“Tina’s Groove” and “Edge City” unavailable in comics aggregator due to Comics Kingdom shenanigans

Users of my comics aggregator who are also Comics Kingdom subscribers may have noticed that Tina’s Groove and Edge City have been missing in the aggregator for more than a week. This is because they are also missing on Comics Kingdom, which has stopped updating them without explanation. This is not the first step this… Read More »

“Baby Blues” disrupted in comics aggregator during transition from King Features to Andrews McMeel

Users of the comics aggregator who are also Comics Kingdom subscribers may have noticed that the comic strip Baby Blues is no longer available as of January 12. Apparently syndication of this strip is moving from King Features (Comics Kingdom) to to Andrews McMeel (Go Comics) as of February 1, and the maintainers of Comics… Read More »

Hack of the day: enhancing Eastern Bank deposit notification emails

I have my Eastern Bank account configured to email me notifications about checking deposits. There are three problems with these notifications: They include only the amount of the deposit, not whom it’s from. They only put the deposit amount in the body of the email, not in the subject. They email me about every deposit,… Read More »

Hack of the day: using the Google Fi “Messages for Web” app on Linux to open “tel:” links from the browser and elsewhere

Over on Github, I just published some code I wrote to implement support for “tel:” links for Google Fi’s Messages for Web app on Linux. In other words, if you have Google Fi and you use Google’s Messages for Web app on Linux, then once you’ve deployed my solution, if you click on a phone-number… Read More »

Endorsements in November 2, 2021 Boston municipal election

Dropboxes are open starting today for ballots for the November 2, 2021 Boston municipal election, and early voting starts today Saturday, so it’s time for me to share my endorsements. My endorsements here closely mirror those from the preliminary election. Local government is important, people. Get out there and vote! For Mayor, Michelle Wu. Wu… Read More »

Hotels.com refunds illegal New York City hotel occupancy tax after months of refusing

On October 15, 2021, I received this email from Hotels.com: Those of you who’ve been reading my blog know that I‘ve been demanding this since June. Even emailing the president of the company didn’t help. After that failed, I filed a complaint with the New York Attorney General’s office. That, too, was fruitless. They forwarded… Read More »

DisplayLink now working for some hardware for Ubuntu 21.04, 21.10 (NVIDIA is a problem)

UPDATE [2021-12-22]: With the the recently released update, 5.5.0-59.118, both Wayland and Xorg work on my PC with an Intel graphics controller, and Wayland doesn’t work on my PC with an NVIDIA controller without the proprietary NVIDIA driver, but Xorg does. I did not test whether Wayland or Xorg works with the proprietary NVIDIA controller,… Read More »