The Family Guide

Introduction

From the I'm so old that... file. When we were kids there were 2 and then 3 networks. CBS, NBC and then ABC a few years later. Everything was broadcast over the air and most of it was in black and white. As color broadcasts started to become available, it was a big deal. Sunday night was Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color. The Pattersons were friends of my parents. The husband was an electrical hobbyist and built Heathkit projects in his garage. He was an early adopter of color TV and built his set himself. We would occasionally go to their house and watch something in color. It was a complicated affair. Pat would turn on the set and let it warm up for about a half an hour. It took that long for it to stabilize. Then he would spend 10-20 minutes adjusting the color. Compared to today, it was awful. Flesh tones would be greenish or purplish. The reds were always off. But it was COLOR TV! Very few shows were in color.

The stations only broadcast from about 6 in the morning to about 11PM or midnight. They usually finished the day by running the High Flight! video and the national anthem. The plane is, by the way, a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter. Hott stuff at the time. In the morning, before the actual broadcasting day started. we were treated to a test pattern that looked like this:

That is how I started my morning since I was an early riser. The test pattern allowed technicians at the stations to confirm that their equipment was working and shops to adjust sets. Keep in mind that there was no consumer grade video equipment available at the time. There was no way to generate this image short of it being broadcast.

I find it funny how language elements that entered the vocabulary from the radio and early TV days is still with us. Phrases like "Stay tuned" and "Tune in" stick with us even though actual tuners disappeared from sets years ago.

Local programming filled a good part of the day. Soap operas were the daytime king. They directly descended from their radio counterparts and there was some degree of overlap as TV was slowly adopted by post-war America. Some of the game shows from the era are actually painful to watch. I particularly remember Queen for a Day. Housewives competed to win prizes like a washing machine.

Watching TV

The normal way that we watch TV is with TiVo. It has been a mainstay with us for almost 30 years. The living room TV is configured to open the video connection to a TiVo Bolt when it is turned on. I don't think that more information is needed than that. There is a Mini in Bonita's room and an old Roamio in mine. The Roamio has a much larger capacity than the Bolt in the living room. The content on the Roamio is available on the Bolt and vice versa.

Streaming Services

Discovery+

This has: HGTV and a lot of other shows.

User: lynnmacey@gmail.com
Password: Roundrock123!

HBO Max

This is part of the AT&T phone subscription. We don't have to pay extra for it.

Netflix

This is a general streaming site. It has a ton of stuff including a lot of original programming.

LG TV

This is the set in the living room.

What is all of this stuff?

Ok, I am a digital hoarder. It is a lot like a physical hoarder, but it doesn't leave a mess around the house, it never smells, and it doesn't attract bugs and rats.

The collection falls into several categories. There are books, including audio books, videos that are primarily movies and TV series, documents and pictures. This section is focused on accessing and handling the media rather than on maintaining the libraries.

I will be happy to see if I can find specific titles, movies, TV shows and books if you let me know what you would like.

Using the Resources

Most of the applications are, on the surface, pretty straightforward to use. Open the web site at the included link, login if necessary and start to use the app. If you need a login, let me know.

Audio Books

Sometimes it is nice to have a book read to you rather that loading it up on a reader or cracking open the physical book.

Audiobooks and podcasts are maintained and served by the Audiobookshelf application installed at:

https://audiobook.maceys.net

After logging in, books can be selected to be read or the audio file downloaded.

Documentation and Guides are here:

Documentation Guides

The documentation, and to a large degree the guides, are focused on administering the application.

Books and Magazines

Books and magazines are catalogued in the Calibre and Lazylibrarian applications respectively.

Books

Books can be read directly from the web or downloaded and copied to a Kindle. Reading on a Kindle requires a couple of steps.

Preliminary Setup

The details are still being sorted out in order to make this work seamlessly.

Step 1. Your Amazon Kindle account needs to be set to allow books to be e-mailed from the account that sends them from the application. This is a security feature from Amazon and is actually a good thing so, login to your Amazon account.

Step 2. Navigate to this link:

For some reason, Amazon make setting this hard to find even though making the change is pretty easy once you navigate there. The link below is not account specific. It will work with the currently logged in account.

https://www.amazon.com/hz/mycd/preferences/myx#/home/settings/payment

At the bottom of the page select Personal Document Settings. This will expand to list the email addresses where content can be sent. This includes Kindles, iPads and PC devices.

