This is what I use as well, although it was primarily out of laziness. Works well enough. I would say the Gluetun solution is a better recommendation, more robust and scalable, but the haugene container basically just works.

I tried to read The Nightingale and had to drop it because Hannah seemed to simultaneously want to insist on how french everything was (ooo, they’re drinking café noir, not black coffee) but also didn’t seem to understand how a language works.

Like, the main character was reflecting on her mom calling them her little nightingales because their last name is Rossignol, the french word for nightingale, and I’m like… She called you nightingales because your name is literally nightingale, why does this warrant multiple paragraphs of internal monologuing?

The plot and characters were fine if uninspired, but she put so little effort into the setting that the whole thing felt poorly slapped together. Which I guess tracks well enough with this article, too.

The first few are available on standard ebooks and they’re quick, easy reads, go for it! With the caveat that the standard ebook versions are the original 1920s versions so there’s a bit of weird racial stuff now and then.

I had to put down Fellowship of the Ring for a while due to a cascade of library books, but I’m finally back to it. God I just love how that book flows.

When I want something simpler to read I’ve been going to the Hardy Boys books lately. Read a bunch of them as a kid, they’re still quite enjoyable now. Normally if I reread something 20 years later it’s pretty clearly no longer my taste, but I’m on book 3 and still enjoying them quite a bit.

IIRC New Zealand returned to actual normal, as in COVID was a relative non-issue, faster than many other countries. Their restrictions were more severe and weren’t lifted very quickly, but when they were lifted things were actually fine.

Places like the US and much of Canada dropped restrictions while things were still pretty bad in terms of infection rates and strain on health care systems, and really they hardly enforced them to begin with. You could see this as a return to normalcy since restrictions were gone, but in Alberta they lifted restrictions when we were still dealing with plenty of deaths, severely impacted health care, and on top of that we were still figuring out the implications of the whole long COVID thing. That’s not a return to normal, I don’t think, it’s pretending things are normal when they’re not.

It’s one of my all-time favorite books and I’m still not sure I could actually explain the plot to someone. In fact, I’m not confident there is a coherent plot rather than a bunch of related vignettes that just kind of happen, some of which tell a story and some not so much.

My brain just kind of spent so much time trying to understand what the point of any of it was that I eventually ended up with an interpretation that I loved to view the book through, and therefore I ended up loving the book.

If you can see a polar bear it’s a threat.

They really aren’t like other bear species. They are an apex predator in an area where basically nothing other than another polar bear can even harm them. They see most things as food, including humans.

As a bonus, Iceland has a pretty wonky ecosystem that needs protecting as is and polar bears aren’t native to the island. They have to swim extreme distances to get there, making relocation extremely difficult and expensive, plus if they leave it be it will entirely disrupt other wildlife in the area, to say nothing of the human population.

As others have said, it sucks that it got shot, but Iceland especially has very limited options on how else to deal with it. Shoot on sight is, unfortunately, a very reasonable policy for them.

It’s been almost a decade since I used C++ and had to verify, but after some quick searching around it looks like it hasn’t changed a ton since I last looked at it.

You can use smart pointers, and certainly you should, but it’s a whole extra thing tacked on to the language and the compiler doesn’t consider it an issue if you don’t use them. Using new in C++ isn’t like using unsafe in rust; in rust your code is almost certainly safe unless marked otherwise, whereas in C++ it may or may not be managed properly unless you explicitly mark a pointer as smart.

For your own code in new codebases this is probably fine. You can just always make your pointers smart. When you’re relying on code from other people, some of which has been around for many years and has been written by people you’ve never heard of, it becomes harder to be sure everything is being done properly at every point, and that’s where many of these issues come into play.

C and C++ require more manual management of memory, and their compilers are unable to let you know about a lot of cases where you’re managing memory improperly. This often causes bugs, memory leaks, and security issues.

Safer languages manage the memory for you, or at least are able to track memory usage to ensure you don’t run into problems. Rust is the poster boy for this lately; if you’re writing code that has potential issues with memory management, the compiler will consider that an error unless you specifically mark that section of code as unsafe.

The irony kills me on this one. I would like to imagine that if you send your ID in they auto-fail you, but I’m sure they’re not that clever.

Honestly? Bash. I tried a bunch a few years back and eventually settled back on bash.

Fish was really nice in a lot of ways, but the incompatibilities with normal POSIX workflows threw me off regularly. The tradeoff ended up with me moving off of it.

I liked the extensibility of zsh, except that I found it would get slow with only a few bits from ohmyzsh installed. My terminal did cool things but too slowly for me to find it acceptable.

Dash was the opposite, too feature light for me to be able to use efficiently. It didn’t even have tab completion. I suffered that week.

Bash sits in a middle ground of usability, performance, and extensibility that just works for me. It has enough features to work well out of the box, I can add enough in my bashrc to ease some workflows for myself, and it’s basically instantaneous when I open a terminal or run simple commands.

On principal I don’t use cloud-based password management solutions like this, but Proton Pass does make it somewhat tempting, especially since I have a Proton Unlimited subscription anyways. KeepassXC + syncthing do well enough, but PAM integration would be kind of nice some days when I’m opening and closing my vault a ton.

Unciv works perfectly fine on a phone if you feel like risking significant amounts of your time (:

This is how I do it. I may never stop actually having that gmail account in use due to the number of accounts tied to it, but I at least can use other services going forward without losing tons of stuff.

It’s a bit different but provides more support for the core ideas, for sure. More about our physical, neurological reactions to digital media than about the philosophical and historical aspects. I read it a few years back and enjoyed it quite a bit.

Honestly, it’s halfway correct, if I need to go into the office I’d rather be able to interact with people IRL. Most of my work unit tries to be there on Mondays for that reason.

The caveats are that I’d still rather not be there at all and that our office sucks so most people are at least as effective at home anyways.

Honestly, most books in the genre are not great from a critical perspective. Even popular and “good” ones. But they do a great job of being long-lasting entertainment products that get that dopamine flowing, and they engage you in a way that is hard to find elsewhere.

I haven’t read a lot of western litrpg, but there’s pretty heavy overlap with Japanese light novels. Arguably a good chunk of the tropes and popularity spilled over from Japanese light novels and Chinese progression fantasy/xianxia. In that genre I can recommend these pretty easily:

• Apocalypse Bringer Mynoghra, which has a guy transported to a fantasy world with powers like a Civilization leader.
• Log Horizon, where a bunch of MMO players kind themselves in a world basically like the game they know but slowly uncover differences.
• Sword Art Online: Progressive, which is basically the original story filled in with the details and character development needed to make it actually pretty good.
• Konosuba, which has a lot of similarities to gamelit progression and such but is very much a comedy.

If you’re into web novels, Shadow Slave and Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint are both incredible while scratching that itch. I’ve only read the manwha but Greatest Estate Developer also lurks around the genre while being quite good.

I was going away for a few days and picked up one of my cats to say bye. His reaction was to immediately kick himself off my chest and sprint downstairs. He was also meh about my return. Gotta love him.

Current focus is Whalefall since it’s due back to the library at some point. Read a little when I first picked it up, trying to read the rest this week.

Also working through The Invincible Shovel manga. Read three volumes, I’ll probably read the rest this week. It’s stupid. I love it.