I hate Adobe Acrobat. It’s a huge steaming pile of slow-to-start, over-featured nonsense.

That said, pdfs ARE a good way to transfer pages where layout is important, so I find myself using them a lot for design stuff and for chord charts and what not (particularly with Planning Center Online).

One thing Adobe Acrobat does well (the real version, not the viewer) is allow you to do basic drag and drop manipulations with pdfs: rearrange pages, remove pages, merge other pdfs into the first one by dragging it onto the page view.

Not being able to do that kind of stuff on Linux has driven me crazy. I couldn’t believe there wasn’t an open source way to do this stuff.

So today, I did a quick google search and found pdftk, a CLI app for doing all that kind of stuff. But the syntax was rather arcane. And part of the Acrobat’s appeal was being able to see a thumbnail of the page (so you know you’ve got the right one) and be hit delete or drag it between two other thumbnails and have immediate visual feedback that you made the right change.

So I went on a quest for a GUI wrapper for pdftk, something that would make it easy to make those sorts of edits. Here’s my quick shootout of pdf editors (ie. page re-arrangers):

1. PDF Chain

   This is described as a GUI for pdftk. It’ll do a lot of things (split pdfs, merge pdfs, attach files to them), but removing a single page wasn’t one of them.

2. PDF Shuffler

   Not a bad choice. It seemed to do what I want but wasn’t exactly easy to use.

3. PDF Mod

   Overall this was the best performer. Drag and drop seemed to work and selecting a page and hitting delete made it disappear like it should.

   The only thing it doesn’t seem to do well is view pdfs. In fact the main bug I ram into involved the viewer–if you zoom in too far, it seems to revert to displaying pages you’ve already deleted. If the text (or your monitor) is small, by the time you get the pages big enough to tell which is the right one to delete, you might find yourself looking at a page you’d already deleted.

   It’s a little under-featured (there’s no real menu), but it handles all the drag and drop stuff very well.

4. PDFSam

   This was an exercise in #fail, at least with regard to UI design. Despite “delete page” being displayed prominently, there didn’t seem to be am obvious way to USE the feature on a document. Perhaps it’s simple, but I didn’t bother to research it.

5. PDF Edit

   Very old school KDE. Or to put it another way: too many features and buttons, so many that clicking “remove page” didn’t seem to actualy remove the page.

To sum up, for an alternative to Adobe Acrobat for editing pdfs, PDF Shuffler seems to be the best bet.

Unfortunately, its a poor viewer, so it shouldn’t be your default tool for PDFs, but it does the job I need more than adequately.

I want them in my podcatcher b/c when I’m in the car, I don’t want to muck around with multiple audio players–I just want to turn on CarCast and go.

My original thought was to use Dropbox’s RSS feeds. Unfortunately, Dropbox doesn’t provide all the knobs and twiddly bits in the RSS feed to make an proper podcast (no enclosures or media:content).

Also, Dropbox only provides an RSS feed for your whole account, not per folder. And I wanted a specific folder I could drop files in to.

My first instinct was just to mung this up on my home server and republish it myself. Truth be told, it probably wouldn’t have been that hard. But I’d have to set up cron jobs to republish the feed periodically, etc.

So instead, I turned to Yahoo Pipes, which lets you do all sorts of mojo with RSS feeds.

I’m not going to link to my feed because I’m not interested in publicising my Dropbox RSS feed (again, it shows activity from all folders).

