched the first disc in 2023, then never got around to the second. Well, now it’s 2024, so I decided I should probably make some progress with it. But my Xbox refused to play disc 2. So I checked another disc, and it was fine. So it’s not that the Xbox Blu-ray drive is broken. The DVD seems to load fine on my PC though. So now, I’m using Handbrake to rip it, so I can watch it via my Apple TV.

All in all, I’m spending way more time in front of my PC than I intended to today. And whatever disc space I saved by futzing with my comic book files is going to get eaten up by the rip of the Doctor Who DVD. Oh well. I guess this is still more fun than work!

using up my PTO

I’m taking three days of PTO this week, to use up the last few days that I can’t roll over to next year. I’m counting it as a bit of an accomplishment that I actually have a few days left to burn, and that I never got sick enough this year to use them up on sick time. (Unlike last year, when I got COVID.)

Of course, I’m sick right now, so I’m taking it easy, and not doing much. I spent some time yesterday messing around with my DRM-free comic book files again. (See previous post.) This time, I decided to see if I could replace some very large CBZ files from an old Star Trek Humble bundle with smaller EPUB files.

This sent me down a rabbit hole, messing around with iPadOS comic book and EPUB reader apps, Calibre, and some other random stuff. I was briefly mad at myself for wasting so much time on it, but then I realized that (a) I’m taking PTO, (b) I’m  sick enough that I didn’t want to do much else, and (c) I actually enjoy messing around with stuff like this, from time to time. So here are some notes on what I did and where I left things.

First: I’m not sure if there’s a good reason why these specific Star Trek comic book files were so big as CBZs and so much smaller as EPUBs. I think Humble doesn’t necessarily put a lot of work into optimizing their files. CBZ files are compressed, so it’s not a lack of compression. (The “Z” is for “Zip”.) And EPUB files are also compressed, so I guess the only thing that would account for the difference would be image file size. So maybe they made the CBZ with high-resolution images, and the EPUB with lower resolution images.

Anyway, I downloaded some EPUBs and tried them out with my usual comic book reading app on the iPad, Panels. They were pulled into the app with no problem, and are readable, but the covers wouldn’t show. I probably should have stopped there and said “fine”, but I decided to mess around some more.

First, I pulled one of the EPUBs into Calibre, and let that mess with it a bit. I verified that the cover was visible in Calibre, so I exported Calibre’s version of the EPUB and pulled that into Panels. That version didn’t work at all though. So I gave up on that.

Then I tried the EPUB in some of my other ebook reading apps:

  • I tried GoodReader, but that doesn’t support EPUBs, only PDFs.
  • I tried the Kindle app, but that doesn’t support large EPUBs.
  • I tried Apple Books, and that worked, but the page size & page turning was a bit wonky.
  • I tried the Kobo app. That worked, but was also wonky about page size/turning.
  • I used to have an app called Marvin that was my go-to app for reading DRM-free EPUBs, but that app was discontinued and is no longer in the app store, so I couldn’t even get it loaded on my iPad.
  • I still have BlueFire Reader, and it still works, but I’m pretty sure it’s not being maintained, so I didn’t even bother trying it.

Most EPUB reading apps are meant to be used for books that are mostly text, so I guess they don’t work great with comic book files. Panels still seems to be the best app overall for reading comics, regardless of file format.

So now I can maybe mess around with the EPUB a bit and see if I can get Panels to recognize the cover. EPUBs are basically just a compressed bundle of HTML and image files. Maybe I just need to tweak something in the HTML? Or I could decompress the EPUB and recompress it as a CBZ file maybe. That would give me a file with the lower-res images from the EPUB but in the better-supported CBZ format.

Stepping back a bit, I remember that I’m messing around with files from a Humble bundle that I bought back in 2016. I haven’t read anything from it yet, and probably won’t, any time soon. So none of this is a big deal.

Meanwhile, I also bought this Hellboy bundle this week, which is actually the third Hellboy-related bundle I’ve bought from Humble. So now I’ve got a ton of Hellboy comics files on my drive, more than I’ll probably ever get around to reading. I just have to remember that having too much to read is a good thing… better that, than not having enough.

