divabot

I haven't even logged in since the objectionable terms-of-service change several years ago, but I'm tempted to. Edit: Made the post.

Here is how to de-DRM the books you damn well paid for. You can also convert them to ePubs if you like.

Rather than the old AZW format, Kindle for PC now tries to download Amazon's new KFX format by preference.

You need Kindle for PC no later than 1.26, you need to nobble the KFX format, and you need to block Kindle for PC from its aggressive auto-updating. (And always say "no" when it asks you to update.)

This does not always work. Amazon try super-hard to beat all possible DRM cracking schemes, whether you "bought" the book or not. I expect to tweak these instructions further.

The instructions below are for Kindle for PC 1.17, which is from 2016. But it seems to work for me, for now.

If you're on Linux, as I am: Kindle for PC doesn't work in Wine, and I couldn't be bothered with the faff to set up DeDRM standalone. So I use Windows 10 in a virtual machine, e.g. VirtualBox. I don't think you need to authenticate it — I certainly didn't. Just download the ISO from Microsoft and authenticate at your leisure, or maybe never. I gave my Windows VM 2GB RAM. Taylor Swift says set UAC to full.

If you're on a Mac, I have only very old how-to sites; if you de-DRM your own Kindle books, please post any guides you use, and I'll link them. I've had one report that an ancient Kindle for Mac 1.12 and Calibre with DeDRM work, following instructions similar to the ones below.

WHAT YOU NEED:

• Kindle for PC 1.17.44183 (direct link on Internet Archive)
• Calibre
• DeDRM
• KFX Input

STEPS TO SET THIS UP:

1. Uninstall your present Kindle for PC. Just set it on fire. Delete every trace.

2. The tricks in this post won't work with Kindle later than 1.26, so you need to go fishing for old versions.

   The file for 1.17.44183 is called: kindle-for-pc-1-17-44183.exe
   File size is 66,693,792 bytes
   The SHA-256 is: c3861198d6a18bf1eef6f6970705f7f57b5ff152b733abbadaadd4d1bff4be17

   This file is mostly to be found on variably reputable download sites. So CHECK THE SHA-256 SUM, e.g., here.

3. Once you've verified this is the genuine Kindle 1.17, and not virus-riddled malware, install it. Now close the application.

4. Attempt to disable KFX by removing the KFX tester. Open the CMD app and run:

   ren %localappdata%\Amazon\Kindle\application\renderer-test.exe renderer-test.xxx

5. Kindle for PC auto-upgrades even when you tell it not to. So we need to disable its ability to update. Run the following in CMD by hand, or as a batch file (sourced from here):

   @echo off
   set KINDLE=%LocalAppData%\Amazon\Kindle
   if not exist "%KINDLE%\application\Kindle.exe" goto :nokindle
   if exist "%KINDLE%\storage" if not exist "%KINDLE%\storage\" del /Q "%KINDLE%\storage"
   if exist "%KINDLE%\updates" rmdir /S /Q "%KINDLE%\updates"
   echo This file disables Kindle for PC downloads. > "%KINDLE%\updates"
   echo Kindle for PC downloads are now disabled
   goto :exit
   :nokindle
   echo Cannot disable downloads - Kindle for PC is not installed at expected location
   :exit
   pause

6. Download and open the DeDRM zip file. Inside that you will find a folder called "DeDRM_calibre_plugin", and inside that you will find a file called "DeDRM_plugin.zip". Drag that second zip file to your Downloads folder (don't unzip it).

7. Download the KFX Input plugin (don't unzip it). Hopefully you'll never need it, but it's there if you do.

8. Open Calibre. Open "Preferences". Go to "Plugins". Click "Load plugin from file". Load"DeDRM_plugin.zip" and "KFX Input.zip". Close Calibre (so that it'll load the plugin next time it starts).

9. Open the Kindle app, log yourself in, and download your books. (You need to log into the Kindle app to generate your DRM key that DeDRM then uses.)

   In the Kindle app, go into Tools->Options->General and untick "Automatically install updates when they are available without asking me."

10. Open Calibre again, ready for the next step.

11. Open Windows Explorer. Under your username, you should have a folder "Documents\My Kindle Content". This should have several folders, each with an ebook in them. Go to the search box at top right, and search here for ".azw", which will conveniently list them all.

