Creative avoidance – with yeast
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I’m experiencing a bout of creative avoidance – finding useful and easily justifiable tasks to do in order to avoid tackling a bigger, more important activity. At Christmas, our daughter Frances made a delicious batch of bread following a no-knead recipe which originated in the Sullivan Street bakery in New York, courtesy of the New York Times. Her results were inspirational. I’ve dabbled with yeast for many years with varying degress of success – basic loaves, bloomers, plaits, bagels, croissants, muffins – I’ve tried them all and with a wide range of flours. What made me try again was a combination of Fran’s superb bread and the availability of fresh yeast at a nearby supermarket.First, I repeated the no-knead recipe and followed this with a bloomer and two coburgs. The results with the fresh yeast, I found, were much better than with the dried yeast I’ve used before.
So, what else could I make in order not to do that other job? First it was baps (see first photo). That went well – nice and soft – thanks to a heavy dusting of flour and covering them with a tea-towel as they cooled. The drawback was the 40g of lard that get rubbed into the flour at the start of the recipe – that’s more fat than I would like in my diet. What else? We recently bought a Czech cooker. This is a low energy cooker that can be used instead of an oven. The difference in power is considerable – a typical oven might consume 3 kilowatts while the Czech cooker at full power consumes 450 watts. I made the casserole, shown left, in 2 hours with the power set to 1, which I think equates to a 100 watt light bulb. My problem with the yeast was that it was sold as four 1oz packets and had an imminent ‘use by’ date. I realised that, to get the best out it, I needed to get kneading. I like making bagels; they have extra ingredients compared with plainer bread, like whisked egg white and melted butter. There’s also a poaching interlude when you get to toss the rings of dough into simmering water for 30 seconds. Glaze with the egg yolk and bake for 20-25 minutes and you get the bagels shown here. I suppose I should get on with that job that’s looming. I know, I’ll just blog about creative avoidance first. |
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Six eggs – twelve yolks
Four eggs - eight yolks
The Telegraph this morning told the story of a Cumbrian woman who discovered that all six eggs in a box had double yolks: six eggs – twelve yolks. They put the odds of this happening at over one in a trillion.
Does that mean more than a trillion boxes of eggs have been consumed since 16May03 when the photograph shown here was taken? We had a box of six double-yolkers, though only four were used for the meal we were preparing.
Copyright © Colin Hazlehurst, 2010
Inside Epub – sort NCX navMap by playOrder
The NCX document of an epub publication is held in XML format. The <navMap> element of an NCX document holds navigation information that reading software can use to present a table of contents to the reader. The content documents in an epub publication are described in <navPoint> elements in the <navMap>. The order in which the <navPoint> elements should be displayed is specified by their playOrder attributes.
It’s important to realise that the sequence of <navPoint> nodes in a <navMap> don’t have to be held in playOrder sequence. This creates a need to sort the <navPoint> nodes before using them to display a table of contents.
In this Technical Note: sort an NCX navMap by playOrder, one way to do this, using an XSL transform, is presented by Inside Epub.
Inside Epub – design of an NCX handler in C#
The NCX document of an epub publication contains information about its structure. When presented to a reader using a reading device it acts like a Table of Contents. As such, it plays a key role for content providers; authors and publishers want to be able to organise their documents; they want to add and remove content and change the order in which content is presented to the reader.
The article published today in the Inside Epub series looks at the design of software that provides this functionality in the context of an online wysiwyg epub editor.
The article can be found at: Design of an NCX handler in C#
Figure 1. shows the latest user interface design for the editor and shows how the <navMap> of the NCX is displayed as a table of contents.
Figure 1. Online wysiwyg epub editor
Figure 2. shows the actions that can be performed by the content provider. All of these action involve changes to the NCX document, and mostly they need changes elsewhere in the OPF Package. For instance, whenever a content document is added or removed or its position in the reading order is changed, there will typically be changes required in the <spine> and the <manifest> elements of the <package>. These topics are covered in the article.
Figure 2. Editor Actions that affect the NCX
User interface for an online epub editor
A new article is available in the Inside Epub series which discusses and presents a user interface design for an online epub editor. The article is in the programming branch of the Inside Epub website which splits between an exploration of the epub standards and documentation of the author’s efforts to design and develop an online wysiwyg epub editor.