Step 3. At the bottom is a Section titled Approved Personal Document E-mail List. Click on Add a new e-mail address and add lynnmacey@gmail.com. Content going to your Kindle will come from that address.

There are Two Web Interfaces

There are two web interfaces available, calibre and calibre-web. There are several differences between them. While they share a common name and database formats, calibre-web has a pretty interface, and calibre does the heavy lifting for library maintenance.

Calibre-web

The link to access this application is: https://calibre-web-auto.maceys.net/

Calibre-web understands accounts. You will be prompted to login. Use the provided account.

The main screen displayed when you login will be books in that library. This application doesn't have the ability to change libraries easily, but we can work with that. Pick a book that you want to work with. It will open a window with more detailed information as well as the opportunity to download it, send it to your Kindle of read it through the web interface.

Overall, the interface is pretty easy to navigate. There is a pretty rich menu set that helps to narrow down on what you might want to read. Since this library is relatively small at the moment, it isn't really needed that much. That should change.

The major deficiency in Calibre-web is the inability to add books to a library. To do that you need regular Calibre.

A little searching on the web revealed that it is possible to upload books in Calibre-web. It required that the feature be enabled globally and then also enabled on a per user basis. Only one title can be uploaded at a time so, Calibre is still a better choice to upload multiple books.

Calibre

Calibre is the go to library management app that has been around for a very long time as a standalone application. Fairly recently, someone took the app and put a web wrapper around it so that it can be run from the web.

Since Calibre is actually a standalone app, it doesn't understand accounts. Since it is a security risk to have it available without authentication, it was necessary to put it behind a security application.

Decrypting DRM Protected Books

The files must be on the Kindle in order to decrypt them.

Run the Epubor Ultimate tool. Drag the titles that you want to decrypt from the left panel to the right. They will be decrypted as they are copied. The default output is in EPUB format which is the native Kindle one. It is also possible to output in MODI, AZW3, PDF, TXT or DOCX.

The converted files are located in the user home directory in the Ultimate folder.

Info saved. Manage Authelia: https://akashrajpurohit.com/blog/setup-authelia-for-sso-authentication/

Incoming books are best processed in batches. One of the distributors tends to send the out in groups of 40. This works pretty well.

Open the Calibre app and load the Calibre-tech-work library. This will hopefully be empty. Open the folder with the collection to be processed. Select all and drop them into the work pane of Calibre.

Select off of the titles and process then with the "Extract ISBN" tool. Apply the changes when they it returns. Then do a Download Metadata and Covers on them. Go get coffee, that takes quite a while. When it returns, apply the updates.

Check the results. Ones that are clearly complete can be moved to the permanent libraries. There will be some titles that didn't process because the title/author could not be found. For many this can be edited and the metadata can be downloaded for each title.

Missing covers can generally be extracted. For PDF files, open with the Foxit PDF reader, click on Home->Select and then click on the cover page. Go to Calibre and paste the selection into the cove. For E-pubs, open the title and use the Snagit app to get the image. It will open, Snagit with the selection. Click on copy all to clipboard and then over to Calibre and paste it into the cover.

Titles go to the following libraries by type:

Titles go here

Genre	Library
General fiction	Calibre-Fiction
General Non-fiction	Calibre-library-NF
Technical non-fiction	Calibre-library-NF-Tech
Cookbooks	Calibre-Cookbooks

Magazines

Handled much like books but, they generally need more work with less automation.

After importing the titles, edit the fields as follows:

Field Edition

Field	Format
Title	Magazine Name - yyyy/mm/dd
Author	Publisher
Series	Magazine Name
Number	Issue Number or yyyy.mm
Publisher	Publisher

Magazine name format:

For quarterlies:

12  1  2
 3  4  5
 6  7  8
 9  10 11

Calibre

A quick note on working with Amazon. Amazon has been working to make use of their content outside of their universe more difficult. The relatively portable AZW3 format has been mostly replace with KFX-ZIP which extends what can be done with a title, but also means that moving it around became harder.

Calibre again comes to the rescue. Adding two plugins allows the format to be converted to epub which can be easily handled. The plugins must be manually installed. Instructions are here:

Convert KFX-ZIP to epub & mobi

Complete documentation for them is here:

KFX Conversion Input Plugin