Weekend reading: "Metaverse" edition
- How Your Native Language Changes The Structure Of Your Brain (Stephen Luntz, IFLScience)
- Who Is Still Inside the Metaverse? (Paul Murray, New York Magazine)
Language learning hack: Generate a "Word of the day" wallpaper
The best way to learn new words and phrases is to use them actively. The next-best way to learn new words is to be exposed to them as much as possible. And since the wallpaper that adorns my graphical desktop environment is what I stare at most of my waking hours, I thought that it'd only make sense to add words and phrases I want to memorize there.
Half an hour after the eureka moment, I had a working hack consisting of a plain text file with words and phrases along with their translations, a wallpaper template PNG file, and a simple Bash shell script. The latter pulls a random line from the text file, and uses the template to generate a new wallpaper with the picked line. Below are all the gory details worth knowing if you want to roll out something similar.
The engineers are back
Three years ago to the day, I wrote about two collared doves, who decided to build a nest right above our kitchen window. I'll be forever thankful to them for brightening our days during the worst pandemic days.
But the story didn't end there. In 2020, they didn't manage to finish the nest, so they returned in 2021. They didn't finish the nest then either. So in 2022, they were back. Alas, a storm took down their unfinished work. It's 2023, and guess who is back?
We're now lovingly referring to them as "The Engineers" and their nest as "Berlin Airport".
Weekend reading: "Textpocalypse" edition
- Prepare for the Textpocalypse (Matthew Kirschenbaum, The Atlantic)
- The Untold Story Of Andrew Tate, The Internet’s Most Notorious Influencer (Tom Warren and Ikran Dahir, BuzzFeed)
- On the Trail of the Fentanyl King (Benoît Morenne, Wired)
Grab and de-DRM Kobo ebooks with kobodl
Used with the Obok DeDRM plugin, Calibre can easily strip DRM from ebooks bought from the Kobo store. The combo works fine, but it has two downsides: you need to have access to the machine running Calibre, and you must connect your Kobo reader to the machine. While these are not deal-breakers, Kobodl provides a more elegant solution for downloading Kobo ebooks and liberating them from the DRM shackles.