Develop your own epub editor
Inside Epub has just released an article entitled: Develop your own epub editor. This is the first article in a series which will show how to build an online, wysiwyg, epub editor using free and/or open software tools that are in widespread use.
The Code Project strand of Inside Epub builds on the background information presented recently which explored the epub standards and showed how they work together to package content documents and hold them in a file with the .epub extension. See Introduction to epub for more details.
OPS and PDF in one OCF container
Did you know it’s possible to ship a PDF version of your ebook when you publish it in the epub format?
The Open Container Format, part of the epub specification from the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), provides a general-purpose container capable of holding a range of resource types.
The latest article from Inside Epub shows how the Open Container Format makes it possible to have a PDF file as part of your epub publication: OPS and PDF in one OCF container.
How the epub standards work together
The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) maintains the standards describing how ebooks with the .epub extension are constructed. There are three main specifications:
- Open Publication Structure (OPS)
- Open Packaging Format (OPF)
- Open Container Format (OCF)
If you want to know more about these specifications and how they work together, read the recent article How the standards work together from the series provided by Inside Epub. The analogy is drawn between the structure of a printed book and the aspects that each standard addresses:
- OPS <==> the vocabulary used to write the book
- OPF <==> the parts, chapters, and sections of the book
- OCF <==> the cover and binding of the book
The articles in this series explore epub by looking inside The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a free ebook available from epubBooks. Screenshots are used to illustrate how the standards have been used in this relatively simple example.
Try this at home – you might find it useful.
Copyright © Colin Hazlehurst, 2010
NCX navigation in epub books
The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) maintains the epub standards for electronic publication, but there are good reasons to reuse an already existing standard – not least of which is you don’t have to maintain it yourself.
That’s what IDPF have done to specify how a Table of Contents should be held in an epub ebook. They have adopted the NCX specification of the DAISY consortium. The problem was how to let readers dive into any part of an ebook and at the same time save the processing effort to open and parse the entire book.
The latest article in my Inside Epub series explains how this works: NCX navigation in epub books.
Copyright © Colin Hazlehurst, 2010
A closer look at Open Packaging Format
If you want to find out more about the epub standards created by the International Digital Publishing Forum, you might be interested in the series of articles I’m writing under the banner Inside Epub.
I have just added the latest article called A closer look at OPF which explores the Open Packaging Format document that comes with the free epub ebook The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, available from epubBooks.
The article explains how epub documents are described using <metadata> – data about data – and how they are packaged using a <manifest>. It also discusses the use of the <spine> element to specify the reading order of the enclosed content documents.
Copyright © Colin Hazlehurst, 2010
Inside epub
I’ve started a series of articles at: netkingcol.blogspot.com that explore the International Digital Publishing Forum’s standards for epub documents.
Using F.Scott Fitzgerald’s short story The Curious Case of Benjamin Button I show how an epub ebook is put together by conforming with the Open Container Format, the Open Packaging Format, and the Open Publication Structure.
The articles should be of interest to content providers – authors and publishers – who want to know more about epub. I also plan to develop a C# model of the entities found in epub so developers will be able to open and manipulate epub publications.
Smashwords doesn’t suck after all – it is I
I asked the question recently: Will Smashwords suck? I thought they were slow to respond to my request for support.
It had been a week since my email to them and I hadn’t heard anything. I was about to post a new blog entry to the effect that they certainly would suck if they didn’t reply soon. Before hitting SEND, I thought I’d better check my remote mail server that acts as my first line of defence against spam. Sure enough – oops – there were two very timely responses to my emails in the mailbox; they simply hadn’t been forwarded to the mailbox I normally use.
Conclusion: Smashwords are fine and I receive my doctorate in sucking (summa cum laude) next week.
It looks as though Smashwords are uploading books at a great rate. This has the effect that one’s own work is very soon difficult to notice as it slips down the initial date-related presentation.
The online book industry badly needs trusted reviewers to help people find their way among the rapidly growing quantity and highly variable quality of ebooks.
