Today Kobold Press opened up the Kickstarter for thier Player’s Guide 2. While Kobold Press has already done a couple Kickstarters that are going to dramatically expand Tales of the Valiant when they come out later this year (Enter the Labyrinth - both a campaign book and a setting book; Monster Vault 2 - an expansion of their bestiary), Player’s Guide 2 is a huge expansion to the Tales of the Valiant ruleset. I, for one, am very excited about this update. Actually, I’m not the only one - at the time that I am writing this (end of the first day of the Kickstarter) there are 1461 backers that have pledged $114,000 against a $50k goal. This means after just about 8 hours they’ve almost reached 3/4 of their stretch goals.
This year I have sponsored a lot of Kickstarter creative work, including lots of music. One that I was very excited to support was The PDX Broadsides’ latest album, Relatable Content. They started off as a pirate shanty band and have evolved into a nerd filk band whose songs range from silly to profound. I really enjoyed their last album, Trust Issues, which had some pretty timely songs like Noncompliant (superficially about the Bitch Planet comic, but actually about the Me Too era) and We Want Rey (about representation in nerd toydom). It also had some fun songs (both feature Christian as the lead) like Tiny Little Octopus and Robot vs Boy (which I want to see made into a mini-musical). Their last Kickstarter also had a dirty album called Lust Issues that continued their trend of Shakespeare music with the great Dirtbag Romeo and their dirtier songs from their pirate shanty days with It’s Just Sex.
I Fight Dragons – Project Atma (music): They were awesome at Warped Tour - I can’t wait until they go on the Projecet Atma tour. Manufacturing delays at the vinyl plant meant that the album was delayed. Still don’t have it - should be in my hands in December.
Jonathan Coulton, Greg Pak, and others – Code Monkey Save World (music and comics): Still missing the new music and The Princess Who Saved Herself. To be fair, the latter wasn’t promised until early 2015.
I Fight Dragons – Project Atma (music): Things are on track with IFD. They are posting awesome videos of the recording process. It’s already March so as long as there aren’t any more delays, the album will be here in a few short months! Also, they’ll be on the Van’s Warped Tour, so I’ll be attending Warped Tour for the first time to go see them (and quite a few other bands I really like)
It’s December and I should have gotten all of my Kickstarter products by now. But that’s not exactly what happened. Every single one of my Kickstarters was late except the one I had the least faith and relationship with - Random Encounter’s Let Me Tell You a Story.
I’m writing this in late August - by the time this post appears I should have received all of my Kickstarter goods or they should be in the mail. Interestingly, even though the Kickstarter backer cycles were spread over about a three month period, they’re all supposed to be delivering the product at around the same time - 4th quarter of this year. As of the time of this writing, this is the status of my Kickstarters:
Those of you who have been reading this blog long enough know that I often write my blog posts during my lunch break at work and set it to post at some point in the future. I’m writing this post almost 1 month before it is to appear on the blog. So in the middle of July I find myself in what many who have backed projects probably experience as the Kickstarter Lull. I backed a project by I Fight Dragons and interviewed them about it here and I backed a comic project by Greg Pak and Jonathan Coulton. During the backing period as a way to drum up support there was a constant stream of both updates and digital goodies. IFD, in particular, gave backers 2 albums (live concert recording and a conceptual album) and a concert film. A little while after the backing period was over, the projects contacted us for the info they needed to fulfill our backer rewards. Since then I haven’t heard from either of them. On the rational side, I’m glad they’re focusing on creating what we paid them to create. But after the constant communications it just feels odd to have “radio” silence. Now we just wait for the products to be created. In the case of these two projects, the members involved are all veterans: IFD put out records before having a record company contract and Greg Pak has already done about a half dozen Kickstarters. So, outside of catastrophe, I don’t fear for my money. I could see where this silence might be more disturbing with an unproven team.
A little over a month ago I came across an article on Boing Boing about the movie Zach Braff was trying to get funded via Kickstarter. It was interesting time as I had just contributed to two Kickstarter projects for the first time - I Fight Dragons’ Project Atma and the Code Monkey comic by Jonathan Coulton and Greg Pak. The Boing Boing piece linked to an article by Ken Levine saying why he wouldn’t support Zach Braff’s Kickstarter. His premise was essentially that Braff has money and should finance it himself or use his Hollywood connections. Save Kickstarter for the indie film producer/director. He mentioned that he didn’t want Kickstarter to get all corporate like Sundance. He had a response blog post in which he showed that his lamentations had come true - Melissa Joan Hart was asking for money on Kickstarter and was only offering to follow her backers on Twitter. Ten days later he posted his final response (at the time I’m writing this) in which he pointed out that Braff’s Kickstarter was pointless because he got “gap funding” anyway. Although I’m sure most of the air will be out of the tire by the time this post appears on my blog, I’d like to take the chance to refute and elaborate on some of what Ken Levine said. (Also, this isn’t the Ken Levine of Bioshock, just so you know)
Today Kobold Press opened up the Kickstarter for thier Player’s Guide 2. While Kobold Press has already done a couple Kickstarters that are going to dramatically expand Tales of the Valiant when they come out later this year (Enter the Labyrinth - both a campaign book and a setting book; Monster Vault 2 - an expansion of their bestiary), Player’s Guide 2 is a huge expansion to the Tales of the Valiant ruleset. I, for one, am very excited about this update. Actually, I’m not the only one - at the time that I am writing this (end of the first day of the Kickstarter) there are 1461 backers that have pledged $114,000 against a $50k goal. This means after just about 8 hours they’ve almost reached 3/4 of their stretch goals.
As the crew sails towards the Astral plane they suddenly see tons of flowers in the water as well as lots of sea creatures. Thomas checks the flowers, but they are normal. (ie not magical) Suddenly the current seems to “grab” the ship and start pulling it to an island. The Captain has everyone head to various stations where they can help with navigation and they help avoid any damage to the ship. The current carries the ship far up the shore and it’s beached. Thomas attempts to push the ship, but it’s way too heavy and too far ashore.
The living star, which takes the shape of a turtle, is named Shelly by the crew. It becomes over-excited while playing with the crew and causes some of the wood on the ship to sprout leaves and branches and attracts the attention of a squid-like sea monster. After the heroes get rid of the sea monster, the Oahtu who joined the journey a while ago help repair the ship.
Humblewood: Beyond the Canopy by Hit Point Press - Part 2 of the Humblewood story. My kids are very excited that this kickstarter is due to be fulfilled this year (for Digital items). While I’m glad we don’t have to wait until next year to play and while it means that maybe the USA tariff issues will be done by then, the fact that digital delivery is 6+ months after digital kept me from ordering the whole physical item she-bang.
It’s literally been years since I went into a Barnes and Noble. Ever since I went fully digital (or MOSTLY fully digital) with my books, I haven’t really had the occasion. But today we were in the vicinity of a B&N and the kids wanted to go inside. As I was wandering around I came to the Dungeons and Dragons table and happened to find a packet of Misfit dice. As you guys know, I have no further need of dice, but at $11 it was an easy impulse buy. I was actually really happy with the dice that came in the package.
The team’s boat arrives at Wollerton. As they arrive, they hear the sounds of a brawl at the local bar. After someone is thrown out the window, the adventurers attempt to calm the bar brawl. There’s also a halfling with a sign yelling that the end is nigh. The party tries calmly asking people to stop, but the humans and dwarves do not listen. A mastic that belongs to one of the brawlers ends up biting Jackal. Eventually they end up dragged into the fight. A human and dwarf attempt to head butt each other and knock each other out. Eventually Appeluna ends the fight by casting sleep on the brawlers.
The team arrived at Moonlight where the scrawler dropped them off in the middle of town. The old orc and Silgre both also got off the Scrawler. After a brief conversation, the adventurers decided to go to the mayor’s house first. There they were hired to rid the town of kobolds. They agreed on a payment of 25GP per person and 3 nights room and board paid at the tavern.
Marketing is often lies or half-truths dressed up to try and trick our stupid animal brains - pushing past our rationality. I’m happy to report that in this case, the marketing was, in my humble opinion, not a lie. We were told that this was a new, useful Dungeon Master’s Guide - more useful than the 2014 guide. I found this to be true. I don’t think I’ve re-opened the 2014 DMG since first reading it. It was really structured as a reference book or manual. The 2024 DMG is full of very useful information.<
If you’ve been reading my blog for the last few months, you know that I have fallen in love with the TTRPG publisher Kobold Press, creators of Tales of the Valiant. They recently held their second virtual convention, KoboldCon. I wanted to write up a quick review of what is effectively my first TTRPG convention.
First of all, the virtual aspect of the convention. During the COVID pandemic convention season (2020-2021), I attended quite a few virtual conventions - usually programming language conventions like PyCon. Many of those attempted to recreate the physical aspects of the convention like having virtual hallway tracks and profile areas where you can get to know your fellow attendees. Kobold Press went for a lower tech solution, but one that I think worked perfectly for what they were trying to do.
The adventurers had been working with Kylana for the past month to try and figure out how the mycaloid water source was poisoned. A gnome arrived with a wedding invitation for Ariana from her college friend, a gnome named Favienne Northcord. The wedding is in a town called Moonbright. It’s far enough away that they decide they will take a scrawler to get to the town.
As they are waiting at the ticket booth to purchase a ride on the scrawler, two dwarves show up looking beaten up. They tell the townsfolk that there are some goblins attacking all wagons headed into the town. The mayor tells the adventurers that if they help eradicate the goblins, their tickets on the scrawler will be covered. The team agrees to deal with the goblins.
The adventurers are offered Bastions. Minla and Iris take up the offer and tree shapers are sent to create the bastions. Minla chooses to start off with a bedroom, kitchen, garden, and a library. Iris chooses to have a bedroom, kitchen, smithy, and armory. She also named it The Spiked Defenders.
The session starts off in Minla’s very cramped bastion kitchen. A strig in the employ of the Council delivers a letter to Minla explaining the Council’s need for the party to explore Hamlin’s rumor of The Loper because they are afraid of ignoring rumors after what happened with the fire elemental.
I’m the forever-GM for our house. The kids prefer for me to GM and I don’t know anyone in person who can match my schedule for a regular game and who wants to take on the GM responsibilities. When one of my players from last week’s New Gamemaster Month game wanted to host their own game, I jumped at the chance to be a player. Also, I wanted to repay their kindness for being in my game.
January flew by and it was time to read the last two lessons before running the game as the capstone project for this class. Tuesday’s generic lesson was about gathering what you need to run the game. I didn’t really learn anything with that lesson, although I did like the acknowledgement that VTTs can offer some benefits over in-person play. The Tales of the Valiant part of the lesson included links to the character sheets as well as their ToV extra Lineages and Heritages PDFs for free (normally ~$3-$5 each).
When I first started really playing D&D with the kids, the starter kit came with a flyer advertising dndbeyond. At the time they had the encounter builder and the character creation; maps didn’t exist yet. I made use of the encounter builder (which was free at the time - and I think remains free with some limits) and character creator. Around the time that Humblewood was released for dndbeyond, maps started its alpha, available only to Master Tier subscribers. It was quite useful to set up encounters so that the players could visualize where they were relative to the enemy. Since then we’ve continued using dndbeyond (with my Master Tier subscription). Mostly I’ve made use of the maps when playing one-shots with my brother on the other side of the country and occasionally with the kids for the map. I was happy and I was constantly wishing more creators would get their content onto dndbeyond so that I could make use of all the stat blocks without having to “homebrew” anything to add it to the system. Then Brandon Sanderson launched the Cosmere RPG kickstarter. I looked around at the various virtual tabletops that would be supported. I wanted something I could pay for once and own vs a subscription. I ended up choosing FoundryVTT. This eventually led me down a decision matrix that led to the writing of this blog post.
The first time I played D&D my brother, the Dungeon Master, did the math for me. Later, when I was ready to start serving as the dungeon master for my kids we had dndbeyond. The character creator on dndbeyond does a great job of bringing together information from across the Players Handbook into one easy to use location. Since the web app is doing the math for the player, it’s easy to select various different options and see how the changes ripple through the system and result in different bonuses to the characters. It wasn’t until late last year when I was getting ready for Tales of the Valiant that I had to do character creation manually. (Kobold press does not maintain an automated character creation app) It took a LOT longer (as does leveling up), but I think it’s worth doing it at least once. (If not making it your default)
Once the party was back on the ship after the events with the mermaids they let Hal know that dragonfire is needed to melt the adamantine on the star. Hal consults his charts and they head towards the Archipelago where Lux lives. The since the adventurers have the star, the Blackrift compass points towards them. Many Blackrift ships approach and they’re boarded. They fight a Far Elf Lunar Monk and 2 Link Acolytes. Before more enemies can board, Aurora arrives and incinerates the ship nearest them. They end the battle and Aurora lands on the deck of the ship.
The only constant in the universe is change and so of course I should come to tabletop roleplaying games right when there’s a big shift. Dungeons and Dragons 5e came out in 2014, but I didn’t know that when I picked it up about 2 years ago at the behest of my kids. And it was D&D instead of Pathfinder because that’s what my brother had introduced them to at Christmas the year before. As soon as I spend a bunch of money on the big three source books (Players Handbook, Monster Manual, and Dungeon Master’s Guide) they decide to revamp the game in 2024. Perhaps learning the (right? wrong?) lesson from D&D 3.5, they don’t christen this new version as 5.5e. The publisher, Wizards of the Coast, goes to great lengths to say that the game is both backwards and forwards compatible. That is, old adventures will work with new 2024 characters. New adventures (or at least recently published ones) will work with 2014 characters and monsters. Somehow in all that chaos I also found and became interested in Kobold Press’ Tales of the Valiant. Tales of the Valiant is a fork (in the free and open source sense of the word) of the 5e system. For now it remains highly compatible with D&D 2024. The forks may eventually diverge, making Tales of the Valiant the Pathfinder (which split off from D&D 3.5) of this generation. (The fork happened because of the OGL license scandal of 2023 when Wizards of the Coast attempted to change the terms of the deal. What I found interesting is that there was a certain feeling in the air - either among the players or the developers - that led to a lot of convergent evolution in both D&D 5.5e and ToV despite the ways in which they are different. (quick disclaimer to say that this isn’t a post about which is better or which you should play, just what I’ve noticed is different)
New Gamemaster Month continued this week by building on the idea of the encounter. Tuesday’s blog post defined an encounter and the homework was to read Homework to read Encounter and Spell Casting pages from Tales of the Valiant (pp221-245). Also read ch 1 of Guide to Labyrinth. (This gave me many new ideas for my Midgard campaign). Thursday’s blog post and homework were to think about the atmospherics of the encounters.
After dealing with the lich and the leviathan, the characters find themselves alone on the ocean. They sail on in the direction the compass directs. Eventually they reach a point where the compass is going in circles like it did when the leviathan was near. Everyone looks over the edge, but only Hazel and Amelia have the prior knowledge to recognize that they are above some merfolk architecture. They sail in the direction of the merfolk architecture, but are dragged a mile back by water elementals.
I honestly cannot remember what made me decide to check out Tales of the Valiant as an alternate 5e ruleset. But we decided to check it out and start our first Tales of the Valiant campaign. If I have my way, this will end up being our longest running campaign. Time will tell.
Character Introduction
Appaluna Harrietdaughter (Female Human Warlock)
Stats
Heritage: Vexed
Background: Courtier
28 years old
6 feet tall
Brown eyes and hair. Caucasian skin color.
Backstory
Appaluna was born to a noble family. She grew up in comfort, but was often bored and unhappy. When she was 20 she made a deal with an otherworldly creature. Some of the maids found out, and word got out that Appaluna had made a deal with the devil. Appaluna was cast out of the court in disgrace, and now works to try and earn enough money to buy her way back to nobility.
