One of the things I wish I had done years ago was create a catalog of things I have read, viewed, or listened to. A bibliography of things I have digested over my lifetime. In order to mitigate that I am currently working on creating a catalog of my library. If you are old like me it brings up mental pictures of a large wooden cabinet with many an index card filed away. Well the one I am working on is electronic. My system is a simple bash script. I can run the script enter an ISBN number, the script goes out to the Internet, grabs the bibliographical information and insets into a Bibtex file.

What is a Bibtex file and why do I use it over something else?

First and foremost a Bibtex file is a structured plain text. I have been using computers since 1980 and programs have come and gone but plain text format is still here. Anything you want to keep for years and go back to should be plain text. I remember the days when Word Perfect had the market locked down and their format was the standard. Now Word Perfect is a small segment of the market and the file format they use now is not compatible with the format they used back in the day. Does anyone remember Lotus 123? Binary file formats come and go. So for data that you may want for twenty to forty years should be in a file format that is based on plain text.

Bibtex while an old file format is still used today by many of bibliography managers. Is it the best format? Maybe, maybe not but it is very convenient to use because so many tools can read it, including humans. It common use is the reason I chose the Bibtex file structure over something else. I could be replaced in the future. But even if it is, since the file is plain text it would only take a simple SED command or AWK script to put it in the right format. Off the soapbox.

Now to the script.

 #!/bin/bash
 str='https://www.ottobib.com/isbn/'
 str+=$1
 str+='/bibtex'
 xidel $str --extract //textarea >> ~/Documents/Latex/isbn.bib

The script is very simple the first part of the script creates an url. The url is for www.ottobib.com. You can provide the site with an ISBN and it will give you the bibliography entry for the matching ISBN in your requested format. The second part of the script uses xidel to extract the bibloigraphic information from the web page and appends it to my Bibtex file.

Please feel free to use at your own risk.

Zettelkasten ID bibliography-2020-05-20-1140

To my dismay I can not find a terminal based audiobook reader. I can find plenty of music and even video players that are terminal based but nothing for audiobooks. I was talking to Roman, he is my black lab (think Mr. Peabody with black fur and without the glasses), about this and he suggested using one of the terminal players for music or videos. The problem is having a way to save your place in the audiobook

After much review we decided to use MPV. MPV has a switch --save-position-on-quit this allows you to resume playback where you left off if you quit the program and start it up later. The switch has one limitation it can only save the position for one file at a time. If you use that switch on the playback of multiple files it saves only the quit position for the last file played.

There are two switches I tried --use-filedir-conf which looks for file-specific configuration files in the same directory as the file being played. I tried this option first but I could not get it to be consistency applied. Sometimes it worked as intended and sometimes not. I am assuming the issue was me and not MPV. I may go back later and try to see if I can get this to work.

The second approach I tried was using the --config-dir=. This approach is the one that worked for me.

The first thing I did was create a directory in my current MPV config directory called book1. Next, I created a subdirectory in book1 called watch_later. This is the default directory that MPV will use to store the current stopping point. The new configuration file only has one line in it save-position-on-quit. This file is saved in book1 with the name mpv.conf Whenever this configuration is called it will save your position in watch_later.

Next I created a bash script the started MPV using the configuration file I just created. The script starts MPV with the specified configuration file and plays a playlist I created for the book called book1.m3u

 #!/bin/sh
 mpv --config-dir='/pathto.config/.config/mpv/book1' /pathtoplaylist/book1.m3u

If you listen to more than one book at a time, just repeat this setup for book2 and then for book3 till you get to the number of books you listen to simultaneously.

When you finish a book and want to start a new book just edit the book1 playlist and remove the old book and add the files for the new book.

This configuration allows me to start and stop playing my audio book and have MPV remember which file I left off at and where in that file I left off at.

Zettelkasten ID mpvaudiobook-2020-05-14-0744