Category: Kindle

Memorial Day

I have a habit of writing posts on Memorial Day. Here are some past posts: 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2020. This year, the Tour of Somerville prep started at 5 AM, with contractors setting up the metal fencing on Main Street, which of course woke me up. At some point between 5 and 5:30, we had a quick little storm, which dumped a bunch of rain outside. But it stopped by the time I got out of bed, at 5:40. Things are looking OK right now, around 9 AM, but there could be more thunderstorms in the afternoon, which would probably mean that the main race would have to be cancelled.

Coffee & Sleep

I had a lot of trouble sleeping this past week. I think that was mostly due to allergies and the change in weather. (It was very hot most of the week.) I’ve been compensating for that by drinking probably way too much coffee. So, for the weekend, I decided to go cold turkey.

Well, that didn’t last long! I had decaf on Saturday morning, then felt crappy all day. Not all of that was due to caffeine withdrawal, but some of it certainly was. So I had a Coke Zero at some point in the afternoon. And for Sunday and Monday, I’ve decided to have about half my usual weekend morning coffee. I usually have a full Moka pot, which means two scoops of ground coffee and enough water for two mugs full. Which might not sound like a lot, but the Moka pot produces something like espresso strength coffee. So, basically, I’m cutting back from around six shots of espresso to three shots. That’s working out OK. I’ve also cut out afternoon coffee, so I haven’t gotten cold brew from either of my usual coffee spots at all this weekend. And I’m sleeping a little better.

Pain & Finance

I also had some pain in my right hand that had been building through the week. So, in addition to going cold turkey on caffeine, I was going to avoid computer keyboards and mice, to the extent that I could. I really didn’t touch a computer on Saturday. On Sunday, I spent a good bit of time on my PC going through some financial stuff, and today, I’m writing this blog post, but probably won’t do much more. The pain has been gradually going away.

On that financial stuff yesterday: I moved a bit more money over to my new Marcus account, and opened a couple of CDs. So now I have some money making 4.6% in the savings account, a 12-month CD making 5% and an 18-month CD making 4.6% APY. So that should allow me to hedge my bets a little, if rates go up or down over the next year or two. Of course, all of that is pending until the banks open up again tomorrow, so I’ll have to check it again tomorrow or later in the week and make sure everything went where it was supposed to.

TV & Sports

I just hit the three-month mark on my YouTube TV subscription, so I had to make a decision on whether or not I was going to keep it going, past the $10 off promo rate, and into the regular pricing. I almost decided to cancel it, but changed my mind at the last minute.

Right now, I’m watching some coverage of Roland Garros on T2. I’ve found that watching tennis is very relaxing for me. YouTube TV includes T2 in their base package, but not Tennis Channel. I hadn’t really looked into this before, but I guess T2 is basically the overflow channel for Tennis Channel. So the bigger matches are on the main channel, and a bunch of “lesser” matches are on T2. I can get Tennis Channel with the Sports Plus add-on for YouTube TV, which costs an extra $11 per month. But I’m not going to do that. I’m mostly watching tennis as background noise, so it doesn’t matter if I’m watching an “important” match or not. And there’s going to be some Roland-Garros coverage on NBC later today, so I can watch that too. (And if I still had Peacock, they’ve also got Roland-Garros coverage. TV has gotten so confusing and fragmented.)

Kobo & The Wheel of Time

I’m well into Crossroads of Twilight on my Kobo now. I’m finding it to be a little better than the Kindle for most things, but not substantially. So, I really didn’t need the Kobo, but I don’t regret buying it. I want to get back to it and read a couple more chapters today, if I can.

And, with that, I should probably stop writing. My hands are starting to hurt again. (Getting old sucks.)

Kobo, Pocket, Instapaper, and some Wheel of Time thoughts

I finished reading Winter’s Heart yesterday, the ninth Wheel of Time book. I do want to start the next one, Crossroads of Twilight, soon, but before I do, I want to catch up with the last couple of episodes of The Wheel Weaves podcast. A lot happens in the last few chapters of Winter’s Heart, and I feel like I need someone to walk me through it so I can understand it a bit better.

I haven’t been actively reading Sylas K Barrett’s “Reading The Wheel of Time” series over at reactor.com, but I noticed that I’m now further along in the series than him, since his latest article is on chapter 25 of Winter’s Heart. The Wheel Weaves, on the other hand, is currently on book 12, so I have a while to go before I catch up with them.

