Something To Read

A couple of my flash shorts are in this charity anthology:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00Q7HOU2E

Google

I’m in the process of uploading my books to Google Books. Spent most of the afternoon writing scripts to automatically convert my LibreOffice files to .epub and .pdf for Google, and it’s now pretty easy. I’ll upload the ones that aren’t Amazon-exclusive over the next couple of weeks.

Android 5

I did finally get this update on my Nexus 7 a week or two back. Overall, there aren’t that many differences, and it’s still missing real, useful permission controls.

Pros:

Smoother. Kindle app, in particular, doesn’t seem to chug as much when reading books or scrolling through the list of books.

Cons:

Many things now take longer. For example, getting to the settings requires two screen touches instead of one, and logging in requires swiping the screen before you can type the password. The animations are kind of useful, but time consuming.

Ambivalent:

The new look is flatter than the old one. I honestly don’t see why anyone thought it was worth investing all the time to develop, and some apps look much worse with the new look. Seems like change for change’s sake.

Android 5 still not here

So, despite the rumours, seems like Android 5 still isn’t out yet. I’ve been checking the Nexus 7 a couple of times a day, and nothing has shown up. Guess we’ll be waiting a few weeks longer before it’s available to upgrade.

Linux Mint 17

Finally got around to upgrading. So far it works no worse than 16, except my fancy login screen has been replaced with some crappy username/password entry box, and encrypted swap partitions no longer work (apparently the latter is a known bug).

Here’s roughly how I did it:

1. Use the backup tool to save a list of installed applications.
2. Boot up, plug in the USB backup drive and log in to a console terminal.
3. cd /tmp and sudo -i to become root, not in my own home directory.
4. Since I have an encrypted home directory, I now want to unmount /home/emg so nothing can write to the directory while I’m backing it up. So umount /home/emg.
5. Copy /home to the backup drive. This saves an encrypted backup which can be reloaded if everything goes horribly wrong.
6. While doing that, make a list of the partitions on the disk.
7. Unmount the backup drive, unplug it, and reboot on the install disk.
8. Select to install. Select all partitions other than /home, and choose to reformat them and install.
9. Set the hostname and username, and ensure you pick the same password as you had before, so the encrypted home directory will work.
10. Install.
11. Reboot.
12. Edit /etc/fstab to mount the old home partition as /home.
13. Reboot.
14. Log in as yourself, update (in my case, I had to download about 400 upgraded packages) and finish installing the packages you need.
15. Reboot for safety. Job done.