ulysses

Looks nice, but...

It doesn't appear to be set up to work without logging in to Steam first. That really reduces the portability.

If it's a book that's only available DRM, I buy it on the Kindle. I'm not fond of buying DRMed books, but most are only available that way, and Amazon is the most likely to still be around in the future.

For non-DRM:

Tor Books are no longer DRMed.

Baen Books -- https://www.baen.com/ -- don't have DRM, and you can buy directly from the publisher, and manage your library on their site, and download as many times as you like. You can also often purchase eArc versions, and they have a monthly subscription bundle were you can read parts of the book as it comes out, and then you get the complete book when it's done.

If you're interested in translated Japanese light novels, there's J Novel Club -- https://j-novel.club/ -- for a monthly subscription, you can read book parts for free as they're being translated. Once they're fully translated, you can then purchase the final epub directly from their site.

Books are interesting in that they both are and aren't fungible. If, say, I want to read the next Martha Wells Murderbot book, or the next Julie McGalliard Rougarou book, I have to buy that particular book.

But if I'm just looking for another book to read, I always check Tor, Baen, and J Novel Club first.

Perhaps replace the time worked with time spent looking for another job. Despite having faced suicidal depression a time or two myself, I have no great advice to offer; but one of the things I've turned to many times is a bit in the ASR FAQ.

  5.8) But seriously, should I kill myself?

  Seriously, no.
  As posted to ASR by Ed Evans:

    Ultimate recovery stalks us all, no need to succour it.  Quit or
    take a leave with or without pay (or permission), stop seeing him
    or her, recognise that the cat or dog does rule you, call in sick
    and spend the day in the big blue room, it's only money and can
    be earned again, all the pictures will be posted again, call the
    local professionals if you really feel that way...

    And if all else fails?  Lawn mowing.

  If you're willing to take the severe step of killing yourself, you should
  be willing to take less severe steps such as quitting your job or taking a
  leave without permission.  And really, there _is_ help out there.
  Maybe in here, too.

  And more of us have been there than you may realize.  We're grateful
  now that we didn't do it.  (Most days.)  In chess they have a saying,
  "You can't win by resigning."  Keep playing; you never know.

They use AWS for their DNS, so of course it's failing...

  Trying j.gtld-servers.net.
    parler.com.           172800  IN      NS      ns-8.awsdns-01.com.
    parler.com.           172800  IN      NS      ns-715.awsdns-25.net.
    parler.com.           172800  IN      NS      ns-1170.awsdns-18.org.
    parler.com.           172800  IN      NS      ns-1848.awsdns-39.co.uk.

Thank you. I think Nintendo's quote from that article is even funnier:

"Nintendo does not talk about confidential discussions with other companies. In any event, nothing came of these discussions."

Speed. I moved mostly to Ruby years ago, but when doing lots of text processing, a trivial script in Perl runs a lot faster than a similar trivial script in Ruby.

That doesn't work, unless you have an unusual Linux setup:

  $ tar -zxvf srs-epub.epub
  gzip: stdin has more than one entry--rest ignored
  tar: Child returned status 2
  tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

But you can do "unzip srs-epub.epub".

The part where your friend stopped playing you -- that's something that I just don't understand, on a fundamental level.

My brother-in-law talked about chess for years, I finally agreed to play him, and won both games. He's never brought it up again. It makes no sense to me.

Growing up, I was the youngest, so I generally lost at whatever games we played, and it never made me want to stop playing. When my significantly older brother came back home and stayed with us for awhile, we played chess regularly, and I lost a _lot_. But I kept playing, and when I finally got to the point where I won one out of three, it felt really good.

How much fun would I have missed out on if I hadn't kept playing?

"A collection of pure bash alternatives to external processes."

"They won't admit to this on their website"? I think it's more that they won't shut up about it. Their entire business model and their marketing is all based on the idea that most people are around wifi most of the time.

The cell data you pay for is your cell data usage, you (of course) don't pay them for your wifi data usage.

Baen Books

https://www.baen.com/

They have always been very customer friendly. They have a "free library" section, too. (Often has such things as the first book in a series.)

J Novel Club

https://j-novel.club/top

Translated Japanese light novels. There's a membership that lets you read along as they translate, but if you purchase the ebook when they're done, it's DRM free.

And of course http://www.gutenberg.org/

The date on the status page is 9:50 AM PDT, the original poster posted well before that.

It isn't historically uncommon for AWS outage information to be posted and commented on here well before the status page is updated.

I had such a wonderful visual in my head, of drones with tiny machine guns doing night strafing runs on rats...

Sigh.

(Also was looking forward to the next article, about the rats scavenging from the drones and firing back...)

The config files are for a game that was announced in 1999 and released in 2003.

Usually, that's because /bin/mv is just changing a link to the file, not moving the file itself. In cases where it's actually moving the file -- say across a file system boundary -- it does copy the file and then delete the old version.

Gel pens were amazing when I first tried one.

My path went crappy pens -> Pilot ballpoint -> Pilot gel -> Pilot Metropolitan fountain pen.

Not having to exert pressure makes such a difference to me that my handwriting immediately improved when I started using fountain pens. I've even had friends comment on it. "Wait, I can read your handwriting."

The article mentions "promotional" pens, pens with logos on them. One of the things I never understood about promotional pens is how they're almost always really junky pens. So they go in the garbage.

If it was a nice pen, I'd use it for awhile, and perhaps it would eventually move on to someone else. I'd think that if you were spending X dollars on promotional items, it would be worth spending 2 or 3*X dollars for items that lasted longer and also made a more favorable impression.

Very interesting article.

I recently visited New York and spent a day at the Met. As a tech-employed American who can afford to do things like fly to New York for a week, $25 dollars seemed like an amazing deal. An unbelievable deal, really. $25 there and $25 at MOMA didn't really register against the overall expense of the trip.

They still have pay-what-you-can for people who live in New York or within a certain distance thereof.

The Professor and the Madman is about him:

https://www.amazon.com/Professor-Madman-Simon-Winchester/dp/...

It also has some nice history on the OED.

I like DO, and appreciate them being open with the outage timeline. Two thing really jump out at me though:

1.) If they have a time-delayed replica, why not recover it to the point-in-time before the issue, and then switch master over to it?

2.) They took a backup of the replica, moved the backup to the master, and then restored from it. Do they not have direct backups of the master? A time-delayed replica is no replacement for valid backups.

In this case, it looks like they could have, since the replica was time-delayed -- stop replication, then carefully let it continue replication up to the point you want, then switch it to master.

I look at man pages all the time.

On the other hand, I avoid Java as much as possible, so I might not be the best test market.

This is an indiegogo campaign, planned to ship q2 2017:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/retroengine-sigma-mini-co...

Looks pretty cool...

Any personal account I have, at a minimum, I give access to my SO.