With a little bit of work, I’ve updated the economist_to_kindle.php PHP script to handle logging into the economist.com’s website with your user-name and password so it can generate a Kindle version again:

economist_to_kindle.phps

With this update, and if you’re a print edition subscriber, you should be able to get this week’s edition on your Kindle again.

Updated 2010/01/25: Several bugfixes, see comments for details.

Updated 2010/07/22: slifox and crosscode have made some great additions to the code and got it working with the Economist.com’s latest site structure. Check out crosscode’s latest version or read the comments for details.

There are several good web sites and programs out there that aim to let you apply Allen’s GTD principals, such as Remember The Milk (RTM), Todoist, Toodledo, Outlook, Google Tasks, and even maintaining a todo.txt. One of my favorite blogs is Lifehacker, which is focused on GTD stuff, and has covered todoist.com and RTM as well as similar sites. They’ve published a book called Lifehacker: 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day and a sequel Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better, that are both fun reads. There’s been a lot of activity around GTD since the book was published, and many websites and apps attempt to provide a seamless way for people to manage their life in a GTD way.

After test-driving a few of the GTD web sites and programs, I settled on one that I’ve been using for 100% of my task management over the last three years: todoist.com. Todoist is a simple, Ajax’y site that allows you to organize your tasks in different projects:

You can nest tasks and projects, prioritize, tag, colorize, and set absolute and recurring due dates. The interface is dead-simple and very quick. In the three years that I’ve been using the site, there’s only been a few moments of downtime. It manages hundreds of my tasks (all prioritized!) with ease. I honestly think I worry less these days, knowing that all of my tasks and projects are neatly organized. Yes, I am often slightly OCD.

However, I had a big concern that Todoist, which now stores 100% of my tasks, may disappeared without a trace some day. Luckily, Todoist provides a simple JSON API for retrieving all of your projects and tasks. With this API, I was able to build a simple C# app (TodoistBackup.exe) that does daily backups of my Todoist data, just in case Todoist were to ever disappear unexpectedly. (What to do with the data is another question entirely, but I’m sure I could deal with a text file until I found the time to write a replacement… ).

The program I created is called TodoistBackup. I am utilizing a C# library from James Newton-King called Json.NET to interface with todoist.com’s API, and save the output into XML. The program is dead simple to use: you simply specify your API “token” (basically a unique ID for each login, so you don’t have to share your username/password), and the output XML file name. For example, this command line saves my tasks to an XML file with today’s date:

TodoistBackup.exe [api token] "tasks-%date:~10,4%%date:~4,2%%date:~7,2%.xml"

The XML looks like this:

      
        
        ...
      
      ...
    

The conversion from JSON to a XML archival format is incredibly easy in C# using JsonSerializer and XmlSerializer attributes. Check out how nice this is:

...
    /// 

    /// Todoist project
    /// 
    [JsonObject(MemberSerialization.OptIn)]
    [XmlRootAttribute(ElementName = "project")]
    public class TodoistProject
    {
        /// 

        /// Initializes a new instance of the TodoistProject class.
        /// 
        public TodoistProject()
        {
            Items = new List();
        }

        /// 

        /// Gets or sets the project's Id
        /// 
        /// Project's Id
        [JsonProperty("id")]
        [XmlAttribute]
        public int Id
        {
            get;
            set;
        }

        /// 

        /// Gets or sets the user's Id
        /// 
        /// User's Id number
        [JsonProperty("user_id")]
        [XmlAttribute]
        public int UserId
        {
            get;
            set;
        }
...

Very clean!

The program and source code for TodoistBackup is available here. Please let me know if you use it!

With the extra 5 hours of reading a week during the bus ride (a half-hour ride to and from work), I’ve been able to finish more books than I would otherwise, as well as keep current with some of my favorite magazines.  I started reading The Economist on and off during college, and I recently took the plunge and purchased a print subscription.  Which is no small commitment, as the best prices you can find for a print subscription are over $120 a year.  You can potentially get a subscription for $77 a year if you’re a student, which is an amazing deal: something that, after subscribing to the print edition for a year, I’d heartily recommend to anyone who qualifies.

