Love & Rockets & Claude

Today, I bought a fairly large Humble Bundle of Love & Rockets comics. I then tried using Claude to help me download and organize the bundle, with mixed success. So I thought this would be a good topic for a blog post, since it allows me to talk about my two favorite things at once: comic books and tech.

Love & Rockets

I’ve been reading Love & Rockets, on and off, since the early eighties. I’m pretty sure the first I issue I bought was #2, from 1983. I think I have most of that original run, through to issue 50. (That was magazine zine, in black and white.) I think I also have the first ten or so trade paperbacks, from the original run of those. After that, things get a little fuzzy. Here’s a bibliography from 2021 and a How to Read Love and Rockets article that was last updated in 2024, both from the Fantagraphics site. I think I probably have all of the volume 2 run (comic-book size, early 2000s). I think I have all of the New Stories run in my Comixology library. (That one was done in a larger “book” format, rather than the magazine/comic format of the earlier volumes.) And I didn’t have any of the current volume 4 run, which I think is back in the original b&w magazine format.

And, in terms of what I’ve actually read, I know I’ve read all of the volume 1 run, either in the original format or the collections (and probably both, for the earlier issues). And I’m pretty sure I’ve read all of volume 2, in the original comics format. I haven’t ready any of the volume 3 (New Stories) stuff yet. Which is why I haven’t bothered buying any of volume 4.

The Humble Bundle includes 57 items, and as usual with Humble, they don’t really do any of the organizational work for you. After getting some help from Claude (more on that later), I see that it has 15 volumes of the L&R library. That might be the whole series to date. It also has 17 issues of volume 4, which is probably all of that to date too. And then it has… a bunch of other stuff. The Hernandez brothers have done so much work over the years, and it’s appeared in some many different formats, it’s really hard to figure out what you’ve read and what you haven’t, past a certain point. But, just from a reading perspective, for me, I now have all of volume 4 in a DRM-free format that I can read whenever I want, so that’s a big win. And I think I probably now have most (or all?) of volumes 1, 2, and 3 in the L&R library volumes, so that’s convenient.

Claude Cowork

So where does Claude come in? I thought there might be a few things it could help me with:

  1. Humble doesn’t give you a simple text-format list of the items in your bundle. In the past, I’d copy and paste the text from the bundle page into Notepad++, then do a bunch of frenzied deletion until I wound up with a simple list. So I thought Claude might help there.
  2. Downloading all of the items in a bundle is always a pain. There’s are various ways to help out with that, but I had some hope that maybe I could just point Claude at the download page and say “grab all this stuff for me.”
  3. After downloading the stuff, I usually spend some time renaming files and organizing stuff into sub-folders. I thought Claude might help with that too.

So here’s my actual experience with all that, starting with the simple task of trying to get a plain-text list of the books in the bundle. First, I tried giving Claude the URL to the main (public) web page for the bundle, and asking it to scrape the list of books are reformat it for me. That didn’t work, as apparently Claude is blocked from browsing the Humble site. (Looking at their robots.txt file, I guess that makes sense, and I appreciate Anthropic/Claude for respecting that.) So I then copied the text from the page myself, pasted it into Claude, and asked it to make me a list of the books. It did a good job of that, so that was one thing done.

In terms of trying to get Claude to help me download the books, that was a bust. I tried getting Claude Cowork to do it for me, but again there was the robots.txt exception. It did then generate a Python script for me that should have allowed me to download the books, but (long story short), I couldn’t get it working. So I gave up and used the “bulk download” option on the Humble download page, which succeeded in downloading most (but not all) of the files. So I then asked Cowork to look at the downloaded files, and the list it had made for me, and tell me which ones I’d missed. And it did a good job of that! So that saved a little time.

So then, having all 57 items in a single folder, I talked Cowork through doing a few things for me. First, I created a Markdown file in the folder with the list it had generated. I asked it to go out to the web and create a revised list, categorizing the various books in the bundle into groups, and adding publication date and some other summary info. It did a pretty awesome job there, creating a well-formatted Markdown file with headings and tables, separating the Jaime volumes from the Gilbert volumes, filling in publication dates, and including short summaries of what’s in each volume. I then also had it rename the files to look nicer, e.g. “pennycentury.pdf” to “Penny Century.pdf”. It did a really good job with that too. I also had it separate out all of the L&R library volumes into a sub-folder, and put the volume number at the start, so “Penny Century.pdf” became “08 Penny Century.pdf”. I did a bit more fiddling around there, and now I have a pretty well-organized collection of books, where I know which ones are which, rather than just 57 badly-named PDF files.

