Michael W. Lucas's Blog, page 6

“Dear Abyss” live on Kickstarter

Confession time: I don’t love Kickstarter. I don’t love money either, but it does seem to be a dependency when living in capitalism.

When I release a book on my site, I sell a few copies. When I launch it on Kickstarter, sales go up tenfold.

So: Dear Abyss is live on Kickstarter. The book exists, and the moment I get paid it goes to everyone.

Backers immediately get a copy of Letters to ed(1), the out-of-print three-year compilation.

64: File Corrupting Butterfly

Dear Abyss is ready to launch, so I’m making new words. It’s another column.

If you insist on proceeding, though, if you demand you be allowed to weave yourself a chrysalis and transform into a kernel developer like a panic-prone memory-dumping file-corrupting butterfly, immediately separate your dreams from your goals. A goal is something actionable that is completely within your control to achieve. Accomplishing a dream requires other people intervene on your behalf. Going out for a dinner dat...

63: Skip Off The Heliosphere

Life has been a bit chaotic this last couple weeks, and fulfilling the last 5% of the Run Your Own Mail Server Kickstarter has soaked up my time. I’m just getting to finishing the copyedits on Dear Abyss so I can launch the bloody Kickstarter. Here’s a snippet from the Introduction.

Here’s the other problem with an advice column. It needs glue.

Saying “I’ll write about FreeBSD stuff” isn’t enough. People don’t beseech Dear Abby for solutions. They want her soothing voice. Her calmness. Her gent...

New short story in Pulphouse? I read the opening

My short story “The Rats’ Man’s Lackey and the Bringer of Leaves” is in issue #33 of Pulphouse Magazine. I’m sharing the issue with folks like Kevin J. Anderson and Nina Kiriki Hoffman.

I’ve missed a couple episodes of “60 Seconds of WIP” because of the Kickstarter fulfillment, which is only a problem as I’ve fallen behind on my reading practice. So I recorded the opening of my story.

To save the sanity of us all, I learned how to capture a single frame of a video and make Youtube use it as a t...

“Networking for Systems Administrators, 2nd ed” open for sponsorship

TLDR: “Networking for Systems Administrators, 2nd Edition” is open for sponsorships at https://www.tiltedwindmillpress.com/product/n4sa2e-sponsor/ and I would appreciate your support.

Longer version:

Every large company I’d ever worked in since 1995 suffered from a continuous feud between the sysadmins and the network team. One team would demand an inch, the other would insist on 25.4 millimeters, and battle was declared. As someone with an ankle shackled in each world, I quickly reached two con...

Patronizers, Sponsors, and Kickstarter Backers

People can support my work by buying my books, through whatever channels they prefer. I also have my Patronizer program, offer sponsorships of individual titles, and take early orders via Kickstarter. Folks ask me what the differences are between these three things.

Patronizers send me money every month, either through Patreon or my store. They get everything that sponsors and Kickstarter backers get. If you receive my books in print, and I send sponsors a physical gift, you get that gift. Patro...

Building Mastodon Bots is Stupid Easy

I just updated the footnote fortune file for Patronizers. Yes, my Patronizers get a Unix fortune file containing all the footnotes from my nonfiction books. I thought it was daft, but apparently a few readers actually use the dang thing. My exhausted brain wondered, “How hard would it be to build a Mastodon bot that posted one of these every few hours?” Turns out: not hard at all.

First, install toot (https://toot.bezdomni.net/). FreeBSD packages it as py311-toot.

Then register an account for yo...

62: Isolated But Not Alone

Got some words on #projectIDGAF this week, hurrah!

Music might have saved Will, but the valley’s only radio station spent ten minutes out of each hour praising Jesus, ten minutes advertising albums of popular music rewritten to praise Jesus, and forty minutes begging for donations to help spread the Word. The county health department knows that the station mostly spreads clamydia, but it also spreads bribes so everything works out. There wasn’t any chance that he’d encounter any of the music tha...

Mail Talk 8 October 2024, with bonus Craig Maloney Memorial Charity Auction starting–NOW

Next Tuesday, 8 October 2024, I’ll be talking about Running Your Own Mail Server at mug.org, 6:30PM EDT. MUG is my local “hard-core Unixy People” group. Giving a talk during a book release is bad planning, but I am crap at scheduling.

One of its members was Craig Maloney. Many years ago Craig asked me if I was the same Michael Lucas who had written a couple RPG books in the 1990s. I admitted my guilt. He pulled an obviously-read plastic-bagged copy of Gatecrasher out of his backpack and asked me...

September’s Sibilant Sausage

[this post went to Patronizers at the beginning of September, and to the public at the beginning of October.]

Pretty sure August was eating locoweed.

The “Run Your Own Mail Server” Kickstarter owned most of my hide this last month. Not all of it. A patch on the back of my neck remains freehold. I managed to make a few words on what I’m calling #projectIDGAF, but mostly it’s been investing in production stuff. Which means spreadsheets.

My main printer, IngramSpark has facilities in the US, UK, Au...