Kindle, Kobo, Humble, and DRM thoughts

I’ve been buying various Humble bundles going back to 2012. I think the first couple were probably book bundles. Then, they started selling comics bundles too. I’ve been buying two or three of their bundles every year since then. So it’s not a ton of stuff, but it adds up. Some of the comics bundles, if you download all the books, can take up a lot of disk space. The largest one I have is a Star Trek bundle that takes up 25 GB.

My general approach with the DRM-free Humble comics bundles is to download all the books onto my main PC, then back them up to DVD. I’ve kept them in a local folder on the PC, only moving individual books to OneDrive when I’m ready to load them onto my iPad.

But I’m starting to rethink that. I have 1 TB drive in my PC, and I try to keep at least 100 GB free on it. I bought a couple of Humble bundles this week, and the comics one (Black Hammer) pushed me over the edge into having just under 100 GB free. I found that my local Humble folder had 175 GB worth of comics in it.

In OneDrive, I have 1 TB of storage, and I was using about 170 GB of that. So there’s plenty of room on OneDrive for the comics. I keep all of my OneDrive files local on my PC, so I don’t gain much immediately from moving the comics there. (Though there is some overlap, with stuff I’d copied to OneDrive and also had on my PC.) So I’ve spent some time over the last few days moving stuff from my local folder to OneDrive. I’m almost done now, with the last couple of bundles uploading right now. As you can imagine, it takes a long time to upload 175 GB to OneDrive.

When I’m done, I will consider changing the settings in OneDrive so that the Humble comics folder is offloaded and not always available on the PC. I already have both my MacBook and PC laptop set so that OneDrive is in “files on demand” mode, but I’ve resisted doing that on my main PC, since I like to be able to have the OneDrive files included in my daily backups (via Bvckup 2).

Overall, I’m trying to let go a bit of the idea that I need to have all of my DRM-free comics on my hard drive and backed up. Humble has now been around for more than ten years, and I’m pretty sure all of the stuff I’ve bought from them is still downloadable from their library. So it doesn’t seem as though I’m likely to suddenly lose access to it at any point soon. And, hey, it’s just comics, and honestly, I’ve got so many of them now that I’m probably not ever going to read them all anyway.

Another idea I had was to move them to a separate OneDrive account, as an archive. I have Microsoft 365 Family, so I can set up another user on the family account and move the comics over there, so they’ll be off the hard drive, out of my main OneDrive, but still safely in the cloud. That could be a lot of work though.

Well, I guess the system I have is good enough for now. The other Humble bundle I bought this week was a book bundle, the Ursula K. Le Guin bundle. Humble has been doing book bundles with Kobo recently, including the Terry Pratchett one from earlier this year. For the Pratchett bundle, I actually downloaded all the books from Kobo and pulled them into Calibre. I don’t think I’m going to bother doing that with the Le Guin bundle. Since I now have both a Kobo Libra Colour and a Kindle Colorsoft, I don’t have to worry that much about stripping DRM and moving files around, if I don’t want to. I can read the Kobo books on the Kobo and my Kindle books on the Kindle.

I’m not really happy about the overall situation with DRM on books and comics and music, but I guess I’ve accepted it, to some extent. And I think I’m starting to accept that I’ll never read every book and comic I “own” before I die. I read something some time ago by (I think) Steve Leveen that reframed the issue of having a large “To Be Read” pile as a positive rather than a negative thing. Rather than thinking of your backlog as a burden, think of it as an abundance of options. Every time I want to sit down and read a book or comic, I have hundreds of options to choose from, without spending any money or leaving my apartment. So that’s a good thing, right?

perfect Sundays

I feel like I’ve been having a nice run of near-perfect Sundays lately, so I thought I’d blog about that a little. Since at least 2020, I’ve been organizing my weekends so that I generally get all of my chores done on Saturday, and I can spend Sunday relaxing. And I’ve developed some habits that work well for me.

I started reading the Sunday Routine articles in the NY Times around 2020, and enjoyed a lot of those. I haven’t kept up with them, but I think I may have taken some inspiration from them, without really meaning to. A lot of them are easy to make fun of. But many of them are also inspirational and interesting.

