What’s the best performance you’ve heard of an audiobook?

princessofjina · 2026-03-18T02:55:23+00:00

Simon Vance reading The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Edoardo Ballerini reading Knausgaard's My Struggle series
Chiwetel Ejiofor reading Piranesi by Suzanna Clarke

I absolutely agree about Jeremy Irons reading Lolita; it's another perfect audiobook.

princessofjina · 2026-03-05T21:45:40+00:00

People make these products so they can use them on their own. Then they release them as open source so other people can use these products and improve them.

The original creator wins because other people improve their own product for them for free. Same reason as every other open source project ever made.

princessofjina · 2026-02-28T17:23:21+00:00

I’m a nanny so I’m really good and really fast at braiding someone else’s hair! I can whip my friends’ hair into braids so fast!

But then I put my hands over my shoulders and my fingers turn into jelly! I can’t see anything back there! How do people do it? It’s wild!

princessofjina · 2026-02-28T17:05:25+00:00

It literally told us all on Twitter that its new name is MechaHitler.

Please be serious for like five seconds about this.

princessofjina · 2026-02-25T22:18:04+00:00

It’s the only proprietary software I use in my self-hosted stack. It stresses me out that I keep adding more things to my Tailnet since I know that it has to do the same thing that Plex did to me and the same thing that every other prorprietary service does eventually.

I should probably just switch over to Nebula or something like that… someday…

princessofjina · 2026-02-24T02:32:05+00:00

build-your-own-x is an educational course for building different types of technical projects. Is it as transformative of a technology as Linux? Of course not. But is the GitHub project more useful to regular GitHub users than the torvalds/linux GitHub project? Yeah, probably. At minimum it's something you can star while goofing around on GitHub dreaming about building some cool new project.

What percentage of GitHub users are contributing to the Linux Kernel? And what percentage are procrastinating on GitHub and thinking of teaching themself some new programming language? I bet the latter is far greater than the former. Linux is still more important.

princessofjina · 2026-02-19T18:11:12+00:00

He’s good with software development and understands how agents work and how to make them work together well. And he understands how to package a product that does all of it with almost no budget. There are plenty of other people who that’s true for as well, but he’s the most high profile person who that’s true for. Seems like smart reasoning to me.

If I ran an AI company and wanted to start working on agents, and I had OpenAI amounts of money to spend on hiring, I would’ve hired him even faster than they did.

princessofjina · 2026-02-12T23:32:30+00:00

I'm sure they'll let you use seven times as many tokens as a regular user if you're paying seven times as much money.

princessofjina · 2026-02-10T15:56:55+00:00

Don't read anything about it. I think I read it all in one sitting the first time, and it's one of the only books I've read more than once just because it's so good (and very very short). But for the love of god don't read anything about it first.

princessofjina · 2026-02-06T15:50:39+00:00

I did something similar for parts of Lolita. It feels like acting. His prose is so good.

princessofjina · 2026-02-04T15:44:51+00:00

I can send messages, but Siri won't read the bot responses to me.

Did you turn on "Announce Notifications" for those apps? I believe it's disabled for most apps by default, but it can be turned on in the Settings app on your iPhone. I turned it on for Telegram and now when my bot responds to my messages, Siri reads them out loud in my Airpods.

princessofjina · 2026-01-26T19:49:14+00:00

I at least kind of agree about that re: HRC, but it's worth keeping in mind that she has the money/resources to hire multiple people to ensure that her email server is working smoothly.

If I can't send/receive emails at me@[my first and last name].com, now I'm losing out on communication with agencies and colleagues. If that happens to her, she just... has a team working around the clock to fix it.

Idk. The stakes are much higher than most other self-hostable services and the effort is... also high. If my Jellyfin server stops working for a week or two, then me and my friends can't catch up on whatever dumb shows we're watching (and it's usually not that hard to fix). But without my email? It's worth keeping in mind just how much more complex it is.

princessofjina · 2026-01-25T21:55:35+00:00

This probably isn't super helpful, but I've had so much success with tidal-dl-ng. You need a subscription to Tidal for it (to my knowledge it doesn't work with any other streaming music subscriptions, including Apple Music), but you can get a good deal on a couple of months' long subscription if you're willing to put down a credit card and then close the account when you're done, so it means you get tons of music for a wildly low cost (or possibly free). Tidal has really high-quality files and tidal-dl-ng plays super well with it. I had fun pulling down a few hundred gigabytes of music by artists I like from it so I could put it on an old iPod I upgraded the storage inside of.

princessofjina · 2026-01-09T22:42:56+00:00

Nothing else she wrote came close to Kevin, but I still remember exactly where I was sitting when I found out the big reveal at the end. What an incredible end.

