Dickens of a Blog – The third iteration of Doug Bolden's various thoughts and musings.

And Thus…I Leave Feedly

On 2026-03-13

Sigh.

Just a few days ago I was going through a multi-hour process to disentangle from OneDrive and now, for reasons, I’m doing the same thing for Feedly. Some of it is similar. A recurring cost that offers little real value compared to what I can do myself. A company that considers its AI-arm to be its true innovation. Features and elements I like being de-prioritized over a different type of client than I am.

And while Feedly is different in several ways…

OneDrive is more integrated into the default Windows experience
Feedly genuinely is one of the best feed readers out there, while OneDrive is not necessarily one of the best cloud-based storage systems
Feedly is a lot more “optional” than proper file management, even if very helpful
I would say that Feedly is actually innovative in its interface, even if I don’t need most of it

…it still hit an irk in me this morning.

I went to search for something. The above picture shows me searching for “dice¹.” That’s not what I searched, initially, [it was “daylight savings time” which glitched it out] but it will do for a demo.

I had to click several things to tell it “just my feeds, please” instead of “Feeds & All Web” and then to unclick the defaults of “Business & Strategy” and “Tech Blogs” as well.

After which, I got the worst search results since Bing was initially launched.

I could only see, nearly fully, the “top result” but not click on it. Every other result is faded out and hidden. In fact, they are not search results at all. They are dummy results slapped behind a “disabled-entries” flag.

I can’t even tell if this is just some sort of hiccup in the system or if they really expect me to upgrade to Pro+ just to be able to search by classifying “search” as “follow” which are two different sorts of tasks.

It for sure has encapsulated what should be a fairly simple task as a “Feedly AI” worthy one. If you go all the way back up to the top, you’ll see the “Feedly AI” tweaked my search options to generate more results…none of which were usable by me. Outside of that, if I search for something in my feeds and there are no results, I want there to be no results. I’m not just idly passing time. I’m trying to use information.

Keep in mind, there used to be a fairly user friendly, intuitive search feature just a little over a year ago. One I am pretty sure wasn’t locked behind the Pro/Pro+ features. I was Pro, then. In fact, I joined Feedly in August (?) 2016 and joined Pro around a month later. And kept it, at the actual ridiculous fee of around $7us/month for a decade.

I should have bolted when they started going more in on Enterprise level tasks rather than just serving a product that worked.

At any rate, spent around an hour researching private and self-hosted type feed readers and began migrating stuff over (including finding a fun glitch where CloudFlare keeps killing some OpenRSS feeds).

Will probably delete my entire Feedly account soon. They can have MBAs using AI models to track awful crypto blogs be their customer base if they want that crowd so badly.

Going Back to Check…it is designed worse than I thought

So I went back before clicking post because I wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing some obvious checkmark. I might still be missing some check mark, but, I am pretty confident that I am not missing an obvious one.

Some things I learned.

Feedly still brands its search as “Across Your Favorite Sources” on the home screen…

heh, “easily.” “Just fifteen clicks to not get any results! easy!”

…then changes up the language once you get to the search page.

Note that most of those are AI searches rather than just a simple search across data.

Technically you can see THREE of your results, you just have to check them all and save them to a board

Note, you have to believe that the checkbox exist and just mouse over it. The fun thing about “3 articles selected” (and with some testing, it seems to always be three articles returned for a search) is that it means there is always a completely hidden-in-fog article down below for absolutely NO reason since it’s just white, no-display space. They are literally wasting server and browser processing time to show you something that isn’t there. It’s probably something to do with needing extra space to get the proper fade on the gradient. Or just plain madness.

“Yesterday on the stairs, I met a Feedly search result that wasn’t there…”

That’s…just awful. That’s some serious tomfoolery.

Yeah, deleting that account very shortly.

NOTE: I have not tested the app and right now don’t care to test the app. I’d rather just delete than waste any more time on this. Maybe it works as expected, there, but none of these things suggest good things about the future of this product.