So that’s all pretty cool. I asked it to do one more thing for me, and that didn’t work out too well. One of the files was, for no particular reason, an EPUB instead of a PDF, so I asked Cowork to convert it into a PDF. It took a lot of spinning to get there, but it eventually did. But the resulting PDF was basically unusable. I may come back to that at some point, since I have other EPUBs that would work better as PDFs or CBZs, and I’ve done some work on that already. (I don’t think I’ve ever written a post about that. Maybe I will, when I get back to it.)

So, at the end of the day, I think I have a better idea about stuff where Claude Cowork can help me out, and stuff where it’s going to be mostly useless. I think I might point it at some of the other stuff I’ve downloaded from Humble over the years, and let it clean up and organize some files, in cases where I haven’t gotten around to it. And also ask it to create a nice summary Markdown file, the way I did here.

Future possibilities

There’s one other thing that would be useful, but that I haven’t tried. It would be great to have a way to automate getting all of the books added to my Goodreads account, and tagged appropriately. It would also be cool to have it create a Goodreads list with all of the books. But I’m about 99% sure that Claude won’t be able to automate that. If it can’t even read the Humble pages, I really doubt it’ll do work on the Goodreads site for me. I could probably mess around with it, but I’m not sure it’s worth it. I know there’s a Claude add-in for Chrome that can do some interesting stuff, but I use Firefox, and I don’t want to have to go through setting up Chrome right now. I could also try one of the fancy new AI browser tools, like Dia or Comet or something, but I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole right now either.

Maybe I could get Claude to create a CSV file that I could import into Goodreads. Hmm, that might be worth trying. But maybe not today. It’s fairly warm out today, so I should probably go out for another walk, and stop wasting time in front of the computer.

Dracula Pro

I’m one of those weirdos who experiments with fonts and color schemes and application themes more than I probably should. For the most part, I do actually stick with some sensible defaults, but I keep coming back to it and messing around. Sometimes, this is just a way to procrastinate and avoid real work. But I think there’s a fine line between procrastination and “sharpening the saw.” My eyesight is bad enough at this point that even a small improvement in legibility can help me out a lot.

So this week, for some reason, I got on a “playing with themes” kick again. I’m not even sure what kicked it off. But my focus this week was the Dracula theme. The basic free version is available for quite a few apps! I first started using it with git bash, the version of bash that comes with Git for Windows. That was quite some time ago. Dracula was included with the default themes there, and it was easier on my eyes than any of the other defaults. I’ve seen it included here and there with other apps, but hadn’t paid much attention to it.

But, again, something drew my attention to it this week, and I got curious about the paid Dracula Pro version. It costs $80, which seems like a lot just for a pack of themes, but they throw in some other stuff too. After some dithering, I decided to go ahead and pay for it. I haven’t seen a lot of reviews of it, so I thought I’d write one up here.

I’m not specifically a “dark theme” or a “light theme” guy. I lean more towards light themes, so paying for a pack of mostly dark themes doesn’t really make much sense for me, but I found Dracula to be more usable than most other dark themes, so I thought I’d give the Pro version a try.

After you pay for it, you’re directed to a Gumroad page where you can download a zip file. It’s a big 750 MB file, which surprised me a bit. Most of that space (about 600 GB) is the audiobook version of the creator’s book, 14 Habits of Highly Productive Developers. I think maybe they should have put that in a separate zip file, but I guess it was simpler this way.

I’ll walk through the contents of the zip file here, with some comments on what I’ve tried so far.

  • As mentioned above, there’s a content folder with copies of the ebook and audiobook for 14 Habits of Highly Productive Developers. The ebook is available in English, Portuguese, and Spanish. EPUB and MOBI versions are included for each. The audiobook is available in English and Portuguese, in MP3 format. I haven’t tried reading/listening to any of it yet, but I did copy the EPUB to my Kobo. I’ll probably compress the MP3s into a single M4B file and copy it over to my iPhone at some point too.
  • Next, there’s a design folder, with some info about the color palettes that I guess would be useful if you were designing a theme for a new app and wanted to use the Dracula Pro palette.
  • There’s a fonts folder, with five fonts, all of which are already available for free. So it’s useful to have them all together in one place, but it doesn’t add any value really. The fonts are Cascadia Code, Fira Code, Inconsolata, JetBrains Mono, and Victor Mono.
  • There’s an icons folder, with custom icons for a bunch of different applications. I don’t see much point in messing around with icons. I guess some people like doing that, but to me, it seems like a lot of work for little gain.
  • Then there’s the themes folder, which is basically what you’re paying for. It includes themes for 21 different apps. I’ll get into some details on that below.
  • And last is the wallpapers folder. There are a bunch of files here, but they’re all basically the same wallpaper design just in different sizes/resolutions, and with slightly different color combos.
  • I should mention that the description of Dracula Pro says that it comes with a “bonus screencast,” but I don’t see that in the zip file, or any reference to it in the email receipt.
  • I’d also mention that the description on the website says “Your license covers multiple computers with activation on up to 3 devices.” Based on that wording, I was a little worried that there would be some kind of half-assed activation software included with the package, but there isn’t. (Not that it would even be possible to enforce that for most of this stuff, but I’m glad they didn’t try.)

