Finally, new books arrived. Let’s see if Dead Silence is as good as it sounds. 😃

I’ve read 63 books so far this year. Here’s how I did it
Research shows Australians are reading fewer books than ever before. One writer shares her advice on how to make reading a daily habit. ⌘ Read more

ChatGPT Now Interacts With Multiple Apps Inside Conversations
ChatGPT users can now interact with a handful of third-party apps directly within their conversations, OpenAI has announced.

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The new Apps SDK allows developers to build tools that blend naturally into chats, and initial partners include Spotify, Canva, Zillow, Expedia, Booking.com, Coursera, and Figma.

User … ⌘ Read more

Trent Dalton’s latest is about how far a journalist will go for a story
In Gravity Let Me Go, a struggling crime journalist lands the scoop of a lifetime, to the detriment of his loved ones. That’s something Trent Dalton understands intimately. ⌘ Read more

Breaking: English author Jilly Cooper dies at age 88
The author was best known for The Rutshire Chronicles and her book Rivals, recently adapted into a Disney+ series. ⌘ Read more

** Read the Book **
There’s a whole lot going on, and I’ve been feeling myself develop bad habits concerning doom scrolling. I can’t reconfigure my life to not have a phone, so, instead, I made a thing to replace those things that invite me to doomy scroll. Meet Read the Book.

Read the book is a relatively simple website where you can read a book. The books are presented in short chunks so you’re never faced with a big scrolling wall of text. It has support for dark mode and light mode, and you can u … ⌘ Read more

** Franconia Notch **
We went to the Franconia Notch, which is on objectively funny thing to name a region. It was beautiful and the weather was wildly clear. Even on top of Mount Washington, the highest peak in the entire north eastern United States, it was sunny and calm. We could see all the way back to Maine…supposedly…it all looks kinda like green lumpy blurs to me.

While there I started to read two books, Katabasis, by R.F. Kuang and The City and Its Uncertain Walls, by Haruki Murakami.

_Kata … ⌘ Read more

«1977 United States Environmental
Protection Agency
Graphic Standards System

Designed by Steff Geissbühler,
Chermayeff & Geismar Associates

The EPA Graphic Standards System is one of the finest examples of a standards manual ever created. The modular and flexible system devised raised the standard for public design in the United States.

The book features a foreword by Tom Geismar, introduction by Steff Geissbühler, an essay by Christopher Bonanos, scans of the original manual (from Geissbühler’s personal copy), and 48 pages of photographs from the EPA-commissioned Documerica project (1970–1977).»

https://standardsmanual.com/products/epa

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@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Ten stories or more are already very tall in my books. Not sure at which height I would start calling high rise buildings sky scrapers, but Wikipedia suggests around 150 meters, depending on region.

Oh, I just found https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f1/Pier_17_2018-03_jeh.jpg and this really does not look all that high. I thought that this would be at least 50 or 100 meters up. I was completely wrong. :-D

** A week notes to round out the summer **
I haven’t posted anything remotely resembling week notes since the middle of June! Since then many things have happened including, but not limited to: a trip to Minnesota to visit Isaac, a couple trips to New Hampshire for work, a family trip to Mount Desert Island to revisit our old stomping grounds, a whole heap of bicycle riding, I finished a couple great books, played some games, made some games, and wrote what is probably an unhealthy a … ⌘ Read more

Its like TV. Very few good channels and many bad channels. Or like books. Very few good books and many bad books. Look for spezialized channels and educate your children. Read the bible.com . But only Jesus is reliable. Forget Moses and the punishing God.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz On the one hand, all these programs have a very long history and the technology behind manpages is actually very powerful – you can use it to write books:

https://www.troff.org/pubs.html

I have two books from that list, for example “The UNIX programming environment”:

https://movq.de/v/c3dab75c97/upe.jpg

It’s a bit older, of course, but it looks and feels like a normal book, and it uses the same tech as manpages – which I think is really cool. 😎

It’s comparable to LaTeX (just harder/different to use) but much faster than LaTeX. You can also do stuff like render manpages as a PDF (man -Tpdf cp >cp.pdf) or as an HTML file (man -Thtml cp >cp.html). I think I once made slides for a talk this way.

On the other hand, traditional manpages (i.e., ones that are not written in mandoc) do not use semantic markup. They literally say, “this text is bold, that text over here is italics”, and so on.

