Checking in, Kobo and Fastmail ------------------------------ Wow, it's been (and continues to be) a busy month! But I'm just checking in to keep the lights burning and too much dust from settling on the lambda labs' furniture. - Kobo - While I haven't been able to keep up with everything that's been posted recently, I have enjoyed reading Jason's [1] and Gray Area's [2] continuing Kobo/ebook-reader discussion. I'm coming to the realisation that, apart from stripping DRM off of my purchased books, I'm a bit of a muggle when it comes to my use of my reader. I use the standard firmware, the standard fonts and run no Calibre servers. (I don't really enjoy Calibre actually.) I just keep a (properly backed up) directory full of my epub files on my desktop, then transfer anything I want the old fashioned way: plugging in a usb cable and using cp. :-) - Fastmail - Another post I was super chuffed to come across was Dave's [3] on switching from Gmail to Fastmail---something that I just did too! In fact, that post was from the Nov 1, so I reckon we must have switched within a few days of one another. While I empathise with much of the reasoning between Dave's switch, my own primary reason has been an increasing feeling of unease at having a huge chunk of very personal and very valuable (to me) data being managed by an entity that has no direct incentive to look after it. Essentially I've just heard one too many stories about people getting locked out of their Google accounts for ill-defined reasons, and this started to terrify me. I've been using gmail for personal+work email (I forward work email to my personal account for defensible reasons) since around 2005, so that's 15 years of my life. Most of this is just junk of course, but there's a lot of stuff that's important to me in there too. ... Which of course I could have solved just by backing it up locally, but then there's also the thing that having a snappy machine-agnostic email system with effectively bottomless storage is so incredibly useful, despite the inevitable trade-offs. So switching to a paid service that provides essentially the same experience has been a huge relief for me. Actually it's even better, because with fastmail I can also use my own domain. To summarize, here was the situation before leaving gmail: - Hoards of data hosted with company with no incentive to look after me. - Effects of being locked out would include: 1. loosing all data, and 2. potentially losing access to other important services which are tied to that email address. The situation post-move is now - Hoards of data hosted with a company I am a paying customer of. - Not worried about being locked out, due to above. - I own my email address (i.e. use my own domain) so I'm no longer locked into anything. BTW, I appreciated Dave's tip regarding using password managers to make finding what services you've signed up for using the old email address. I've been using KeepassX for several years thankfully, and there were absolutely a few in there that I would have forgotten about. Although, as he says, it's not urgent as gmail should keep forwarding mail indefinitely. But I've transferred over all of the important ones, I think. - Coda - Hrm, this has been yet another rambling post that's about an order of magnitude too long. There's actually a bunch of other things I want to talk about, but I won't strain this relationship any further. Okay, maybe just a little. I'm slowly working toward the next major Elpher release, which will (unless something goes horribly wrong!) include support for multiple independent buffers. They will still share all of the important things like the cache, but this means you'll be able to, say, keep an index open in one buffer while reading individual files in the other. Weirdly it doesn't sound very useful when I write it like that, but it's something that periodically annoys me when using the current single-buffer version. Basically: I want tabs! Another thing: I've gotten all excited about Corewar [4,5]. I somehow recently remembered reading about this in one of my Dad's old Scientific American magazines when I was little, so went to look it up. Sure enough, I got hooked, then one thing led to another and I implemented a Memory Array Redcode Simulator (MARS), redcode load file parser (no proper assembler yet) and game visualizer in Chicken. I'm part-way through implementing a King of the Hill server for it, so we should soon be able to get a persistent gopher-centric Corewar tournament going! But much more on that later. Thanks for reading, and stay tuned! --- [1]: gopher://jfm.carcosa.net:70/0/blog/life/ereader.txt [2]: gopher://ascraeus.org:70/0/phlog/036.txt [3]: gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/dbucklin/posts/fastmail.txt [4]: https://corewar.co.uk/ [5]: gopher://thelambdalab.xyz:70/0/docs/icws94.txt .