Anyway, I thought I’d take a break from book-reading today and experiment with reading some short fiction and newspaper/magazine articles on my Kobo, via Pocket. Overall, I think I’ve decided that I like the experience of using Pocket on Kobo, but there are a few caveats.

I started this process by taking a couple of New York Times articles, saving them to Pocket, then reading them on the Kobo. That worked out fine. Then, I thought I’d see if I could take a few things I’d saved in Instapaper and read those in Pocket. The first thing I discovered is that Pocket seems to have two modes of saving articles: for some articles, it saves a readable view of the article in Pocket, and for others, it just saves a bookmark. For the latter type, those don’t sync down to the Kobo. Pocket calls these two modes “article view” and “view original” apparently.

One idea that I had for saving Instapaper articles to Pocket was to just hit the Pocket button on the webpage for Instapaper’s readable version of the article. But that just triggered the bookmarking mode for Pocket, and didn’t save the readable version. So that was useless. And I found that, for a few things I’d saved in Instapaper, either the original article had disappeared from the web, or the original article could also not be saved to Pocket except as a bookmark. That was an interesting experiment, and I think it convinced me that Instapaper is still superior to Pocket as a general read-it-later service, since I don’t think I’ve ever found anything that Instapaper refused to save to its own database. Pocket definitely works for the New York Times and the New Yorker, but it’s only about 50/50 on other pages I’ve tried.

So, anyway, having saved a few things to Pocket, I did some reading on the Kobo. I found that the experience was pretty good, with a few caveats. The biggest issue is that I realized that you can’t highlight Pocket articles on the Kobo. That’s maybe not a big thing really, but it is something I’d like to be able to do.

It’s occurred to me that, for longer articles, I could save the Instapaper version to an .epub file, then transfer that over to the Kobo via Calibre (or Google Drive). There’s a point where I’m jumping through too many hoops just to read a short story though. I may spend some more time messing around, but not right now.

Meanwhile, I’m thinking about using the Kobo to read the next WoT book. I’ve already copied it from my Amazon account, into Calibre, then over to Kobo. (The WoT books are sold without DRM, so I don’t need Calibre to remove DRM, just to convert them to EPUB.) On Kobo, I’d lose the X-Ray feature that the Kindle has, which sometimes comes in useful with WoT, given the large cast of characters. But X-Ray is often useless, and I’ve taken to looking up characters in the WoT Compendium app on my phone instead.

I’m not sure if I spent more time today actually reading, vs. playing around with Instapaper, Pocket, Calibre, etc., but I did have a relatively pleasant morning, so I guess that’s good either way.

thoughts on the Kobo Libra Colour

I got my Kobo Libra Colour in the mail on Friday, and started setting it up and playing around with it over the weekend. I didn’t get to play with it as much as I would have liked though, since I was sick and didn’t have much energy. Still, I wanted to write up some initial thoughts.

Overall, I like the device. But I’m not sure if it’s good enough to pull me away from my Kindle and the Amazon Kindle ecosystem. I think I’ll probably keep using my Kindle as my primary E-Reader, and maybe use the Kobo as a secondary device for certain kinds of books and documents. I’m really not sure how it’ll settle out.

To get into the specifics, let’s start with the obvious stuff that makes it different from the Kindle. First, color: The color screen is nice, though obviously it doesn’t compare to, say, an iPad. It’s nice to see book covers in color, but it’s not necessary and it doesn’t add much value, really.

I thought the color screen might make the device usable for reading comics, but my experiments with that aren’t encouraging. The device is too small for normal-size American comics to look good on it. It’s about the right size for manga, but I didn’t have much luck with that. I had a couple of DRM-free manga volumes that I thought I’d try, but they didn’t work well. I might try that again with different files, but I’m not in a rush to do that.

The second main feature would be the stylus. You can use the stylus to take notes, with the built-in notebook app, or to highlight passages in books and mark them up. I tried the notebook app, and I don’t think I’m going to get much use out of it. I think I’ve gotten to the point where using a pen just isn’t that comfortable for me anymore, whether it’s a “real” pen and paper, or a stylus and tablet. And I think both the device size and the texture of the screen make using the stylus a bit harder than using a regular pen and paper, for me. I did get a little kick out of how much it reminded me of my old Newton though!

I haven’t tried a Kindle Scribe, so I can’t compare it to that. I’ve occasionally thought about getting a Scribe, and that’s still in the back of my mind as a possibility, but I’d say I’m a little less enthusiastic about trying it now.

