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.
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.
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.
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!
Well, I made it through another year, I guess, so here’s my usual New Year’s Day blog post! I went to bed around 9:30 PM last night, after watching the first two Thin Man movies on TCM. I got out of bed around 6:15 AM this morning. My days of staying up late on New Year’s Eve are pretty much done, apparently.
WordPress stats
I like to use these posts for both useful self-reflection and pointless (but fun) stats. I’m going to start with some pointless stats related to this blog. I ran a quick SQL statement to get my posts per year, over the life of this blog, and got the following:
blog posts per year
So that’s 49 posts in 2024. My most active year was 2005, with over 200 posts. The least active full year was 2013, with 33 posts. I don’t know if any of that is super-interesting to anyone but me, but there it is.
I was trying to think of why 2013 would be a low point, and I guess it probably had something to do with starting a new job that year. And that’s still my current job (SHI), almost 12 years later. (More about that later.)
I also looked at traffic stats on the blog. Nothing interesting to report there, except that December 2024 was my most active month ever, by a long shot, with more than 3000 views. All of that traffic was on one day though: December 9. And I’m pretty sure it was all search bots or AI training bots or whatever.
Health
I’ve been fighting a low-level cold since Thanksgiving (or thereabouts), so my health situation is pretty much business as usual. I remember having a pretty good run of “not being sick” at some point this year though. Maybe in the spring? I thought I’d made a note of it in Day One or somewhere, but I can’t quite pinpoint when it was or how long it was.
As for my weight: I started 2024 at around 160, and ended it at 165. I’ve been fairly stable at 165, plus or minus two, for the last three months. So I’m hoping that I’ve stopped gaining weight and have hit a stable point. (In 2023, I went from 150 to 160, so my gain this year was half of last year’s gain.) And I’m still logging all of my meals/snacks with LoseIt, as I have been doing since 2013.
I think I still need to do some work on getting my snacking under control. I need to cut down on cookies and pastries form the various bakeries and coffee shops here in town. (Having a good French bakery almost directly below my apartment, in the same building, has turned out to be a bit of a problem…)
On the exercise front, I’m doing good. I was going to look for some summary stats to support that, but I’ve just realized that Apple’s Fitness app doesn’t have any kind of “year in review” thing, similar to Apple Music Replay or any of the other end-of-year things that have gotten big over the last few years. Odd, since that would likely be really popular. You can get some yearly graphs in the Health app though. So, from that, I see that I’ve averaged about 45 minutes per day exercise and 550 calories per day on the “move” ring. That’s pretty good, and I see that it’s been pretty consistent over the whole year.
And, having written all this, I realized that I hadn’t gone for a walk yet, so I did that just now. Here’s a photo!
New Year’s Day morning walk
Work
Wow, I could write a lot about work this year. My old boss retired at the end of 2023, so I’ve just finished out my first year under the new boss. I had a pretty solid relationship with the old boss, but I’m still working on building one with the new guy.
I had gotten used to near-perfect performance reviews from the old boss, so I was a bit surprised to get an average review from the new one. (Basically, a rating of 3 out of 5 on everything, and a lower raise than I usually get.) I have a feeling that he didn’t put that much thought into the review, since he doesn’t actually know that much about me or what I do. So I’m not too worried about him just clicking “3” down the row of questions on the review form; it’s not that I did anything wrong, he just doesn’t have much to go on. But I think I do need to try to build up some kind of relationship with him in 2025, if I can. It’s hard, since he’s in Texas and I’m in NJ, and since he has a fairly large number of direct reports, and responsibility for three main groups (AX, CRM, and ServiceNow). So I guess I need to just keep trying to be a good employee and make sure to do the stuff he wants me to do.
In terms of systems and projects this year: We’re still on AX 2012, and haven’t made any real progress towards moving to D365 F&O. Maybe that’s too simplistic a view. Some stuff is going on behind the scenes, I guess, but there’s really no concrete progress on the real work of moving off AX 2012 and getting to F&O. For 2025, we’re planning on upgrading our SQL environment and getting on the latest CU for AX, so that’s something, and likely a necessary start. At the start of 2024, we were saying that getting to F&O was a three-year project. I think it’s still at least a three-year project, and I’m not sure if 2025 is going to count as year one, or if 2025 will be more like “year zero” with the real project starting in 2026.
We’ve been going through what they call an “agile transition” over the last year. We’ve been using something like scrum since 2022, but the new boss (and new IT management in general) has been trying to really formalize that. We now have a scrum master, daily stand-ups, and multiple standard meetings (the usual stuff). And our group has been broken up into two separate “feature teams.” Also, we’ve stopped doing weekly deployments, and now only do one deployment per sprint (every two weeks). So that’s been a lot to get used to. And for 2025, we’re switching from using Azure DevOps to Jira for our agile/scrum management. So, just when things are getting smooth, we’re going to upend it all again.
