Fiction!
paradox2011 @ paradox2011 @lemmy.ml Posts 0Comments 200Joined 2 yr. ago
Absolutely, I wish his suspense catalogue was bigger! It's been neat to see his ideas getting worked in to modern fiction like True Detective. There's also a handful of TTRPG games that are using the mythos of Carcosa and the king in yellow as the premise for pre-written adventure scenarios.
Nice, yeah Fahrenheit 451 is easily my favorite of the bunch. Ray Bradbury's passion for the human experience is infectious, and he has a way of elevating the idea of reading to an almost spiritual level 😅.
For Lovecraft, try grabbing his complete works as an e-book if you can. It's usually only $2 or $3 dollars on e-book sites and will let you sample around in the stories.
Here's a few things that a might make the reading more enjoyable (at least it did for me.)
- Lovecraft was a very feaful, anxious person. His stories were a way that he tried to deal with fear of the unknown.
- There is a rythym to his writing: he spends a long time circling around an idea, painting a picture of mundane facts that don't mean much on their own, but then towards the end of the paragraph or the chapter he will drop one or two sentences that cast an eery, unsettling light on those mundane descriptions. Those payoff sentences were great, I was always on the edge if my seat waiting for them.
- The story is not so much to tell the story itself, but to try to communicate a feeling or emotion to the reader.
Here's a few stories to dip a toe in to:
The Call Of Cthulhu At the risk of sounding a bit front door, this is probably the best starting place. It may not be the best of his stories, but it is not too long or overworked, and has a nice array of the characteristic Lovecraft style. You'll probably be able to tell if you're onboard after this one.
At The Mountains Of Madness This is the one I started with. Its very long and incredibly dense in the beggining especially. I remember actually skipping the introductory set up, up to about page 15 😄. Now I've gone back and appreciated the world building, but goodness H.P. gets wordy. It is a fantastic story and might be my favorite despite it's density.
The Lurking Fear This one crosses more from suspense in to horror. He doesn't get too dark, but this one definitely is meant to get you on an instinctual fear level.
The Shadow Out Of Time This one I read later on, and it is another good example of his world building and story construction. Interesting premise and good descriptive elements.
I took a look at my book shelf, here's a few more books that I've really enjoyed over the years:
"An Unsuitable Job For A Woman" - P.D. James, Mystery
"The Night Thoreau Spent In Jail - Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee, Script of a stage play that is sold in book form
Vernor Vinge, Author - mostly science fiction Any of his books are good, notably Deepness In The Sky and Rainbows End. Deepness in the sky is technically a sequel, but I read it out of order and still enjoyed it. "Fire Upon The Deep" is the prequel. It was good, but a little more scattered. I had a harder time visualizing the scenes.
EDIT: spelling
First, follow that 1984 rabbit hole if you enjoyed it:
Fahrenheit 451
Brave New World
Animal Farm
Aside from that, I enjoyed the biographical fiction "The Agony And The Exctasy" by Irving Stone. It's a fictionalized (but historically accurate) telling of Michaelangelo's life and works. If you like the psychology and drive of creativity, you'll probably like this.
For more recent works, try Tad Williams' "Otherland" series. They're a great mix of fantasy and science fiction that kind of cosplays through the styles of other significant works of fiction. He has other series, but I couldn't get in to the straight fantasy stuff quite as much.
Obligatory H.P. Lovecraft plug as well. You'll either love it or hate it, but if you do get in to it there's really nothing like it.
As a secondary recommendation to that, if you like the darker themes of Lovecraft, try the short story compilation "The King In Yellow" by Robert Chambers. It's what originally inspired H.P. Lovecraft's writing, but Chambers has an entirely different style than Lovecraft. He started out in the dark suspense genre, but ended up writing romance later in life. His writing is warmly vivid, even in the suspense stories. It's not a chore to make it through paragraphs of description like it can be with Lovecraft, and I think Chambers is adept at maintaining suspense through allusion and suspension, never quite revealing what you should be afraid of directly. His later romance writings don't have the same creative flare, I think he maybe was just trying to earn a living at that point.
Try the package html2text. I haven't used it before, but I think it might be what you're looking for. Interestingly, it was originally developed by Aaron Schwartz, one of the co-founders of markdown.
Other than that I've seen people being pretty successful with a combination of wget and pandoc. I don't know how well that would work in scripts though.
Interesting, it just started working automatically for me. I dont know exactly what combo of settings it might be, but try:
- Go to Heliboard settings > Text Correction > suggestions. Then toggle on "show correction suggestions," "personalized suggestion" and "next word suggestions." Those are the ones I have on.
- Go to Keepassdx setting > Form Filling. Make sure "set default autofill service" is toggled on. Then go in to "autofill settings" and toggle on "inline suggestions." I think this is probably the issue.
- Make sure Keepassdx is set as your default autofill service in android settings Settings > Passwords and accounts. You should see Keepassdx listed there as the form autofilling option.
Let me know how it goes.
Oh I gotcha, yeah that would be a really nice improvement. If you do end up writing something up, think about making it available in github and post about it here! I don't know how much work that would take compared to a personal project though.
Haha, you're over my head with all that. Is there some issues with setting time and date for reminders and due dates?