Anyway, here’s my Sunday routine: I generally get up at 6, because I’m old and I can’t really sleep late anymore. But Sunday is the one day I don’t need to get up at 6, so sometimes I’ll sleep in until 7, if my body lets me do that. I almost always make a variation on the same breakfast: two eggs, one slice of pork roll, and two slices of toast. And I make coffee with my Moka pot. At some point after breakfast, I go for a walk. Generally for 20-25 minutes, just around the neighborhood. When I come back, I read a few chapters of whichever Wheel of Time book I’m currently reading. At 10 AM, I walk over to the Somerville Farmers Market and buy some stuff. I’ve been going to that consistently enough this year that a lot of the vendors know me now, and I can have some little chats with them. So that’s quite nice. After that, I might go back to reading my Wheel of Time book. For the afternoon, I might make a sandwich and watch a movie on TV, or a football game. There’s usually an afternoon nap in there somewhere.

So there’s not much of a point in writing all of that out, but I like thinking about it. And it’s good to recognize the nice things in your life and be thankful for them.

And all of that is leading me up to thinking about the election results from last week. I have to admit that it all kind of broke me. (I was going to link to a news article about the results here, but browsing through them now is only making me angry again…) I’m trying to think back now to how I felt in 2016. And, because I have a blog, I can check on that! Here’s a post from (coincidentally) today in 2016. It’s kind of funny to see that I embedded a bunch of Twitter posts into that blog entry. I would never do that now; Twitter is worse than useless at this point.

There was a lot of reaction to the election on the social networks I now follow (Mastodon and Bluesky, mostly), but nothing I feel like I need to share. In fact, I avoided social media for the day after the election, except for a couple of quick check-ins to see if there was anything I needed to know about. I’m starting to rethink my media diet again. I’ve found that I’m not ready for stuff like Colbert or other typical last-night humor again. So I might lay off all of that for the rest of the year. I will probably keep watching NJ Spotlight News, but I might be fast-forwarding through parts of it now. (That’s what I was doing last week. I just couldn’t bear to watch anything related to the election results.)

One thing I did see on social media today was a post from Michiko Kakutani on Instagram quoting W. H. Auden’s poem September 1, 1939, which I’ve mentioned on this blog before. I was going to stick a quote from it in here, but you’re better off reading the whole thing. (It’s not long.)

And there have been a lot of blog posts and essays and think pieces written about these election results. (Of course.) I’ve looked at a few of them, but haven’t read many, past the first paragraph or two. (That’s probably healthy. Reading too much of this stuff would only make my state of mind worse, and probably wouldn’t result in any useful action on my part.) I’ll like to one piece though: And Yet It Moves, by Ken White.

OK, that’s it for now. Back to relaxing.

vacation review

So I guess my vacation is just about done. Looking back over the week, I’m curious to see what I’ve accomplished, what I didn’t, and how I feel about it.

  • The boil water advisory was lifted last night, and water pressure seems to be back to normal, so I guess that’s over.
  • I mentioned in my last post that I’d wiped my TiVo. Today was the first Saturday of the month, which is when they accept electronics for recycling at our local recycling center, so I took care of that today. I got rid of both the TiVo, and my old answering machine (which I unhooked back in June when I parked my old home number).
  • On the way back from the recycling center, I tried to stop off at Duke Farms, which I’d wanted to do earlier in the week, but couldn’t because of the water main break. Alas, it turns out that this is the last weekend of the year where they require a parking pass to be reserved, rather than the first weekend when they don’t, as I’d thought. So they turned me away. I guess I can try again next Saturday.
  • I managed to watch some pretty random movies this week: The Mummy, John Wick: Chapter 4, Sita Sings the Blues, and Teen Titans: The Judas Contract. So that was nice.
  • I got some dental work done on Friday, and I’m still recovering from that. I’m glad I had that whole day off. I was supposed to have one follow-up visit after that, but now it’s two follow-ups, because there was an issue, and the dentist couldn’t finish up on Friday. So, one visit in mid-November and one in early December. Sigh. These things never seem to end.
  • Ditto for the car work I did on Monday. I was hoping to get everything done, but, for one problem, they just did a bit more diagnostic work and gave me a price for it, rather than just going ahead and doing it. So I’m going to have to bring the car back again at some point.