I don’t know which is worse, the fact that it assumed I was searching for “DICE” the company and tagged it as a company search OR the fact that it absolutely did not matter since it just did a keyword search anyhow across my feeds. Terrible. ↩︎

KoRo brand “Soy Chunks”

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-03-10

In Review, Vegan

Back in the States I consumed a lot of TVP from Betta Foods, Inc. I miss Betta Foods. Chances are, I could do something to ship over here but I also need to find some local replacements for multiple reasons.

While I am at it: goodbye, Butler Foods Soy Curls, you are the real king bar none.

Doing some shop arounds, one of the first local-to-EU brands of “soy chunks” to come to my attention was KoRo’s Bio grove sojastukjes, grof [aka, soy chunks, the biggish ones].

At €13.95/kg, the price was reasonable¹, but it was hard to tell how big it was at a glance online. You want chunks to be chunky, no? I decided to just order and put them through various tests and recipes.

First, the size test [versus a €.20 coin (I looked but didn’t have a Euro on hand and was already committed to the bit)]:

I did crank up the contrast and played with the brightness a little to try and make the texture pop out. Makes a couple look like they are floating in space [and thanks, phone, for focusing much harder on the coin than the product I’m showing and which is closer to you]. As you can see, average size is fair. Not as chunky as TRS Soya Chunks, which you can find in some local-to-Brussels Asian markets. A bit smaller than I like, but not terribly so.

The specks you see are from the “dust” in the bag. I’ve never minded a few random flakes of extra soya protein, but if you figure you might for whatever reason, just maybe toss them gently in a sieve or some such.

In order to give them a fair test across a few different cooking techniques. Each started with the basic prep: soaking them in water for 30 minutes prior to draining and squeezing out a bit but not too aggressively, then letting sit for a few minutes to reform and settle. I used some MSG, mushroom powder, and other seasonings but mix-and-matched that. And no, none of these have photos because you see how crappy I am taking food photos, above, at least with my cantankerous phone camera.

The four variations were:

A…um, what’s wet-stir-fry called? Like a stir fry but with sauce? That. With some rice vermicelli, veggies, and brussels sprouts in a mushroom sauce.
Deep fry after tossing them in a “Nashville Hot” blend of spices and a small amount of flour/starch on the outside.
A “cream of mushroom” soup with some flat wheat noodles and maybe a too heavy helping of the chunks. The next day the noodles and chunks had absorbed enough of the left over liquid that it was effectively “TVP and Dumplings.”
A soft- and hard-bake version (200C for 35 minutes and 50 minutes).

In all cases, the Taste was Very Fine. If you eat a lot of TVP [textured vegetable protein] and related protein products, you get a bit used to that shelf-stable soya flavor. Some brands embrace it. Some try to cover it up. With KoRo chunks, it is there but softer. These are very receptive to the flavors you add.

I would go so far as to say that if you are sensitive to that dried soya product flavor, these are the ones I’d put in your hands.

In the first three cases, the Texture was Lacking (a bit). This is not to say they had a bad texture, there just wasn’t much there. More akin to a thick noodle or tight dumpling than some of the other soy chunks. The bite was soft and missing that sense of internal fiber that I like by a hair. Compared to Plant Basics Soy Chunks, they have pretty much spot-on identical protein but PB’s has a tad more fiber. I think it might just be the processing.

With the fourth style, baking it it out, the soft-bake had a similar texture to the wet-prep and fried versions. The hard bake, getting them almost corn-nut-like in texture, is where I finally got the feel of the internal workings of the product.

As for Ease of Prep, I’d say they are Just Fine. No more or less harder than other similar sized soy/soya TVP. Well, maybe a little easier. A few, like the TRS mentioned above, are a lot stronger in flavor so you might need to soak those a bit longer than these from KoRo depending on the recipe. Since the KoRo ones respond more to added flavor, you don’t have to over-season to get the full effect.

To conclude, while I would like a slightly bigger “chunk” and a chunkier mouth-feel, these are Quite Good and might hit the spot for folks who have been a little reluctant to try such soy food options because of the flavor or preparation.

