Category: books

an overdue post

Well, I haven’t posted here since May. I’ve had a bunch of stuff I wanted to post about, but I just haven’t had the time (and/or energy).

Tomorrow is July 4th, and a Saturday, so today is the official day off from work for Independence Day. We’re in a bit of a heatwave right now, so I’m not doing anything much for the long weekend. So I thought I’d spend some time writing a blog post today, and trying to catch up on some stuff I wanted to write about.

WordPress 7.0

Well, I didn’t actually intend to write about WordPress 7.0 today, but when I went into my blog admin page, I saw that it was available. So I’m currently upgrading my test site, and will update my actual blog site later, if all is well with the test site.

It seems like the big feature in WP 7 is AI integration. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised about that. Not too long ago, I probably would have rolled my eyes at the idea of having AI integration in my blog site, but, today, I can think of some semi-valid uses for it. Yes, some people are going to use it to create terrible AI slop, but I’ve got a few ideas about how I could use it in a positive way.

Here are a few links related to it:

I haven’t read any of this stuff too closely yet. I’m not even sure how much of it works with the open source WordPress software, vs. how much of it is specific to WordPress.com. Anyway, I guess that researching this stuff and playing around with it is yet another little project for me.

Robot Assistant Field Guide

I mentioned the Robot Assistant Field Guide a couple of posts back. The main part of that class is all done now, but there’s a series of “Robot Builder’s Club” meetings that’s continuing, and those are fun. I learned a bit from this series, though I’m still not really on board with the full robot lifestyle, I guess you could say. I did about 2 hours of busywork this morning (or “donkey work” as David Sparks would say), and I really haven’t automated any of that. But I have gotten in the habit of keeping Claude open while I’m doing work, and using it for little tasks here and there. Here’s some stuff I did today:

  • I had it read all of the 2026 statements for a bank account I have, and create an Excel file summarizing performance YTD, including charts. It did a pretty good job. I didn’t get any new insights out of it, but it was nice. I then also had it create a CLAUDE.md file in the folder with the statements, so I can repeat the exercise, updating the Excel file regularly.
  • I asked it to read and summarize a mutual fund prospectus that I had just downloaded. It called out one upcoming change that’s kind of important: the fund is converting to an ETF next year. I’d stopped reading prospectuses at all, some years ago, but now I’m trying to get into the habit of downloading them and asking Claude to summarize them for me. There’s often nothing big in them, but sometimes, there’s something important.

Overall, I’ve started using Claude as a way to help me analyze my finances and surface trends and opportunities. It’s working better than I would have expected.

The AI Pro

I’m starting to look at something called The AI Pro, from Rob Conery. I signed up for a free account, and I might talk myself into the $300/year paid membership, though I’m not sure about that. I’ve watched one of the free videos, and it’s pretty good. And the material is definitely aimed at folks like me: senior engineers who are getting curious about getting better at AI-assisted programming.

But he uses a service called Circle to host it, and my company (for some reason) blocks that. So I wouldn’t be able to access any of the content from my work computer. In theory, I could ask work to unblock it, but I’m a little hesitant about requesting an unblock for anything that isn’t strictly work-related. I mean, this is clearly a tool that would help me do my job better, but who knows what the powers-that-be at work would think about me bettering myself on company time. (Yes, I know that sounds cynical, but that’s where we are these days.)

Books

I’m currently reading the first book in the Marlow Murder Club series. I’d previously watched (and enjoyed) the PBS series based on the book. I’m enjoying the book too. And I finished the first book in the Thursday Murder Club series earlier this year. Both of these “murder club” books were (presumably) named in reference to Agatha Christie’s “Tuesday Night Club” from The Thirteen Problems, featuring Miss Marple. So that’s another book I need to read, one of these days.

I went on a Kindle book buying binge during the Prime Day sale a week or two ago. I just counted them up, and it looks like I bought… 15 books. Yikes. They were mostly on sale for $2 or $3, so I didn’t break the bank here. But my “want to read” shelf on Goodreads is now up to 928 books.

I’ve also been wanting to switch more of my book buying over from Amazon Kindle to Kobo, but I haven’t been terribly successful at that. Kobo recently announced integration with StoryGraph. I haven’t set that up, but this could be a nudge in the direction of moving away from Amazon/Goodreads over to something else. So I guess that’s yet another little personal project for a rainy day.