But here’s the basics of what I did:

1. Fetch Feed — I threw my dropbox RSS url in here so Pipes has something to work with
2. Filter — I needed to only get items that I ADDED (I don’t care about deleting) to my podcast folder so I added two row to this module:
   1. item.description Contains podcast
   2. item.description Contains You added
3. Regex — now, I need to grab the URL to the actual file out of the description, which is a whole mess of unnecessary html. I used three rows of regular expressions to get rid of all the cruft. If you’re a wizard, you can probably do this in one row, but it’s not Vim, so I was rather stumped. On all these rows, I ticked the “s” box, so it’d do substitution.
   1. In item.description replace

      ^.*href='

      with _ (you’re going to have to pretend that underscore is a space)

   2. In item.description replace

      '.*

      with _

   3. In item.description replace _ with (here I’m replacing any spaces with nothing)
4. Loop — this was the tricky one. I needed to get enclosures going, and couldn’t make it happen with the Create RSS. Here’s how I set it up:
   • For each item in input feed
     • type = audio/mpeg
     • length = 100
     • url = item.description (here I’m using the URL we trimmed out in the previous step)
   • assign first results to item.enclosure (I had to just type “item.enclosure” there–it wasn’t an option).
5. Create RSS — ok, here we’re (re)creating the RSS feed with everything in the right place. Apparently getting the media:content section in here is important:
   • Description: item.title
   • Link: item.description
   • PubDate: item.pubDate
   • Author: item.author
   • GUID: item.link
   • media:content
     • url: item.description
     • type: audio/mpeg

Save that and you should be good to go!

Install Python 2.7 (d/l the .exe)

http://www.python.org/getit/

Install easy_install, if it’s not already. Should be in c:\Python27\Scripts.

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools#downloads

Open a shell (ie. command prompt), cd into C:\Python27\Scripts and run the following:
.\easy_install.exe ipython[zmq]
.\easy_install.exe mathlib
.\easy_install.exe numpy
.\easy_install.exe pandas
.\easy_install.exe tornado

Whilst in the same directory, run:
ipython notebook –pylab

(You can also set up a shortcut for that)

It’ll run the background services and then open a tab in your browser to for the UI.

So a short bit of time with YouTube, and you get this. He plays it in G, whereas I’ve written it out in D b/c I can’t that low/high. If you need it different, you’ll have to either get out your capo and put it on something way high on the neck (5? 7?) or just transpose the whole thing in your head.

I recommend the latter–it’s a skill you won’t regret learning.

Without further ado, the chords to Rick Nestler’s (or Pete Seeger, if you haven’t done your homework) ‘The River that Flows Both Ways’:

The River That Flows Both Ways
Rick Nestler

 D                       A
Once the sachems told a story
                             D
of a land the Great Spirit blessed.
                             A
And the people followed the legend
                              D
from the great waters in the west
         G                                  D
And they stopped where they found that the fishing was good,
     G                             A         D
the earth it was fertile and game ran in the wood.

	G                      D
	I could be happy just spending my days
	G                  A          D
	on the river that flows both ways

First came the trappers, then the traders
Their own fortunes for to find
And the valley treated them kindly
So the farmers followed close behind
Then the sloops sailed well laden ‘round the battery
with flour from Yonkers, furs from Albany.

Writers and painters have shown its beauty
In its waters and on the shore
While musicians sing its praises
And keep alive the river’s lore
With the sun setting golden o’er the Palisades
Afternoon ends and the daylight fades

Maybe it’s the moonshine, maybe it’s the starlight
Reflected in Haverstraw Bay
Maybe it’s the fog that rolls off the Highlands
At the break of a brand new day
But apple cider and pumpkins, strawberries and corn
Make the people of the river glad they were born

And then, after a horrible experience with free hosting, I moved the back end to my home server. Which was a problem, because I used dynamic DNS (which puts me on a subdomain automatically) and as far as I can tell, you can’t have a subdomain of a subdomain. Or at least, the way my DNS registrar played w/ DynDNS, I couldn’t get it to work.

So, the blog sort of moved to http://jaket.is-a-geek.com/blog. But I left the original address working. Actually, I forwarded all of jaketolbert.com to that address.

Well, the time has come to fix that up–I need to straighten things out, so listento.jaketolbert.com is going away. If you’re still subscribed there, you’ll need to change the address to jaketolbert.com/blog (or jaket.is-a-geek.com/blog–either will work since the former will just forward to the latter).