12. Select all the .azw files, and drag them to the Calibre window. This should load them all, readably.

    If Calibre shows the format as AZW3, MOBI or KFX, you're probably OK. If it's KFX-ZIP, that DRM hasn't been cracked yet.

13. If it's KFX, you want to convert to ePub, so anything can read it. Select all the new books in Calibre. Right-click, select "Convert books->Bulk convert". Just use the defaults, you can do it again if you want to fiddle with stuff.

14. If you get errors on KFX conversion in Calibre, go "Preferences->Input options->Allow conversion to complete even if errors are detected", and check the conversion log to see if it tells you anything useful. Check for updated versions of the KFX and DeDRM plugins, and see if those help.

You now have a pile of .epub/.azw/.mobi files in various subfolders of "Documents\Calibre Library". You can search for ".epub" or whatever here if you want to select them all and drag them to some convenient place.

Previously: the 2017 version of this post.

I started reading LessWrong in 2010 and they went on about "Bayesianism". The hot new epistemology that handles everything!

They explain it for single numbers well. This is a legitimately cool web page explaining Bayes' theorem with little JavaScript calculators, and is Eliezer Yudkowsky at his best as a science populariser.

Rationalists would go on about Bayesing your beliefs — update on information!

But probabilities are distributions, not single numbers. So the subculture is supplying an illusion of understanding here, not the actual understanding.

The rationalist subculture's entire understanding of statistics is "Bayes good, frequentist evil." And they can't do the numbers for Bayes either. Because the numbers for Bayes are hard.

This is what Elizabeth Sandifer calls "literary Bayesianism" in Neoreaction a Basilisk. Literary Bayesianism is so much easier than the kind with actual numbers in.

When I was still reading LessWrong, I went "OK, this Bayes thing sounds way cool, I'll take the first obvious step and read a book or something, this [I forget which book] is a recommended starter textbook ..." (starts book) "holy Jesus fuck what the"

(these people have, of course, never done the reading either, beyond alluding to Jaynes and certainly not reading all 758 pages)

Like, of course priors are distributions, not single numbers. And not nice well-behaved distributions you have an equation for — no, they're weird lumpy irregular shit with normal bits in maybe.

You're not talking about running a number through an equation — you're talking about running a couple of matrices through a transformation.

Once you realise priors are lumpy distributions, literary "Bayesianism" promptly falls apart, as a word game that 0 of its perpetrators are using anything resembling numbers for when they say "I updated on that." Like most Yudkowskian advances, it's just a verbal sketch of what their claimed solution might look like.

(Maybe I'm being unfair here, but even the SEP description of Bayesian epistemology reads like a verbal sketch of how it might work in a hypothetical world where humans could do that, rather than a thing you could actually do in your real life.)

I have had rationalists tell me that pulling a number out of their arse and running it through Bayes makes it somehow more reliable than just pulling it out of their arse. Handmade bespoke artisanal bias laundering. Garbage in, LessWrong out.

How literary Bayesianism works in practice:

• I have Bayesian priors
• YOU have cognitive biases
• THEY are toxoplasmotic SJW filth

Bayesian means the ingroup can do no wrong and the outgroup can do no right, and the more gooder the ingroup and badder the outgroup the more Bayesian it is.

I was in the market for a proper Xubuntu netbook, after taking arkady’s Chromebook to Vancouver last month.

I have a work Lenovo X390, which is a corporate beast machine — 32GB RAM, four core i7, compiles LibreOffice in ninety minutes.

But I wanted something cheap, cheerful and semi-disposable — so it wouldn’t be a disaster if it broke, or was lost or stolen.

Also, I really miss my old Dell Mini 9.

So there’s a new laptop from a company called Hypa, exclusively through Argos. 4GB RAM, 64GB SSD, 64-bit CPU, £179. Bright purple.

“It’s a PC,” I thought, “I can Linux this!”

I did try the preinstalled Windows 10 S for a while. I can confidently state that Windows 10 S is an abomination, and should be razed from the face of the earth. If you like Windows, you can apparently de-S it, and then you might be able to do things like install software.

The hardware

The laptop weighs just one kilogram. This is only slightly heavier than my 10″ Android tablet.

The keyboard is about the same width as the X390’s, and the keys are actually bigger. The key action is pretty soft, but the whole thing clatters in a pleasing manner when I type. This is a lovely LibreOffice machine.

