blueduck

Heh I meant coffee or tea

Thanks for sharing! It’s a thing I don’t quite understand but I enjoy reading about characters with different experiences. Books can be mirrors or windows

The more I travel (37 countries on four continents) the more I realize everyone is the same. For me, it’s like a mini-version of the overview effect.

Everyone has a hand wrap (pita, taco, wrap, sandwich).

Everyone has their customs that bleed into public life (religious, secular, religious-cum-secular)

Everyone has to take care of children

Everyone has a grocery store

Everyone likes to drink a hot liquid out of a mug. Everyone likes to drink a cold liquid out of a glass

Everyone has their pockets of disengaged youth who lash out at society, “normalcy” and the status quo

it’s not a weird, scary world. We are all people. We all live here. The content of my pita might be different from what’s in your taco, but it’s basically the same thing. The difference between my town and one a few kilometers away is not that much larger than one on the other side of the world. We are all people living our lives.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built is a cozy novella by Becky Chambers. I enjoyed the setting and the main characters experience. I think they are NB but female presenting. Part coming of age, part Walden’s Pond. Worth a read if you like robots, solarpunk, determination

Sunward by William Alexander is similar in vibes (cozy, robots, far future) but moves to space. Our main character has to save her found family and decide what’s most important to her.

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo is Buffy the Vampire Slayer in book form. There’s some longing but not much romance.

Mister Magic by Kiersten White is a modern retelling of IT. Friends experienced some trauma as kids and have all chosen to deal with it in their own ways. They must come back together as adults and Figure It Out ™️

AudioBookShelf + Prologue (iOS)

I ran ABS + Plex for a while, but the latest major release from Prologue broke Plex libraries and it was faster to switch to ABS than it was to wait for a patch.

Performance is comparable with ABS, but sessions are stored on the ABS side so client switching is easier than it was with Plex

The loaner canes are wooden and known safe since TSA sourced them. Basic operational security

They scan the passenger’s cane and then return it

The good news is that WaT has a satisfying conclusion to most of the arcs presented in the first five books. New arcs are started, and they’ll be addressed in the back five.

I think the five books are a satisfying whole, especially if you read the novellas

Similar to how the US started enforcing fines for late arrivals of airplanes. So the airlines just extended the “duration” of their flights to include the expected delays and now they’re “99.9% on time”. You can see this in action when the pilot says “well we’re waiting for something before we leave. It’ll be another 15 minutes but we’ll still get you there on time.”

Highly recommend the audiobook version of Project: Hail Mary. You really get a lot more out of the experience. Plus Ray Porter is awesome

Oathbringer can feel like a slog after Words of Radiance.

Unfortunately WoR is by far the best book he’s written so everything else is just a slight disappointment.

Rhythm of War is very good at setting up Wind and Truth… but fails to be entirely satisfying on its own.

The good news is you won’t have to wait years between books, so I can feel like one smooth ride

Big fan of the series by the way. But the pacing of the overall series has its issues

I read Robinson Crusoe a few years ago. Man… the 18th century racism and white superiority was tough to stomach.

Just stated the Bobiverse this week. I’ve finished books 1 & 2. Interestig stuff. Sort of like The Expanse but handwaves the tech in a way that doesn’t disturb the storytelling.

I’m torn on finishing the series or getting into my TBR list:

1. Elita by Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum
2. The Everlasting by Alic Harrow
3. The Antidote by Karen Russell
4. Atmosphere: A Love Story by Taylor Jenkins Reid
5. Buckeye by Patrick Ryan
6. Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig
7. Culpability by Bruce Holsinger
8. The Devils by Joe Abercrombie
9. Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
10. The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo

Oh, I also want to look into using a tailscale exit node to use a proton vpn wire guard route so I don’t have to switch between two separate VPNs

So much has been going on

I moved recently and had to change ISPs. I went from 2 Gbps symmetrical fiber to 90/3 Mbps satellite behind CGNAT.

Fastest place to get the WAN cable into the house was through the attic and into my guest room / office. But that caused some serious heat and noise issues.

Ran some structural Cat6, installed new electrical outlet, put in some keystone jacks, wired a new patch panel, then moved the rack to the basement.

Bought and installed a UPS which has already saved me twice in a month.

Up speeds were too slow and the high latency to the satellite constellation was causing issues, so I spun up a small VPS. But that means I have to sync content back to my local.

I’ve been wrestling with rsync for over a month… fiddling with flags to get the best results. I think I finally settled on a config yesterday and the service and timer are working well

CGNAT is messing with remote access, so I set up cloudflare tunnels. But the tunneling is not well suited for streaming. I was only getting ~100 Kbps on remote connections. Ran some iperf3 testing over tailscale and was slightly better.

My preferred audiobook app Prologue released a major update to v4.0 which broke Plex libraries on launch, so I had to quickly pivot to AudioBookShelf.

To achieve remote streaming and access for Prologue, I had to explain Tailscale set up and create new user accounts. Only halfway through my user base. Not looking forward to explaining it to my parents

Finally, I’m trying to set up Claude to run on my server rather than my locked down enterprise laptop. That’ll allow more tooling access like git rather than before when I was spending a lot of time downloading and uploading files manually. I need to figure out how to keep my session open. I’ll probably run tmux inside a docker container then run claude inside the tmux window. Hopefully that works

One dimension:

Willingness to share Liberties with other people

Far Right = Ayn Rand

Far Left = some guy who just wants to live in a van down by the river and smoke weed all day

You don’t wear an undershirt with your tees?

No helper audio to indicate the difference.

a different narrator, for example, would REALLY help

Yeah I listen to audiobooks and the interweaving plotlines with similarly named characters is confusing

Just finished The Will of the Many on Monday and started Strength. There’s a lot going on in this second book and I’m only 10% in

I migrated from GoodReads to Hardcover.app and I really like it