If you don’t know the rough size of 1kg of TVP, it’s a pretty big amount. You can make a fairly chunky soup with just 100g of the stuff. Even with dishes completely centered on just soy chunks, you are looking at around 30-50 servings per bag. ↩︎

“Deleting” OneDrive…

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-03-09

In Technology

One of my promises to myself for 2026 — which admittedly feels a bit “puny” with everything going on — was to redraw from most cloud-based storage. Part of the broad “clean up!” phase of my mid-life crisis…

Leave social media
Leave [most] third party cloud-based storage [Google Drive is something of an exception, for now, and I have other specialty storage to handle certain accounts and servers]
Reduce streaming subscriptions to a minimum
Generally stop paying for services I can do myself with some sweat/tears

…which, when written like that, does sound a bit like I’m turning into a paranoid old codger. I am, that. But also, it gives me a challenge. Something to chew upon.

Today was OneDrive. I had some variation of the Office 365 subscription— which is now something like Office 365 Copilot — where I had apps, storage space, improvements to email, and upgrades to “freemium” MS stuff like Copilot++ Extreme Teams Plus™ or whatever branding makes the shareholders happy. I don’t know. The fact that I never knew what kind of value I could possible be getting from most of it is part of my problem.

Which is part of your problem, MS people.

Any Microsoft folks seeing this, that’s my feedback. Help me to feel like I am getting much more than $100 out of such a thing if you want me to keep it. Make it feel like you are giving me the sweetest deal ever. You ain’t a charity. You ain’t a college student just working your way up through the world. Impress me.

I got said annual subscription a few years back when I got this computer and continued, like a good little puppet, to pay the $100ish annual fee for all these many months. As we were prepping a move to the EU, I cut out most of my annual/recurring payments to stuff that wasn’t absolutely necessary, keeping only a few with some of those few on the eventual chopping block. This included my Office 365 [insert other branding terms, here] subscription though I figured I’d keep it if I wanted it after all.

If and only if I felt I was getting my value.

In the interim time, I set up more of my own storage, switched most/all documents to LibreOffice [etc], and started handling my email largely “in house.” In short, I absolutely did not need to pay a trillion dollar company $100 to do those things for me. Which left a problem.

There were roughly 500gig of files on my computer tied to OneDrive. Not paying meant my OneDrive was stuffed full to the brim — 9000% over the limit, the warnings said — and stuff was throwing errors. I logged in and started to delete out my files from the online side and then went…

…because while I doubted it, there was a non-zero chance that I was about to trigger Microsoft deleting half a terabytes of files off my PC. Good files. Stuff like my pdf copies of Outgunned and my Two Steps from Hell music. That would have made me sad having to redownload all that.

I stopped, looked into it, and figured out that I had to go through OneDrive’s settings and then stop syncing each of the major folders. One at a time. Which takes…time. It moves the folders around and changes the links and stuff. A few folders with only a gig or two worth of files might be quick but my main Documents folder which had 300gig alone took the better part of an hour. Then sit there in fear that it was simply going to delete those files outright [Ron Howard voice: it did not].

That’s before I had to go through and update some bookmarks, rebuild a music library in Foobar2000, and related things. Piece by piece.

Doug’s Note: There are walkthroughs already written for this process. I should have taken screenshots on the way down but didn’t think about it until later.

After I did all that, and dealt with all the errors, I then “resynced” and that deleted the files off my online account. I then deleted out a few more bits and then unlinked my account from OneDrive and then exited OneDrive.

Which has twice tried re-opening and which prompted Windows Defender to lecture me about the importance of having online backup, etc.

My primary annoyance since then is that the Default Library Folders — Documents, Pictures, Downloads, Videos, Desktop — are now put into kind of janky library containers in the “Libraries” tree at the bottom of the left-hand panel and there doesn’t seem to be a way to build a more functional version of that towards the top to match the older style.