The screen is 11.6″, 1920×1080. I got used to 1920×1080 on the X390, and it turns out retina is good. The Chromebook I took travelling is 1366×768, and it just seemed annoyingly pixelated — so 1080p was essential. I set XFCE to 128dpi, though I think the screen’s actually about 192dpi.

The screen has a distinct blue cast to it. I do redshift -O 6000 at startup now, which seems to get it not looking too weird. (redshift is great, one day I’ll bother messing with it to get the screen balanced just right.)

I’d be happier if the screen hinge tilted back to flat, but I can live with it.

The CPU is a tiny, slow Celeron N3350 running at 1.1GHz for minimum power use. It isn’t quite up to pushing pixels to the screen fast enough to actually play 1080p videos off YouTube. But 720p works okay, as long as you don’t move the mouse or something. (1080p plays fine in VLC.)

The charger is some proprietary plug, not USB-C like all the cool kids are using these days. This is a disappointment. Also, the headphone socket is precisely opposite the power socket, and about the same size, so it's easy to accidentally plug power into that instead — not good design. Apparently you can get spare chargers from Hypa, though they don’t give a price or list them on the site. The model is PS24A120K2000BD — get a spare in. (This charger is not the original, but is compatible — 12V, 2A, 3.5mm barrel plug.)

The battery lasts approximately forever, even in active use.

The webcam is 640×480, which is bizarrely incapable these days. Not that I care about the webcam.

The laptop is BRIGHT PURPLE. I woulda liked hot pink, but this will do me just fine.

Linux on the Hypa Flux — is “nostalgia” that word for wanting to stab everything

I do not recommend that you use the Hypa Flux for Linux unless you are comfortable with compiling a driver from source.

Hypa have a FAQ:

Q.Can I install Linux on my HYPA device?
A. Your HYPA device has been specifically designed and built to work the best with Windows 10, therefore we do not support changing from the preinstalled Windows 10 operating system.

Hypa are 100% correct here — because the hardware in this thing is barely supported in Linux, especially the crappy Realtek wifi.

The machine wouldn’t even run the live disk of Xubuntu 18.04 without hanging, so I tried the 20.04 preview and it was a bit happier. The touchpad driver does all the gestures! (Middle-click is three fingers simultaneously — apparently this doesn't work in Windows, only Linux.)

20.04 comes with kernel 5.4, which includes the rtl8xxxu driver. This is not a good driver. It achieves 1Mbps on a good day — and the PC keeps randomly freezing, which I strongly suspect the driver has a fair bit to do with.

So it’s time for … an authentic early-2000s Linux experience!

The proper driver is Larry Finger’s rtl8723bu driver. Download, compile, install with dkms so it’ll recompile for you every time you get a new kernel.

I also disabled Secure Boot to get the module running. Given that travel is actually one of the use cases for Secure Boot, I should probably go back and sign the driver properly and so on.

The laptop kept hanging, so I got Ubuntu kernel 5.5.8 from kernel-ppa, and it’s been stable since — this page tells you which files to install. 5.5.8 doesn’t include a good Realtek driver either (update: the prepackaged driver still sucks as of 5.8.0, though that version reaches 6Mbps update 2: and still only 6Mbps as of 5.14), so I’m still on my hand-compiled one.

If you suspend, the wifi won't come back by itself on resume. I added this script as /lib/systemd/system-sleep/redshiftandwifi and made it executable:

#!/bin/bash 
if [ "${1}" = "post" ]; then
    /usr/bin/redshift -O 6000
    /usr/sbin/rmmod 8723bu
    /usr/sbin/modprobe rtl8723bu
fi

I’m basically waiting for ever-newer mainline kernels to hit kernel-ppa, in the hope of slight improvements to rtl8xxxu.

This sort of nonsense is why Ubuntu's attitude of "make it just work" was a good idea in the first place. But! My lovely netbook behaves now!

Should you buy it?

Even with the wifi issues, I love it!

If you miss the netbooks of ten years ago, this will be a delight.

If you’re happy with Windows 10, and think you can live in a Windows with 4GB RAM, go for it.

If you want Linux … wait a couple of years. Or be prepared to get into the OS with a spanner.

But I want a lovely light Linux netbook!

There’s a whole lotta Windows netbooks of late of this sort — Microsoft are responding to the threat of Chromebooks. These are recent devices, so they may well have similarly new and ill-supported hardware.