When we got to this trilogy, we had already played every other trilogy in the DnD Adventure Club world. We’d mostly, but not entirely, gone through the adventures in order. DnD Adventure Club provides some very awesome, simplified, pre-created character sheets. Back when we played the introductory adventure (which is referenced in this trilogy) the GM guidance was to have one or more of the players be an orphan raised by Baba (I don’t remember if it’s explicitly mentioned before this trilogy that this is Baba Yaga of Russia lore, but we figured it out at some point). The kids looked at the backstories of the characters they chose, and it didn’t really fit with any of them, but they chose to have Sasha (Scarlett’s character) have spent some time in the orphanage that Baba runs at the outskirts of the Tumbledowns.
As part of New Gamemaster month, I continued my prep work within FoundryVTT to be ready to host my game in February as the capstone project for class.
On Tuesday our homework was to learn the rules of Tales of the Valiant and watch the creators of Tov play the game. I learned a lot from watching the video, especially with how the GM often invited the players to contribute to their shared history rather than dictating it. I also enjoyed how the players would play along (“yes and”) if the players had their characters forget the name of their nemesis.
It wasn’t that long ago that I wrote a blog post reflecting on being the family dungeon master for the past year. So I’m going to try and avoid repeating too much of what I wrote there. At the time that I wrote it, I wasn’t considering making tabletop gaming one of the topics I reflect on at the end of the year. However, it has become a pretty large part of my leisure and it may continue to grow in the amount of my free time that it takes up. I think, for this year, I will divide my post according to campaign. We’ll see what makes sense next year.
This was our second non-kiddie Dungeons and Dragons 5e campaign after Humblewood. As it says on the tin, this is a very dungeon-focused adventure. I reviewed the first 3 adventures from the point of view of the Dungeon Master a while back. This is a session recap of the adventure as experienced by the players. If you’re not a DM, but someone who might play, there are spoilers below!
Note: we didn’t play in a VTT, I’m just using it to illustrate some key moments from each session.
As part of New Gamemaster month, I continued my prep work within FoundryVTT to be ready to host my game in February as the capstone project for class. Whether you’re on the main page of the blog or reading through an RSS reader, click through to see the YouTube videos of my session prep. (Walls & Lighting, Character Creator, and vanilla combat)
The organizers recommended practicing what you’ve learned by the end of the month by running a game. The second class was about selecting an adventure and finding players. Kobold Press recommended The Impregnable Fortress of Dibs as it’s short, fun, and is a great level one introductory adventure. For finding players they had a few recommendations, including the #LFG channel on their Discord server. (LFG stands for lookign for group) Finally, potential new GMs were supposed to read the introduction to the Players Guide. I’d read it before, but I re-read it to get it fresh in my mind.
Last year running the Humblewood campaign setting for my kids was the experience that really leveled up my skills as game master / dungeon master. I previously made a commentary post after the first session This post collects the session notes as well as my commentary on those session notes. Spoilers ahead if you plan to be a player in a Humblewood campaign (rather than GM/DM).
Session 1
Meadowfen
Player Character backstories
Minla
Minla was a normal Jerbeen in a big, happy family. Until a band of vulpin raiders came and, while plundering Minla’s family, killed her entire family.
Spend enough time on the internet, (especially /r/dnd or /r/dndbeyond) and you’ll come away feeling like TTRGPs are over, Wizards of the Coast is ruining your childhood, and a million other negative thoughts. But as I was watching the latest promotional video from Wizards of the Coast for the “2024” Monster Manual, I realized that the hobby is in the midst of a creative spurt. So I wanted to write this short post to share some joy as we start 2025.
Whenever I get the chance, I like to watch the Kobold Press YT series Kobold Chats. Kendo, the community manager for Kobold Press, goes over various tabletop RPG topics - usually revolving around Kobold press releases or blog posts from that week. Occasionally they do interviews with Kobold Press employees or with others in the TTRPG space (like someone from Roll20). Kendo has a very fun personality on the chats and it’s hard not to find myself grinning at his antics. This last week’s video (linked earlier) mentioned something I wish I’d known about last year - New Gamemaster Month, an annual event to increase the number of game masters (also sometimes called dungeon masters) by providing a month-long tutorial on the process. Last January I would have been about 6 months into my GM journey and could definitely have made use of the month. However, that doesn’t mean all is lost for me. Whenever I teach myself a new skill - programming, photography, TTRPGs, etc - I will usually eventually seek out a class if it interests me enough. I’m not sure how unique I am, but I find that whenever I’m self-taught I end up with gaps in my knowledge compared to learning in a class. ALSO, I’ve always found that if I’m learning any skill that isn’t TOO basic, I learn it much better the second time through. (Obviously, if it’s too basic, it would just be boring the second time through) So I’ll be participating in New Gamemaster Month this month. If I’ve piqued your interest, follow the prior link. There are a bunch of game companies participating and you can use one of their games to learn how to GM. As is often the case, most of the companies are small-to-midsize (ie Wizards of the Coast is not represented). The games represented are:
When DMing for my kids I used to always pick one of my dice sets for my DM rolls. Sometimes when we would play on dndbeyond we would take advantage of the ability to roll any amount of any dice. (or the fact that it would automatically roll extra dice if needed for an attack or spell) Then I read the 2024 version of the Wizards of the Coast Dungeon Master Guide…
Let’s take a look at the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar.
This batch of dice contains my favorite die, topping the candle die from day 12. It also confirmed that I’ll be getting 2 full Dice Envy sets. A Dice Envy Set has the usual 7 plus a chonky d20, an oversized d6 with the Dice Envy logo and an infinity d4 (those pill-shaped d4s that I already got 2 of).
I don’t have time tonight for the photo editing required for my Dice Envy advent calendar post, but I did have time to turn your attention to a couple professionals in the TTRPG space that have done some retrospectives on the year. They also happen to overlap with my 2024 a bit, which is what made me want to share them.
First up, game designer Richard Green shares his year in 2024 TTRPG gaming. Mr Green worked on the Labyrinth World Book for the Kobold Press kickstarter that I pledged to. I’m excited about the concept behind the campaign setting as described in the kickstarter. The titular Labyrinth not only ties together worlds created by Kobold Press, but they encourage DMs to also use this to tie into campaign settings from Wizards of the Coast (since ToV is currently pretty compatible with 2025 D&D 5e) or from any other publisher of D&D or ToV content. I know I already have some plans to have a lot of fun with my kids and the 5e Multiverse once this book comes out some time next year. (I’m also interested in his Parsantium world which is also now an official world in The Labyrinth)
Let’s take a look at the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar.
I thought that by not having to worry about solving the advent of code problems to write a post along with the dice I would be able to keep up with writing a post each day. Twas not to be as I’ve been incredibly busy at work recently.
Although the main sets are definitely the Elsa-blue and the glittery set, we had another of their neat pill d4s during this time period.
Let’s take a look at the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar.
There isn’t too much to say today that I haven’t already said while going through this dice Advent Calendar. It looks like the two main sets are the Elsa-blue and the yellow-which-photographs-green-glitter. (Hmm…need a better name). Today it’s a d4 for the former and a d6 for the latter.
Let’s take a look at the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar.
I got extremely busy with both work and my personal life, so I fell behind a bit. I also decided to drop Advent of Code from these posts (and from my life) as I can’t fit it in with the other things I’m busy with this month.
Today I did not attempt the advent of code problem. It involved solving a word search in which there could be overlapping words as well as, if I read it correctly, multiple words starting from the same place. I’m guessing it’s to be done with a depth-first or breadth-first search in which you kill off searches if you can’t continue. I know these sorts of problems present themselves every year, but I never have time to learn during the AoC period (with work, life, and Christmas in the way) and I never make it a priority to relearn (I was taught this back in undergrad). So rather than waste my time on something I know that I won’t know how to do, I’ll save it for another time - maybe when I’m taking time off closer to Christmas/New Years Day.
Time once again to review my Advent of Code solutions! Also the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar; scroll below the AoC code to see today’s die.
Advent of Code
As the years have piled on, Eric Wasl has thrown in references to past years’ problems. However, as of day 3 we now have 2 references (perhaps that’s what the historian story line is about). Day 02 had you visit the location of 2015 Day 19 and today visited the location of 2020 Day 2 (my first year doing Advent of Code!) The only thing I’m slightly worried about is if this signals that this year will be a grand finale for the annual event.
Time once again to review my Advent of Code solutions! Also the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar; scroll below the AoC code to see today’s die.
December has finally arrived and with it my favorite activity of the month - Advent of Code! I also wanted to give myself a fun little present this year, so I bought the Dice Envy Advent Calendar. Every day I’ll get a fun new die (or dice!). Scroll below the AoC code to see today’s die.
Advent of Code
Let’s start off with Advent of Code. This year I haven’t done any of the Advent of Code problems ahead of December so I was a bit rusty. One is not often using the same algorithms or libraries for Advent of Code as one does for everyday programming. I started off with Python since that’s my most comfortable language. First you can head over to today’s page to see the prompt. If you’re not solving the problems yourself, you won’t be able to see the prompt for part 2, so in summary:
When I first played D&D with David maybe 3 Christmases ago, one of the most baffling things for me to understand was my character sheet. Take a looka t the first page of Sam’s Dungeon in a Box character sheet:
Ignoring how busy this page is, one of the biggest design issues I see right away is that all of the trait boxes are incorrectly prioritized. I have seen people argue for completely eliminating the scores from the sheet because you don’t ever use those scores. Instead, you use the modifiers (the +# or -#). Yet on this sheet those numbers are teeny, tiny compared to the numbers that are functionally useless. (Except during character creation) I would otherwise say there’s not too much that’s bad about this page - it gives you the information you will need most often. The second page has information you might need to refer to so that you don’t need to keep referring to the Player’s Handbook (PHB)
I mentioned before that my kids have, so far, been more about the D&D fights than the roleplay. (It’s a generalization, as they do ocassionally get into the roleplay). But a couple weeks ago when we were doing our Humblewood week (we’re rotating through a few of our different campaigns) Sam really impressed me by getting into the head of his character. He had been charmed by one of the characters and the spell specified that he would not attack the charmer. He would only attack the other enemies. I said, “it’s as if you were friends with her.” After a couple more rounds of combat he looks up at me during his turn and he says, “If she’s my friend. I would want to heal her, wouldn’t I?” I thought about it and didn’t see any flaw to the logic. (I also wanted to reward the creativity) So I told him that made sense. His only healing spell required him to get much closer to the enemy who had charmed him so he used his turn to start moving in that direction. The fight had been going on for a bit so his sister realized this could lead to a pretty bad situation so she decided to use her turn to grapple him and keep him from healing the enemy.
In my reflections on a year of being the family DM I mentioned we started playing the Dungeon in a Box campaign Voyage of the Fallen Star. It’s a monthly subscription that provides a connected story that takes place over a year. I’ve finished DMing the first 3 adventures, so I wanted to talk aobut my impressions with the content so far.
Minis, Skinny Minis, and one of the Dungeon in a Box maps
As I was looking back over my old blog posts, searching for things that needed fixing in this migration over to the Hugo static site platform, I saw that I used to write brief blog posts about the Kickstarter campaigns I was backing. Since 2013 I’ve backed somewhere around 70 or more kickstarter campaigns. Since I usually don’t back anything that involves hardware, so far I haven’t had any of the campaigns disappear without giving me what I backed. Recently I realized I had backed an inordinate amount of D&D campaigns (I tend to fall pretty deep into hobbies). So I thought I might resurrect my Kickstarter posts to follow along with the D&D campaigns I’ve backed.
I can’t find the exact blog post, but some time in the last few months I had a throwaway line about how I was a little frustrated in how D&D’s digital assets were handled, particularly the fact that they are tied to platforms. That is to say, if I bought the 2024 Player’s Handbook on Roll20, I wouldn’t also have access to it on DnDBeyond. I think there are really 2 reasons this hasn’t blown up more: 1) many of the platforms only require the DM to purchase content (if it was required of all the players, I think there’d be a revolt) 2) D&D is still primarily an analog, pencil and paper game. That said, this issue has started to become a bit more relevant to me, so I wanted to get some ideas out there (and maybe vent a little).
About a year ago, I wrote a blog post about how my kids got themselves (and, by extension, me) into Dungeons and Dragons. I wanted to reflect on how far I’ve come since then and where I might go in the near future. Starting off with a quick recap of the linked blog post, my brother David had introduced the kids to D&D via Muk, a module for introducing your kids to D&D. Unfortunately, it was written for an experience adult D&D player or DM to DM for the kids, so we had a few fails with my first time as the DM. Then we moved on to DnD Adventure Club. That was, and continues to be, a huge hit with the kids.
Last weekend I decided to try the Humblewood D&D campaign setting with the kids. For the past year (give or take) we’ve had a lot of fun playing DnD Adventure Club campaigns. Our one major foray in to regular D&D, Dragons of Stormreck Isle, was a failure. I think there were a few reasons for that. First of all, I was fairly new to DMing and so probably not doing as good of a job as I am a year-ish later. Second, since it was a campaign meant to introduce people to both playing and DMing, it came with pre-made characters. I think that meant the kids had less of an attachment to the characters. Also, the session went very slowly as I had to go back and forth through the player handbook, monster manual, and campaign sheet to look up spells, monsters, etc.
This weekend we finished The Wild Trilogy from DnD Adventure Club. The first challenge involved sneaking around an Owlbear. The kids asked about their options and I noted that in addition to sneaking, they could try and distract it. Sam’s dwarf, Grumpy McGrumbles, has a cooking hobby, so he took hits pots and pans and made a bunch of noise so that the Owlbear would follow him around the camp.
After that there was a mini “dungeon” crawl in the basement beneath a wizard’s tower. The girls finally started to get the hang of investigating chambers rather than blindly setting off traps.
I’ve written a lot about DnD Adventure Club, including my lasttwo posts. Today while I was looking at the Pathfinder Humble Bundle, I went to the Pathfinder website to see if they had a page listing differences (since Pathfinder started as a fork of D&D 3.5). I found this page - Adventure Paths. It looks like they’re doing the same thing as DnD Adventure Club, except in Pathfinder 2e and without a kid focus. Also, it seems like each trilogy is building to a larger story (like Buffy the Vampire Slayer with its villain of the season, but also overarching story). It makes me wish that Wizards of the Coast (the Hasbro subsidiary that runs D&D) would do something similar - or if a 3rd party creator did it that it would be tightly coupled to D&D beyond. One advantage of WotC doing the mini-adventures is that they could use them to highlight different aspects of the mechanics or classes. I love that DnD Adventure Club comes with a new character each month with some example backstories. It really helps demonstrate the different races and classes. Also, upon further examination of the Pathfinder adventures I saw that each trilogy is written by a different person (creating opportunities to showcase new writers) and that (at least the one I clicked on) is tied to a campaign setting book. This is SO smart from a marketing point of view. “If you enjoyed your little trilogy in this corner of our world, you might enjoy learning more about it…” Yeah, WoTC should DEFINITELY look into this.
Scarlett was inspired by my previous post and made an animatic-style drawing of some of her favorite moments from the campaign.
The top panel is the party questioning the guards. (The ninja-looking character is Sasha, the character that Scarlett plays)
The next panel is Grumpy using intimidation to question a gnoll. The middle panel is the throwing of gnolls I referenced in my previous post. The last panel on that row depicts the characters examining someone who was shot mid-exposition.
