Shallow Thoughts : tags : sql

View or Reset All Your Firefox Zoom Settings

Firefox's zoom settings are useful. You can zoom in on a page with Ctrl-+ (actually Ctrl-+ on a US-English keyboard), or out with Ctrl--.

Useful, that is, until you start noticing that lots of pages you visit have weirdly large or small font sizes, and it turns out that Firefox is remembering a Zoom setting you used on that site half a year ago on a different monitor.

Whenever you zoom, Firefox remembers that site, and uses that zoom setting any time you go to that site forevermore (unless you zoom back out).

Now that I'm using the same laptop in different modes — sometimes plugged into a monitor, sometimes using its own screen — that has become a problem.

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Removing Bad Autocompletes from Firefox's Location Bar

A priest, a minister, and a rabbit walk into a bar.
The bartender asks the rabbit what he'll have to drink.
"How should I know?" says the rabbit. "I'm only here because of autocomplete."

Firefox folks like to call the location bar/URL bar the "awesomebar" because of the suggestions it makes. Sometimes, those suggestions are pretty great; there are a lot of sites I don't bother to bookmark because I know they will show up as the first suggestion.

Other times, the "awesomebar" not so awesome. It gets stuck on some site I never use, and there's seemingly no way to make Firefox forget that site.

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Hacking / Customizing a Kobo Touch ebook reader: Part II, Python

I wrote last week about tweaking a Kobo e-reader's sqlite database by hand.

But who wants to remember all the table names and type out those queries? I sure don't. So I wrote a Python wrapper that makes it much easier to interact with the Kobo databases.

Happily, Python already has a module called sqlite3. So all I had to do was come up with an API that included the calls I typically wanted -- list all the books, list all the shelves, figure out which books are on which shelves, and so forth.

The result was kobo_utils.py, which includes a main function that can list books, shelves, or shelf contents.

You can initialize kobo_utils like this:

import kobo_utils

koboDB = KoboDB("/path/where/your/kobo/is/mounted")
koboDB.connect("/path/to/KoboReader.sqlite")

Then you can list books thusly:

koboDB.list_books()

koboDB.list_shelves()

shelves = koboDB.get_dlist("Shelf", selectors=[ "Name" ])
for shelf in shelves:
    print shelf["Name"]

What I really wanted, though, was a way to organize my library, taking the tags in each of my epub books and assigning them to an appropriate shelf on the Kobo, creating new shelves as needed. Using kobo_utils.py plus the Python epub library I'd already written, that ended up being quite straightforward: shelves_by_tag.

Hacking / Customizing a Kobo Touch ebook reader: Part I, sqlite

I've been enjoying reading my new Kobo Touch quite a lot. The screen is crisp, clear and quite a bit whiter than my old Nook; the form factor is great, it's reasonably responsive (though there are a few places on the screen where I have to tap harder than other places to get it to turn the page), and I'm happy with the choice of fonts.

But as I mentioned in my previous Kobo article, there were a few tweaks I wanted to make; and I was very happy with how easy it was to tweak, compared to the Nook. Here's how.

Mount the Kobo

When you plug the Kobo in to USB, it automatically shows up as a USB-Storage device once you tap "Connect" on the Kobo -- or as two storage devices, if you have an SD card inserted.

Like the Nook, the Kobo's storage devices show up without partitions. For instance, on Linux, they might be /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc, rather than /dev/sdb1 and /dev/sdc1. That means they also don't present UUIDs until after they're already mounted, so it's hard to make an entry for them in /etc/fstab if you're the sort of dinosaur (like I am) who prefers that to automounters.

Instead, you can use the entry in /dev/disk/by-id. So fstab entries, if you're inclined to make them, might look like:

/dev/disk/by-id/usb-Kobo_eReader-3.16.0_N905K138254971:0 /kobo   vfat user,noauto,exec,fmask=133,shortname=lower 0 0
/dev/disk/by-id/usb-Kobo_eReader-3.16.0_N905K138254971:1 /kobosd vfat user,noauto,exec,fmask=133,shortname=lower 0 0

One other complication, for me, was that the Kobo is one of a few devices that don't work through my USB2 powered hub. Initially I thought the Kobo wasn't working, until I tried a cable plugged directly into my computer. I have no idea what controls which devices work through the hub and which ones don't. (The Kobo also doesn't give any indication when it's plugged in to a wall charger, nor does

The sqlite database

Once the Kobo is mouted, ls -a will show a directory named .kobo. That's where all the good stuff is: in particular, KoboReader.sqlite, the device's database, and Kobo/Kobo eReader.conf, a human-readable configuration file.

Browse through Kobo/Kobo eReader.conf for your own amusement, but the remainder of this article will be about KoboReader.sqlite.

I hadn't used sqlite before, and I'm certainly no SQL expert. But a little web searching and experimentation taught me what I needed to know.

First, make a local copy of KoboReader.sqlite, so you don't risk overwriting something important during your experimentation. The Kobo is apparently good at regenerating data it needs, but you might lose information on books you're reading.

To explore the database manually, run: sqlite3 KoboReader.sqlite

Some useful queries

Here are some useful sqlite commands, which you can generalize to whatever you want to search for on your own Kobo. Every query (not .tables) must end with a semicolon.

Show all tables in the database:

.tables

Show all column names in a table:

PRAGMA table_info(content);

Show the names of all your shelves/collections:

SELECT Name FROM Shelf;

Show everything in a table:

SELECT * FROM Shelf;

Show all books assigned to shelves, and which shelves they're on:

SELECT ShelfName,ContentId FROM ShelfContent;

Show all books you have installed:

SELECT Title,Attribution,ContentID FROM content WHERE BookTitle is null ORDER BY Title;

sqlite> SELECT Title,BookTitle from content WHERE ContentID LIKE "%hamlet%";
HAMLET, PRINCE OF DENMARK|Hamlet
PERSONS REPRESENTED.|Hamlet
ACT I.|Hamlet
Scene II. Elsinore. A room of state in the Castle.|Hamlet
Scene III. A room in Polonius's house.|Hamlet
Scene IV. The platform.|Hamlet
Scene V. A more remote part of the Castle.|Hamlet
Act II.|Hamlet
  [ ... and so on ... ]
ACT V.|Hamlet
Scene II. A hall in the Castle.|Hamlet
Hamlet|

Show all books by an author:

SELECT Title,Attribution,ContentID FROM content WHERE BookTitle is null
AND Attribution LIKE "%twain%" ORDER BY Title;

SELECT Title,Attribution,ContentID,BookTitle FROM content WHERE Attribution LIKE "%Doyle%" AND Title LIKE "%Adventures%";
UPDATE content SET Title="Sherlock Stories 1: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" WHERE Attribution LIKE "%Doyle%" AND Title LIKE "%Adventures%";
    

DELETE from content WHERE Attribution LIKE "%Doyle%" AND ContentID="file:///mnt/sd/memoirs-holmes.epub";
    

Of course, it's a lot handier to have a program that knows these queries so you don't have to type them in every time (especially since the sqlite3 app has no history or proper command-line editing). But this has gotten long enough, so I'll write about that separately.