So that’s a bunch of stuff, and it’s well-organized, but it’s up to you to decide if it’s worth $80 or not.

There are seven variants of the theme, six dark and one light. The main dark theme is called Dracula Pro. The light theme is called Alucard. the rest of the themes are all named after various vampire-adjacent characters (Buffy, Blade, Morbius, etc). It’s cute. So far, I’ve only messed with Dracula Pro and Alucard. The other dark themes seem to be minor variations on the main Dracula Pro theme.

Here’s what I’ve tried out, and what’s worked for me and what hasn’t:

  • I’ve applied the Visual Studio Code theme on my home and work computers. It’s distributed as a .VSIX file. (The free Dracula theme is also a .VSIX file, available in the VS Code extension marketplace.) Since the Pro VSIX file isn’t freely available, it’s not in the Marketplace and needs to be installed manually. And it won’t sync between computers like the Marketplace extensions will. So that’s a bit of a pain, but not a big deal. It’s working well for me, and I think I’ve going to stick with it.
  • There are no themes in the pack for the regular Visual Studio product, which was a bit of a disappointment. The free Dracula theme is available in the VS Marketplace (here), so I’m not sure why they didn’t create a variant for the paid theme. Honestly, though, for VS 2026, the “Cool Breeze” theme (one of the included default themes) seems to work really well for me, so I’m sticking with that anyway.
  • On my Mac, I tried the Dracula Pro and Alucard themes for the Mac Terminal app.  Both are fine, but I don’t do that much work in Terminal on the Mac, and was happy enough with the default theme.
  • For Windows Terminal, I imported the Dracula Pro theme, and I’ve decided to use that as my new default for git bash and Ubuntu tabs, but I’m leaving the PowerShell default as-is (the “Campbell” theme), since I think Dracula Pro doesn’t work as well with PowerShell.
  • I tried Dracula Pro and Alucard in Notepad++, but have had some issues there. I won’t get into details here, but I might not bother going further with that. (Or I might, if I get bored and want to mess around with XML files for a while…)
  • There’s not much else in the way of themes that I want to try. My main text editing environments at this point are Visual Studio, VS Code, Notepad++, and Dynamics AX 2012, which isn’t customizable at all. Terminal windows, for me, are mostly through Windows Terminal and sometimes Mac Terminal.app. So this is covering most of my bases.

As to fonts, I’ve been reviewing my font settings too, and for now, I’m trying to standardize on Cascadia Code. I was already using that for a lot of stuff anyway.

So that’s my review of Dracula Pro. Was it worth $80? Is it that much better than the free version? I don’t know. But it was a good opportunity to review all of my font and color settings and try to make things a little better, so I don’t regret it.

movie and TV complaints

I have a note in Obsidian (originally from Evernote) that I wrote up in 2022, with some links I was going to use to support a blog post I was going to write, complaining about various issues with modern movies and TV. And I never got around to writing it. I was looking at it today, and was going to just move it from my inbox to my archive folder, but decided that actually writing the post might be more fun than starting on my taxes. So here we are. (And yes, I actually had the note sitting at the bottom of my inbox folder for four years.)

Now, plenty of other people have pointed out the stuff that’s bothering me, so this post is mostly just going to be a collection of links. If I’d actually gotten around to writing it in 2022, it might have been more detailed.

My first point of contention is sound. I find myself turning on subtitles a lot lately. Now, I’m fairly old and have a fair degree of hearing loss, so some of that is just me. But some of it is not. I don’t generally need subtitles for Tom Baker era Doctor Who, or old episodes of Murder She Wrote.

Here’s my first link: Here’s Why Movie Dialogue Has Gotten More Difficult To Understand (And Three Ways To Fix It). This is actually a pretty detailed article, and I don’t have much to add to it.

Next link: Why We All Need Subtitles Now. (Not much new there, but still interesting.)

Next complaint: picture. Everything is way too dark these days. I’ve actually given up on a few TV shows and movies, just because the picture was too dark and I couldn’t figure out what was going on. I can fix the audio problem by turning on subtitles, but there’s usually no good way to fix this problem.