In other words, paying for OneDrive put all those files into a convenient place in the panel which doesn’t seem possible, without possibly editing the registry, to replicate. That’s…madness, right? That’s purposely nerfing their own operating system to sell a side product.

Hey, looking for a book to read? Let me just suggest something. Probably totally unrelated to this whole experience:

I ended up just making “Quick Access” links to those folders, a few others, though it seems like Windows 11 keeps wanting to trim those out.

All this has made me really miss Linux all the more.

Waking Up to the STINK

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-03-07

In Daily Life, Grimbergen

Foggy mornings are not rare in Grimbergen.

BUT, sometimes those foggy mornings have a way of trapping the smells and scents of absolutely everything at around head height. The fumes from the airplanes, the smell of pollen, the decay of grass.

This morning, I woke up, was getting out of bed, started to smell something…awful. For a few seconds, I got really angry at the cats for whatever the hell they had just did…and then decided to investigate.

Opened the front door and that’s what I realized just how well insulated our house is in general. It was worse outside. And there was that sound. Not unlike the scene in Dumb & Dumber where Jeff Daniels’ character tries to take a not quite stealth poo. If you don’t know the scene, just look at this GIF and imagine the sound:

Like a hundred tubes of cottage cheese being forcibly evacuated. Just a long phhlllbbttlllttt sound that would definitely be followed by a green fog in a 90s cartoon. It was rank.

There was a tractor in the field around 30m from our front door spraying a very organic fertilizer on the field.

The end result was a smell not unlike a port-a-potty left in the summer sun near the kind of race track where they serve egregious amounts of cheese and red meat.

I absolutely adore farmers and have no real issue with the process, but the mix of that being sprayed on a day when all smells are locked as tight as a 16-year-old girl’s diary…

It was a rough couple of hours until it dissipated.

Congrats to Connections for Reaching 1000 Puzzles

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-03-07

In Games

While I play around on several games on NYTimes, the game that I most enjoy remains Connections. And today, Connections hit the milestone of 1000 Puzzles [of which I seem to have played 587].

I was curious how they were going to celebrate, and we got a cute little message and a unique object:

Didn’t have too much trouble beating and getting the Reverse Rainbow [Purple, Blue, Green, Yellow in that order]: solving from hardest to easy category. To be honest, though, I just went for a category with the cute little Connections icon. It just happened to be, well, I guess already spoiled it: Purple.

All in all, the growing bloat and badges and all that are starting to detract from me enjoying even the regular rotation of NYT Games, but’s been fun playing this for the past year or two.

Even if I don’t make it to 2000 [or 1300, at this rate], just wanted to swing by and say “congrats” to the team behind it.

It’s been one of the better ones.

You Had Me at Henshin GIF

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-03-05

In Creativity, Tokusatsu

A friend on a certain Discord server shared with me a mod that puts Kamen Rider into Skyrim, and so I realized if I wanted to have a “You Had Me At HENSHIN!” gif I was going to have to make it myself, so I did:

Now I’m sharing it for everyone in the world to use, meaning me.

“What’s the mod?,” you might be rightly asking. I have no idea. I don’t play Skyrim…but I do adore some Kamen Rider.

I have suffered through a Reimagined achievement, finally

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-03-04

In Rants, Videogames

Look, I am generally a fan of the recent Dragon Quest VII: Reimagined even with the cutting of content and sometimes oversimplifying a few things. I like the improvement of character stories. I like the voice acting. I like the art. I like most of the pacing.

BUT, this took a stupidly long time to do…

To put this in perspective, I beat the game somewhere around the 60-70 hour mark. The rest has been grinding up stats and unlocking achievements. There is something like 10-11 hours of just playing for the achievement I’m about to rant about in this post.

Most of the achievements are precisely the sort of things you like to see for videogame achievements. Fight a certain number of fights. Get a certain amount of gold. Reach a few storyline checkpoints. Even some trickier stuff, like having to compete against some fairly difficult bosses. At least of a “standard hard difficulty” in the aspect of needing to grind quite a bit and trying out new strategies to be strong enough to do it without really good RNG.