Unless you can be sure a particular device has fully-supported hardware, then I’d say get an 11″ Chromebook with 4GB RAM and use CHRX to install your GNU/Linux of choice — ChromeOS is also Linux, so for hardware support you’ll just need a new enough kernel. Note caveats on the CHRX page — very recent hardware is not so well supported.

(I nearly got a refurbished HP Chromebook 11 with 4GB instead of this — but that weighed 200 grams more, and weight was important to me.)

You may also be interested in DSHR's tiny travel laptop experiences from 2017, with updates in the comments to the present day.

Wine is a program to run Windows applications on a Unix PC.

Running Wine on Windows has been a fever dream of those responding to the siren call of "we do what we must, because we shouldn't" since at least 2004, when someone tried compiling Wine in Cygwin and trashed the registry of the host system.

The excuse is "what about ancient applications that don't run properly in recent Windows." But you know the real reason is "I suffered for my art, now it's your turn."

In late 2008, I got a bug in my brain and (I think it was me) started the WineOnWindows page on the Wine wiki. Summary: it was bloody impossible as things stood — going via Cygwin, MinGW or Windows Services for Unix. The current page isn't much more successful.

Windows 10 introduced Windows Subsystem for Linux — and the convenience of Ubuntu downloadable from the Microsoft Store. This makes this dumb idea pretty much Just Work out of the box, apart from having to set your DISPLAY environment variable by hand.

So far, it's mindbogglingly useless. It can only run 64-bit Windows apps, which doesn't even include all the apps that come with Windows 10 itself.

(The original inspiration was someone who couldn't run Encarta 97 on Windows 10. So, like any good geek solution, it doesn't actually solve the user's original problem at all.)

But I want to stress again: this now works trivially. I'm not some sort of mad genius to have done this thing — I only appear to be the first person to admit to it in public.

How to do this dumb thing

1. Your Windows 10 is 64-bit, right? That's the only version that has WSL.

2. Install WSL. Control Panel -> Programs -> Programs and Features -> Turn Windows features on or off — tick "Windows Subsystem for Linux". Restart Windows.

3. Open the Microsoft Store, install Ubuntu. (This is basically what WSL was created to run.) I installed "Ubuntu 18.04 LTS". Open Ubuntu, and you'll see a bash terminal.

4. Install the following from the bash command line:

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
sudo apt update; sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install wine-stable

You can install a more current Wine if you want to faff around considerably. (Don't forget the two new libs that wine-devel >=4.5 needs that aren't in Ubuntu yet!) Let me know if it works.

5. Add to your .bashrc this line:

export DISPLAY=:0.0

You'll probably want to run that in the present bash window as well.

6. Install VcXsrv, which is a nicely packaged version of XOrg compiled for Windows — just grab the latest .exe and run it to install it. Start the X server from the Start button with "XLaunch". It'll take you through defaults — leave most of them as-is. I ticked "Disable access control" just in case. Save your configuration.

6a. If you want to test you have your X server set up properly, install sudo apt install x11-apps and start xeyes for a quick trip back to the '80s-'90s.

7. wine itself doesn't work, because 32-bit binaries don't work in WSL as yet — it gives /usr/bin/wine: 40: exec: /usr/lib/wine/wine: Exec format error on this 64-bit Windows 10. This is apparently fixed in WSL 2.

But in the meantime, let's run Wine notepad!

wine64 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/wine/fakedlls/notepad.exe

TO DO: 32-bit support. This will have to wait for Microsoft to release WSL 2. I wonder if ancient Win16 programs will work then — they should do in Wine, even if they don't in Windows any more.

Handling 32-bit with qemu

Thanks to my anonymous commenter below, we have a route to 32-bit:

sudo apt install qemu-user-static
sudo update-binfmts --install i386 /usr/bin/qemu-i386-static --magic '\x7fELF\x01\x01\x01\x03\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x03\x00\x03\x00\x01\x00\x00\x00' --mask '\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xfc\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xf8\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff'
sudo service binfmt-support start

And now we can do:

fun@DESKTOP-7F6DU8P:~$ wine --version
wine-3.0 (Ubuntu 3.0-1ubuntu1)

Encarta 97 doesn't work, though:

fun@DESKTOP-7F6DU8P:/mnt/e$ wine SETUP.EXE
wine: Unhandled page fault on read access to 0xffffffff at address 0x11df:0x00002c11 (thread 0011), starting debugger...
0011:err:seh:start_debugger Couldn't start debugger ("winedbg --auto 15 108") (2)
Read the Wine Developers Guide on how to set up winedbg or another debugger

I'll leave that bit to someone who knows what they're doing. file says SETUP.EXE: MS-DOS executable, NE for MS Windows 3.x — so we need to get down to casually-clicked 16-bit programs working.

