Month: July 2025

reading comics, and (maybe) done with COVID

I took my last dose of Paxlovid today, and got a negative result on a COVID test this morning, so I think I’m over COVID. (Unless the Paxlovid rebound thing hits me, like it did in 2023.) I think I’m probably OK to go over to the farmers market a little later, which will be the first time I’ve mingled with other people in a week. We’ll see how that goes.

Meanwhile, I read a lot of comics this week. I didn’t have enough energy, initially, to read prose, so I stuck with comics. Then, I got on a kick, and kept going. I read a really random assortment of stuff, mostly from old Humble bundles, but from other sources as well.

Here’s a list of most of the stuff I read:

  • American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang
  • Superman: Earth One, Vol. 1-3 (JMS)
  • Vampirella Masters Series Vol. 4: Visionaries
  • Mind the Gap, vol 1-3
  • Angel Omnibus
  • Alex + Ada: The Complete Collection
  • C.O.W.L. Vol. 1
  • Detective Comics 471-476 (Englehart/Rogers)
  • Velvet, Vol. 1-3 (Brubaker/Epting)

All of it was quite good.

I also just bought yet another Humble bundle, this one containing a bunch of stuff from James Tynion IV. Most of the stuff in the bundle is DRM-free PDFs, but there are a couple of oddball items in it.

One book is redeemable only through DSTLRY, which is a company I’d heard of before, but hadn’t really investigated. And another two are redeemable through Neon Ichiban, which I hadn’t heard of, and isn’t live yet. They seem to be related to each other, and are both founded by a couple of ex-Comixology guys. I guess DSTLRY is more of a “publisher” and Neon Ichiban is more of “platform”. Here’s an article from Comics Beat about Neon Ichiban. So now I’ve signed up for a DSTLRY account, and put myself on the Neon Ichiban waitlist, though I’m not really enthusiastic about jumping on any new bandwagons.

Right now, I read all of my DRM-free books with Panels, which has evolved into a really nice app, and seems to be under continued active development. I read all of my Comixology books with the Kindle app, of course. And that’s about it.

I did also use the Comics Plus app this past week to read a book. That app is tied to my library card, and lets you read a fairly impressive catalog of comics, for free. I’m not really sure how the licensing works, but it’s different from Overdrive/Libby. With Overdrive, your library “owns” a set number of digital copies of a book, and you may have to get on a waitlist before you can read something. With Comics Plus, there are no limits. If it’s in their catalog, you can read it. So that’s great. Unfortunately, the user interface for the app is pretty bad. It froze up on me a number of times, and I couldn’t move from page to page without force quitting and going back in. And it doesn’t have good functionality for zooming in, which is something I need.

Somewhere along the line this week, I also started looking at Global Comix, which has been around for a couple of years. I’m pretty sure I’d heard of it before, but hadn’t looked into it. Here’s an article on them from Comics Beat. I’m definitely leery of getting too involved with any digital comics platform other than Amazon/Comixology, as it doesn’t seem like any of them are likely to be around for the long term. I notice that Omnibus shut down last year. They only lasted a year or two, so I’m glad I didn’t get too involved with them. And of course Dark Horse Digital shutting down was a big pain for me.

Well, regardless of all that, I have quite a lot of comics to read. Certainly enough, at this point, that I won’t run out before I die, even if I don’t ever buy any more. It’s interesting (if a little morbid) to start thinking about things from that perspective.

Well, that’s probably enough pointless rumination for today. Here’s hoping I have a nice COVID-free week.

COVID again

I felt like I was getting a cold last weekend, on Saturday. It got worse on Sunday. Long story short, I got COVID again. I took off from work Monday through Thursday. I started Paxlovid on Tuesday. I went back to work today (Friday), working from home. I’m feeling a bit better, but very tired.

My last bout of COVID was in 2023. I’m hoping this one is pretty much done now. I’ll be taking the Paxlovid until Sunday, then I hope I’ll be all better. I’d like to have a “normal” week at work next week. I’ll test myself again on Sunday or Monday. If I’m still positive, then I’ll try to at least work from home next week.