I recently stumbled upon something amazing: the current week’s full print edition is available, online, for free: this week’s Economist print edition.  Reading past editions requires a paid economist.com subscription, which carries a decent yearly fee.  But this week’s edition is completely free.  I’m not going to gush anymore over how much I enjoy reading The Economist, but to say, that if I only subscribed to one magazine, The Economist would be it. (I also subscribe to Business Week, Wired and others).

After a lot of research, I also decided to purchase a Kindle 2.  I’m in love with it. It’s so tiny, which is wonderful for reducing the amount of weight in books and magazines I was carrying to and from work before.  I’ve been able to expand the range of books I can read on the bus because some of them (text books, Harry Potter, SciFi award compilations, etc) are just too darn thick to lug back and forth!  My Kindle has a dozen of my in-progress books on it right now.

Unfortunately, as of right now, The Economist isn’t available on the Kindle.  After scouring the ‘tubes, I came across a big customer request discussion on Amazon.com.  Looks like hundreds of people want the same thing.  There are also rumors flying around that something’s in the works from The Economist, but nothing substantial yet.

More scouring found KindleFeeder.com (free for most users), which has a feed for The Economist articles, as well as Calibre, which is a really cool e-Book manager.  Calibre will automatically download the Economist print edition, and convert it to a format for your Kindle or similar reading device.

My searches finally brought me to this post on the blog Fat Knowledge, which was exactly what I was looking for: a PHP script that downloads the print edition from economist.com and converts it to Mobi format, which the Kindle can read.  A table of contents is generated, and full text and images from articles are available.  Really cool!

Since the source was available, I also customized it a bit to my needs:

• emails my kindle (xxx@kindle.com) the resulting .mobi, so I get Thursday morning delivery of the latest Economist (via cron)
• reformatted the PHP a bit, to better help me understand what the script was doing

Original source code from the Fat Knowledge blog is available, as well as my updates here:

economist_to_kindle.phps

After reading The Economist on my Kindle for a few weeks, I do find myself going back and forth between the Kindle format and the dead-tree edition.  There’s something about the magazine format that will probably get me to renew my print subscription for another year or so.  But it’s nice to also have it on the Kindle, especially a day or two before the print edition arrives!

Note: Depending on where you will run the script, you will also need MobiGen for Linux or PC.  The PC version is available from MobiPocket’s /dev/ website.  For some reason, their Developer website no longer links to the Linux version.  I eventually found a random link that has the Linux version on the ‘tubes (though I can’t remember where), so here is mobigen_linux v6.2 build 41 if you need it.

Update 7/9/2009: Amazon announces that The Economist is (officially) available on the Kindle, abeit at the full newsstand price ($10.49/mo) — more expensive than any other magazine available for the Kindle. Do they really expect people to pay full price for a digital edition? The Kindle edition is getting a ton of 1-star reviews because of this — hopefully this sends a message to Amazon/The Economist that they need to lower their price to be more competitive.

Update 1/3/2010: A new version of the script has been posted that uses your economist.com’s login credentials to get this week’s Print Edition. If you are not a subscriber to the online or print editions, you won’t be able to access the website.

nicj.net has a new look. As my coding styles and design preferences sway from year to year, this time around I wanted a cleaner look for the homepage.  From shades of blue I’ve moved to mostly white, with an emphasis on tidyness.  I’ve changed blogging engines as well, from a really old version of b2evolution to Wordpress.

Erica and I still live in Kirkland, WA.  She’s found a job working for the Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS), and we’re making final preparations for our wedding, which is only 5 months away!

I hope to start writing more than once a year.  It’s hard to find the energy to write consistently when work wears you out, but I enjoy posting tidbits of life updates, pictures and random technical musings.  I still have over 2,400 pictures from Yellowstonee to triage (via Lightroom), and will probably share my top 10-20.

Take care everyone.

Last weekend, I asked Erica to marry me (she said yes!).

We’re both very happy and excited! No date yet, but it probably won’t be until spring or summer of ‘09 — Erica has to move out here to Seattle next year and land a job, so we didn’t want to rush things.

Just wanted to share the good news — best wishes to all.

