I finished two seasons of Foundation in one week so this imagery of space warping is still fresh in my mind. Reddit tells me that the series is way different than its written counterpart but for all its little plot holes and significant departure from the book, Foundation is a solid show. Eagerly awaiting the 3rd season. In the meantime, For All Mankind is satiating my thirst for space. Lessons in Chemistry is next on my list. I would watch anything Brie is in. Its shocking and wonderful to discover that the book on which the show is based was rejected 98 times before it was published! The way the book came to be is also not any less inspiring. Fueling anger into constructive anger. Lemons to lemonade.

Speaking of books, I received my copy of Things become other things early this week along with a copy of Kissa by Kissa authored by Craig Mod. The book, the paper, the photographs. Everything about TBOT and Kissa is such a pleasure. An art in itself. Craig's photos have a certain je ne sais quoi and a calm that soothes your soul. Hoping to pick those two up as soon as I am done with The complete works of Dieter Rams and Slow Horses.

On the personal computing side, I switched to Thunderbird from Evolution. There was a brief period of Geary in between but that didn't last a day. Evolution and Geary, both seem to get hiccups from time to time and refuse to fetch emails. With both being tied to the Online Accounts in Gnome desktop, I cannot tell if its the client or the Gnome desktop stuttering in doing its job. Thunderbird is resource heavy but so much better in handling emails. No more crippled search results. Did you know, static charge can interfere with your desktop and knock out WiFi and Bluetooth? It happened to me twice this year. Once when this desktop was 1 week old back in July and yesterday. On both these occasions, powering down and holding the power button for 10 seconds drained all the static charge. I don't have a permanent solution for this yet. Between the copious fur my dogs shed and the lack of humidity, this might be something I have to live with. The desktop is flawless otherwise. I get my ass handed to me in CS2 by kids but hey all the Steam games run great on this AMD build. I am gonna have to upgrade the storage if I want to install any more games. Makes me wonder how many terabytes or petabytes of storage does an average gamer use. In the meantime, I am left with making more space by deleting existing installations.

Until next time.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Last month I had a deja vu of sorts when the pain came back but a 100 times worse. It felt as if my intestines were getting ripped out. I passed out twice in a space of 5 minutes because of the pain and when I couldn't even move on my own, had to rely on 911 for medial attention. This time they found a kidney stone. A 2.5 mm stone, that scraped the walls of the tube on its way to the bladder. I had no idea what was happening in 2020. Maybe the stone was tiny enough back then and I passed it without even realizing but this time around it was in my bladder by the time I got out of the hospital.

For couple of days, I could feel a slight ache going down the tube. The doctor did say its gonna time some time to heal while the kidney is working round the clock. Naturally, I had to increase my water intake and I am currently at a little more than 64 oz daily. Plus an increase in fiber in my diet. I do not want to go through that agonizing pain ever again.

Nowadays, my watch is happy with the uptick in steps count with the frequent bio breaks alone.

A Scribe and Elipsa walk into a bar. The bartender says, "You are unremarkable".

Terrible, I know. Just had to get it out.

Recently, I came across articles about Kobo Elipsa 2E. A note taking device similar to Kindle Scribe. Now, I own a Scribe and take my daily notes on it but looking at the feature set of Elipsa 2E, I was tempted to switch. So naturally, I scoured youtube and reddit for reviews of the device but was not at all whelmed by what people were talking about. For a note taking device that I spend hours on, I am not going to write like I am painting over a canvas. Palm rejection is important to me. The Scribe is not great but it can handle most of my movements and its very rare that I jump pages on the Scribe while writing. The reviewers were more inclined to showcase the features rather than use the device practically. The real reviews are hidden in the 1 star reviews and Q&A section of Amazon product page. The benchmark, as one of the reviews go, for writing on a ePaper tablet is Remarkable 2. Indeed. Once you experience it, everything else just feels... ordinary. The Scribe, in its first generation, offers a smooth writing surface. I don't get why people like it so much. It sucks.

My ideal ePaper tablet will have the writing surface and pen of Remarkable 2, Kindle integration like the Scribe, the software feature set of Elipsa 2E and (since we are building castles in the air) the speed of an iPad. I just have to wait half a decade probably.

My digital garden on halloween

Shot on iPhone.

This is not the actual image but dithered ones to reduce the size from ~1.5 mb each image. I really like how it turned out on a mere iPhone.

In a superb stroke of luck, I am located right in the zone of where this annular eclipse passed through and the next total solar eclipse will also pass.