Still snuggled down

30th November & 1st December

We changed our plans once more over the last couple of days, again in the light of the weather forecast. We’d planned to go to Marple today (Tuesday) having decided that Monday was going to be too cold and windy. However, we woke this morning to find some ice on the cut and a forecast giving strong wind and rain later in the day.

By contrast, the forecast for tomorrow is quite reasonable at least until mid afternoon, so we shall go then.

Meanwhile, yesterday had its interesting moments. We were nicely settled down pursuing our literary interests when Peter Mason rang to discuss the best location for the VHF antenna and the solar panels on the roof of Sanity Again. This is where our earlier research stood us in good stead. We had soon decided that a single large panel would work best, identified a possible unit, printed out the technical information about it and were able to go across to the yard for a discussion.

I’ll put more detail about this on the other blog on Friday; we’ve actually ended up with a different solar panel, because the manufacturer of our original choice, Kyocera, does not extend a warranty to mobile applications of their products.

I’m still researching the issue of the best co-ax connector for where the VHF antenna lead goes through the roof; it’s important that this is of the right quality or we shall lose transmission power and therefore coverage.

My discovery of a new, multi platform piece of software for formatting e books, Sigil, means that I have joined Sheila in the interesting exercise of preparing ebooks for use. Sheila’s contribution is as part of the Distributing Proofreading Team (in fact the Canadian branch) which prepares the text of scanned books for publication by Project Gutenberg.

Sigil comes in once Gutenberg has distributed the resulting text. It is very much still a work in progress, in fact its creator describes it as an alpha version, but even so it is reasonably stable on the Mac (that is, it doesn't fall over more than twice an hour). It allows you to take the HTML version of the Gutenberg text, tidy it up and output it in ePub format which is becoming the standard for ebook readers.

The aim is to be able to use it in WYSIWYG mode, but at present some of the tinkering has to be done in code view. Anyone with experience of producing web pages will find little difficulty in getting to grips with the variant of XML which is ePub.

The other thing to report is that on my way back from getting a paper and a loaf of bread, I found Caxton filling her water tank. I made myself known to Lesley and Joe and we had a good chat before they set off for Bollington and I went back to Sanity.

This afternoon has seen the weather deteriorate somewhat, though nothing like as much as forecast. Nonetheless, it is still very cold and we’ve been glad to keep busy inside the boat.