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A few months ago, my wife and I moved from the UK to a small caribbean island (Grand Cayman) – she had been offered a 2 year work contract. People from the UK (and I suppose other large countries) don’t comprehend the issues with living somewhere only 40,000 people live… The main one being products and produce for people to consume – it can rarely be produced locally and is instead shipped in from nearby (in this case, Miami).

Postage can also be a major problem – not least that there isn’t a delivery service in Cayman; you have to go to the post office to pick your mail up and if it’s from overseas, you have to pay any applicable import duty.

My wife teaches Law, so she has to read and reference a lot of Law books and keep up to date with the latest cases etc – she also enjoys reading fiction… Unfortunately this means that she needs to buy quite a few books throughout the year. Buying books in Cayman isn’t difficult; but it tends to be fiction and mainstream stuff rather than the latest employment law ‘chart-topper’ (OK – I was kidding about chart-topping)…. And even if you do find the book you want, it’s generally very expensive.

So the other day she was moaning about the problem in that she needs books, but it’s very difficult to get them here, either by post or by buying locally, and I just so happened to mention about the kindle and/or ipad. She looked at it – and realised what it did and decided to take the plunge – we bought a Amazon Kindle!! The price is now fairly reasonable, rather than absolutely stupid (£100 instead of $450+), and there is quite a lot of sources for mobipocket documentsif you’re able to convert them yourself. I’m pretty glad of my/our purchase – and we’re just waiting for it to arrive!

Anyone got any tips for using these things – getting books from cheaper places or converting from other formats? Just leave a comment below!!

This is just a post for others who have the same problem and find my solution through google and more to the point, for my reference in future!!

I’ve had this problem numerous times before, as you do when you mess around with datasets from numerous sources… The quality differs and data formats can cause headaches.

Anyway – I was trying to import data from Amazon into perl, and this had worked fine before, but a particular product description didn’t want to import – instead coming up with the errors;

Wide character in print

Wide character in subroutine

All I want to do is get the text in unicode and convert it, preferably keeping as much ‘quality’ as possible, but ultimately the data should be in 7-bit ASCII.

I searched the web for a quick-and-dirty answer, but to no avail; countless people are out there telling you that it’s unicode and blah blah – there was one useful guy out there suggesting to use the binmode operator; but the downside is that I wasn’t actually writing the data to a file; I was repackaging it as XML data; binmode will only set the file writing mode.

Anyway – to cut a long story short – the best way around this – ie. to process unicode into being ‘just ASCII’ is to use the Text::Unidecode module and then use unidecode on any problem variables that are unicode.

Hope that helps someone and saves a bit of time!

I recently moved abroad, and to keep up with family etc I’ve taken to using skype a lot. It’s worked really well and I think I talk more to my family then I ever did when I was at home.

Anyway – I’ve recently noticed a weird phenomena, which is basically that I’m sat at my PC doing my work and suddenly an IM will pop up on the screen – but it will be part of a conversation I had a week ago. At first I replied to the message thinking the message had just come through but then I realised that if I get a random message I can check it out by scrolling through my chat history and checking if anything has come in for the last 5 minutes or whatever.

However! These random messages can be really annoying and a bit odd!!

To fix the problem – I’ve been trying to figure out whether I can purge previous skype IM conversations – but you don’t seem to be able to do that, you can ‘hide’ conversations but you don’t seem to actually be able to delete them completely.

Anyone have the same problem and/or advice for how they fixed it?! It’s driving me nuts!