I just recently finished watching the last few episodes of Stranger Things, on Netflix. While I loved the show, this last season has gotten a little too dark at times. John Oliver called this out briefly on Last Week Tonight: “Loved The Ending Of ‘Stranger Things,’ By The Way — Very Brown.” (And that reminds me: I need to read some of the articles I bookmarked about the Stranger Things finale, now that I’ve watched it, including this one by Linda Holmes from NPR.)

Anyway, here are a couple of articles I saved about this:

And the last complaint for today: length. Movies are all too long these days! I only have one link for that one: Why Are Movies So Long Now?

I worked my way through the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies a while ago, and they where glorious: None of them are over 90 minutes, and most of them are closer to 60 than 90. The dialog is perfectly understandable, and the picture is great. (Assuming you’re watching the restored versions. If you’re watching a random version on YouTube, you might be getting a good version or a crappy one.)

So now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, I can finally move that note to the archive folder, and get on with my day. (Though I might still try to avoid starting on my taxes for a while longer.)

 

 

one more Towers of Hanoi experiment

OK, after my last post, I was going to spend the rest of the day watching the last episode of Stranger Things, but I got the itch to return to my AI experimentation, so I did. Specifically, I decided to try my idea to upgrade to Copilot Pro and build the app again from scratch with a different model. The end result can be found here. I set the model to Claude Opus 4.6 (high) and worked through it.

Things went much more smoothly than they did the first time (when I was using Haiku 4.5). Still, the end result wasn’t quite as good as the one produced with Claude Code.

I’ve got a 30-day free trial of Copilot Pro, so I may experiment with it some more over the next few weeks. Of course, I have a paid Copilot sub available to me from work too, so I really don’t need a personal sub, if I’m just using it to mess around a little. So I don’t think I’ll keep the personal Pro sub.

For personal experimentation, going forward, I’ll probably use my Claude Pro sub, since I’ve paid for that for a whole year.

Oh, and one more thing on the Towers of Hanoi: I’m finding myself slightly coveting the wooden puzzle shown on that episode of Astrid. I’ve looked around on Amazon and Etsy, and there are a lot of versions of it out there, but none of them really grabbed me. So for now, I think I’ll stick with the virtual versions.

more on Claude Code and GitHub Copilot CLI

Since my last post, I’ve been doing more experimenting with both Claude Code and GitHub Copilot CLI. I’d been having trouble coming up with any good ideas for little projects to work on, but I recently watched an episode of Astrid, in which the main character is working on a Towers of Hanoi puzzle. I’m pretty sure I had a little BASIC program for a Towers of Hanoi game running on my TRS-80, a very long time ago. I hadn’t thought about it much since then though. But it seemed like a good little old-school challenge I could use to spend some more time with AI coding tools.

I started out with Claude Code. My methodology was to start out by writing a “requirements.md” file and placing it in a new folder. I then launched Claude Code in that folder and asked it to generate a “PLAN.md” file, with a detailed plan to create the application. I then iterated through the steps in the plan, letting Claude do most of the work. That worked really well, and I had a running, bug-free, application in just about an hour. Checking my usage, I saw that I’d used just a third of my session limit and 4% of my weekly limit. And I was using whatever the default model was, probably Opus 4.6? You can see the whole project here, if you want.

After that, I tried the same experiment with Copilot CLI. That didn’t go nearly as well. The generated PLAN.md file wasn’t bad, but it was a good bit less detailed than Claude’s. And, while I got to a “finished” application pretty quickly, it had a fair number of bugs in it. I spent a little time working through those bugs today, and I have a finished application now, though it’s still a little rough around the edges. In terms of usage, I’m at 50% of my monthly max (though of course I’m on the free plan here). For the model, I used the default, which was “claude-haiku-4.5”. I think that may account for a good bit of the difference I saw between Claude and Copilot here, though it might not be all of it. I think that, if I paid for a Pro plan and switched to Opus 4.6 here, I would have gotten results similar to Claude. I’m not sure though.

So where to go from here? In both of these cases, I had asked the AI to create a C# console app for the game. I’m considering going back to the Claude one, and asking it to rewrite the user interface using a TUI library, like Terminal.Gui or Spectre.Console or maybe Consolonia. I haven’t played with any of these, but I’ve been curious about them, so that might be interesting.

I’ve also considered asking Claude to add a SPA project to the solution with a web-based user interface. I could either tell it to use a specific technology for that, or leave it open and see what it does. That might be fun.

I could also bite the bullet and pay for the Copilot Pro plan, and then repeat the exercise from scratch in Copilot with a better model and see how that works. And/or take the PLAN.md file from the Claude implementation and let Copilot use it. It would be interesting to see how much of a difference a good, detailed, plan makes.

Well, I’m off today for Presidents Day, and I’ve already spent a good bit of the morning messing around with this stuff. Maybe it’s a good time to have lunch, and then switch to just relaxing for the rest of the day.

