eide

Breakfast in bed, accompanied by completing my first ever playthrough of the main body of Monument Valley. I think I wound up getting two prompts from A, who also spent a significant chunk of the afternoon attempting to get it working on two different large-format touchscreen devices -- I'd been struggling with the trackpad, and was gratified when A reported that they'd had a go at playing the very first level with a trackpad and it really was kind of wretched. (Made it to approximately halfway through Appendix 1 before deciding I needed to call it for the day...)
smitten kitchen's braised chickpeas with zucchini and pesto continues fantastic.
'tis The Season for my current Favourite Chocolate (I'm not sure if it's available year-round but the company we get groceries from only carries them during the winter, and I honestly probably enjoy them more because of the Seasonal Availability). I am writing this post with one of them + a mug of warm milk.
The box of meds I dropped in an airport this Monday gone has successfully been picked up! First step in a pass-the-parcel that will hopefully conclude weekend after next...
Got a substantial increase on my highest score in one of the silly clicky games in Flight Rising :)

Previously: uk.bookshop.org were selling a Tor ebook with DRM applied, which I only noticed after I had bought it, because all? Tor ebooks? are DRM-free? at the request of the publisher? Like, Hive applies DRM to them, but given that bookshop.org lets you filter for DRM-free, this... was surprising.

My initial support request for (1) an explanation and (2) any chance of a refund, realise this is totally on me though, ... got me an almost-immediate refund, which I was not expecting, and a very entry-level explanation of What DRM Is, which I sort of was. So I wrote back saying thank you very much, and also, Tor went famously DRM-free in about 2012, and they're definitely supplying this specific ebook to other retailers without DRM applied.

There was A Pause.

A day or two later I received a response from someone with "Senior" in their signature, thanking me for my patience and saying they were Investigating.

A few days after that I noticed that the ebook in question was now marked DRM-free: hurrah! ... but when I bought it, and clicked on the "yes please download my DRM-free ebook" button, nothing happened.

I did not write back in because I have been. preoccupied.

But a few days after that I tried again and this time the download did work! So hurrah for bookshop.org needing me to do much less assertive escalation than I'd been expecting, and also for noticing that something was still broken and Fixing It without me needing to get around to e-mailing in about it.

... the quick part of this note was going to be: I know there were Questions on my first post about Hey They're Doing Ebooks Now, about how you actually filter for DRM-free. As far as I can tell this isn't actually possible from the ebooks landing page, which seems A Pity, BUT when you search for something (which can absolutely be as vague as "science fiction"), the FORMAT dropdown lets you filter for DRM-free ebooks only. Obviously this is Not Ideal, in that one might actually like to browse All DRM-Free Ebooks, but it does exist as an option, where as far as I can tell it doesn't, at all, on e.g. Kobo. Hopefully this knowledge is helpful! And certainly The Above Saga has caused me to think sufficiently positively of them that I'm likely to default to them for my ebooks in future.

kaberett

For lo these many years (i.e. basically since I got a smartphone) I've been using Swype as an onscreen keyboard. Some time ago it was announced that it had reached end-of-life-and-support, but it wasn't until I went looking earlier today that I realised that happened in 2018, that being when I posted asking for suggestions for replacements.

And then I didn't think about it again for, apparently, approximately eight years, through several new phones and quite a lot of new major versions of Android... and then a few-ish weeks ago Fairphone rolled out Android 15 to the Fairphone 4 and alas That Was The End Of That.

Recommendations back in 2018 were for Gboard and Swiftkey; a question posted to reddit in 2022 garnered similar responses.

Since the Abrupt Keyboard Failure I've swapped to Gboard more or less by default. I don't hate the bit where language switching is now automatic (for the purposes of language learning apps, at any rate), but good grief I am missing the ability to e.g. type < or | without needing to go like three clicks deep in menus. Yes, when I have "Touch and hold keys for symbols" enabled -- as far as I can tell that only gives me one symbol per key, not "now select from a variety of them" as with the much-lamented Swype. I'm also missing the gestures I know for "yes, that word, but change the capitalisation", and still grumpily adjusting to the shift key mode cycle being in a different order to what I'm used to.

I've experimented briefly with AnySoftKey but rapidly got annoyed by the total lack of any Irish language pack (and how difficult it is to navigate the app listings to establish this fact). I'm trying to persuade myself that it's worth giving SwiftKey a try even though it (1) is now Microsoft, (2) has gone all-in on Bundling With Copilot, and (3) apparently "contains ads".