I was DMing the first third of a DnD Adventure Club campaign for my kids today. My son likes to mostly play as Grumpy Mcgrumbles, a dwarven fighter. The kids were attacked by a group of Gnolls. Normally, most of the time, the kids play pretty straightforwardly although they are starting to get more creative. My son decided that since he’s a strong dwarf, he wanted to pick up the Gnolls and throw them into the river or into each other. I wanted to encourage the creativity, so I had him do an athletics check. Between his +7 and a series of lucky rolls, he ends up almost always successfully tossing the Gnolls and the kids and I erupted into fits of laughter as the battle became more and more chaotic. It was even funnier when he finally had a bad roll and so he just picked up the Gnoll and dropped him at his feet.
I’ve been backing a few different D&D 5e adventures on kickstarter, but the one I’m most excited about getting fulfillment on is Obojima: Tales from the Tall Grass. It’s so freakin’ beautiful that I had to hold myself back from getting the package that came with everything. But I’m not the only one excited bout it, I also read this article about it in Wired today. One of the points they make in the article is about how gamers and readers are moving away from Grimdark because there’s already enough of this in the world:
Two years ago, while spending time with my brothers, I played Dungeons and Dragons for the first time ever. David had been introduced to D&D by a coworker during COVID. Tony and Alex apparently had played in high school. I’m not sure when David’s wife started playing, but she joined us that night, too. David played the role of DM and selected a one-off campaign. I had a blast and couldn’t believe that I’d somehow gone most of my life without ever having had someone convince me to play. Incidentally, in our campaign, we accidentally murdered Santa Claus. Ask me about it some time.
First off, the production values on the audiobook are great! The main narrator does the many voices very well, especially Mickey7 and Marshall. The female narrator mostly narrates for a computer system. Chats have radio static behind them so that you know they are chats and not the narrator speaking to someone in person.
This series has really grown on me. It helps that the characters within have grown and now have a relationship based on a respectful working relationship. This book seems to have addressed most of the loose ends from the first two books. You learn a lot more about The Huntsman and a bit of Grimsby’s backstory. Mostly it’s a pretty straightforward mystery. As with many mystery books I’ve read there are two simultaneous storylines that had me wondering when they would intersect. One of them is a heist, although it thankfully avoids most of the annoying tropes - especially the crew assembly. Most of the crew is already pre-assembled and there was just need for one more. Like any good mystery, I saw some of the twists coming (the author had laid the bread crumbs) and others were just beyond my reach, but not out of left field.
This novella picks up a little before the end of the previous book. It deals with the main new consequence of that book. Therefore we get to have lots of time with one of my favorite characters - The Sea Witch! McGuire does a good job alternating between the abstinence of the the main character and McGuire using the Sea Witch’s power and might to move the story along. Definitely one of my favorite novellas in this series.
This book seems to answer most of the leftover questions at this point in the series. It also continues to spiral out consequences from October’s actions. If McGuire has one consistent theme for this series it’s that even the heroes trying to do their best have consequences that echo out that aren’t always positive. It’s one of those things that is much easier to do with a long-running series. There have been a few books (especially in the last five years) that explore the afterlife of being The Hero. Some of them are funny, some are more serious, and some are cozy. But with a series we get to see things spiral out from the inciting incident. And some of these consequences spiral into other consequences causing further complications.
My rating: [4 of 5 stars][https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/160777971]
This is my second time reading this book
Although by this point in my first read-through I was already a fan of Sam Vimes, this second read-through is definitely cementing the idea. Most of these are essentially fantasy police procedurals and, although we have Colon and Nobby for humor, these are the stories I believe that Pratchett took most seriously. The plot are full of less silliness and have aged better on this second time around.
It’s been mentioned a few times, but things were left in an unfinished state at the end of the second book. This novella, from April’s point of view, finally finishes things. McGuire does a good job portraying April’s alien state of mind as the world’s only Cyber Dryad. This seems to be one of the short stories/novellas that’s definite worth reading in publication order.
Up until now we’ve barely seen much of Amandine the Liar. We know that she is considered spoiled by The Ludiaeg and that Winterrose looks down at her. Toby’s relationship and desires to know her have changed as Toby has learned more about who she truly is and what her mother did to her (psychologically and physically). Well, she makes an appearance here and we realize that Toby is lucky she has not been too involved before.
It was pretty clear to me as soon as Toby and gang developed a cure for Elf Shot that it was going to cause a huge problem with the balance of power. I don’t know how true it is, but it’s accepted knowledge that the USA and USSR having nuclear weapons throughout the cold war prevented large scale war. (There were plenty of wars, but most of them were civil wars that the USA and/or USSR gave support to - or participated in) In the same way, removal of the ability to simply send your rivals to sleep for a while would definitely cause problems.
What I really liked about this book: At the end we got a bunch of POV chapters, not just Rierson.
What I really hated about this book: The use of the trope where if people will just take time to talk to each other instead of being cryptic (or following up if things are busy) then things would go better for the protagonists. I know sometimes we need certain tropes “so the plot can happen!” (to paraphrase Pitch Meeting YT) but this one is just SO annoying and seems the most unlike real life. If something is that important - like lives on the line important - then you keep following up.
A fun short story that shows us how Patrick and Dianda met. As far as I can tell, it’s completely optional - nothing key learned - but it’s a ton of fun.
This one’s a bit longer than most of the other short stories. It’s great to get into Quentin’s head, given what we learned in recent books. It also helps explain why, after the adventure with Arden, his parents didn’t immediately recall him. It’s also fun to see how Quentin sees the others.
Since the previous book ended the first cycle, this one doesn’t move to answer a few of the remaining mysteries - what will the night haunts want in return? Where is August? Where is Amy? Will October and Sylvester reconcile? But this book does tie off one loose end from the last cycle as things move to Portland, OR for this book.
I think the Tybalt-based short stories are my favorites. I love when McGuire writes from his point of view. In fact, for all the short stories, while it’s nice to get more backstory on the October Daye universe, what I love most is getting to be in the headspace of different characters.
This short story takes place before anything else in the timeline (at least so far). It explains a lot, but should definitely not be read until this point in the narrative (that is, don’t read it until after October Daye #8).
If it sets up any new plot points, I couldn’t see them, but it does provide backstories for a few of the histories we’ve heard until now. SO FAR, of all the short stories this one seems the most skippable. We’ll see if time proves me wrong.
Seanan McGuire mentions that this book is what all the previous books have been working towards. I believe McGuire. This book truly does feel like the end of an era for Toby. Almost every single plot from the first book to the last one is touched upon as we finally (FINALLY) start getting answers about Toby’s life and why all the fae in her life act the way they do towards her. Of course, it’s an October Daye book so triumph comes with tragedy, pain, and sadness.
Marketing is often lies or half-truths dressed up to try and trick our stupid animal brains - pushing past our rationality. I’m happy to report that in this case, the marketing was, in my humble opinion, not a lie. We were told that this was a new, useful Dungeon Master’s Guide - more useful than the 2014 guide. I found this to be true. I don’t think I’ve re-opened the 2014 DMG since first reading it. It was really structured as a reference book or manual. The 2024 DMG is full of very useful information.<
We saw bits of this in the last full book and now we get to see the whole scene. This is much shorter than other short stories so far, definitely worth reading, because I think it’s probably going to be important for the setup going forward.
Another short story about Tybalt’s past. It picks up a while after the last short story. We learn yet another bit about what things were like for him and why he acts the way he does with October Daye. It also builds on what we’ve learned about Selkies in both mainline book One Salt Sea and short story In Sea-Salt Tears. So, definitely read those first if you want to get the most out of this short story.
The previous entry in the series introduced us to the dangers of Goblin Fruit. It’s an intoxicant that blisses out purebloods, but leaves changelings and humans dangerously addicted (even after only one taste) until they die. This book is about October dealing with that threat to the non-pureblooded community in the San Francisco area. It quickly spirals out from there because, of course it does when October Daye is involved.
McGuire makes use of all we’ve learned about the fae and all the characters we’ve met to produce a great bit of detective fiction here. We also get some character growth for October. That’s always a great thing in a long-running series to keep it from getting boring.
I don’t want to ruin the plot so I’ll keep this short, but a couple little random notes:
There’s a reason Seanan McGuire has stated that their preference for the reading order is published order. This story takes place before any of the other mainline books thus far, but it would be a spoiler for book 5 to read it before then.
McGuire knows how to write tragedy - it’s evident in the October Daye books and the Wayward children series. The world is an unforgiving place and the same is true in her books. They aren’t good books to escape the brutality of the world. But they ARE good books to empathize and sympathize with others who may be going through similar problems as you are. She writes universal themes through a fantasy lens and really brings the emotional response out of the reader.
The latest Wayward Children book gives us Nadya’s backstory. She was mostly a secondary character in the main series, but since she did get an ending in a prior book, it was nice to see her backstory. Well, I say “nice”, but as usual these stories are emotional roller coasters. Most kids don’t find a door if everything is perfectly awesome in their lives. As usual McGuire has cutting insight into the ways that adults can be cruel to children, often without realizing it.
The Men Who Change the World (Christopher East) - this story gives me serious “Severance” vibes, but it was written before that show came out. I think there was something in the air they were both tapping into.
All Together, Now (Jason Hough and Ramez Naam) - even though we know where the story is headed, it still managed to surprise me in the final paragraph. Because humanity doesn’t change, this remains so relevant today as so many civilians die to try and kill a small enemy
At the end of 2023 I had 3283 ebooks and magazines (a change of 234 - a similar gain to last year’s 256). Of those, 2636 were unread (an increase of about 200). I continued to get free issues of The MagPi (Raspberry Pi official magazine) and Hackspace Magazine. Tor.com pulled back on their free ebooks this year. However, Scarlett bought lots of books and I keep all the family’s books together in the same library. At the end of 2024 I had 222 audiobooks (an increase of 25 from last year).
Just like the Dresden Files (which it my nearest comparison point to this genre), this series does not seem to be read as a series of standalone mysteries a la Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew (or the adult equivalent). This book is full of details that are building on the details from the last two books. This is a series that happens to have an investigator as the protagonist.
It’s been a while since I posted a book review on here and rather than have a whole bunch of book review posts, I thought I’d collect the most recent ones into this post.
I listened to the audiobook, so, in all likelihood, I’m going to mispell everyone’s names
As I said with the first entry in this series, Yarros does a great job writing a compelling fantasy story. The romance is there, but it’s not what brings me into the story. We’ll get back to that momentarily. The best thing I could say about novel is that when I got to the end, I was upset that I have to wait until some time next year to continue the story. Yarros gives us a complete story (well, 2 of them - more on that as well) and does leave us with quite a compelling reason to come back, but even without the events of the last chapter, I would be there for the aftermath of the macro events of this book. If you need another reason to get into this book before I get to the details - there were multiple moments where Yarros had me reacting strongly to events in the book - like the precursor feeling to crying. Usually this involved Violet’s squad mates, but the penultimate chapter (not including Xaden’s epilogue) with the Sorengale family - I almost had to pull off the road for a moment.
When I saw that this book topped the lists for most checked out book in 2023 in multiple library systems my curiosity was piqued. But it was this episode of Our Opinions are Correct that pushed me over the edge into getting this book. Boy am I glad I did!
How to describe this book? One of my thoughts was Ender’s game meets Harry Potter, but with college kids. But then I cam up with a better comparison: RF Kuang’s Poppy War Trilogy (first book: The Poppy WarThe Poppy War, but with Western settings. Is it dark academia? I’m not sure. I was a kickstarter funder for a few dark academia anthologies, but haven’t read them yet. No matter how it’s classified, it does (eventually) have some really graphic sex. Like, the beginning of the book has a warning about all the violence and how graphic the sex is. I think if you’ve read a romance book before, it’s probably nothing you haven’t heard before. But if you’re used to the usual sex scenes in SFF, this is quite a bit more.
This book is the definition of a niche product. The only people I think would enjoy this are the intersection in the Venn diagram of D&D fans and Rick and Morty fans. I know I’ve been watching Rick and Morty since the first season and I can’t imagine that I would find this collection if my kids hadn’t gotten me into D&D a year or so ago. Almost all of the humor comes from D&D jokes and Easter Eggs.
Valerie Valdes continues the Gen X/Millenial pastiche that the Chilling Effect in this third, and final, entry.
A few of the references across the trilogy:
- Voltron
- Portal (from previous books)
- Smash Bros (crash sisters)
- Death Star-like weapon
- Solid snake reference?
- Transformers
- Pokemon (in previous books)
-Captain Planet
Sometimes the references are just in the chapter titles and other times they are important plot points. The insane thing is that this WORKS for three whole books! You may or may not shake your head, but this doesn’t feel like Mel Brooks’ Spaceballs. This feels like a real, cohesive universe. It’s not jokey (although it’s not overly dramatic). I don’t know how Valdes pulled this off.
Science Fiction
———————
The Concubine’s Heart (Matthew Bright) - I could not even Begin to predict the turn the story would take. It was quite a fascinating story. I wonder at the culture (a sort of sci-fi Chinese culture) that would lead to the events in the story. Very well done.
Her Appetite, His Heart (Dominica Phetteplace) - a continuation of the world we first saw in “One Thousand Beetles in a Jumpsuit” back in Lightspeed #111. Interestingly, most of the story is a character study and it’s not until the end of the story where we see the consequences of the events of the previous story.
I’m usually not a fan of the middle books in planned trilogies. They often can’t resolve anything because most trilogies are just one gigantic book split into three. While that’s also somewhat true in this book, McClellan has done a great job giving us a mini try/fail cycle that makes this book pretty satisfying on its own. We learn a TON about Ka-Poel. There’s also a good amount of character growth for Vlora and Ben Styke.
Just to get my one issue out of the way - this trilogy is really just one giant book broken in 3. This book doesn’t really have a resolution at the end. In a strict technical sense, at least one of the storylines finishes up.
I really enjoyed this return to the world of Powder Mages, Privileged, and Knacked. We have the return of one of my favorite characters, Olem, as well as Vlora. Since the last series they’ve gone mercenary and for their storyline we follow as they have to deal with the missions they’re hired for. Just like the previous series we also have a couple more storylines that will eventually link up. One of them involves Michel, a member of the Blackhats - a gestapo-style police/intelligence force in Fatrasta. The other storyline is about Ben Styke. I don’t remember if we saw him in the previous series since people later bring up that he worked with Taniel Two-Shot.
Murderbot continues to be awesome. As with most mysteries, there isn’t too much to say that won’t end up being a spoiler. Muderbot continues to grow as a character while also not losing that which makes Murderbot such a delight to read. It’s similar to the way I feel about the alien character in Resident Alien.
I could potentially see a long life for the TV show as a mystery-of-the-week show that leaves the novels and novellas in the series behind after the first season.
I stayed up way too late last night reading. Today I took advantage of the fact that it was raining all day long to sit on the couch with a few cups of tea to finish the book. As I finished I recognized that this was both Seanan McGuire’s masterpiece and probably the book most likely to divide her readers. I doubt there’s anyone who feels “meh” about this book. I think it’s one where you love or hate it.
Our favorite Cuban spaceship captain is back and I enjoyed it even more than the first book. Now that Eva is her new self and knows there isn’t any more lying to her crew, they can move on to more fun adventures. This book is essentially one long quest to find a specific person and Eva and crew’s attempts to figure out where that person is.
I would probably more accurately rate this book as 4.5, but I decided to round up.
Yang does a perfect job in this novella creating just enough history for the world that we feel as though it’s gone on forever. It’s mostly focused on the two main characters, Mokoyo and Akeha, and yet there is so much happening in the background that we learn just enough about. I see it almost as a template for what the time between Sanderson’s Mistborn Era 2 and Era 3 might be like. In this story the world, which seems like a second-world Indonesia (lots of Chinese and Indian infuence), runs on magic-based devices. Only the government Tensors can create these devices and from there comes some of the government’s source of power - the monopoly on technology. In this novella (which spans 35 or so years) a faction grows that begins to invent science-based machines. All of this is fascinating, yet in so many ways it has nothing to do with plot propelling our story.