Mermaid, Copilot, Claude Code, Project Euler, and some other stuff

Once again, I’ve been meaning to write up a bunch of stuff here on my blog, but just haven’t gotten around to it. In my last post, from about two weeks ago, I blogged about the nightmare that was Main St overnight construction. Well, the good news is that there’s hasn’t been any more over the last couple of weeks. The bad news is that they haven’t been able to do it because the weather has been so bad. We had a big snowstorm, followed by very cold temperatures, so a lot of the snow is still on the ground. I won’t get into all of the inconvenience that’s caused. I have other stuff I want to blog about. Let’s just say that a combination of stuff, staring with the construction, then the weather, has really put a dent in my productivity and equanimity this year.

So on to the next thing. One thing I’ve actually managed to learn and enjoy playing around with this year has been Mermaid, a language for creating diagrams programmatically. I’ve always hated creating diagrams with drag & drop tools like Visio and Lucid. I’m just not good at it. I never get things quite right. With Mermaid, I just describe the diagram in code and let the system render the diagram. It might not always look as pretty as a carefully handmade Visio or Lucid diagram, but it’s good enough for me!

I stumbled across Mermaid via a reference to it in David Sparks’ Obsidian Field Guide. I learned it by reading a book called Creating Software with Modern Diagramming Techniques, which also discussed the C4 model, which is a simple framework for thinking about how to use diagrams to describe a given computer system. None of this was really planned; it was just serendipity, but it turned out to be fun and useful. I’d recommend looking into it, if you have to create diagrams, and like the idea of doing it through code.

Topic number three: AI-assisted programming. I’ve been messing around with GitHub Copilot for a while. I passed an exam on it late last year. I’ve been using it at work, for my C# work. (A lot of my work is in AX 2012, using X++, so it’s not easy to use AI assistants for that.) I’ve found Copilot to be a mixed bag, in practice. I do use it, but it’s often more trouble than it’s worth.

I keep hearing good things about Claude Code, though. We’re not allowed to use it at work (sigh), but I eventually felt I had to give in and try it. This article about Microsoft not just allowing, but encouraging, their employees to try Claude Code was the thing that really pushed me to dive in.

So I’ve spent some time this week trying to figure it out. First, I had to sign up for a Claude Pro subscription, at $20/month. (I actually decided to go all-in and pay for a full year, at $200.) That money was another thing that was holding me back with Claude Code. Since I already have access to Copilot, I didn’t want to pay for another AI subscription. But, yeah, I gave in.

The next stumbling block for me was knowing that Claude Code is oriented more towards Linux and Mac developers, vs. Windows. It relies on Node.js and npm, which are… not my favorite tools. GitHub Copilot is integrated right into Visual Studio and VS Code, so you can get started with it quite easily, if those are the tools you’re using. (And, for me, they are!)

After some weeping and gnashing of teeth, I finally decided to set it up in WSL on my Windows 11 laptop. That wasn’t too hard. I initially used it in conjunction with a repo I had on my Windows drive, and which I was trying to work on in Visual Studio 2026. But that’s not a great way to work. Claude Code needs to be able to build and run your project, and if I’m doing that on the Windows side, it’s going to leave Claude crippled.

So, then, I took the leap and set myself up for .NET development under WSL. (That, also, wasn’t too hard.) So the setup I settled on is, basically, opening a WSL prompt in Windows Terminal, changing into my project folder (now in the WSL filesystem), running “code .” to open my project in VS Code, then running “claude” from the prompt to set up the Claude Code environment. (Using VS Code from WSL is described here.) So I switch back and forth between Claude Code running in the terminal and VS Code.

Once I started doing that, I was surprised to see that I could chat with Claude Code from a chat window in VS Code. Honestly, I’m not even sure how that happened, since I didn’t install the Claude Code extension in VS Code. I’m going to have to figure that out at some point.

But my main way of working was to chat with Claude in the terminal session, let it change stuff in my project, then review it in VS Code, and build and test it there. (I did let Claude build and test it a bit, too. That worked.)

The project I choose to use for my Claude Code experiment was my Project Euler repo. (I last messed around with it back in 2023.) I’ve found that Claude Code can easily solve Euler problems by just typing “implement a solution for problem XX” and then letting it go. That’s probably because so many other people have solved the problems, then blogged about them. So Claude probably has a bunch of solutions and information about the older problems in it’s training data, so it’s all baked in. But I wanted to use trial and error, and actually learn some stuff, so I figured out how to prompt it to work with me rather than just doing the work itself. Part of that was explaining my intentions in my CLAUDE.md file. (I’m not sure how much that helped, but I think it did.)

