◊(Local Yarn Code "Check-in [305293b3]")

#lang pollen

◊; Copyright 2019 by Joel Dueck. All Rights Reserved.

◊(define-meta published "2013-02-08")

◊dialogue{
◊say["Jason"]{If I asked you to say “Hi” to your band mates would you: do it, say you would then
not, or tell me you wouldn’t?}

◊say["Caroline"]{My band and I only talk through music; it’s the only form of ◊index[#:key "music!as
communication "]{communication} we know. But tonight I will write a guitar solo that delineates me
saying hi to them from you. I will call it “me saying hi to them from you”.} }

◊attrib{◊link[1]{Caroline v. Daredevil Album Release Show}}

◊url[1]{http://thedaredevilchristopherwright.com/post/23831123244/caroline-v-daredevil-album-release-show-eau}

#lang pollen

◊; Copyright 2020 by Joel Dueck. All Rights Reserved.

◊(define-meta published "2020-03-08")

◊title{Future Proofing}

Thing that’s been on my mind lately: if you want your blog posts or your photographs to be around
fifty years from now, you need to print them out. And the best format for that printout is a bound
book. And if you care about your stuff being around ◊em{after you die}, you’ll print lots of copies
and distribute them to anyone who might be persuaded to take one of them.

Sixty years ago, Harper Lee wrote ◊i{Go Set a Watchmen} and lost track of it, and this year the
original manuscript was apparently ◊link[1]{found by someone rummaging through a box of old
papers}. Suppose she had written it on a computer, where is it now? Sitting ◊link[2]{on a punch tape
or a giant magnetic platter}, that’s where. Who cares if it is saved in plain text or WordStar
3.0 format; at that point it’s almost undiscoverable, and as good as gone. And sixty years from now
  our SSDS, USB drives, and even our ◊link[3]{M-Discs} are going to be as difficult to use (and as
  busted) as that fridge-sized IBM Model 350 is now.

Keeping electronic files and photos around is like trying to keep a brain alive with tubes, wires
and chemicals. You have to keep checking in on them, making sure they’re backed up, and migrating
them to some stable combination of hardware and filesystem. ◊em{Every few years.} Maybe you have the
patience to keep doing that for a decade, to keep writing the checks and putting in the Saturday
afternoons. But someone has to keep up the effort or the day comes when you lose track of it, and at
that point it’s basically kaput.

This is why I started my project of making a book-making machine. The goal of the project is to be
able to take a snapshot of whatever I write or photograph, and magically turn that into a bound
book. So that, should I someday no longer have the wherewithal to fiddle with computers and web
servers, I can still have all those words and pictures on a shelf somewhere. ` I could just print my
stuff out on my laser printer, staple it together and call it a day. But a bound book is more
compact, more durable and more useable than a sheaf of papers. We happen to live in a time when
printing books is easy, fast and cheap. You can send a PDF to CreateSpace, order a single book for
a few clams plus shipping, and it will show up on your doorstep a week later.◊fn[1]

So that’s what I’m working on, for fun, in my spare time. I’ll probably make a book of The Local
Yarn, and a second one of transcripts of the Howell Creek Radio podcast. When I’m done, I’ll make
the books available for anyone to purchase. I expect to sell perhaps three copies and end up with
a couple of dimes in my pocket. The point isn’t to make money; it’s to ensure that whoever might
want a permanent, offline copy of this stuff can get one — and that, if my house gets hit by
a tornado, I can beg or buy a copy back from somebody.

◊fndef[1]{I just can’t get over the fact that this service exists. The ability to print a single
bound book for the price of a hot dog is, as much as the internet itself, an economic result that is
unique in the history of the world. I keep thinking that, as a society, we could be taking much
better advantage of this capability than we do. Who knows how long it will last.}

◊url[1]{http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/2015/02/03/harper-lee-to-publish-new-book-in-july-her-first-since-to-kill-a-mockingbird.html}
◊url[2]{http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/04/08/the-history-of-computer-data-storage-in-pictures/}
◊url[3]{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC}

◊note[#:date "2015-03-08" #:author "Rundy" #:author-url "http://silverwarethief.com/"]{I have
thought this about my own writing as well, but I would add that a less ego-centric take I have also
considered on this idea is future proofing what I read. The vast majority of what I read on the
internet is not worth reading again (and plenty was not worth reading the first time), but a small
percentage is really good—even worth reading again in ten years, or sharing with my children. I find
some deep sadness, or irritation, in knowing that what I have read and valued is lost in the day
I read it, slipping away in the water torrent of the internet never to be read by me and considered
again.