I’m not going to waste time looking it up, but I believe this was SMBC’s first collection. So Weinersmith (or whoever didn’t the formatting) hadn’t figured out the formatting. In order to save space, the comics are all over the place instead of one per page. This isn’t horrible, but it does mean there’s a little extra time to think about each page and see whether this is one large comic (as is sometimes the case) or a bunch of smaller ones.
The intro mentions the natural language nature of Javascript. I wonder if the book had been concieved a few years later if it would rather have been Python or Ruby - both of which are way more like human language than Javascript.
The book is fun and I mostly get it, but to truly get what the author is doing here, I think you would need to be a Javascript dev. The whole point is that the author is nerding out not only on the writing style of the authors they have chosen, but also converting that into Javascript coding styles. As someone who programmed in many languages, but hasn’t touched Javasscript in the the mid-90s, a lot of the elegance of this book is lost on me.
This book is a refinement of many topics that Doctorow has broached in the past:
- uploading of consciounesses/backups and how that changes things
- living in Capitalism vs leaving capitalism behind
- the violence often used to maintain compliance, even in non-totalitarian countries
- contractors involved in the above-mentioned violence inherent in the system
Description in one line? Cowboy Bebop meets Mass Effect with a Cuban protagonist.
I grew up in Miami, Florida so having a main character speak in “spanglish” brings me back to my childhood. The narrator also nails the voice of our main character, Eva. Overall, the narrator does a good job distinguishing the voices of all the main characters although a character we meet near the end - think this book’s version of the Ed character from Cowboy Bebop - doesn’t get an original enough of a voice to distinguish her in a few scenes.
This book is a companion to Maangchi’s youtube channel. It teaches you how to cook the way she cooks. So it’s authentic to her even if it’s not what you’re used to from Korean BBQ. The recipes are a good jumping off point to tweak the flavors to match what you prefer.
I’m generally a fan of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (the source of these comics) and even though I would identify myself as a Christian, I’m not one of those easily-offended, book-banning types. I found lots of the jokes in here funny, even the ones a more self-serious person would find blasphemous. But all collected together, some of the jokes get a bit repetitious. There are several “why do good things happen to bad people” comics, a few “are you in heaven or in hell?” comics, and at least 2 “do animals go to heaven” comics. Weinersmith does also find some humor in Zen Buddhism, but even some of those are repetitious in theme. I think, really, it’s more the case that there aren’t really enough jokes to tell about religion to create a whole book without repeating yourself. (Even my review is starting to repeat itself!)
I got this for free from the Kindle First (or whatever it’s called now) program where Amazon Prime members get a free book each month.
It’s been a while since I disliked a book a much as I disliked this one. I kept reading in hopes of redemption because that has happened once or twice. But, alas, it was not meant to be.
This is my second time reading the book. I lowered the rating from 5 to 4 stars mostly because 5 stars is “it was amazing” and 4 stars is “really liked it” so that’s a more honest assessment.
This is a book that I remembered fondly and, thankfully, the re-read did not reveal that the book had been visited by the Suck Fairy. In fact, I found it a bit more clever than I remembered. I still remembered the big twist - it’s a bit too big to forget, but I had forgotten how it was revealed.
The Cut Cares Not for the Flesh (George Sandison) - It was foreshadowed from the first paragraphs, but if one finds themselves in a horror story, it pays to read the contractual fine-print. I’ve read stories in a similar genre before, but I love the way this one focused more on the characters than the mechanisms behind the magic. Also, some interesting gender dynamics on this one.
This book is definitely more political than the last non-fiction book I read, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, but that makes sense. The author’s entire thesis is not so much about butts in the abstract, but more specifically the female butt. As part of that explanation she also considers how the butt was used as one dimension across which to define the differences between European and African bodies. Since race as a concept is itself political (more or less emerging in the Age of Exploration), this causes the book to be more political. This isn’t a knock against it or for it. It just means it’s going to be a bit more contentious and, at times, opinionated than Eve, which was simply talking about science and how our bodies evolved.
Another great issue of Lightspeed Magazine. There was only one story I wasn’t a fan of.
Science Fiction
---——–
The Beasts We Want to Be (Sam J. Miller) - a historical SF set in Russia after the communist revolution. The SF is almost incidental to the story, merely a way to explore the ideas behind the way humans act under different regimes and how much is conditioned vs free will.
I loved listening to this book. The author (also the narrator) does an incredible job taking a look at every difference between male and female bodies and explaining the current scientific knowledge about when and why these differences came about. Bohannon tackles some of the current received wisdom and explains ways in which these hypothesis fall apart. Usually the culprit is folks taking our current situation and trying to explain back rather than going in the actual direction of evolution.
Just like Scalzi’s previous book, The Kaiju Preservation Society, this one is a real popcorn book. It’s also got a pretty silly movie-inspired premise and I consider them to be in a meta series.
As the book blurb says, our protagonist inherits his Uncle’s villainy business (think Dr Evil and Scott in Austin Powers). Because Scalzi has good writing chops, this turns out to actually be a pretty neat story and not one overly long joke. Just like The Kaiju Preservation Society I feel like this story ends just as it’s really getting started. In a way, both of these books have the feel of a short story with the length of a novel. It’s the only real criticism I have and the biggest reason for just 4 stars.
this is my second time reading the book. The rating remains 4/5 stars.
I didn’t remember liking this book so much given the fact that I’m not much of a fan of time loops, at least, not since I got use to the idea. (I remember thinking the Terminator/Terminator 2 time loop was pretty neat) But, as in the best of Pratchett’s books, this one only incidentally has the time loop to set the plot in motion. It’s really a character study about Samuel Vimes. By this point Pratchett has been building him up and getting the audience to really understand how he works. This book puts it all to the test by asking him to make some impossible choices.
A neat collection of short stories that take place in the world of the Temeriare series. Some of them are simultaneous with the series and some take place afterwards. It’s a fun little reunion with our friends from the last 9 books.
Volley’s Cow: Almost microfiction length short story in which we find out a bit more about how the draconic parliamentary participation is going.
A perfect ending to the Temeriare series. There’s finally an ending to the Napoleonic threat - I won’t say whether it follows the same trajectory as in our world. But, more importantly, we finally begin to see dragons finally understand their place in society. Novik intelligently began the series with Laurence the son of an abolitionist and made it clear that if the dragons were indeed sentient, that they had a parallel claim to recognition. Without spoiling what happens in this book, I’m delighted to have seen Perscitia’s role in things.
Since this novella only just came out on Tuesday (a few days ago), I’m going to be very careful about any spoilers other than what can easily be inferred from the back of the book description.
McGuire has formed a main clique from the student body at Eleanor’s School For Wayward Children who have been the main characters since the first book (with a few exceptions). Once again we follow the clique as they disregard the No Quests rule. I think this book serves as a satisfying sequel to the main Antsy. It also reveals more about the backstories of Eleanor and Kade that seem to be setting up a final climax. I don’t know if McGuire has stated elsewhere if the series will end at 10 books, but if it does, I expect it will at least hinge on Eleanor’s story. If I had to make predictions, it would probably also involve resolving the story set up when we finally saw the inside of the Whitehorn Institute, but McGuire likes to keep things complex. If you look back over the series, not every protagonist has gotten a happy ending. And even some of the supposed happy endings may be “happiest possible” rather than simply happy - think of the Woolcott Twins.
This is my second time reading this book. I left the rating at 3/5
I debated dropping the rating to 2 stars (“It was OK”), but Lu-Tze was enough to keep it at 3 stars. I am not sure if we learned his name back then, but I think we’re meant to associate him with the person who nudged Brutha in Small Gods. (Or maybe it was explicitly stated, but while reading a few books at once and stretching this one out over months, I’ve forgotten) He’s definitely in Night Watch, so Pratchett had fun with the character.
Even though AI has been a constant subject in science fiction for nearly 100 years now, it’s interesting reading the two AI-related stories in the 2023, the year of ChatGPT. Although ChatGPT is still far away from general AI, the trope seems to be closer than ever to becoming a reality and so makes reading these stories feel a little different.
Oh, Temeriaire, you sweet summer child-dragon (to mix together 2 vastly different dragon-containing series). Yes, you’re learning, but you still are way too optimistic about people, dragons, and battles.
This was one of the better Temeriare novels, although so far they’ve all been at least “good”. It started a bit rough. I thought this was going to be like the entry in the series where we start off with Temeriare in the breeding grounds and Laurence on a ship. But Novik has already put us through that wringer, so it was only a short portion of the book and which introduced us to the Japanese dragons. Here Novik leans on the asian association of dragons with water and so we get river and ocean dragons. The society seems halfway between the Chinese and South American dragon situation. They are revered, but aren’t necessarily living among the populace.
By the end of 2023 I had 3049 ebooks and magazines (a change of 256 - pretty even with last year). Of those, 2434 were unread. Some chunk of those - maybe as much as ¼ were giveaways like Raspberry Pi Magazine, HackSpace Magazine, and Tor.com book club freebies. I stopped getting the monthly free Prime books since I no longer have a way to liberate them. I ended the year with 197 audiobooks (a change of 53). A lot of those were for Danielle - more on that later.
This issue was one in which I enjoyed all of the stories very much.
Science Fiction
One Thousand Beetles in a Jumpsuit (Dominica Phetteplace) - a dystopian story taking place “20 Minutes in the Future” that seems to me to be even more likely now than it was 4 years ago when this story was published. That said, I really enjoyed our protagonist and the story overall. I had originally written that I wanted to see more stories in this setting, but on reading the author interview I saw that they have another one coming up in a future issues of Lightspeed.
What is this book? It’s a love-letter to science fiction nerds. It shares narrative bits with Jurassic Park. It’s a reminder of how disruptive 2020 was in every day.
I had a lot of fun with this story. I think the only criticism (which is kind of a hidden praise) is that I felt it ended too quickly. We learned the premise and the world and then the climax came and it was all over. I think it may be that, as can be the case with a short story or novella, that the house of cards would have come crashing down if the story went on too much longer. There was a lot of “don’t think about it” hand-wavy things in the setup and maybe they wouldn’t survive strict scrutiny. Scalzi said he created a pop song of a novel and he’s not wrong. He also created a bit of a time capsule of a crazy time that most of the creative world is pretending didn’t happen.
When we last left Laurence and Temeriare, they were in Australia, contemplating retirement. This book has them dragged back in because Napoleon continues to scheme. Thanks to the deviation from our history in which Africa has been wrested from colonialism, Napoleon makes a deal with the largest “country” on the continent to provide them with transportation to South America to try and get back/get revenge for their family and ancestors recently sold into slavery. As a bonus, this means they harass Brazil and give Napoleon the chance to take a distracted Portugal, leaving Britain without allies.
I’m not a horror person - I got this to listen to with my wife on a car trip. She calls the book Baby-Dexter. She’s not wrong. I think the book fits in a very interesting intersection. It’s (in my opinion) a little gruesome for YA being in John’s head and reading his sociopathic thoughts. But because it’s YA it’s also pretty tame with some of the horror elements. Also, the first twist about the nature of the killer (it’s not on the GR description, but it’s on some other descriptions - including the movie based on it) somewhat absolves John of some of his inner tension - at least that’s how my wife and I felt. That is to say, based on the nature of the killer, some of what John is debating seems moot. (And that continues with his antagonists at least through book 3, according to my wife)
(a reminder that I use the star rating tooltips on the goodreads site. 3 stars = “I liked it”.)
Butcher, the son, is back with another entry in The Unorthodox Chronicles. Book 1 was a buddy-cop plot. We’re back with the same characters and, roughly, dealing with the consequences of the first book. I say roughly because JJB seems to be copying his dad in that there is a greater over-arching plot - or at the very least not every plot point from the last book or this book is resolved. It also doesn’t seem that each book will be standalone. In light of that, it was annoying, and cost the book a star - that our protagonists had backslid a bit. That might be more realistic, vs a linear progression, but with only 2 books out, it seems to waste enough of a chunk of this book getting the characters back to where they were at the end of the last book.
Just like the Africa book, this one is a lot of just passing the time without much happening. Then in the last few chapters we get a bunch of bombshells about how the world continues to differ from ours because of the the dragons equalizing things between the colonies and colonizers (or would-be colonizers). The epilogue seems Mr. Laurence finally come a bit unmoored from society - something that has been about 2.5 books in the making. It presents a very interesting position for the protagonists of our series over the final 3 books in the series. I’m very curious to see where Novik means to take us.
What is Eve? (Will McIntosh) - Will does a great job with the story. The reader can probably guess the general direction of the story, but it’s the details that make it shine. I think he also does a good job with the voice of a middle school kid.
Webs (Mary Anne Mohanraj) - Starts off with what seems like a metaphor for being trans and then it adds on a straight story of being trans on top of the metaphor. It’s unfortunately how perennial the issue is that this was written years ago and yet feels fresh now.
The Elephants’ Crematorium (Timothy Mudie) - we’ve seen a few movies/books/etc with a plot in which something ending the cycle of life. This one increases the stakes by considering other animals as well. I found the narrative very emotionally affecting.
Mozart on the Kalahari (Steven Barnes) - I’ve heard expressions similar to the title of this short story. The “moral”, as such, of the story is one we would do well to get more people to think about.
I found this book to be a nice change of pace from book 4. It was more exciting and moved the plot along quite a bit. We’ve had the dragon suffrage plot as a Chekov’s Gun since around the first book and we finally started to get some movement on that in this book. Additionally, we see the consequences of the actions at the end of the last book. It was very interesting seeing Laurence’s actions and how they are constrained by his culture. I think a modern protagonist would have reacted very, very differently to the situation he finds himself in. In a way, it’s similar to the reason that I enjoy the Imperial Radch books - it’s a sci-fi version of an honor-bound English culture.
I have come to the realization that what I enjoy in this series is similar to what I enjoy in Anne Leckie’s Imperial Radch series - I enjoy the formality of the systems that govern the main character’s lives. I wouldn’t want to live in such a rigid society, but I enjoy how the authors play with the difference in how we would respond to the situation vs these protagonists who are bound by their society and not as free as we are to choose their actions.
I was not familiar with the original ( The Island of Doctor Moreau Illustrated), but my wife tells me the plot is fairly similar (based on her recollection of the Marlon Brando movie). What we get out of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s retelling is a recontextualization that explains a bit more about the intersection of capitalism and Dr. Moreau’s research. The doctor needs funding for what we would today call genetic engineering as well as for his living expenses since he wants to dedicate himself to his research. Moreno-Garcia places the story in the late 1800s in Mexico when Mayans were rebelling against the indentured servitude ( and in some cases outright slavery ) they had been subject to since The Conquest. So the doctor is able to get money for his hybrid research on the promise that he will provide workers that are even better than humans (for their animal traits) and which do not have any rights whatsoever for being animals. For, while the 1800s does have “science” behind the idea of the white race being superior, there is still some call for ending slavery for non-Whites still being humans (even if lesser humans).
As a cookbook this one is fascinating. It will not be a huge surprise to those who have read Reinhart’s other bread books, but the first half of the book is entirely prose. Reinhart takes us on a journey through America to Italy and back as he explores the types of pizzas. This is not just self-indulgence and it doesn’t just help the reader believe that Reinhart knows what he’s talking about. It also serves to educate us on the origins of pizza and to understand that the pizzas we may have grown up eating are not the only way for pizza to be.
