After Yahoo!’s announcement to sell del.icio.us quite a few people were looking for a safer home for their bookmarks. And found Pinboard. If you are among them you may like the following script by Rafael Bugajewski which imports your Pinboard bookmarks into DEVONthink. Click here to download the script.

In early December (2010), I used a file from the Australian Project Gutenberg to create an EPUB of most of Lovecraft’s works. It wasn’t a comprehensive file and while it’s been popular (just having hit 1,000 downloads this morning, in under 3 months), it isn’t what I want for my own use or what the librarian-in-training in me thinks should be out there.

So, after several months of working on the project when I could—snatching minutes and hours between work, grad school, and making Cthulhus—I am very proud to announce that I have finished an eBook of The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft. In fact, I expanded my original project and made versions both for the Nook (EPUB) and for the Kindle (MOBI). If you’re downloading to a mobile device and want the EPUB, try this download link instead or (new) if you have Stanza or if you’re getting a validation error try this copy instead.

I started this project because I couldn’t find a free or inexpensive (or expensive) EPUB eBook of Lovecraft’s complete works for my Nook. Many compilations or standalone stories exist, but as you can see from the table of contents list below, there are a lot of these stories and having them in individual files would be a bit of an organizational nightmare.

About the eBook

The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft contains all the original stories which Lovecraft wrote as an adult. It begins in 1917 with “The Tomb” and ends in 1935 with his last original work “The Haunter of the Dark.” The book is ordered chronologically by the date the story was written. Because Lovecraft was a terrible businessman and left no heirs to his intellectual property, all of his works are already in the public domain. I did not include collaborations or revisions because some of those works may still be under the co-author’s copyright.

After putting together one very large HTML file containing the complete works with a linked table of contents, I formatted it as EPUB for Nook using Sigil and converted it to MOBI for Kindle using Calibre. When I created the original EPUB of most of Lovecraft’s works, based on a file from the Australian Project Gutenberg, I had used Calibre to convert it from HTML. But while Calibre converts well from EPUB to MOBI, it doesn’t work nearly so well going from HTML to EPUB. HTML tags were dropping in places, making the layout look sloppy. Sigil’s interface allows one to create and edit the book, which made it something far better than I was getting through my many Calibre conversion attempts.

3/4/11 – I’ve updated the eBook with a cover created by Santiago Casares, an artist and Lovecraftian fan.

A note on using your Nook’s chapter lookup function (this may apply to other devices, my testers didn’t respond one way or the other). If you use Go To -> Chapter, there are a few unnamed “chapters” at the beginning of the chapter list. After that it’s got a proper list of each story’s title.

Putting the eBook on Your eReader

The eBook downloads contain slightly different files for the two differing formats. I’ve put together a page with my own and other people’s tips and walk-throughs to help you add the book to your eReader. People with Sony Readers are particularly advised to use the page as it appears they’ll need to do an EPUB -> EPUB conversion on Calibre or it won’t display correctly.

Licensing and Acknowledgments

This book and all the works contained therein are in the public domain. The book may be redistributed, torn apart, revised, etc. If you choose to share or redistribute the book, please give credit to CthulhuChick.com.

I would like to express my gratitude to three websites without which I could not have made the book: HPLovecraft.com, DagonBytes.com, and Project Gutenberg (especially the Australian Project Gutenberg). I’d also like to thank The H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast for getting me interested in Lovecraft and Terry from GameCouch for proofreading the Kindle version.

If you discover any typos or other problems with the eBook, please leave a comment or send me an e-mail letting me know which story and format to fix! I’ll do my best to keep the download file updated based on reader reports. 

Table of Contents

The eBook’s table of contents is listed below. It includes the year each story was written.