The stylus cost $70, so I should probably return it, but I’m probably going to hang onto it. Maybe I’ll find a good use case for it at some point.

So I think I’ve figured out that the two main features that set it apart from my Kindle Paperwhite aren’t compelling enough to get me to switch away from the Kindle.

There are a bunch of other interesting features on the device that aren’t specific to the Libra Colour, but to Kobo in general, and I think some of those are quite interesting and maybe useful. I’ve had a chance to set up a few of those and try them out, so I’ll go through some of them here.

  1. Google Drive and Dropbox integration: I set up the Google Drive integration. (I assume the Dropbox support is similar.) This feature let’s you take books from your cloud storage account, and copy them down to the device from there. So it’s mostly just another way of getting books onto the device. It works well, though copying books over USB is more convenient for me, really.
  2. OverDrive integration: This is a really nice feature. OverDrive is integrated right into the device OS, so you can borrow library books directly from the device. Mind you, it’s not really difficult to borrow books via the OverDrive web site and send them to my Kindle, but this does make it a little easier. When I mentioned above that I might find myself using the Kobo as a secondary device for certain use cases, this it the one I’m most likely to use it for, I think: borrowing and reading library books.
  3. Pocket integration: This is interesting. I’d prefer Instapaper integration, since that’s my read-it-later service of choice, but I do have a free Pocket account, so maybe I’ll try it out and see how it works. The Kobo might be a better device than my iPad for reading, say, a long New Yorker article. (It is possible to send articles to the Kindle with Instapaper, but it’s a bit of a hack.)

So that’s it for the oddball features. The most important thing, of course, is how well it works as a reading device. I’ve only done a little bit of reading on it so far. I copied the Wheel of Time book that I’m currently reading over to it, and read part of a chapter. It worked well. I could increase the font size to something that worked for me. The display is bright enough, clear enough, and easy on the eyes. I’m not sure that it’s better than the Kindle, but it might be.

There are a couple of things that I have on the Kindle that I will probably miss (to some extent) on the Kobo. The first would be Goodreads integration. That’s not really a big deal, but it’s nice. The second would be the X-Ray feature on the Kindle. That’s really a hit-or-miss feature, but when it works, it’s nice. Especially on the Wheel of Time books, it’s nice to be able to use it to look up a character name. It is really hit-or-miss though. I often find myself going to an external reference. (I’ve been getting a lot of use out of the WoT Compendium iOS app lately.)

One more topic I should really cover is how it works with Calibre. I haven’t spent enough time on that yet though. I’ve made sure that Calibre recognizes it and lets me copy books down, but nothing more than that. I may come back to that in a later blog post.

So overall, this thing was an unnecessary expenditure, and I probably won’t get much use out of it. I don’t know, though. I get so much use out of the Kindle that it makes sense to try an alternative and see how it works for me. And my vision is so screwed up at this point that it’s worth experimenting to find the device that works best for me and my old broken eyes.

Kobo Libra Colour

I got kinda curious about Kobo earlier this year, after buying an ebook bundle of Kobo books. I’m perfectly happy with my Kindle, but I’m always curious about other hardware and software, whether it’s computers or phones or tablets or whatever. I couldn’t really talk myself into buying a Kobo back then, but Kobo has just released two color e-readers, and that was enough to get me to break down and buy one, just for the novelty of trying out an e-reader with color.

I got the higher-end one, the Kobo Libra Colour. And I also got the stylus for it, and a case, so I’m spending around $350 on it, which is a lot for something I don’t need and might not get much use out of, but, well, I can afford it. I get a lot of use out of my Kindle, so if I find that I like the Kobo more than the Kindle, then it was worth spending the money.

And I’m curious about the stylus. I can’t really see myself using the Kobo as a notebook on a regular basis, but it’ll be interesting to try it out and see how it works. The last time I regularly used a handheld/tablet/whatever with a stylus was probably my Palm i705, in 2002.

The new models are being released on April 30th, so I’m assuming mine will show up in early May. I’ll post some thoughts about it after I’ve received it and had a chance to play around with it a bit.

