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