That is one of the things I like about Tasks.org (and really anything that interacts with CalDAV, messy though it can be), you could probably write some back end server element to interface with it and it would accept it just fine. It really gets me when I find a polished, well designed app... that will only work with the companies proprietary, hosted back end 🥲
Ah that makes sense, my server is a mini PC that has a quiet fan. I probably wouldn't notice if it was popping on throughout the day.
I did a quick top check and it seems like the tailscaled service is pretty consistent at %0.7 CPU usage, and %0.5 memory usage. It seemed to stay consistent when I initiated a remote connection via ssh as well. I'm going to continue testing it though, I don't like taxing my system. Ain't got the money to replace it, so it's gotta survive for as long as possible 😄
That's correct. I didn't notice the c/opensource that this post came from, disregard that entry if you're a %100 FLOSS user. I'm still happy to recommend it in general though. It's privacy respecting as far as I am able to verify by their policies and TOS, and it has been a huge quality of life improvement for me on mobile. Hopefully organic maps or other mobile clients for OsmAnd continue to progress 🍻
That was exactly my experience with Florisboard too. It has tons of potential, but I couldn't ever quite feel fluid with my typing on it. It was a relief to see Openboard get forked.
Thanks! Glad to share.
I'm not super sharp on the legalese of licensing so I may be missing something important, but the license for the voice input app seems to be pretty straightforward to me. It does retain more control over the source code than true open source licenses generally do, but that doesn't bother me too much personally, provided the respect for privacy and user rights is there. I live more on the world of privacy policies and TOS since I don't code anything beyond a few shell scripts on my desktop.
I should have made a note on my list that both FUTO voice and Magic Earth are not fully FLOSS, just privacy respecting. I'm not surprised there has been some drama though with it not being fully FLOSS. Along with that, one of the companies employees, Louis Rossman, is a YouTuber and has somewhat of a polarizing personality 😄.
I think overall I do generally get a good feeling from the company and the way this app has been functioning. The privacy policy is just about as clean as I think you could get it a speech to text app. Mostly though, it's a lesser of two evils for me, as this is really the only option aside from Google speech to text that I've found. It fills a pretty niche spot on mobile devices right now.
Edit: checked out the FUTO temporary license
Myne is pretty awesome. I love project gutenburg, but their interface is hard to navigate through without a wrapper like Myne.
Interesting, I'll have to check out the CPU usage on my server. I've been running it for months now and haven't noticed anything, but it's worth a second look.
Nice! I'm glad to be able to pass them along, I hope they serve you well.
- Audile: offline, trackerless music recognition.
- Keepassdx + Heliboard: both excellent apps in their own right that create a smoother experience of mundane phone use, but they also integrate rather well together and Heliboard will often pop Keepassdx in to its suggestion bar when you enter a log in page. It's been really nice for me.
- FUTO voice input: speech to text for those who don't want to use Google speech services. Frankly, the FUTO app works better than googles app anyways, it always handles grammar correctly as long as you speak relatively clearly, and integrates with Heliboard nicely.
- Tailscale: for those who need VPN access to their other devices.
- Thunder : a Lemmy client with compatibility with Lemmy's recent server side changes and also has a decent UI/UX
- tasks.org: fantastic, customizable to do app with various syncing options.
- Magic Earth: privacy respecting maps/directions for those who don't want google maps. (NOTE: closed source. Here is the privacy policy, terms of use and description of their business model at the bottom of their FAQ)
- Myne: e-book downloader.
- Markdownr: convert webpages to markdown. Great option for mobile, if I'm on desktop I use the Joplin web clipper plug in for Firefox.
Seconding Newpipe, excellent app.
EDIT: added links to the terms, policies and FAQ of Magic Earth, as it is not open source.
- Keep WiFi and Bluetooth turned off while you're out in public.
- If you have the ability to keep the phone connected to a guest network or VLAN on your home network while it still has stock android that is a bonus. Google scoops up data regarding the other devices on your network.
- Use a privacy oriented DNS service like NextDNS to block all the google requests. They have a block list just for that, blocking them is as simple as clicking a button.
I've been looking for a decent PDF editor on Linux for years. Like you said, there are plenty that will basically work, but I always have issues with font mishandling.
So far I've just settled on using a windows VM with adobe for editing PDFs (along with one other windows only program that I need.) There is a way to get Adobe PDF software working in linux, but I haven't tried it.
If you need to sign PDFs, xournal++ is an excellent app for applying a saved signature as a stamp.
I have my tasks.org set to CalDAV sync, then using my Nextcloud info as normal for the credentials with Nextcloud selected as server type. I've found that owncloud also works just as well for that setting. That along with the CalDAV address should be it for the Tasks.org app itself. I believe you'll also need the DAVx5 app to sync the CalDAV info this way, but it seemed to work better for me than the straight up Nextcloud connection.
I appreciate this comment. I agree with both sides of the argument to an extent, but feel that there is some unbalanced thinking with this rejection of Fdroid that's been happening. Its a hugely important service.
I totally didn't know about libgen, that's an awesome resource! I've used Project Gutenburg for public domain stuff, but sometimes they just haven't digitized the work I'm looking for. Between the two of them I bet there won't be much that isn't available.