Make your own Palm Ebooks using MakeBook

I like to have an ebook on my palm, just in case I find myself waiting somewhere unexpected, and I don’t have a printed book with me. I also like reading classics and classic philosophy, which means that there’s plenty of free electronic texts around. Here’s how you can create your own ebooks in linux :

mkdir ~/installs/MakeBook
cd ~/installs/MakeBook

wget http://ereader.com/download/product/15097/makebook.tar.gz (or go to the site and read and accept the license, if you want)

unzip MakeBook\ 1.0.0.zip

tar xzvf makebook.tar.gz

java -classpath “makebook.jar” com.peanutpress.MakeBook

Point it to an input text file, and an output file, and it will generate your ebook.
You’ll also need a reader, available here.

Mousewheel in Emacs

Mousewheel not working in emacs ? The beeps giving you headaches ? Edit your .emacs file to include the following :

(mouse-wheel-mode)
(setq bell-volume 0)
(setq sound-alist nil)

Of course, if you don’t have a .emacs file, create one.

NTFS woes over ?

Enter ntfs-3g, “a read-write ntfs driver, capable of unlimited file creation and deletion”.

If this works as advertised, there’s gonna be a lot less reboots to windows happening around the world. Sweet, sweet music to my ears !

Two Linux PCs Power 12-Station Internet Café

This is not exactly earth-shattering stuff, given that linux/unix was designed to be a multi-user system, and X uses a client/server architecture. Still, nice to see that people are making use of the advantages linux has to offer.