Fun with Kobo, Calibre, and Discworld

Following up on my previous post: I decided to fool around a bit again today with Calibre and the Discworld books from Kobo. This time, I installed Adobe Digital Editions, “downloaded” the books from the Kobo web site, brought them into ADE, then from there into Calibre. That actually worked. So I now have 39 Discworld books as DRM-free EPUB files that I can (hopefully) read on my Kindle. (I only loaded one of them to the Kindle, and it worked, so presumably the rest would too.)

I also decided to try loading some DRM’d books I’ve gotten from The University of Chicago Press into ADE and them Calibre. That worked too. Previously, for those, I’ve followed the instructions from UChicago, which was to download them directly to the Bluefire Reader app on my iPad. (That app is tied into Adobe’s DRM system.) I’ve discovered that I can take the files from Bluefire, save them to OneDrive, then strip the DRM with Calibre. So that’s cool, and it means I can finally read those books on my Kindle. (I have about a dozen unread books from them. Maybe this will actually get me to read some of them. Or not… I have over 600 books in my TBR pile on Goodreads right now.)

And, since this has gotten me thinking about e-readers and tablets and stuff, I decided to finally trade in my old 2015 Fire tablet. It only cost me $35 when I bought it, and it no longer powers on, but Amazon gave me $5 for it, plus 20% off a new Fire tablet. (That’s assuming they accept it. I guess they could reject it, but I already told them it doesn’t power on or hold a charge, so it should be fine.)

I don’t really intend on using that 20% off on a new Fire tablet, but I poked around a bit, just to see what they have. The Amazon Fire HD 8 Plus is on sale right now for $75. So I’d get another $15 off, bringing it down to $60. That’s not bad. Of course, I have no particular need for a Fire tablet, so I need to remember that.

I’m still kind of curious about picking up a Kobo Libre 2 maybe, but of course I don’t need that either. Still, e-readers and small tablets are a lot cheaper than, say, the Apple Vision Pro, so if I’m going to get tempted into buying gadgets I don’t need, I’m better off with e-readers and cheap tablets, right?

Discworld bundle

A few days ago, I noticed that Humble has a Terry Pratchett Discworld bundle up right now. Thirty-nine books for $18. I love the Discworld books, but have only read 3 or 4 of them. So I was ready to jump on it, and get (nearly) all of them, but then I saw that the books aren’t DRM-free, as they usually are with Humble. Instead, they’re redeemable through Kobo.com. I don’t have a Kobo, and have never really delved into the Kobo ecosystem, so my first though was “oh well, not for me.” And I should have left it there, but I’m a weirdo nerd, so I started looking into what I could do with Kobo books.

It turns out that you can download them, strip the DRM, and pull them into your Kindle library, so that got me interested. I decided to play around a bit. I installed the DeDRM plugins into my Calibre install on my PC, registered a Kobo account, and started reading up on things. I decided that it was doable, and $18 wasn’t that much anyway, so I went ahead and bought the bundle.

The simpler method of stripping the DRM didn’t work for me. That involves using a plugin called Obok, which should be able to pull the files from the Kobo desktop software, strip the DRM, and import them into Calibre.

There’s a more complicated method that involves transferring the books from Kobo into Adobe Digital Editions, and then stripping the DRM from there. I haven’t tried that yet. It would definitely be time-consuming to do it for all 39 books in the bundle. Maybe I’ll try it on just one and see how it goes.

Meanwhile, this has gotten me curious about the Kobo e-ink devices. The Kobo Libra 2 is interesting. There’s no particular reason why I can’t buy one and have both a Kindle and a Kobo. Except that I don’t really need yet another software platform/ecosystem in my life.

Sigh. For now, I’m just going to leave the Discworld books in my Kobo library. I’m plenty busy with the Wheel of Time books right now anyway. I’m not sure when I thought I’d have time to read 39 Discworld books…

Lord of Chaos – getting back into the Wheel of Time books

I took a break from reading Wheel of Time books after finishing The Fires of Heaven in November. But I’m ready to dive back in now, I think. I made it through the first five books last year. I figure I can make it through the next five in 2024. Or maybe even finish out the series, though that may be a little too ambitious.

The next book up is Lord of Chaos, which is either the longest book in the series, or the second longest, depending on who you believe. This page seems to show LoC as slightly longer than The Shadow Rising, which other articles say is the longest. I may have gone down a “pointless analysis of WoT books” rabbit hole just now… Here’s a reddit post with some discussion of word counts, and a reddit page with links to a bunch of other weird little bits of analysis. Do you want a stacked bar chart analyzing Nynaeve’s braid tugging habit? It’s out there!