Learning and other fun Stuff
OK, that’s enough of the serious stuff. Now let’s go through some more fun stuff. Let’s start with my Goodreads year in books. Just 27 books for 2024, though some of the Wheel of Time books were pretty long (Lord of Chaos was 1049 pages.) I had set a goal for myself of finishing the WOT series in 2024, but I’m not quite done with the final book. So maybe I’ll finish it by the end of January 2025. I’m not quite sure what I’ll tackle next; WOT has been eating up a lot of my reading time. I have a bunch of Dresden Files and Laundry Files books in my TBR pile, so maybe some of those. Or Discworld? And I have so many comics piled up too!
In terms of professional learning, I only see three books on my list that count towards that, and they’re all fairly general books. I don’t seem to have learned any new programming languages in 2024, or anything else big.
Looking at my Pluralsight history, I see that I completed around 15 courses there in 2024. Some of those were work-specific, as part of Pluralsight “challenges.” Some were just stuff I wanted to learn on my own. So there’s a mix of agile/scrum stuff, C# stuff, AI stuff, and miscellaneous “soft skill” stuff.
At some point during the year, I started looking at maybe getting an AZ-204 certification. But I didn’t get very far with that, and I’ve pretty much dropped the idea now. Back in 2013, I also started thinking about a D365 F&O certification of some kind, but I’m not going forward with that either, at least not yet.
During my performance review, my boss said that he wants me to pursue a SAFe certification for 2025, so I’m starting to work on that. Honestly, I’m not too enthusiastic about it, but it’ll probably help my career, and I’m open-minded enough to give it a try, I guess. I’ve started a leaning path in Pluralsight, and a video series on O’Reilly. I might also try to read the SAFe Distilled book at some point too. I don’t know. This plan may fizzle out, honestly, but I’m going to give it a try.
My Apple Music Replay is kind of weird. My top song for the year is Hell of a Ride, by Nourished by Time. My top album is Songs of Surrender, by U2. And my top artist is Bombay Bicycle Club. I guess those all kinda make sense, though they’re all a little surprising. I guess the U2 album being on the top is mostly because it’s a four-disc set, and I added it in January. Looking at albums that I added to my library this year, none of them really stand out. There are some really good ones, but nothing that really stuck enough for me to listen to a lot, or that really blew my mind. At the moment, I’m pretty enthusiastic about the new Joan Armatrading album.
Ten Years Ago
I’ve been doing this so long that I can now look at my post from ten years ago (and even twenty years ago) and try to think about some big picture stuff. (The post from 20 years ago is just a one-liner about a song, so that one’s not too valuable.)
So, ten years ago:
I noted that I’d gone from 200 pounds to 165 over the course of 2014. So I’m starting 2025 at the same weight at which I started 2015. I’m not sure how I feel about that, but it is what it is!
2014 was my first full year at SHI. I’ve been there since, so overall that’s gone well, I think.
I talked a little about consulting and volunteering in that post. I haven’t done any consulting in a long time, and I’m not planning to. I think those days are done, unless I decide to do that part-time after I’m retired. And I haven’t done any volunteering either. I’d like to do some of that, but I’m getting to the point where I’m too tired to do much of anything outside of my normal salaried work. (And I’m OK with that.)
I finished 30 books in 2014, so that’s pretty similar to this year’s total.
I moved this blog to WordPress in 2014, so I guess I should have celebrated my ten-year WordPress anniversary in 2024. I’m still OK with WordPress (even with Matt Mullenweg’s shenanigans).
I was hoping to finish A Memory of Light, the last Wheel of Time book, before the end of this year. But there are only a few days left in the year, and I’m at about the 75% mark, so it’s not looking likely.
I’m currently reading chapter 37, “The Last Battle”, which is a ridiculously long chapter. Most WoT chapters take 15-30 minutes for me to read. This one showed as 5.5 hrs when I started reading it on my Kindle. And I’ve since learned that it’s a 9 hour chapter in the audiobook. So I’m not too sure when I’m even going to finish just this chapter.
I see that, on this day last year, I was just starting Lord of Chaos, which is book 6. (A Memory of Light is book 14.) So I have definitely made a lot of progress!
I’m taking three days of PTO this week, to use up the last few days that I can’t roll over to next year. I’m counting it as a bit of an accomplishment that I actually have a few days left to burn, and that I never got sick enough this year to use them up on sick time. (Unlike last year, when I got COVID.)
Of course, I’m sick right now, so I’m taking it easy, and not doing much. I spent some time yesterday messing around with my DRM-free comic book files again. (See previous post.) This time, I decided to see if I could replace some very large CBZ files from an old Star Trek Humble bundle with smaller EPUB files.