Encarta 97 installs and runs flawlessly in Wine 4.13 on Linux ... 4.13 on Windows 10 still fails:

fun@DESKTOP-7F6DU8P:~$ wine /mnt/e/SETUP.EXE
Xlib: extension "MIT-SHM" missing on display ":0.0".
Xlib: extension "MIT-SHM" missing on display ":0.0".
0009:err:process:__wine_kernel_init boot event wait timed out
001d:err:process:__wine_kernel_init boot event wait timed out
wine: Unhandled page fault on read access to 0xffffffff at address 0x11cf:0x00002c11 (thread 001e), starting debugger...001e:err:seh:start_debugger Couldn't start debugger ("winedbg --auto 28 152") (2)
Read the Wine Developers Guide on how to set up winedbg or another debugger
001d:err:ntdll:RtlpWaitForCriticalSection section 0x7e6273e0 "syslevel.c: Win16Mutex" wait timed out in thread 001d, blocked by 001e, retrying (60 sec)
Xlib: extension "MIT-SHM" missing on display ":0.0".
Could not load wine-gecko. HTML rendering will be disabled.
001e:err:seh:raise_exception Unhandled exception code c0000005 flags 0 addr 0x7b4a6abc
wine client error:1e: write: Bad file descriptor

Of course, it gave different error messages across multiple runs ...

oh, this post is popular. While you're here, check out my cryptocurrency/blockchain blog and my book about why Bitcoin and related nonsense sucks. The New York Review of Books and the BBC loved it!

You'd think being able to write to and from an SMB share on the local wifi — e.g., your home NAS — was a simple and reasonable thing to do with a phone.

Google made an official SMB client for a while, but they withdrew it and now pretend it never happened. Nobody knows what the story is there.

So there's various third-party clients. They're mostly ad-infested dogshit, have a user interface from Satan that not even a geek could love, charge extra for basic protocols, or all three.

But! I discovered what appears to be the mythical Android SMB client that doesn't suck too much: the Asus File Manager.

It's the standard file manager for Asus' own phones — so it's designed for ordinary humans — but they put it up on the Play store. Frankly, it's good advertising for Asus phones.

The interface is a bit dogshit — but if you know what you're trying to do, then the process of dumping files and folders to/from the NAS is trivial.

(The Play store says it contains ads, but i've yet to see one.)

Bug 0: it only seems to do SMB1. Ew.

Bug 1: it doesn't recurse reliably. Always move your folders with "Copy", not "Move", just in case it fails to copy everything.

Bug 2: I got bitten by the "you must perform the certain steps" bug, when I swapped in a larger SD card. The app didn't have write permission for the card, even though I told it in Settings -> Apps that it did — it came up with an error, then gave three help screens that are only useful on an Asus phone.

(Apparently, the problem is something to do with Android no longer being happy with apps changing folders they didn't create? I'm not clear on the cause of the bug.)

The fix for this is:

1. Close Asus File Manager.
2. Settings -> Apps -> File Manager -> Storage — clear cache and data.
3. Restart the phone (without opening File Manager).
4. File Manager should now be able to write to the SD card.

(Yes, despite the above, this still sucks less than most SMB clients for Android.)

("but have you tried my personal favourite, XYZ Geek Dogshit SMB Client Pro Plus?" no, no I haven't. nor am I going to bother at this point.)

I just spent 7 hours today doing nothing but going through the blog (good Lord I post a lot) and noting down stuff that would be on topic for the second blockchain book. It's been a heck of a year, hasn't it. Soooo we'll see if I get to these any time soon. I have 4000 words of notes and my goodness there are so many stories to tell. The working title is now "A Buttful of Fistcoins," just to make sure I definitely cannot use it.

Things I should do this long weekend:

• Similar hours of notes for "Roko's Basilisk", or perhaps some prospective text
  • Robin Hanson made a dick of himself in public, so I'll probably have to at least mention him, and now I probably also have to read 10 years' Overcoming Bias
  • Hanson thinks the Journal of Cosmology is a legit scientific source, holy shit
• Script for a prospective audio book. I need to do Intro and ch 2, and note glitches in the reading of ch 1.
• My own accounts to some degree, then they might be in usable order by January.
• A ton of house stuff and stuff, the place is a pit. Tidy, change sheets, you know.
• Start yet more mead off.