• The Tomb (1917)
• Dagon (1917)
• Polaris (1918)
• Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1919)
• Memory (1919)
• Old Bugs (1919)
• The Transition of Juan Romero (1919)
• The White Ship (1919)
• The Doom That Came to Sarnath (1919)
• The Statement of Randolph Carter (1919)
• The Terrible Old Man (1920)
• The Tree (1920)
• The Cats of Ulthar (1920)
• The Temple (1920)
• Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family (1920)
• The Street (1920)
• Celephaïs (1920)
• From Beyond (1920)
• Nyarlathotep (1920)
• The Picture in the House (1920)
• Ex Oblivione (1921)
• The Nameless City (1921)
• The Quest of Iranon (1921)
• The Moon-Bog (1921)
• The Outsider (1921)
• The Other Gods (1921)
• The Music of Erich Zann (1921)
• Herbert West — Reanimator (1922)
• Hypnos (1922)
• What the Moon Brings (1922)
• Azathoth (1922)
• The Hound (1922)
• The Lurking Fear (1922)
• The Rats in the Walls (1923)
• The Unnamable (1923)
• The Festival (1923)
• The Shunned House (1924)
• The Horror at Red Hook (1925)
• He (1925)
• In the Vault (1925)
• The Descendant (1926)
• Cool Air (1926)
• The Call of Cthulhu (1926)
• Pickman’s Model (1926)
• The Silver Key (1926)
• The Strange High House in the Mist (1926)
• The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1927)
• The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927)
• The Colour Out of Space (1927)
• The Very Old Folk (1927)
• The Thing in the Moonlight (1927)
• The History of the Necronomicon (1927)
• Ibid (1928)
• The Dunwich Horror (1928)
• The Whisperer in Darkness (1930)
• At the Mountains of Madness (1931)
• The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1931)
• The Dreams in the Witch House (1932)
• The Thing on the Doorstep (1933)
• The Evil Clergyman (1933)
• The Book (1933)
• The Shadow out of Time (1934)
• The Haunter of the Dark (1935)

Posted in Showcase

We made Talker free

The time has come to talk of many things: About Talker’s present and future, and about what’s in for you.

Talker is now a part of the Teambox ecosystem. If you don’t know about it yet, I encourage you to take a look at our fine project collaboration software.

We love Talker. Just as Teambox, it became an essential part of our workflow. We want Talker to be useful for more people, and that’s why…

Talker is now free, with unlimited users

We are doing this because Teambox is our premium offering, and we consider group chat something essential for any team.

There is still a premium Talker version offering more storage and logs for those who choose paid accounts.

What will happen to existing premium plans?

If you have a premium plan, you can either keep your current plan indefinitely or ask for a refund for your last payment and stay on the free plan.

What’s next for Talker

We are working on opening more parts of Talker. In the following months, we plan to release more tools for embedding and writing custom clients.

The focus will be on having rooms that are either public or private, and having different clients that can connect to it.

One of the applications consuming Talker as a chat service will be Teambox, which we plan to integrate fully with Talker.

Get your free Talker account now!

Gute Nacht, FDP!

Als ich das letzte Mal auf die Uhr sah, war es 11:57. Ich weiß noch, dass ich dann mit dem Kopf auf die Tastatur gefallen bin und während ich träumte versuchte, mit der Nase „Bitte aufhören“ zu tippen. Dabei hatte ich nur sieben Sekunden vom wahrscheinlich charismatischsten FDPler dieser Tage gesehen, darf ich vorstellen: Friedhelm Ernst, FDP Bruchsal.

Ich leg mich jetzt wieder hin.

Polizei reinigt Schaufenster von der FDP

In Berlin ist ja heute eine riesige Demonstration gegen den Ausstieg aus dem Atomausstieg gelaufen. Ich habe mir die Sache via Twitter so gut es ging mit angesehen. Zwei Bilder möchte ich euch in diesem Zusammenhang nicht vorenthalten. 

Kernkraftgegner haben der FDP eine kleine Nachricht hinterlassen.

 

Polizeibeamte reinigen der FDP Schaufenster von Aufklebern frei.

 

Und ich so…

Jetzt mal ernsthaft. Wieso reinigt die Polizei einer Partei die Schaufenster?

Update vom 19.09.2010: In den Kommentaren machte jemand auf einen Ticker bei der TAZ aufmerksam, aus dem hervorgeht, dass die Beamten von Dienstvorgesetzten zu der Reinemachaktion abbeordert wurden.

Über 1000 Antiatom-Aufkleber hatten die Demonstranten am Mittag an die FDP-Parteizentrale geklebt. Von Wand und Tür und Fensterscheiben war kaum mehr etwas zu sehen. Jetzt stehen hier vier Polizisten, sie murren. Aufkleber für Aufkleber entfernen sie – per Hand. “Zu unseren originären Aufgaben gehört das eigentlich nicht”, sagt einer. Aber es war “Anweisung von oben”.

