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