CFLs are recently becoming popular in home lighting, and can provide substantial energy savings over their lifetime. They can replace almost all of your existing light bulbs in your house.

CFLs:

• Use 2/3 the energy of normal bulbs
• Last up to 10 times longer
• Generate up to 70% less heat

They do come at a higher initial cost. However, as I was shopping for CFLs at Home Depot, I noticed coupons from Puget Sound Energy for $2 off (small) and $3 off (large) per bulb, limit of 8 of each size. That saved me (8 * $2 + 8 * $3) = $40 in bulbs, so I retrofitted my entire apartment, 16 bulbs for $32!

After replacing all of the bulbs in my apartment, I am quite happy. Their lighting output is the same (to the naked eye) as the old bulbs. The energy savings are substantial. Before and after wattages (verified with the Kill-A-Watt):

• 1x floor lamp – 140W before, 21W with CFLs
• 1x night stand lamp – 90W before, 14W with CFLs (60W equivalent)
• 3x bathroom mirror lights – 60W before, 14W with CFLs
• 4x dome lights – 60W before, 14W with CFLs
• 6x track lights – 60W before, 14W with CFLs
• Total: 1010W before, 217W with CFLs

PSE charges me about $0.06841 per kWh. (not that I do), but if I ran all of these lights 24/7, I would be spending (1010W * 24 h * 30 days * 0.06841) = $49.73 / mo. With CFLs, this is reduced to (216 W * 24 h * 30 days * 0.06841) = $10.63 / mo. So while that isn’t realistic, as I don’t have all my lights on all of the time, I’m probably saving a few dollars a month.

Cool stuff!

I had been meaning to check it out for a while, so I finally watched An Inconvenient Truth (on my Zune! great for a coast to coast flight) on the way back to Michigan before Christmas. I would definitely recommend watching it, then doing some research on your own afterwards. There is a Wikipedia article with some good references for further information as well.

ClimateCrisis.net has an interesting calculator to determine how much CO2 emissions you produce annually (I’m estimated at about 10.2 tons of CO2 per year, mostly due to flying every month). In an attempt to lower my impact on the environment, I’ve dug out my P3 Kill-A-Watt I bought last year after reading about it on Coding Horror.

The $25 Kill-A-Watt is a sweet little device that you can use to measure the energy consumption of various things in your house. You just plug this into your wall first, then your appliance into it. It shows current volts, amps, watts, kWh, etc.

I went on an energy census of my various electrical devices, and found some interesting things:

Appliances
* Mini refrigerator (average): 20W
* Coffee grinder: 67W
* Toaster oven: 1470W

Fans
* Bedroom tower fan: 25W low, 38W high
* Living room tower fan: 30W low, 37W high, 37W high+oscillation

Lighting
* Bedroom tower light: 140W, 21W w/ CFL
* Bedroom desk lamp: 90W, 13W w/ CFL
* CPU desk lamp: 20W
* Living room tower light: 165W low, 300W high
* Bathroom mirror (3x): 60W, 14W w/ CFL
* Dome lights (4x): 60W, 14W w/ CFL
* Kitchen, living room track lights (6x): 60W, 14W w/ CFL

Misc
* Zune charging w/ iPod adapter: 2W
* Jabra (headset) charging: 0W
* MotoQ (cellphone) charging: 2W
* Alarm clock: 0W

Electronics
* Main computer: 190W
* Shuttle (Media Center) computer: 140W
* 17″ LCD: 45W
* 21″ LCD: 40W
* Comcast DVR: 43W off, recording, or playing
* Xbox 360: 275W @ dashboard, +4W if a 1-4 wireless controllers active
* TV: 87W
* Amp: 72W idle or playing content
* Playstation 2: 29W

Interesting stuff! I was surprised that my 21″ LCD took less energy than the 17″ LCD. The 17″ LCD is older (a year or two), and is also running VGA (instead of DVI on the 21″). Would that be why?

There are other devices that I didn’t quite measure that I’m sure account for a good percentage lot of my electrical usage (refrigerators, microwave, washer, dryer, dish washer) as well. Here’s a good estimator for those appliances.

Tomorrow’s adventure is converting my apartment to Compact Fluorescent Lights (CFLs).