Gut investierte Steuergelder.

^{Peter Piksa am 18.9.2010 um 17:56}

Late last year, on the eve of launch, I announced the end of the CrunchPad project, sadly ending a very exciting one and a half year effort to create a very inexpensive touch screen tablet computer.

Our partner, Fusion Garage, had inexplicably decided to simply terminate the partnership over “nothing more than greed, jealousy and miscommunication.” A couple of weeks later they launched the device that we had worked on together under a new name, and we filed a lawsuit for Fraud and Deceit, Misappropriation of Business Ideas, Breach of Fiduciary Duty, Unfair Competitition and Violations of the Lanham Act.

Ugly stuff.

Except at the time we really didn’t know how ugly. After nearly a year of discovery it became clear that Fusion Garage, conspiring (there’s just no other word for it) with their PR firm McGrath Power, had been working for months to dramatically break the partnership, disregard our ownership of the project, and go to market without us. Jonathan Bloom at McGrath was the principle ringleader, and he and Fusion Garage actually planned the entire blowup from beginning to end. The only thing they didn’t expect was an actual lawsuit.

The blowup included a plan to reach out to press that competes with TechCrunch with a confusing story that suggested that we were mostly to blame. There was no evidence of any of that, but a lot of press ran with the easy to write story anyway.

Sound crazy? It is. Truly insane. But it all happened, and the internal emails prove it.

We’ve been through a lot of the regular pre-trial stuff at this point and we’ve amended our complaint to point out the worst of the new evidence that we’ve found. I’m embedding all the relevant documents below. A lot of time has been spent by Fusion Garage’s lawyers to try to keep these documents under seal, but they have recently been made publicly available.

The first document below reads like a novel, and frankly it probably would make a great movie. I’d consider it highly entertaining, I guess, if I wasn’t the central figure being manipulated. Our attorneys actually made a table on page 19-20 to show how they were promising us one thing while conspiring with their PR firm to do exactly the opposite.

For example, the email supposedly from Fusion Garage’s investor was actually written by Fusion Garage and the PR firm. There was a lot of back and forth about the tone and language to make this fraudulent document seem real.

Another example – Fusion Garage employee Stuart Tan, who still lists the Crunchpad as the project he’s working on on his Facebook profile, emails his girlfriend to tell her that he’s “really sucker these people.” He also mentions that he’ll be working on the project from our offices, and we’ve added pictures to the complaint showing the Fusion Garage team working with our team, from our offices, on the CrunchPad.

And the fun doesn’t end there. There are other documents showing the PR firm scripting Fusion Garage’s language so that it doesn’t appear to “suggest that we took crunchpad concept and went further with it and did joojoo and are now announcing it…We need to clearly make the link that this is the crunchpad with a different name.“

And “Right now the script reads as if we built it the way he wanted it and are now taking the product away from him and simply changing the name. This is not where I’d like us to be.”

Finally, the judge assigned to our case has made preliminary findings that “TechCrunch has made a credible showing that it may be able to establish the existence of a joint venture under which Fusion Garage owed it certain fiduciary duties. Such duties may have precluded Fusion Garage from proceeding to market with the joojoo without taking appropriate steps to dissolve the relationship and to compensate TechCrunch” And “Here, the parties’ conduct in jointly working to develop a tablet computer speaks louder than any uncertainties that may have existed between them as to the details of how their relationship would be structured.”

The documents are below.

View this document on Scribd

View this document on Scribd

View this document on Scribd

Nennt mich Genosse! Mitten in der vermeintlich größten Krise der Zeitungsverlagsbranche, in der Zeitungen vom Markt verschwinden, sich ehemalige Qualitätsblätter wie der Spiegel zu Kampagnenlautsprecher degradieren und Alice Schwarzer für die Bild vom Kachelmann-Prozess berichtet (wenn mensch das „berichten” nennen kann), mitten in dieser Krise also verhalte ich mich antizyklisch: ich bin soeben Genosse der taz, der tageszeitung aus Berlin, geworden.