Anyway, what was I really going to talk about here? Oh yeah, so I have the book downloaded to my Kindle and ready to read. And I checked the audiobook out from my local library, and have that on my iPhone. I don’t know if I’m really going to listen to it at all, but maybe I can make it through the book faster if I switch back and forth between the ebook and audiobook. (Of course, that would be easier to do if I just paid the $7.50 for the Audible narration option from Amazon, but I’ll see how far I get with the library copy before shelling out for that.)

I also downloaded a handful of the Tor articles about the book to Instapaper. I had been reading all of those recap articles, for the first few books, but I gave up on it at some point, since I didn’t feel like I really needed to, and I didn’t want to slow myself down. But I want to try getting back into them again, at least at the start of this book.

(I mentioned in another post recently that the price of Instapaper Premium is doubling soon, so I spent a little time looking at alternatives. But I think I’m going to stick with Instapaper for now. I may be writing a blog post about that, and some related topics soon. Or not, depending on time.)

Getting Deeper into The Wheel of Time

I finished reading The Eye of the World yesterday. I liked it a lot, and got through it fairly quickly, considering the length of the book and how slowly I usually read. Here’s my Goodreads review.  I noticed yesterday that the books has almost half a million ratings and 20,000 reviews, so I’m pretty sure no one is ever going to stumble across mine on the site, so I might as well link it here.

Per my last post on WoT, this series has activated that part of my brain that likes to go down rabbit holes researching a thing, shopping for stuff, and spending more time on that than actually reading the books. But I did finish the first book, so I’m patting myself on the back for that! Meanwhile, Amazon sent me $5 off coupons for most of the series, so I went ahead and bought the Kindle versions of books one through eleven. I find it hard to imagine myself actually reading my way that far into the series, but, well, I’ve got them in my “official” Kindle library now, at least.

I also paid $7.50 for the “Audible narration” add-on for the first book, in case I want to re-read it at some point, in audiobook format. I assumed that would get me the newer Rosamund Pike version, but instead it got me the older Kate Reading and Michael Kramer version. (Which is fine, since that one is also supposed to be pretty good. Though Pike won an Audie for her version, so maybe I should pick up that version too, and listen to them both… You see how quickly I spiral out of control with these things?)

I may start reading the second book, The Great Hunt, today, since it looks to be a quiet Sunday, and I have nothing much else to do. And I’m interested to see where the story goes. As I’ve said before, I expect that I’ll lose interest in this stuff at some point, but I’m not there yet.

As I read the first book, I followed along with the Reading The Wheel of Time blog post series at tor.com. I’ll likely continue that habit with the next book. It’s fun to connect with other people’s opinions and enthusiasm for a series like this, and there’s quite a community around WoT.

And, as usual with these things, I’ve gotten side-tracked on a couple of fiddly little technical things. First, I started reading Eye of the World from the EPUB file that I got from Tor a long time ago (as mentioned in the previous post). But then I bought the “official” Kindle store version, and switched to that, at about the halfway point in the book. That got me thinking about whether or not I could transfer my highlights from the EPUB to the Kindle store version. Short answer: probably not. But I might hook my Kindle up to my PC via USB today and see if I can copy all of the highlights into a text file and then stick them in Evernote, just for yuks. I could go off on a tangent here about a couple of services I found that automate (or semi-automate) pulling your notes & highlights from the Kindle into other systems, but I’m going to avoid going down that hole right now.

Second, I’ve been thinking about better ways to deal with the tor.com blog post series. The first book had twenty posts, usually covering 2 or 3 chapters each. To read them, I was simply keeping a tab open in Firefox on my MacBook, and never closing Firefox. (That’s unusual for me. I always close Firefox when I’m done, and I don’t have it set to reopen previous tabs on launch.) Then, I would just go back and forth from the series page into the individual posts. And I was keeping a note in Drafts to keep track of how far I had to read in the book before reading the next post. So it was a workable system, but a little weird.

For the next book, I was thinking I could open all of the articles, send them all to Instapaper, in a new folder, and then read them from Instapaper, deleting them as I finished them. If I did that, I’d probably read them on my iPad, so I’d be switching back and forth between the Kindle and iPad. Or, there’s an RSS feed on the series page, so I could subscribe to that in my RSS service, The Old Reader, and then read them from Reeder on my iPad. Or, I could put the RSS feed into Calibre and send the articles from there directly to my Kindle. Or… there are a bunch of things I could screw around with here. You see where things start spiraling out of control for me when I go down these rabbit holes… But I guess it keeps me out of trouble, mostly.