This is a good book that I want everyone to read so they understand why the tech is so broken right now. At the same time I think it’s hampered by the very forces it talks about. That is to say, unlike a protagonist from a Doctorow fiction novel, there isn’t any form of civil disobedience offered within the book. Instead, it depends on a bunch of things that will never happen:
This book is the most Cosmere book of the year. Both Tress of the Emerald Sea and Yumi and the Nightmare Painter were basically standalone stories that happened to have Hoid in them. The ending of Tress is slightly inscrutable if you don’t know The Cosmere, but it mostly work. I’m pretty sure 99% of Yumi works without any knowledge of the Cosmere. This book, on the other hand, is comprehensible without Cosmere knowledge, but a lot of the main character’s thoughts and motivations won’t make any sense.
This is Hickman at his most Hickman. There are repeated timelines, conspiracies, and a semi-non-linear story that goes out 1000 years from the time of the first book. It’s more sci-fi than a typical X-Men book. It’s also, almost 100% setup. Interestingly, I heard this is just phase 1/3 and Marvel hasn’t even begun phase 2 yet. (COVID and other stuff got in the way, I think)
A popular science book about emerging technologies. I’m not sure if it’s because Kelly Weinersmith is actually a scientist, but they do a good job probing potential downsides to each of the technologies. Zach provides cartoons (in the style of his Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic) and some humor in the explanations of the technologies.
And so it appears we have finished the most recent Arc of the Dresden files. We tied together everything that has come before and just like the previously named book Changes this one changes a whole bunch. We’ve now left the world as it exists to us (the readers) to a new world that’s split off into its own timeline where there was a confrontation with supernatural creatures.
Overall, these stories are more relevant to the main storyline than the Brief Cases stories were. Definitely recommend reading where it takes place in the timeline.
A Fistful of Warlocks - Lots of fun with wizards in the wild West. Would like to see Butcher do as he says he wants and set more stories in this part of the Dresden timeline.
What a way to end a book. Thank goodness I’m reading this when book 17 is already out. That said, I’m not sure the next book isn’t going to have a cliff-hanger based on what’s supposed to happen in that book.
In these reviews I’ve been talking about overarching plot arcs. This appears to be the penultimate story before the third arch finishes. Afterwards, if Butcher maintains his original plot pace - we’ve got about 3 more books worth of setup leading to a trilogy that is all climax. (Total of 23 books)
Putting aside any feelings you, dear reader, may have about Rick and Morty - I have to say that their episode parodying heists had ruined me any time I come across a heist in any narrative media. That’s right, folks - Harry Dresden is going to be part of a heist!
The plot is mostly a lot of fun. It does continue a few plot threads, including closing one out from the book my wife just finished - I think she’s on book 10). There isn’t too much to say without spoiling the story, but I enjoyed the crew assembly. It was interesting to see their interactions as the plot went on. Butcher is also having fun with the tropes, even having Harry call the item they’re after The MacGuffin.
I won’t know until the next book, but this one seems like the end or Arc 2. We finally learn what was happening with a bunch of loose plot threads. We learn why Rashid has the title he has. Harry and a bunch of his relationships level up to the next level.
Butcher does a good job balancing the overarching book with a more traditional detective plot as Harry has a problem (or 3) to figure out in order to make the right choice at the end. Also, and I’ve been saying this for a few books now - this book REALLY benefits from a reader having read the short stories that take place before this one.
Reinhart brings his expertise to the topic of whole grain breads. He’s been a champion of these healthier breads for a while, but here he bring his latest knowledge to bear to create tastier whole wheat and whole grain bread.
I’ve made 2 recipes from this book so far - the whole grain naan and the 100% whole wheat sandwich bread. The naan was great. I had no idea that whole grain naan could taste so good. The whole wheat sandwich bread tasted good, but I made some kind of mistake with the shaping and it ended up with a part in the middle of the bread that would easily rip.
The ending of this story saved it from being 2 stars in my estimation. I’d been telling lots of people that I viewed books 1-6 or 7 as the first arc of The Dresden Files. By the end of those books you’ve met all the main characters (both protagonist and antagonist). Book 7 or 8 until Changes was clearly the second arc. All the chickens were coming home to roost. Each story seemed to be building up on all the chaos that Harry had sewed throughout Chicago and the Never Never. This book can almost be read as an epilogue to the second arc.
“Restoration of Faith” - for all Butcher’s disclaimer that this is amateur hour, it still reads rather well. Enjoyable story with a sort of proto-Harry.
“Vignette” - a fun bit of flash fiction. The only thing that felt weird was Bob seeming a bit meaner than usual.
“Something Borrowed” – from My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding - Fun to see the wedding and how things were able to go awry as a consequence of the fight with the Sindhe.
Changes, the title promises us, and changes we do get. As I was reading the story, I told my wife, I think this is the close of another grand story arc. She’s at about book 6, which I considered the be the first arc where Butcher finally finishes introducing us to the key players in the story.
I half predicted the climactic plot twist, but I couldn’t have predicted where that would lead. I certainly did not predict the end of the book. That said, I wonder if Butcher did it because he’d painted himself into a corner with a previous book and wanted to rid Harry of a certain sword of Damocles hanging above his head.
I was wondering what happened to the novellas in the newer issues - editorial in this issue answers the question - they were taking longer short stories and felt the novella section was redundant.
Science Fiction
—
The Null Space conundrum (Violet Allen) - reminds me a lot of the type of story that Charlie Jane Anders would write. Somewhat nonsensical with an irreverent narrator.
This book combines the two types of Dresden novels into one. It’s both a story concerned with the overarching Dresden plot and a typical detective case. As the back of the book blurb says, this time it’s Morgan (Dresden’s nemesis on the White Council) who “hires” Harry to clear him of murder charges. Doing so brings together plot points from previous books (going as far back as Summer Knight) and gets us to resolve the first climactic part of the story Butcher has been telling over these past 11 novels.
This entry in The Dresden Files was a real page-turner. I couldn’t stop myself from continually telling myself “just one more chapter”. Once the plot kicked off, it was kinetic the whole time. This one was once again departure from the case structure. Instead it’s like a lot of the previous books (except 9) where we’re just dealing with the consequences of all the prior books. We’ve got the fey, the knights of the cross, Marcone and his inner circle, and a couple others that would be a spoiler to mention.
This is my favorite Dresden in a while. While it’s still tied up in the overarching story, this one is more of a return to a typical detective story. Murders abound and Harry has to find the killer. Like a proper detective book there a red herrings and bad conclusions as Harry and friends work to try and figure things out. In typical Dresden fashion, there’s an explosive climax (I won’t say if it’s literal or metaphorical).
A reminder that I use the tooltips on GR and 3 stars is “I liked it”
This book doesn’t have nearly as much Star Wars as I was hoping for, but the Star Wars aspect still helps a lot. Let me illustrate what I was expecting and what I got. What I was expecting is for a book that would follow one or more Star Wars movies and discuss the security issues in each scene (if the scene had any); basically like the Star Wars and Philosophy books that the author mentions in the acknowledgments section. What Shostack does instead is use specific moments in Star Wars to illustrate concepts in a a book that reads like a more entertaining version of the CISSP certification study book. That is to say, it’s not dry, but it’s also WAY more technical than you might expect from the title itself. (Or the trailer for the book)
I’m a huge fan of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, a nerdy web comic (like XKCD, but not stick figures). What elevates this book beyond a simple collection of science-themed SMBC strips is the ending where Weinersmith creates strips from personal anecdotes of various scientists (and a Mythbusters host).
This book seemed to be more of a return to form in the sense that Harry has a lot of detective work to do here to figure out what’s going on. As usual, we have a bunch of seemingly disparate plots that come together in the end.
The series has explored ideas of faith quite a bit, especially when Michael is involved. This one spent a lot of time exploring it. I think Butcher has done a good job in the past, and continues to do a good job here, of finding ways to explain a world in which capital-G God exists and yet isn’t in direct opposition to the vampires and other horror creatures.
“Making Us Monsters” (Sam J. Miller & Lara Elena Donnelly) - A story that takes place during WWI and the inter-war period. The main characters are gay and the story serves mostly to remind me of the horrible treatment given to Alan Turing. Turing was responsible for helping break the German code (along with a giant support staff - including lots of female “computers”) and was foundational in computer and information theory. But he was convicted of being gay and forced to endure punishment for that. The story was beautiful, but I found it to be a bit too long.
This is the hardest book to read of the entire series. There’s a content warning at the front of the book that explains why - but it is truly one of the cruelest. I think it’s also a book that needs to be ready by young adults and parents and anyone else who has to deal with the subject matter either as a victim or a potential helper.
I’m very much in favor of the way McGuire makes use of short stories within this series. They expand upon the stories from the main books without requiring those stories to be bogged down. In a sense, these are deleted scenes, except they’re meant to be canon. In taking a small chunk and expanding upon it, McGuire can slow things down and give us even more consideration or interiority of the characters.
I think this is the best book McGuire has yet written in the Wayward Children series. It’s a culmination of all that has come before and seems to be setting up something big for either book 9 or book 10. It’s clear that there are more complex rules to the doors and their effects on our world than had even been revealed in previous books.
A beautiful short story that finally reveals Christopher’s world and how he ended up back in the real world. It’s beautiful and somber and, as always, cruel in a unique way.
Even though there’s a timeskip of, I think, a year - this book is a direct follow-on from the previous one. That is to say that Dresden spends a big chunk of the book dealing with the consequences of the last one. Even the case that kicks things off is directly related to the previous book. From that kick-off, things spiral so wildly that I had a bit of trouble remembering just what the case was that set things into motion.
A Study in Oils (Kelly Robson) - a neat blend of science fiction and fantasy, I love how the author evokes the setting. I can really picture it in my mind. Although not entirely unique, I like the idea of an Earth cultural sanctuary.
Waves of influence (DA Xiaolin Spires) - Recently I’ve read a slew of SFF stories dealing with futuristic or fantastical versions of social media. It makes perfect sense given their prevalence and influence on the culture this last decade. This one, written back before the current moment in which it seems Twitter might implode and we might have the next evolution in the space, tackles the facial filter aspect. Any gender can experience dysmorphia from the practice but it seems to have extra urgency in the hands of Spires, who has female pronouns in her bio at the end of the story. I also love the story she has used to explore how this might affect users - quite different from the usual narrative in real life.
The Relationship of Ink to Blood (Alex Langer) - I world have interpreted the actions this story very differently had it not been in a SFF magazine. But in Hebrew we have different expectations about what’s real and what’s not. The ending caught me by surprise, though.
Ncheta (Chisom Umeh) - not too dissimilar from the plots of Small Gods or American Gods, but using African deities. I enjoyed it.
On the Cosmere subreddit there’s always a debate on how the eventual Cosmere films should be made. Some of us think it would work best as an anime. There are certain things like the Mistborn jumping around that might look better with the suspension of disbelief that comes with animation and look silly in live action. But in the past Sanderson has said he’d prefer live action and some folks are VERY opposed to the idea of anime. I mention all of this because as I was reading Yumi and the Nightmare Painter, I found myself thinking this sounds like Cosmere: The Anime. Interestingly enough, Sanderson says at the end of this book that he was partly inspired by the manga Hikari No Go and another one called Your Name.
FICTION
A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies (Alix Harrow) - The whole reason I got this issue was because of this story, which won some awards. Andrea Johnson writes, in the introduction to an interview with the author, that the story brought her to tears. I didn’t get that far, but it did indeed tug at my heartstrings. It’s not at all what I was expected, but it was still a wonderful story.
Without giving away the plot or meta-spoilers, I can say that Seanan McGuire has continued to find a way to keep these novellas fresh. All these books have been deconstructions/reconstructions of the Portal Fantasy trope, but I feel this one is the closest to being a commentary on Narnia (without being as direct as The Magicians and Fillory). I’m less familiar with the mythical creatures found here although I at least knew what Kelpies were because of the PBS YouTube show Monstrum.
SCIENCE FICTION
Between the Dark and the Dark (Deji Bryce Olukotun) - the story starts off with the common trope of generation ships and leaving a ruined Earth. I’ve even come across it a bunch of times during my current SFF magazine binge. But the author introduces some cool new ideas, like the council. The story, therefore, goes in some interesting directions.
Butcher brings together all the storylines from the previous five books in this larger mystery. It’s a much bigger story than the previous books, but it works very well. I’m glad that Murph and Harry are continuing to develop their relationship. The opening caper is a lot of fun although I’m left wondering if it’s going to lead to any bad consequences for Harry.
In a short time I’ve read 2 Reinhart bread books (and am working on another). It’s interesting to see his bread techniques evolve. Although, he’s careful to say that the techniques in this book aren’t necessarily better than what he developed in the previous books, this one does potentially allow the home baker to do some prep work throughout the week and bake bread on a reasonable schedule. In essence, these are all recipes where you mix the bread and then put it in the fridge for 1-4 days and shape/bake it when you take it out. This means that on baking day you can potentially have your bread cooling after just 2.5ish hours - making it possible to bake and still have a job.
I got this book free as a Kindle First Read - or whatever they’re calling it nowadays
This book sits at the intersection of a lot of genres and sub-genres. It’s a mystery, but it’s not told from the point of view of the detective. This causes it to share a bit of DNA with the thriller genre as there are a few times our protagonist finds herself in the middle of something big. It’s also got a giant dose of geek/nerd culture with lots of references. Some will be rather easy for most people to get now that geek/nerd culture is a bit more mainstream. Others are pretty deep cuts. There’s also a bit of a romance novel hidden in here. And a dip into LGBT culture as well. So, it’s a book with a little of something for everyone.
ATK teams up with a dietitian and nutritionist to create a series of recipes for “athletes”, defined in the book as people who do vigorous exercise at least 3 times a week. So far I’ve made the rice crispy protein bars and I love the taste. I usually have one before heading to the gym/pool.
This is my second time reading this book. Keeping the score of 3/5 stars
Another mystery staring Samuel Vimes. This time he’s been sent by Vetinari to Uberwald as Ambassador. Vetinari purposely chose him because he thinks like a cop and isn’t the usual royalty that gets sent to these things. This turns out to be a good thing because the Dwarves, Vampires, and Wolves are each trying to gain advantage over the other.
SCIENCE FICTION
Cocoons (Nancy Kress) - This story could very easily have gone to a horror place. But instead it ends up being about the complexity of humanity, the perils of colonizing a new world, and hope.
This Way to Paradise (Rati Mehrotra) - After a rapture-style event, things go nuts in India. We follow a family in the aftermath. A couple great twists to the story.
I’ll be getting caught up on book reviews, so through the end of the year you’ll see at least one book review per day. I’ll still be occasionally writing my usual blog posts, but the most consistent content will be book reviews.
SCIENCE FICTION
The Archronology of Love (Caroline M. Yoachim) - This short story involves an interesting idea where an alien race has created a VR history, but to make an analogy with archeology, when you view part of the history, you mess up that record and if you move around you mess even more up. (Similar to how digging up an archeology site disturbs the very record being observed) The story isn’t just a neat gimmick - it also has a nice little love story that goes along with it.
This book has a more straight-forward narrative style rather than the more poetic one of the last few stories. Chronologically, it takes place after the events of Beneath the Sugar Sky. Books 4 and 4.5 are prequel novellas.
In addition to completing (maybe?) the story of the Wolcott sisters, McGuire continues to explore the themes they’ve been laying down throughout the series. What does it mean to ask children to “be sure”? How much trauma can children (and teens) take? And other topics like body dysphoria - taken to an extreme here with the main plot point.
