Cryptozoic Kickstarter for the DC Heroes RPG 40th Anniversary

Back in 1985, Mayfair began publishing the DC Heroes RPG. The game has been out of print since the mid-1990s, but Cryptozoic recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to recreate and reprint all the books.

We had to figure out how to create new prints of the books! There are no digital files of the books, so we knew we’d have to recreate them. We had to acquire all the DC Heroes Role-Playing Game products. That meant scouring the internet (hello, eBay!) to find pristine editions of many of the books.

I never played the game, but I have many of the sourcebooks in various conditions.

The Kickstarter prices are way above my budget, but hopefully, Cryptozoic will eventually be able to release high quality PDF versions of the game books.

Random Thoughts About My Experience With Wegovy

This is my typical health care experience–got approved for Wegovy by my insurance company a month ago, only for my employer to decide they are going to drop it from coverage for the whole organization. The economics seem pretty straightforward at $1600/month, but still…

I’m not sure I would have remained on Wegovy for long, even without this curveball. This was my experience over the last month:

  1. I injected the first dose on Wednesday morning. By Thursday, I felt no desire to eat at all. I ended up having to force myself to eat enough to get up to 1500 calories on most days.
  2. It felt like my body took forever to digest food. I felt bloated and uncomfortable fairly often, even after eating only small portions of food.
  3. It appears to be an uncommon side effect, but I experienced overwhelming fatigue, especially in the first few days after each weekly injection. I was already a big fan of sleep but did not expect to go from 8 hours a night to 9.5 to 10 hours a night.

    I’m not sure if this was a side effect of the actual medication, my lower caloric intake, the slow digestion, or a combination of all three.
  4. Not even sure how to describe this, but my stomach felt weird. You know that momentary weightless feeling you get in your stomach when you are going down a steep hill or in a roller coaster? I felt something like that. A lot.

LocalSend—Cross Platform, Open Source Utility to Copy Files Across Devices

LocalSend is an open source peer-to-peer service that will copy files across devices that are connected to the same network.

After installing the client on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, or iOS devices, the program lets you select files to transfer from one device to another.

The transfer is end-to-end encrypted, with the data never leaving the local network. Devices can be configured to require a PIN and affirmative approval before the file transfer takes place, or configured to auto accept any transfers from approved devices.

I used to use Syncthing for this, but Syncthing was always a bit too fiddly and would fail frequently. Additionally, I tend to move hundreds of gigabytes every week, and sending it out to the Internet from the sending device and then back down over the Internet to the receiving device was much slower.

The tradeoff is that LocalSend won’t let me send files from my phone to my desktop from different networks like Syncthing allows.

But for what I need—moving files from multiple devices to a central device or vice versa—LocalSend just works.

DeFlock.Me–Tracking Automated License Plate Readers

Flock Safety is a company that sells automated license plate readers to law enforcement, HOAs, apartment complexes, companies and apparently anyone else willing to fork over enough money to buy one.

DeFlock.me is an effort to map these license place readers around the world. The folks behind it regularly scrape Flock’s website for lists of places that are known operators of the devices, as well as relying on individual reports of such cameras in the wild.