Things I am doing this weekend:

• Reading books. So many books. I have Kindle Unlimited and I'm hitting the self-published punk rock books hard.
• Reading Worm fanfic, because there is little better to waste hours upon.
• Eating things that disagree with me 'cos I like them.
• Sleeping more. I remember sleep patterns.

You?

The text below is obsolete. Instead, go to the 2021 edition!

Here is how to de-DRM the books you damn well paid for. You can also convert them to ePubs if you like.

The Kindle software for PC doesn't work in WINE and I couldn't be bothered with the faff to set up DeDRM standalone, so I used arkady's old Windows 10 laptop that was sitting around spare.

You can install Windows 10 in a VM, e.g. VirtualBox! You don't need to authenticate it. Just download the ISO from Microsoft and authenticate at your leisure, or maybe never. I gave it 2GB RAM. Taylor Swift says set UAC to full.

WHAT YOU NEED:

• Kindle for PC
• Calibre
• DeDRM

STEPS TO SET THIS UP:

1. Rather than the old AZW format, Kindle now tries to download in its new KFX format by preference, so we have to nobble that — DeDRM has only just started on supporting it. Per this page, open a CMD window and run:

   ren %localappdata%\Amazon\Kindle\application\renderer-test.exe renderer-test.xxx

2. Open the DeDRM zip file. Inside that you will find a folder called "DeDRM_calibre_plugin" and inside that you will find a file called "DeDRM_plugin.zip". Get that second zip file (don't unzip it).

3. Open Calibre. Open "Preferences". Go to "Plugins". Click "Load plugin from file". Load the "DeDRM_plugin.zip" from the previous step. Close Calibre (so that it'll load the plugin next time it starts).

4. Open the Kindle app, log yourself in, download your books. (You need to log into the Kindle app to generate your DRM key that DeDRM then uses.)

   Go into Tools->Options->General and untick "Automatically install updates when they are available without asking me."

5. Open Calibre again, ready for the next step.

6. Open Windows Explorer. Under your username, you should have a folder "Documents\My Kindle Content". This should have several folders, each with an ebook in them. Go to the search box at top right, and search here for ".azw", which will conveniently list them all.

7. Select all the .azw files, and drag them to the Calibre window. This should load them all, readably.

8. If you want to convert to ePub: Select all the new books in Calibre. Right-click, select "Convert books->Bulk convert". Just use the defaults, you can do it again if you want to fiddle with stuff. If not: You can leave the de-DRMed books in .mobi or .azw format, as quite a lot of ebook readers are fine with these.

You now have a pile of .epub/.azw/.mobi files in various subfolders of "Documents\Calibre Library". You can search for ".epub" or whatever here if you want to select them all and drag them to some convenient place.

If you're on a Mac, try this page (and this one to fix the KFX problem). If you're on Linux, I don't know what to do while the Kindle app doesnt run in WINE.

I have an Android phone and tablet. The sound quality is eminently usable, and I have Skype to call people on!

How the arsing fuck do I record it?

There appears to be no standard option. Skype itself has no facility for recording calls. There are assorted extremely dodgy apps that claim to do the job, none of which I want to go near. I can Google for dodgy apps as well as you can — I’m not asking you to do a quick Google for me. What I want to know is — has anyone reading this done this personally, recording a Skype call? How do you do it? What do you use?

(Last time I did it on a Linux desktop — I had to run Audacity capturing the microphone and Audio Recorder capturing the speaker, then put the two recordings together. Hideous and stupid and I don't want to do that again.)

Update, 2018: the answer turns out to be OBS on the PC.

In a small way. But gosh!

Also, the print version is gorgeous. (If you're in the US, that's the link to tell people, 'cos I get the most money from it.)

( the paperback art )

I've turned the book site into a sceptical Bitcoin blog. Because punditry is my life now. That and trolling bitcoiners on Twitter, of course.

The book is doing shockingly well for a self-published work without any money spent on promotion. About 800 ebooks and 100 printed copies in a month. People who read it love it ... so I need to get the word out. Please tell everyone you know!

(how the hell do I get journalists to look at an ebook.)