So when you run man foo, it has no other choice but to show it in black, white, bold, underline – showing it in color would be wrong, because that’s not what the source code of that manpage says.

Colorizing them is a hack, to be honest. You’re not meant to do this. (The devs actually broke this by accident recently. They themselves aren’t really aware that people use colors.)

If mandoc and semantic markup was more commonly used, I think it would be easier to convince the devs to add proper customizable colors.

We ate the #burgers and drank the #beers before taking a picture to the #books during the second #BBB (Books, Beers and Burgers) of #2025 in #Lamego - oops!

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HTTP referrers are quite broken, aren’t they?

Because of that recent storm on my blog, I had a peek at them. There’s a lot of garbage in there. For example, https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/disks-virtual.html is supposed to refer to one of my blog posts …

What’s going on here?

About ChatGPT rotting people’s brains, similarly could be said about search engines, and reference books. Oh, also doom scrolling, and mobile devices, and the Internet… :-P

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — First Woman — Dream to Reality https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/06/21/first-woman-1.html #freeculture #bookclub

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Tag Team https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/06/14/tag-team.html #freeculture #bookclub

Lately (since there are AI summaries at the top), each time I Google for the answer to a question, the AI summary has at least a part of the answer wrong. It makes up laws that do not exist, books that were never published - in sum, well written sentences that make linguistic sense, but with made up content.

Let me repeat: each time. Maybe I only search for hard stuff, or fringe stuff, or this some other explanation - but seriously, it’s hard to understand how isn’t Google ashamed of its AI overviews… or not sued under some regulation regarding fake news.

PS: yes, I know, my fault for using Google as a search engine.

#qotd

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Drivers nabbed way over limit in Victoria-wide King’s Birthday road blitz
Nearly a third of drivers booked during a major policing operation in Melbourne this weekend have allegedly blown more than double the limit. ⌘ Read more

Pixie-Rose only lived for three weeks, but she taught her mum about life
A Queensland mother has written a book to help grieving families after navigating her own agonising loss following the death of her baby girl. ⌘ Read more

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — The Pink and Black Album https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/06/07/pink-black.html #freeculture #bookclub

The Luke Bateman backlash highlights publishing’s diversity problem
When former Canberra Raiders player and farmer Luke Bateman joined TikTok, he went viral for his love of fantasy novels. A month later he announced a book deal, but the news has generated controversy. ⌘ Read more

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Meteorite https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/05/31/meteorite.html #freeculture #bookclub

[$] Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet
Cory Doctorow wears many hats:
digital activist, science-fiction author, journalist, and more. He has
also written many books, both fiction and non-fiction, runs the Pluralistic blog, is a visiting
professor, and is an advisor to the Electronic\
Frontier Foundation (EFF); his Chokepoint Capitalism
co-author, Rebecca Giblin, gave a [2023 keynote\
in Australia](https://lw … ⌘ Read more

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Sówka w świecie dnia https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/05/24/owl-world.html #freeculture #bookclub

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Pilogy, part 4 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/05/17/pilogy-4.html #freeculture #bookclub

** My not so pragmatic guide to running background services on macOS **
I self host a lot of stuff — these days, mostly weird little utility scripts and toys that run in the background, but also some web apps like plex, calibre, and a suite of irc things. For a long time I ran such things on a VPS, but being incredibly cheap, and hardly ever leaving my house for realsies, during the height of the pandemic I brought everything on to an aged mac mini I keep on a shelf behind some books.

I tr … ⌘ Read more

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Pilogy, part 3 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/05/10/pilogy-3.html #freeculture #bookclub

@movq@www.uninformativ.de a first edition signed Superman comic book, carefully folded just to fit, but not damaged enough to have lost its value?

On my blog: 0M — Remixed Classrooms https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/05/04/30m-free-education.html #3#0#million #books #diversity #education

Nobody want to be a shitty programmer. The question is: Do you do anything not to not be one?
Reading blogs or social media and watching YouTube videos is fun. After them, your code may be a little better, of course. But you need a lot. You need to study! Read good books and study the code of other programmers, for example. Maybe work with a new language, architectures and paradigms. You need break the routine.

If you know Object-oriented programming, you learn functional programming.
If you know Model-View-Controller, you learn Model-View-ViewModel.
If you don’t know anything about architectures, you learn Clean Architecture, Hexagonal Architecture, etc.
If you know Python, you learn Ruby or Go.
If you know Clojure or Lisp… you don’t need to learn anything else. You are already a good programmer. Just kidding. You can learn Elixir or Scala.