Comixology updates

Comixology has been in the news lately. There was a lengthy article at The Beat a couple of weeks ago, and one at Popverse a couple of days ago. It looks like a bunch of folks there got laid off, and Amazon is probably looking to finish integrating all the Comixology stuff into their Kindle books ecosystem.

I wrote a few blog posts about Comixology about a year ago, when they shut down the separate comixology.com site, and replaced the old Comixology app with the new one. I was going to say here that I haven’t bought much from Comixology since they made that change, but I checked, and I bought about 30 books in 2022, so I guess that’s not quite true. And I still have more than 200 unread books in my account.

I don’t think that Amazon is going to get out of the digital comics business entirely, so I’m assuming that my current Comixology library is safe. But I am a little worried about whether or not Amazon is really going to continue to support digital comics the way they did when they had a real staff at Comixology, and it was at least semi-independent.

Well, I guess this is the kind of thing that’s not worth worrying too much about, since there’s really nothing I can do to affect it. It’ll be interesting to see what Amazon does with Comixology over the next year, and what else happens in the digital comics market.

 

Clean Code, Visual Studio, Windows 11, and a bit more on ebooks

I wanted to add some more notes about the whole Kindle, EPUB, MOBI, etc. thing that I’ve been blogging about in my last few posts. As I mentioned a few posts back, I’ve been working my way through the Clean Code learning path in O’Reilly. Since I’m probably going to lose access to O’Reilly before I’m done with that, I thought I’d buy a copy of the Clean Code book, so I could finish reading it at my leisure, and to have it for later reference. With tech books, I usually like buying a DRM-free ebook directly from the publisher, when possible. In this case, I initially had some trouble finding that, but eventually figured out that it’s purchasable through the InformIT site. I bought the Robert C. Martin Clean Code Collection ebook, which contains both Clean Code and The Clean Coder. I had a discount code, so it was about $40 total.

I copied the EPUB, MOBI, and PDF files for the book to OneDrive. There are a number of ways I can read an ebook on my iPad, if it’s DRM-free and available in multiple formats. For this one, I wound up sending it from OneDrive into my Kindle app, as a MOBI file. That method still doesn’t support EPUBs. And it will copy the file up into my Kindle library, which is nice. I don’t think I’d ever copied anything into the Kindle library that way before, but it worked fine. I also copied the PDF into GoodReader. The code listings in the MOBI version look a little weird, which is a common problem with tech ebooks, so it’s nice to have the PDF handy as an alternative.

Clean Code has some example refactorings that are fairly interesting. They’re all in Java, but I thought it might be interesting to take the original Java code for one of the examples, convert it to C#, get it working, then work through some refactoring that’s similar to what Uncle Bob does in the book/videos. I found some of the code for the examples in GitHub under the Clean Code Kata user account. (I’m not sure if that’s an “official” account for Bob Martin or his organization, but either way, the code is there.)

This idea to convert some of the examples to C# and work through them was prompted in part by a desire to set up a .NET dev environment of some sort on one of my personal machines, and to maybe experiment a bit with some of the more recent .NET stuff, like .NET 6 and VS 2022. I realized that I don’t currently have any dev stuff at all set up on my desktop PC, my MacBook, or my Lenovo laptop. The MacBook is new, so I just haven’t set any dev stuff up yet. The Lenovo was bought in 2020, and I haven’t gotten much use out of it at all. And I’ve been trying to keep the desktop PC free of any heavyweight dev tools, since I just want to keep it clean for personal productivity stuff. After going back and forth on a few possible setups, I decided to install Visual Studio 2022 (Community edition) on my Lenovo laptop. I considered just installing the .NET 6 SDK and Visual Studio Code, which would have been much more lightweight, but I’m used to using the full VS product, and I can’t see a reason not to use it. And the Lenovo is the best place to install it, since I can wipe out that machine entirely and start fresh if things get too messed up. I’ve also recently upgraded that laptop to Windows 11, so this was also an opportunity to (finally) give that a try.

Of course, I’ve had other things to do this weekend too, so I’ve only gotten as far as installing Visual Studio and git, and tweaking some settings. Maybe I’ll actually do some programming next weekend. (Or maybe I’ll get distracted by something else, and the whole thing will fall by the wayside.)