Well, I have more stuff I could write about, but I feel like that’s about it for me today. I’ve spent most of the morning doing busy work, writing this post, and generally not doing the kind of things one should do on a holiday. So I think my next stop is the couch, for a quick afternoon nap.

Robert Silverberg

I found myself thinking about Lord Valentine’s Castle, by Robert Silverberg, earlier this week. I read it a long time ago, when it was first serialized in F&SF. I can see here that that was in 1979/1980, so I would have been twelve years old.

At some point, I bought a used copy of the paperback, intending to reread it. Looking through my email, I see that that was in 2010. I never got around to reading that paperback. I went looking for it a few months ago and couldn’t find it, but I stumbled across it earlier this week. (It was in a pile under a bunch of DVDs.) As with a lot of my old paperbacks, I found that the print was too small for me to read, so I put it in my “donation” pile, which will eventually get dumped into a book donation drop box. And I added the Kindle version to my wishlist, figuring I’d buy that version eventually.

That got me looking through my unread Kindle books, which led to me discovering that I had Nightwings in my Kindle library, which I bought about a year ago, for some reason. So I started reading it this week. So far, I’m enjoying it.

Then, in the course of doing some internet searching for info on Silverberg books, I discovered that there’s a Humble bundle running right now, with a bunch of his books! So I bought that, and now I have digital copies of Lord Valentine’s Castle, and all of the other books in that series, plus a whole bunch of other stuff. So that’s cool.

I definitely have too much to read now, and I should absolutely stop buying new books. But I know I won’t. I’m eyeing up the Mercedes Lackey Humble bundle right now. I probably won’t buy that one. I’ve read a few of her books already, and liked them, but I don’t know if I want to add another 37 to my library.

Claude and Kobo

It’s a quiet rainy Sunday, and I’m pretty tired, so I thought now would be a good time to write up a little blog post.

The first thing on my mind: more experimenting with Claude Cowork. My most recent mini-project was to see if I could hook Claude up to my email. Claude has a built-in connector for Gmail, but of course that’s not what I use. I use Fastmail. I spent a fair bit of time looking at various MCP options. In in end, I went with this one. There are a few ways to get it working, but I went with the simplest one (I think): adding it into Claude Desktop as a Claude Desktop Extension (DXT). That worked well.

I haven’t really done much with it yet. I have a few ideas though. I keep coming back to the idea of some kind of “daily briefing” out of Claude, combining info from my Obsidian vault (tasks), email (newsletters), and news pulled from the web. But I haven’t really gotten far with that.

I just tried this prompt: “Please look at the Receipts folder in my email and find all emails from Kobo. Then make me a list of all the books I’ve bought from Kobo, including title, author, and purchase date. Also, indicate which ones are audiobooks.”

That took a while, but worked pretty well. If I didn’t already have a list of all those books in Obsidian, I could have dumped it into there. I do note that the search took longer than I think it should have; it may be that the MCP I’m using isn’t terribly efficient? Or Claude isn’t using it efficiently? I don’t know.

One thing I’m noticing in my efforts to find good use cases for Claude Cowork: A lot of the stuff that would qualify as “quick wins” doesn’t really help me, because it’s all about information organization, and I’m already really fussy about that stuff. I started watching a video the other day showing how Claude Cowork could sort out a folder full of random documents. The example input folder was full of files named “document.pdf” and “document (2).pdf” and “attachment (3).pdf”. Useless file names, basically. I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if I had a folder like that! My bank statements for the last ten years are all stored in folders by year and consistently named like “statement-yyyy-mm-dd.pdf”. Same with credit card statements, phone bills, and so on. So Claude can’t help me there!

Another semi-useful thing  I did recently was to pull the annotations from a a book I just finished on my Kobo and reformat them into a nice Markdown file and save it into Obsidian. I use the annotations plugin for Calibre to pull annotations from Kobo books. For Kobo books purchased from the Kobo store, you can export annotations from your account, but for EPUBs that you load yourself, there’s no supported way to pull them. For those, the annotations plugin works, but it’s far from perfect. The annotations show in the book’s metadata in Calibre. They’re in an HTML format, and they’re shown in semi-random order. So that’s frustrating. Claude managed to convert the HTML into clean Markdown, and sort the annotations back into proper order. So I think I’ll be doing that again.

