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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When working in a shell, from time to time, I need to know if a command succeeded or failed. Sometimes, it’s easy:

$ make noise

make: *** No rule to make target `noise'.  Stop.

Sometimes, less so:

$ grep frog podcasts.json > podcasts-about-frogs.txt

Since, alas, I don’t have any podcasts about frogs, that command would fail silently. But that’s fixable!

$ grep frog podcasts.json > podcasts-about-frogs.txt

$ # Bash/Zsh
$ echo $?
1

$ # Fish
$ echo $status
1

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