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008: In broad daylight

008: In broad daylight

March 1, 2026
5 min read
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media-notes
2026
2026-03-01
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Hello world,

I was more than happy to take advantage of the warmth and sunshine this week — especially given how cold and cloudy late February usually is in Pennsylvania. The most exciting activity inspired by the weather was my return to cycling. An ankle sprain late last fall took me off my bike and the snow and subfreezing temperatures kept me off. On Saturday, I rode my bike from Montour Trail’s mile zero — a convenient trailhead I bike from frequently. I made my way North and rode through the business district and the parts of town between the train tracks and the Ohio River. Being back on my bike felt amazing and so did walking along Pittsburgh’s three rivers.

🌟 My Favorite Stuff from the Internet This Week

Record Club

🧰 Tools

I got some exciting things done with some cool new tools this week:

  • made my tiny ereader practical
  • merged twenty years of last.fm data from two accounts with koito

🌟 Made my tiny ereader practical

This is the week I made my tiny ereader more than just a cute novelty: it’s practical and integrated into my PocketBook-based workflow. That’s largely thanks to these tools:

  • crosspoint-reader/crosspoint-reader: Firmware for the Xteink X4 e-paper display reader
    • CrossPoint Reader provides an improved UI on the ereader itself and a web interface for managing the device. This supports functionality like:
      • transferring books wirelessly
      • transferring .bmp for use as sleep screens
      • configuring a KOReader sync server
  • jberlyn/kosync-dotnet: A self-hostable implementation of the KOReader sync server, written in .NET
    • This is the KOReader sync server I am using. (Although I’ve been using KOReader for quite a while, I hadn’t needed the progress sync functionality until now — mostly since I don’t use KOReader on my phone. I read fairly infrequently on my phone and I use ReadEra when I do.)
    • Being able to sync progress between my tiny ereader and my PocketBook

A few places to get sleep screens for your device:

The sleep screen photographed above is from the gallery at readme.club. I contributed a few of my photographs to that gallery this week.

I expect to continue tinkering. We’ll see how much use I get out of the tiny ereader over time. For now: it’s totally worth it.

Deployed koito

I really like koito because of how nicely it lets me own my scrobbling data. This week, I exported 200,000 scrobbles from both my last.fm accounts and let koito import this data. (One account briealeida has scrobbles from 2006-2014 and my current account bbbbbbbbrie has everything after that.)

Since koito offers a ListenBrainz-compatible endpoint, I can also scrobble to my koito instance to keep it accurate moving forward. In this way, I have all of my scrobbling data in one place that I control. I wrote about this after the import completed.

Overall, I like the look of koito and the ease of deployment. Having to ignore the minutes listened stats because of how inaccurate they are is one downside.

🌱 Gardening 2026

All of my seeds have arrived. They have been cataloged and tucked away in a cool, dark, dry place. Now that it’s March, I will immediately turn to acquiring soil. I’ll also plan out which seeds I’ll start earliest and where they’ll go.

I like reading how others approach their gardens:

📖 Reading

• The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi (Read on 2026-02-27)

I finished reading Water Knife for book club. It was a fine foray into cli-fi with a plot that was just interesting enough.

Next up is my pick: A Gentleman in Moscow. I’m super excited about this one and I’ve already started reading it on my tiny ereader.

🔗 Social Reading

I keep track of my reading in various places across the Internet:

🎮 Gaming

🌟 I made it to LVL15 in Ingress this week. It’s an exciting week ahead in Ingress:

The event on Saturday permits 6x AP if you use Apex boosts.

🎧 Music

Total tracks scrobbled: 363

Top Artists

  • Radkey (30 plays)
  • Brother Ali (26 plays)
  • Robert Johnson (14 plays)
  • Daft Punk (14 plays)
  • The Jimi Hendrix Experience (13 plays)
  • The Tallest Man on Earth (13 plays)
  • Willie Colón (13 plays)
  • Led Zeppelin (11 plays)
  • Mitski (11 plays)
  • The Black Keys (11 plays)

🔗 Social Listening

I scrobble my music: bbbbbbbbrie on last.fm | bbrie on libre.fm | briealeida on ListenBrainz.

Sporadically, I write song reviews: Brie Carranza’s Crucial Tracks.

Talk to you next week!

— Brie