I’m fairly exhausted right now. I had to stay up for an after-hours deployment today, which is now done. So I can go to bed. Of course, it’s Friday night in Somerville, so Main St. is pretty noisy. Maybe I’ll try to watch the rest of the Phillies game before bed.

my new (working) HP Mini

The replacement for my DOA HP Mini PC arrived today. I originally ordered the PC on June 30, and had hoped to set it up over the July 4 weekend, but now I guess I’m setting it up this weekend. (It does, at least, boot up, so that’s good.)

I think there’s going to be some bureaucratic back and forth on it, in terms of the warranty and registration. My HP account now shows the old broken PC under my name, but not the new one. And the serial number on the new one is not recognized. I had the same problem with the serial # on the previous PC. I get the feeling that HP has some weird cobbled-together system, where the serial # on a new PC doesn’t show in their online systems until a few days (or weeks) after it has shipped. So I think I’ll let it sit, then come back and check again in a week or so.

I may also need to straighten out the three-year extended warranty that I bought with the PC. I never got an email acknowledgement about that, and I don’t know if it’ll automatically attach itself to the new PC, or what. So I’m going to give that a week or so too, then follow up.

Here are some random notes about the basic setup and features on it:

  • It works fine with the IOGear KVM that I bought for it.
  • It appears to have an internal speaker, so I don’t need to worry about hooking up external speakers yet. The internal speaker is obviously not very good, but it’s enough so that I can hear basic audio for now.
  • I bought an external DVD burner to use with it, but haven’t tried it out yet.
  • From the specs, I wasn’t sure if it had Bluetooth or not. It does. So I might pair my AirPods with it, at some point.
  • I also wasn’t sure if it had WiFi or not; it does. I’m planning on sticking with a wired connection, but it’s good to know I can use WiFi if I have to.
  • The initial setup wasn’t too bad. It’s been a while since I’ve set up a PC from scratch. It’s definitely smoother than it used to be. Windows pulled over most of my preferences, settings, and even some installed software from my old desktop. So there’s less stuff to configure and install than there used to be.
  • It came with something called HP Wolf Security, which is probably useless, but I guess I’ll leave it installed. I think it might be a subscription thing that expires after a year. I’ll worry about it then, I guess.
  • I’m starting with OneDrive set to download files on-demand, so my 400 GB worth of files are all still in the cloud and the 1 TB drive is mostly empty. I’ve been slowly getting more comfortable with relying on the cloud; I used to have my desktop PC set to keep all of my files local, so I could back them up. But I turned that setting off a while ago, and have been clicking the “free up space” option on some folders here and there, when I start to run low on disk space. So I guess now I’m just going to let that go entirely and trust the cloud. (Maybe I should shop around for some service that backs up OneDrive to somewhere else…)

Overall, I got a bunch of the basics done today, in the background, while I was working from home. I’ll try to get some of the harder stuff done tomorrow.

I’m not sure when I’m going to switch over and consider it my “main machine.” I guess the most critical piece of software I have now that isn’t largely cloud-based is Quicken. So there’s going to have to be a point where I stop using Quicken on my old PC and start using it on my new one.

And I also need to figure out what I’m going to do with my music library. I still have 100 GB worth of MP3 files on my old PC. It’s all basically synced up to Apple Music at this point, so I could just install Apple Music on the new PC and trust that my library is safe in Apple’s hands.

DOA new PC

The new PC I ordered earlier this week arrived yesterday. I was pretty enthusiastic about getting to spend the three-day weekend getting it all set up. (Yes, I know, I’m a nerd.) But, alas, it arrived DOA.

When I hooked it up, it emitted a series of beeps that, according to this article, means that the computer could not detect its CPU. (Which is of course very bad…) I initially tried to contact tech support, but the support page wouldn’t recognize my serial number. I tried figuring out if there was a different way to get through to support, but there really isn’t.

So I eventually gave up and called order support and arranged to return it. I’ve got that all arranged now, but of course everything is closed today, so I can’t drop it off until tomorrow. And they won’t ship the replacement PC out until they get the broken one back, so it’ll be another week, I’d guess, before I can try this again.

One of the reasons I decided to buy a new PC direct from HP is that a lot of the other options I looked at seemed a bit iffy. (Third party sellers on Amazon and eBay, mostly.) I thought I’d be less likely to get a dud if I bought direct from one of the big PC makers. And I thought support would be smoother too. Oh well.

So now I guess I’m mostly going to be watching Wimbledon this weekend. And maybe doing some reading. So that’s not so bad.