Henrik Carlsson's Blog

All things me.

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For no reason what so ever, this DRM stripper for Calibre seems like quite a useful tool. You’ll need the serial number from your Kindle for it to work. If, hypothetically, I were to do this, I would look in the settings for this information. I would also take a look at this guide.

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Replied to https://micro.blog/khurtwilliams/56928517 (micro.blog)

@MrHenko I never got Webmentions working properly with micro.blog. I can receive Webmentions from micro.blog but I have never ever successfully sent a Webmention back to micro.blog. It never worked. I have tested Webmentions with other website and they work find in both directions.
main micro.blog p…

@khurtwilliams This is a reply on my website, hopefully sent as a web mention.

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On February the 26th Amazon will remove the option to download Kindle books directly to your computer. You should probably download your entire library today, and consider never purchasing anything from the Kindle Store ever again.

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The trend(?) of selling expensive frozen meals via influencers feels like an elaborate trolling or an art project.

Looking back on 2024 – the worst year of my life

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2024 turned out to probably be the worst year of my life.

The year started out nice, as far as I can remember. Nothing big comes to mind now, so I assume it was fairly routine. Me, Linn and the kids actually booked a trip to Greece for the month of May and we had some fun summer plans. The problems started for real in April.

I’m not going to go into too much detail, which might sound strange as I’m writing this. If I don’t want to write about it too much, why write at all? The way I see it, I write most of my life-related posts here for my own sake. It’s really like sort of a journal for me, but it is a potentially a very public forum and particularly when the things I write about involves other people – in this case my family – I want to be careful about the amount of details I share. That being said, the problems have been rooted in health issues for my son, Ebbe. In the early spring he started showing worsening symptoms of something that he’s had more or less of for his entire life. This time it would escalate and escalate and it took until the early fall before we finally got help. I’m not going to divulge the details about it, but it is not a fatal condition, and hopefully it won’t be chronic but we don’t really know that yet.

His health problem meant that the trip to Greece was a lot less idyllic than we planned, though in the end the positive moments outweighed the negative ones. As spring turned into summer things got worse and worse and for more or less the entire summer he was ”grounded” to the couch, just sitting still to not provoke the pain. It took a lot of effort for both us and for him to get him out of the house even for small things. We tried and succeeded a couple of times but there was a lot of frustration for all of us. The paradox of it all is that while much of the summer was truly terrible, some of our best moments as a family also happened this summer, mostly in the small, simple moments.

As the summer break ended and school resumed, Ebbe refused to go to school. The pain and the constant problems had taken a heavy toll on his psyche, so he was afraid of seeing his classmates again. We tried and fought, and begged and pleaded, and did everything we could but in the end we just couldn’t get him to go.

Late in September there was finally a plan in place to help him medically with the health issue and on October the 2nd we got checked into Uppsala Children’s hospital. What was meant to be a simple surgical procedure eventually turned out to having been done wrong and he needed a second operation to fix what was done wrong. The second operation succeeded but by then he had a really bad infection as a result of the first failed attempt and we ended up spending the entire month of October in the hospital and has had some medical care in the home ever since. In fact, as I’m writing this the night nurse just came by to take him off his drip.

It’s been a long, long few months. A lot was worsened by the failed surgery and I’ve been so angry at times. Angry at doctors, angry at life, angry at the world.

As the year came to a close he was getting better. We had a good time at Christmas and we all really wanted the year to end and move on to a new, better year. As 2025 started I think something inside me broke, probably all the tension, and I was tired beyond my ability to explain. It took a few days but then things turned for the better. Ebbe’s health has continually improved and tomorrow will be the last day of daily medical care in the home. And, best of all, this past week he started to work on going back to school and on Friday he managed to be there the whole day and he seems to actually long for Monday, and to be back and see his friends again.

2025 is off to a great start, and I hope I never have to experience another 2024 again.

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I am not the most well-versed person when it comes to David Lynch, but based on the things that I have seen, one thing that I love is that he seemed to be very sincere, and despite the weirdness of a lot of his works he seemed to be able to see the beauty in the world. There is no cynicism and very little nihilism in his works, and that is something that I really love. Rest in peace, mister Lynch.

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Indeed, a white Christmas

Lost Art

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I just fell upon a trailer for a documentary on the tv show Lost on YouTube and as I glanced at the comments the black hole opened up. ”Great show, terrible ending.” ”Worst ending of a show ever.” ”The creators should be sent to prison over the ending.” (Yes, that was an actual comment.) And so on, and so forth.

I was really into Lost when it started and I kept watching up until season four, I think, then I stopped and later got back into it via the DVD box sets. A year or two ago I rewatched two or three seasons but it’s been quite some time since I’ve watched the whole thing, so this is not going to be a post about details of Lost. I’m going from memory here so things are inevitably colored by the bit rot the mind. Regardless, in my opinion whatever problem Lost had was not the ending. It dragged in the middle but the very end, in particular the last episode, was great.

But arguing whether the ending was good or not is sort of pointless. What I do want to argue is how much I think we keep missing the point of the art, yes, art, of stories when we keep coming back whether the plot was all tied up, whether there where any ”plot holes” or not, and only judging it by what can be summarized in a wikipedia plot synopsis. If that is all that matters, why even read books? Why watch movies and tv shows? Why not just read the wikipedia page and have time to consume so much more content?

I took special note of a comment from someone who was so mad that the show demanded an ”English major” to understand. Why not just spell it out plainly? At first I wanted to reply to that comment but I quickly realized that that would be pointless, so I started writing this instead.

Maybe I’ve become that artsy fartsy, high brow person that I despised when I was nineteen, but these days I care much more about how a story, regardless of medium, makes me feel and the journey I took with the characters than I do about exact plotting. Because again, if I only care about plot why even spend the time engaging with the story when there are so many great summaries to read online?

Maybe me changing my opinion this way over time is something I should be ashamed of. Maybe I’ve let my past self down. Or maybe it’s a natural part of growing and evolving – after all, nineteen years have passed since I was nineteen – and it’s much worse that so many people seem stuck in their teen mindset. Maybe that mindset and single-mindedness stops stories from being art and instead turns them into more content, more slop for us to consume.

Zoo Station (Achtung Perfection)

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posted this note on and tagged it with Achtung Perfection

”Time is a train”, and I’m about to get left behind by it and miss my deadline for Achtung Perfection. So many things happening with the family right now that I’m not going to go into here but it’s making it really convinient for me to procrastinate and maybe even give up but tonight I sat down and did some editing. So many vocal takes to sort out! In the end I’m sort of back on track. I need to get some more work into it, record some more guitars and then actually focus on the mix but if I can get two more nights worth of work I will have something decent by the end of the month.