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How to fix “download was unsuccessful” on Kindle Keyboard and Kindle DX

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This morning I got a notification from Amazon that Jerry’s new book had been released. I had pre-ordered it a few weeks ago and was eager to start reading it. Having a long journey across town from Miami Beach to Sunset ahead of me, Jerry’s Book of Sin would be a great accompaniment.

My trusty old Kindle Keyboard 3G was all charged up, I was ready to leave, but the book had not been downloaded. “Hm”, I thought, “this should have happened automatically”. Was I signed into the correct account?

Yes I was, and to my surprise, the book was showing up correctly under Archived Items. But when I tried to download it manually, all I got was an error message stating that “The download was unsuccessful. Please try again later”.

Several tries later, and without any luck, I remembered a solution that did the trick: fully rebooting my Kindle Keyboard. This trick also works on the DX and other models, even on Kindle Fire devices. Let me tell you how to do it. 

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How to export multiple timelines at once in Premiere

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I recently had the need to encode several audio clips I had edited in Adobe Premiere Pro CS 5.5. That’s easy if you export one timeline at a time, by selecting the sequence, then click File – Export – Media. 

But this principle doesn’t work if you have several sequences that need to be exported. 

An article in the Adobe Forums suggests how to do this using After Effects as an intermediary, but it seemed very convoluted and a total hack. Besides, I don’t have After Effects so that’s not really a solution.

Convinced that there had to be a better way, I had a quick fiddle – and lucky for me I’ve discovered an easy workaround that I’ll share with you here. I’m using Premiere Pro CS 5.5, so I’m assuming it’ll work in later versions too.

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How to create a project for narration on ACX

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I wanted to upload an audio version of my book, narrated by myself, for sale on Amazon, Audible and iTunes. It’s apparently very easy to do using Amazon’ own ACX service. You can even login with your existing Amazon credentials.

When I did that, it all seemed fairly straightforward. There was a Projects Tab at the top, which I assumed is where I’d create a new project and start uploading myself. But that’s not how ACX works. Instead, you search for a book on the ACX homepage, which in turn sifts through Amazon’s catalogue. Only if said book exists can you pick it and start working on it.

That’s fair enough, and it makes sense. If you know how the system works. But even then, in my case, said list only seemed to return books open for auditions on ACX, rather than results from Amazon.com. My own books never came up while I was successfully logged in. They only ever came up while I was logged out. What gives?

As so often in life, there is an explanation for this – but of course it’s not something that’s obvious, nor included in the generous Help Section on ACX.

Eventually I’ve figured it out – and here’s how it works.

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Created in June 2018

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Last month I’ve been flat out writing the last chapters of my book “BROKEN BOWELS – Tales of a Super Survivor“. In total I’ve written a whopping 109.944 words.

Not all of them made it into the final cut mind you, which by the way has an astonishing word count of over 132.000. That’s nearly three times as much as I had originally set out to write.

The Kindle Edition is already available, and now I’m working on creating a paperback version too. All my Patreon supporters get a free copy of the ebook!

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Discovered in June 2018

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WordPress Dev Links WordPress Post Transition Hooks wp_update_post() Function Reference Debugging WordPress Publishing a post on a future date automatically Changing the time and date of new posts  PHP Links How to convert strings to Date and DateTime in PHP PHP DateTime Class Reference  Miscellaneous very good solution for the original Rubik’s Cube very good …

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Discovered in May 2018

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Miscellaneous Discoveries

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Created in May 2018

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This month I’ve decided to start this list at the beginning of the month and add to it as I go along, rather than trying to retrace what I’ve been doing (like I did last month). The latter approach takes forever and is prone to losing something I did in the process.

Starting this list early means I can easily add to it, and even schedule the date of publication. It works great both for scheduling as well as a victory log.

Super Survivor Project

I’ve spent the second half of May writing more of my book, something I’ve taken a break from for over two months. To see where I stand, I printed the whole 400+ pages out and bound them using 1″ book rings (just about fits). The book is definitely coming together, but there’s so much more I want to say. It will probably take me the better part of June finish t.

I gave myself an (already extended) deadline: Broken Bowels shall be released on the 4th of July, which means I need to deliver the final manuscript to Amazon no later than June 30th 2018.

My original plan was to have it all done by the end of March but I had reached a point at which it just didn’t flow anymore. As I later found out it was the premise that wasn’t working for me. The more I thought about it, the less I felt that an account of the events as they happened during my cancer journey wasn’t telling the whole story.

What was fascinating me more and more was the question, “how did I survive this ordeal – both mentally and physically”. And as soon as I started writing with that question in mind, things kept flowing like never before. Hence I’m very happy to report that I’m back in the game, hitting the keys almost every day and I’m very much enjoying it!

