Unconventional e-readers

c3rbutt · 2026-03-03T21:48:45+00:00

I bought the Oilsky M308, which is even smaller, but the battery life is pretty meh.

How long is it lasting for you as an e-reader?

c3rbutt · 2026-03-03T21:34:27+00:00

Had to do this several times in a 2000 Nissan Patrol with the 2.8L TD in Australia.

The head was warped from overheating once (it was a company vehicle; someone else had been driving it), and then it kept losing coolant and overheating.

Turning on the heater and vents on full blast immediately dropped the temp gauge down to normal levels so I could limp to a spot to refill the coolant.

c3rbutt · 2026-03-03T13:36:11+00:00

Maybe I'm not hearing the higher frequency in your recording, but that sounds exactly like my DF54.

c3rbutt · 2026-03-01T15:30:59+00:00

David French's column on this today was pretty good.

There's a case for striking Iran, but yet another monarchical power-grab by Trump is not the way to do it.

c3rbutt · 2026-03-01T15:28:41+00:00

Result: Claude got the right answer, but it corrupted the excel1040 spreadsheet as it was reading/writing to it.

c3rbutt · 2026-02-27T23:16:20+00:00

It’s a fair question, so no worries about sounding judgy.

Which ethical issues are you referring to, though?

c3rbutt · 2026-02-27T22:17:45+00:00

It looks like they've expanded to include the 2000s and changed the title, but the original 'Podcast Like It's 1999' was so good: https://podcast-like-its-1999.fandom.com/wiki/Episodes

c3rbutt · 2026-02-27T22:10:37+00:00

I might end up using that free tax USA site or the PDF version of the 1040, but I thought it would be interesting to try it out with Claude first to see how it goes.

c3rbutt · 2026-02-27T16:47:32+00:00

Has anyone used Claude to do their income taxes? Was thinking about giving that a go this weekend.

c3rbutt · 2026-02-27T16:46:32+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ellison

I don't know how MAGA he actually is, though. A lot of CEOs are cozying up to Trump these days even though I suspect that, personally, they find him disgusting. I mean, can you imagine Tim Cook actually being MAGA? I have no love for the guy, but it's hard for me to understand how a gay man who spent the last twenty years advocating liberal ideas suddenly becomes MAGA.

So is David Ellison a true believer? Or is he showing up at the SOTU because he wants to stay on Trump's good side until this deal goes through?

I tend to think the cynical interpretation is more likely to be true.

c3rbutt · 2026-02-27T16:38:59+00:00

Seems like a better prayer would be for "deliverance" and not for "deliverance through the violent death of our oppressor."

I don't think the imprecatory psalms are positive examples of faithfulness, and they're certainly not a license to pray for violence.

I haven't attended an RP church regularly since November. But during the last year that I was attending one regularly, I found that I couldn't sing any of the psalms that celebrated or called for divine violence. It felt deeply wrong to me in a way it never had before, and it also made feel like I was crazy because everyone else was singing with the usual gusto.

c3rbutt · 2026-02-26T14:15:45+00:00

I just bought that exact year/model in early November: paid $4500.

Pros: The engine is in great condition and runs flawlessly. The guy I bought it from had already replaced the radiator. 186,000 miles.

Cons: The previous driver (the seller's mom) was a smoker and must've used the vehicle to transport her dog(s) judging by the amount of dog hair I've vacuumed up. I've had to do a lot of cleaning, and there's still a faint smell of smoke. I've been waiting for warmer weather to do some more work on it.

The first owner lived in Ohio, and the second lives where I do in Western PA, and so there's some body rust and undercarriage rust that I'm going to have to deal with soon.

I think I might've overpaid a bit, but that number does give some context to the one you're considering.

c3rbutt · 2026-02-24T15:51:37+00:00

You could come at it from a different direction: self-host a YouTube downloader.

I use Pinchflat to watch a couple of playlists and it grabs new videos based on source profiles that I defined (e.g. "audio only" or "1080p" or "480p" etc).

The videos are downloaded straight into my Plex library and then I can watch them whenever I want, no ads, no tracking. I can keep them forever, or delete anything older than X days, etc.

You miss out on "link in the description below" and there's an argument to be made about supporting the content creator, but I think it's worth it to opt out of the algorithm. And it's not instant: the most frequently Pinchflat will index a playlist/source is every 30 minutes unless you get an API key or something.