So, at this point, I know I’m only using about 10% of the power of Claude Code. Maybe less. There’s a lot more I could try. Small steps for now. I’m making progress!

Main St construction, shopping for earplugs

It’s been a rough week. I was surprised on Monday by some exciting new overnight construction work, happening right outside my window. Here’s an announcement about it, on the Somerville web site, and here’s a page with some more information. The work is supposed to be happening overnight, from 8 pm to 5 am, and might continue through to the end of March.

I’m truly hoping that this isn’t going to be going on every night between now and March 31, but I’m honestly not sure. The last time they did something like this, it was emergency work, and they got it done in less than a week. But this seems like it might be a much longer project.

I’ve been spending a lot of time this week trying to get my head around this, and figure out how to deal with it. So far, I’ve been through four nights of it, and it’s been pretty bad.

For now, I’m looking at various options for plugging up my ears and blocking out the noise. I’ve got some old earplugs, that I’ve used in the past, and I’ve been using those this week.

I’ve got some Leight Plugs, like these ones, that I’ve had for a long time. (I think I found them in my parents’ bathroom when I was clearing out their house.) They don’t really work for me. Too small. And I have some Flents Quiet Please earplugs, which I’ve also had for a long time. I bought those myself, and have used them in the past. They work OK for me, but they’re not perfect. (And apparently they no longer make the ones I have. They make something similar, but it’s not quite the same design.)

So I’ve been shopping around, looking at other options. I ordered a couple of things from Amazon, and they arrived yesterday. First, I got some Macks silicone earplugs. I haven’t tried them yet. The silicone earplugs are a bit different from the foam ones. With the foam ones, you compress them a bit, put them in your ear, then let them expand. With the silicone ones, you roll them into a ball, push them into your ear, then mold them to fit. (I think.) I’m curious to see if they work better than the foam ones.

I also bought these Alpine SleepDeep earplugs. They’re reusable plastic earplugs. I tried the M/L size last night. I got a good fit in my left ear (which is the mostly deaf ear), but a not-so-good fit in my right ear. I had to push it in maybe a bit too far to get it to stay in, and I woke up with maybe a little wax issue this morning? I might try again tonight. Or try the small one in my right ear. Or maybe just give up on them for now, and go back to the Flents foam ones for now.

And of course I’ve looked at other options. Happy Ears look kind of interesting. But they also look like they’re maybe a gimmick.

And there are some high-tech options. I remember reading about the Bose Sleepbuds some time ago, and being interested in them. Bose discontinued them, but the rights to the product got sold off and they’re now sold as Ozlo Sleepbuds. I’m curious, but maybe not curious enough to spend $275 on them. The Anker Soundcore A30 earbuds are similar. They sell for $200 on Amazon. (Here’s an article from ZDNet that covers both these and the Ozlo Sleepbuds.)

I wouldn’t mind trying out either of these high-tech solutions, but I feel like I should give the low-tech options a fair chance first. And I feel like maybe just sticking a wad of putty or foam in your ears might be a better solution for loud construction noise than high-tech earbuds. Those might be better for masking/minimizing sounds that aren’t quite at the “jackhammer outside my window” level.

I guess I’m just going to experiment with a few options for the upcoming week and try to figure out what works best for me. I’m really worried that the next couple of months might be a bit of an ordeal.

Evernote to Obsidian – point of no return

I’ve been chronicling my journey from Evernote to Obsidian here on my blog; here’s a link to my last post about that. I thought I’d write a post today to mark the “point of no return” with this project.

This morning, I deleted all of the notes from my Evernote account, and canceled my paid account. I didn’t completely delete my account; I now have just the free version, so if I need any of my old notes in the next week or two, I could probably log in and pull them out of my trash. But, for all practical purposes, I’m committed to Obsidian now, as my “trusted system.”

I think I’ve got Obsidian set up the way I want it now, but there’s some stuff I want to clean up and/or tweak. First, I’m still trying to clean up all of my images/attachments that came over from Evernote. I initially put them in separate sub-folders for each notebook that I imported from Evernote. Now, I’m trying to consolidate them into one top-level “_resources” folder. As I’m doing that, I’m cleaning up file names on them a bit. A lot of them have names like “img_1234.jpg” or “snapshot.1.jpg”, so I’m trying to rename those to be a bit more unique and descriptive. I initially tried a plugin that automatically renamed them to match the name of the note that they were referenced in, but that plugin seemed to cause some issues, so I gave up on that. Now, I’m going through them a few at a time. I’m not renaming all of them; if they’re already named with a date/time stamp of some kind, or anything else that’s reasonably unique, I’m leaving them be. This is still probably overkill, but it’s also giving me a chance to look at some of the older notes and clean them up a bit too. Eventually, I’ll be done with that.

