Today is the first Friday in June, which means that it is time again to celebrate one of the most magical events of the year, National Doughnut Day. On this day we give thanks for all the joy and happiness that doughnuts have brought into our lives. It is a time to recollect on all the events that have been enhanced by the presence of those wonderful fried rings of dough.

This year National Doughnut Day is particularly poignant for me because I am back in the land of a million doughnut stores: Southern California. Here it seems that there are doughnut stores on every corner, and happily almost none of them are Dunkin’ Donuts. In Illinois there are quite a few doughnut stores, but 90 percent or more of them are Dunkin’. Upon our arrival in California, we stopped at one of the first doughnut stores that we saw, and were amazed to find that the doughnuts here are even better than we remembered. Hooray for good doughnuts!

Celebrate the day by getting yourself a free doughnut from Krispy Kreme, or one of the many other stores that are giving away free doughnuts today.

Recently, I made the jump to an electronic format for my scripture study and other church related reading. Currently, the best format for reading and marking up text on the computer is when it is in the form of a PDF. The LDS church makes most of its materials available as PDFs, but unfortunately that doesn’t include the scriptures, which are only available in various text formats or HTML.

In my quest to find all the standard works — the four books of scripture of the church: The Bible, The Book of Mormon, The Doctrine & Covenants, and The Pearl of Great Price — in PDF, I found that you can get a KJV of the Bible from a number of places (but not the LDS version with the footnotes), and you can get the Book of Mormon (but again, without the footnotes).

That’s when I came across this post on MormonTechie.com. A comment there explained how to download the Church’s HTML version of the scriptures and convert it to a PDF:

This is what I did to get the scriptures into a pdf:

Use HTTrack to copy the online scriptures to your computer. You can find it at http://www.httrack.com/.

You’ll want to scan http://scriptures.lds.org/en/ and under “set options” use the following scan rules:

+*.png +*.gif +*.jpg -*.css -*.js -mime:application/foobar
-*/*listen*
-*/*server*
-*/*jst*
-*/*helps*
-*/*/gs/*
-*/*biblemaps*
-*/*chmaps*
-*/*biblephotos*
-*/*chphotos*
-*/*search*
-*/*options*
-*/*help*
-*/*-*
-*/*/dc/*/**
-*/*/bd/*
-*/*/tg/*
-*/*/in/*

That will leave only the scriptures (no index, dictionary, photos, guides, etc.) in order to make the final pdf a manageable size. Also under limits, set max mirroring depth to 4. That will prevent all the footnotes from being copied. The footnote links in the verses still work, they’ll just send you to the online footnotes in your browser. The other links will move you around the pdf.

That should take an hour or so to download. Then you can use adobe acrobat (or the trial version of acrobat if you don’t have it) to make a pdf of the site that is now located on your hard disk. After opening acrobat hit ctrl shift O and enter the location of the index web page. Select “get entire site.” You can change the font size, and formatting of the pdf you’ll make under settings. It will take 45 min or so for acrobat to make your pdf.

The pdf I made is just under 45 MB. Now I can use my tablet to read my scriptures and save all the ink highlighting and annotating I make (I use PDF Annotator from GRAHL software). Navigating through the scriptures is very quick within the pdf. If you click on a link that is outside of the pdf (like a footnote) it will open your web browser so you can still access that info.

I did this and it worked out pretty well. My PDF is actually more like 17 MB, which is nice. Like the commenter explains, it doesn’t include the footnotes in the PDF, but if you have internet access, then it will link you to the church website. But it is still pretty hefty for most computers and PDF annotators to handle. So I made some adjustments to the layout, and broke each of the books up into separate PDFs that link to each other. Pretty cool. Now I can read the scriptures in the PDF, and mark it up with PDF Annotator or PDF Revu (as I have been doing with the other church materials) to my heart’s content.

