Ho boy - a new Neal Stephenson book due in a month!

Fall; or, Dodge In Hell. Continuing the adventures of Richard Forthrast from Stephenson's 2011 novel Reamde, the blurb from Amazon reads "In his youth, Richard “Dodge” Forthrast founded Corporation 9592, a gaming company that made him a multibillionaire. Now in his middle years, Dodge appreciates his comfortable, unencumbered life, managing his myriad business interests, and spending time with his beloved niece Zula and her young daughter, Sophia.

One beautiful autumn day, while he undergoes a routine medical procedure, something goes irrevocably wrong. Dodge is pronounced brain dead and put on life support, leaving his stunned family and close friends with difficult decisions. Long ago, when a much younger Dodge drew up his will, he directed that his body be given to a cryonics company now owned by enigmatic tech entrepreneur Elmo Shepherd. Legally bound to follow the directive despite their misgivings, Dodge’s family has his brain scanned and its data structures uploaded and stored in the cloud, until it can eventually be revived.

In the coming years, technology allows Dodge’s brain to be turned back on. It is an achievement that is nothing less than the disruption of death itself. An eternal afterlife—the Bitworld—is created, in which humans continue to exist as digital souls.

But this brave new immortal world is not the Utopia it might first seem . . .

Available for pre-order now from your favourite book sources and due June 4, and it is, of course, 880 pages. I think the universe might end if Neal ever managed to write a book of fewer than 400 pages! ;-) I think I'll probably re-read Reamde first, I'm over 3/4s done with mu current read, Madeline Albright's autobiographical history book Prague Winter, about World War 2 and the early 20th century and World War 2 history of Prague. Amazing book, just got out of WW2 and in to Czechoslovakia being swallowed by the USSR.

https://www.amazon.com/Fall-Dodge-Hell-Neal-Stephenson-ebook/dp/B071X3ZWDN/

If you're running Firefox, there's a massive glitch disabling some add-in extensions

Some or all extensions are being disabled. You get a warning, but re-installing the program doesn't make it work again. This is a known bug, and a ticket has been submitted. It will get fixed, but it will require a patch to be issued, i.e. a new release of Firefox, so we're just going to have to wait for it to be fixed.

It's a bit of an overstatement to say ALL Firefox extensions are breaking, but a lot are. My main one is Adblock+, and it's just fine.

In the words of the Bard, shit happens.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/03/a-glitch-is-breaking-all-firefox-extensions/

A friend is giving me a MacBook Pro!

A rather newer one, a 2015 with a Retina display, as a matter of fact! My plan was to buy a 2012 MBP since it could be serviced, and that was going to run $600-800, so this will be quite a savings.

One slight problem: the battery is bulging, and it's quite a PITB to replace, so that's going to be a chunk of change to replace. That's why I'm getting it: he replaced it with a new Air, and knew that my MBP blew up last year, and knew I'd benefit from it.