This is a short story that was posted to Tor.com that fills in a key story that was briefly mentioned in In an Absent Dream. Even though it was a key plot point in that book, it makes a lot of sense to be separated out from the novella. It would have changed the pacing as well as lessened the emotions from the novella.
The Synapse Will Free Us from Ourselves (Violet Allen) - a story that seems (however horrifying) even more likely now than it did when this issue was first printed. I don’t want to give anything away so I’ll say it would make a great episode of Black Mirror or The Twilight Zone.
On the Shores of Ligeia (Carolyn Ives Gilman) - a nice breath of fresh air in that this story is mostly a story of how and discovery without any dystopian elements.
Another prequel entry in the Wayward Children series. I read this almost entirely in one sitting because I was transfixed. I love logic fantasy worlds and I loved the idea of this one where the world enforces a sense of balance and fairness. As with many of the novellas in this series, it has a lot of tragic twists and turns for the portal worlds are not forgiving places. (A solid deconstruction of the idea as also explored the Magicians trilogy)
This book continues the story from book 1, not book 2. (Which makes sense since Down Among the Sticks and Bones was a prequel) We’re introduced to some new characters and get a little more background on some of the others.
I found it to be a very interesting plot considering the world that McGuire has set up. In a way, because of the existence of nonsense, it feels like McGuire actually needs stricter rules (in her world bible) to keep from either painting themself into a corner or ending up with a cheap-feeling deus ex machine.
This book serves as a prequel to Every Heart a Doorway but should definitely be read after that book in order not to spoil any plot points. The book elicits an incredible amount of emotion and I believe this is due, at least in part, to the fact that the narrative style is that of a children’s book or middle grade book - like the first Harry Potter book or the Chronicles of Narnia. This narrative style is juxtaposed with YA-level content and I think it produces the effect taking us back to those books we read (or had read to us) when we were young while containing the harsher, more cynical tone that we are ready for as adults.
R.F. Kuang brought this story to a conclusion in exactly the right way, given the story they were telling. This final entry didn’t begin as depressingly as part 2 (thank goodness!), but Kuang writes realistic fantastical fiction. Both this trilogy and Babel: An Arcane History contain realistic consequences for the actions of their protagonists. Somewhat analogous to the original Mistborn trilogy, it’s not just “kill the evil emeperor and everything is hunky-dory”. There are consequences to civil war.
SCIENCE FICTION
Life Sentence (Matthew Baker) - This story’s a real doozy. It’s about a potentially different way to handle criminal punishment. Because this is a well-written story, it’s not simple to decide which system is more cruel - the one in the story or the one in which we currently live. They’re both evil in their own ways. Definitely a powerful story that I recommend to anyone, especially if interested in criminal justice reform and/or abolishment. Also has the added layer (if I’m not misreading the story) of the protagonist being of First Nations descent, which makes it even worse, given the historical injustices.
I think the only story here that didn’t really click with me was “With Teeth Unmake the Sun”. It was beautiful and I appreciated that, but it wasn’t my fave. “Midway” hit me very hard at this age. Endor House is definitely my favorite story in this issue.
Here are the reviews per story:
Science Fiction
With Teeth Unmake the Sun (A. Merc Rustad): This story definitely has beautiful prose, but it also made it very hard to understand what was going on at first. Not my favorite kind of short story when metaphors are real and it’s hard to get a grip on what’s actually happening. Still, a neat set of concepts.
I was part of the kickstarter that funded this book
I did not immediately jump into this book (Sanderson’s Secret Project #2) because it was not a Cosmere book. (The Cosmere being the equivalent of the MCU for almost all Sanderson’s fantasy books) Once I finally got to it, I was a little hesitant at first. The tone was somewhat like an adult version of Sanderson’s Alcatraz series (a middle grade series). Although, seemingly like Sanderson, I’m a fan of dad jokes - this could get a bit tiring over the course of a novel.
Relatively quick read this month. Here are the reviews per story:
Enchanted Mirrors Are Making a Comeback. That’s Not Necessarily a Good Thing. (Mari Ness): I recognized the author’s name, but I couldn’t remember where I recognized it from. Then it hit me, Ness is the author of a series of Tor.com articles that I love in which they compared Disney movies to the original fairy tales and also wrote about production issues and other background information about those movies. So of course Ness would write a short story with this subject. I think it’s done with the appropriate amount of wit and humor to keep it from sliding into eye roll territory. I hope to see more short fiction from Ness in the future.
This book started off in a very hard to read place because the author had to deal with the aftermath of the first book. It made everything Rin goes through feel earned. Nothing comes too easily. But it did mean that it was a while before I reached a point where I couldn’t stop reading.
It works very well as the second book in a trilogy. There are lots of twists and turns that mirror the chaos of war. Rin struggles with many internal questions - who to trust, are soldiers responsible for their actions in war, who are your friends, and more. But there’s also lots of well-written action.
This issue started off unevenly for me, but I ended up liking most of the stories and non-fiction essays.
A Catalog of Storms (Fran Wilde): A fantasy world in which weather becomes sentient. I failed to gel with the premise or consequences of the world. I think maybe part of it was me being unable to figure out at first if it was supposed to be a SF or fantasy world and whether what was happening was metaphorical or physical.
This is my second time reading the book. Dropped the rating from 5/5 stars to 3/5 stars.
On this second time reading through the Discworld books, I’ve come to realize that I really prefer the Witch books to the Rincewind/Wizard books. Usually (or at least up to this point), the Witch books have been parodies or retellings of Shakespeare or Fairy Tale stories. This one is used by Pratchett to formally introduce Uberwald. It will play a larger and larger role in future Discworld books (including City Watch books). Uberwald is where horror creatures like vampires and werewolves come from. It also includes Igors (although within this book we only know of one family line of Igors).
A great selection of stories this month! Here are my reviews per story:
The Dizzy Room (Kristina Ten): While I didn’t have the ESL issues the main character has, I definitely got my first computer around the same time. I remember playing all these edutainment games like Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, and (of course) Oregon Trail while my brothers played Reading Rabbit. I really enjoyed the twist - since it was in a horror magazine, I knew it was coming, but it was great seeing it gradually emerge.
This was an awesome issue of Lightspeed magazine where I really enjoyed every story. I was especially happy to find out that I started out my Lightspeed magazine subscription with this issue because for the next 5 issues they had stories by Ashok K Banker that all take place in the same universe and I loved the story in this issue. Here are my reviews per story:
I read this book along with the Sword and Laser group on Goodreads as the April 2023 book pick. I’m glad this ended up being the pick. That said, this is probably going to be a very divisive book. It’s a book in which, to some degree, “nothing” happens. Our main character is an Orc member of a fantasy adventuring party (think RPGs or Lord of the Rings). She wants to retire to start a coffee shop in a fantasy world where coffee is new (and unknown in the city she chooses).
I got this book for free from the Tor.com ebook club
Once again Vo creates a novella from The Singing Hills Cycle that I had so much trouble putting down. Vo expands the world a little more as Chih ends up in the north this time, traveling with the mammoth corps.
Vo finds another way for Chih to end up in story telling and recording mode without feeling repetitive with the first book. This time the names are mostly (from what I can tell) Vietnamese so I wonder if this is a retelling/remix of a Vietnamese legend. What I loved was mixing this with a (view spoiler)[Thousand and One Nights (hide spoiler)] situation to create a greater sense of tension.
I’ve always liked books, articles, and podcasts about little trivia like this. There are so many objects in our world and they each have a history! We often gloss over those things that have existed since we were born. For me that includes all the items on the cover (like the traffic lights and the slinky). What separates this book from others in the same genre is that the author isn’t afraid to say when the true story is unknown or when there are multiple claims to the creation of a particular object.
This book is written at the level of a college paper with lots of footnotes, citations, etc. There are even some sections of chapters that get into some heavy terminology that didn’t really mean anything to me. But overall, I found the book to be written in a very approachable way.
What was incredibly fascinating to me was that, given my age, I lived through the NES -> SNES transition. I remember all the commercials and the rivalry with Sega. I remember wondering why some arcade games were way better on the Sega Genesis. I remember being incredibly impressed with late-era SNES games like Super Mario RPG and Donkey Kong Country. And I remember strange translations, but not knowing why they were so strange.
Another issue of Nightmare Magazine I bought to read and discuss with the wife. I bought it thinking she’d prefer Who The Final Girl Becomes (having only read the synopsis), but our favorite ended up being Home.
Who the final girl becomes - an interesting examination of the trauma of being a sole survivor. Obviously, horror stories wouldn’t be the same if we always examples the aftereffects, but it can be illuminating to explore it occasionally. As they state in the author interview, the story becomes (at least partially) a critique of the true crime genre. The trans aspect of the story is interesting. At first I thought maybe it was giving the wrong message that there was a transition that took place in the face of trauma. But the author also presented a more traditional transition, so perhaps it’s even better because it presents how complicated real life is.
I have enjoyed many of the books in the Boss Fight Books series. They’re each unique in their own way, but this is the only one (that I know of) written by the creator of the game. It was fascinating to read Yu’s thought process as he chipped away at various ideas and finally ended up at Spelunky.
Yu mentions in the final chapter that his game came about at the right time for an indie resurgence, but it’s especially interesting reading this book at the same time as Super Power, Spoony Bards, and Silverware: The Super Nintendo Entertainment System, a history of the SNES. That is a period where, on consoles, it was more or less impossible to be a bedroom developer because of the way Nintendo controlled the market. So this book also functions as somewhat of a history of the early days of the indie video game market.
I bought this book as part of a story bundle collection.
I haven’t read any of the other books in the “Gods and Monsters” universe, but (as one of the ads at the back of the book says) it’s somewhat similar to American Gods. The gods of various religions and traditions are real and interact with humanity. This book (more like novella) takes place in Malaysia where Rupert Wong cooks humans for some gods or demi-gods. Interestingly, this story has almost nothing to do with that.
By the end of 2022 I had 2793 digital books and magazines (a change of 264). Around twenty-four of those came from free books I get monthly from Tor.com and Amazon Prime. This year I’m also going to start the amount of audiobooks I have: 144. In 2022 I started up my libro.fm subscription and listened to quite a few great audiobooks.
Although this year I read some cookbooks and comics, I read far fewer of each of those than in other years. The biggest surprise was the discovery of the trilogy starting with Gideon The Ninth. The world is so incredibly vast and the narrative voice was so much fun. I heartily recommend it to all. The Becky Chambers stories starting with the book A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet was the nice, cozy story that I needed as the real world continued to get crazier and crazier.
This whole collection of essays makes me think a lot about the semi-gonzo video game reviews that Tim Rogers is known for. The shorter format allows the authors to be much more creative than they can be in the full-size Boss Fight Books. It’s a very fun read overall. Here are my thoughts per entry:
Ken Sent Me - A fun piece about playing Leisure Suit Larry back in the 1990s and more recently. I was also a big fan of the Sierra games of the period, although I never played LSL. The essay is written with just the right amount of humor for talking about an early Sierra game.
Ever since I put this book on my shelf “digital-on-deck” - most likely somewhere around 2019 - I’d been looking forward to reading it. The title seemed interesting and the description on Goodreads seemed fun. (I got this book as part of a Humble Bundle) It seemed as though it might fall into either a Terry Pratchett-like parody of fantasy or maybe a fractured fairy tale. At first it seemed to go alright - it had some dad-joke level puns, and I like those. (eg a town called Farrawee) Or a Who’s-on-First style joke with someone named Herrow.
A love letter to New York meets Lovecraftian Horror and you get this book.
I believe this is probably one of those love or hate books with very little room in between. As someone who married into a NYC family, I was able to nod along with a lot of the narration in the book. I could see some of it going over the heads of people less familiar.
Well, that was incredible and deserving of all the praise it got. I was already a fan of T. Kingfisher from when my eldest daughter convinced me to read A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, but this was just so perfect to me.
It’s essentially a fairy tale, but told for adults. Not in the way that Shrek or other fractured fairy tales make everything into sexual innuendo and fart jokes and so on. Just a fairy tale that can go a little darker, maybe speak about material that would be a bit much for the average child. Even mundane things like the politics of kingdoms and how that affects the choices we have. In that way it reminded me a lot of Tress of the Emerald Sea, which I just read last month. Except Tress has a more whimsical nature to it and is being narrated by a narrator that is in conversation with the reader. So more about the tone than the style as Tress is also told as a fairy tale for adults. One other commonality is that Tress is Princess Bride if Princess Buttercup had more agency. This book is a typical fairy tale if one of the princesses had more agency. This book also has more horror elements to it. The market scene also gave me strong vibes of the spa in Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. In fact, the book seemed to have a somewhat similar tone to his manga and anime in that it’s mostly naturalistic, but with magical/supernatural elements sprinkled throughout.
This is my second time reading. I dropped the rating from 2 to 1 star
The first time I read this book, I thought, “I’m done with Rincewind stories”. And this second time around cemented that. The book is essentially Pratchett riffing on every Australian stereotype, Mad Max parodies, and what I think (having learned about it recently, but not having seen it) a parody of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
Thoughts as I first read through this collection:
Boy, modern English is so dumbed down. I love to read and read voraciously and still found it so laborious to read some of these short stories. Everyone speaks in purple prose and it takes a bit to figure out what each sentence is saying. (And that’s before even considering the words that have morphed since then)
As a Kickstarter backer on this campaign, I was able to read this book immediately on the first day of the year and I bet it will be tough to find another book that I will love more this year. As the back of the book (and Goodreads description) says, this book is basically “What if Brandon Sanderson wrote The Princess Bride?” It even has a Vizini battle of wits moment and an eel moment! I do not know if the regular commercial versions of the books will have the amazing art in the kickstarter versions, but definitely find a way to see the illustrations - they are beautiful!
This first book by Jim Butcher’s son has prose that reads like a combination of his father’s prose and John Scalzi’s prose. It’s fun and sarcastic, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t serious stakes. I was actually quite happy that Butcher tends towards realism. For example, in a scene where a character normally would have rallied to a heroic speech, the character acts according to what we know of their personality.
A great collection of Scalzi short stories and flash fiction about Christmas. If you like his sense of humor, you’ll enjoy the book. Depending on your reading speed, probably a little over an hour to complete.
It will be very interesting to compare this book to Seize the Stars when I get to it next year. Both involve the seeming impossibility of pushing for justice against a society and economy that is dependent upon injustice. Whereas this book is relatively realistic, Ms Fan’s book is YA and may turn out to be more hopeful than realistic.
I was more of a fan of the abridged Bible, but that’s probably because I have more familiarity with the Bible than Shakespeare. Still, it’s interesting to see how old negging is.
I’m not an incredible baker, I’m an average baker. When I bake breads - my family is often happy with the taste, but my wife always says - “All that work and we could have bought bread that’s just as good from Wegmans.” So, not show-stopping or anything. And, out of all my hobbies, I practice it the least often because of the time commitments. (Gotta be home to start the bread, proof the bread, bake the bread)
I’ll start off with a reminder that I use the tooltips for Goodreads ratings and 2 stars is “it was ok”. It may possibly have hurt that this was my first Zahn novel and I’ve heard so much about him because of the Thrawn Star Wars novels. But I think it’s really more that the novel reads like it was written in the 1980s (which it was). It’s full of that “karate stuff is cool " feeling from the 80s that culminated in films like The Karate Kid. I tend to do alright with Golden Age SF because I like the philosophical aspect behind most of the characters’ dialogue. But the 1980s seems to just fall into an uncanny valley - it’s almost like the modern SF I read, but just full of enough older tropes to feel a bit clunky. This story also seemed to revolve a bit too much on the one character in the know always having a bunch of gambits going on at once and refusing to reveal anything to the main character. So sometimes the wins felt a bit cheap. I also think the idea of training super karate soldiers to fight aliens just doesn’t make sense in the context of an interspecies war.