I’m also experimenting a bit with how I’m going to record my day-to-day activities and task completions. I’m using the tasks plugin, and that’s working well so far, as a replacement for Evernote reminders. To record day-to-day activities, in Evernote, I used to keep a year-long task note, named “Tasks 2025” (or whatever year it was), with a bulleted list of ongoing projects and simple to-do items at the top. On any day where I was working on stuff, I’d create a date-stamped list of stuff I worked on that day. That list would get pushed down below the master project/to-do list when I was done with it, so, by the end of the year, the note would be a reverse-chronological list of everything I’d done that year. (Well, not everything, but you know what I mean.)

In Obsidian, I was initially going to keep doing that. But then I thought about trying daily notes instead. I started that on January 1, and it’s working OK so far. But I have a bit of a hybrid system now, where I’m using a combination of three notes to track things:

  1. A “tasks” note that is just a bunch of task queries, to show me what’s due today, what’s due in the next week, and a master list of all pending tasks.
  2. A “Tasks 2026” note, with that master list of tasks, projects, and simple to-do items.
  3. A daily note each day, with the list of stuff I did that day.

So that’s probably too much stuff. I should probably consolidate the note with the task queries and the note with the project (etc) list. But I haven’t settled on how I want that to look. Either way, I think I’m on the right track. I just haven’t converged on exactly what I want yet.

I still have a couple of friction points with Obsidian. Sync is occasionally not as reliable as I’d like it to be. I guess I need to get used to looking at the little sync status icon in the lower right corner of the screen and not exiting Obsidian until it’s green. (Evernote sync had been very reliable lately, and I’d been taking that for granted. I guess that was because Evernote had really transitioned to an online-first experience, while Obsidian remains a local-first experience. The Evernote client, I think, was constantly saving stuff to their back-end; the local database was probably being treated as just a cache, really.)

Most of the other friction points are just little things that I need to get used to, or find ways to work around. I’ll get there.

New Year’s Day 2026

Well, here we are, with another New Year’s Day post. I’ve been doing these posts since 2008 or thereabouts. It occurs to me now that I should create a category for these posts, so I can see them all together. So I just did that. The category is NYD, and I have added it to all (or most) of my previous New Year’s Day posts.

Health

2025 was a bit of a rough year. Honestly, it didn’t start well, and it didn’t end well. I started the year sick, and I ended the year sick. There were a good number of healthy days in between, of course, but right now I’m fighting a cold (or flu or whatever) that’s been on and off since Thanksgiving. And I had my second bout of COVID in 2025, in July. That was unpleasant.

Travel

I don’t think I left NJ at all in 2025. No trips to NYC or anywhere else. I didn’t even go too far within NJ. I finally closed my E-ZPass account and returned my tag last month. I hadn’t used it since 2019.

Weight

I started the year at 165 pounds, and ended it at 167. (It’s gone as high as 169, but hasn’t stayed that high for more than a day or two.) I’d hoped to keep it at 165, but I haven’t quite managed to do that. In 2024, I went from 160 to 165, and the year before that, from 150 to 160. So I’ve cut my yearly increase from 10, to 5, and to 2 pounds. So that’s progress!

Exercise

It’s kind of funny that Apple Fitness doesn’t have a fancy “year in review” function the way so many other apps/services do. Going into the Health app, and looking at some yearly graphs, here’s what I see:

  • I’m averaging around 500 move calories per day over the last year.
  • I’m getting an average of 7800 steps in per day.
  • I’m averaging 28 minutes per day of exercise.

I also just downloaded an app called Fitness Wrapped, which is supposed to generate a year-in-review, but it requires payment before showing me the 2025 summary. It looks interesting, but I don’t know if I want to pay for it.

Either way, I think I did fine on exercise in 2025. It seems to be down from 2024 (550 move calories and 45 minutes exercise per day), but it’s fine.

Work

We didn’t do performance reviews this year, but I did get a small raise. It was slightly bigger than 2024’s raise, but smaller than 2023’s, for what that’s worth.

In January 2025, I transitioned to a new boss. (My previous boss is now my boss’s boss, so he’s moved up a bit.) The new boss is someone I’ve worked with for years, and I think we have a good relationship. It can be hard to tell, when you don’t have a formal performance review or any other structured review, but I think I’m doing OK.

Learning

My 2024 performance review included a goal (from my previous boss) that I pursue a SAFe Certification. I wasn’t that enthusiastic about it, but I figured I should give it a try, so I did a bunch of e-learning around it, including a long series of videos on O’Reilly Learning. The cert exam is pretty expensive, and I never got an OK to go through with it, so I dropped it at some point and concentrated on other stuff.