Copyright © Colin Hazlehurst, 2009
Will Smashwords suck?
I’ve taken to heart my reading of Jeff Jarvis’s book ‘What Would Google Do?’ in which he documents how his interactions with Dell concerning hardware and communication problems led him to an understanding of the new internet-based business landscape.
I posted yesterday that I had uploaded a second book – The Stones of Liverpool – to Smashwords, a digital publishing business. Their automated conversion process generates a wide range of formats for the text, one of which is the IDPF’s EPUB. When I downloaded the book in this format, I found that it crashed my version of Adobe Digital Editions. The first book I uploaded - Mus musicus - converted correctly and doesn’t crash Digital Editions.
I emailed Smashwords support this morning. The question is: are they listening? I’ll let you know.
Copyright © Colin Hazlehurst, 2009
The Stones of Liverpool at Smashwords
Following yesterday’s successful upload of Mus musicus, I have now uploaded The Stones of Liverpool to Smashwords.
In 2020-Liverpool, John, Andy, and Lily discover that the Jewel of Liverpool is more than a medallion worn by the mayor. It’s a dongle that allows its owner to surf the timespace web.
With the help of a timespace-traveller, they have to stop a gang of pirates from pillaging civilisations across time and space who take their plunder to a well-hidden timespace bubble in 16th century Rome.
The trick will be to do it without Liverpool crumbling to dust.
First impressions of Smashwords
Yesterday I went through the process of publishing my story Mus musicus as an ebook on Smashwords. I’d read about them from my LinkedIn group ‘Tools of Change for Publishing’, which drew attention to their recent acquisition of the New Zealand-based digital book publisher BookHabit.
Smashwords Registration
The registration process was straightforward, requiring minimal initial details. This is followed by the arrival of an activation email to prove ownership of the email address.
Once logged in I was able to change a wide range of information about me and my account: personal profile, how I want to be contacted, how I want to be paid (most interesting), how much of my royalty do I want to share with affiliate members etc. Most of these I’ve only just started to explore.
Read the Style Guide
The first thing you need to do is to read the Smashwords Style Guide which tells you how to prepare your ebook for submission. Essentially, you need to simplify your text in terms of its formatting and layout. The point is that ebooks don’t have page layout; the devices on which they are read need to be able to flow the text smoothly, screen by screen, and since these devices have screens that range in size from the largest computer monitor down to the smallest mobile phone, you can’t impose a page size on your book. It’s the same separation of content from presentation that makes CSS and XML so valuable.
The benefit you get from this is that Smashwords can deliver your text in the widest range of formats, making it available to the largest number of potential readers. The downside is that it’s advisable to keep a separate copy of the work if you want to preserve formatting for distribution through other channels. Editing multiple source documents is a nightmare. If I felt that Smashwords were the place to be then I would write new stories with the Style Guide in mind in order to minimise the rework. Mus musicus is about 25,000 words; I wouldn’t want to start from scratch preparing The Lord of the Rings. Read the rest of this entry »
Authonomy – valuable feedback or a distraction from writing?
After only five days using HarperCollins’ Authonomy website I’m reviewing whether or not I should continue. The site allows authors, editors, publishers, and people who simply like to read, to view and comment on the books that have been uploaded. There is a system of ranking both the books and the commentators. Books that are backed by others move up the rankings; books that climb the rankings improve the Talent Spotter ranking of those who backed them.
There are many games to play on Authonomy to get your book backed. The first task is to get people even to look at it – as with everything online getting eyes looking at your stuff is vital.
- You can send messages to other members inviting them to read your book, often with the promise of reading their book, the so-called ’swap read’.
- You can find books, read all or part of them, and then write comments to the author, hopefully constructive ones, in the hope you will prick their conscience into looking at your work.
- You can be an active forum participant. Eventually people will click on your profile to find out more about you and from there they will see your book.
- You can write the most brilliant, beautifully crafted story and rely on its intrinsic quality to get unequivocal support from the Authonomy community (I haven’t tried this one yet).
- You can blatantly offer to swap ‘backings’ without even reading the other person’s book.
