Author: Andrew Huey

Roland-Garros, YouTube TV, and other stuff

I’ve finally talked myself into cancelling YouTube TV. I had signed up for it about a year ago, after (finally) cancelling my cable TV service. So I’m slowly finding my way into the 21st century, at least with regard to video entertainment.

It’s going to be weird giving up the system I grew up with, with all the “OTA” TV channels I’m used to. But I’ll figure it out. My post-work weekday routine used to include watching a combination of live and DVR’d stuff from YouTube TV, generally the previous night’s Colbert from DVR, and the NJ PBS news either live or from DVR. This past week, I’ve been watching Colbert from Paramount+, which is arguably better than watching it via YTTV, since I don’t have to fast-forward through commercials. (I have ad-free Paramount+.) Watching the NJ PBS news is a little more difficult. It airs live at 5:30 PM, so I can watch it streaming via the PBS app, but if I miss it, the on-demand version isn’t available until a bit later in the evening. So I’ve been missing the NJ PBS news most nights. I may need to figure out a better way to watch news, overall.

Of course, right after I cancelled YTTV, I saw an article about the TV broadcast arrangements for this year’s Roland-Garros, which starts soon. Last year, it was on NBC and Peacock. This year, it’s moved to Max, and other WB/Discovery networks. It looks like they’ll be carrying matches on TNT and TruTV, so I’d be able to watch those if I still had YTTV. But I don’t, and Max is the one major streaming platform that I don’t subscribe to. So maybe I need to subscribe to Max if I want to watch Roland-Garros this year.

Maybe I should cancel my Disney+/Hulu/ESPN+ bundle and replace it with the Disney+/Hulu/Max bundle. Why did we let this stuff get so convoluted and expensive? Maybe I should just read more books and watch less TV!

Programming for Dynamics AX 2012 in 2025

Yes, it’s 2025 and I’m still writing X++ code for Dynamics AX 2012. Sometimes, there are hurdles when you have to write code in an almost dead language for an almost dead product, and you’re trying to get information from the internet. I thought I would take a quick break and write a blog post about that.

First, the state of internet search, in general, is kind of rotten right now. That’s well-documented. And when you’re searching for information about an almost-dead product, it gets harder.

In terms of search engines: at work, I can generally use Bing, Google, and DuckDuckGo. None of those is blocked, though I can only log in to a Microsoft account, not a Google account. So whatever advantage there is to having your search history saved, I can only get that with Bing.

(At home, I’ve been experimenting with Kagi. That’s blocked at work, so I can’t use it there. I may be writing up a blog post on Kagi soon, but that’s for another day.)

I haven’t seen any advantage to using one search engine over another when searching for Dynamics AX content. I think Google is probably the best, to be honest.

A few general observations:

    • Microsoft documentation for AX and X++ is usually still out there, somewhere, on Microsoft’s site, but it doesn’t always surface near the top of any given search. A good starting point for that might be here.
    • AX lives on as “Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations”, or… something like that. Some of the documentation for FinOps also applies to AX 2012. A good starting point for that is here.
    • Axaptapedia used to be a good resource for AX info, but it seems to be gone. It does occasionally still show up in search results. You may be able to find it on archive.org. (Though that’s another thing that’s blocked at work. Sigh.)
    • There are a lot of AX-related blogs out there. Most of them are dead at this point, but still up on the web. And many of them were never really much good. Some were just cash grabs, scraping info from other blogs and sticking Google ads on them and hoping to make some money (presumably). Some were well-intentioned, but provided questionable advice. You can still find some useful blog posts out there, but you need to sift through some dross to get to the useful stuff.

Aside from using search engines, you can also try to get useful information about AX and X++ from LLMs, like ChatGPT and Copilot. I’ve had some success with that, but I’ve found that LLMs are prone to a lot of hallucination when it comes to X++ code. (Again, there are limits to the LLMs I’m allowed to use at work. I’m basically limited to Copilot and our internal LLM chatbot.)

I’ve recently been working on a problem, trying to optimize some fairly complex X++ code. I got some fairly useful advice and assistance out of our chatbot, but also some entirely wrong information. For instance, I needed to review some stuff about X++ collection classes. Our LLM hallucinated a few functions which would be great, if they existed, but they don’t. One was “Global::conSort()” which was supposed to sort a container, and “Set::toContainer()” which was supposed to convert a set to a container. Alas, neither of those exists!