Be a good programmer my friend.

happy free comic book day! my store was out of freebies but i got some of my pulls and also a trade of one of my favorite reads last year!

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On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Pilogy, part 2 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/05/03/pilogy-2.html #freeculture #bookclub

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I started with Delphi in school, the book (that we never ever used even once and I also never looked at) taught Pascal. The UI part felt easy at first but prevented me from understanding fundamental stuff like procedures or functions or even begin and end blocks for ifs or loops. For example I always thought that I needed to have a button somewhere, even if hidden. That gave me a handler procedure where I could put code and somehow call it. Two or three years later, a new mate from the parallel class finally told me that this wasn’t necessary and how to do thing better.

You know all too well that back in the day there was not a whole lot of information out there. And the bits that did exist were well hidden. At least from me. Eventually discovering planet-quellcodes.de (I don’t remember if that was the original forum or if that got split off from some other board) via my best schoolmate was like finding the Amber Room. Yeah, reading the ITG book would have been a very good idea for sure. :-)

In hindsight, a console program without the UI overhead might have been better. At least for the very start. Much less things to worry about or get lost.

Hence, I’d recommend to start programming with a console program. As for the language, not sure. But Python is probably a good choice, it doesn’t require a lot of surrounding boilerplate like, say Java or Go. It also does exceptionally well in the principle of least surprise.

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Pilogy, part 1 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/04/26/pilogy-1.html #freeculture #bookclub

These ideas are dr the two books:

• Drift into Failure: From Hunting Broken Components to Understanding Complex Systems by Sidney Dekker (2011)
  
• Engineering a Safer World by Nancy Leveson (2011)
  

The former I haven’t read. The later I haven’t finished reading 😅

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Secrets in the Static https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/04/19/secrets-static.html #freeculture #bookclub

iPhone Fold: New Leak Corroborates Camera Setup on Outer Display
Further details have emerged about the camera system on Apple’s upcoming foldable iPhone, informally dubbed the “iPhone Fold.”

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Expected to launch next year, Apple’s book-style foldable is rumored to feature a 7.8-inch crease-free internal display and a 5.5-inch external screen. According to industry analyst [Ming-Chi Kuo](https … ⌘ Read more

Foldable iPhone Resolutions Leak With Under-Screen Camera Tipped
Apple’s upcoming foldable iPhone (or “iPhone Fold”) will feature two screens as part of its book-style design, and a Chinese leaker claims to know the resolutions for both of them.

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According to the Weibo-based account Digital Chat Station, the inner display, which is approximately 7.76 i … ⌘ Read more

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Nose Ears, part 3 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/04/12/nose-ears-3.html #freeculture #bookclub

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Nose Ears, part 2 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/04/05/nose-ears-2.html #freeculture #bookclub

well, there is a whole book about piracy, DRM and selling stuff on the internet.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Doesn%27t_Want_to_Be_Free

So I won’t add much to the topic, what I can say is that this is about being pragmatic. There is some people who’s gonna spend their money on books but it requires publicity (polemic topic) and subsidizing creativity with our own money (another controversial one).

Otherwise it’s a difficult discipline /profession /industry

@prologic@twtxt.net @eapl.me@eapl.me I want to highlight another social problem: People don’t read. Paper industry is a bad moment because people don’t pay for books; it does not matter if it is a physical or digital platform. I have this information because I have a good friend who left the industry after publishing a magazine, books and working in an editorial. DRM is a try to give some more money.

well, that leads to a long conversation.

Piracy is a difficult topic which is very personal, so I won’t say much about it.

On writing books, I’ve tried along with other digital products such as courses and videogames, and I got to confess that it has been hard for me.

If it helps, I think it all reaches our expectations on the activity and the result. If royalties is the expectation, it’s going to be slow. By 5% of royalties, for a rough example, a huge amount of sales will be required to get a decent “wage”, so I’ve understood of doing it by the side of a normal employment although it has been discouraging and a bit sad.

I have reflected about it in Spanish here: https://sembrandojuegos.substack.com/p/sobre-expectativas-al-crear-juegos

@prologic@twtxt.net Fully agreed. I’m far more likely to buy such mediums when DRM-free. I never go near Amazon eBooks etc because of their lock-in, and I have a Kobo eReader which needs to have the books side loaded unless directly from the Kobo store. I prefer DRM-free files every time.

