A mixture of a growing Ebook library, tracking my goals in Goodreads, and Calibre’s ability to generate a catalog have made me decide to start tracking things quarterly in the book dimension as well. Here’s my second report.

Total Ebooks: 417 (increase of 54 books)

Total Unread: 313 (increase of 45 so I’m reading them faster than I can add them…good)

Goodreads 2015 Challenge: 38 of 30 books complete. Last time I went way over. We’ll see what this year brings.

SDDM just kept crashing on my system. I can’t figure out what’s screwed up about it. And when it would get me to a KDE desktop, I couldn’t click on anything. So it’s back to KDM for now…

Whenever I boot up post upgrade to Fedora 22, it takes much longer to load KDM than it used to. So I thought maybe it has something to do with Wayland and the fact that KDM is EOL’d. So I thought I’d convert to SDDM. I had no idea how to change DMs in the modern day, so I decided to look it up and ask on LinuxQuestions.org. Eventually, I found it on a stack overflow page:

The Witcher (3 hours): Finally had some time to get back to The Witcher. It definitely isn’t the type of game where you want to have long gaps between playthroughs. But there isn’t much I can do about it.

https://youtu.be/3_xIybABzx4?list=PLEJrELYLxNgUtl5L7oM52YnJj9Jt4c5yp

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (30 minutes): Scarlett just asked me if we could play Sonic. So we tried to get past the third world for a while, but I kept slipping up.

As I documented before, I’ve had problems with Pogoplug and Arch Linux running my servers. Recently I’ve been having problems logging in via SSH on my updated Fedora computers. From what I can tell from a little research, it seems the old way of connecting had a flaw so updated SSH doesn’t want talk to unupdated SSH. So I tried to update Arch Linux and once again ended up with a borked computer. And it’s not something I did wrong - everyone had complaints of the change from /usr/bin (and some other bins) bricking systems. If Pogoplug had a display, I’d have been able to fix it. I tried reinstalling, but something has changed that makes the Pogoplug no longer work. Sick of having stuff go wrong every time I update, I decided this was the time to implement the Home Server Project.

Machine of Death: A Collection of Stories About People Who Know How They Will Die by Ryan North

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is, in a way, not what you think it’s going to be when you read the premise. Essentially it’s a dozen or so Oedipus Rex stories - in the oracle sense, not the incest sense. There is a machine called The Machine of Death and it tells you how you will die. Not when (except in one story). Just how. So if you get CANCER you might die of cancer in two months or at age 99. Sometimes, like Oedipus, what you do to avoid it causes it to happen. Other times that’s not the point of the story, but it can’t be avoided. If your death is EATING A PEANUT you cannot commit suicide by any way other than eating one. The predictions are also vague and/or ironic. OLD AGE might mean you die old or it might mean a senior citizen kills you. So I thought this would be a bunch of stories of people trying to outwit the machine. Instead, what I got were about a dozen stories in which the authors explore how our world would change with the existence of the Machine of Death.

Just the Tips by Matt Fraction

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is like the 90s movie Booty Call. It’s funny in a really dumb, immature way. What’s sad is that the tips in all those women’s magazines should be treated with about as much seriousness as these tips, but some people actually take them seriously. It also includes some hilarious joke sex positions and reader-submitted stories.

View all my reviews

I’ve been a fan of Weird Al for about 17 years. I used to have the Disney special Weird Al Going Home, but unfortunately, I lent it to someone and never got it back. Yet, in all the time, I’d never seen a Weird Al concert live. Finally, Weird Al came to Baltimore as part of his Mandatory Fun Tour and I was able to experience an Al Tour. It was a pretty neat experience. It’s only something like the fourth arena concert I’ve been to (even thought it wasn’t technically in an arena). The last arena concert I went to was Rihanna. Interestingly, Weird Al had WAY more costume changes than she did. He had just about one outfit per song with few exceptions. While he was changing, clips played from nearly every video Weird Al has ever been involved in.

I have KDE connect installed on my computer and phone. KDE connect allows phone alerts to appear on my computer - letting me see if I’m getting a text or something. It just went off, letting me know I had a phone call. What’s neat is that I was listening to music and it paused the music until the phone call was over. While there might be some circumstances where that wouldn’t be the best default (say a party where I was playing the music), it’s certainly neat in the context of a personal computer.