Sunday, August 3, 2008
Bookbinding part III, SqueezeCenter adventures
Urgh, almost two months without updates. Too much work and study, and then I was sick. sigh. Now that I am finally feeling better, I restarted some projects.
Finally, I managed to finish binding my book! horray! obviously my cam died while I was doing it, so I just have a couple photos of the application of the cover. Finished book to come!
Corner marks!
Pasting the covers
SqueezeCenter Adventures
This needs a paragraph per se.
Some time ago, while sick in bed, I decided it was time to replace my trusty old synology DS101g+ with something newer and more standard. Yes, I have enough of hacking the poor synology’s firmware, and it has waay too little ram, just 64 megs. I started looking for an alternative, and initially I choose a mini-itx. But with my great disappointment che 800mgz C3 on board gave me more or less the same performance of the 266 PPC 603 on the syno! ARGH! we call this CESSO in italian! And I did not calculate the fact it does NOT have a case, and every case I saw was:
1) HUGE
2) UGLY
3) EXPENSIVE! how can a stupid case cose 70$$????
So it was time to find and alterative. To my astonishment it seems that small computers tend to be UGLY and COSTLY, sigh! But a friend gave me an idea… and used mac mini! The first generation mac minis with a PPC G4 are easy to find and quite cheap. And they are a blast. Debian on this machine is.. wow! I’m really satisfied with the performance, and the machine is small and quiet too!.
One of the reasons for getting a real machine is to run squeezecenter (and other goodies too). SqueezeCenter is nice, and pkgs exist for debian. i386 that is, no ppc! On ppc it requires a manual installation. Oh well!
The installation is quite simple, except for some caveats. It wants gcc, g++, libc-dev, msql, libmysqldev. And loads of perl pkgs. Some of this can be installed via apt:
libalgorithm-c3-perl libclass-c3-perl libclass-data-accessor-perl libclass-inspector-perl libdata-dump-perl libdbix-class-perl libmp4-info-perl libpath-class-perl libproc-background-perl libsql-abstract-limit-perl libsql-abstract-perl libxml-simple-perl libyaml-perl libyaml-syck-perl
(Note, I got the list form the debian pkg for i386. These are the only ones that exist on ppc).
For the others, it is necessary to use the included script
$SQEEZE/Bin/build-perl-modules.pl.
Watch out for errors, as the program WILL fail. Ah, BEFORE running the program setup CPAN:
$ cpan
and setup regional settings, etc.
Once the build-perl-modules.pl is done, squeezecenter it will not work. For some strange reason it failed to install Compress::Zlib. Yes, it downloads and compiles it, but it did NOT install it! So, assuming you used /tmp for dowloading the temp archives:
Welcome to the Slim Devices perl module installer. These packages are needed for SqueezeCenter to function. You will need a C compiler (gcc), make, and perl installed. You will need development libraries for MySQL. eg: libmysqlclient You will need development libraries for expat. eg: libexpat1-dev *** Ignore any warnings about AppConfig. *** Please enter a perl binary to use (defaults to /usr/bin/perl) This must be the same perl binary that you ran this program with --> Please enter a directory to download files to --> /tmp Downloads will use /usr/bin/wget to fetch tarballs. Downloading Compress-Zlib-1.41.tar.gz to: /tmp
And install it:
cd /tmp/Compress-Zlib-1.41 make install
Now squeeze is a bit more happy, but not too much. In fact the logs may say this:
[ERROR] Error message file '/root/squeezecenter-7.1/MySQL/errmsg.sys' had only 463 error messages, but it should contain at least 608 error messages. Check that the above file is the right version for this program! Slim::Utils::MySQLHelper::createSystemTables (433) FATAL: Couldn't connect to database: [Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/root/squeezecenter-7.1/Cache/squeezecenter-mysql.sock' (2)]
It means we have to link errmsg.sys with the one provided by the current installation of mysql:
cd $SQUEEZE/MySQL mv errmsg.sys errmsg.sys.old ln -s /usr/share/mysql/english/errmsg.sys errmsg.sys
Now it works! No, it does not! You will have to install the GD libraries, version 2.35 EACTLY. The build-perl-modules.pl script does not do this! After some research I found that you NEED version 2.35 EXACTLY. It will NOT work with versions > 2.35 (CPAN at this moment has 2.39). The error you may find is:
The following CPAN modules were found but are too old to work with SqueezeCenter: GD (loaded 2.35, need 2.35) To fix this problem you have several options: 1. Install the latest version of the module(s) using CPAN: sudo cpan Some::Module 2. Update the module's package using apt-get, yum, etc. 3. Run the .tar.gz version of SqueezeCenter which includes all required CPAN modules.
This happened to me while having 2.39 installed from CPAN. First, install GD libraries:
apt-get install libgd2-noxpm libgd2-noxpm-dev
Then get GD from CPAN and install it:
wget http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/L/LD/LDS/GD-2.35.tar.gz tar -xvzf GD-2.35.tar.gz cd GD-2.35 perl Makefile.PL make make install
It will probably moan for missing perl modules. I did like this:
1) install GD 2.39 from CPAN (cpan GD)
2) overwrite it with 2.35
but after this, squeezecenter works! horray!
Friday, May 9, 2008
Bookbinding Phase II, Part 1
This sunday was a beautiful day. A perfect day to bind a book!
This time I tried dong things in a semi-serious fashion, with the help of a copule specialized books. I still miss some tools, but the results seem encouraging nevertheless.
1) The signatures are made. I used a mixture of… mmh I never remember exactly, but it tool all morning. I first created a big PDF with a dozen files, converted it to PS, made the signatures (psbook) reconverted it back to PDF using Preview.app and printed it 2-nup in duplex. This should me enough for me to remember next time.
The signatures are then folded:
2) The places for the tape and kettlestitches are marked (under a weight)
3) Piercing anyone? The holes are pierced in the signatures. I KNOW, I need the right tools.
4) Home made tapes! From the side of some scratch cloth.
5) Sewing is the most fun part. I even punched a finger with the needle (OUCH!)!
6) The sewn signatures.
7) I decided to make the paste using flour.
8) Next, the mull is applied.
No I did not blow my nose here!
The pasted mull
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Finishing the book
Yesterday I finally had some free time so I decided to apply the cover to my book. The results are here shown:
The finished thing
It opens! for real!
Ergh…. the spine is not really artistic…
I found some old photos of the making one month ago (the file dates say Jan 12). My original idea was to document all the steps involved, but the battery of my cam died the day I was bookbinding, so I have only a few images.
Home made press:
Cutting:
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Bookbinding
Since I decided this WE I’d be doing nothing, I finally found some time to finish binding a book that was lying in my shelf. I had to finish trimming it before applying the cover, and I had to correct a previously miserably failed trimming attempt.
THIS time I used a saw (hehehe clever neh??):
Too clever indeed since the result was more horrifying than before! I had to use sandpaper to smooth things up….
After the book survived the trimming (and it was aceptable), I started applying the cover, made of simple heavy paper (eh, I had this at home…)
This is the glued up thing
And these after the trimming:
Quite nifty, counting that this is my fourth attempt :)