I entertain the idea of copying out the very best of what I read on the internet, with proper
attribution, and collecting it in volumes of reading in a nice book. It is a wonderful thing that we
can so easily collect our own writing in book form, but isn’t it an even greater thing that we can
so easily create books of awesome writing that we have found to share with others in our lives?}

◊note[#:date "2015-04-18"]{Ben Fino-Radin, of the MoMA Department of Conservation, wrote about the
complex measures needed to preserve digital art across 100-year time scales:

◊blockquote{The packager addresses the most fundamental challenge in digital preservation: all
digital files are encoded. They require special tools in order to be understood as anything more
than a pile of bits and bytes. Just as a VHS tape is useless without a VCR, a digital video file is
useless without some kind of software that understands how to interpret and play it, or tell you
something about its contents. At least with a VHS tape you can hold it in your hand and say, “Hey,
this looks like a VHS tape and it probably has an analog video signal recorded on it.” But there is
essentially nothing about a QuickTime .MOV file that says, “Hello, I am a video file! You should use
this sort of software to view me.” We rely on specially designed software—be it an operating system
or something more specialized—to tell us these things. The problem is that these tools may not
always be around, or may not always understand all formats the way they do today. This means that
even if we manage to keep a perfect copy of a video file for 100 years, no one may be able to
understand that it’s a video file, let alone what to do with it. To avoid this scenario, the
“packager”—free, open-source software called Archivematica—analyzes all digital collections
materials as they arrive, and records the results in an obsolescence-proof text format that is
packaged and stored with the materials themselves. We call this an “archival information package.”}

He also touches on the problem of verifying that no file corruption has taken place, and the giant
robotic tape deck that will ultimately house and index 1.2 million gigabytes of digital art and
associated metadata.

‘Ambitious’ and ‘technically impressive’ are the most favourable ways I can describe this
arrangement. ‘Unsustainably complicated’ may also be applicable.

(via ◊link['kottke]{kottke})
◊url['kottke]{http://kottke.org/15/04/momas-digital-art-vault}

}

◊note[#:date "2015-05-12"]{

◊blockquote{E-book backup is a physical, tangible, human readable copy of an electronically stored
novel. The purchased contents of an e-book reader were easily photocopied and clip-bound to create
a shelf-stable backup for the benefit of me, the book consumer. I can keep it on my bookshelf
without worry of remote recall. A second hardcover backup has been made with the help of an online
self-publishing house.

◊footer{◊link['eb]{Ebook backup} by Jesse England (◊link['rg]{via Roberto Greco})}

}

◊url['eb]{http://jesseengland.net/index.php?/project/e-book-backup/}
◊url['rg]{http://robertogreco.tumblr.com/post/118835221028/ebook-backup-jesse-england-2012-via}

}

◊note[#:date "2015-05-13"]{

◊blockquote{Unlike with other digital expressions, format is not the problem: HTML, CSS, and
backward-compatible web browsers will be with us forever. The problem is, authors pay for their own
hosting.

…Keeping your website active is probably the last thing your family will wish to focus on in their
grief. As they move on, attending to your digital affairs may not be high on their task list.

◊footer{Jeff Reifman, ◊link['wh]{Hosting Your Website After Your Death} }

}

◊url['wh]{https://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/hosting-your-website-after-death--cms-23492}

}

◊note[#:date "2015-10-15"]{

◊blockquote{The web, as it appears at any one moment, is a phantasmagoria. It’s not a place in any
reliable sense of the word. It is not a repository. It is not a library. It is a constantly changing
patchwork of perpetual nowness.

You can’t count on the web, okay? It’s unstable. You have to know this. …If a sprawling Pulitzer
Prize-nominated feature in one of the nation’s oldest newspapers can disappear from the web,
anything can. “There are now no passive means of preserving digital information,” said Abby Rumsey,
a writer and digital historian. In other words if you want to save something online, you have to
decide to save it. Ephemerality is built into the very architecture of the web, which was intended
to be a messaging system, not a library.

◊footer{Adrienne LaFrance, ◊link['rtw]{Raiders of the Lost Web}}

}

I can envision only one sort-of-practical way the web can be “preserved” in any meaningful sense of
the word: a giant microfiche archive with a card index. Yes, it would be inconvenient to use. It’s
also the only option likely to be useable at all in 100 years.

}

#lang pollen

◊; Copyright 2015 by Joel Dueck. All Rights Reserved.

◊(define-meta published "2015-02-24" conceal "blog,feed")

◊title{Making a Book-Making Machine}

I’m trying to automate the process of taking a blog (or any collection of plain text and images) and
producing a printed book, for reasons that will be stated elsewhere. These are my notes on doing
so.