I have just received the royalties for the last book: 98 euros for the four-month period, about 24 euros a month on average. Not even enough for the gym membership.
If you have to keep some knowledge: don’t write for money, the paper (or ebook) industry is in a very bad way, the margins for the author are very small and piracy is devastating.

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Nose Ears, part 1 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/03/29/nose-ears-1.html #freeculture #bookclub

iPhone Foldable Display Said to Feature iPad-Style 4:3 Aspect Ratio
Apple’s upcoming “iPhone Fold” will feature a foldable screen with a 4:3 aspect ratio, according to a Chinese leaker who previously leaked the book-style device’s display dimensions.

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The Weibo-based account Digital Chat Station claims that Apple will adopt a “roughly” 4:3 aspe … ⌘ Read more

‘iPhone Fold’ to Feature Metallic Glass Hinge That Resists Deformation
Last week, we covered a report claiming that Apple’s book-style foldable iPhone (or “iPhone Fold,” as we are provisionally calling it here) will use liquid metal hinges to improve durability and help minimize screen creasing. Today, a Chinese leaker provided more details on the properties of this hinge material that help to clarify why Apple chose it for its first foldable device.

![](https://images.macrumors.com/arti … ⌘ Read more

@eapl.me@eapl.me Interesting! Two points stood right out to me:

1. Why the hell are e-mail newsletters considered a valid option in the first place? Just offer an Atom feed and be done with it! Especially for a blog of this very type. This doesn’t even involve a third party service. Although, in addition he also links to Feedburner, what the fuck!? No e-mail address or the like is needed and subject to being disclosed.

2. When these spam mailers want to prevent resubscribing, then for fuck’s sake, why don’t they use a hash of the e-mail address (I saw that in yarnd) for that purpose? Storing the e-mail address in clear text after unsubscribing is illegal in my book.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Pointers can be a bit tricky. I know it took me also quite some time to wrap my head around them. Let my try to explain. It’s a pretty simple, yet very powerful concept with many facets to it.

A pointer is an indirection. At a lower level, when you have some chunk of memory, you can have some actual values sitting in there, ready for direct use. A pointer, on the other hand, points to some other location where to look for the values one’s actually after. Following that pointer is also called dereferencing the pointer.

I can’t come up with a good real-world example, so this poor comparison has to do. It’s a bit like you have a book (the real value that is being pointed to) and an ISBN referencing that book (the pointer). So, instead of sending you all these many pages from that book, I could give you just a small tag containing the ISBN. With that small piece of information, you’re able to locate the book. Probably a copy of that book and that’s where this analogy falls apart.

In contrast to that flawed comparision, it’s actually the other way around. Many different pointers can point to the same value. But there are many books (values) and just one ISBN (pointer).

The pointer’s target might actually be another pointer. You typically then would follow both of them. There are no limits on how long your pointer chains can become.

One important property of pointers is that they can also point into nothingness, signalling a dead end. This is typically called a null pointer. Following such a null pointer calls for big trouble, it typically crashes your program. Hence, you must never follow any null pointer.

Pointers are important for example in linked lists, trees or graphs. Let’s look at a doubly linked list. One entry could be a triple consisting of (actual value, pointer to next entry, pointer to previous entry).

  _______________________
 /               ________\_______________
↓               ↓         |              \
+---+---+---+   +---+---+-|-+   +---+---+-|-+
| 7 | n | x |   | 23| n | p |   | 42| x | p |
+---+-|-+---+   +---+-|-+---+   +---+---+---+
      |         ↑     |         ↑
       \_______/       \_______/

The “x” indicates a null pointer. So, the first element of the doubly linked list with value 7 does not have any reference to a previous element. The same is true for the next element pointer in the last element with value 42.

In the middle element with value 23, both pointers to the next (labeled “n”) and previous (labeled “p”) elements are pointing to the respective elements.

You can also see that the middle element is pointed to by two pointers. By the “next” pointer in the first element and the “previous” pointer in the last element.

That’s it for now. There are heaps ;-) more things to tell about pointers. But it might help you a tiny bit.

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Sulphur Nimbus https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/03/22/sulphur-nimbus.html #freeculture #bookclub

** A day off **
I didn’t go to work today. Six month ago I took the day off when I made my kids a dentist appointment. So, this morning I took them to the dentist where we played Mario Kart in the waiting room on the Nintendo the dentist keeps set up there.