It also gave me some incorrect information about sets. It told me that using a SetEnumerator does not necessarily guarantee that the set will be returned in a sorted, or even predictable, order. But I’m pretty sure that it does always return the set in sorted order. I haven’t found a definitive answer for that anywhere, but here’s a blog post that indicates that sets are returned sorted. And Axaptapedia seems to agree. (And all my testing supports that.)

And here’s one more blog post that has what I think is a pretty good answer:

No matter what order elements are added to a set or keys are added to a map, when using an enumerator to traverse the set or map, the elements are in a sorted order (for string and numeric types). However, the MSDN documentation for the set class states that elements are stored in a set “in a way that facilitates efficient lookup of the elements.” It might not be safe, therefore, to rely on this sorting behavior as it might possibly change in the future.

Good enough for me, for now. So maybe the LLM wasn’t entirely wrong on this, but for my purposes, I’m fine assuming that the output of a SetEnumerator is sorted.

maybe working on the AZ-204 exam

After passing the AZ-900 exam a few weeks ago, I decided to get back to working towards the AZ-204 exam. (TL;DR: I may have overestimated my readiness for that one.)

For the AZ-900, I’d paid for it myself, using a 50% discount from the ESI program, and then got work to reimburse me for it, after passing. That was somewhat useful, since it gave me an excuse to get set up in our expense system, so now I have that ready if I ever need to submit any more expenses.

For the AZ-204, I decided to reach out to the person at work who got me a free voucher when I took the PL-900 in 2023. I wasn’t expecting much, but I figured it would be OK to ask. Well, it turns out that she did have some vouchers, and she gave me one, but they expire on June 30, so I need to use it before then. That’s actually not a bad thing; having a deadline will make me a bit more likely to apply myself, and either commit, or give up and move on to something else.

Just to see how close I was to being ready, I took the Microsoft practice exam this week. I scored only 60% on it, so I’m not nearly ready for the real exam. And some of the questions on the MS practice exam go deeper than a lot of the prep material I’m working through does. I may actually have to learn all of this stuff to pass the exam, not just watch a bunch of videos and take notes.

So the question arises: Is it worth doing the work, just to pass an exam and have a certification on my resume? And the answer is, of course, that we need to determine if the prep work has value, in and of itself. Would it be good if I knew more about, for instance, Docker? Yes. Would it be good if I knew more about a lot of these other Azure services? Probably. So if “doing the work” is fun and useful, it’s worth doing. If I pass the test, great. If I don’t, at least I learned some new stuff. (Maybe I’ll forget it all in a year, but maybe some of it will stick and/or be useful in the future.)

Kindle, Kobo, DRM, and general book thoughts

I last blogged about Kindle and Kobo and DRM in February. Since then, I’ve figured out how to strip DRM from Kindle books again. Short version: you need both the DeDRM and KFX plugins for Calibre, and you need to copy the books directly from your Kindle into Calibre. For a longer version, see this video.

So that feels good, though I’m really at the point where I’m fine reading Kindle books on my Kindle Colorsoft and Kobo books on my Kobo Libra Colour. It’s nice to know I have backups though, if something happens.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this on the blog before, but I’ve hit a tipping point recently, in terms of my vision. I’m now finding that many of the print books I have in my TBR pile have print too small for me to comfortably read. So I’m going through a process where I’m trying to replace those with Kindle or Kobo versions. In some cases, I’ve found the books via OverDrive, and I can borrow them from the library. In other cases, I’ve added them to my Kindle wish list, and will buy them if I see them on sale cheap. Either way, I’m taking the print books and donating them. So this will eventually help me clear out some of the clutter in my apartment too. I hope to eventually zero out my hard copy TBR pile entirely.

On a related topic, I signed up for BookBub recently. I’m using that to keep an eye out for sales on these old print books that I want to replace with ebooks. And of course, the BookBub emails have caused me to purchase some books I wasn’t actually looking out for, so my Kindle library continues to grow, much faster than I can actually read through it. But too many books is much better than not enough books, so that’s fine.

my hearing aid

I last posted about my hearing aid about a month ago, so it’s time for a follow-up post. Since then, I have actually picked up my hearing aid and used it for awhile. I even went back for a follow-up and changed something. So I’ve got some stuff to blog about.

