Phew. Finished!

Apart from a few books at work and whichever ones have escaped into the far depths of the house my book database is done. Both offline and online.

2086 books

Legion of Super Heroes. Back in action

Tomorrow is a very special day for me. It's the day I head off to Forbidden Planet to pick up the first issue of Legion of Super Heroes with Jim Shooter doing the writing chores.

Newsarama have some preview images up and it looks stunning. The current run has been pretty "meh" but those preview pages give me a lot of hope. It doesn't look like Jim has forgotten what makes the LSH great.

A new project

Yesterday I started something I've wanted to do for quite a while but never got around to due to lack of tools. Making a database of my book collection.

I started off with Libra. A free database for Windows that allows you to scan barcodes using your webcam. It then trundles off to Amazon to pull out the information on your item. Initially I tried using it with my XBox 360 webcam with no luck. Happily my Logitech Quickcam 4000 works just fine although I did just order a cuecat from Ebay to make things even more straightforward.

After I'd been working on this for a few hours I was told about a wonderful web project called Librarything. This lets you create an online database of your book collection and share it with the world. It also features some very nice social networking features. Better yet it allows me to take a csv export from Libra and import my books neat so I now have a local database and a nice searchable online copy.

I haven't finished yet but my current catalogue can be viewed here. You can also see a random selection of books (Complete with Amazon links) over to the right.

And of course once I finish my current collection keeping it up to date with any new books becomes trivial.

Christmas is a time for hacking

This Christmas morning I turned my spare PSP battery into a hardcore Pandora hacking machine. I don't actually need a hardcore Pandora hacking machine but it certainly can't hurt to have a way to unbrick the thing if I need to.

On Thursday I'm going out to buy a PSP Slim. I'll keep that updated with the real Sony firmware so I have something I can use with my PS3. My old PSP Phat shall continue to be used for homebrew (Ahem).

It's not straightforward doing this sort of thing. The people writing the tutorials and readme files seem to have no skill in document writing in the slightest. They always assume the person reading them knows exactly what they're talking about which is exactly the wrong thing to assume of someone who needs to read the documentation. It's also a common flaw in most open source software. I got it done in the end though. Sony must have been gutted when that secret came out. It pretty much negates every single security measure they've put into the PSP firmware :)

Frank is my bitch

What are you looking at pal?

DSC00044.JPG, originally uploaded by HGFB.

Meet my new friend Frank Dalek. 18 inches of bubbling green hate in bonded polycarbide armour.

It looks like my soul is a gibbon. I'm not sure what to make of that.