So am I ready to go back to work? I guess so. I’m very tired today, due to a lack of sleep last night (which I think is partially due to a lingering headache from the dental work, and partially due to some noisy folks outside at 1 AM last night). If I can get a good night’s sleep tonight, and have a good trouble-free day tomorrow, I should be good for work on Monday. But did I really succeed in de-stressing at all? Eh, a little, I guess. It was nice not to think (too much) about work for a week, and have some space to just hang out and get some stuff done.

vacation clean-up

So we’ve got water back, though the water pressure is a little weird, and we have a boil water advisory. Meanwhile, I’m trying to check a few things off my to-do list today.

A few days ago, I finally wiped my TiVo, unhooked it from the TV, and boxed it up for recycling. I got it in 2015, so it had a good run. Almost ten years.

That made me look at the situation under my TV a bit closer, and convinced me to see whether or not it was worth keeping my PS3. I got that in 2008, so it’s even older than the TiVo. I’d unplugged the HDMI cable on it at some point, for some reason. I plugged it back in today and turned it on, and surprisingly, it worked.

It wasn’t hooked up to my current WiFi network, which means it’s been at least two years since I’ve turned it on, since I bought that router in 2022. It took a bit of work to get it going. I had to reset my PSN account password, then generate a new device setup password, and get it entered on the dumb on-screen keyboard on the PS3. But it’s working now.

The PlayStation store for PS3 was discontinued in 2021. And I’m not sure if the Blu-Ray player works. So I’m not sure if it’s at all useful. I should probably talk myself into resetting it to factory defaults and recycling it. One thing at a time though.

My other big cleanup thing today was to put together a pile of old tech books and dump them in a book donation bin. (I know tech books usually don’t have much resale value, but this bin specifically says that it’s OK, as long as they have UPC codes. They might just toss them, but I’m fine either way.)

It took some effort to convince myself to dump them. I know they were all out of date, and I can access most of them through O’Reilly Learning if I need them, but it was still hard, for some reason. Most of them were from the stack of books I used to keep at my desk at work, before they moved us to our new smaller cubicles, which don’t have any space for books.

I guess I still have trouble letting go of old stuff, in general. Part of me still thinks I’m going to finish reading that book about SharePoint 2010 development, or playing Final Fantasy VIII, or watching all the Svengoolie episodes on my TiVo. But I need to let go of some of this stuff and move forward.

vacation week and water main break

I’m in the middle of a vacation week. I’m not really doing anything with it, other than taking care of some miscellaneous stuff and just trying to relax. This is my first vacation this year, and also really my first time taking a full calendar week vacation in… quite some time. I took a full week off last year, but that was when I got COVID. And the last few years before that, I’d only really taken long weekends, essentially.

So this is kind of a nice break. Of course, I scheduled some car stuff on Monday, and some dental work for Friday, so Tuesday through Thursday are really my only 100% free days. Today is Wednesday, and I had some ideas in my head about maybe going over to Duke Farms for a walk. But, when I got out of bed, I discovered that we had no water. And it’s a town-wide thing, due to a water main break on Rt 206, near Duke Farms. So they’ve closed for the day. And I also had some ideas in my head about making myself a fancy breakfast, but I didn’t want to do that without running water, so I had a bowl of Cheerios instead, with some instant coffee made with bottled water.

So now I’m not sure what I should do with myself today. I have a few little chores I could do. And maybe I could find a park that’s in the other direction from 206 to go for a walk. Or I could just sit around and continue reading Towers of Midnight. Yeah, I think I’m probably going to do that.

subscriptions

I seem to have a lot of yearly subscriptions coming up for renewal soon, and I’m spending a little time thinking about them today. So I thought I’d write up some notes.

