A lot of shouting has been made from the modern propaganda boxes known as social media, the news and classic TV broadcasts. Elon Musk and Donald Trump have engaged in what can only be described as a silly, and very likely staged, ridiculous slap fight. Epstein narratives are making their way into the news again as Los Angeles moves from forest fire season to riot season. Meanwhile, Congress has become functionally illiterate as they continue to vote for bills that they do not read. Bills that are ushering in an era of magical wrong answer language machines (a.k.a “AI”) permeating their way through state and local governments. There are a lot of distractions out there, so it’s important to understand why it’s all most certainly propaganda and surveillance narrative.
I’ve been using Stack Overflow, and other Stack Exchange sites, for over fourteen years. During that time, I’ve both asked and answered over 80 questions, with some overlap of providing answers to my own queries. Even when I was younger, I limited my questions to things that were truly difficult problems I was stuck on. The site has provided some great insights and has helped me tackle difficult coding issues. Recently, the amount of questions submitted has gone into massive decline. A few weeks ago, I used the site to ask questions about a very difficult problem I was facing, which involved Python and Qt using PyQt bindings. The comments I got were condescending. Even as I provided more information and fully reproducible examples, I was told to further condense my questions before they were eventually closed and deleted. Stack Overflow is no longer the website I once enjoyed using.
Hogwarts Legacy is a game built upon the world of Harry Potter. It takes place long before the events of the famous J.K. Rowling series. You, as the main character, are a new 5th year student at Hogwarts who must catch up to the other students while also working with Professor Fig to deal with a mystery surrounding goblins and poachers. It’s a game that does an amazing job of immersing the player into the world of Harry Potter, but it also reuses many of the familiar mechanics of open world games. The game is a total mixed bag, with some of the artwork and world building fitting beautifully, while other aspects just felt crammed into an existing game engine. The story is mid-tier, and much of the dialog is pretty awful. It’s a game I put down for a few months, but I did eventually finish it.
A few years ago, I built out a home theater system, after not having a TV for nearly a decade. Even after leaving my life of minimalism, I still just watched movies and shows on a regular desktop monitor or laptop. I was surprised at how difficult it was to get HDR support working on Linux, and how limited my options were. For years, I simply used Windows 10 and the VLC media player to play videos with HDR and high quality audio. Although true HDR is now possible on Linux, it’s still not entirely straightforward and took a little bit of work. This guide explains how to setup mpv media player with HDR on KDE Neon Linux, but should be adaptable to other Wayland based setups.
Odin Sphere is a platforming role-playing game originally released on the PS2. I played the Leifthrasir PS4 remake of this adventure with its rich story, beautiful artwork and breathing animation. I’ve played a couple of other Vanillaware games, but Odin Sphere is one of their earliest classics I missed out on back when it was originally released. The artwork is incredible, although the action did get a little bland. At just around 37 hours, the rich and complex story seemed to go well with the casual gameplay.
Years ago, I donated most of the physical books I had to local libraries in preparation for moving out of the country. While abroad, I switched to reading books on a tablet device as a way of staying minimalistic. In the fall of 2021, I purchased my first e-ink reader: A Kobo Mini. Although it was new old stock, the reader was already past its support life when I purchased it. I’ve read over a dozen books on it in the past three years, but this small e-reader is starting to show its age. Momentarily, I tried an Amazon Kindle, which turned out to be a horrible mistake.
I ended up replacing the Kobo Mini with a PocketBook Verse Pro Color. It had to be ordered from Europe since it’s not available in American markets. It’s a great little reader, and I’ve already finished six books on the device in the first two months I’ve had it. In this post I’ll go over the Kobo, the issues I ran into with Amazon products, and my current thoughts on the PocketBook.
I’ve talked about how making moral purchasing decisions likely doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in this world, but I am still going to do it anyway. I’ve been meaning to donate to several open source technology and alternative media groups. These are small contributions in the overall scheme of things, but I hope they provide some value to each of these organizations.
I like to keep backups of things other people just leave “in the cloud,” (which is really just some private corporation’s computer). In the past, I’ve used eReader software on tablets or phones. I wanted to create a book quote bot that would post random highlights from novels I’ve read. In order to do so, I first had to write tools to convert book highlights into usable formats. Bibliobunny is a Python application I wrote to parse notes from Amazon Kindle and Google Play note formats into JSON. It can also load those JSON files into a sqlite database, which can be used to post book quotes to a Pleroma server.
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