When I first got the hearing aid, they gave me a small dome. That seemed fine to me, though I was getting a little feedback from time to time. When I went back for my follow-up visit, they switched me to a large dome. That solved the feedback problem, but I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the large dome. I might see if I can try out the medium size. (Here’s a page with some info about domes.) I’ve figured out that I can order domes from Amazon, or I can just stop by the hearing aid center at Costco and get them to give me one for free. So I may do one or the other of those things.

In terms of overall performance of the hearing aid, I’m pretty happy. Short version: It helps me hear better. (Duh.) Longer version: It doesn’t solve all of my problems. I still have issues with speech comprehension in noisy environments. Maybe that’ll get better as I get used to the thing. I sometimes feel like my brain is still catching up and isn’t used to it yet.

And in terms of how it’s fitting in to my life, and how convenient / inconvenient it is:

  • With the small dome, I was getting to the point where I didn’t notice it was there, and it wasn’t causing any irritation. With the large dome, I find myself fiddling with it a bit, and trying to push it into my ear so it’ll stay in place. (Hence, I think I need to try the medium dome.)
  • While I can pipe audio to it from my iPhone, that doesn’t work really well. So when I want to listen to music or podcasts, I’m always swapping out the hearing aid and swapping in the AirPods. That’s a bit annoying, but it’s not that bad. I’ll get used to it.
  • At work, I use a regular old USB headset for Teams calls. I can use that with my hearing aid still in, but it’s not a great experience. The big issue is that the mic for the hearing aid is behind my ear, so outside the headphone cup. But the speaker of course is in my ear, so I’m getting the outside sound amplified and the sound from the headset blocked by the hearing aid dome. So I generally have to pull out my hearing aid when I’m in a Teams meeting or on a call. I might look into getting a fancier headset where the ear cup fits over the whole ear, so the mic and speaker are both under the cup. But I don’t know if that’s a good idea. For now, I’m just going to be taking the hearing aid in and out for calls.
  • It turns out that I now have too many things behind my left ear. At nearly all times, I have my glasses on and my hearing aid in, so that’s two things fighting for space back there. And I’m still one of those weirdos who is wearing a mask in certain places. So then I have the mask string back there too. And that tends to get tangled up with the hearing aid wire. And I’ve found this week that adding a baseball cap to the mix makes things even more complicated. So I’m getting used to all that and figuring it out.

Overall, the small annoyances aren’t enough to get me to give up on it and demand a refund. I’ll get used to it, I think.

AZ-900 Azure Fundamentals exam

I’ve been messing around with various prep materials for various Microsoft exams for a while now. I go back and forth, but I never seem to get far enough to actually take a test. The ground shifts under me, and I have to switch my focus to something else.

I’d been working towards taking the AZ-204 exam, starting in mid-2024, but I kept getting sidetracked. Well, I got serious about it again recently. But then I realized that there’s some overlap between AZ-204 and AZ-900, and I could probably prep for the AZ-900 in just a few days. I already know a lot of the material on AZ-900, so there wasn’t much extra stuff to learn.

So I spent some time last week studying, then got enough done over the weekend that I felt I could take the exam today. And with the online exams, you can generally get a same-day appointment. So I did that, and passed the exam today!

The process for the online, at-home, exam is pretty much the same as it was in 2023, when I passed the PL-900 exam. The one wrinkle I had this time was that I couldn’t get through the pre-exam system check. Long story short: I had to go into “Windows Features” on my laptop and disable anything related to Hyper-V. They don’t want you taking the exam on a VM, which I can kinda understand, but they also make it impossible to take the exam on a laptop that’s configured as a VM host, which is kinda silly. I also had an issue where the proctor made me wander around my table with my laptop, showing her my entire kitchen table via the webcam, to make sure the table surface was actually clear. And she had me take off my watch. So the prep was a bit of a pain, and took longer than the actual test. I don’t remember the proctor bothering me at all last time.

I paid for the exam myself, using a 50% discount that I can get through ESI (Enterprise Skills Initiative), so it was only $50. I might get reimbursed for it, or I might not. I decided to take this exam without running it by my boss first. I was afraid he might throw some obstacles in my way, and I just wanted to “strike while the iron was hot,” so to speak.

I’ve also rediscovered today that my “test anxiety” problem is still a thing. I’ve always had it. It peaked in high school, where I went through a phase where I would get physically sick when dealing with high-pressure tests (like finals or mid-terms). At some point, I realized what was happening, and got it under control. (There was really no guidance for mental health stuff for teenagers back then, so I’m not sure how I did it. I just figured it out on my own.) Anyway, even taking a dumb little Microsoft cert exam still makes me break out in a sweat, apparently.

