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.
Slack now allows you to change the default font, which means I no longer need to look at the ridiculous ligatures Lato does for various letter combinations.
404 Media shines the light on VoteRef, a database of (most) registered voters in America along with their addresses, voting history and political affiliation. Terrifyingly easy to go from name to specifics.
The ranked choice voting rounds for the San Francisco mayoral election such a great representation of how it works. I love that you can feel empowered to vote for an unlikely candidate without “throwing” your vote away.
This is a confirmation that your Hulu subscription will be canceled
Baseball season truly is over. Got hit with one month of the latest Hulu rate hike to watch the World Series but my initial cost calculations proved pretty good. Will have to see what it’s like next season.
How Dormant Domains Can Be Weaponized During Events[…]:
CSC researched election-themed domain registrations from January 2023 to September 2024 and observed 59,000 unique domain names that were not owned by the candidates, political parties, or voting organizations.
Just in registration fees alone this feels absurd; to what end is this being done?
One of my favorite Guy Gavriel Kay novels is on sale today for $1.99, The Lions of al-Rassan. It’ll make you cry at the end.
botsin.space shutting down highlights one of the biggest weaknesses of the Fediverse: lack of true portability. That’s a lot of history that’s going to be lost, and probably scores of bots that won’t be updated to point to a new destination.
Ashes of Man (Sun Eater #5) by Christopher Ruocchio ★★★★☆: This series has not shied away from killing off major characters, to say the least, but off-screen at the end was a bit weak; the common failing with this series is the endings feeling like brief sudden pauses. Still captivating world-building action with solid forward momentum. Hard to believe I’m nearly caught up.
Beautiful ad campaign from Mullvad:
At Mullvad VPN, we have a very clear position on marketing. We have a strong policy against paying for reviews, a total ban on working with affiliate marketing, and we never pay influencers.
Pocket Casts has a cool unintended side effect of how it syncs to devices. As it replays my history of subscribing and unsubscribing the list of Podcasts temporarily flashes things I haven’t listened to in years and the various manual reordering I’ve done. Blast from the past.
Kingdoms of Death (Sun Eater #4) by Christopher Ruocchio ★★★★☆: I couldn’t stop. There’s something about the story line and the gradual reveals that makes me really captivated. This was a much harder book to read, probably owing to Hadrian’s experiences. I’m a little confused about the contrast between going down a path with no foresight past this point and earlier books narrator proclaiming some of the visions after this point had happened. I’m guessing it’s a continuity problem, a retcon, or something that’ll be settled in the books in the future. This one ended at a weird point and really did not feel like a conclusion: both unsatisfying and immediate.
The West Wing came out on Blu-ray on October 1st!
Demon in White (Sun Eater #3) by Christopher Ruocchio ★★★★☆: I’m appreciating more the time-skips and forward references but I’m still not entirely convinced it’s going to continue to work. I feel like the end of this book came quickly, predictably and uninterestingly. The plot overall was still fun, and the world-building definitely kicked up a notch. I’m not sure I’ll be reading the rest of the series, given I’m halfway through what’s released so far, but I think I’m happy to have read to this point too.