Like any good techie, I've been playing with Mastodon these past couple of weeks, now that Melon Husk has purchased Twitter.  Having a space on another microblogging platform isn't a bad idea, in case you want to pull the ripcord on the parachute if and when Twitter goes down in flames.  I tried Mastodon back in 2016 (or was it 2017?) when it was new, and I ended up deleting my account. 

The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election by Malcolm W. Nance My rating: 4 of 5 stars Enlightening investigative piece.  It tied a few things that were happening in the background that seemed separate, but where not. I was kind of hoping that the timeline of the book proceeded past the election of 2016,

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport My rating: 5 of 5 stars I am not always a fan of Cal's writing, but after a friend recommended this (Brian?), I decided to pick it up. It's a quick read (comparative to other books anyway) and it's filled with good advice (some of which I stumbled upon through my own social media use...so

 I guess living in Salem, I should wish you all seasons greetings...even though Halloween season ends tonight 👻☠️🦇

Woohoo!!! It took a while...but I finally got all of the Mirror Incursion Research DOFF (duty officer) missions completed with a critical rating! As a result, I got the nice little title of "Mirror Infiltrator" in Star Trek Online (and around 50,000 dilithium, which I don't have much use for at the moment).  This DOFF accolade had 10 missions to complete, and when I originally tried to play through

 Just something a little funny from around the web recently... A mashup invoking the iconic scene from the movie 300.

 Well, to be fair, I was never gone, but my "daily driver" for the past 3 years (during the early days of COVID) has been an aging Dell Optiplex 9010, which was a hand-me-down. When my work-issued Surface Pro 3 died an untimely death in 2017 (and wasn't replaced), I refurbished the Optiplex which I had saved in our equipment closet for just such an emergency occasion. The original use case was

Hellsing, Vol. 10 by Kohta Hirano My rating: 3 of 5 stars Well... this was an anticlimactic ending. 🙄. I was first introduced to Hellsing in Anime form in 2001.  The original ending of having "Incognito" as the big bad made little sense, but then I read somewhere on the web that the manga was not complete at that point, so the animators needed to modify

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff My rating: 5 of 5 stars I would say that this is a "must-read" book. It reminded me a lot of the original aspirations and "promise" of connected technologies and "smart" devices, which was to serve people for the purpose of improving our lives.  Instead, what

Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution by Fred Vogelstein My rating: 3 of 5 stars Not a bad book.  Having just finished "The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone" which only deals with the development of the iPhone, this book was both shorter and covered both Apple and Google.  As such, I think this book plays a