I had several very successful sessions that yielded more than 4200 words per day (about 20 A4/Letter pages) and the whole project is becoming more than what I had envisioned it to be when I started it. Here’s what I did in detail:

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Double-sided printing with the HP 4620

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The other day I had to print out a rather large file to sift through. It was about 20 pages long, and being the economically conscious guy that I am, I wanted to print this document double sided to safe some paper.

Turns out my (relatively cheap) printer, the HP 4620, does not have such an option built in by default. However, the included printer driver does allow for odd or even pages to be printed manually. With a bit of thinking and elbow grease, perhaps this is an adventure worth exploring.

But how do we do it exactly, and what settings do we use? Lucky for us both that I took some notes when I did it last time so we can do it again next time.

Here’s how I did it on macOS 10.14 Sierra, but the same steps work fine under Windows 10.

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LAMP Stack for Humans – available as Paperback and Kindle Edition

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Did I mention that my book LAMP Stack for Humans is also available in paperback format?

Actually it has been for several months now, and it slipped my mind to share this news with you. LIfe’s just too busy I guess. Amazon are kind enough to offer it alongside the Kindle edition, so if you want a printed and nicely bound guide on how to build your own LAMP stack, here you go. 

The printed version is a lovely 6 x 9″ (15 x 23cm) large book with matte finish, about 1″ thick and weighs about a pound (413g to be exact). Printed with love in South Carolina as soon as you order it.

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Discovered in April 2018

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Commodore Discoveries A fan of my Commodore teachings, Stein-Ove Bratthammer, has a nice G+ page with some interesting BASIC programmes. TheDuckSun has built himself a remastered version of the Commodore 128 There’s a whole (under construction) website for the project too: http://www.the128rm.com Forum user Unseen has an interesting signature in the this forum post. I reverse-engineered it …

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How to pixelate text in Photoshop

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In this screencast I’ll demonstrate how to pixelate or obfuscate text in Photoshop. I usually use Skitch for such things, but one day it wasn’t working, and all I had to hand was Photoshop – so I hunted around and found that it works just as well. It’s just knowing what to click. Once I …

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Created in April 2018

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It’s been a very productive month for me, more so than I had expected. I must admit that before I started compiling lists of what I’ve been doing with my time I had the subtle feeling of “slacking off” too much. Looks like that’s not the case after all 🙂

In keeping with the Japanese Kaizen movement, I’ll try to write future lists during the month rather than retrospectively. I’ll be so much quicker and won’t take half a day trying to remember where I put what. Without further ado, here’s what I’ve been doing with my time in April 2018:

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How to print a PDF File with CreateSpace

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Last month I’ve printed three books I had a (shady) PDF version of. They were all old Commodore computer books full of good knowledge and have sadly been out of print for decades.

My first attempt at getting hard copies from those was at a local copy shop, who were kind enough to print and bind the files onto US Letter paper for me. While the result looks great, the size of such a document is rather huge. Imagine a 500 page book: it consists of 250 pages printed double-sided, comb-bound on the left. The total cost was $60. Yikes!

Amazon’s CreateSpace service on the other hand can print a book of that size for about $5 plus shipping, depending on the amount of pages of course. I’ve used the service successfully for my book LAMP Stack for Humans and thought perhaps the same principle could be used to print a PDF. 

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Discovered in April 2018

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When I do research, I come across a plethora of interesting links on the internet. I always tell myself, “I really must remember this link”, but then I never write them down or add them to my bookmarks (believe, I’ve tried that once – only to find that my bookmarks were overflowing to a point …

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Created in March 2018

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This month I’ve setup a Patreon campaign so that people from all walks of life can support all my many projects on an ongoing basis. As part of that, I though it might be an interesting idea to give supporters an idea to see what exactly I’m doing with my time, and as a result …

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Created in January / February 2018

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Here’s a retrospective entry in my Creator’s Diary.  The highlight of the beginning of 2018 was undoubtedly the fact that I had no more surgeries to endure in the near future, and was recovering nicely from the most recent one in late December. Although my output was mediocre compared to recent years, I managed to …

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How to create DAZ Character Morphs with Blender

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In this video I’m demonstrating how to export a character from DAZ Studio, apply a geometrical change in Blender, and import that change back into DAZ Studio as a Morph Target.

First we’ll prepare and export a Genesis 3 character (Eva 7) as OBJ. Here are the steps I’m using in the video:

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Podcast: Download (Duration: 23:06 — 21.2MB)

How to run Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 in 2017

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I had some editing to do the other day that, for one reason or another, I wanted to do on my Windows machine. I tried several open-source utilities, but none of them can cut the mustard like Adobe Premiere Pro can.

