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Howard County, Zum, and Industry Disruption being Disruptive
Last week was the first week of school in Howard County, Maryland. It was a chaotic week for transportation and, I think it was caused in large part by contractor issues. In the USA we tend to believe that privatizing everything makes it better. But, in fact, all it does is create an extra layer…
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2022 in Books
By the end of 2022 I had 2793 digital books and magazines (a change of 264). Around twenty-four of those came from free books I get monthly from Tor.com and Amazon Prime. This year I’m also going to start the amount of audiobooks I have: 144. In 2022 I started up my libro.fm subscription and…
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Swimming 2022
About a decade after someone first suggested that I should join US Masters Swimming, I finally did. Originally it was because a local swim team required swimmers to be USMS members. I didn’t end up joining the team because the pool plus team fees were a bit more than I wanted to spend. But, since…
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An Update on Fedora 36, Plasma 5 and Wayland
KDE Wayland has come a long way support has come a long way since I last wrote about it 8 months ago. Yakuake now shows up in the correct place (although it seems to have a hard time remembering to start up upon login). The lock screen bug hasn’t hit me in the past month.…
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KDE 2021
Desktop – SuperMario Fedora 32 – KDE Plasma 5 2021:
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Web Browsers: Brave on Linux and Brave in the News
As I did last time, I wanted my web browser post to contain both news stories about browsers that have caught my attention and my thoughts on the newest web browser I’m trying out. Let’s start with the news. As you probably have heard if you’re paying any attention to browsers, one of the selling…
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NYRR: RBC Brooklyn Half Marathon 2022
Before Race Day I think I’ve become addicted to races. I really missed having races between April (Cherry Blossom) and the end of May (BK HM) although I did that on purpose to allow myself to rest and train. July, when I once again will be sans race, is probably going to be hard for…
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Review: Generation Xbox: How Videogames Invaded Hollywood
Generation Xbox: How Videogames Invaded Hollywood by Jamie Russell My rating: 4 of 5 stars Anyone who has followed my book reviews on Good Reads or my blog knows that I have read quite a bit of video game history. Whether it’s a history of video games starting with the miltiary and university campuses, a…
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Review: InvestiGators: Off the Hook
InvestiGators: Off the Hook by John Patrick Green My rating: 4 of 5 stars Another fun entry in the Investigators to read with the kids. The cast of characters continues to grow and reward re-reads of previous books with lots of references to previous events. It’s evident now that Green has written each book to…
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MxPx – Before Everything & After: What if MxPx made a Good Charlotte album?
(the first 3 paragraphs are a slight modification of what I wrote for an Amazon review) The headline kind of gives it away, but this album definitely sounds like a cross between early/late MxPx and Good Charlotte. You can see on Wikipedia and other places that this was part of a 3ish album trend where MxPx…
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Web Browsers Update: Vivaldi on Windows Part 3 and Firefox
This post continues a series on exploring new browsers: Are Web Browsers getting exciting again? Vivaldi Part 1 Vivaldi Part 2 Vivaldi I’ve been meaning to get to this post for a while now, but the recent Vivaldi update blog post spurred me to go ahead and write it. Vivaldi continues to do a decent…
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Review: Rave Master, Vol. 04
Rave Master, Vol. 04 by Hiro Mashima My rating: 3 of 5 stars Part of me wonders – is this just meant to be a comedic manga hero’s journey or is it a straight up parody? I can’t tell from this volume. Story-wise it concludes the story from the previous volume about the town where…
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Trying out the Code Syntax Block Plugin
I’m not a huge fan of plugins for key parts of the site. There are some blog posts that no longer make sense because they used, for example, the iframe plugin to embed Google Maps. That said, my previous solution for displaying code on the site – special CSS is also brittle because I lose…
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Today’s Programming: Flowers in Scratch 3
First of all, if you’re a Linux user and would like an offline version of Scratch 3, you can get it from https://scratux.org/. They make binaries for a few Linux distros plus an AppImage which works on any of them. On the Raspberry Pi Blog I saw that this week was about making art on…
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Review: Double Life (Razia, #1)
Double Life by S. Usher Evans My rating: 3 of 5 stars I met Ms. Usher Evans at Baltimore Comic-Con a year or two ago and she is a very prolific author. If any particular book of yours isn’t your cup of tea, you can try another – she has magical school YA, fantasy, and…