I’m probably going to try for the AZ-204 later this year, if I can find the time to finish the prep.

GoComics changes and other random topics

OK, I guess I’m going to write two posts today. (See my previous one for details on why I’m home with nothing much to do this afternoon.)

GoComics announced a while back that they’d be doing a site redesign. It seems like, at some point in the distant past, an announcement of a site redesign on a website I use frequently might have been good news rather than “oh god, how much worse is it going to get?” news.

The last time GoComics did a site redesign, they dropped one of my favorite features, which let you create little collections of strips around various topics. So I had a “coffee” collection, for funny strips mentioning coffee, for instance, and a “tech” collection, for funny strips about tech stuff. They kept a single “favorites” collection, but dropped the ability to keep multiple named collections. This time, they dropped any ability to save a collection of strips. And they didn’t (as far as I can tell) mention that in advance, so I had no opportunity to save my favorites page out to a PDF file, or convert it into raindrop.io bookmarks or whatever. Oh well. I shouldn’t get too worked up about that. (Comic strips are supposed to be ephemeral, right?)

They’re also raising prices, from $20/year to $35/year, but I have the old price locked in for another year. I still want to support the comic strip business, and even $35/year isn’t much, but it’s annoying to lose features and have the price go up. I guess that’s about enough complaining about GoComics for today.

One thing they seem to have gotten right is that they haven’t messed up their URL scheme, so any links I’ve included on this blog should still work, and I can still find (for instance) the Peanuts strip from the day I was born pretty easily. (Which made me wonder if any other strips on their site go back that far… I tried a few, and no dice. Oh well, I’m too old, I guess.) On the other hand, while the links still work, you need to be a subscriber to see older strips now, so the links work for me, but probably won’t work for many other people. (I can’t really blame them for doing that. I’m sure they need the money.)

On another subject, I was looking at my “on this day” widget, and see that I came back from WonderCon on this day in 2019. And I had a nice day out in NYC on this day in 2017. I haven’t been on a plane since that trip to WonderCon in 2019. And I haven’t been in to NYC in quite a while now. This year’s WonderCon just wrapped up, and the reports I’ve seen make it sound like it was a good one. (See here for Mark Evanier’s write-up.) But, at this point, I don’t think I’m getting on a plane any time soon, without a really good reason for doing so. Even getting on a train to NYC is going to require a very good reason. I just get sick way too easily these days.

hearing aids and AirPods Pro 2

I took a half-day today, because I was supposed to be going over to Costco to pick up my new hearing aid. But the hearing aid hasn’t arrived yet, and they didn’t call me to tell me that until after I’d already driven home, so now I have a half-day to relax, catch up on some reading, and maybe write a pointless blog post.

To back up a bit: I got my hearing tested in 2020 and 2021. In 2020, I went to an ENT, and he determined that (1) there was nothing wrong with my ears that required surgery or that I should be excessively worried about, and (2) that I was on the verge of needing a hearing aid for my left ear, but I could probably hold off. In 2021, I went to an audiologist who said that I should really get that hearing aid, and was going to follow up with a price, but then I never heard from her again. (And I never followed up myself.)

Now, in 2025, I finally decided that my hearing had gotten bad enough that I should try again. This time, I decided to try Costco. I was motivated to do this mostly from having watched this Adam Savage video. At some point in the video, he says something about how no one who has ever gotten hearing aids has ever later said “that was a bad idea.” So that got me to get off my butt and call the Costco hearing aid center.

You can get some details about Costco’s hearing aids here. Their appointment system is kind of low-tech. You need to call your local Costco to make an appointment. And there’s a PDF intake form that you can fill out and print, prior to your first visit. There’s no online system at all; it’s all over the phone and in person.

I can’t say that things went entirely smoothly for me. My first appointment was canceled and rescheduled, because the audio tech called in sick or something. (And the rescheduled appointment coincided with the Somerville St Patrick’s Day parade, so that made getting to Costco challenging…) For that appointment, they did a hearing test, asked a few questions, then set up a sample hearing aid for me, and let me try it out, by wandering around the store for a few minutes. I think it helped, but I wasn’t sure, so I told them I’d think it over.

Long story short, I made up my mind to go ahead with it and called them back a week or two later. So I had to make a second appointment to come back into the store and buy the hearing aid. (There was really nothing to do in that visit other than pick a color and hand over my debit card. I feel like they should have been able to do that over the phone, but whatever.)