Only the true boss of the entire damned game is not that, it’s a stupid match game called Lucky Panel where you flip over tiles and match items and some items have some chance of ranking up and if you get lucky you might rank something up to max before the final round and get a chest and then get a shot at a few really rare items.

And the sadistic game designers made it so that there are several items that are not only locked to the panel with no other way to get them but locked to the most RNG of RNG luck. Chests are already slightly rare due to the “early max rank” condition in a game where you have to also use some luck | strategy | skill just to keep playing – or, in various ways, cheat – AND then some of those items [such as the liquid metal gear] is very rare even by chest standards.

What this means is that folks are reporting 10-15+ hours of post-game content dedicated entirely to getting those rare-rare items from panels. And some are actively encouraging stuff like screen captures if not outright cheat-ware to help.

Sure, we only need to do play Lucky Panel if we want to get all the achievements, but I detest content like this where you have to play against highly complex dice rolls. Where people who luck might get those items in a dozen plays while folks like me have to play the match game…wait, let me see.

188 games. Siggghhhhhhhh. It’s the return of gacha trauma.

Anyhow, after said 188 games, I finally got this…

Which unlocked the Heroic Hoarder achievement and that unlocked the final “get all the other achievements” achievement. My word. I have no idea, going by the top screenshot, about that poor 0.3% who managed to get through the stupid Panel grind without getting everything else which generally pales in comparison.

While there are a handful of text/translation errors and other things I would prioritize fixing, at this point one of my big wish list items for this game if they could go back and tweak it would be to allow some items like rare monster hearts that increased the number of misses or improved the luck on the panels or something like that.

OR, make it so that every item can be gotten, somehow, outside of it and leave the Lucky Panel as less a requirement and more a fun way to just score a few duplicates of rare items if people are so inclined.

On the Shades of Pain

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-03-04

In Daily Life, Health, Rants, Words

I have a half-dozen links/notes saved for blog posts from this past week. Which is likely a sign that those half-dozen things will not be posted. Because that is the way of blogs like these: you either strike when the rod is too hot for common sense to stop you or you do not strike at all

And because I have spent the last week in a lot of pain.

Pain comes in shades.

I post this with the caveat that I am not trying to one-up or out-suffer anyone. Trust me, as much as you can trust me, that I appreciate that pain is personal in the way that tastes in food or enjoyment of art is personal. There are recipes. There are genres. But right there, where the spark exists between the “I” which is you and me and each of us individually and the It, the object or concept in question, there is that personal relationship between your I and its It.

When you hurt long enough, people are apt to give you advice which is to say people are apt to tell you about their pain. Their suffering. Their shades. Their tastes. We are lonely. It is in our nature to talk. Bless us, one and all.

Sometimes, maybe most times, we mean well, but we are idiots. Because all we do is shout the name of our own personal pain over and over and over again. Into the void. Into the sky. Into the gray.

I am sorry that you hurt, Space Pilgrims, I truly am.

But this is my blog, so it is my time to shout. I am not speaking for you. I am not even speaking for myself, because the me in this much pain is probably not really me. Whether a half-truth or a desperate plea, I hold to that. I will continue to hold to that.

In 2022, when I fell while hiking and tore the ligaments | muscles | nerves in my leg so badly that I still do not walk like a real boy these four years later: that should have been the worst pain I ever experienced. It maybe was. I do not know. I told the people at the scene that it was a 6 or 7 on the out-of-10 scale, maybe an 8. A doctor later told me that it was a 10. Thing is, I do not recall that pain. I recall the fear. I recall the months of healing. I recall the falling down. I recall the long void that followed.

The pain I better remember is the pain much like the pain I have right now: the revolt of my body against itself as the genetic lottery awards me an autoimmune disfunction which fills my vessels and my veins and throat and my joints and my bones with inflammation.

