For literature I find 100 years of Solitude to be without equal. An absolute joy to read.
For nonfiction I have learned so much from 1491. It was recommended to me by a friend though I have never heard of it elsewhere. The premise is that basically everything we think about Native Americans before Columbus arrived is wrong. I could go on but here is one tidbit: we tend to think of Native Americans as peoples without government. Now of course there are so many different groups of peoples all over the Americas and across so many eras it’s foolish to even think of them as being this way or that way because who and when are you referring to? But there were many types of government. In fact the Incas were total bureaucrats! Anyway I’m doing a poor job selling it i know but it’s a great read.
For self-help try How to Win Friends and Influence People. I know the title sounds like it’s a guide to manipulation but it’s really not. It’s 100 years old but still holds up so well. Times change, but people don’t, you know what I mean? People 100 years later still appreciate it when you remember their name and look them in the eye and make time to listen.
All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing are beautiful western novels by Cormac McCarthy. Both are very much “a boy and his horse” kind of stories about learning to be yourself. They’re loosely related and there’s a third book that brings the boys together and concludes their stories
The Jungle and Oil! by Upton Sinclair are novelizations of Sinclair’s investigative journalism work in the meat packing industry and the nascent workers rights movement respectively. Oil! was very loosely adapted into the film There Will Be Blood (the film covers maybe the first 3-4 chapters by greatly expanding upon the material
Hatchet by Gary Paulsen was a very impactful book for me as a child. It’s a YA novel, but still worth a read. The main character Brian survives a plane crash in the Canadian wilderness and is forced to find a way to survive on his own
A few more recent novels that I enjoyed:
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. Won the 2024 Booker Prize (best English language novel) about an authoritarian government taking power in Ireland and how that unfolds from the perspective of a mother with young children. It’s a hard read, but very well written
Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez. Translated into English. A friend described it as “sexy witches in South America deal with authoritarian rule.” And that’s pretty close…
Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park. A semi-fictionalized history of the Korean Peninsula and the desire to have a unified identity. Many people come to the peninsula (same bed) with very different goals for its use (different dreams). Really fascinating book and engaging
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. Follows a trio of friends as they explore the world of video game design. Starts in the early 80s and runs through the 2000s. Reminder me very much of the show Halt and Catch Fire.
My Friends by Hisham Matar. Follows a Libyan immigrant living in England in the 80s through 2010s as he wrestles with his identity, his homeland, his friends and family. Khaled’s closest friends serve as foils to his own feelings, reacting to the same circumstances very differently from himself
I like Sleep as Android. I have had it for so many years though, I apologize that I cannot remember if it is part of the premium upgrade. Has tons of custom sleep and wake settings.
I am a light sleeper and really like that I can set it to just vibrate for a time. If that didn’t wake me up it will start a random song and increase in volume.
Funny. I absolutely hated Stranger in a Strange Land. It felt like a 14-year-old boy's fantasy/im14andiamsmart. Pretentious and masturbatory.
Maybe I would have loved it if I read it when I was 14 instead of when I was something like 22.
It's actually my go-to example for a book that I dislike. I think it's the only book I've really actually hated. I would have just thought it was tripe if it hadn't taken such a wonderful title away. Now there will never be a good book with that fantastic title.
If it’s a MacBook that no longer gets updates from Apple then it’s probably from around 2014ish, and is definitely an Intel Mac. This is a great candidate for Linux. If you want an environment that is similar to Mac, go with gnome as the desktop environment. Outside of that, any of the major distributions should be fine. I’ve run KDE Neon, Ubuntu, and am currently running fedora on a 2014 iMac and all of them worked without issue.
Fedora has always had good Mac support in my experience. Should just be able to hold option key at boot and select the USB.
If you want to continue dual booting I’d use the Mac’s recovery mode to shrink the partition so it leaves space first. Other than that it should be just like normal. Hold option to get the boot menu.
I have been using Tailscale, connected it to my domain, I use Authentik for my OIDC/SSO Sign in and tied it that way for the MFA OIDC Login Tailscale let’s you use. All I needed to do is setup a webfinger for it and once it verified my domain, I was able to give them my OIDC settings for them. Tailscale so far for me in the last year or so has been quite simple to use. Plus, being able to log into my admin console and any devices I enroll through Authentik’s front end, has given me peace of mind knowing it’s quite secure. (All of this on a Proxmox server BTW).
One may argue about self hosting Wireguard and I agree, it’s quite easy to do if you use something like wg-easy which makes it simple to add phones to your network. My concern with it though was having to poke a hole into my firewall for the WG traffic to hit the server, once I got into Tailscale, it’s made it easier and I don’t have any open ports on the router now. I think this is primarily why the Jupiter Broadcasting guys push it so much on their podcasts, not to mention one of the hosts on his podcast is an employee for Tailscale as well, so that probably helps a bit.
As for funding for both Nebula, or Tailscale, they do cater to enterprise customers so you have the assurance that they do have to answer to them if they revoke a service or ruin it. :)
For Tailscale, it’s just a matter of them allowing you to add 100 devices for free and it’s simple command to install it on any client via the cli including Apple TV for example. For phones, I have Tailscale on my phone connected 24/7 to my exit node which is my Proxmox server which acts as one, and as a backup, my Raspberry Pi which acts as one as well. So, even if I’m on the road or away from home, I’m always on my home network (unless blocked by overzealous sysadmins on their public WiFi networks). There’s not much to manage via the phone, but I like to think it’s ‘set and forget’ really, once you have it all configured, it just runs in the background and they do not decrypt your traffic much less care what goes through it.
I long for a moneyless, classless game in this genre where the incentives are community thriving, trust, pleasure, and all the other aspects that make life worth worth living outside of capitalism.
I think Sim Ant technically meets these conditions.
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