Mindful Ink     Life, Living and Productivity

As I’ve been playing with my new eBook reader (the only advantage of one’s birthday being near Christmas is the ability to combine monetary gifts for large purchases!) I’ve found a number of new sites for eBooks.  One I like in particular is Feedbooks.

Feedbooks takes books in the public domain (both generated by them and users) and people who may wish to publish their own work, and makes the content easily (and freely) available in a variety of formats.  New content is being generated daily.  For instance, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night is available in ePub, MobiPocket/Kindle, PDF in A4 size (close to standard paper size in the states), Sony Reader, iLiad Reader, and the ability to custom design your own PDF size.

But, that’s not all!  Feedbooks also allows you to turn RSS feeds into these sorts of files as well, quickly and easily.  You can also compose your own “Newspaper” of your favorite feeds.  The only big drawback here is that partial feeds, as you might imagine, don’t work terribly well (another reason to dislike partial feeds).  You can find a link to Mindful Ink’s under the RSS icon in the corner of the site.

I’ve also compiled a list of excellent Feedbooks below:

FeedBooks: MindfulInk’s Collection

So, if you’re interested in this sort of thing - take a look.

Lifehacker had a nice feature this morning on an online PDF to TXT tool. I don’t know about you, but I find myself hip deep in PDF’s that I’m always having to OCR and turn into something else.

PDFTextOnline doesn’t require registration and lets you edit them post transition.

I wanted to give this a good testing, so I tried a few things. One was a copy of a Spinoza’s work The Ethics that had a nice presentation in PDF and was all text. It translated it out perfectly, and actually came out rather nice for a text file.

You can see the original here. You can see the text it came out with here:

Pretty nice job, and better than you’d get copying and pasting.

So, let’s try something really hard….

A Google Books scan of William James’s Psychology - which is, to say the least, rather rough.  Unfortunately, this didn’t work - it was a bit over the 10mb limit.  So, to try again I grabbed his “The Meaning of Truth” which was a bit smaller but equally as rough.

The file, which was about 300 pages and 4mb, took roughly a minute to translate - MUCH faster than any desktop OCR program I’ve ever used.

Of course, I’d find out why in a moment.  The only page it captured was the Google attribution page.  It just created blank pages for the rest.  So, while it may be based on the “best PDF content extraction money can buy” it pretty much just works on pdf’s that are already text (having been printed that way, or converted via other OCR).

This is a useful tool, as it saves you some long editing work that would arise simply from copying and pasting - but don’t expect it to do any heavy lifting.

Lifehacker - PDFs: Pull and Format Text from PDFs with PDFTextOnline

Microsoft Office for Mac: Excel, Word, Powerpoint and Entourage | Mactopia

Well, Microsoft’s version of Office for Mac has finally been updated (and it’s a Universal app - so it’ll work speedy on those Intel Macs). MS decided not to update their previous version to a Universal binary so Mac users who had to use Office for some reason or another were working with a pretty sluggish app.

Personally, I’m not all that impressed with the new version. It’s like some sort of hybrid bastard baby of Office 2004 and Office 2007. All the nice features I liked about Office 2007 aren’t there, and all the compromised decisions of 2004 are. Also, still no Mac OneNote.

I was quite excited about this product, but after iWork ‘08 I found I really didn’t need it as Pages was finally a worthy alternative to Word that worked fast and was well integrated into OSX.  Everyone I’ve introduced to iWork (up to and including the most recent Mac convert, my mom) has loved using Pages - clean interface, lots of functionality, and works just dandy with Word files (with the occasional bit of weirdness in complicated documents).  I talked a lot about word processor options back in August (The Joy of Word Processing).

But, different strokes for different folks… Get them here (your Uni store may have them at a better price. Mine doesn’t, but yours may)

Microsoft Office 2008 for Home and Students
Apple iWork ‘08

And some free alternatives (though I find them sluggish on an Intel Mac)

NeoOffice

OpenOffice 

For PC users, of course… you have the (in my opinion) excellent Office 2007 (and OneNote!) and of course OpenOffice and its variations work well.
Have a favorite word processor I didn’t mention?  Let’s hear about it!