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How to take a backup/export your kobo ebooks

I had an issue with my ebook reader – kobo, just wanted to test my ebook on another ebook reader – should be fine right? Turns out the books i bought and paid for on kobo don’t allow me to do that.

 

A quick google tells me there is a plugin called obok but it seems older and i ‘aint got no time fo dat!’ .  Plugged kobo in to my PC, told it to connect, opened a linux terminal and had a poke about . This is what i found.

velofille@tea:/media/velofille/KOBOeReader/.kobo$ ls
affiliate.conf  BookReader.sqlite  certificates  device.salt.conf  dict  guide  kepub  Kobo  KoboReader.sqlite  version
velofille@tea:/media/velofille/KOBOeReader/.kobo$ cd kepub/
velofille@tea:/media/velofille/KOBOeReader/.kobo/kepub$ ls -sh
total 28M
3.1M 0ebc1dcc-8ee2-4184-b89d-4ea7d63be35b  792K 642a7ebd-f337-421a-b285-db7f3034423d  496K c6f9076c-0f3d-4804-a2d8-dab922fde058
1.3M 2c1cadeb-805b-4f7c-866c-cc1a5b3a37df  384K 75a93a60-b844-4c15-aab3-264e05d2b9d2  1.5M cc2c97aa-478f-4909-98f6-57df0aedeab1
292K 2d7ff8d7-c55b-4ce7-b5c6-e2829dd0a181  320K 7dc7280d-3af5-445c-899a-2e9dc74c3fcc  764K e9fda9bc-b601-4b7f-a5bb-6f2e66285617
4.5M 349f9491-e5b5-449f-9e05-5969b374c986  796K 8a41e46c-9246-4cc3-9775-396fbed422ec  1.5M f4538279-26a6-45f7-af8a-22ecaf60f79b
832K 452e403a-301e-4ae8-adcb-2a063a0969b7  1.3M 9fd75d28-fb3e-4d6c-bbb1-6c17e4a2c699  1.7M fafe790d-3f52-4d3a-9fab-798f12114fba
1.7M 497eb736-14c9-4ac1-b3d3-14f930989485  324K b054220c-ad1b-42d4-b8d7-16a47b70aaa9  316K fdcc3a9e-4f6d-4f18-8c1f-82a5ccfacb13
1.7M 5c3fd797-79af-4fe6-80b5-abd5728f6c7a  1.4M b5755009-3b29-447e-bf24-1821fc728d86
2.1M 5fa748aa-8507-4674-b94f-a55fbd860e18  792K c1fd4250-b11c-4b3a-b99e-437405ea1fee
velofille@tea:/media/velofille/KOBOeReader/.kobo/kepub$ file *
0ebc1dcc-8ee2-4184-b89d-4ea7d63be35b: EPUB document
2c1cadeb-805b-4f7c-866c-cc1a5b3a37df: Zip data (MIME type "application/epub+zip"?)
2d7ff8d7-c55b-4ce7-b5c6-e2829dd0a181: EPUB document
349f9491-e5b5-449f-9e05-5969b374c986: EPUB document
452e403a-301e-4ae8-adcb-2a063a0969b7: EPUB document
497eb736-14c9-4ac1-b3d3-14f930989485: EPUB document
5c3fd797-79af-4fe6-80b5-abd5728f6c7a: EPUB document
5fa748aa-8507-4674-b94f-a55fbd860e18: EPUB document
642a7ebd-f337-421a-b285-db7f3034423d: EPUB document
75a93a60-b844-4c15-aab3-264e05d2b9d2: EPUB document
7dc7280d-3af5-445c-899a-2e9dc74c3fcc: EPUB document
8a41e46c-9246-4cc3-9775-396fbed422ec: EPUB document
9fd75d28-fb3e-4d6c-bbb1-6c17e4a2c699: EPUB document
b054220c-ad1b-42d4-b8d7-16a47b70aaa9: EPUB document
b5755009-3b29-447e-bf24-1821fc728d86: EPUB document
c1fd4250-b11c-4b3a-b99e-437405ea1fee: EPUB document
c6f9076c-0f3d-4804-a2d8-dab922fde058: EPUB document
cc2c97aa-478f-4909-98f6-57df0aedeab1: EPUB document
e9fda9bc-b601-4b7f-a5bb-6f2e66285617: EPUB document
f4538279-26a6-45f7-af8a-22ecaf60f79b: EPUB document
fafe790d-3f52-4d3a-9fab-798f12114fba: EPUB document
fdcc3a9e-4f6d-4f18-8c1f-82a5ccfacb13: EPUB document

Bingo! If you are in windows, just turn on hidden files, find the .kobo directory, then the kepub directory inside that. I copied those all off, renamed them to .epub and then imported the into calibre.