I also mentioned in interest in pursuing an AZ-204 certification in my New Year’s post for 2025. I did actually go through with that one, and two other Microsoft certs. I passed the AZ-900 in April, the AZ-204 in June, and the GH-300 in December. So I’m a bit proud of getting all of that done.

This year, I’ll need to renew the AZ-204, if I want to keep my “Azure Developer Associate” status. I have until June to do that. And the renewal test is simpler than the initial one; you can do it without all of the Pearson OnVUE nonsense. So I’ll probably do that.

Books

Now onto some fun stuff. My Goodreads 2025 reading challenge shows me as having read 60 books. I think it was actually more like 50; the challenge picks up stuff from my Kindle that it probably shouldn’t, but I’m not going to try to clean that up.

I finished reading A Memory of Light in January, so that finished up the Wheel of Time series that had taken up so much of my time in 2024. I didn’t take on a similar project in 2025; I just read a bunch of random stuff, really.

  • I read a few Robert A. Heinlein novels that I thought I hadn’t read before, but which I discovered that I had read, probably in my teens. So that was interesting.
  • I was going to read a few Kurt Vonnegut books, but I see I only read one, Breakfast of Champions. Maybe I’ll get to a few more this year.
  • I managed to finish The Stand, by Stephen King, which I’d started in 2019, and then abandoned. That’s a very long book, and took a good chunk of time to get through.
  • I got on a Star Trek kick near the end of the year, and finished the Rise of the Federation series. I also started the Prey series. I’m almost done with that. (I was going to try to finish off the last book yesterday, but didn’t quite make it.)
  • I didn’t do a lot of self-help reading this year. I did finally manage to read How to Win Friends and Influence People, but that’s about it.
  • And I didn’t do much book reading for professional purposes. I read one random book on AI, and started another. I’ll probably mark that second one as “abandoned” on Goodreads and give up on it. I wasn’t getting much out of it. At this point, I guess I’m mostly doing all of my professional learning in video form, via O’Reilly and Pluralsight.
  • My comic book reading this year was pretty random. I read through a few volumes of Greg Rucka’s Lazarus series. I’m enjoying that, and should get back to it soon. I read all three volumes of Ed Brubaker’s Velvet series. I really enjoyed those too.

For next year, I’d like to maybe make some progress on my backlog of Dresden Files novels, Laundry Files novels, or maybe Discworld. (I said the same thing in last year’s post, and didn’t do any of that. So maybe in 2026.)

Summary

2025 felt like a “let’s just get through this” kind of year. I don’t blog about politics much, but… geez. And my health has been up and down. I’m hoping 2026 will be better, on several fronts, but I’m not sure it will. I’m pretty sure I’ll get through it though. I’ll end with links to a couple of funny New Year’s Day comic strips: Over the Hedge and Lio.

Christmas 2025

I’ve been looking back at old journal entries in Day One, and posts on this blog, and it looks like I’ve been at least a bit sick every Christmas so far this decade. And this year is no exception. I’ve been having issues on and off all month. I thought I was getting better yesterday, but I had trouble sleeping last night and feel worse today. So, today, I’m in a state where I haven’t had enough sleep, my nose is stuffed up, and my stomach is bothering me.

So all that is to say that I’m not going to be very ambitious today. Rest and recuperation. Plenty of fluids. All that.

Meanwhile, I’m still working on my Obsidian setup. I’ve started watching the Obsidian Field Guide, from David Sparks. I paid for the full $99 “plus” version. That seems like a bit much, but I’ve been listening to his MPU podcast for years without supporting it, so I might as well toss some money his way.

It’s pretty good, though it’s a couple of years out of date at this point. (It was made in 2023.) For instance, he covers Dataview rather than Bases. I’ve worked my way through about half the course. I’ve found it oddly relaxing. There’s something about learning a certain kind of thing… It’s hard for me to put my finger on just what it is. Maybe it’s just that I’m not going to have to take an exam on Obsidian, like I have with the other stuff I’ve been learning this year. (See previous posts on  AZ-900, AZ-204, and GH-300.) Anyway, I think I’ve going to spend some more time today working through the videos. It seems like a dumb thing to do on Christmas, but I don’t have enough energy for anything else, really, and I’d rather do this than watch TV right now.

I’m aware that, with something like Obsidian, you can go down a rabbit hole, where you’re spending so much time learning stuff and tweaking your setup, that you don’t actually get anything useful done. But I think I’ve got a pretty workable system figured out at this point, and I’m probably only a little less productive with Obsidian now than I previously was with Evernote. Hopefully, I can soon get back to the point I was at with Evernote, where I’m not thinking about the system too much, and I’m just using it effectively.