The shades of this particular flavor of pains goes like this:

First, there is the idea of pain. A twinge. A whisper. A voice hiding behind a corner which is down the hall.

Then, there is the greeting. The laughter. The introduction. Hello, my name is…

Then, there is the romance. The dance. The twirling with pain down the path under the trees and up the hill. Waking up and having your pain there in the bed beside you. The pain strips naked and crawls into the shower with you. It shares meals with you. It stands with you and walks with you and it listens to you tell stories about itself.

Then, there comes the shade I fear the most. There comes the moment on the edge of a pit where you wonder for a second if you and the pain are just different names for the same thing.

This is the moment of exhaustion.

The reason the pain no longer crawls into the shower with you is because you no longer feel able to take a shower. You do not wake up beside pain because your dreams were pain. So much so for a moment upon waking you think you might be better, only to realize you are worse.

Where you press your hand against your back because making it hurt there means it hurts less elsewhere and you can breathe for a moment without wondering why you can you feel each and every breath. Where you watch TV or read books and every word and every scene is being told to you by the pain and it speaks with broken spiral teeth and a throat of bark and and bone and feathers.

Then, comes the shade I do not fear so much, though it is possibly worse. That point past the exhaustion. There are no words or quaint ideas about that point. Deconstruction. The silence that was never silent in the moment but is after because part of us is lost there on that shore. We forget the sound of the waves and later wonder from where did the salt and grit come. Memory lapses and a sense of loss.

Then, the lucky of us…we wake up one morning and we’re still exhausted but we can walk again. We can shower again. We can drop something on the floor and pick it back up again. Maybe not gracefully. Maybe not without sacrifice, but we can do it.

[this is where i am right now]

And each day, maybe each hour, after that is a step back up the hill. Learning to walk on our own again. Learning to breathe without having to press our hands into our back. Reading. Watching TV. Doing these things on our own, again.

Moving on to the final shade of pain, the ugliest shade of all, the one we don’t like to talk about with anyone but ourselves and often not even then

: the shade where we remember what it felt like and know it will one day return. Maybe worse. Maybe not.

and we laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh

The [Super] Universe is Healing…

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-02-24

In Internet, Movies & TV, Tokusatsu

In the sheer inanity of modern existence, where every day is a slam between the mental load of simply considering an international conspiracy of terrible people on one side and the wryly chuckling at “boop-gate” on the other…

It is sometimes nice to see the same fights show up about fansubs as always.

Ah, that takes me back. Logging into IRC channels and getting reamed because you make a joke or ask about the process. I one time asked about the process of fansubbing a series that was on a kind of on semi-pause¹ and the ensuing argument out of nowhere ended up with an announcement that “despite rumors, we have not dropped this series.” No shit. I was just curious.

Ah, 2003-2004 era TV-Nihon, I kind of miss that level of jack-assed-ness. Seriously TVN folks, thank you for the memories.

超 100% means “super” in this context, as backed up by all of the hype [heh, pun], press, and most likely some official release somewhere down the road that I’m ready and willing to slap down pre-order button upon when I get the chance. As in a reference to the Super Sentai series that Gavan is “replacing.” As in the kanji used in numerous Super Sentai productions which calls-back to that meta-series name. It’s an homage. I thought it was a nice touch.

A loving handshake to a venerable series that has lasted for multiple generations of childhoods.

Still, fansubbers and fansub-fans arguing about such things is like… it’s the universe healing, you know? Something lost from my youth and taken up by a whole new generation.

Actually, I think it was more like the series was still be subbed, but they were sharing the files via a different method? I don’t know, that was 20 damned years ago. Specifics escape me. ↩︎

Giggle

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-02-24

In Discoveries, Humor, Science

Look, it’s pretty impressive – at least, I’m impressed – that very intelligent people have mapped out the structure of Uranus’s upper atmosphere. I adore finding out more about our local system.

BUT…

Several pop-sci and pop-gen news services have gone for a slightly more tongue-in-cheek article title:

…and I also adore that.

Especially when the graphic just oh so slightly does not help.