blizzack

BLACK LIVES MATTER !!!


2020-12-05 - Flayva in ya ear…

here's my list of favorite podcasts that i sent to a friend recently

They're alphabetized and not in any preferential order.

I also listen to a bunch of tech podcasts. Below is my complete list – there are a handful that no longer exist.


2020-11-08 - Microphone Checka…One Two Checka

this is my first post on this blog.

it'll mostly be a space for me to express things that are going on with me creatively or maybe politically. who knows…either way it will be a lil bit of a journey. i'll also try to do much of the formatting for this in a homegrown bespoke way. allowing for a lot of creativity in styles, formatting…etc.



i've been using emacs as my text editor for little over a year. as a computer programmer, software developer, and in system operations i spend an enormous amount of time interfacing w/ computer systems. this requires i read a lot and take lots of notes !

the emacs editor was suggested to me about 20 years ago by a fellow co-worker and lisp programmer. i was in the middle of my third paid programming gig and while i had (and still have) lots of patience then…i was just trying to wrap my head around programming concepts at the time. learning to use a crazy esoteric editor was not where i wanted or needed to spend my time.

anyway…long story short; i recently began to read the emacs manual and felt it was one of the best documented software manuals i ever read. so good in fact; i bought the hard-copy manual from the fsf.

my emacs journey has brought me to understanding more about emacs lisp and i even bought an read the book "An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp, 3rd Edition".

the next step in that journey has been to read the "emacs lisp reference manual". the issue with this book is that there are no current hard-copies of it being sold anywhere.

the jist of it is that the book is large…quite large…at 1334 pages. it does not make sense to sell copies of something that changes frequently.

so i decided to print it myself. to do this i needed to pull the pdf doc to my computer i decided to use barnes & noble printing service, but they have a limit of 800 pages for any book. this meant i need to break apart the book into two separate parts/volumes. i split the book at the beginning of chapter 28. i need to also add index pages to the first volume as well as a cover page for the second volume.

the following are commands i used to split the book into different volumes:

$ pdfinfo elisp.pdf
$ pdftk elisp.pdf cat 1-643 output elisp_vol1.pdf
$ pdftk elisp.pdf cat 644-1334 output elisp_vol2.pdf
$ pdftk elisp.pdf cat 1285-1334 output elisp_index.pdf
$ pdftk A=elisp_vol1.pdf B=elisp_index.pdf cat A1-643 B1-50 output elispVol1WithIndex.pdf
$ pdftk elisp.pdf cat 1-2 output elisp_begin.pdf
$ pdftk A=elisp_begin.pdf B=elisp_vol2.pdf cat A1-2 B1-691 output elispVol2Begin.pdf

i submitted both elispVol1WithIndex.pdf & elispVol2Begin.pdf to the barnes & noble website. these are 2 different books that have come out to 694 pages each. i also followed the book cover formatting requirements and with gimp - created book covers for both volumes.

conclusion:

i recommend creating a bounded hard copy of a book you want. the process was fast, easy and cheap. the tools to do this are free! i will definitely do this again for any future projects.

elisp books image

Figure 1: elisp books

elisp book back cover image

Figure 2: elisp book back cover