My recs for software, web sites, browser add-ons.

I've noticed that ebook readers are becoming increasingly popular, both for reading new published fiction and also online text such as fanfiction. I bought mine a year or so ago, and have found it incredibly useful.

One vital piece of software I've found is Calibre, an open-source, multi-platform ebook management application. It's a lot more flexible that the one that came with my Sony Reader and has the advantage of not being tied to Windows.

I haven't got into using an ebook reader on my iPod, but for those of you who like to read on their phones/tablets alitalf recommends Aldiko for Android devices.

If you are looking for sources of things to read there are several sites offering public domain or other free ebooks to download. Try Feedbooks, ManyBooks.net and Project Gutenberg. If anyone has any other suggestions for free ebook sites, do comment with them.

There's also the MobileRead forums, to discuss readers, ebooks and software.

( For those of us who also like to use our readers for fanfiction, there are some very useful sites for that as well under the cut. )

To start with I'd like to recommend a community, style_system, which is great if you want to ask for advice on tweaking your layout. There are a lot of helpful people there who are willing to work with you to get the results you want.

You can see this post where foxfirefey helped me get the picture header set up on my journal. It doesn't work on all layouts, but it might be a good place to start.


.module-navlinks { top: 315px; }

#header { margin-top: 290px; }

#canvas {
background-image:url("where your image is hosted online");
background-position: center top;
background-repeat:no-repeat;
}


Put it in the Custom CSS box on this page and tweak the top and margin-top numbers and hopefully you can get it to work - it definitely works on Crossroads and Basic Boxes, but not on Modish.


There's also this post where wiring and jana helped me get my tags set up as a comma-separated list - see the sidebar for this community for an example.

This works for all the layouts, as far as I can tell.

Go to the module customisation tab and set the Tabs module to Cloud.

Then go to the Custom CSS box and paste


.module-tags_cloud .module-list-item { font-size: 12pt !important; }
.module-tags_cloud .module-list-item:after{content: ", "; }
.module-tags_cloud .module-list-item:last-child:after{content: " "; }


You can change the font-size to what ever looks best with your layout.


If you are looking for other cool things to do with Dreamwidth, you might want to watch the dw_nifty community, which people post all sorts of interesting things to. For example, the most recent post was on making a border round the text shown by the new dynamic cut tags.

If you have one of the more recent iPods with a screen, you will know that while the video playback is pretty good, not many videos come in iPod format. If you are using Windows a useful solution is DVDVideoSoft's Video to iPod Converter. It'll convert a whole range of video formats to various different sizes and qualities of iPod .mp4 video.

It's freeware, and while you do have to tell it not to install the Ask toolbar while you are installing it, all it takes is unselecting a couple of tick boxes. After that it installs normally and works just fine.

If you prefer to read text, it's not quite so easy. For some reason, iPods don't have an easy way of uploading ebooks. On the other hand, it is possible, using the Notes function. The problem is that Notes can't be more than 4K in size, which even for text files is limiting, and so the solution is to use the ebookhood website. There's a slightly worrying message there these days, which implies it may be going away, but until it does it's by far the easiest way of splitting a text file into 4K chunks and building in the links so that you can navigate from one part to the next. Simply upload the file into the form on the page (go into advanced options to give the files a name, which will make it easier to work with) and the result is a zipped file for you to download, containing the separate Notes that make up the original file.

Make sure you've ticked the box on the Summary tab in iTunes that enables you to copy files directly to your iPod and it will appear as a hard disc in Explorer. Copy the unzipped contents of the file to the Notes folder (you can put each separate book in their own folder if you like) and then find them under Extras and then Notes on your player.

If podfic or other spoken word stuff is more your style, you may find listening to a string of long mp3s to be a pain. There is an iPod Audiobook format, which works much better - stored separately on the player and with a built in resume function on each file, even if you've listened to other things in the meantime. There's a really useful Windows MP3 to Audiobook converter here, which not only converts mp3s, but also combines them at the same time, so you can put a whole book into one file.

You may already have anti-malware included with your internet security package but if you haven't, or you are looking for a way of dealing with a nasty that your current software can't touch, there are two excellent free pieces of software to try.

Spybot - Search and Destroy is a long-established program that has many useful features, including the ability to immunize your PC against a range of malware, as well as an in-depth scanner to check for anything that may have got through the net. I've been using it for years and have never got anything worse that a few tracking cookies.

Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware is newer but it's cleared up problems that Spybot couldn't handle for a couple of people I know. Well worth keeping around, just in case.

As I have to start somewhere, I thought I could begin with this wonderfully useful addon for the Firefox browser.

LiveJournal Hook

When you install it, it seems as if nothing has happened, no obvious menu entries or icons. The way to discover just what it can do is to right-click in an LJ text entry window - the ones you use for posting and making comments. Then you find a LJ Hook entry on the menu, which enables you to add user names, LJ cuts and all sorts of other general HTML and LJ specific markup.

If you prefer to post on Dreamwidth, then you can still use it. Go to Preferences and Clones Manager and add dreamwidth.org to the list. You can also use the Custom function to add the DW specific markup, so you don't have to keep looking those up either.

A god-send for anyone who doesn't always remember HTML tags, and wants to use the site entry page rather than a client.