Author Archives: Brian

epub cover extractor

Another quick little utility I wrote recently. This extracts covers from your epub files and can change the size, greyscale etc. By default it will greyscale and resize them, to work as screensavers for ebook readers.

Sample image from an epub:
sample image

No more WIndows – linux only

I’ve been using Linux Mint as my main home desktop for 11 years now and as of about a month ago I finally got rid of Windows. The two things that were holding me back were gaming and Overdrive ebooks.

Linux gaming has come a LONG way and it now works good enough for me to ditch Windows. I successfully got most games working:

  • Steam – most games work
  • Epic Games, Ubisoft, GOG, via Lutris
  • Amazon Gaming via Nile – not elegant, but it works

As for Overdrive, I found Knock on github – it will take the downloaded .acsm file and download the epub file. I originally got Adobe Digital Editions installed and it worked, but Knock is much easier. I just put the knock executable into my ~/bin and once I download the .acsm file I run knock on it. UPDATE: I can’t find the Knock github repo anymore – here is the archive of it: https://web.archive.org/web/20221016154220/https://github.com/BentonEdmondson/knock

Karabast.com

I just finished watching Star Wars Rebels and on a whim, looked up some related some domain names and to my surprise – karabast.com was available! So naturally, I bought it! I tossed a simple page up for now. No definitive plans for it at this point.

Customizer Corner


I launched a new site over the weekend – Customizer Corner. It’s a search engine for custom action figure and diorama parts. I needed something like this for myself and figured others could use it too. I launched it by posting it in ~6 of the action figure groups I’m a member of on Facebook. The response was overwhelmingly positive which is amazing.

My original plan was to write the “data gathering code” and put it in a WordPress site as a POC. Once I saw it worked, I was going to write a backend from scratch. But… the more I used WordPress the more I saw it can get me to about 90% of what I wanted. It has faceted searching and the ability to search in tags. So I changed my mind and figured I’d just use WordPress. Now I’m finding some shortcomings and I’m rethinking that… I’m still not 100% happy with the searching… searching for two words doesn’t work like I want and some of the ideas I have for the site just don’t fit well into WordPress, so I’m looking to see if there is a site framework I can easily use. If not, I guess I’ll write it from scratch.

I talked with Neil at Red Flare Models and he is an enthusiastic backer of the site and idea. I also talked to Brian at https://customsforthekid.blogspot.com/ and he is totally on board too. Cool stuff.

HOWTO: Making 1:12 scale cowboy hats


BTW – If you prefer this type of tutorial as a short youtube video, let me know.

So I’ve been playing around some more with making (cowboy) hats and came up with something that seems to work pretty well for me. This technique could be used for making other types of hats and I have even used this basic concept to make leather-ish clothing. The good thing is, this technique is cheap to experiment with.

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