And today’s appointment was to pick up the hearing aid. But they called around noon to tell me that it hadn’t come in yet, so we rescheduled for Sunday. So, you can see, it hasn’t been entirely smooth.

I’ll blog more about the hearing aid once I actually get it and have a chance to use it for a few days. I’m getting the Philips HearLink 9050, which is costing me around $850. (A pair would be $1600, but I only need one.)

And to back up a bit again, in between my first and second visits, I ordered a paid of AirPods Pro 2 from Costco, for $200, to see how they would work as hearing aids. I’d been curious about that, but didn’t want to buy new AirPods, since my old AirPods Pro (first gen) were still working fine. (I bought them in 2021, so they were four years old, admittedly, but there was nothing wrong with them…) Overall, I think I could get away with using them occasionally as hearing aids, but not as an all day, every day, kind of thing. And they’re not as good as the actual Philips hearing aid that I tried at Costco. (There are a few other enhancements between the first gen Pros and the second gen that I guess I don’t feel like I’ve wasted the $200 on the upgrade.)

So, anyway, that’s my pointless blog post for today. I’m hoping that the hearing aid will help me hear better when I’m in the office, and in other environments where I’m often saying “what?” or “huh?” or just entirely missing something someone was trying to tell me.

five years of COVID

I’ve been reflecting a lot this month on the five-year anniversary of the COVID-19 outbreak. I’m one of only a few people in the office who still wear a mask on a regular basis. And recently, for the first time, someone actually asked me about it. It wasn’t ill-intentioned or confrontational. It was just someone who didn’t understand why an otherwise healthy person would be wearing a mask in a meeting. So, from my perspective at least, I feel like we’ve hit a milestone, where wearing a mask in public has gone from “normal” (but uncommon) back to “unusual” and “worthy of comment.”

NJ Spotlight News did a report this week, looking back at the last five years. Here’s a link to the video, and here’s the original article. The summary for our current status is “manageable,” which I guess is fair.

I’m a little worried though. There’s another article on the site about how things are going with measles, and it ain’t great. If we can’t handle measles, I’m not sure how the current (federal) administration is going to do with COVID, going forward. Am I even going to be able to get a booster shot this year?

Here’s a link to a post from the end of March, 2020. Looking back at how things were going then, I guess we’re doing better. I’m not sure I’m doing better though. Here’s a chart of my weight, over the last five years, for instance:

My weight March 2020-2025

I’m honestly not doing that bad, and my current weight is (relatively) healthy. Still, it feels like I’ve gotten a lot older in the last five years. I’m still getting a decent amount of exercise, but I’ve had days where I get really tired by the end of the day. I rarely have the energy to go out and do anything interesting or adventurous. I’m feeling a lot more general aches and pains. My allergies are worse.

Hmm, now I feel like I need to find a way to end this on a positive note! …and, OK, I just spent 15 minutes trying to find a positive news article to link to, and didn’t find one. Instead, I keep stumbling across stuff like this and this. So I’m going to link to a mildly funny comic panel instead.

Dark Horse, Kindle, DRM, etc.

I’ve been wanting to write a blog post on the stuff that’s been going on with Amazon and Kindle lately, and it seems like more stuff keeps happening, and I never get around to writing that post. So now here I am, writing a post about a bunch of semi-related stuff.

I’ll start with the news that Dark Horse Digital is shutting down. I’ve actually been expecting them to shut down DHD at some point, ever since they started making their books available through Comixology, which happened back in 2015. I had hoped that, when they did it, they’d strike a deal with Amazon/Comixology to transfer their user’s libraries over to Amazon. Or, for certain books, make them available as DRM-free downloads. (I can understand where they wouldn’t be able to make some of their old stuff available DRM-free, due to licensing issues, but they should be able to make stuff like Hellboy and BPRD available, since those have already been sold DRM-free through Humble.) Well, they didn’t do any of that.

I had around 300 books in my DHD library, with about half of them unread. Some of those books were single-issue comics, and some were 400-page omnibus volumes, so it was really all over the place. I found a TamperMonkey script that let me download the books as DRM-free CBZs from the DHD web site, so I went ahead and used it to download most of my library. You need to download the books one at a time, so it was time-consuming. Initially, I was going to limit myself to downloading just my unread books, but at some point, my OCD kicked in, and I decided to download almost everything. I managed to stop myself from downloading various random freebie issues, but I grabbed nearly everything else, including stuff that I’m pretty sure I have from Humble bundles. So that’s taking up a little more than 20 GB. I actually feel pretty good about this now; I have a bunch of good DRM-free books that I can read in Panels, which probably works better than the old DHD iPad app anyhow.

