Starting off the season by emailing NBC Sports to ask that they please use a monospace digit font for the centered pitch clock countdown so it stops bouncing around.
Continuing what would be my normal complaining about baseball streaming costs, this year is such an improvement:
- $20/mo for MLB.tv Giants. No commercials‽ This is heaven.
- $26/mo for Peacock+Giants. Bad quality video, frustrating app. Easy “no.”
- $85+/mo for anything else.
Unlike macOS, iOS and Linux, Android does not support a CNAME to private domains (in this case a Tailscale ts.net) because its resolver doesn’t request after it encounters one; it just fails. A tad frustrating since it means a significantly more complicated DNS setup just for the one OS.
“AI-free since 1990” is a great tag line for SiriusXM; doubling-down on not doing algorithmic radio is hopefully a long-term strategic success for them. Human-curated just hits differently.
Enclosed is the platonic ideal of an encrypted pastebin: beautiful, performant, scriptable, open source and easy to self-host. It even supports file uploads.
Amazon is removing the ability to download purchased Kindle content, which is the only way to read it on my Kobo or elsewhere. What this means is I will no longer be purchasing (“a license to”–ick) any books by the mostly independent authors who exclusively publish there; just cancelled preorders.
How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying (Dark Lord Davi #1) by Django Wexler ★★★★☆: What a surprise! I went in somewhat blind expecting something softer like his Forbidden Library series and it is quite not. It’s a funny, violent, isekai-meets-Groundhog Day adventure with just the right amount of world building. I normally shy away from fantasy intersecting with our world but it worked well.
I’ve been using my phone for sysadmin tasks as laptops are tough around young kids. Vim keybindings are so good! Significantly reduces the toil of editing on a phone. I want it in every app.
The new year means 20 new books on Standard Ebooks after entering the public domain. Nice assortment this year as well.
My meal kit delivery is arriving 3 days late tomorrow. I wonder what temperature the contents will arrive at: clearly unsafe, of course, but how unsafe?
The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett ★★★★★: Phenomenal fantasy murder mystery. My mental checklist was satisfyingly fully resolved in the last 10%.
send.djazz.se is a convenient way to send ePubs out-of-band to Kobo. Calibre and KoboTouchExtended automate it but the latter’s had a bug for a few releases causing whitespace issues and one of my books snuck through. It was easier to use this from my phone than getting out of bed to grab my laptop.
When Wizards Follow Fools by Andrew Rowe ★★★★☆: More depth to the LitRPG aspects is fun; definitely enjoying the increased understanding of the magic systems.
All the Seas of the World by Guy Gavriel Kay ★★★★★ (Spoilers): Inverted my expectations of lost siblings: strongly heart-warming rather than heart-breaking like Tigana. Loved the depth of lived religious experiences and how certain characters receiving an epilogue comfortably filled in the story.
Arrived yesterday at an airport with less than an hour to departure time with a few checked bags. Barely made it on the plane, however one of the bags did not. Impressed with how fast American Airlines delivered it this morning. I enjoyed tracking it in Find My!
Gitea’s mirroring of Git repositories proves useful with how often legal projects like DRM strippers are taken down. The utility I use to download & remove Adobe DRM is gone but still available on my server and in my backups. Presumably this new tool for Apple Books will suffer a similar fate.
A Brightness Long Ago by Guy Gavriel Kay ★★★★★: Every Kay novel can be summed up as: thorough. This fills in the background of stories past–and works better knowing them–while feeling individually compelling. What rich characters, even the “villain” is once again somehow lovable.
Disquiet Gods (Sun Eater #6) by Christopher Ruocchio ★★★★☆: Informative, interesting and often inconsequential but the world building keeps me going. I really enjoy the universe but again I’m torn by narrator hints of future calamities; this plot device isn’t my favorite.
What a lovely way to do a live record, from mewithoutYou:
The tracks for Live (vol. One) are not listed so that the songs may reveal themselves to listeners just as they would in a concert setting.
Listening through for the first time and it sounds excellent.
Fun look at physical pen testing:
Turns out she didn’t need to do any breaking in at all.
She rode the elevator up to the reception floor without needing a security badge, found the office suite door propped open, walked past a security guard sitting at a desk and straight into a conference room.