◊newthought{Working backwards:} I’ll be using CreateSpace to print and bind the book. CS’s main
inputs are 1) a PDF of the book’s cover and 2) a PDF of the book’s interior. I’ll figure out how to
automate the creation of the cover later; for now I’ll focus on the book’s interior. I’ll be using
◊link[1]{pandoc} to convert HTML or Markdown into LaTeX, which can then be used to generate the PDF.
Most of the work will be in creating a suitable LaTeX template. On my Mac, I set up the development
environment for this by installing ◊link[2]{MacTeX} and ◊link[3]{Homebrew}, then installing pandoc
from the command line with:

◊blockcode{$ brew install pandoc}

As a simple test, I took the plain text of one of my own blog posts and saved it to simplepost.txt.
I also manually added some meta-data to the top (as ◊link[4]{described} in pandoc’s user guide),
like so:

◊blockcode{---
title: Imagination and Self-Doubt
author: Joel Dueck
date: July 18, 2014
---

# Imagination and Self-Doubt

...}

and then ‘compiled’ to PDF:

◊blockcode{$ pandoc -s -o out.tex simplepost.pdf
$ xelatex out.tex out.pdf}

The result is a very basic PDF set in Computer Modern, suitable for printing on loose sheets of 8.5″
× 11″ paper:

◊figure-@2x["bookscript-output1.png"]{PDF output using Pandoc and LaTeX on a simple Markdown file}

In later notes I’ll be working on customizing the LaTeX template used by pandoc to get
a good-looking PDF suitable for use with CreateSpace.

◊url[1]{http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/index.html} 
◊url[2]{http://www.tug.org/mactex/index.html}
◊url[3]{http://brew.sh/}
◊url[4]{http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/README.html#metadata-blocks}

◊note[#:date "2015-02-28"]{Since this effort happens to be geared towards created printed copies of
blogs, we’ll have each blog post correspond to a chapter in the book.

Blog posts are a little different than normal book chapters, though. Book chapters usually have
numbers, but posts are more commonly marked by the date on which they were posted. I had a hard time
finding examples of LaTeX chapter styles which featured a date within the chapter heading itself, so
I came up with my own solution. My preferred starting point was memoir’s “dowding” chapter style, in
which the chapter number appears above the chapter title, and both are centered. I copied its
definition and changed it so that, instead of printing automatic chapter numbers in numbered
headings (e.g., “Chapter One”) it instead prints whatever text I supply:

◊blockcode{
\makeatletter
\makechapterstyle{dowdingdate}{%
  \setlength{\beforechapskip}{2\onelineskip}
  \setlength{\afterchapskip}{1.5\onelineskip \@plus .1\onelineskip 
                            \@minus 0.167\onelineskip}%
  \renewcommand*{\chapnamefont}{\normalfont}%
  \renewcommand*{\chapnumfont}{\chapnamefont}%
  
  % Remove the word "Chapter" before the date (where the chapter 
  % number would normally be)
  \renewcommand*{\printchaptername}{}%
  
  % Print the contents of \chapterDesc in place of the chapter number
  % (except in appendices, where a simple [roman] numeral is printed)
  \renewcommand*{\printchapternum}{\centering\chapnumfont 
                                   \ifanappendix \thechapter
                                   \else \chapterDesc\fi}
  % (Original, for reference:) % 
  %\renewcommand*{\printchapternum}{\centering\chapnumfont 
  %                                 \ifanappendix \thechapter
  %                                 \else \numtoName{\c@chapter}\fi}%
  \renewcommand*{\chaptitlefont}{\normalfont\itshape\huge\centering}%
  \renewcommand*{\printchapternonum}{%
      \vphantom{\printchaptername}\vskip\midchapskip}} \makeatother }

Then I define a couple of new commands that allow me to pass an additional string of text to be used
in place of each chapter’s number:

◊blockcode{\newcommand{\setChapterDescription}[1]{%
   \def\chapterDesc{#1}%
}

\newcommand{\ChapterDate}[2]{
    \setChapterDescription{#2}
    \chapter{#1}
    \setChapterDescription{}
}

% define as empty to prevent an error the first time
\def\chapterDesc{} }

And here’s how I use all this in the template:

◊blockcode{
...
\begin{document} 
\chapterstyle{dowdingdate}

\ChapterDate{My Summer Vacation}{July 22, 2014}
...
}

◊figure-@2x["bookscript-output2.png"]{The new chapter style, set in Adobe Caslon Pro} }

◊note[#:date "2018-03-01"]{The first version of the LaTeX template pictured in the previous note is
now available on github as part of ◊link['github]{Simple Book Machine}, which is a shell script and
a system for using LaTeX templates to build a book from a collection of text files. 

