Sam Wilson's Website

May 2022

  1. KOReader for my Kobo

    I finally installed Koreader!

    Here’s some notes of what I did:

    Downloaded koreader-kobo-v2022.03.1.zip from https://github.com/koreader/koreader/releases and extracted to the root of the device.

    Add the following to .kobo/Kobo/Kobo eReader.conf:

    [FeatureSettings]
ExcludeSyncFolders=(\\.(?!kobo|adobe).+|([^.][^/]*/)+\\..+)

    Restarted, and it ended up back in the normal system. Oh, I didn’t follow the instructions… try again with downloading OCP-KOReader-v2022.03.1.zip from that forum post, and extracting that to the root. Unmounted the device, and it did much more flashing and gurgling this time. When it restarted, there was a new Koreader item in the main menu! Wonderful.

    To enable OPDS, go to the search menu (the magnifying glass icon) and down to “OPDS”. Then add a catalogue URL. Wikisource is https://ws-export.wmcloud.org/opds/en/Ready_for_export.xml — unfortunately, it seems the only way to get it in there is to type it in by hand, and I kept making mistakes. I tried three times before I realised that it was possible to long-press on a catalogue name to get to an edit dialogue.

    Then, I had access to 45 pages of Wikisource’s works. Unfortunately, they’re in alphabetical order by title so it’s a bit weird to browse them in this way. But, still, it’s a terrific start and much easier than copying epubs from my laptop.

    All in all, Koreader seems much much faster, and has many more features… and why didn’t I do this ages ago?!

  2. Many wikis

    I think I want a tool whereby I can compare the biography pages in ArchivesWiki with those on WikiTree and FamilySearch. Surely that wouldn’t be too hard.

    The bio pages on the wiki already (mostly) have their external IDs defined. They’re in Cargo, so I think there’s probably a need for a parser function from the Genealogy extension, so these IDs can be saved as page properties and passed to the wiki-comparing code. It’d be a bit odd to have the Genealogy extension to go querying Cargo tables directly.

  3. GitLab → Packagist

    I’ve been wondering for a while how it’d be setting up a package on Packagist from Wikimedia’s GitLab… turns out it’s incredibly simple, and we now have wikimedia/toolforge-skeleton added and working! There’s still more to be done on it, but hopefully it’ll make it super quick to bootstrap the development of new PHP tools.

  4. Changing gears

    It seems to be Thursday morning again. The list of things for the week doesn’t seem to be any shorter, but there’s only one day of proper-work left! (Tomorrow begins the Wikimedia Hackathon.)

    The dramas I’ve been having with my rear gear shifting have been resolved, so at least that’s good news. It seems my gut feeling was right: it felt like there was something preventing the derailleur from springing outwards, but I couldn’t figure it out. I lubed all cable sheaths, cleaned springs, pulled everything apart and put it back together clean and lubricated. But I’d underestimated the simplicity of the shifters (Microshift BS-A09 I think they are), and hadn’t realised that it’s actually perfectly correct to just loosen the bolt a bit. This frees up the mechanism, and allows the derailleur full control. Everything is nice again now.

  7. The fediverse is a bit of a strange place: it’s like writing on one’s own site, because there’s this great culture of many small separate servers and communities, but it also is writing on someone else’s site, and with that comes a feeling of working within a community framework. That’s good, because it helps with keeping things reasonable and sometimes on-topic. But I do like the feeling of writing on my own site, where no one cares what I do (and yeah… no one reads it either!).

    But still, it’s exciting that there are more and more people joining Mastodon and the others, and it’s nice to not feel like Twitter and Facebook are the extent of the web.

  8. samwilson.id.au
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