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Today is Tuxday, 16 of Mikon 4113. [4113.08.16]
…assuming you follow the Common Calendar, of course, but I assume you probably do not. Or should. Ahem. Newsletter!
Entropy Arbitrage welcomed visitors from Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Lithuania, Netherlands, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and United States this month, which never fails to please me. Remember, all content is made available under the CC-BY-SA license, so if anybody needs to provide a translation, you don’t need my permission.
It’s the fifth issue of the newsletter and by now, Joe Biden has won the United States Presidential election enough times that I lost count, as lame duck Donald Trump keeps demanding recounts and keeps finding out that he lost by a wider margin than was expected.
If the goal wasn’t to undermine faith in democracy for the fifth of the country who voted for him, it would be funny, but I’ll take solace in the Four Seasons Total Landscaping and tiny desk stories, which actually are funny with no downsides. (I have no idea if Tasnim is a credible news source, by the way, but it’s the only free-licensed source that appears to have covered the incident in question.)
Oh, well. My big point is that there’s no longer a fascist in office and the people who preferred the fascist haven’t plunged us into some violent dystopia out of spite. So, that’s good.
While we’re on the topic of the election, I’m considering the possibility that, rather than colluding with Russia, the Trump campaign may have colluded with a genie, instead. Trump got to be President of the United States…but he lost reelection, lost supporters, was impeached, and may have exposed everyone around him to criminal prosecution. His campaign had its announced press conference at the Four Seasons, but not the Four Seasons Hotel that’s known around the world. He has always wanted people to stop talking about the size of his hands, and they look normal in contrast to his comically small desk.
If someone finds thousands of millions of male deer and a battallion of one-sixth scale concert piano players strolling around White House grounds, then I think we’ll have found our culprit.
I finally finished backing up my assorted DVDs. I thought that was tedious, but that was before I installed Emby. Don’t get me wrong, here; it’s a great Free Software product that is only problematic in the “freemium” business model that explicitly blocks useful features to sell subscriptions, pops up advertisements for itself, and offers “lifetime” subscriptions that are locked to versions of the software to keep people paying.
However, because home media server software like this doesn’t want to read DVDs (and file systems that are structured like DVDs), for whatever reason, the disc images need to be converted to explicit video files. The state of the art, here, appears to be MakeMKV, a Windows-only Free Software product that—like the name suggests—converts DVDs to MKV files, usually broken down into individual episodes and special features. It looks like MakeMKV can read directly from the disc, so that would’ve been nice to know going in. I still would’ve needed the Windows machine, but could’ve at least skipped the shady DVD-ripping freeware that hasn’t been updated in a decade.
So far, so good. But that then requires renaming the video files in a way that Emby can recognize which episode is which across different directories. Then, Emby can’t identify every series and movie, so that requires hunting down IDs on database sites to inform it. It’s worth the effort to not need to get a DVD player working whenever I want to watch an old movie or TV show, but…it’s a lot of up-front tedium.
Eventually, I’ll want to switch from Emby to Jellyfin, by the way, because of the aforementioned business model issues. Jellyfin is a fully free fork of the project, but it sounds like its Roku app isn’t quite ready for normal use. But with full features, I’d be able to set up a DVR for live TV with locast2plex, apparently, which would be useful as a happy Locast subscriber.
Regardless, I now have my own in-house streaming service running, which is nice. Quick estimates suggest that buying DVDs is going to be significantly cheaper, for me, than subscribing to the more expensive streaming services, and there’s less of a chance of an outage or content rotating out.
This month has been slow for a variety of reasons, unfortunately.
Here’s a small exerpt from the opening. You might be able to use this to track down some of the sources I’ve been working from. If you’re concerned about spoilers, it looks like this is part of the climax, but it’s nothing of the sort…at least, not for this story.
Impaled on a jagged spire, orange blood spewing, Xenos wouldn’t make it.
Plainsong spun on her heel. “Dollbaby, try to get around them. In the haze, they won’t see you,” she hoped. “Our only chance is to overload their computers.”
A moment’s hesitation. “Sure. But Xenos.”
“Hopefully, he can pull himself back together, but none of us are going to make it, if that computer doesn’t come down. And where the Hell are Grimknight and Blindsight?”
As Dollbaby vanished into the smoke, a flying kick to the henchman over Plainsong’s shoulder answered one question.
“Good to see you survived without me, Plainsong,” Blindsight quipped, standing back to back.
“Xenos wasn’t so lucky.” Another two minions down. The portal was churning them out like a factory, though.
“He’ll make it if we can get to him.”
“No! We don’t have time. We need to seal the gate. Stay on mission.”
“But—”
Another wave of shock troops came at them, these more heavily armed. A shriek from Plainsong took out most of them.
“And where is Grimknight? He could slip us between these thugs, if he—”
“I’m here, Plainsong. You’re not going to like it, though. I can’t use the Mantle to help you. Taking this violence through Arawn is forbidden.”
“But Grimknight—Diggs—it needs to happen to save Earth. Don’t make me go through you.”
It’s not a style of story I instinctively tell, and it almost certainly needs editing, but I think it’s a decent start.
I gave myself an entire extra month, but still managed to not get this out the door, as other things interested me. I suspect that a big part of the problem is that I still haven’t settled on a branding scheme. I created a logo, but it mostly just annoys me, making the project unappealing and making it difficult to visualize a real presentation. I suspect that I need to fix that to improve motivation.
In no particular order, here are some things that I finished watching or listening to in September. No, I don’t remember when I started them.
In case you missed one and don’t like RSS readers, here’s a round-up of the past month’s worth of posts.
The most popular posts on the blog have been Developer Journal, Election Eve, Free Culture Book Club — MTF Sigma-5 “Pumpkin Punchers”, Tweets from 10/26 to 10/30, and SlackBackup for the month.
You’ve seen some of these already in Friday posts, but here’s more from the sources in my RSS reader that I thought were worth reading.
These are pages I bookmarked, basically. They might be old articles, non-articles, fiction, or any number of other possibilities. You’ve seen the web. You know what it’s like out there. And you also know that half the titles are probably bogus, because people are terrible at setting their page titles to something useful.
That’s it for this month. Stop by the blog and leave comments or contact me however else you see fit.
—John
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