And all for what? At the end of each month, the top five books go before a HarperCollins editorial review board. Beyond that is the hope that after much rework your book might actually be published. Read the rest of this entry »
How to convert car insurance into cavity wall insulation
This post is a follow-up to Nil By Ear when I said I was swapping my car for a tricycle. Today was the day I handed my Prius back to Toyota Financial Services. As much as anything, the photographs above are to show that it was in good condition when it left me.
I feel an inexplicable lightness – but then maybe it can be explained by the realisations that: a) I won’t be pumping all that carbon dioxide into the air, b) I won’t be incurring the running costs of a car, and c) I’ll be healthier for walking and cycling everywhere.
Continuing the theme of taking individual responsibility for my carbon footprint, I’ll be spending the refund of the car insurance policy that I’ve just cancelled on the cavity wall insulation that will be installed tomorrow morning.
The article in George Monbiot’s blog last week looks to me more like an excuse to do nothing. He seems to be forwarding the argument, based on an experiment at the University of Toronto, that we licence ourselves to be greedy and to perform environmentally unfriendly acts by taking a few small-scale green actions. He’s more in favour of allowing the politicians – the ones with two houses, two jags, and who never admit to ‘wrong-doing’ – to make the decisions for us and to tell us what to do.
I believe we can, and should, make decisions for ourselves about how we behave. Putting a cross on a ballot paper every 4 or 5 years isn’t enough, especially when you can’t trust the people who get the power. I really hope that Copenhagen is successful, but I’m not waiting for the outcome.
Copyright © Colin Hazlehurt, 2009
Sparrowhawk
This rather damp female Sparrowhawk (Accipiter nisus) appeared in our garden this afternoon. It’s a common enough bird across the country, having recovered from a number of threats including guns and DDT. It’s not that common in our garden, though, so it was quite exciting to see it.
The excitement is tempered by the knowledge that the hawk is a threat to the other avian visitors we enjoy. At the base of the fence in the picture there’s a raised pond that we built over the summer. The pond is used daily by blackbirds, pigeons, and others, all of which are part of the Sparrowhawk diet.
Flemish Bond – Bricks and Blood
In Ieper, Flemish Bond takes on a new meaning. The extreme madness of the First World War is evident everywhere, in the trenches of Sanctuary Wood, on Hill 62, in the museum inside the Cloth Hall of Ieper, and in the city itself which was completely destroyed and rebuilt.
One cannot help but be moved by the 60,000 names carved into the marble of the Menin Gate and by the 12,000 headstones in Tyne Cot cemetery, especially if you imagine each soldier to be standing there in uniform with full kit. I’m not taking sides; German youth was also squandered in the power struggle between the old empires. But I did, somehow, feel the bond between Britain and Belgium, created by the mingling of spilt blood in a common cause. 
It happened in a strange way. I was standing under the arch of the Menin Gate, looking across the road, when a girl in her late teens came cycling quickly and happily through – it’s downhill into town. She probably does this every day and I wondered at that moment how often she thought about the meaning of the memorial. For less than a second our eyes met, and I could see she asked herself why I was there and I could tell that she knew. Instantaneously, we shared the thought, as those men had shared the trenches and the cigarettes and the dying. Flemish Bond is sometimes made with bricks and sometimes it’s made with blood.
Copyright © Colin Hazlehurst, 2009
Nil By Ear
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Exchanging a Prius for a recumbent tricycle as my main form of transport. |  |
Why?
Well, because of climate change. According to some web-based calculators, the Prius needs 425 calories per mile which is equivalent to 4.7 small bananas. It’s fantastic that the Prius is so efficient, but those calories come from petrol (0.1 pints per mile if I drive carefully). The Prius puts 166g per mile of CO2 into the atmosphere. The recumbent, however, needs only 50 calories of my energy to carry it for 1 mile; that’s about half of a small banana. Although I’m breathing out CO2 at a higher rate than when I’m standing still, the beauty is I get to eat the banana as well as exercising my heart muscle and keeping fit.
Stephen Fry tweeted recently about a campaign organised by Avaaz to make some noise on 21Sep09 in order to wake up world leaders and urge them to action on climate change: http://tr.im/yRjL
