chrisanthropic

In the past I found it useful to design and layout a pen-and-paper role playing game book and export it as a print-ready PDF i could send to the printer(s).

Specifically, it has CMYK support, allowed me to layout images and text side-by-side and/or overlapping, along with shaded backgrounds for readability and emphasis.

Most books didn't require something this heavy, but the images were a pain without it.

For those interested in these things, here's a music/synesthesia study that I stumbled across last week that sounds pretty cool.

https://researchprofiles.herts.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/...

Typically, research has focussed on synaesthetic musicians such as the composer, Messiaen, who experienced colours when hearing music. This new inquiry investigates and develops a novel approach:

Can music be composed to evoke cross-modal sensory experiences such as taste, touch or smell in a general audience?

From principles derived from current research, can a methodology be devised to evoke novel cross-modal sensory experiences through musical composition?

I've been a fan of the correspondent since they launched: https://thecorrespondent.com/principles

Pay what you want, ad-free, paid reporters and staff, and focused on solutions versus sensationalism.

I really enjoyed the graphic novel "Economix: How our economy works (and doesn't work)" by Goodwin & Burr.

I found it informative, clear, concise, and funny at times, all uncommon for educational economic text in my experience.

In no particular order, here's the ones I've been following:

-https://postmarketos.org/

-https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/

-https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/

I'm the most optimistic about Postmarket in the long run, but the others are actual hardware so there's that.

Collective bargaining at it's finest.

I haven't touched the code in a couple of years, but I wrote something combining Jekyll, Pandoc, and custom LaTeX templates for publishing my wife's novels (ebook and print).

Someone found it and posted about it here in 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14482828

While I basically agree, one of the arguments in the episode (as I remember it, it's been a while) is that since we ship it away, we don't see the negative results of our lifestyle choices, making the problems created easier to ignore.

Also, they argue that modern landfills _can_ be pretty damned "green", capturing the heat/gases created and using them to generate power.

But since we've prioritized and financially incentivized recycling (shipping everything somewhere else) we haven't prioritized responsible ways to manage waste locally and once our waste gets rejected we'll likely to be playing catch-up.

I guess we'll see. Or we'll all die before then.

Shrug.

The first time I really started thinking about this was years ago after watching the recycling episode of "Penn & Teller: Bullshit" where they essentially warn that many recycling programs consist of shipping our waste elsewhere for someone else to deal with and that some day the countries we send our "recycling"/waste to will likely get sick of it and start rejecting it and we'll be fucked.

That was almost 10 years ago

I'll mention clubhouse.io every chance I get.

It's billed as a Project Management software (and it's great at that) but it can be great for documentation because it:

- provides hierarchical nesting (Milestones / Epics / Stories)

- each object can have a relationship to another (related, blocks, duplicates)

- each object offers a markdown text area, lists, github PR links/integration, comments, and can be moved between various stages (standard scrum stages or your own custom ones)

- each object can be assigned multiple owners, requesters, and followers

- each object can be tagged

- search by title, tag, owner, state, etc.

- each object can have files uploaded and attached

This allows me to track why the work was done, how the work was done, and what work was done, while providing a nice README as a comment.

Everything can be edited, or others in the team can leave their own comments.

It's odd for sure, but I love it.

Automating more Terraform stuff.

First, a script that calculates what percentage of your AWS resources (15 different resources for now) are managed by the Terraform code in a given directory, and then creates GitHub style badges for each. https://github.com/chrisanthropic/terraform-infra-as-code-co...

Second, a script to fully automate importing an existing GitHub org into Terraform and create a basic Terraform resource block for each resource. Imports teams, users, user memberships, and all repos. https://github.com/chrisanthropic/terraform-import-github-or...

Both scripts are just bash and the AWS API, GitHub API, and Terraform. jq is also required.

The best Jenkins advice I ever received was from here: https://medium.com/mindera/jenkins-a-la-travis-6c5a8debbb5b

On setting up Jenkins Job Builder using a 'seed job'. This setup allows you to add a .jenkins directory to you project, define a yaml based jenkins job inside that directory, push to github, and Jenkins will create the job you defined - NO web UI required.