Eheu, alas, etc; all is woe; ... unless anyone knows of any other Android keyboards that provide ready access to All the punctuation...?

kaberett

... to be expanded on tomorrow. <3

denise posting in

dw_news

Hello, friends! It's about to be December again, and you know what that means: the fact I am posting this actually before December 1 means

karzilla reminded me about the existence of linear time again. Wait, no -- well, yes, but also -- okay, look, let me back up and start again: it's almost December, and that means it's time for our annual December holiday points bonus.

The standard explanation: For the entire month of December, all orders made in the Shop of points and paid time, either for you or as a gift for a friend, will have 10% of your completed cart total sent to you in points when you finish the transaction. For instance, if you buy an order of 12 months of paid time for $35 (350 points), you'll get 35 points when the order is complete, to use on a future purchase.

( The fine print and much more behind this cut! )

Thank you, in short, for being the best possible users any social media site could possibly ever hope for. I'm probably in danger of crossing the Sappiness Line if I haven't already, but you all make everything worth it.

On behalf of Mark, Jen, Robby, and our team of awesome volunteers, and to each and every one of you, whether you've been with us on this wild ride since the beginning or just signed up last week, I'm wishing you all a very happy set of end-of-year holidays, whichever ones you celebrate, and hoping for all of you that your 2026 is full of kindness, determination, empathy, and a hell of a lot more luck than we've all had lately. Let's go.

kaberett

The terrible hyphenation one can reasonably attribute to a failure to invest in subject specialist proof readers (or possibly any proof readers at all, good grief).

The wildly ahistorical nonsense about the history of medicine? Less so. I begin to understand why there isn't a references section, and I've only made it as far as page 7 before needing to stop and shriek about it and also stare at a wall for a bit...

kaberett

Spotted in today's book, with just as much of a medical theme as you might reasonably expect:

... biopsy-
chosocial...

lovingboth

This is the best time of the year to get CameraBag, an extremely useful tool for altering photos. It won't let you create pictures, but it will let you change exposure, colour, add text overlays, resize and much more.

With the current sale, it's $14. You get permanent ownership and all of the four or so upgrades that will happen in the next twelve months. Extending that gets another discount.

The 'pro' version can do much the same with video, and costs about twice that. Getting another year cost me just under £10, and I'm delighted to give the developers the money.

Native versions for Windows and Macs, plus 95% of the former now works for photos under Wine on Linux.

judiff

Been re-watching Monkey while we are still like a bit poorly and bored (it’s like currently on Amazon Prime)

It makes me really wish I had/could use a quarter staff (and like a magic cloud, obviously)

Current Mood: drained

kaberett

Reading. ... I think, like, a page or two of Descartes (Treatise on Man), and that's it?

OH. NO. I also finished my first pass through indexing The National Trust Cookbook for EYB. That's right. That's a thing I did.

Watching. Three Whole Entire Episodes of Beddybyes, halfway through the third of which the toddler (who felt it was Very Important that we saw it) pretty much fell asleep where it was sat.

Playing. RIDICULOUS Inkulinati run for Preposterous Amounts Of Prestige.

Cooking. Medlar jelly (plain, spiced). Quince sorbet. Several bread. A batch of buttermilk pancakes. Some terrible First, Burn Your Lettuce, thereby ticking another item off the current Cook The Book project. Buttermilk pancakes.

Eating. One of the CHILLIS from the CHILLI PLANTS we brought HOME from the GREENHOUSE just after first frost (but they were fine); also A turned the small pile of peppers that broke off the sweet pepper I brought home on a bike, still green, into akuri this morning.

Exploring. Important sploshy stomp through the puddles of Barking Park. I... think that's it?

Growing. I have NOT sown any physalis or lemongrass in the electric propagator, to get them hopefully Established by the time I need it for Other Things in the new year. This is a deliberate decision. They can go in next week.

... and now it's very definitely time for bed, goodnight world. <3

judiff

We are feeling a bit not well so we like tried making homemade spaghetti hoops as like a comfort food (well, not like making the hoops - we like bought them as dried pasta - but cooking them and making the orange sauce).

We used the recipe in Catherine Phipps’ Everyday Pressure Cooking (but like halved becos it’s like written to be enuff for four people) only without sticking in an onion or any fresh basil (we didn’t have any). And it does taste mostly like tin sgetti hoops but not quite as soggy. But the sauce is more red than orange so we like need to experiment with that a bit

Current Mood: sleepy

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Page generated Dec. 7th, 2025 04:47 pm

Reading

some good things (a post)

quick note re bookshop.org

the inexorable passage of time and end of all things

vital functions is once again a placeholder

Look! I remembered to post before December started this year!

[pain] oh this book is bad

[pain] a strong contender for The Worst Possible Hyphenation

Photo manipulation software recommendation

(no subject)

vital functions

Sgetti Hoops

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April 2017

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