This process triggered something else I’ve been putting off: figuring out what to do about the growing library of DRM-free comics and other stuff that’s filling up my PC hard drive. I’ve got it all in OneDrive, but I’ve always had OneDrive configured to keep all my stuff local (on my desktop PC). But space on my PC has been getting a little tight. I have a 1 TB SSD in there, and I’ve been dropping below 100 GB free. Which seems like plenty, but I want to keep at least 10% free. So I finally bit the bullet and turned on the files on-demand feature in OneDrive. Then, I let it offload some of my bigger CBZ files, and got myself back to 150 GB free.

I also set up my backup program to skip trying to backup offline files, otherwise it would have tried to pull them back down every time I ran a backup. That was another mental hurdle to get past. Now, I won’t necessarily have a local backup of some files either. But, hey, I trust OneDrive, I guess. Oh, and I still have plenty of space in OneDrive itself. I’m using around 370 GB of my 1 TB, so that’s about 35%.

On a related topic, there’s been a lot going on around Amazon and Kindle lately. First, there has been a lot of talk on Mastodon and Reddit around people wanting to drop out of the Amazon ecosystem, due to Jeff Bezos cozying up to Trump. That’s been going on for a while now, and I’m not happy about it, but I’m not ready to set fire to my Kindle just yet.

Second, there’s a lot of anger around Amazon’s recent decision to discontinue the “download and transfer” option for Kindle books. I already faced that issue when I traded in my Paperwhite for a Colorsoft, since download & transfer never worked for the newest Kindles. If I still had the old Paperwhite, I probably would have spent some time this week downloading a bunch of my Kindle books, removing the DRM, and pulling them into Calibre, for safekeeping. But I didn’t really have any good options for that this week.

Just out of curiosity, I tried copying a few books directly from my Colorsoft into Calibre, to see if I could strip the DRM that way, but it didn’t work. I think there may be a way for me to get around that, but it’s probably not worth the effort.

So, for now, I’m still “all in” on the Amazon/Kindle ecosystem, for better or worse. I have a ton of books and comics in my library there, and no obvious way of getting them back out. Which is fine. I like the Colorsoft a lot, and reading my comics via the Kindle app on my iPad is a pretty good experience too. And I don’t expect Amazon to shut any of this down any time soon. So hopefully I’m good there.

I have been thinking a bit about how I should approach new book purchases though. I still need to stick with ebooks, for the most part, due to my failing eyesight. I can buy stuff for the Kobo instead of the Kindle, and that at least takes a few dollars away from Amazon and gives them to somebody else. Mind you, I have no idea who the CEO of Kobo is, or what their political leanings are. (And now that I’ve written that, I’ve realized that I can probably find out… OK, so it’s this guy apparently. Seems like a decent guy? And he’s Canadian, so that helps…)

I did buy one book for Kobo recently, and thought about buying some more, but then I realized that I’m going to have to overhaul my system for tracking my wishlist and my list of purchased books if I move away from Amazon. And I have some thoughts on that. (Which should probably be in their own blog post, but I’m on a roll now…)

My current system is all-Amazon, basically. I have a Kindle wishlist in Amazon. If I’m interested in a book, I add it to that wishlist. If I decide to buy it, I do it on Amazon, and it gets removed from my wishlist automatically. Then, I add it to Goodreads from the handy “Amazon book purchases” screen there. And, if I ever forget I own it and try to buy it again, there will be a banner on the Amazon page saying “you bought this book already dummy” or words to that effect.

So that got me thinking about alternate wishlist and book-tracking systems. For my wishlist, Bookbub might work. The main purpose of it is to let you know about deals on books you want, but it seems like it could work as a general wishlist tool. And it links to both the Kindle and Kobo stores, so that’s good. For replacing the Amazon-owned Goodreads, a lot of people seem to be going to StoryGraph. It looks like it could work well as a Goodreads replacement. Of course, if I do any of this, my life inevitably gets more complicated. Honestly, right now, I think I’m going to keep one foot in the Amazon/Kindle ecosystem and one foot in the Kobo/etc world.

I could keep going on this stuff, but I just noticed that the sun has gone down, and it’s time to eat dinner. So I’ll stop here.