    • Instapaper is $60/year now, having doubled from the old price of $30/year. I’ve thought about switching to Pocket, which would be $45/year. But I’m used to Instapaper, and it works fine, and I can afford the $60. The weird thing, though, is that it should have renewed several days ago, but hasn’t yet. Every time I check my account page, it says that my renewal date is “today”. I don’t know. I guess I’ll let it go and see what happens.
    • I just got a renewal notice for my AAA membership, which expires at the end of the year. I don’t have that on auto-renew. I thought about canceling it last year, since I never really use it, and I can get roadside assistance through my regular auto insurance. Maybe I’ll finally drop it this year. I’ve been a member since I got my license and first car in the early 90s, but it doesn’t really seem useful anymore.
    • My Costco membership is up for renewal too. This is another one that might go into the same category as AAA. I’ve had it for years, but I really don’t go to the local Costco anymore, since COVID, and I haven’t ordered anything from their website lately either. I might let it expire, and just re-up it later if I need it.
    • My GoComics subscription renews soon. That one’s a no-brainer, at $20/year for my daily comic strip fix. I occasionally consider also subscribing to Comics Kingdom, which is $30/year, but I don’t really need it.
    • My ACM membership is coming due soon. That one’s also a no-brainer. I get a fair bit of use out of the O’Reilly Learning access that I get through ACM, so it’s worth it just for that. I’ve fallen way behind on reading my ACM newsletters and the CACM magazine though. And in fact, I just checked, and it seems like I turned off emails on some of the ACM stuff a while ago, so I’m not getting notices when new CACM issues come out, so I guess I should fix that.
    • And I guess the last thing would be my Poe subscription. I have really mixed feelings about that. It’s $200/year, which is a lot. I’ve gotten a good bit of use out of it, but it’s annoying that it’s blocked on my work computer, which is where I need it most. (At work, I’m stuck using Copilot and/or our own internal AI chatbot.) I originally signed up for it because ChatGPT Plus signups were on hold, so Poe was an alternative. I might cancel the Poe sub and switch to the $20/month ChatGPT sub. Really, I don’t know if I need a “pro” AI chatbot service. A year ago, I was trying to learn this stuff, figure out what it was good for, and get some experience with it. Now I think I know where it’s useful and where it’s not. And I’m not too interested in doing any API stuff with it right now.

waiting for my Kindle

My new Kindle still hasn’t shown up yet. It’s due on Nov 4, which is fine, but a little inconvenient, since I’m on vacation next week, and it would have been nice to have a new Kindle to play with.

I’ve already sent my old Kindle back for trade-in, and it’s been accepted, with no issues. But now I’m not sure I should have traded it in. It looks like the new Kindles don’t allow the download and transfer option like the old ones did. And that’s the way I generally get Kindle ebooks over to my Kobo; by downloading them, pulling them into Calibre, letting it convert them, then copying them to the Kobo.

So, since I now have no older devices registered to my Amazon account, I can’t download books anymore. I probably should have kept the old Kindle, just so I could keep that ability.

Mind you, Amazon has said nothing about this, so no one is sure if this is just a temporary thing, or a change in policy going forward. Either way, I probably shouldn’t worry about it. The main point of buying a new Kindle is so that I can use it to read my Kindle books. And it should be at least as good as the Kobo.

My old 2018 Paperwhite wasn’t quite as good as the Kobo, so I’d been copying all of my Wheel of Time books over to the Kobo and reading them on it. But now, I’ll want to go back to the Kindle anyway, I think.

This does leave me wondering what I’ll do with the Kobo. Of course, I have plenty of DRM-free ebooks that I can read on either device, easily. And I have a bundle of Terry Pratchett ebooks that I got through Kobo, so there’s those too.

Kindle Colorsoft

When the new Kindles were announced this week, I pretty much jumped right in and ordered a Kindle Colorsoft. I used to be a lot more cautious/frugal about ordering new bits of hardware, but I seem to have decided that “you only live once”, as the kids say, so now I have a fancy new color Kindle on its way to me. It should be here on Nov 4. I traded in my old Kindle Paperwhite, so the total cost after trade-in discount is around $233. I got the Paperwhite in 2018, so I was due for a new Kindle.

Of course, I also bought a Kobo Libra Colour just a few months ago. So now I’ll have two color e-readers to choose from. Part of me feels ashamed for my flagrant consumerism here. I feel like I should have held out and waited for the new Kindles, instead of buying the Kobo. Or decided to stick with the Kobo and give up on the Kindle. But, eh… you only live once.

I’m using the Kobo to read my Wheel of Time books right now, despite having bought them through Amazon. Once I get the Kindle, I’ll probably switch back to it, and see if the screen is as good as (or better than) the Kobo. (The Kobo screen is definitely better than my 2018 Paperwhite, but that’s to be expected.)

If I like the new Kindle better than the Kobo, then I guess the Kobo will become a secondary device. I’m pretty sure I’ll hold on to it, either way.