In other words you make Jenkins behave like Travis.

Set this up with your first job being a job to backup Jenkins to S3 and things aren't as bad to manage.

project management (personal projects, long-term house chores, etc): - https://clubhouse.io/

notes: - https://boostnote.io/

backups: - rclone + google drive

It's completely up to the publisher (or author if self-published) to enable DRM or not via a checkbox in the UI when publishing on Amazon.

We've been releasing ours with the same CC license as Cory Doctorow, but honestly very few people really seem to care, unfortunately.

Unlike most LaTeX templates I've seen this project was written with a focus on fiction so I didn't touch anything around code blocks.

I'd love to add some more templates and a structure to make them easy to switch between eventually though.

That's to do with Github not displaying PDFs very well, but if you download it you can view it fine. Also, that PDF is the Adobe Pre-Flight verification of the 5x8 template.

The sample book can be created by cloning the repo and running the container. (http://chrisanthropic.github.io/Open-Publisher-Documentation...)

If you want to see examples, I formatted everything here: https://www.amazon.com/Tristan-J.-Tarwater/e/B004WS3P3A/

done, MIT license added.

The repo _does_ include a sample book, but you're right, some screenshots would be nice. I actually created the tool to handle all of my wife's books but I avoided linking to them from the project because I don't want it to look like a promotional tool/grab. But if anyone is interested in seeing books "in the wild" that have been created with this tool I'm happy to send you links.

Thanks for sharing, I'd somehow never heard of softcover before - it looks really nice! (Not the OP, but Open-Publisher is my project).

I wrote a free tool a bit ago that wraps Pandoc/LaTeX/Jekyll and takes Markdown inputs and exports epub, mobi, and print-ready PDFs (5x8 & 6x9 Pdfx-1a compliant), specifically for fiction.

You can check out the LaTeX template in the repo.

http://chrisanthropic.github.io/Open-Publisher-Documentation...

Wave accounting / https://waveapps.com

I really enjoyed _A Burglar's Guide to the City_ - https://www.amazon.com/Burglars-Guide-City-Geoff-Manaugh-ebo...

The premise of the book is a study of high-profile heists and how the crimes themselves were heavily influenced and determined by the surrounding infrastructure. Where it shines though is driving home the fact that the infrastructure of a place is meant to define how that place is used & criminals are often people who use it in a way other than the way it was designed to be used - such as burglars who choose to enter through a ceiling or maneuver through the HVAC system like hallways.

It's simply the best non-technincal description of hackers and IT security I've ever seen.

This.

Like I said further down, give mailtrain.org a look. It's self hosted and you can use multiple SMTP providers.

I looked into Sendy for quite a while but I like EmailOctopus' tech stack (and dev speed) better. My personal opinion only of course.

No problem. Honestly, the only reason I didn't go with that is because I work with AWS and wanted to see how they're setting up a 'serverless' newsletter via SES.

I've spent the last few months researching this and the only one I've found that offers that is https://mailtrain.org/

It's self-hosted and from their FAQ: "Amazon SES, SparkPost, SendGrid, Mailgun – you name it. You can use any provider that supports SMTP protocol to send out your newsletters. Bounce and complaints handling via webhooks is supported for SES, SparkPost, SendGrid and Mailgun."

Great info, thanks, setting up my account now and then I'll update the article.

EDIT

The article has been updated to include this.

And just in case anyone is feeling frisky all of the sensitive info in the screenshots was removed and replaced.

I've been using Jekyll + Gitlab + S3 + Cloudfront (+ lambda).

This costs me just over 50 cents a month, almost all of which is the Route53/DNS costs.

  - Gitlab stores the source and GitlabCI builds the site.
  - Lambda triggers the build on a schedule.
  - GitlabCI pushes the site to S3 (using Gitlab ENV VARS!).
  - CloudFront as the CDN, also provides free SSL.