Rename:

velofille@tea:~/kobooks$ rename s/$/.epub/ *

As it turned out, the ebook was fine, just had an odd font 🙂

Posted on

Automating the chicken Coop

I’m not overly keen on cage eggs, so i got a few chooks for around home. Legally we are allowed 5 hens (no roosters) since we live in town. Not wanting to annoy neighbours i went for snuggly quiet little silkies which are the poodle of the chicken world .

Since I am not overly keen on early mornings, i have been trying to find a good way to automate the chicken coop. I made a basic sliding door up and down, tied a piece of string to that, ran it through a pully inside hte top of the coop and out the back.

This meant i pulled the string, it pulled the door up. I could tie it off during the day, or easily close it. Since the chicken coop is near my bedroom but outside, i ran the string in a bedroom window – on weekends i open window, pull string, close window and go back to sleep.

Now days thats getting a little old, i want to automate things!

When the chickens were smaller, i set up a raspberry pi with a basic install of rasbian, i installed a raspberry pi camera on that, and put it all in a case. This was ideal for just watching the chicks whilst at work, and when i was integrating new chicks.

Moving on to the more fun project, i ended up using scraps of things from all over the show. My son had an arduino car that had a servo AS3013 (3kg) that i took, along with a plastic end spinning thing. I attached a piece of dowel to that, and made a crappy mount.  This is what my high tech setup looks like.

The idea is that the string for the sliding door wraps about the dowel, pulling it up.

The 3 wires from the servo go on the 5V, ground, and pin 18 according to https://pinout.xyz/pinout/ground which has them neatly in a row, and the Pi itself goes in a nice container to keep dust away. I had to drill out some space for the wires going to the servo.

To make the servo work, i installed the RaPi GPIO librarys

sudo apt-get install -y wiringpi

After this i can just create scripts like this to run the servo (this is continuous rotation servo)

# opendoor.sh 
# This switches pin 18 to pwm if its not already
gpio -g mode 18 pwm
Now you can tell gpio to set the PWM clock to those numbers:
gpio pwm-ms
gpio pwmc 192
gpio pwmr 2000
# This here tells its the placement
gpio -g pwm 18 200
#sleep whilst it turns for 2 seconds
sleep 2
# Stop the turning and reset that
gpio -g pwm 18 150

Likely im doing this wrong, but it works for me, it was simple and easy to setup and do. THis is from tutorial at https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruits-raspberry-pi-lesson-8-using-a-servo-motor/software

Once i had the servo moving, the camera working, and all that , i made a web page that simply runs the php scripts using exec, this means i can click ‘pic’ and get a pic realtime without running a webcam. Terribly insecure and probably not good, but its on local network only, not a major issue. Door scripts are on a crontab to run at a set time.

I uploaded all the code for this to https://github.com/lizquilty/automated-chicken-coop

Now i just need to wait for a sunny day to install it all 🙂

Posted on

CHICKENS! (not tech related)

So recently i have decided i wanted a couple chickens, so i could  have eggs. I wanted to do the whole hog, so got a cheap incubator and bought some fertile eggs.

Incubator was not getting up to temp, so i pulled it apart, and fixed it, and put the eggs in. Turns out those eggs were not fertile 🙁
Second time i got a decent incubator, much larger! unfortunately the hygromtre reading was wrong, and temp was about 1C off. I did manage to hatch 4 chicks though from 24 eggs, despite it having all the wrong settings.

Third time incubating, three days before hatch it lost temp, and i ended up doing dodgy hackery things to keep the temp up to try hatching, but ended up with only 3 hatching from 10 eggs

Going for a 4th time lucky, i have new sensors and fixed the whole thing up (yet again) with more reliable ways of heating and measuring these things.

In the mean time, the first 4 chooks were black/blue, and the second batch of 3 are all white.

So from here i clearly needed a cage! I had a ton of pink wood sitting about, so i built a raised cage to deter cats/rats, and give the chickens more run space underneath.

I have since added a veranda, ramp and painted the whole thing. Chooks seem to love it, though are still only about 6 weeks old

 

The next thing to do is automate it! Heating, door opening, egg notification, etc etc!