It’s going to take me a couple days to get it all straightened out (and for the DNS changes to shake out around the internet) but that at least lets you know what’s up in case you were still subscribed at the old spot. I’m changing the feedburner link now: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ListenTo so it’ll still be right…

Enjoy!

As it turns out, it’s a 2 chord song, so maybe you don’t need them, but here they are. Woody plays it in Cm, but I’m not man enough to play a Cm through a whole song (perhaps he capoed?) so I’ve got it here in Am.

 Am
Along in the sun and the rain
Along in the sun and the rain
Along, a long, a long long long
              Em           Am
Along in the sun and the rain
Hey, boys, I've come a long ways...

I seen a whole lot of things...

I kissed a whole lot of lips...

I've seen a lot of towns...

I've had a lot of fights...

I've shook a lot of hands...

I'm gonna get my job done...

Clamping, or Perhaps Smashing

Here, I’m clamping the 3rd side on (the other long/tall side). Note that I’m using a cinder block on top of a scrap to exert downward pressure, since I’m using all my other clamps to do extert force in other places.

Putting the Bottom On

Remember how I said that you don’t have to worry about getting everything exactly square because it’ll all square itself up? Well, here’s where that happens. As it turns out, I was pretty close, but things were awful tight, so I couldn’t just put the bottom in place.

I actually had to slide it down from the top and, in fact, use a rubber mallet to tap it in to place. This resulted in a lot of glue getting pushed around, but all in all, it was a fairly tight fit.

And here’s a pic of clamping that. I didn’t use the cinder block on this one because it’s so much shorter than the other sides–if I set the cinder block on a scrap, most of the weight would be distributed on the other sides rather than the one side I cared about.

So I used one vertical clamp. Which wasn’t enough, but it was all I had.

This is by far the hardest piece to effectively clamp, since you can’t get on the inside. However, as I mentioned before, even without the glue, it’s still all really tight in there, so I don’t think it’s going anywhere.

After this all dries, I’ll be doing a bit of finishing work: sanding off any parts that aren’t exactly square, filling in any gaps with putty, and maybe even running a saw along an edge or two of the front–I want the tapa to fit on perfectly flush all the way around.

But we’ll get to that later.

All steps

We’ve already covered cutting things out and gluing internal bracing, so now we’re ready for step 3: gluing the sides and tops on.

Remember that we’re going to put the top (which you sit on) and the bottom (what sits on the floor) on the outside, sandwiching the back and the sides (the tapa, or front that you bang on, will go on last and isn’t structural).

Glue on the top

Like we did with the braces, we’re going to use wood glue and clamps to glue everything down. If your cuts are square, you should end up with largely square joints, as the sides get clamped not only to each other, but to the braces which sit at right angles to them.

With that in mind, don’t worry too much about this joint being square. If it’s not, it’ll square up once we get everything else in there (again, assuming your cuts are, for the most part, square).

Glue on the sides

After you glue on the top (again, that’s really the top in the geometric sense–the part you sit on), glue on the sides, one at a time.

Above, you can see how I’ve clamped the first side. You’ll want to do as much clamping as humanly possible–the more you can pull the side you’re gluing close to the brace and the side to which you’re gluing it, the tighter the joint will be, which translates into a tighter sound (and a better look).

After I do this side, I’ll do the other side, and then do the bottom after that. Unlike the sides, it’s really difficult to clamp the bottom, as there’s no way to get clamps on the inside to push the internal brace up against the buttom–you can only use bar clamps to push the two sides together (there might be some fancy way to do this using luthier/woodcraft know-how–I won’t be using it).

I’ll try to post more pics once the whole structure is put together (the back, sides, top and bottom). After that, it’s on to putting in the braces for the tapa.

All steps

Oh, did I mention, we’re not using any screws in this thing (except in the top/face/head/side-that-you-bang-on)? It’s 100% wood glue all the way.

With that in mind, and for that matter, even if we WERE going to use screws, we want something more substantial inside for the facing pieces to attach to.

So we’re going to use bits of 1x1s. Or whatever we can find in the scrap bin, assuming it’s got at least one flat, preferably two flat edges.