The output generated can theoretically be uploaded straight to CreateSpace for use in a 5.25″ × 8″
sized bound book. (I have yet to actually try this, but the PDF does meet all their requirements.)
I plan to add options for a few other book sizes and designs in the future.}

◊url['github]{https://github.com/otherjoel/simplebookmachine}

#lang pollen

◊; Copyright 2012–2018 by Joel Dueck. All Rights Reserved.

◊(define-meta published "2012-01-31")

◊blockquote{“I wish it longevity so that it might find shabbiness.”
◊footer{Arthur, on the occasion of Path’s launch, ◊link[1]{comparing new social networks to new
museums}.}}

◊url[1]{http://sexpigeon.tumblr.com/post/16729718345/path-puts-a-silly-amount-of-trust-in-its-avatars}

◊note[#:date "2018-11-11"]{Path did not achieve longevity or shabbiness:

◊blockquote{“On May 28, 2015, Path announced it had been acquired for an undisclosed amount by
Kakao.

“On September 17, 2018, Path ◊link[2]{announced} its termination of the service. From October 18,
2018, existing users are no longer able to access the Path service.”
◊footer{◊link[3]{◊i{Path (social network)}} on Wikipedia}}}

◊url[2]{http://blog.path.com/post/178172780707/the-last-goodbye}
◊url[3]{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_(social_network)}

#lang pollen

◊; I have made no determination of the copyright for this file’s contents — Joel Dueck

◊(define-meta published "2011-03-26")

◊blockquote{“He felt the full warmth of that pleasure from which the proud shut themselves out; the
pleasure which not only goes with humiliation, but which almost is humiliation. Men who have
◊index[#:key "drowning"]{escaped death by a hair} have it, and men whose love is returned by a woman
unexpectedly, and men whose sins are forgiven them. Everything his eye fell on it feasted on, not
aesthetically, but with a plain, jolly appetite as of a boy eating buns.” ◊footer{G.K. Chesterton,
◊cite{The Ball and the Cross}}}

#lang pollen

◊; I have made no determination of copyright on this file’s contents.

◊(define-meta published "2010-04-29")

◊blockquote{“One thing that is not in my fridge is ketchup and mustard. You know why? Because you
don’t have to put them in the fridge! Too many Americans are putting cold ketchup on nice, hot
hamburgers. And I ask those Americans, When you go to the diner, where is the ketchup? Sitting out
on the table.”
◊footer{Dave Barry, ◊link[1]{profile in the ◊cite{New York Times}}}}

◊url[1]{https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/magazine/02fob-domains-t.html}

#lang pollen

◊; Copyright 2011 by Joel Dueck. All Rights Reserved.

◊(define-meta published "2011-03-25")

◊verse{I often wondered when I cursed,
Often feared where I would be – 
Wondered where she’d yield her love
When I yield, so will she.
I would her will be pitied!
Cursed be love! She pitied me…}
◊attrib{Attributed to Lewis Carrol}

◊note[#:date "2011-03-25"]{This is a “◊index{square poem}”: it can be read vertically (first word of
each line, second word of each line, and so on) as well as horizontally.

◊blockquote{“One of Carroll’s most remarkable poems, if indeed he wrote it, ◊index[#:key "tenuous
paper trails"]{was first published} by Trevor Wakefield in his Lewis Carroll Circular, No.
2 (November 1974). The poem is quoted in a letter to The Daily Express (January 1, 1964) by a writer
who tells of a privately printed book titled Memoirs of Lady Ure. Lady Ure, it seems, quoted the
poem as one that Carroll wrote for her brother. Wakefield says that no one has yet located a copy of
Lady Ure’s Memoirs, but whether this is still true I do not know.” ◊footer{Martin Gardener,
◊link[1]{◊cite{The Universe in a Handkerchief}, p. 20}}}}

◊url[1]{https://books.google.com/books?id=77kcKHmLZXIC&lpg=PA20&pg=PA20#v=onepage&q&f=false}

#lang pollen

◊; Copyright 2003 by Joel Dueck. All Rights Reserved.

◊(define-meta published "2003-03-27")

◊verse[#:title "Soar"]{
Though our labour soon devours all that lies within our powers  
Soon it’s late and all our hours into past’s abyss have tore;  
See, the light of Heaven’s fire pales both fame and funeral pyre;  
Earthly glory, gain & hire lose the glimmer that they wore  
Light of heaven pales the shallow grace and glimmer that they wore;  
      Now they sway us — soon, no more.

For we find in all the ages, men whose passing life presages  
Life beyond our dusty cages, light behind that darkest door;  
May we, as we end this chapter, freed from earth, our sometime captor,  
Hail the advent of an apter sphere for all our souls to soar;  
Hail, in death, the ageless God whose sight will make our souls to soar,  
      Dying as we lived before.}