I really was not feeling it with this issue. The editor mentions that these are all stories in Weird Horror. I’m not a big fan of Weird Science Fiction either, so I’m not surprised these stories all bounced off of me.
Devil Take Me - The main character is a kid in an abusive household. Things got a little too metaphorical and weird and I couldn’t really understand the source of the horror or what was going on.
Well, Sanderson has completed Era 2 of the Mistborn series. Originally intended to just be a bridge novella, Sanderson expanded it to 4 books. (Not surprising since he wrote 4 books during COVID out of boredom)
If you’ve been reading the books from Mistborn Era 2, you know that Sanderson has used it to bring the series more into the cosmic war between gods that appears to be the full Cosmere story. Previous entries were mostly confined to easter eggs and the mention of a rival god known as Trell. This book takes things up to 11 and, if you haven’t read other parts of the Cosmere before this, you will be partly lost and partly truly missing out on the consequences of what’s going on as part of the mystery Wax and friends are solving.
Once again we join Menedemos and Sostratos as they sail around the Med. This time they head to Phoenicia and Israel. I was very curious what a pre-Hellenized Isreal would be like and what our Sostratos would think about the Isrealites. As usual it was a fun journey through history with our usual cast of characters. By this point in the series you should know whether or not you enjoy this writing which is centered on philosophical debates, traders haggling, and Hellenic partying and sexual escapades. It’s more of the same which is exactly what I wanted.
I know a lot about money and its history and I still learned a bunch in this book. Jacob Goldstein, who also narrates, uses his podcast-acquired skills to make the stories he uses to illustrate the history of money very accessible. It felt like I was listening to a podcast series with a bunch of episodes (each chapter) that were fascinating and illuminated a lot about the history of money. I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to understand money and what’s been happening in the world economy over the last few decades.
I think this book is best read by someone who’s been in the software field for a few years - it provides the perspective to truly understand what the Experts are communicating. I think a recent CS grad could certainly understand the words and concepts, but would be lacking the perspective of working in the real world with real life-cycle requirements and customer requirements and time crunches.
Rebecca Giblin and Corey Doctorow have written an incredibly important book for everyone to read, whether you’re a producer or consumer of cultural products (books, movies, music, etc). They do a great job of explaining how, over a bunch of industries, a handful of companies have made themselves into both monopolies and monopsonies. This allows them to screw over both the producers and the consumers by being the sole buyer and seller. Also shows how certain things like Spotify playlists are actually pretty insidious. (Spoiler: it’s because they train you not to care about the artist so that if the artist threatens to take their music off, no one will care)
This was a very interesting collection of short stories. They are companion piece to the dystopia described in Janelle Monáe’s concept album Dirty Computer. That said, these stories are mostly full of hope. They also depict a world in which there is more room for LGBT+ members and with intersectionality. That is to say, yes, the LGBT+ individuals are hated within the dystopia of New Dawn, but within the various communities explored in the short stories, everyone who’s against New Dawn is OK with the LGBT+. This is a world where no one blinks at pronoun preferences or various types of couples. (Except in one story where the weakness of not accepting it is kind of the point of the story) Most of the morals and lessons of the stories are pretty obvious (at least to me), but I feel like Monáe and her collaborators do a good job of not distracting from the quality of the stories.
The wife wanted something we could listen to while doing a bunch of driving last weekend. I don’t remember how we found this particular book, but she said it sounded fun. And she was right!
The book centers around a bunch of alcoholic women who are married to rich men. (Although some of them are also entrepreneurs in their own right as well as being married to rich men) They tend to often meet up at an exclusive hair salon and the proprietor of the salon is another protagonist. Each chapter is told from the POV of one of the women and is narrated by a different voice actor. This provides a bit of meta-fun as we get to hear how each voice actor narrates the others characters who are speaking in their chapters. I may have been imagining things, but I felt that they put different inflections into the other characters’ voices depending on their relationships to one another.
This is my second time reading this book. Rating dropped from 4/5 to 2/5 stars
For a City Watch novel, this one is a bit of a weak procedural. Pratchett somewhat goes back to meandering storytelling as we go back and forth between Vimes’ storyline and the storyline with Vetinari, Nobby, Colon, and Discworld’s version of Leonardo DaVinci. Vimes’ story isn’t presented as a straightforward mystery anyway. It’s mostly about how war makes people dumb as they get swept up in nationalism. There’s a slight mystery tugging at Vimes’ mind, but it’s not really central to anything. It just shows (near the end) that he was clever for not buying the simple explanations to things.
This book definitely sticks to its title. Our protagonist is suffering from a few mental ailments and they play into the story in all sorts of ways. Sometimes it leaves us with an unreliable narrator. Other times it appears to give the narrator the ability to have a greater understanding of the world around her compared to the “normal” folks around her.
While a book about web technologies is undoubtablely going to get out of date (especially when Javascript is involved), I would definitely recommend this book if you want to do some data visualization either as part of your job or for an undergrad, grad, or PhD project. While I would probably use FastAPI rather than Flask, I heard recently that the Javascript library the author uses, D3, is still one of the best in class libraries for this kind of work.
I’ve read lots of books covering web frameworks or GUI programming (both involve UI design and a different workflow where you’re often waiting for user input), but this one is one of the best I’ve ever read. While it’s traditional for a book to culminate in a blog or social media app (and this one does it too) there’s something about the way Grinberg writes that makes it so much more approachable. Also, something only more modern books can do, he has a github repo with all the code with commits that match different sections of the book.
The Cage of Zeus is written in the style of a Golden Age SF novel. That is to say, the characters spend many pages debating the philosophical issues of the novel. So if you like those old novels (think Asimov or Arthur C Clark), you’ll probably like this one.
In some ways, the information here is not too different from some of the lessons I’ve been taught in managerial training or reading books by people like Steven Covey or Tony Robbins. But the main difference here, and the the thing that made the points relevant to me is that the author uses some very compelling examples that show that this is nowhere near as easy to do as some of the other types of books make it seem. Most interesting was the story of the conflict resolution guy (who invented arbitration divorce) who couldn’t see that he was locked in high conflict. And even once he did, he had trouble extricating himself. That made it a lot more relatable. If THIS guy has trouble, of course I’m going to have trouble. I don’t know how successful I’ll be, but I intend to try and remember the lessons in this book both at work and in my personal life.
This book continues on from the last one, but the author does a good job of catching readers up. If you like a Victorian era archaeological adventure story, you can do much worse than this. It works well and the story is enjoyable.
Warning: not for small children, contains explicit sex.
Tamsyn Muir seems to have created, with this series, a true experiment in making a genre book more about the journey than the destination. This is the second book in which almost nothing happens for most of the book. In fact, this is moreso the case in this book. It is not hard to see how this was originally just meant to be a small chunk of what is now book 4, Alecto the Ninth. In reality, the action in this book could have been just a few chapters of Alecto. And yet, this didn’t lead to a lower rating from me, because, by dedicating a whole book to this story, Muir earns the emotional payoffs with the characters.
My utter enjoyment of this book is inexplicable to me. The subtitle says that it’s a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, but McKinley doesn’t change too much from the original tale. Mostly she makes Beauty’s sister’s not be caricatures of vanity.
Yet there’s something about the way that McKinley wrote the story that just had me entranced the whole time. I couldn’t get enough of it and tore through it in record time (allowing for the fact that I was just reading it in snatches throughout the week).
This is a perfect conclusion to the trilogy. Sanderson does a good job extending out everyone’s character growth and the natural progression of the story.
I don’t remember if, while reading the earlier books in the trilogy, I made the leap of Calamity as a metaphor for Satan. Satan is often referred to as Morning Star and Calamity has been shining up in space this whole time. This book makes the metaphor more explicit as Sanderson has Calamity explain that he has pushed the epics to greater paranoia in the hopes that it would exacerbate their cruelty.
Once again I bought an issue of Nightmare Magazine to share the stories with my wife. The descriptions on the site seemed interesting and, indeed, they were. The description that got me to buy it was for the short story Concerning the Upstairs Bathroom. That one turned out to be my favorite. Overall, a good issue and you can’t go wrong for only $3.
A well-written and well-narrated book that’s just on this side of a self-help book. There is some advice, but it’s really mostly a series of vignettes that illustrate some points the author wants to make as well as showing that there are sometimes counter-examples. It made me think about a lot of assumptions I’ve been carrying around regarding the various topic areas. I’d recommend it to just about anyone.
I got this to read together with my wife who lives horror I ended up really enjoying most of the stories.
Wish you were here - the history of a revolution and civil war overlaid on a ghost story with a set of entitled tourists. First story out of the gate meets The editor’s mission perfectly.
I got this book for free as part of the Kindle First Reads program
I like to geek out on many things and one of those is history. Thanks to books like 1776 I already knew that it was only through a series of coincidences and good luck paired with General Washington’s leadership that we won against the British. But I had no idea just how many mutinies there were or even that there was a week (the subject of this book) where things could have gone in a very different direction.
This is my second time reading this book. Rating went from 2 stars to 1 star.
I didn’t like this book all that much when I first read it and I liked it even less this time around. I don’t like The Auditors as Death’s antagonist. Susan as a Discworld Mary Poppins is a joke that isn’t quite enough to carry a whole book. Death once again not doing death stuff….meh. And the Wizard b-plot seems to mostly exist to keep the story from just being novella length.
I don’t know if it’s from reading this book right after Becky Chambers Wayfarers series, but this book did not pull me in the way the other series did. It was fine, but I just finished it more out of obligation to finish than because I wanted to know what came next.
I think the best thing the book had going for it is that the antagonist was a 3D, fleshed out character rather than an out-and-out villain. He had rational motives that had more to do with the culture he was born into and political ambition than with mustache-twirling evil. The fact that he was part of a faction advocating more peace and financial gain than war also kept his species from being from a Planet of Hats.
I got this book as part of Amazon’s Kindle First Reads where Prime members get a free ebook from a selection of ebooks each month
I didn’t like this book for 2 reasons:
1. It’s derivative in all the ways that don’t work for me. It’s got a Fritz Lang Metropolis setup that I’ve seen done a million times before from books like Red Rising to a half dozen anime. It tries to draw lots of parallels to Romeo and Juliet, but in that play, the families are equals. Here our Juliet is a poor girl in a gang and our Romeo is a rich boy who is trying to fight the city’s corruption. It IS a YA book. Maybe it works better for young folk who don’t know where the book cribs from.
Things are a little less profane and a little more of the story gets revealed. Maybe Ennis felt he had to be edgy in the first 2 volumes just to shock an audience into interest? That said, there’s still plenty juvenile gross out humor (Little Hughie’s face after a certain event) and the continued use of homophobic language to an extreme amount I haven’t heard since the middle school playground.
This continues the feeling that Ennis is simply trying to be as profane as possible just because. The first story revolves around a super hero (kind of like a Batman crossed with Iron Man) who suddenly is unable to keep from having sex with anything living around him. The second story is actually a good, fun mystery but Ennis has a main plot point revolve around the main antagonist constantly having to use a vibrator.
I got this book for free from Tor.com’s ebook club. I highly recommend it - in exchange for your email address you get access to free books from Tor.com’s catalog; a new one each month. (Currently it’s a Brandon Sanderson book from Mistborn Era 2)
As I’ve mentioned in previous reviews, I usually don’t go back and read the descriptions of books I’ve added to my “Digital On Deck” list and lots of these books have been on that list for 1-2 years. So I had no idea what this book was going to be about. The title of the series, the artwork on this book, and some general buzz I’d heard about it gave me some idea. But they were the wrong ideas - IN THE BEST WAY!
Interestingly enough, I heard an audiobook of this picture book. It was on sale recently at libro.fm and I was curious about how a picture book became one of the first live action/adventure movies I saw as a kid. This book basically reads as a less whimsical, less rhyme-y version of The Cat in the Hat. The kids are left alone (oh, the freedom of kids in kid-lit) and they find Jumanji at the park. The parents leave them with the admonition of “not one thing out of place” because they’re coming back with more adults for an adult party. The game has the same effects in the book as it has in the movie.
What if you took Wild Cards and started off from a more modern place than the 1980s. What would you have? Well, for one thing, less gay slurs and stereotypes. For another, starting with a less sleazy, more modern NYC. I Kickstarted (at the level to get a Tuckerization) because I was a big fan of Mary Fan’s writing. As I mention below, during the Red Sky in Mourning review, my only real criticism of this shared world anthology is that the stories seem too short. Maybe it’s something about the way these authors write compared to the Wild Cards authors, but I feel like I’m just getting into the grooves of the stories in this anthology before they’re over. They’re currently working on a second anthology and I’m hoping things can expand a bit the second time out. I also think it would be neat to have them maybe have tighter intertwined stories like Wilds Cards 2 and 3. Or maybe a full-length story like later Wild Cards volumes. If you’re a fan of superhero comics, but wouldn’t mind experiencing it as prose, this is a good anthology for you.
We have reached the end of the Wayfarers series. As has been the case throughout the series, this is less about a specific plot than it is about getting to spend time with the characters that inhabit Chambers’ Wayfarers universe. As soon as I heard the prologue (for I was listening to the audiobook version) I had a strong suspicion this was going to be a Closed Circle plot. This suspicion was strengthened when it was revealed that we’d have a bunch of different aliens that, if it WAS a Closed Circle plot, would be stuck depending on each other and having to work past each others’ differences.
This is my favorite book of 2022 so far. I don’t remember what it was about the write-up on the Big Idea section of Scalzi’s blog that caused me to add this book to my TBR pile, but I’m glad I did.
As the description of the book says, our main character is a bot who suddenly finds himself experiencing emotions. What made the book an almost non-stop read for me was the voice in which the story is told. It’s as if Jared is telling us, conversationally, the story of what happened to him. To imagine the tone of this narration, imagine if Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation and the alien from Resident Alien were combined and then wrote their descriptions of humanity and all the weird things we do as we navigate the world. One example:
Chambers continues to make each book in this “series” a standalone that’s tangentially related to the other books. The second book continued with a couple characters from the first book, but otherwise did not interact with them at all. This book is related to the others in that one of the protagonists we follow is the sister of the first book’s captain. It doesn’t appear to have any connections to the second book unless I missed it.
I got this book as part of a StoryBundle bundle, so I didn’t specifically buy this book because I wanted to read it. It turned out to be a nice book in a steampunk-lite second world. (Steampunk-lite in that there are dirigibles. And it’s a Victorian setting. But deep into the book you find out that most of the stuff that would traditionally be explained to run on steam are actually running on mundane magic spells)
A bit bummed this wasn’t included in the audiobook of Harrow the Ninth. That said, it was easy to find on Tor.com.
As you find out near the last third or so of Harrow the Ninth, some of the survivors of the first book have been busy with a project of their own. This short story is a bit of a bridge that helps us see how they got there. There are still a lot of unanswered questions (perhaps until Nona comes out this Sept), but it does fill in a bit of the info. More interesting to me is the character study aspect of the story.
This book is both a follow-on to the previous one that picks up right where it left off and can be enjoyed as a standalone book. That’s quite a magic trick that Becky Chambers plays there, but it works very well. Essentially, the end of the first book necessitates the characters in this book leaving all the other characters alone and not really interacting with them. It’s also a very different kind of story. While The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is basically Firefly, with our crew going from planet to planet having vaguely linked adventures, this book all takes place in one place.
