A working solution for me was to deploy a little website to organize both my physical and ebooks in the same place. For physical books, it tells me where they should be. For ebooks, I can download the file, the website is light enough that it works fine with my ebook reader.

Surely there are bugs, but here it is, if you'd like to give it a spin: https://github.com/seanboyce/ubiblio

Interestingly enough, I had tried to find a way to add an 'email to my device' option, but it was too fiddly. I got it working with OAUTH + gmail, but setting it up was not exactly user-friendly. The simple download option worked much better.

Anyway just a weekend project I extended a little. Don't expect much polish :D

That looks good (not actually cloned and tried it yet).

However the screenshots in the README show (for me anyway) as broken links, even though they work when clicked on. I can see you're linking to the images in the blobs. If it helps, for my own stuff in the README I link relative to the README file in the actual source. So for one of yours for example I'd use: ./ubiblio_menu.png

This also has the advantages of both being self-contained and also working locally (eg in the VS Code preview) before you've pushed the images.

It's not my place to critique your beliefs -- you may find Gödel's incompleteness theorem interesting to think about though. It was the end of the attempts to unify mathematics under a common set of axioms, as far as I know. I find it quite fascinating, personally.

There exist an infinite number of unprovable-but-true statements for any given set of axioms of sufficient complexity (e.g. arithmetic). I find it conceivable that having "more than one mathematics" would be quite practical!

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I share what I read, but only with very close friends. I'm hesitant to lend books out -- people are not great at returning them (partly my fault, I'm also bad at tracking the loans). I also have a hard time finding my books, as I live in a very small house (bookshelves are out of the question, it's numbered bins).

I am also wary of most of the cloud services in this domain.

So I wrote a little software to manage the situation -- just a simple CRUD thing that lets me manage a small personal library, or a small shared library between friends. It's not a "social network for books" or something grand like that. Just a simple self-hosted thing with minimal system requirements. There were some existing solutions, but none that really felt right.

It's published (open source) and has a few users, but I don't think I'll be able to manage it, if it receives a giant burst of attention. On github it's called 'ubiblio'. Perhaps I'll be ready to share it more generally in a few months.

Not sure if it's useful to you, but I hope it is!

Perhaps there is one in your area: https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/List_of_Hacker_Spaces

I'm in Asia so no luck, but on the bright side, tools are quite affordable here.

Also in Asia, I know of a few smaller ones, but they come and go - and with space at a premium I’ve not found them that useful.

I think it’s more about the community than the physical space though (to a point)

I enjoy AVR Assembly a lot. A big reason is that Atmel has very good datasheets.

However if having an audience for your games matters, this is maybe a bad choice. On the other hand, if you would like to use LEDs, buttons, and sensors (or just like making physical hardware in general) it's very good fun.

Another word of warning, I find Microchip Studio bloated and buggy. To the point where I'll code ASM in literally anything except that, then paste it in to simulate.

Also there's a bug in the Atmel-ICE. One of the programming headers is soldered in upside down (or at least it is on mine). This is no problem if you buy the full cable assembly (where they reverse it again in the cable). However if you cheap out and buy the raw PCB only like I did, knowing this will save you a frustrating puzzle.

Anyway these minor frustrations aside, its the main language I've always returned to when I want to make something just for the fun of it.

I immigrated to Asia around a decade ago and the relative optimism for technology and the future in general is one of the things that struck me as well.

I mean, if you look for pessimism you'll find examples of that too -- but in broad strokes I would also describe the average perception as 'enthusiastic'. It's something I've have a hard time explaining to my North American colleagues.

Maybe it just has to be experienced?

That's a result of massive recent change. The US hasn't had that, since the basic infrastructure was built long ago.

The reminds me of a few Thai colleagues who ended up with a legal first name of "Mr." (period included), probably as a result of this.

Buying them plane tickets to attend meetings and so on proved fairly difficult.

Ah, I live in one of those impenetrable realms, and have made some progress deciphering their arcane glyphs. I can tell you that here in Viet Nam, accounting is almost entirely done in spreadsheets. I've mostly seen similar in nearby countries.

Also your accountant will universally have a bizarre custom font for Vietnamese characters, that they downloaded ten years ago from a now-defunct forum. It will never correctly transcribe into any other font, and they don't know how to change it. If I switch accountants, it's always a different cursed font. This is a great and enduring mystery.

So I keep a second set of books -- GnuCash is fantastic for this, but I've also used QuickBooks sometimes. Then I use that to make sure the accountant is producing something that at is at least adjacent to reality. I'm audited by law every year (at my own expense), and they only support spreadsheets.

Surely one day soon this will change (except the font thing I bet), but for now I thought you might get a laugh out of this little slice of my life :)

I designed an electronic board game, very similar to Settlers of Catan.

There are some electronic Catan builds out there, but I found them really expensive -- e.g. opting for a smartwatch screen + microcontroller for every game tile (of which there are 19). Beautiful, yes -- but not my style.

Instead, I went for 8-segment displays for numeric tile values, and RGB LEDs to display terrain types. It adds up to 342 LEDs to control for the full board, from a single central microcontroller. When you turn it on, it sets up the board for you. Pressing a central button "rolls the dice", and it will flash the tiles that produce resources as per the game rules. Or cue special actions on certain rolls.

I really enjoy cost-optimizing prototypes, so this was good fun. I got it down to about USD 20 for a single, ready-to-play unit, including solid brass game pieces (it helps that I'm in Asia). I still use the deck of cards from Catan for now, but plan to replace it with something sci-fi themed. Maybe "Asteroid Miners".

The only thing I'm not 100% satisfied with is that the board is a little cramped -- it's a bit over half the size of the original Catan board. The PCBs had to fit within 100mx100mm -- I used a bit of a weird PCB geometry so that the board is composed of 3 identical subunits, rotated a few degrees to maximize it's surface area within a 100mm square.

I'm not planning to sell it. I just had a slow month, so it's a good time to learn to do new things. I never make any money with hardware, but I love how whimsical electronics can brighten someone's day. Sometimes that earns me a client -- and if not, it's cheap entertainment for me that keeps my skills sharp and my morale high.

This sounds really cool! Please post it to HN!

I'll slot some time in to write it up properly in a month or two!

This month is busy but I will get around to it. Would you like me to drop you an email (to the address in your profile) when I do?

A more accurate analogy would be that without looking at very much sand, you already possess one grain of sand in the exact shape of your face. This spikes your curiosity and you ask: What are the chances of finding another?

I do think these are two different arguments.

1. Aliens can exist because we exist

2. Aliens do exist because of probabilities

Mine was about 2

I think it would be orders of magnitude more astounding if aliens didn't exist than if they did, just given the sheer odds of life only happening once in the observable universe. That's all I'm saying.