After that, I dropped them each at school and picked up my dad and took him to Costco and to the Chinese takeaway place. While he gossiped with the folks at the takeaway I started Sally Rooney’s Normal People. I’m late to this book, but enjoying it right away.

After all th … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net I created a script for your book. i have only done the first two chapters. have to do some adjustments to the text so it sounds ok and that takes time..

https://git.sour.is/xuu/piper

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — electric (yang) https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/03/15/electric-yang.html #freeculture #bookclub

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — acoustic (yin) https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/03/08/acoustic-yin.html #freeculture #bookclub

Kuo: Apple’s First Foldable iPhone to Feature Book-Style Design, Sell for Over $2,000
Apple’s first foldable iPhone should arrive around the end of 2026 or early 2027 with a book-style design and a premium price tag of over $2,000, according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. In a report today, Kuo outlines his expectations for the device, noting that it will have an approximately 7.8-inch “crease-free” inner d … ⌘ Read more

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Stories by Matthew DeBlock https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/03/01/deblock.html #freeculture #bookclub

@xuu@txt.sour.is What books do you have?

I agree. finding good writings on architecture is hard to find. I used to read architecture reviews over on the high scalability blog. i suspect the reason why is that the arch is how the big tech companies can build moats around their bases. I know in AWS world it only goes as far as how to nickle and dime you to death.

I have the books but they don’t grow much more past interview level.

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Cairn Wardens Guide, part 2 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/02/22/cairn-3.html #freeculture #bookclub

Alleged Display Sizes Leaked for Apple’s Book-Style Foldable iPhone
Another week, another alleged leak regarding Apple’s fabled foldable iPhone. We’ve been hearing rumors about an iPhone that folds in half for over eight years now. While they have lacked consistency, they do suggest that Apple has tested various prototypes, with the hinge seemingly the biggest challenge Apple has been trying to overcome. Apple wants to el … ⌘ Read more

World’s Thinnest Foldable Phone Launches in Europe and Asia
Oppo has launched the Find N5, the world’s thinnest foldable phone yet. When closed, the book-style foldable measures 8.93mm. That’s less than a millimeter thicker than an iPhone 16 Pro, and thinner than the Honor Magic V3, which was the previous record holder.

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The device is barely thicker than it … ⌘ Read more

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Cairn Wardens Guide, part 1 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/02/15/cairn-2.html #freeculture #bookclub

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Cairn Players Guide and Background https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/02/08/cairn-1.html #freeculture #bookclub

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Thanks for sharing. I really enjoyed it. The beginning part about the history of life on Earth was fun to watch having just read Dawkin’s old book The Selfish Geene, and now I want to read more about archaea. The end of the talk about what might be going on on Mars made me a bit hopeful someone will find some good evidence.

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — The Man Behind the Machine https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/02/01/man-machine.html #freeculture #bookclub

Just leaving this book here for no reason 🤫

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26184

@prologic@twtxt.net I’d stumbled upon #FrankenPHP while reading through #Caddy stuff and thought maybe it’s bit overkill for what i need it for but then again, it will be just a “One container in for two out”, that’s win in my book 😆

Dava Sobel’s Religious Experience While Writing Her Book! ⌘ Read more

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Blood of the Ancient Star, part 3 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/01/25/bloodstar-3.html #freeculture #bookclub

Lowkey planning out a book (anthology. Maybe) of just playscripts in my Greek myth yuriverse. Thank u lord

Apple Honors Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Apple has updated the home page of its website to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. today. The page highlights some of King’s most impactful quotes, and invites people to explore his legacy further through the Apple Books and Apple News apps.

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Apple CEO Tim Cook also honored King in a social media post … ⌘ Read more

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Blood of the Ancient Star, part 2 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/01/18/bloodstar-2.html #freeculture #bookclub

** Bullshit Jobs **
Having one of those days where I am regretting having read that book, Bullshit Jobs. 🫠 ⌘ Read more

** Sirens & Muses **
I finished reading Sirens & Muses by Antonia Angress.

It left me gutted, but like in a good way. It leaves so much unsaid, which I found pleasant and sorrowful and so yawningly, humongously open that it left me feeling a little claustrophobic.

A few years ago everyone, everyone, everyone I spoke to about books told me again and again and again to read Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. I found it to be totally and completely lacking in joy and any sort of human warmth, and, I think th … ⌘ Read more

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Reading “The Book Thief” by Markus Zusak

Cancelled Mastodon because the time spent on it could have been used for reading books instead and the level of interaction is not enough to keep me interested.

