A few months back, I gave a Kobo a try. I’m still really enjoying it. At the time, I was using a script on the Kobo + Dropbox to sync annotations. But it was a little heavy (to send the entire database) and tended to fail silently. Plus, I had to use a second script to take the exported database and actually turn it into Markdown I could easily read and share.

So I took a chance to make that a bit better!

The code for this is available on Github here: https://github.com/jpverkamp/kobo-highlights/

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I’ve recently been trying out a Kobo. Amazon has some issues and Kindles are hard to do any amount of customization to, let’s just leave it at that.

So what fun tricks can one do with a Kobo?

Well, for one, it’s a Linux system. And if you attach it to your computer, you get access to a lot of the local filesystem. This includes the SQLite database holding all of teh system metadata, along with places to install all sorts of interesting scripts.

One that I’ve been wanting in particular is the ability to extract my annotations. It’s a great way to review books. Highlight, write a note, and then export right at the end.

So how do you do that on a Kobo?

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I had a script that would take a file and a passphrase and either encrypt it or, if already encrypted, decrypt it. It worked well enough and I got to play with the struct library. But it was home grown–so not compatible with anything–and didn’t properly validate anything. It worked well enough, but perhaps I could do something better.

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I upload a lot of images when testing for various things. And of course, I don’t want to use any of my own images. So what would I do instead?

Kittens!

$ get-kitten

Downloading a 640 x 480 kitten
Downloading to kitten-1.jpg

$ open kitten-1.jpg

Perfect.

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I have a bunch of files with Arabic content that I need to split into chunks so they can be better run in parallel¹. But by default, when I open them in a text editor, the encoding changes from windows-1256 to utf-8². I could use the Unix split command to break them into chunks, but I need to preserve the headers. So… how do I fix all this?

Write a script!

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I work on a lot of projects.

$ ls ~/Projects/ | wc -l
      29

$ ls ~/Projects/work/ | wc -l
      67

And that’s just what I have checked out at the moment. 😇

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Quite often, I’ll find myself wanting to query and manipulate MySQL data entirely on the command line. I could be building up a pipeline or working on a task that I’m going to eventually automate but haven’t quite gotten to yet. Whenver I have to do something like that, I have a small pile of scripts I’ve written over time that help out:

• skiphead: Skip the first line of output, used to skip over headers in a query response
• skipuntil: Skip all lines until we see one matching a pattern, used to resume partial tasks
• commaify: Take a list of single values on the command line and turn them into a comma separated list (for use in IN clauses)
• csv2json: a previously posted script for converting csv/tab delimited output to json
• jq: not my script, but used to take the output of csv2json and query it further in ways that would be complicated to do with SQL

Admitedly, the first two of those are one liners and I could easily remember them, but the advantage of a single command that does it is tab completion. sk<tab>, arrow to select which one I want, and off we go. I could put them as an alias, but I don’t always use the same shell (mostly fish, but sometimes Bash or Zsh).

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One problem that has come up a time or two is dealing with email-based domain validation (specifically in this case for the issuance of TLS certificates) on domains that aren’t actually configured to receive email. Yes, in a perfect world, it would be easier to switch to DNS-based validation (since we have to have control of the DNS for the domain, we need it later), but let’s just assume that’s not an option. So, how do we ‘catch’ the activation email so we can prove we can receive email on that domain?

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Semi-random amusing code snippet of the day:

aws ec2 describe-instances | jq << EOF
    .[][].Instances[]
    | select(.Tags[]?.Value == "production")
    | .PrivateIpAddress
EOF

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