I’ve thought about turning that into a skill, so I can keep using it and get consistent results, but I asked Claude if I should, and it said not to bother. So we’ll see how it works next time. If I see any inconsistency or I can think of stuff I want to tweak with it, I’ll give the skill thing another thought.

So that’s it for random Claude stuff for today. I had to work late on Friday, then all day Saturday, on a server virtualization project, so I should really just be relaxing today and not thinking about computers.

more fun with Claude

OK, one more post about Claude: I took some time last week to play around with the idea of using Claude to analyze my Goodreads library. I started out by exporting my Goodreads library to a CSV file. Then, I started a new “project” in Claude, and attached the CSV.

I got some interesting visualizations out of that, including reading volume per year, distribution of my star ratings, and stuff like that. Nothing I couldn’t have gotten out of Excel, if I opened the CSV there and poked around a bit, but it was a lot easier than if I’d tried to do it the “old-fashioned way.”

Next, I asked it to go a bit beyond the data in the CSV file, and tell me how many of the books on my “to read” shelf were fiction vs. non-fiction. That’s not in the CSV, so it used “a smart heuristic approach” to do that. I have no idea what it actually did there, but it seems to have done a reasonable job.

It then broke the non-fiction down into categories like tech, history, business, and so on. Then, I asked it some questions about those books, like which of the tech books were outdated and should be discarded. Stuff like that. I used it to help me zero in on a few non-fiction books I’d like to read that have been gathering (virtual) dust in my Kindle library too long.

By putting this in a project, I can come back to it and ask it more questions whenever I want to, and I can upload newer versions of the CSV to update its working data. So that’s all pretty interesting and fun.

The other thing I did recently with a Claude project was to upload some tax documents and Merrill statements and ask it some questions about them. I’ve always been very leery about giving any kind of AI access to financial documents, but I decided to give in and give it a try. (YOLO, as the kids say.) Again, I got some interesting data and ideas out of it. Obviously, I’m not trusting Claude for tax advice, but it did a good job of analyzing some stuff and surfacing some things that I need to think about. I’m not sure if I’m going to do much more with this, but it would be interesting to upload my Merrill statement every month and ask Claude to summarize it for me and highlight important info.  My Merrill statements are typically 30-40 pages long, so I don’t ever have time to read them thoroughly.

I guess I’m gradually dragging myself into the modern age of AI. At work, we’re going to need to start learning Palantir Foundry pretty soon, and that’s pretty scary!

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.

Thanksgiving weekend check-in

Today is the last day of the four-day Thanksgiving weekend. I had a bunch of stuff on my “maybe to-do” list for this weekend, and one of those items was “write a blog post,” so I’m going to go ahead and do that now. I have a bunch of stuff on my mind, so this is likely to turn into one of those rambling multi-topic posts.

Thanksgiving day itself was uneventful. I don’t really have anybody to hang out with on major holidays anymore, and I’m honestly not even that interested in doing so. I get tired easily, and I get sick easily, so sometimes it’s better to just stay at home and rest.

I wasn’t really sick this weekend, but I did have a kind of low-level thing on Friday that kept me from getting too ambitious about anything.

On Saturday, I had a pretty eventful day. My brother and his wife were driving back to Georgia from Massachusetts, and stopped by here for brunch. So I got to spend around 90 minutes with them, eating a waffle and drinking a bunch of coffee. It turns out that my brother’s wife has some friends in the area who were getting together in Somerville, so that may have been their main reason for stopping here, but either way, I’m glad they could stop by and spend some time. (And I’m now realizing that, for me, a 90 minute brunch counts as “an eventful day”. I didn’t really do much else that day!)

Back on the subject of my “maybe to-do” list: I had a mental list of stuff, of varying levels of actual usefulness, that I could do this weekend. And I did a few of those things. And I did a lot of reading and TV watching. So I’m going to throw some notes about all of that in here.

Book Stuff

I did a good bit of book-related stuff this weekend.