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Blood of the Ancient Star, part 1 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/01/11/bloodstar-1.html #freeculture #bookclub

** Not what I was expecting **
A while ago I was talking with someone about books. I mentioned that I like to read capital R romance novels, and like 19th century literary realism.

This person excitedly recommended Victor LaValle’s The Changeling. Knowing nothing about it, and because I pretty much say“yes” to any book recommendation I get from a real live person that I can find at the library, I’ve been reading it.

My dude. What the fuck!? This is just horror. 🥲😨 ⌘ Read more

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Trans Girl Project, part 2 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/01/04/trans-girl-2.html #freeculture #bookclub

[WTS] [0.005 XMR] Zen Mind - Shunryu Suzuki Digital Scans

I’ve scanned this book. There are 68 pics (138 pages). These scans are double-paged (2 pages scanned at same time). (47MB) Download link is a Tor/Onion link, using the OnionShare program. You will need the Tor browser to download. After purchasing, you will automatically receive the download link.

Link: https://xmrbazaar.com/listing/Qbby/

themaker117@conversations.im (XMPP) ⌘ Read more

** Bouncing off of books **
After playing a few hours in Fields of Mistria I decided to put it down for a bit. I’m really really enjoying it. The farming is low key, and feels more like grinding for resources so far (positive), the relationship sim stuff is fun and the quests and tasks are really approachable (and there is, my favorite thing in the world, an in-game quest log!). All in all it’s a supremely, deliciously, snackable game. If I had to level critique against it, it’d be that the day/nigh … ⌘ Read more

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Trans Girl Project, part 1 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2024/12/28/trans-girl-1.html #freeculture #bookclub

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Speciare Lunar Research Facility https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2024/12/21/speciare.html #freeculture #bookclub

[ANN] Phantom Circuit: Introduction

Phantom Circuit is a fictional short story generated entirely by AI. It was inspired by a Darknet Diaries podcast episode [..] I also managed to work in some mention of Monero…

Link: https://cyberspace.dad/book/

j@cyberspace.dad (XMPP) ⌘ Read more

An inspiring book on making a life around IT security

Troy Hunt: “Pwned”, The Book, Is Now Available for Free
https://www.troyhunt.com/pwned-the-book-is-now-available-for-free/

The web server in Calibre is pretty cool. Love how the UI was designed and made. Feels intuitive, yet powerful. Now i do need to organise the book collection a bit better.

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — 2048, Enkidu, and Plastic https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2024/12/07/enkidu.html #freeculture #bookclub

How to Instantly Write a Business Plan with AI on Mac, iPhone, iPad
While there are plenty of paid options to get a business plan, from business plan software, to books, to working with a consultant, or even outsourcing the entire thing, another option is available for iPhone, iPad, and Mac users, and it uses the magic of Apple Intelligence features and ChatGPT to instantly create a business … Read More ⌘ Read more

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Ancient Fire https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2024/11/30/ancient-fire.html #freeculture #bookclub

Its time to brush up on your competitive programming skills!

https://cses.fi/book/book.pdf

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Fully Automated! part 2 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2024/11/23/fully-automated-2.html #freeculture #bookclub

If all Orange Face Elefant party voters would take them on their words and make them actually do whatever insane world they invented, then perhaps people will realize the grave mistake that was made today. Many people have to feel consequences before they believe it. I hope there will still be history books in the future to disclose the insanity for future generations. But whatever happens, the World will keep spinning…

Inversion by Aric McBay was another random library pick. Like The Fall of Io, it’s the most recent in a series, though I think this series is pretty loosely connected. In contrast, the villain in this book is simple and cartoonishly evil. The book presents a design for utopia which was interesting but a little cloying. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to want to live there, but I don’t think I do. I enjoyed the book as easy reading, and might try the others in the series some time. (4/4)

I read Starter Villain by John Scalzi. Enjoyable, like his other books that I’ve read. Somewhat sillier. (¾)

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Restoration Day, part 3 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2024/10/26/restoration-day-3.html #freeculture #bookclub

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Restoration Day, part 2 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2024/10/19/restoration-day-2.html #freeculture #bookclub

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Restoration Day, part 1 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2024/10/12/restoration-day-1.html #freeculture #bookclub