Michael W. Lucas's Blog, page 27

“OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems” print layout notes

The cost of printing books is going up, just like everything. I don’t want to increase the price of my tech print books. I consider $25 reasonable.

For the second edition of DNSSEC Mastery, I developed a new print interior layout, using every trick I know to reduce page count while remaining readable. It worked. I was able to cut page count by about 30%. There’s only one problem with it:

I don’t like it.

Print books, especially tech books, occupy a weird niche these days. Books are no longer con...

“OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems” status

I just finished indexing the manuscript. That’s normally a hard day’s work, but this being the week before a major holiday I was unable to get a full day to dedicate to the task. I wound up spending about two hard man-days on the task, because context switching in and out of indexing has a higher cost than any other task my brain runs.

With luck, I’ll have the print book laid out next week and ebooks by the end of the week. Yes, I could prepare ebooks first, but the print layout forces me to go ...

The Spite Bezos sale ends, Filesystems, and my Next Kickstarter

A trio of updates, which is super annoying because I’m trying to blog more often but this all happened late yesterday so I guess I’m stuck.

The Amazon Spends Money To Sell Montague Portal hardcover and ebook sale has ended. Amazon has reverted the price to normal everywhere except for Kindle in the UK, and I’m sure that’ll follow soon. At first, I thought The Algorithm was drunk, but the hardcover sale stopped right when their spend crossed $500. That could be a coincidence, sure, but it’s a str...

the complete Montague Portal redux, in hardcover

I posted yesterday about Amazon putting the complete Montague Portal for Kindle on sale for $5.85. They still pay me $7 a sale, so each time you buy one Bezos adds his own dollar to my payment. It’s pretty clear that they’ll clear a profit if you buy this book and one other ebook. Okay, that makes sense.

But now they’ve put the hardcover on sale for $5.85, at least in the US and UK. (Reports in other countries are mixed. I have no clue what’s happening.)

At first, I thought this was to clear out...

The complete Montague Portal on sale for $5.85 at Amazon

My book Aidan Redding Against the Universes, Kindle version, is on sale for $5.85 at Amazon US and Amazon UK. If you buy it, Amazon will pay me $7.

Seriously. You can cost Amazon money by buying one of my books.

You get three novels and two stories–Forever Falls, Hydrogen Sleets, Drinking Heavy Water, Sticky Supersaturation, and No More Lonesome Blue Rings–for a bit over $1 each.

I have no idea how long this deal will last. I have no idea why they picked me. But as I write this, it’s a thing. Yo...

Social Media Updates: Good-Bye Twitter

I’m dropping Twitter. Elon Musk is posting 1488 white supremacist trash and has reactivated many 4chan/8chan accounts. While I was willing to give him a chance to show he wasn’t actually a white supremacist asshole, I’m out.

He has since deleted the posts, the way he does, but there are many screenshots out there. I won’t share them in this post.

(Is deleting posts bad? Not necessarily. I deleted and redrafted twitter posts when I noticed typos, all the time. If I screwed up and shared something...

Mailing List Freebies

I’ve tested everything and it all seems to work, so I guess I can tell you now:

If you sign up for my fiction and/or nonfiction mailing lists, you will get free ebooks.

If you sign up for the nonfiction list, you’ll get a free copy of Tarsnap Mastery. I’m sure that Colin over at Tarsnap will be less than thrilled that I’m giving away free documentation for his service, but it’s my book and he can suck it up.

If you sign up for the fiction list, you will receive not one not two but six free stori...

Fifty Books. Thirty Years. What Next?

I edited my SNMP MIB to include the two new books, Prohibition Orcs and Frozen Talons, and realized that the first book in that table came out in 1992.

Thirty years ago.

Plus, Frozen Talons is my 50th full book. If you count “things with my name on them,” including anthologies and chapbooks but not translations, it’s number 96. No–wait–my list is missing one thing. It’s 97. Quick, someone send me a neurotypical personal assistant to track all this crap!

Fifty books in thirty years. Two thoughts....

Fediverse Servers, plus mac_portacl on FreeBSD

One of my business mantras is “control your platform.” If you build your business around a site like Facebook, they can de-prioritize you and disappear you. Twitter’s implosion served as a fierce reminder of that, so I’m blogging more here.

Before Twitter’s implosion, the Fediverse (Mastodon, PixelFed, and all the other ActivityPub-powered systems) drove just as much traffic to my site as Twitter. Other social networking sites are negligible. If I want to follow my business mantra, I must run my...

Why Mastodon/the Fediverse kind of sucks right now

I’m a big fan of the fediverse. As of right now (8 November 2022), it deeply sucks. Why?

Because nobody expected Elon Musk to be this stupid.

We expected some daftness, sure. But actions like cutting the entire human rights team, accessibility team, and AI ethics team, plus limiting moderation, have people abandoning Twitter and searching for alternatives.

Nobody wants to live in a free-for-all wasteland. “The right to free speech” is built on “the right to take the consequences.” Without modera...