Nathan Arthur

I’ve been listening to The Expanse audiobooks on my commute, and they’re really great.

I’ve read the books before, and really enjoyed them, especially since the series ended strong. And I liked the show, once I had read the books.

But now the audiobooks, with their slower pacing, and excellent performances, are really giving the story more depth. Maybe it’s just because it’s the third time through, too. But they’re making me think about character, more. And the level of craft that went into these stories is more apparent.

I find myself wishing I was back on my drive so I could listen to more of the story!

#books

RE: https://toot.liw.fi/@liw/116623992150017126

Ditto!

And if you can't bear to read the whole thing, @baldur also published a summary: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2025/followup-on-trusting-your-own-judgement/

Well, I’ve done it! I’m the proud owner of a brand new #EV! (Hyundai Ioniq 5) It was a fascinating road to get to this point:

Hail damage to the (paid-off!) car.

Insurance totaled it.

It was going to take over a month without driving it to convert it to a salvage title.

I’ve wanted an EV for years, and used EVs were finally viable, and Ioniqs looked good… but I couldn’t find the right combination of features and price for me.

But Hyundai has massive incentives for their new inventory - so much that it’s actually cheaper, in the long run, to buy new!

So… I did!

#TIL that my 2017 conference lightning talk about negotiation is on YouTube, and it has fewer views than my son’s 2018 brief attempt at becoming a YouTuber: a 14-minute no-audio clip of him starting a new Minecraft world.

I’m ashamed and proud at the same time!

I blogged about migrating my MX (email) from self-hosted #Qmail, with Gmail as the front-end, to @fastmail: https://www.rainskit.com/blog/migrating-from-qmail-and-gmail-to-fastmail/

Many #yaks were shaved in this adventure, and I'm much less visible to Google, now!

The post is long, mostly because I needed to eulogize the end of 25 years of email self-hosting. But it might be interesting to some of you. And it might be helpful if you are on Qmail and want to stop self hosting.

And with that, my email is managed by @fastmail, and I'm one big step more-off Google!

There were some rough edges, coming from Qmail. But Fastmail (the software) seems great, and the Fastmail support people have been fantastic.

...and then right at the end, in my zeal to clean things out, I accidentally deleted the primary user account on my server. So now I get to shave that #yak 🤦‍♂️

#PSA: Don't delete users when you're exhausted.

(I will eventually write this all up on my blog.)

While updating my personal #netbsd server to patch #regresshion, I updated all my installed packages, which broke #php, which broke apache.

So I shaved all those #yaks and discovered that my CMS (#textpattern) was years out of date, and not compatible with modern PHP. And my self-written tagging plugin would require changes, if I upgraded.

So <big sigh of relief> I am finally rid of PHP, Apache, and MySQL on that server! That feels really good. (Even if I'm sad my old content is gone.)

I finished reading my Ashley Book of #Knots. (#abok) What a well-written book! So many interesting bits of lore and knowledge!

Also it was very long.

Mostly it isn’t going to prove useful to me, day to day. (Grog Knots takes the crown, there.) Maybe someday as a reference for one of the elaborate knots.

But the ideas of “nip” and the “single hitch” will stick with me for a long time.