Here you’ll find blog posts related to Digital Superpowers.
You can change the pitch of your voice on a computer running a Linux-based operating system for free. It’s quite fun, if not useless.
If you don’t have a Linux OS, you can install one onto a thumb-drive and reboot your computer into it as a demo without touching your hard drive at all.
Go into some text box anywhere on a computer and type some stuff and then press
Ctrl-Backspace. It deletes the entire previous word! This is much faster than repeatedly
pressing backspace or holding it down when making corrections.
Now try Ctrl + left/right arrow keys. This moves the cursor one whole word at a time in any
direction. If you hold SHIFT while doing this, it will highlight the words. Once
something is highlighted, you can just type a replacement, or you can change the size or
font or anything. It’s really nice to do this on the keyboard without reaching for the
mouse because keyboards are more expressive than mice, and faster.
Here’s a whole list of similar text-editing shortcuts:
| Effect | Windows/Linux | macOS |
|---|---|---|
| Delete previous entire word | Ctrl-Backspace |
Option-Delete |
| Delete next entire word | Ctrl-Delete |
Function-Delete |
| Move cursor to previous or next word | Ctrl-LEFT, Ctrl-RIGHT |
Option-LEFT, Option-RIGHT |
| Move cursor to beginning of line | Home |
Ctrl-A |
| Move cursor to end of line | End |
Ctrl-E |
| Move cursor to beginning of document | Ctrl-Home |
Command-Up |
| Move cursor to end of document | Ctrl-End |
Command-Down |
Enjoy that new superpower!
If you work with text a whole lot and want to heavily invest in borderline magical ways of editing text, check out the power-house text editors vim and emacs.
I got inspired to write Digital Superpowers after realizing how straightforward it is to publish books these days. Anyone who can put together a manuscript can head on over to a direct publishing service and have it up and for sale. E-books are particularly straightforward to self-publish, but print-on-demand paperbacks are almost as easy. If you have dreams of getting a book out the door, now is a great time to do so.
Writing and promoting any book is the bulk of the work, but this post is about the toolset I chose to use in preparing my manuscript.
Many authors will find that writing manuscripts in word processors like LibreOffice or Microsoft Word will be a better choice for them. This toolset is fairly obscure and labor-intensive. This post is in general more advanced than most of the content in Digital Superpowers itself.
I wrote Digital Superpowers as a series of text files in reStructuredText. I used Sphinx to process these into the ePub format, then used Calibre for final touches, and finally KindleGen to convert the manuscript into the Amazon MOBI format for upload to the Kindle store.
I chose to use reStructuredText (RST) for a few reasons:
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