Was looking at some travel options for next summer. Like a $12,000 train ride across Canada. I think maybe I'll stick with air travel. It looks pretty, and the service seems to be well reviewed, but for that kind of money, I could hire a personal chauffeur to drive me around in a steam powered car that burns money.

Both men pulled out books to read on the journey. Kingsley glanced at the Astronomer Royal's book and saw a vivid cover featuring a gun fight among desperados.
'Heaven knows what he'll be reading next,' thought Kingsley.
The Astronomer Royal looked at Kingsley's book and saw it was Herodotus' Histories.
My God, he'll be reading Thucydides next, thought the Astronomer Royal.

Book review: Void Star

Story: A new retelling of Neuromancer, updated for 30 years of tech advancement, and with the Japanophilia replaced with what if Elon Musk lives forever. With a little Westworld and Diamond Age sprinkled in. Are you excited to read about epic cyberbattles between cyber AIs cybershredding each other in cyberspace? There's certainly some of that, but not too much actually. It's not very action heavy, but still intriguing.

Characters: There's the street kid who learned everything there is to know from a laptop he found in the trash. There's the rich kid who's a bit lost, but drives around in a car whose fully autonomous mode includes the armor piercing gun turrets. And there's the AI whisperer, who tells the megacorpos what their electric sheep are dreaming about.

Style: It's very stream of conscious, and two of the three perspective characters have brain damage preventing them from always knowing what's happening, let alone reliably narrating it. The median sentence has 27 commas. Maybe that's your thing, just letting you know. It's a bit of a slower read.

Example: In fact the buildings are rotting, reverting to geology under their furs of vegetation, and over these ruins rises a tower, black even in the dawn's light, and his heart rises as his gaze follows it up to where its heights are lost in the celestial blue of morning, and the answers he needs are at its apex, if only he can reach it, and he'll hunt it down the nights, and he'll hunt it down the years, but he keeps losing his way among the cul-de-sacs and the endless winding streets, and it's not long until he realizes he's in the city's derelict periphery, and hasn't seen the tower in a long time, for the city is many cities, concentric and innumerable, and he's forever lost the core.

Overall: I liked it more than I thought I might at the start, so if you're looking for something new to read, it's one for the list, but if your reading schedule is already fully booked, probably skippable. Also recommended if you're the kind of person who refers to the left side of their car as the loboard.

Slowly coming back to life. Added a new draft feature, to save posts without publishing them.

Google refuses to acknowledge Westworld season 4.

Drunk guy wrestling the no parking sign and losing, and it's not even 9pm.

Almost missed out on the best sandwich on the menu due to banner blindness. It was hiding in the special look at me section.

Lady in the park fed some pigeons, and now the pigeons have concluded that every human in the park is a feed bag.

Not such a big fan of Julian Bashir's appearances on Got Ham.

By popular demand, checkins are here! After a few bugfixes, naturally.

Emergency alert. Found a bug. Now I need to find a laptop to fix it.

Note to self: fix interop with azorius composites. Surprising it doesn't just work.

Cyber's e-curity.

Initial impressions of the anbernic SP. it's cool and very fun.

The software is a weird mix of polished and absolute total jank. Like they set up each emulator with an appropriate filter, scan lines for snes, pixels for gba. But the setting to change sleep mode isn't in settings. It's in the other apps, apps, power app. What?

Also, brief moment of panic when I ejected the sd card and it shot across the room. That's a high powered spring they've got in there.

Anyway, I can play super Metroid all day every day now.

Oh, so Glee and High School Musical are different things.

=> There is 1 zombie process.

Thanks for the heads up.

This is the ideal corporate motto. You don't want to aim too high. Just a little bit better.

"Canadians are consuming 'unhealthy' amount of American news"

Time to build the great firewall of the north.

Apparently one possible answer to "why hasn't this been fixed yet?" is that you're reading a week old article and it has been fixed.

Dear Sir, Your mechanical robot Bel, the idol in the Bible, is a mechanical monstrosity. Your robot is breaking five amendments of the Constitution (1, 3, 4, 5, + 13th). God admits that I am laughing at you. You are making a traitor out of the President of the U.S. And the F.B.I. By letting your robot deceive you. I have threatened to sue the NY Telephone Co. Of NY City, and I will, if you don't wake up.

Put some ice cubes in the freezer for later, now I have one ice cube.

So the Windows bug that makes zen 5 slow has been making zen 4 even slower. (in some situations. clearly not a simple explanation.)

Coffee shop census: two macbook airs and a thinkpad. And I'm not the thinkpad! (It was one of the chunky P9000s I think, which I wouldn't rock anyway.)

Qualcomm CEO Christiano Amon said on the company’s Q3 earnings call (as recorded by The Verge) that the company was hoping to bring Arm PC prices down to $700 at some point in 2025, noting that these cheaper PCs wouldn’t compromise the performance of the Snapdragon X series’ built-in neural processing unit (NPU).

Priorities.

Added a filter to remove tags and links from the end of a post body and display it as part of the post metadata. I think this looks a lot cleaner.

Test case is oldbookillustrations where I like seeing the description followed by the image without all the extra stuff in the middle.