However, the only legitimate version I have is Premiere Pro CS3, vintage 2007, purchased for good money back then (which I’ve all made back, thanks to a three-day editing job I got for BBC interactive, literally a week after I bought it). Those were the days before Full HD video was commonplace, and way before anyone dared to mention the idea of 4K. But I digress.

So I tried to install Premiere under Windows 10, and to my surprise all worked rather well – until the registration part came and told me that this app could no longer be activated. 

Let’s see how we can bring this version back to live in 2017.

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Handy Keyboard Shortcuts in Adobe Premiere Pro

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Here’s a list of handy keyboard shortcuts for Adobe Premiere Pro. I keep forgetting these little helpers every 6 months or so…  By no means an extensive or complete list, here are the ones that I like using: Timeline SPACE – Playback at 100% K – Stop J – Play 100% backwards (multiple presses accelerates …

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How to fit DAZ Clothing using Marvelous Designer

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In this episode I’ll show you how to use existing items of clothing and re-fit them to a other characters in DAZ Studio, using Marvelous Designer. Although auto-fit does work in many cases, it can also give extremely ugly results, and by having Marvelous Designer re-fit clothing, this can be greatly improved. https://www.versluis.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/How-to-fit-DAZ-Clothing-using-Marvelous-Designer.mp3Podcast: Download (Duration: …

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How to create a turntable animation in DAZ Studio

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Turntable animations show an object or a collection of objects from all sides. They’re usually rendered as a loopable image sequence. The above is such an example of Michael 7, assembled as a GIF image. He’ll keep spinning forever!

Let’s see how we can create something like this in DAZ Studio.

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How to import an object as Shape Key in Blender

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Blender stores Morph Targets as Shape Keys. Those can be accessed and created in the palette that resembles the Flux Capacitor icon (it reads Data when you hover over it).  To store one object’s shape in another one as a Shape Key, do the following: import both objects into Blender SHIFT-select both objects make sure …

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How to fix obstructed Viewport Controls in DAZ Studio

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In this video I’ll show you how to fix the partially obstructed or occluded Viewport Controls bug in DAZ Studio. I’ve experienced this problem when I have the Shader Mixer tab docked somewhere, but it stands to reason that other docked panes also have the potential of causing this bug. https://www.versluis.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Obstructed-Viewport-DAZ.mp3Podcast: Download (Duration: 4:29 — …

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How to create a Bokeh Effect in Photoshop

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Photoshop has an interesting set of filters that let us turn ordinary images into fascinating Bokeh Effects. Those can be useful as a nice alternative for gradient backgrounds due to the elements of randomness they can bring, or for foreground effects akin to those created with plastic cameras. 

The above uses a Bokeh Effect as additional foreground pattern. Let’s see how it’s done.

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Exporting assets from DAZ Studio to Blender (and back)

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In this episode I’ll show you how to export assets from DAZ Studio to Blender and back, at a consistent scale and orientation. The default Blender export preset in DAZ Studio is broken, hence the workflow requires a bit of tweaking and knowledge on how Blender thinks about units and scale (which I’ll also show …

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How to create dramatic lights in DAZ Studio (Iray)

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In this episode I’ll show you how to create a string side light in DAZ Studio 4.9. The default light looks very soft and does not create a dramatic effect, so we’ll see how to remove those first, and then apply our own parametric spotlight. In addition, we’ll add and tweak the default IBL to …

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How to aim left/right in Mass Effect Andromeda

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Ryder goes into cover automatically when you enter cover. However, by default he/she only aims to the right. That’s no good when your enemies are around the left corner.  So how do we change that? If they had only told us during the tutorial, ey? On PS4 and Xbox, it’s the R3 button (i.e. press …

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How to mute the mic when recording a voice over in Premiere Pro

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I recently recorded a quick voiceover in Adobe Premiere Pro CS 5.5, but I ran into an issue for which the fix wasn’t exactly obvious. Here’s the problem: When you mark a track to record some audio and start the recording, the full mix is being played back through your speakers (or headphones). This includes …

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How to open and convert multiple raw images in Photoshop

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Opening several JPG or PNG images in Photoshop is the easiest thing in the world: just select several in the Windows Explorer or in the Mac Finder, right-click to choose Open, and Photoshop brings in each image as a new document.

But when we try the same with raw images, it won’t work: although Photoshop shows us the raw processing dialogue for all our chosen images, and lets us make individual changes, as soon as we hit Open at the bottom, only the current image is opened as a new document.

What gives? How can we open and convert several images at once?

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