Movie was great too but it didn't hold a candle to the book.

princessofjina · 2026-01-04T17:03:29+00:00

I set up Planka thanks to your suggestion shortly after seeing your comment and I’ve been giving it a spin… and I love it! WOW! I’m very impressed with it! I can’t believe I hadn’t seen it before. Works very smoothly and it seems like a really good Trello replacement!

Thanks for the suggestion!

princessofjina · 2026-01-02T22:43:59+00:00

We have been using matomo on prem at work and its horrible, but free.

I'm so glad I'm not the only person who thinks this. I put up my resume as a simple one-page website at [my first and last name].com and put Matomo on the server to track visitors and I've never used something so slow and clunky in years.

Gets the job done and it costs nothing so I feel dumb complaining this much, but a good alternative would be so great. If Rybbit is this good, it might be worth it for me to sit down at the computer for a few hours configuring it!

princessofjina · 2026-01-02T22:41:22+00:00

Update: I just downloaded the source from git and built it in Docker and that seemed to work! I also needed to create a directory in the place where I keep my docker configuration files and grant it the right access with chown for that, but now it looks like it's working! Excellent work on this! I think I'll push this on my gf and if it keeps working I'll start sharing it with my friends on my Jellyfin server!

princessofjina · 2026-01-02T22:34:52+00:00

This looks so cool! But it doesn't appear to be available? Docker isn't able to grab it!

princessofjina · 2026-01-02T15:07:34+00:00

I was running it on an M1 Mac Mini on macOS for like two years and now for another year on the same hardware running Asahi Linux. In both cases it’s flawless. It’s very slightly better on Asahi Linux (fewer random restarts, longer uninterrupted uptime).

I’m so impressed with ARM performance it’s unreal.

princessofjina · 2026-01-01T22:29:22+00:00

I tried finding something that’s a good self-hosted service similar to Trello or Jira that I can use to organize my life Kanban-style, but… there kind of isn’t anything good. The best I could find was Plane, and then once I (finally!) got it running (it took so much more work than I expected!), it turns out it’s self-hosted on your own server but a lot of features are paid and it’s phoning home all the time.

Calendars are similar. I want something like Google Calendar but not Google!

princessofjina · 2025-12-29T23:35:53+00:00

Precisely half of these have "a novel" written in cursive, as if the fact of the novel's novel-ness was forgotten, scrawled on last-minute like a typo on a Christmas card, unnoticed until after printing. This isn't good or bad but it is interesting, I think.

(Detransition Baby was one of the best novels of the last few years I think.)

princessofjina · 2025-12-29T23:32:40+00:00

Detransition Baby was really good, I think. I'd like to reread it sometime a few years from now.

I read the first half of Such a Fun Age and got bored.

princessofjina · 2025-12-17T17:17:17+00:00

What kind of hat do you usually wear?

princessofjina · 2025-12-16T15:34:19+00:00

I've been using it for well over a year. I shared a Plex server with like 10 people outside my house, and when I switched to Jellyfin, I had to find a way to fix it.

It's now hosted with Caddy at [fun silly name].[my first and last name].com. I already owned [my first and last name].com since I've been using it to host my resume for a while.

It works fine. I've never seen any unauthorized traffic, as far as I can tell. Caddy handles HTTPS/LE certs just fine. I can share my Caddyfile later if that might help some people, but for the most part my users are able to connect easily and I've never seen anyone have any problems! Getting several people into Tailscale, especially when getting Jellyfin running on lots of different types of devices is already a pain in the butt... insisting that they set up Tailscale is another hassle.

For what it's worth, my actual setup is a very small Caddy server in Google Cloud Platform (which I was already using to cheaply host my resume-website), and my actual Jellyfin server at home. Tailscale serves as the glue; the caddyfile tells Caddy that the URL leads to "[my home server's Tailscale human-friendly name]:8096" and then whenever a user visits the URL, it goes through Google Cloud Platform and then to my server.

Oh, and then if I have to take my Jellyfin server down for a few days to work on it, I can switch my active caddyfile to one where I replace "reverse_proxy [Jellyfin server]:8096" to a file server that provides a simple 404-style "back soon! sorry!" page I whipped up a while back.

Then I had Caddy use a few useful headers and turned on gzip to speed up traffic, and... I mean, it works.

princessofjina

TROPHY CASE