BunnyMan.info

Backstory

When I bought my NOOK Simple Touch™ in January of this year I rediscovered calibre E-book management. While software always felt clunky in Mac OS X you could never deny it’s power and sheer amazing once you got past the UI.

Being a big fan of ReadItLater I immediately tried to have the program pump my massive reading list into my Nook. To my dismay I discovered that the plugin was hardly complete. It piped my entire ~500 article¹ reading list into a several megabytes large ebook and ordered articles from newest to oldest. Running the plugin a second time… produced the same results. It hadn’t even the courtesy to mark articles as read.

After digging about I found a few “close enough but incomplete” and outdated solutions along side plenty of complaints. You can’t blame Calibre, the massive project’s maintainers likely don’t use the service like I do of at all.

Solution

A python based open source project with something that I want improved? A bunny like me only can do one thing in a situation like this; reach back to grab one of my many ‘cans’, learn the API Documentation for recipes, and get my money out of PyCharm.

After a few days and learning more than just Calibre api², I put out what I called ReadItLater V3 on to my github and reposted it to Calibre Recipes MobileRead Forums. Other people picked it up and I ended up adding a few extra features per requests

All was good with the world.

Reward

A few weeks ago Read It Later officially rebranded to Pocket. This prompted me to pull up Calibre and check my plugin was working… all clear. Then, since I like to cover my bases, I pulled up Mobile Reads and dug around… and that’s when I found it.

Calibre merged my version into the official trunk³.

This invigorated me to put my all into the project. However, all I really managed was the branding, some code cleanup, and docs. Pocket wasn’t ready to give out their new API to small beans like me. At one point during this Calibre devs merged in someone else’s but quickly pushed my latest version once I completed it.

I find myself flattered to have my code and name, even my pseudonym, in such a prestigious python project. Some of my friends felt my accomplishment was mediocre at best but I reject the haters. I’ve actively contributed to widely used open source. I don’t get a ton of warm fuzzies from my wins but this was one of those times. I’m still stoked as hell and hope that I can do it again.

Through my whole life I have always struggled to find the perfect tool for the job. No matter what I am doing I from the big to the little I question methods and tools I am using. Sometimes I find it, sometimes I struggle on and on. This is a story about how I think I found perfection.

I have always had a fascination with wallets. They are where we keep the summary of our life and our valuables. Your wallet is like a woman’s purse, the thing that curious people want to pick through to find out more about you and the thing more introspective people think about how it reflects on them. Any time you pay for something the seller glances down and takes a quick look not just at your payment but at what it is coming out of. Your wallet is a statement of you in one of those subtle ways.

In my search I have gone through piles of wallets. I still have a small box in my closet that I have been loathe to throw away with then. I have gone from sleek leather, to big woven bulletproof nylon with lots of features, to slim money clips with stamped leather card slots, to the famous minimal Slimmy. Even with the Slimmy I went through two separate versions, one with window and one without.

My goal was to find a wallet that held everything I need to carry with me while still being small and slim. I have been on the largest minimal kick so the Slimmy and money clips were used for the last three years but they were too minimal for my needs. In the end the fact remains that any wallet I found that is small enough to make me happy didn’t hold enough and any wallet with enough space for everything was just too damn big.

The answer to my problem came to me several weeks ago while I was hanging out at a bar with my younger brother. We were about to tip up and I heard a familiar sound, the sound of rubber against the hard plastic of a credit card before snapping into place.

As a child my father never carried a wallet. He always just took his little pocket address book, pressed all of his cards up against it, folded up some money, and then wrapped it up in a pair of rubber bands. I asked him several times about why he never carried a wallet like everyone else and he told me it was because he never found a wallet he liked. Also, since he received the newspaper which is wrapped in a rubber band, it was free and replaceable weekly.

Like father like son I guess. When I asked my brother about it he said he “got it from dad” and “It was inevitable, you will succumb to it too.” It was and I did.

In the top most picture I didn’t use a normal rubber band but I quickly found that any fancy band I used was too much. Through a few months of testing I found that a traditional rubber band was just enough. In the picture you can easily see that I took the contents of the Slimmy, added my notebook and with the band it is still thinner than the EMPTY Slimmy. Even if I were to add more cards, which I have done, the wallet still manages to be no bigger than the standard four cards and a small amount of cash in a Slimmy that they recommend.¹

My rubber band wallet currently contains a Moleskine extra small notebook², A collapsable pen to write with, a small set of cash, and every card and ID I could need on a day. Somehow it is still smaller and more useful than every wallet I have owned before!

As you can see with the pictures just above the new wallet is just a hair thicker than a AA battery and holds a mass of cards. In fact it actually contains more cards than I actually need. I found if there was too few cards the pen will roll over the cards and wiggle about. I now keep every gift card I have, my Fresh & Easy card, and a random hotel keycard from FurtherConfusion with art on it. Minimalism is amazing but the fact that I never have to go “Oh crap, I forgot card X” is nice.

As for looks? What does this say about me? While as a kid I thought it tacky to have a rubber band for a wallet most people tend to comment on how utilitarian and useful that is. How it holds a notebook and pen in the same space as their own bloated wallets.

No matter how many times I think about the process I think I found the perfect one for the job.

“Everything happens for a reason.” I read this normally innocuous phrase on a friend’s blog recently and wanted to toss my coffee mug. The notion of the phrase makes me want to jump out of my chair and flip my keyboard. I’m not going to rag on them for saying or even feeling it, it’s simply not my place to tell people how to live their lives, however it bothers me that people who I care about in the world think like that.

I think the mentality of saying not only goes against my beliefs but undermines people’s ability to excel. The phrase is a sheep-like mindset that tells us to embrace our losses instead of trying to overcome them. The nature¹ of the phrase is predestination, which inherently is talking about divinity, though most often when I see people use it the meaning is less of a religious mentality² and more an extension of sour grapes. When we over-rationalize our painful decisions or situations we become placated or fight the reoccurrence of the opportunity because it wasn’t meant to be. We need some level of coping when we have perceived large losses but too much drags us down.

I quickly jumped up on the train of thought that this year’s Burning Man was going to be a bomb when I was denied access to STEP³. However I never rationalized my loss to some point of divinity or told myself that there might be something better I need to make. There is no meant to be in my eyes; only what is and what is not. To this end I penciled in three furry conventions to fill my summer and replace the burn. Just a few days ago some things fell in to place and now I have access to tickets. Had I chose the meant to be mentality would I still want these tickets? Was there a reason for me to go through the extra month and a half of mental strife? No. It happened because mistakes were made. I received an opportunity to get tickets this month because of the people I choose to associate with and the impression I put on them. There was no luck in the preceding.

I am unwilling to ague the validity of anyone’s religious or spiritual beliefs but I believe that the moment you take the mentality that anything but you controls and shapes your life you give up the ability to reach your full potential. Removing the accountability for your problems not only dulls the pain of the problems but also the need to own and fix the them.

Another new site, another clean slate ready to be filled with so much information!

I will try to make this site as little about the drivel, porn, rage, and trolls that the rest of the internet seems to amuse itself about. This site is going to be all about the things that really interest me. Currently those things are Fiction, Writing, Technology, writing fiction, and Productivity… There also may be stuff about glitchy painful music and podcasts.

My old site is archived safe and while most of the old links may be gone feel free to check it out. It highlights one of the busiest and most externally exciting period of my life where photography and music production was every facet of my life. You can also feel free to ask questions if you really care. I don’t expect this site to get too much traffic.