  • I bought a few random “Black Friday deal” ebooks, from Kobo. I’ve been going back and forth between Amazon/Kindle and Kobo recently, when buying ebooks. Sometimes, I find something on sale at Amazon, then I check to see if it’s the same price at Kobo, and if it is, I buy it there. I’m not boycotting Amazon, but I’m not super happy about them lately, and I think it makes sense to try not to rely on them for everything.
  • I also bought a Humble Bundle of Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret books this weekend. I’ve been curious about them for quite some time, and the recent Maigret TV series brought them to mind again.
  • And buying that bundle, and a few Kobo books, got me thinking about adding some more of the random non-Amazon ebooks in my library to Goodreads. So I spend a bit of time doing that. I added all of the Discworld books that were part of the bundle I bought last year. And the books from the Ursula Le Guin bundle I bought last Thanksgiving weekend.
  • I also spent some time updating my Calibre setup, including plug-ins, and pulled some more stuff into my Calibre library.
  • And, in terms of actual, y’know, reading: I finished the first book in John Jackson Miller’s Star Trek: Prey trilogy, and started the second. It’s a fun series. I bought the Kindle books back in 2018. (I have so many unread ebooks!)

TV and Movies

I haven’t watched any movies this weekend, but I may finally watch the Fantastic Four movie on Disney+ before the weekend is over.

I started watching Stranger Things season five. There are four episodes up, and I’ve watched one episode per day, on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, so I’ve got one more to go. It’s pretty good. I’ve enjoyed Stranger Things since the beginning. (It is, of course, explicitly designed for people in my demographic, so it’s not surprising that I’d love it. But I don’t resent that, and I do, in fact, enjoy it very much.) I hadn’t really kept up with the press around it, so I didn’t realize that the four episodes that went up this weekend aren’t the final four episodes. Per this article: “Stranger Things 5 will debut in three volumes this fall: four episodes are now streaming, three episodes
 on Christmas, and the finale episode 
on New Year’s Eve.” So I guess that gives me something fun to do on Christmas and New Year’s too!

Hardware

I did a bit of shopping this weekend for three Apple devices that I’m overdue to replace: my iPhone, iPad, and Watch. My iPhone 14 is three years old, and isn’t holding a charge as well as it used to. Other than that, it’s fine for me, but it wouldn’t be a bad idea to replace it soon. My iPad was purchased in 2019, so that’s the oldest of the three devices, and maybe in most need of replacement. The battery isn’t great, and it’s only got 64 GB of storage, which isn’t quite enough for all of the comics I’d like to keep on it. The Watch is a Series 6 from 2020, and that too is having battery issues. As with the iPhone, it’s really fine aside from the battery issues, but I should probably replace it.

I found deals on both an iPad and Watch at Costco that looked pretty good, but I didn’t order them yet. I’m still not sure if I will or not, but there’s no reason not to.

The iPhone is a little more complicated, since I moved to Consumer Cellular. I can order an iPhone from CC, but they’re out of stock on the iPhone 17, and have been for a while. They have the iPhone 17 Pro, though, so I could get the Pro model this time around. But I don’t need it, so maybe not. Of course, I can buy an iPhone 17 direct from Apple, but CC isn’t one of their supported carriers, so I I would have to get an unlocked one and set it up myself. Which shouldn’t be difficult, but it’s another little barrier that makes me stop and pause. And the trade-in value is a factor too. Apple will give me $220 for my old phone, while CC will only give me around $180.

So I haven’t made a decision on any of my iDevices yet. I did make a snap decision on a device from Amazon yesterday, though, and got it today. I decided to replace my Echo Dot with an Echo Spot. I got the Echo Dot in 2020, to replace my old iHome alarm clock. It’s been a nice little unobtrusive clock, sitting on my nightstand, since then. I don’t really use the Alexa features. It’s just a relatively cheap puck that sits there and shows me what time it is. Once in a while, I say something that sounds like “Alexa” and it starts talking back to me, so that’s frustrating, but it doesn’t happen often.

I’m not sure if I’ll like the Spot more or less than the Dot. The screen is fancier, but I don’t know if it’s going to more readable or less readable, if I wake up at 4 AM and want to know what time it is. I should probably give up on these “smart” things and just get this Braun alarm clock from MOMA.