This sent me down a rabbit hole, messing around with iPadOS comic book and EPUB reader apps, Calibre, and some other random stuff. I was briefly mad at myself for wasting so much time on it, but then I realized that (a) I’m taking PTO, (b) I’m sick enough that I didn’t want to do much else, and (c) I actually enjoy messing around with stuff like this, from time to time. So here are some notes on what I did and where I left things.
First: I’m not sure if there’s a good reason why these specific Star Trek comic book files were so big as CBZs and so much smaller as EPUBs. I think Humble doesn’t necessarily put a lot of work into optimizing their files. CBZ files are compressed, so it’s not a lack of compression. (The “Z” is for “Zip”.) And EPUB files are also compressed, so I guess the only thing that would account for the difference would be image file size. So maybe they made the CBZ with high-resolution images, and the EPUB with lower resolution images.
Anyway, I downloaded some EPUBs and tried them out with my usual comic book reading app on the iPad, Panels. They were pulled into the app with no problem, and are readable, but the covers wouldn’t show. I probably should have stopped there and said “fine”, but I decided to mess around some more.
First, I pulled one of the EPUBs into Calibre, and let that mess with it a bit. I verified that the cover was visible in Calibre, so I exported Calibre’s version of the EPUB and pulled that into Panels. That version didn’t work at all though. So I gave up on that.
Then I tried the EPUB in some of my other ebook reading apps:
I tried GoodReader, but that doesn’t support EPUBs, only PDFs.
I tried the Kindle app, but that doesn’t support large EPUBs.
I tried Apple Books, and that worked, but the page size & page turning was a bit wonky.
I tried the Kobo app. That worked, but was also wonky about page size/turning.
I used to have an app called Marvin that was my go-to app for reading DRM-free EPUBs, but that app was discontinued and is no longer in the app store, so I couldn’t even get it loaded on my iPad.
I still have BlueFire Reader, and it still works, but I’m pretty sure it’s not being maintained, so I didn’t even bother trying it.
Most EPUB reading apps are meant to be used for books that are mostly text, so I guess they don’t work great with comic book files. Panels still seems to be the best app overall for reading comics, regardless of file format.
So now I can maybe mess around with the EPUB a bit and see if I can get Panels to recognize the cover. EPUBs are basically just a compressed bundle of HTML and image files. Maybe I just need to tweak something in the HTML? Or I could decompress the EPUB and recompress it as a CBZ file maybe. That would give me a file with the lower-res images from the EPUB but in the better-supported CBZ format.
Stepping back a bit, I remember that I’m messing around with files from a Humble bundle that I bought back in 2016. I haven’t read anything from it yet, and probably won’t, any time soon. So none of this is a big deal.
Meanwhile, I also bought this Hellboy bundle this week, which is actually the third Hellboy-related bundle I’ve bought from Humble. So now I’ve got a ton of Hellboy comics files on my drive, more than I’ll probably ever get around to reading. I just have to remember that having too much to read is a good thing… better that, than not having enough.
I’ve been buying various Humble bundles going back to 2012. I think the first couple were probably book bundles. Then, they started selling comics bundles too. I’ve been buying two or three of their bundles every year since then. So it’s not a ton of stuff, but it adds up. Some of the comics bundles, if you download all the books, can take up a lot of disk space. The largest one I have is a Star Trek bundle that takes up 25 GB.
My general approach with the DRM-free Humble comics bundles is to download all the books onto my main PC, then back them up to DVD. I’ve kept them in a local folder on the PC, only moving individual books to OneDrive when I’m ready to load them onto my iPad.
But I’m starting to rethink that. I have 1 TB drive in my PC, and I try to keep at least 100 GB free on it. I bought a couple of Humble bundles this week, and the comics one (Black Hammer) pushed me over the edge into having just under 100 GB free. I found that my local Humble folder had 175 GB worth of comics in it.
In OneDrive, I have 1 TB of storage, and I was using about 170 GB of that. So there’s plenty of room on OneDrive for the comics. I keep all of my OneDrive files local on my PC, so I don’t gain much immediately from moving the comics there. (Though there is some overlap, with stuff I’d copied to OneDrive and also had on my PC.) So I’ve spent some time over the last few days moving stuff from my local folder to OneDrive. I’m almost done now, with the last couple of bundles uploading right now. As you can imagine, it takes a long time to upload 175 GB to OneDrive.
When I’m done, I will consider changing the settings in OneDrive so that the Humble comics folder is offloaded and not always available on the PC. I already have both my MacBook and PC laptop set so that OneDrive is in “files on demand” mode, but I’ve resisted doing that on my main PC, since I like to be able to have the OneDrive files included in my daily backups (via Bvckup 2).
