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I’ve just finished editing a page on the site that’s a “repository” of fanfiction works that I’ve converted for use on e-readers (Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader, etc.).  If you have one of these devices, feel free to grab the files.

Just to re-iterate here what I’ve stated on the page – these are NOT my works.  The stories belong to the fabulous authors who wrote them in the first place.  I’ve just grabbed them from their respective posted sites and made them into a format available for people to take on the go.  If you personally know the author, and run this by them, and they aren’t thrilled with the idea, I’m more than happy to take them down.  As far as I’m aware, I haven’t broken copyright, but that’s not exactly legal advice I’m standing on.

I’ll continue to add to the list as I convert stuff for me to read on the go.  I’m posting them here to share with everyone for their own enjoyment.  I spent the time to get them converted, so if I can save someone a few minutes out of their day and keep them reading, everyone benefits.  No charge or hoops to jump through.

Fanfiction for e-readers.

by ·Comments Off on Another caught in the net

So, now Alberto Contador, arguably the top Grand Tour rider in the world right now, gets wrapped up in a positive B-sample.  Funny enough, the outrage from the peloton seems to be a bit muted right now.  Many of the reactions I’ve read are “meh, we expected this” and “see, you can’t win a tour without doping.”  It’s funny that they’re either giving the benefit of the doubt to Alberto, or just so apathetic it’s sickening. 

For those who don’t know, his sample after the 2nd rest day showed *traces* of clenbuterol, apparently a very nominal performance booster at all.  (Not on the level of say, EPO or testosterone.)  What’s even more amusing is that the labs have found traces of plastic in his sample as well – suggesting blood doping.  He claims it came from eating tainted meat.  If that’s the case, wouldn’t his teammates have had it as well?  Don’t they all eat the same meals together?  I’m fairly certain that the UCI and French authorities would have kept a pretty stringent eye on Vinokourov after his return from a blood doping ban. 

Surprisingly silent in this is Armstrong, the man they claim doped his way to 7 victories. 

What’s even more interesting is that the latest batch of files to the UCI for teams to acquire ProTour status was missing one team – Astana, Contador’s soon to be former team. 

by ·Comments Off on Oooooh… Shiny

Yay!

So the *planned* purchase finally got here today.  My new Kindle 3 Wi-Fi. 

I never thought the thing was so tiny.  But it is.

My initial impression remains the same as when I got my DX over a year ago – wow!  This is so much nicer.  I can hold it with one hand, still turn pages easily, etc. 

I will say that the interface for moving between Kindles is a little clunky.  I had to resend all my books over, then re-create and organize my collections.  Amazon really needs some sort of desktop interface or ability to back up that kind of data on the cloud. 

There’s a bit less shown while reading, but the page turns are even faster than on the DX. The screen does have better contrast, and i can read it in a bit lower light situations,. 

So, just a couple of pics demonstrating the size. 

IMG_0269 IMG_0270

by ·Comments Off on Karma’s a …

You know, karma’s a real b****.

Before I went home over Labor Day weekend, I knew that I needed an oil change.  I couldn’t remember if I needed a tire rotation or not.  I went in, they offered free rotations, so I took them up on it.  They get the tires off, and they’re at the wear indicators (which means I wouldn’t pass inspection for license renewal).  So I get 4 new shoes for my baby.

After that, I watched the Apple announcement for the new iPod lineup, thinking that with this, I could pickup a recent model on the cheap.  A week later, my 2nd generation nano (we’re on the 6th now) stops putting out sound through the headphones.

I left for home worried about losing power/internet at my house, and as such, my email.  It happens, so I get my VPS (which turns out to be not such a bad thing).

This past week, I ask my PC shop what would be a decent upgrade to help me with backing up/converting my Blu-Ray and DVD collection.  The answer – more memory (short of getting a new processor at $300).  Not even 24 hours later – my memory fries.

Of course, I’m writing this after I dropped more money on a new power supply, motherboard, hard drive, and cpu thinking one of those was the issue.  Don’t forget the money I’ve paid to my shop to attempt to diagnose the problem.

Yeesh, I’m due for some good karma here.  As soon as I picked up a few extra bucks after selling some of my stuff on ebay, all this other stuff crops up.  Just goes to show you that whenever you try to get ahead, life smacks you back down.

So, I’ll go pickup my system tomorrow, with some “temporary” memory until the new sticks I ordered from Newegg get here.  Then hope I can re-sell the old stuff on eBay for a few bucks.

Karma’s a real bitch sometimes…

by ·Comments Off on Moved

Well, my time with bluehost as my provider is an at end. 

After I lost power at the house when I left for the holiday weekend, thus losing my email and other fun services, I decided it was time to look into other alternatives.  I settled on getting a VPS from thrustvps.com.  (A VPS is “virtual private server” – software that allow you to run another instance of an operating system within the main operating system.  Think of it as running Windows inside a Mac.)

It took me forever to get set up.  As with my home box, I’m beginning to loathe CentOS.  It’s stable, which means it also uses some packages that are years old.  That doesn’t help me much sometimes.  CentOS 5, the most recent version, is almost 3 years old now (as are most of the packages).  I tried to run Ubuntu 10.04, but something’s wrong with their template, and I couldn’t get half the stuff I needed to startup at boot time.  So, I’m on yet another flavor of Linux – Debian.

Debian is pretty much the base for Ubuntu, just slightly less friendly.  I also tried out SuSE, Fedora (brother to CentOS), and Ubuntu 8.04.  CentOS, for some reason doesn’t play well with my email push capabilities.  I don’t know what it is.  Probably the older packages, but that’s just a guess at this point. 

For the time being, the only URL that links here is www.t-gk.net.  The main URL with bluehost, www.the-gatekeeper.net will eventually be mirrored over here, once I’m sure that I’m 100% up and running and 100% stable here.  Just a matter of time, really. 

Since my VPS is limited, I have to tweak some of my applications to not be such memory hogs.  Unfortunately, my to-do list (obtained from www.getontracks.org) seems to be the main culprit, eating up nearly 10% of the used memory.  The other is apache (the actual web server itself).  It seems to want to continually start new instances, which would be fine for a major website that has tons of visitors, but I’m not getting a huge amount here, you know.