Here it is for anyone that doesn’t want to go through the whole process to make it themselves: scriptures.zip (18 Mb)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Another great tribute to President Hinckley from Orson Scott Card.

SWEET NEW METAL DDR PAD

page!

Okay, I know that you are excited, but you’ve got to calm down! Even though this is the absolute sweetest DDR pad that you’ve ever seen you still can’t crap your pants. I know that all you want are some pictures, so here they are:

The pad took me approximately 15 hrs. to build, which really isn’t all that bad. The cost was about $120. If you’d like to build one of your own then the best site for instructions is http://www.geocities.com/ddrhomepad/ This pad is far superior to any other pad that you could buy. It’s just like playing at the arcade!

For anyone who is wondering, my pad works great! I can beat a lot of the maniacs like Hot Limit and No Limit and Japan with no problem. Every button registers everytime it gets hit! It really makes it like playing at the arcade because there is no problem with the buttons not registering sometimes like you get with other home pads. As you can see in the picture I have one of those plastic topway pads. It worked good for a while, but it was so loud that it required some moding. It gets used A LOT and it doesn’t work as good as it used to, but it’s holding up okay. It doesn’t compare to the metal pad though. The metal and the acrylic make it feel just like the arcade! We’ll see how it holds up in the long run since it is getting used here in my college dorm almost 24hrs. a day. As things break I’ll add stuff onto my tips section so you’ll all have a sense for what the most vulnerable parts are.

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The current thread at www.ddrfreak.com that is following the progression of these pads is here

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TIPS

There are a few things that I would recommend to those that are serious about building one of these metal pads. Keep in mind, these are specific pieces of information that I would have liked to have when I went to build the pad. They are just added help that will supplement the info at ddrhomepad’s site.

1. When you are making the 5 metal squares, you have to make sure that the four screws that go into the corners are close enough to the corners that they allow for you to use long screws on the brackets. This would come into play on this step.

2. The cutting of the acrylic plastic was one of the hard parts. What ended up working for me was a skill saw with the fine tooth WOOD saw blade. You just need to go really slow, and put some tape on the corners so that they don’t break off.

- If you finished cutting your acrylic and it doesn’t fit, just use a grinder to trim the edges some. This worked like a charm for me since my dad has a bench grinder that could just shave off the edges a little.

3. I decided that I didn’t want to have a separate controller to select the song so I made a “control center.” This was fairly easy since I used the control board out of and old soft pad that had died. The control center just consists of 4 buttons that are equivalent to start, select, X, and O on the playstation controller.

4. The lights that come on when you step on the buttons were also easy to add since the control board came out of the soft pad. The lights are just LEDs that are sandwiched between the two pieces of acrylic.

5. Another tip for when you are hooking the brackets to the metal squares. I made the mistake of using the same screws for the brackets as I did the top of the pad. This is not good because they couldn’t become flush with the bracket itself. You want to get screws that are like the ones that come with the brackets, but that are longer so that it will be stronger, but still flush. This will make it possible to make the acrylic squares fit better and have a smaller gap on the edges.

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THINGS TO FIX

Here is a list of the things that have gone wrong and broken with the constant use of the pad.

1. The first thing that started happening is the weather striping has started coming out. This is kind of my fault since I didn’t stick it on both sides. I figured that it would hold itself in with just one side stuck, but its started coming out. Once you get your pad all working and ready to go, go back and make sure the weather striping is stuck to bother the piece of acrylic and the peg board.

2. The key to making the acrylic last and not crack is to make sure that it is held in tight. You need to tighten the screws that go through the brackets and the acrylic pretty tight. To stop the acrylic from cracking when you put the screws through it and make it tight, drill holes all the way through first. Then when you put the screws through you can push hard to make sure the entire button gets all compressed together.

More to come….

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I will NOT be keeping up with the thread on DDRFreak. If you have any questions that are specific to my additions to the basic design, then post it at my DDR discussion that is at my site ddr.crispycromar.com.