A biking (bicycle, not motorcycle) jacket with LED turn signals, and it's a DIY project!

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I've been collecting free knitting patterns from websites for a while, and while most are in PDF format many are not. PDFs are certainly easier to collect since they are one file rather than several so I thought I'd convert them to PDF myself.

Unfortunately (or fortunately maybe) I started with the ones I collected from Berroco, since the majority of their patterns are in PDF already I figured I'd just convert the few older ones that aren't. After I removed the site navigation and the extraneous ads for the yarn and other patterns and otherwise cleaned up the page so it looked how I wanted it to as a PDF, I tried using Acrobat to convert it.

( Screen captures under the cut )

Is Acrobat just that bad at converting HTML or is there something I'm missing? There's no reason I can see for the inserted line breaks in the heading or for the double spacing in the body. Is it because the containers are tables? Maybe it doesn't like external stylesheets? I don't want to invest too much time into this project but I want the PDFs to look good, and in Berroco's case, like the PDFs they put out themselves.

ETA: Well the link spacing issue is just that, a line spacing issue in the CSS. While 1.5em works on a webpage it needs to be 1em in the PDF. Maybe that's the issue with the lack of padding in the tables as well. Still haven't figured out the problem in that heading cell with the inserted line breaks....

ETA2: In fine hacker tradition I have managed to strip the CSS down so it mostly works. I combined a few tags and removed some empty paragraphs. I ended up adding the padding to the paragraph tags in the instructions rather than to the section ID because Acrobat's CSS handling is borked. It's not as pretty as I'd like and there's a bit more slash and burn than I'd hoped for before I can convert the files, but it works. Thankfully Berroco uses one style sheet for their pattern pages (except for a few really old patterns, which I don't think I saved any of) so the actual CSS hacking is done. I just need to cut chunks out of the HTML and tweak it before I convert to PDF.

I am now the owner of a Genius PenSketch 9x12" graphics tablet. (A delayed birthday gift from hafoc, thank you!) While it doesn't have the fancy extra tips of an Intuos3, or tilt sensitivity, the sensitivity it does have is driving me a bit bonkers, sort of like sketching with a somewhat leaky pen.

Though maybe that's linked to a problem I've been having with my mouse lately, it's been double clicking and hypersensitive. I have no idea what could be causing that since I haven't mucked about with my mouse settings. It doesn't happen with the mouse that came with the tablet, but that mouse isn't sized well for my large hands so I'd rather not switch to using that exclusively.

I'll figure it all out eventually.

[Spoke too soon, the mouse on tablet is also starting to get twitchy. Hmm.]

After all that hassle with the passport I didn't even get asked for an ID to get into Canada. I did to get back into the US though. I managed to hit both borders at times where I only had to wait for two or three cars ahead of me, talk about a nice change of pace.

Instead of the traditional thunderstorm around Albany this year I was treated to FOG, off and on pea soup fog from Albany all the way to my folks' place. :P

The internet here didn't need fixing for a change, but damn I have a lot of software to update....

[Yes, I did get my passport. It arrived while I was at Anthrocon. That would be... eight? maybe seven, weeks after I applied and paid the extra for expedited service (two to four weeks). I'll be writing a letter to try to get that fee back since I paid for a service I didn't receive. Somehow I doubt anything will come of it, the government wiggles out of things that a business would be held to, but it can't hurt to try and I could really use that cash back.]

NeedleLite light-up knitting needles

I'm not really seeing a compelling reason for them myself, perhaps I'm not yet knit addicted enough, but I bet that raver furry at FC that was spinning with a drop spindle would love a light up spindle (yep, they sell those too).

Is the "recently closed tabs" list under the History menu.

I run Firefox maximized and last night I found a weird bug. If I have it maximized and try to minimize it to the taskbar it immediately bounces back up. If I have it in a "normal" window and minimize it it works properly. I think this is a new problem (I don't minimize it often) and my best guess is that it started up after the last windows update (earliest), my adding the ImageShack toolbar to IE7, or I updated the LittleFox theme and Dictionary Search add-ons (latest).

Anyone else having this problem?

My QMS/Minolta Magicolor 2300w is saying it has a paper jam but there's no paper in any of the areas that I can check. As far as I can tell it never fed any paper in in the first place!

I shut it down and rebooted it and my PC and it still claims to have a paper jam. Ideas?

I have to get a page, just one frickin page, printed so I can send off a fax and Dunn's doesn't stay open all that late. :P

Update: Apparently the answer is to tell it "fuck you" and have it try to print with NO paper in the tray while you go attempt to print it out on someone else's printer. (Sorry hafoc but I needed to get this done!) Of course that PC decided that its printer was offline so that whole project was moot. But when I was trying to figure out how to turn that printer on mine made a lot of thumps so I went to see if the cats were investigating. They weren't but I shoved the paper into place before I went to back to the other machine. When I gave up on the alternate printer idea I came back to find mine had actually printed.

The printers hate me. >:(

*hurries to get things together and get off to Dunn's*

So I've been working on a mock up of hafoc's site on my domain, and I have the story archive and site news part of it going all awesome with a lightly modified version of eFiction. I even have a few skins all modded up and ready for use. I thought I was just at the point of skinning out the forums to match and that it would be all downhill from here.

Then I tried installing the software on his domain.

Let me point out, we have the same hosting service and hosting package level.

The software that installed so nice on my domain? Will not install on his. I've created and destroyed four SQL databases today trying to get eFiction installed on his domain and keep getting the same SQL error. Now either they've updated the SQL version in the last week (which they haven't, according to their FAQ and everything I can find on their site about the versions of MySQL and PHP on the site) or something is different about the eFiction installer.

You see, on my domain I installed 3.0 and then discovered right afterward that 3.2 was out so I upgraded. On Hafoc's domain I am trying to install 3.2 directly.

Wouldn't you know that I can't find a copy of the 3.0 zip anywhere? I know it had a security hole but normally you can find an old copy of a program somewhere online.

But then this is eFiction, the one piece of software you can search for with google and get three pages of results of sites using the software without actually finding the homepage and download site for it.

My head hurts.

Update: A very kind soul over in the eFiction support forums sent me the zip for version 3.0 which installed just fine and was upgraded to 3.2 immediately. So that part of Hafoc's site just needs content and a few tweaks (like the text of the Creative Commons license he's using).

Next up is yet another stab at forums now that Hafoc has revised, again, what he wants out of them. I'll have to do some skinning work to make the look and feel from the story archive carry over and I'm not looking forward to that. Skinning eFiction is relatively easy but phpBB is a bit more complex. At least I don't have to bridge the databases.