Overall, I’m trying to let go a bit of the idea that I need to have all of my DRM-free comics on my hard drive and backed up. Humble has now been around for more than ten years, and I’m pretty sure all of the stuff I’ve bought from them is still downloadable from their library. So it doesn’t seem as though I’m likely to suddenly lose access to it at any point soon. And, hey, it’s just comics, and honestly, I’ve got so many of them now that I’m probably not ever going to read them all anyway.
Another idea I had was to move them to a separate OneDrive account, as an archive. I have Microsoft 365 Family, so I can set up another user on the family account and move the comics over there, so they’ll be off the hard drive, out of my main OneDrive, but still safely in the cloud. That could be a lot of work though.
Well, I guess the system I have is good enough for now. The other Humble bundle I bought this week was a book bundle, the Ursula K. Le Guin bundle. Humble has been doing book bundles with Kobo recently, including the Terry Pratchett one from earlier this year. For the Pratchett bundle, I actually downloaded all the books from Kobo and pulled them into Calibre. I don’t think I’m going to bother doing that with the Le Guin bundle. Since I now have both a Kobo Libra Colour and a Kindle Colorsoft, I don’t have to worry that much about stripping DRM and moving files around, if I don’t want to. I can read the Kobo books on the Kobo and my Kindle books on the Kindle.
I’m not really happy about the overall situation with DRM on books and comics and music, but I guess I’ve accepted it, to some extent. And I think I’m starting to accept that I’ll never read every book and comic I “own” before I die. I read something some time ago by (I think) Steve Leveen that reframed the issue of having a large “To Be Read” pile as a positive rather than a negative thing. Rather than thinking of your backlog as a burden, think of it as an abundance of options. Every time I want to sit down and read a book or comic, I have hundreds of options to choose from, without spending any money or leaving my apartment. So that’s a good thing, right?
So we’ve got water back, though the water pressure is a little weird, and we have a boil water advisory. Meanwhile, I’m trying to check a few things off my to-do list today.
A few days ago, I finally wiped my TiVo, unhooked it from the TV, and boxed it up for recycling. I got it in 2015, so it had a good run. Almost ten years.
That made me look at the situation under my TV a bit closer, and convinced me to see whether or not it was worth keeping my PS3. I got that in 2008, so it’s even older than the TiVo. I’d unplugged the HDMI cable on it at some point, for some reason. I plugged it back in today and turned it on, and surprisingly, it worked.
It wasn’t hooked up to my current WiFi network, which means it’s been at least two years since I’ve turned it on, since I bought that router in 2022. It took a bit of work to get it going. I had to reset my PSN account password, then generate a new device setup password, and get it entered on the dumb on-screen keyboard on the PS3. But it’s working now.
The PlayStation store for PS3 was discontinued in 2021. And I’m not sure if the Blu-Ray player works. So I’m not sure if it’s at all useful. I should probably talk myself into resetting it to factory defaults and recycling it. One thing at a time though.
My other big cleanup thing today was to put together a pile of old tech books and dump them in a book donation bin. (I know tech books usually don’t have much resale value, but this bin specifically says that it’s OK, as long as they have UPC codes. They might just toss them, but I’m fine either way.)
It took some effort to convince myself to dump them. I know they were all out of date, and I can access most of them through O’Reilly Learning if I need them, but it was still hard, for some reason. Most of them were from the stack of books I used to keep at my desk at work, before they moved us to our new smaller cubicles, which don’t have any space for books.
I guess I still have trouble letting go of old stuff, in general. Part of me still thinks I’m going to finish reading that book about SharePoint 2010 development, or playing Final Fantasy VIII, or watching all the Svengoolie episodes on my TiVo. But I need to let go of some of this stuff and move forward.
I’m in the middle of a vacation week. I’m not really doing anything with it, other than taking care of some miscellaneous stuff and just trying to relax. This is my first vacation this year, and also really my first time taking a full calendar week vacation in… quite some time. I took a full week off last year, but that was when I got COVID. And the last few years before that, I’d only really taken long weekends, essentially.
So this is kind of a nice break. Of course, I scheduled some car stuff on Monday, and some dental work for Friday, so Tuesday through Thursday are really my only 100% free days. Today is Wednesday, and I had some ideas in my head about maybe going over to Duke Farms for a walk. But, when I got out of bed, I discovered that we had no water. And it’s a town-wide thing, due to a water main break on Rt 206, near Duke Farms. So they’ve closed for the day. And I also had some ideas in my head about making myself a fancy breakfast, but I didn’t want to do that without running water, so I had a bowl of Cheerios instead, with some instant coffee made with bottled water.
So now I’m not sure what I should do with myself today. I have a few little chores I could do. And maybe I could find a park that’s in the other direction from 206 to go for a walk. Or I could just sit around and continue reading Towers of Midnight. Yeah, I think I’m probably going to do that.
