(2025-08-06) Random ToRead Paragraph app

want to build Random antilibrary/ToRead-Paragraph app

• all my ebooks - first
• my unread instapaper

UI: web page that displays a random paragraph, with source info

Aug06: Use calibre to turn all my epubs into txt files! Each paragraph is a "line", have double-break between each.

• use the left-sidebar to list Formats and pick only epub to convert (because converting PDFs would be too slow right now)
• ooh, I could also use some of these as a corpus if I return to playing with Markov Chain bots
  • also, the idea down below of ignoring super-short paragraphs would make sense in such bots, too...

Aug09:

• made code/py3/other/randomBlurb folder, create venv
• generate list of books into text file; won't use db, just read random "line" from file
• pick a book at random from list, then get a random line (that's over 64chars): print line and book-path.
• right now just command-line that returns text. Which I could live with, but it's tiny/ugly to read.
  • duh, change Terminal window profile, now it's white text on blue background.
  • no smart wrapping, just wraps mid-word. Ah, textwrap() library!

Oct20: add similar function for random paragraph of a downloaded/Liked Instapaper article.

Oct26: updating my booklist

Oct27: tweak logic to randomly pick

• Instapaper vs book-list
• if book-list, pick randomly from 3 lists

Oct29: turn into webapp, so I can hit it from phone/tablet when I'm in the house and my laptop is open. But run into problems.