Dekoboler

A work-in-progress CLI tool to extract highlights from my Kobo. Replaces my half-baked Dekindler now that I’ve changed reading devices.

It was a chance to play with Laravel Zero and extract exactly what I’d like from the Kobo’s SQLite database.

Don’t get too excited, because this is pretty much the whole thing right now:

❯ php dekoboler browse

 Which book?:
  [0 ] Anything You Want: 40 lessons for a new kind of entrepreneur
  [1 ] Blood in the Machine
  [2 ] Clear Thinking
  [3 ] Hands of Time
  [4 ] How to Do Nothing
  [5 ] How to Live: 27 conflicting answers and one weird conclusion
  [6 ] Immortality
  [7 ] Julia
  [8 ] Parable of the Sower
  [9 ] Revolutionary Spring
  [10] Self-Compassion
  [11] Skinny Legs and All
  [12] The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi
  [13] The Art of the Novel
  [14] The Artist's Way
  [15] The Book of Doors
  [16] The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation
  [17] The Left Hand of Darkness
  [18] The Murderbot Diaries
  [19] The Unbearable Lightness of Being
  [20] Ursula K. Le Guin: Five Novels (LOA #379)
  [21] What Feasts at Night
  [22] What's Our Problem?
  [23] Witch King
  [24] World Wide Waste: How Digital Is Killing Our Planet—and What We Can Do About It
 > 4

 What do you want to do with clippings?:
  [0] view
  [1] save
 > 0

---
title: How to Do Nothing
---

> What the tastes of neoliberal techno manifest–destiny and the culture of Trump have in common is impatience with anything nuanced, poetic, or less-than-obvious.

– 8/17/24 at 3:29am


> Sometimes it’s good to be stuck in the in-between, even if it’s uncomfortable.

– 8/17/24 at 3:34am


> One might say the parks and libraries of the self are always about to be turned into condos.

– 8/17/24 at 4:30am


> And it takes a break to remember that: a break to do nothing, to just listen, to remember in the deepest sense what, when, and where we are.

– 8/17/24 at 4:50am

Why You Shouldn’t Care

• No tests.
• Assumes you’ve connected your Kobo to your Mac and allowed it to connect/mount.
• Prints or saves Markdown in a sparing format that’s hopelessly inflexible at the moment.
• See TODO.

Life Hack

Run php dekoboler copy-database to make a copy of your Kobo’s SQLite database in the project’s storage/app directory.

You can then update config/database.php and point to the copy, and put your Kobo back where it normally lives:

'database' => 'storage/app/KoboReader.sqlite',

TODO

• make database read only!
• figure out where to get read time
• figure out how to approximate page numbers or locations (or chapters?)
• improve reliability of ePub metadata reading
• fetch StoryGraph and Literal book URLs
• fix timezone