Monday 15 July 2013

Week-end hacks

Last week, I picked up a Kobo Mini e-reader from my local FNAC store for (less than) 40€ and loaded it up with books from the latest Humble eBook Bundle. As generic document icons aren't really that great to recognise the books, I wrote a small thumbnailer for it, which is now available in GNOME git.

Some DRM-free e-books.

The release is available on the GNOME FTP site, and somebody packaging it up for Fedora would be greatly appreciated.

The other week-end hack was a way to run a program with user-defined DNS servers, rather than relying on the system's /etc/resolv.conf file. It only supports IPv4, but it was good enough to run a few command-line utilities with those specific DNS servers.

3 comments:

Matze said...

Thanks for the thumbnailer, that's extremely useful. I wrote a simple application to manage EPUBs which could be of interest:

https://github.com/matze/books

Unfortunately, I don't have that much time to push it really far right now :(

Bastien Nocera said...

Matze: This is great already! Tracker supports indexing EPub files, so you could use that to populate the view the first time it's run (and monitor it).

The rest of the UI could do with being a bit more GNOME3-like, we're adding new widgets in GTK+ to that effect.

I'd be happy giving some advice about making the app better if you have some time to spare. Drop by #gnome-design on GNOME IRC if you're interested.

Bastien Nocera said...

There's designs for a reader application in the GNOME Wiki.

And there were also some discussions on #gnome-design that eBooks might be added directly to gnome-documents (like in this naive patch)