Final Thoughts

So I guess that’s all of my random ruminating for this weekend. For today, I’ll probably watch some football, read a bit more of the Star Trek novel, and watch the next Stranger Things episode. I already went for a 25-minute walk, so that’s a good start to the day.

The farmers market here in Somerville finished up last weekend, so I don’t have that to look forward to today. I guess I need to get into winter mode now. I started using my humidifier this weekend, so that’s a start.

I’d really glad I got a good four-day weekend of doing “not very much.” I’ve been wearing myself out with work recently, and really needed a break.

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.

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.

The Gaiman situation

Welp, I saw the There Is No Safe Word article on the Vulture web site on Monday, and I guess I’m still processing it. To be clear, I didn’t read the whole thing. I skimmed a good bit of it, then gave up once it was clear that there was enough bad stuff in it that I didn’t need to read anymore to decide how I felt about it. Having seen some further discussion of it on social media, I’m glad I didn’t read all of the details and will not be going back and doing so.

I’ve been a fan of Neil Gaiman since the early days of Sandman, which started up in 1988, so that’s a long time. I knew about the earlier article/podcast from Tortoise, about six months ago, but I guess I was kinda hoping it was an exaggeration? I don’t know. Anyway, I guess the Vulture / New York Magazine article pretty much confirms that, yep, there’s a big problem here, and Gaiman isn’t the guy so many of us thought he was. It’s heartbreaking.

I took a look at my Goodreads account today, and I see that I have around 35 Gaiman books/comics on it, with about 6 of them unread. I probably have several other unread Gaiman books/comics/audiobooks, both physical and digital, that I haven’t added to Goodreads. So let’s say a dozen or maybe twenty items.

It’s hard to figure how I should feel about his work now. Do I still want to read the stuff that I have? I picked up my copy of The Graveyard Book graphic novel this afternoon, and stared at it for a bit. I bought it in 2016, and still haven’t read it. The art is by P. Craig Russell, who is maybe my very favorite comic book artist. So I’m not going to toss that one. On the other hand, I’ve got some random Gaiman stuff from an old Humble Bundle that I’m probably not going to bother reading now.

I also went through my Amazon wish list, and my Overdrive wish list, and purged most of the Gaiman stuff off of them. I don’t really need to buy any more of his stuff. (I left a couple of American Gods graphic novels on there, since Russell is involved with those, so I might decide that it’s OK to buy them to support Russell’s work. I don’t know.)

Gaiman has posted a statement on his blog, basically refuting all of the allegations. I’d love to be able to believe him, but at this point, I don’t think I can.

In terms of figuring out how to engage with work you love that was created by a guy who turns out to be a monster: I’ve seen a couple of good takes on this on social media, but I didn’t bookmark them, and can’t find them now. It comes down to deciding that, if you love a certain work, and it inspired you, or just made you happy, the guy who created it doesn’t get to take that away from you. If the work still makes you happy, that’s fine. I’m probably not expressing that too well. Here’s an article from The Paris Review that covers this kind of thing pretty thoroughly.

finished the Wheel of Time

I finished reading A Memory of Light today, so I’m finally finished reading The Wheel of Time! I started almost two years ago, in March 2023. I’d set myself a goal of finishing it by year-end 2024, so I missed that, but only by a few days.

Overall, I’m really glad I read the series. Most of it was very enjoyable, a nice escape from the real world, and something to keep me occupied on Sunday mornings and weekday lunch breaks. And I’ve enjoyed some of the associated media I’ve dipped into, like The Wheel Weaves podcast, or the tor.com articles, or some of the other online fan stuff. Of course, I’ve avoided a lot of it too, in fear of spoilers. Now, I can dig into the spoiler-laden stuff too, if I want to.

But I think I’m going to take a break from WoT and delve into some other stuff. (Except maybe The Wheel Weaves podcast. They’re on the next-to-last book now, so I might as well keep up with that to the end. It’s fun.)

I’m at a bit of a loss as to what to start next. Maybe some shorter stuff, or some comics, as a palate-cleanser? Maybe some non-fiction? My Goodreads TBR list has… 653 books on it, so I’ve got plenty to choose from!