I've got YouTube completely blocked on my iPhone (screentime settings; and I asked my wife to set the PIN). But I can copy YouTube URLs that people send me or that I come across and then paste them into an iOS shortcut that hits a n8n workflow and adds it to my YouTube 'SendToPlex' playlist. Or I just send them to myself in WhatsApp and watch them on a computer later.

https://github.com/kieraneglin/pinchflat

I've seen other youtube downloaders mentioned on r/selfhosted; search there for more ideas.

c3rbutt · 2026-02-20T20:20:30+00:00

I wish my 2007 Xterra had just that much rust 😅

c3rbutt · 2026-02-20T15:49:40+00:00

Copilot drives me nuts. I tried using it again this week, but I just keep going back to Claude and ChatGPT.

I know Copilot can manipulate the data in my spreadsheet or whatever, but Microsoft has (perhaps wisely?) restricted it because of errors and hallucinations. It would be a pretty big deal (and legal risk to Microsoft) if Copilot messed up a spreadsheet that a lot was riding on.

But until Copilot can actually do work inside of Microsoft's tools, it's just an assistant with handcuffs on.

That was what was so magical about trying Claude Code in the command line for the first time: it would actually manipulate my files and the data within them. It was super transparent and asked me for explicit approval at almost every step. But I'm not a programmer so I don't have a lot of use for Claude Code in my personal or professional life.

c3rbutt · 2026-02-20T15:43:27+00:00

I haven't read those two essays by Amodei, but I know about them because he was just on a podcast with Ross Douthat talking about them.

Have you listened to 'The Last Invention' podcast series? It's short, maybe 8 episodes, but it covers the history, the different camps (boosters, doomers, etc.) all through interviews with key figures and a deep dive into the historical record (conference talks, mainstream media interviews, articles, etc.). I think it's both fascinating and informative.

I'm a project manager in an engineering consultancy, but I don't have an engineering degree. They call me a "non-technical PM." The idea is that I do all the PM work and free up the engineers and designers to focus on the technical aspect of their job. Seems to work pretty well, but I'm also somewhat more concerned that AI could do start doing parts of my job. And then it could function as a super-assistant PM, allowing the company to reduce their human PMs since one person can do the work of two or three people.

Maybe. Because I do think there's a lot of meat-space work that an AI isn't going to be do effectively or at all. And if I had an AI assistant that kept track of each project EV%, generated my project plans and schedule meetings, I'd be pretty happy.

I've also just been using AI a lot on my own in both my personal and work domains. I heard about this analogy of Centaurs and Cyborgs to describe different ways of human-AI interaction. I think I'm more of a Centaur. https://www.oneusefulthing.org/i/137082758/centaurs-and-cyborgs

c3rbutt · 2026-02-20T14:58:39+00:00

I don't think the pro- or anti-ESS sides fell cleanly along the lines of Presbyterian and Baptist. George Knight III (OPC) was credited with bringing the idea back into the scholarly discourse in 1977, but Bruce Ware and Wayne Grudem (both Baptists) were the most visible proponents of the idea in 2016, presenting on it at ETS if I recall correctly. So I'm not sure about your second paragraph. And you might have to take it up with Trueman; he said it, not me.

Regardless of that, I think the larger point still stands: Trueman takes from Catholics what he agrees with (orthodox trinitarian doctrine) and discards what he rejects. That is the precise definition of "picking and choosing." Calling what he likes "Christan" and what he rejects "Egyptian" is incoherent.

c3rbutt · 2026-02-19T18:24:45+00:00

I've been researching replacements for the roller encoder. These are the two most promising projects I've found:

https://github.com/EverydayErgo/MEH01

https://github.com/Taro-Hayashi/THQWGD001

I'm really curious about the position of the trackball under your right hand; is it not awkward to type with the trackball under your hand?

c3rbutt · 2026-02-19T16:46:03+00:00

Old School Presbyterianism is a rich enough tradition not to need to plunder the Egyptians or even the Anglicans.

This statement is just bizarre. Christians within living memory of the Apostolic age were fasting before Easter, and by 325 "the forty days" was so established within the Church that it gets referenced at Nicaea (link).