You can see in the pic below that I’ve got all my braces cut and laid out. These don’t have to be measured out exact–in fact, I make an effort to make sure I DON’T cut these the same length as the sides so that the braces don’t bump into each other.

If you’re really concerned about strength, I suppose you’d make these all fit up next to each other perfectly. And they’d all interlock and the thing would be able to withstand a 10 story fall.

As it is, it’s going to be plenty strong, so I cut the braces short so I don’t get part way through and find out that I don’t have room to fit the back onto the top because the braces are in the way of each other.

Also note: the braces that will go around the top/face/place-you-bang-on (ok, in the interest of not having to type that again, I looked it up and apparently the proper name for this piece is tapa so that’s what I’m calling it from now on) are supposed to be hardwood. I assume this is because you’re using screws (you want to be able to vary how attached the tapa is) and you want to make sure they won’t pull out when you start whacking on it.

You’re going to have to go the store on this one and buy some hardwood dowels. I think I got a couple 5/8″ dowels or something like that–they were $2.50 each, which seems steep to me. Good luck finding this stuff in the dumpster–almost all lumber, including MOST trim is pine.

Then again, you only need (2) 2′ pieces and (2) 10–12″ pieces, so if you’re lucky you might be able to find some nice oak trim scraps (maybe out of some old cabinets? who knows). I didn’t include these braces in the pic since I’ll be putting them in later (and differently).

Step 2b: Glue the braces

Once you get your braces cut, you want to glue them in. You want them glued in first so the piece you glue in has something secure to grab on to. But that’s a problem because you’ve got to leave room for the piece that you’re not yet ready to glue to go.

So I made a little jig. It’s just a small scrap of my 3/4″ plywood left over from sawing, screwed tightly to another piece of wood that’s, for the most part, straight.

When I’m ready to glue a brace on to the top (or wherever), I simply stand the jig up on the top, with the 1x2 hanging off. This keep the 3/4″ scrap flush with the edge of the top. Then I lay down my glue and press the brace up next to the jig (see below–in the pic, I’ve left the brace away from the jig just a bit to make it easier to see what’s going on).

Hold it by hand for a few seconds, then remove the jig and clamp, wiping off any glue that oozes out. Let that sit over night and move on to your next piece (unless you’ve got more clamps than me, in which case, do as many as you want as fast as you want!).

Don’t forget to do something about any metal clamps you might be using. It’s not a big deal if they dent the braces–those are on the inside of the box and won’t ever bee seen again. But the outside (what looks like the bottom in the picture above) may very well be the most visible spot on the whole drum, so throw something between your clamps and the wood.

And that wraps up Step 2!

All steps

Recently, I realized I’ve still got a lot of materials left over so I thought I’d build another one for myself, and this time, document the process.

My objective was to build something on the cheap–the majority of the stuff I’m using I already had, either in my scrap bin or as left overs from the last build project. I ended up buying most of the wood, but if I had more time, would have scoured construction site dumpster for the stuff I needed.

You don’t need a lot of wood–I’m sure if you’re patient, you could find whatever you needed in better quality than what I used.

Step 1: Cut the frame

For the outside frame (but not the “head”/face of the drum), you want the thickest nicest plywood you can afford/find.

I used 3/4″ pressboard. Using pressboard is a musical no-no, but a 4x8 sheet with one broken corner was about 4 times cheaper, at the lumberyard, than 3x4 sheet of good stuff, so I went with it.

The cajon I’m building is 2′ tall, 10″ deep and 14″ wide.

So I cut out 5 pieces:

• Top: 14″ x 10″
• Bottom: 14″ x 10″
• Back: 22½” x 10″
• Side 1: 22½” x 13¼”
• Side 2: 22½” x 13¼”

So the idea is that the top and bottom are the most outside pieces. The back and sides sit between them. And the sides butt up to the back (the back is just as wide as the top/bottom), which is why they’re smaller.

That’s Step 1–pretty simple.

All steps