So let’s see… The scale has been trending steadily downwards for the last 2 weeks. I’ve been really happy about that, and I’ve stayed almost totally on track for that time period. Friday night we went out for dinner, and Saturday night we went to a BBQ, where I made a few bad choices. I ended up drinking 5 beers, and while I didn’t eat “all the foods” I probably ate more than I should have. This morning I stepped on the scale and it was up seven fucking pounds since Saturday morning. Holy hell! I know its not a legitimate gain, but WTF?!?
I got up late today and fixed us bacon and eggs, but something was wrong with the bacon. It wouldn’t brown and it just tasted really, really bad. I pitched it out and heated up a dinner sausage instead which used up almost my entire day’s worth of calories just like that. I honestly wasn’t really hungry for most of the day, so dinner was just 2 chicken legs and some veggies.
Tomorrow I am going grocery shopping and also need to ship out an item I sold (finally something I made and not just an item to be resold). I’d like to do some sewing which I had planned on doing today, but somehow never got to. Pretty much all I did today was read on my Nook.
Speaking of reading, I have a lot ebooks. A lot of ebooks. I use a program on my laptop called Calibre to keep track of them and keep them organized. There are lots of configurable columns, plus you can create custom columns, but I pretty much keep things to a minimum with title, author, date added, rating, series title, and any tags I’ve stuck onto a title.
There’s nothing I don’t love about this program, but I was really upset with how much work it takes to organize my ebooks even half so well on my Nook in the Aldiko reading app I was using. Don’t get me wrong, I like Aldiko, the price is right (free), and its easy to use, but its just not so great for organizing stuff when you’re super attentive to details and have specific ideas in your head about how things should go.
Enter Calibre Companion. Its a paid app, but at $2.99 its a fantastic bargain for what it does. If you look at the above image, you’ll see a connect/share buttton in the upper tool bar. Matching settings in that menu with settings in Calibre Companion, and you can wireless transfer your ebooks from your computer to your reading device in minutes. That’s not the best part. It’s nice, but its nothing compared to the features that made me fall in love with this app in ten minutes flat.
After connecting the wireless device to the computer via your wireless network, you can select titles, right click, and send to device. When the files are sent over, all your data you’ve added, changed, altered in your files will be sent over into the companion app exactly the same. Your organization on your computer is the exact organization you’ll get on your device. The detail-loving little snot inside of me about died of happiness when she discovered this.
Here’s a few views from inside the app.
 There are several ways you can sort your library, each of which are grouped as seen at left. |
 This shows a grouping by series. Each set of details in a grouping are arranged alphabetically. |
 Not only can books be brought up by series, but a book order can be assigned to them and can be displayed in that order. |
 Individual books can be brought up to show several details. I have a lot of them turned off. |
You can see at the top in the last screen grab is a “Read” option. Calibre Companion does not have a reader built into it, but you can launch the reader app of your choice with a single tap. The only detail you can really change in your library while in the app is whether or not a title has been read yet or not, and the date it was read. You don’t even have to manually update the date read though because Calibre Companion will automatically set the date to whatever the latest date you’ve read the book on. If you started reading the book on June 18th, but finished reading it on July 3rd, the read date will show as July 3rd.
And… suppose you’ve updated the data sets on some of your titles on your computer. How do you update them in your device? Just connect the two with a single tap, and all the metadata will be exchanged and updated automatically. It really could not be any easier and I can’t rave about this app enough. Out of all the money I’ve spent on apps, or on games, this one is by far the best $2.99 I’ve spent. Its worth more than that to me, and I just wish the app’s description and the help pages showed it off better because they really do not do it justice.