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Title: Keeping on keeping on
Date: June 15, 2024

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  Tonight has been a bit of a distraction for me. I've been moving more of my
book collection over to my old-as-heck gen 4 Kindle eInk reader, and that's
meant converting ePubs into Mobibook with Calibre[0], but even on the older
version on Mac OS, it works fine, and exports to the Kindle through the UI of
the app as-is. It's just been a bit tedious since I'm picking and choosing what
gets put on there, where I wasn't really doing that on my iPad. I'm actually
doing all of this to help me get to sleep faster, since I won't have the iPad's
backlight keeping me more awake as I read before bed.

  And speaking of moving things around, I also started moving my music off of
said iPad, and using an old Alcatel phone I had lying around, along with a 32GB
microSD card I was previously using in my actual phone. It makes for an okay
music player, at least until I can get a better option with real battery life.
I **don't** like Android in the slightest, but it's one of the few options I
have, so I'm currently taking it.

  Likewise, I've been moving my retro gaming off my MacBook, and onto a little
RetroStone 2 that a close friend gave to me more than a year ago. It's an
OrangePi based device that kinda looks like an old Game Boy classic, but with
more buttons and being Linux-based (Ubuntu Bionic, according to the boot
messages). It also has USB ports and such, so I can use it as an OrangePi on
its own if I really want to.

  Not having the iPad sitting on my desk has felt a little weird, and really,
even using that has been sticking to my ethos of using old/used/second-hand
stuff instead of buying new. Bought the thing for $35 USD shipped on eBay, and
it has served me quite well, but I want to futureproof a bit still, and going
with the Kindle makes things more accessible until I can jailbreak the thing
and put my own stuff onto it.

  I even repaired my MacBook with a used (but still working) speaker/subwoofer
assembly when the old one failed, and I'll salvage what I can out of the old
part once I get around to it. For now, it's sitting in one of my storage bins.
And either today or Monday, some cable braid sleeve should be arriving for me
so I can "repair" the power cable for said MacBook. The original rubber coating
for the magsafe side is so far gone that it needs something better.

  Braided cables have also made it easier to put them in the cable management
tunnel of my desk, since the wood seems to destroy rubber-coated cables fairly
quickly if they move around too much. Yay for things that look nice /and/ are a
functional improvement. Just need to get more braiding over time to finish the
rest of what I use constantly: A few USB cables that I like, my Cinema Display
cables, and the rest of the power cables being the big ones. That'll happen
when it happens, though. For now, I'm happy with the way things are.

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[0]: https://calibre-ebook.com/