Adding books from own library to Kindle

Scenario was that books existed on own PC in .mobi format, but away from home so couldn't connect to PC via USB.

After faffing about with the idea of using a USB stick (no joy), a thought occurred. And worked. This was the process.

1. Upload the .mobi books from the computer to a folder on Google Drive (this could be done with Chrome Remote Desktop, or from the USB stick itself)
2. Set up an Amazon Kindle email address (see https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/email - this requires accessing Amazon account to set up the address)
3. From Google Drive (probably Dropbox works too), email the .mobi files to the Kindle email address
4. Connect the Kindle to wifi
5. Books download onto Kindle

Neat!

Downloading tracks bought from Google Play Music

When a purchase is made (and mine tend to be as a result of credits earned through the Rewards Android app), the question is how to get those files downloaded rather than just in the cloud.

It's actually quite simple. From a desktop machine, go to Play Music, click on the three dots and select Download:

exFAT set up on Ubuntu

Following on from my previous post, I wanted to check drives would mount on Ubuntu. My server isn't fixed yet, so in the meantime I used an Acer Aspire notebook running Ubuntu.

The steps here worked for me, basically

1. Add the repository: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:relan/exfat
2. Update the package list: sudo apt-get update
3. Install the exfat package: sudo apt-get install fuse-exfat
4. Create the mount folder: sudo mkdir /media/exfat
5. Mount the filesystem (replace sdc1 with your exfat partition): sudo mount -t exfat /dev/sdc1 /media/exfat
6. Read and write to /media/exfat to your heart's desire.
7. When you are done, unmount the filesystem: sudo umount /media/exfat

Then I wanted to compare the contents of drives. The command line answer is

diff -qr dir1 dir2 | sort

but in typical fashion I forgot how to make the pipe symbol appear. However, there is a graphical frontend that will tell me what I need to know - it's called Meld.

sudo apt-get install meld
meld dir1 dir2

That worked just fine.

So now all the drives are formatted as exFAT so should be far more interchangeable. And with my new Smart Router coming from BT, with its USB slot, I may just plug one of them in there for access by all.

Server issues and exFAT

A side effect of regularly running out of space on my MBP is that I need to archive files over to my Ubuntu server (program files, lossless music, etc), as well as back up others.

This happens through my running cron jobs, alongside SuperDuper!

As I don't generally leave the monitor running on the Ubuntu box, I noticed recently that SuperDuper! wasn't working (it couldn't find a source drive).

Rebooting Ubuntu showed that power commenced, with the fans running, but a black screen (no text appearing at all) and no lights illuminated on keyboard. ssh didn't work either.

There's clearly a larger issue to resolve there (possibly related to graphics card), but before that I wanted to archive some data before my MBP was out of space.

The server has three internal drives, one of which is 120GB and dedicated to Videos, and another is 1TB for backup.

Also, there is an external 2TB WD drive.

I started with the latter, as ease of plugging into MBP made it the best place to start.

Sadly, it was read only. I realised I'd formatted in Ubuntu and couldn't write to it in OSX.

So the plan was to copy files, reformat and then copy back. Fortunately I had another 500GB drive I could use for this purpose.

Copying was easy (albeit slow, as both external drives were USB connected to MBP). Then, to check the contents were correctly copied, I ran

diff -rq folder1 folder2 > ~/Desktop.diffs.txt

Again, very slow output on this.

Now for formatting, Based on this article, I reformatted as exFAT. This should allow readability on Windows, OSX and Linux (with suitable packages installed). Reformat only took a few seconds.

Next stage, copy all files back, then re-run the "diff" command to double-check.

Then, delete the files from the 500GB drive, reformat THAT as exFAT, and then back up as necessary.

Final stage, remove the 120GB and 1TB drives from server, connect via a caddy to MBP, copy, diff, format and repeat...

THEN fix the server issue!