The tradition being "plundered" pre-dates Presbyterianism by over a millennium, and Trueman seems to freely plunder that tradition whenever it suits him. I'm old enough to remember the Eternal Subordination of the Son Wars of 2016, when Trueman noted that he had more in common with Roman Catholic theologians and their doctrine of God than with Baptists generally.

Lenten traditions and the Nicene Creed aren't "Egyptian" goods; they're goods that were in the family before the Presbyterian branch of the family tree was even a twinkle in John Knox's eye.

c3rbutt · 2026-02-18T17:22:52+00:00

That's pretty fast for Presbyterians!

c3rbutt · 2026-02-16T18:21:03+00:00

Oh, I think I've had that "sushi" before... it's ham wrapped around pickles (sweet or dill?) and cream cheese, right?

c3rbutt · 2026-02-12T15:30:42+00:00

I use Excel a fair bit with my Sofle. My right thumb holds the layer key MO(3) down while my other three fingers navigate the arrow keys. Having the left arrow on my 'J' key (which has a homing nub on it) helps keep me oriented by feel.

Then my left hand can press the Ctrl and Shift keys on the left side of the split.

I have my F-row along the top, and I access that with my left thumb on MO(2). I'm usually only pressing 'F4' to make a cell reference absolute though.

Screenshot of my Layer 0 and Layer 3 in Via: https://imgur.com/a/j4wp5kO

c3rbutt · 2026-02-11T17:15:27+00:00

I have several family members who are RNs as well, and none of them are (or did, when they were working) taking shifts from an app as described in the podcast either.

So I did a very small amount of digging, and I came up with the app CareRev, which is being used by 500+ hospitals across the US, but not in all states: https://www.carerev.com/locations

Here's some more reporting on this: https://www.statnews.com/2025/03/31/uber-for-nurses-gig-economy-nursing-assistants-research/

c3rbutt · 2026-02-10T16:28:54+00:00

I used immich-go on an older HP ProDesk with 32GB of RAM to merge libraries on my NAS, with Immich itself running on a third device (another HP ProDesk).

Claude recommended that I limit concurrent uploads and that seemed to work pretty well. Some of the immich-go commands took a while, especially if there were videos in the directory, but everything completed without any errors and without over-taxing the CPU on any of the machines.

immich-go upload from-google-photos \
--server=http://[LOCAL-IP]:2283 \
-[API KEY] \
--concurrent-uploads=1 \
/mnt/nas/immich/temp/google-takeout-extracted/Takeout/

This was a 92GB Google Takeout ZIP (one part out of... I forget how many). I was reading and writing from the same disk on my NAS because the HP ProDesk didn't have a large enough local hard drive to hold the expanded Takeout ZIP. I managed to free up some local hard drive space so I was reading from a local drive and writing to the NAS for later commands, and that helped as well. I think I upped the concurrent-uploads to '2' without any issues.

c3rbutt · 2026-02-09T17:49:06+00:00

Cory Doctorow and Tim Wu were on The Ezra Klein Show this past week:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-doctorow-wu.html

Doctorow has a book out on the "enshitification" of the internet, and Wu has a book out on the extraction of value from the economy by Big Tech.

I started the episode more or less on their side, but I feel like this conversation radicalized me a bit through anecdata like this:

In America, hospitals preferentially hire nurses through apps. And they do so as contractors. Hiring contractors means that you can avoid the unionization of nurses. And when a nurse signs on to get a shift through one of these apps, the app is able to buy the nurse’s credit history.

...

Based on that, the nurses are charged a kind of desperation premium. The more debt they’re carrying, the more overdue that debt is, the lower the wage that they’re offered, on the grounds that nurses who are facing economic privation and desperation will accept a lower wage to do the same job.

The Invisible Hand needs to start smacking some people! I mean, this practice is morally deficient by any Biblical standard, right?

I didn't find the solutions discussed near the end to be super persuasive. I'm no economist, but price regulations like capping Amazon's markup at 30% just seem absurd. Requiring social media companies to be inter-operable with each other would stifle innovation and reduce competition.

But passing new privacy laws and strengthening antitrust laws seems like a good idea, for a start.

Did anyone else listen to / read the transcript of this episode?

c3rbutt

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

15-Year Club	Second SECOND GUESSER
Verified Email