It appears that Microsoft is giving up on the electronic book business. As part of that, they tell their customers: “Unfortunately, this means that starting July 2019 your ebooks will no longer be available to read, but you'll get a full refund for all book purchases.” Nice.
I buy a lot of books, but I refuse to buy books that can simply evaporate on me like this. So I still buy a lot of actual dead-trees books (I find I prefer them anyway); if I get something electronic, I make sure that, one way or another, it's not something that will be taken away from me in the future. I honestly don't understand why people tolerate the idea of a world where vast numbers of books can simply vanish at a corporation's whim.
So Jake recently pointed me at this photo from last year's Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit. One might be amused by me trying to keep up with the conversation, but that should certainly not overshadow the glimpse we get of the bleeding-edge memory-management simulation application running on Willy's machine...!
It seems that the Mastodon integration for this blog hasn't been working; that would appear to be the result of me not plumbing /.well-known through properly. I believe that is fixed now; I'd be curious to hear if anybody is able to make federation work now...
Now, this is very much a gmail bug, but I've long since
given up any hope at all that the gmail people would
listen to outsiders (and from my interactions with
people inside of google, I think they consider
anybody outside the “gmail” team to be outsiders –
good luck to any Google people trying to get gmail
issues fixed either).
GMail has broken email again, in other words, but rather than avoid GMail, we're simply working around the problem in our other tools. That doesn't seem like a way to keep email working outside of a small group of huge, centralized providers.
The new confidential mode does not seem to be supporting a standards-based, federated system either. Email was once a good thing, but that was a fair while ago at this point, I guess.
So it seems our good friend Devin Nunes, recently rendered unable to inhibit House oversight over the Trump administration, has taken to suing satire accounts on Twitter as his new passtime. It also would seem, according to this McClatchy article, that he doesn't understand the Streisand effect. “One of the accounts, known as Devin Nunes’ Cow, saw its followers on Twitter swell from just over a thousand to more than 135,000 in less than a day after the Republican congressman from Tulare announced his lawsuit on Fox News.“
So one of the nice (IMO) outcomes from the 2018 election is that Colorado has joined the national public vote initiative. If and when a majority of the country's electoral votes opt in, all of those votes will go to the winner of the national public vote for president. We will actually elect our own president, imagine that.
It has been my personal determination for a few years now to never buy an internal-combustion-engine car again. Those machines have served us well in many ways (and not so well in others), but their time is coming to an end, and we'll not miss them. One week ago, we took the plunge.
There is no image hosting within WriteFreely itself; they just say to put up a picture somewhere on the net. Well, I ought to be capable of doing that. So, here's a picture of a sunset taken from the deck of our B&B in Nelson, NZ:
Should you ever need a place to stay in Nelson, Big Sky Nelson is awfully nice...
![[You missed out]](/images/sunset.jpg)