If, like me, Firefly’s untimely demise has left a hole in your SFF heart ever since you discovered it (it was DVDs for me back when Netflix was about DVDs), then this book is probably perfect for you. The big difference is that the crew of the Wayfarer is not escaping the law, they’re more like contractors for hire. In this case they’ll help create a wormhole for you so that you can get from point a to point b in hours instead of years or millenia. The captain wants to go for big government contracts so he hires Rosemary, our new-to-space character so that the reader has someone that’s learning along with them.
Whenever I heard about this series, there are two things I heard about it:
“Studio Ghibli really screwed up their adapdation”
“Harry Potter is a huge ripoff of this book and I don’t believe that JK Rowling had never heard of it when she wrote Harry Potter.”
I can’t speak to the first one. But the second one is WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY overblown. At least, based off of this first book in the series they are almost nothing alike. I saw MUCH, MUCH greater similarities between Battle Royale and The Hunger Games. For starters, the first Harry Potter book is a children’s book (or at most a Middle Grade book) written in a very British kid’s book sort of plot. And as a whole it’s more of a children’s boarding school genre than fantasy or magic for large portions of various books (except the last one or two). By contrast, UKLG was tasked to write what we would now call a YA book. There is no focus on the school except as a setting for our young protagonist to act like a young man and be pressured by his rival into doing something stupid. We then spend the rest of the book with Ged (our protagonist) as a young man - they may have said his age at one point, but basically 17-19 years old or thereabouts. It has nothing in common with HP other than the fact that the main character attends a wizarding school.
This book was a bit of a tough read as a sequel. In many ways it is completely unlike the first book. The first book is full of exploration and action. Gideon is our way into this world and boy are they a fun lens into the world. This time we find ourselves following Harrow. Harrow isn’t narrating. In fact, if you listen to the audiobook, rather than read the book, the narrator is a dead giveaway thanks to the audiobook narrator’s voice. But we’re following Harrow around. There are many ways in which this could have been interesting given the analytical mind Harrow seems to have in the first book. But, for reasons that it takes 75% of the book to unwind, Harrow’s mind is a bit unwell. (this NPR article articulates what I am trying to get across here https://www.npr.org/2020/08/06/899472… )
This repackaged magazine special was quite the stroll down memory lane. This is the system where I became a gamer. But it’s also the system where I was a very little kid and when games cost something like $100 in 2021-money. So I had very few of these games and rented some of the others. The history behind the Nintendo was fairly well-known to me, having read a few video histories, but the histories behind games and their ports was new to me. The same way that early 80s and 90s anime got strangely butchered in its journey to the US (lookup how what we know as Robotech was put together), some of these games were full of very strange edits. I also knew about Nintendo’s puritanical stretch and how it affected the translation of later SNES RPGs like Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger, but the way it affected some of the NES-era games ventured into the bizarre.
Some of these stories were great! Things felt a bit bogged down at Hoth, though. Too many stories around the Taun-Taun scenes. Overall recommended if you’re a Star Wars fan. Here’s my story-by-story review:
Eyes of the Empire (Kiersten White) - This story is about a small crew of imperial employees who have to review the footage from those drones that show up at the beginning of Empire Strikes Back. The story is short and cute, but all I could think about was the fact that a space-faring empire would not have humans reviewing all the images from these drones. They would have some machine learning algorithms trained to look for humans, vehicles, and non-visible spectrum for signs of life. Then a human would review those to eliminate false positives.
I definitely can see what all the hype was about. This was a book that always left me guessing at what was coming next. Perhaps my usual trope detection failed me, but it seems to at Tamsyn Muir was able to keep things constantly fresh with plot twists that I mostly didn’t see coming. Even the one that they kept telegraphing (relating to one of the necromancers) turned out to be different than what I was expecting. We’re almost left with more questions than answers, but yet I felt like they did a perfect job creating a story filled with satisfying character arcs.
This is my second time reading the book. Reduced rating from 4 stars to 3 stars
We’re back to The Watch and this is the Watch I remember - not just a detective/police procedural, but also a play on office politics/political correctness. This comes from the non-humans now being allowed on the force and female dwarves wanting to take advantage of living in the city to express their femininity. (Until now Pratchett always made a joke that it was hard for dwarves to figure out if the person they wanted to date was the opposite sex)
I got this book as part of a StoryBundle.com bundle - I wouldn’t have otherwise bought book #8.6 out of a series I’ve never read. But the description said it worked as a standalone story. In the intro to the book, the author confirms this. So I jumped in.
This book did not disappoint. It was an incredibly fast read - I think my ereader (Kobo) marked it as 155 pages. But Buroker does a good job of quickly setting up the world and our characters before jumping into the main plot. I don’t know if the main series is like this, but the narrative is a lot more fun than you’d think based on the cover (I know, I know…. don’t just a book by its cover) or the description. There are heavy topics discussed and there’s death and violence. But there’s also a sweet married relationship that involves flirting and innuendoes. There are pilots who make wry comments. The main characters don’t take themselves too seriously except when it makes sense to the plot.
This novella occurs after the events of the last novel and brings us up to date with the ONE person who we didn’t get a conclusion for in the main series. I remember wondering if James SA Corey had forgotten about this person. But no, they were just saving them off for their own novella. It’s a very fast read and I really like the mixed message of the ending. It also must have been interesting writing this (I assume) as COVID raged around us and showed JSAC how well it could and couldn’t unite us.
It’s the conclusion to the Powder Mage Trilogy and so things generally move fast once we get past the first few chapters that catch us up to where everyone has ended up since the end of book 2. Each chapter definitely left me wanting to continue reading. For that reason I forbade myself from reading at night because I knew I’d end up reading too late into the night.
This is my second time reading Maskerade, the rating remains a 3/5 stars
We have another outing with the Lancre Witches. Pratchett moves us from parodies of Shakespeare to a parody of Phantom of the Opera. In true Pratchett fashion, this is not really the point of the narrative. Instead it’s about the silliness of Opera and about Agnes Nitt finding herself. I believe Anges was a bit character in the last Witches story - part of the emo-coven that the older witches found so silly. She’s moved to Anhk-Morpork to be out of Granny Weatherwax’s influence and joins the Opera. Nanny, noticing that witches have to exist in triplets - “the maid, the mother, and the….other one” - contrives to find another witch in Lancre. Unfortunately, there aren’t any maidens to be found in Lancre. And so Granny and Nanny head out to Anhk-Morkpork to provide comic relief while Agnes has her story.
I think there’s a side novella or short story I haven’t read in the Little Brother series/universe, but as far as I know, this is the first one that isn’t from Marcus Yallow’s perspective. Instead, this one is from Masha Maximov’s point of view. She was mostly an antagonist to him in the previous books, although meant to be a sympathetic one vs her bosses at DHS, or whatever agency she was working at.
As I mentioned in one of my updates, this book follows in an esteemed lineage. We have Starship Troopers, written from the perspective of a Korean War vet. It’s the epitome of society to join the military. The Forever War, written by a Vietnam Vet, in which Earth’s best and brightest are wasted on a pointless war. Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series is a reconstruction of the genre - showing some tropes to be silly and others to make sense within the genre. This book, written within the last decade, is about the military as an escape from a crapsack future in which most folks are on the dole and instead of The Projects being some apartment buildings, it’s whole cities. The military is an escape of sorts - a way to live a sort of middle class life. And I think that’s actually not too far from the truth in the modern USA military, although scaled down. That is to say that our current military recruits far more heavily from poorer parts of America for the enlisted folks. And so it can potentially be a way up into the middle class for some people.
This is my second time reading this book. I didn’t record a prior rating
I remember liking this book the first time I read it. I definitely enjoyed the parodies of the Confucian system and the mistakes at translating from one language to another. But I had forgotten a lot of it, especially the Cohen the Barbarian part.
Upon re-read this is my favorite Rincewind book. I think there’s only one more - the one where he’s on XXXX (Discworld Australia) and I don’t remember liking that one. Of all the Rincewind books this one has the most well-baked plot. It makes me wish Rincewind got more stories like that, although his first stories were also Pratchett getting to know what would eventually become the massive Discworld series. Basically (mild spoiler), Two-Flower has returned to the Agatean Empire (Discworld China with a little Japan thrown in) and written a travelogue. This has led to Rincewind being involved in a plot back in the Empire, so he’s requested. Well, they ask for the Great Wizzard and, eventually, the faculty at Unseen University realize it’s Rincewind. He ends up sent there and eventually gets involved in his main plot (don’t want to spoil it). While there is a bit of Rincewind runs from problem to problem and ends up somewhere, it’s much more focused this time around. We also get to understand the Agatean Empire from his point of view. It’s a nice compromise from the absolute chaos of his first 3 books.
I received a free copy of the novella as a voting member of WorldCon 2021
That. Was. Awesome! It’s no wonder that it won the Hugo for best novella. I wasn’t able to get to it in time to vote, but this month it’s the Sword and Laser pick and I’m so glad that it was! Because this story seems short even for a novella (71 pages in my PDF version; not counting the preview for the next entry in the series), it’s a bit hard to convey too much about why I liked it without spoiling the story. Here’s my attempt:
This collection had all kinds of stories, from dramas to silly stories. I loved it! Here are my reviews per story:
Raymus (Gary Whitta) - a story from the point of view of the captain side so is boarded at the beginning of A New Hope. The anthology starts off well by giving some pathos to one of the first characters to did in the movie. It gets a little sadder when you find out where he’s from.
This is my second time reading the book. Original rating was 4/5 stars
I’m surprised that I had previously rated this book as 4/5 because I don’t remember liking it that much. That was confirmed on this re-read. Yes, the book continues Death’s story from Mort, but so much of the story seems a retread. Once again Death stops being death for a while. This time it’s his granddaughter, Susan, who takes up the mantle. Sure, what she does with it is different than what Mort did, but it’s still repetitive. The rest of the book is mostly an excuse to have a bunch of band names that are plays on words from 1950s-1980s band names.
And so The Expanse is over (except for the Epilogue novella still to come). I think this was the perfect conclusion to the series, everything about it was the perfect cap to all that had come before. We even learned why the proto-molecule creator’s enemies were upset with them.
This book had less to say about humanity, technology, politics, etc than the previous books because James S.A. Corey have already said all they wanted to say. This was just the end to the story. The pace of the book seemed to me to be closer to that of the Imperial Radch series for a good chunk of the book. But that allowed JSAC to provide the appropriate levels of empathy with the protagonists for what was to come in the end. I think some of the neatest meditations in this book were explorations of what it would mean to lose individual identity and what it would be like for a civilization that arose from a slower-paced animal - analogizing, for example, to a tortoise society.
In Calibre, I now have 2529 ebooks and e-magazines, 2026 unread. To be fair, I get a free book from Tor.com and Amazon.com every month. This also counts any ebooks I’ve bought for the kids, many of which I will not end up reading. (I also have some number of physical books and audiobooks I do not wish to count)
I started off the year continuing previous trends - reading sequels and programming books. Speaking of sequels, I finally finished The Expanse (well, there’s one more short story or novella coming, but the main series is done) I added in the Discworld series as a series I can read while waiting for the microwave at work or other places where I usually don’t have my phone with me. I’d intended to read the Tor.com blog posts on the Discworld read-along, but never got around to it in 2021. Then, sometime around the summer, the 2021 WorldCon Hugo nominations voting copies were made available so I scrambled to try and read as many of those as I could before voting time in order to make an informed voting choice. Programming books fel by the wayside. I didn’t really make any kind of significant dent in my cookbooks, either.
Things continue along at a manga’s pace. The characters have a few fights in the same location and we learn more about how various characters and/or their ancestors/mentors are intertwined. I’m curious where Mashima takes things from here, especially given the infamous kiss.
At the end of Volume 9 I had no idea where Mashima could take the story. It seemed he had painted himself into a corner, perhaps not knowing if he’d get to go past volume 9. He expands the story by making all the smaller gangs that were held in check by Demon Card now vie for position at the top. Our main characters also have to finish finding the Rave in order to get all the answers to all their questions. It continues to be a silly and weird ride.
This book is clearly a reaction to Japanese society, but it’s also prescient (given when it was written) about our current situation where no one wants to experience anything that could bother them. It’s incredible that he saw this coming 11 years ago. This is not to say that I’m one of those people who rails against “cancel culture” and so forth. I think it’s a positive thing, in general, that folks who traditionally did not have a voice in the world now can speak out against injustice. But there is definitely a vocal minority who refuses to deal with anything that might unnerve or challenge them. Of course this thin line (which I imagine myself to be on the correct side of) is why I originally considered starting off this review with the sentence “This book is dangerous.” I could definitely see some people taking this book as an example of why everyone should be able to say and do anything; who cares what others think?
This book was the perfect ending to the Imperial Radch trilogy. It continues in the same vein as the previous two books: deeply introspective within the context of Anander Miaanai’s war with herself. The final chapter (which, of course, would have been an epilogue in any other book) comments on what turns out to be the thesis of the entire trilogy: sometimes you’re just a cog in the machine (no pun intended). You’re not the chosen one. The entire fate of the universe doesn’t hinge on you. In fact, it’s entirely possible that there’s absolutely no effect of the events of the trilogy. (At least in the present timeline) Most likely, of course, is that eventually Anaander decides to eliminate Breq for daring to stand against her, no matter which Anaander we’re talking about. But for now that doesn’t matter.
Up until now, we’ve been very America-centric with the Wild Cards series. In fact, except for the first book, it sometimes seemed as if there were only cases in New York City. With this book, things are expanded out. Sometimes it’s because some of the spores dispersed over other countries (of course, not as strongly as they did in the USA). Other times, it’s because of births or other forms of generational transmission.
Let me start with the good:
- The photography in this book is beautiful
- The interviews with various celebrities and chefs are great
- The narrative style of the recipe intros work well
- the section on the the Korean pantry is important and well-written
The neutral:
- Even my wife, who has been cooking for our family (and previously, her family) for somewhere around 35 years (mostly off the top of her head without a recipe) found that once you’ve experienced America’s Test Kitchen recipes, everything else is substandard. We tried to make the Pajeon (seafood pancakes) for dinner and there were lots of assumptions that made it come out less than ideal.
I will admit that I just skimmed over the web server part. I barely write web backend stuff in Python, I’m not about to do it in Go any time soon. My main goal with this book was to finally learn Go after having heard about it for 2-3 years now. This book turns out to be a very good resource for that. I have no idea how well it would work for someone who’s never programmed before, but for me it’s my 4th or 5th programming language and for most languages the basics are all the same (just like most languages have nouns, verbs, articles, etc) and it’s all about learning the details. I’ve been able to use what I’ve learned here to solve some problems for Advent of Code (a December programming set of puzzles) although I did have to go out to the official documentation a little to figure out things not covered in this book (like regular expressions).
I recieved this book as part of the Hugo 2021 nominations packet
This book was GREAT! I can definitely see why its series was up for a Hugo nom this year. I wasn’t able to get past the first book before it was time for Hugo voting, but I looked forward to reading this book every day. There was never a time where I felt I had to push through the book. It even had such a great start:
This is my second time reading this book. I left the rating the same
When it comes to the Anhk-Morpork based books, Pratchett lays in the final brick in the foundation for all that will come. The Night Watch is elevated to full Watch. We get more interactions and elaborations on how the Guilds work and how Vetinari pulls all the strings. Carrot grows a little, even as he retains his essential “Carrot-ness”. Pratchett builds on adding in all the fantasy and horror characters that he started back with Reaper Man and introduces Angua, our werewolf watch-person. We also have the return of Gaspode and Detritus from Moving Pictures. Reading all of these in a row and thinking about them critically for these reviews has made me realize that Pratchett has moved towards really making Anhk-Morpork (and greater Discworld) seem like more real, lived-in places as he settled into it as a long series. It feels as alive as Gotham, especially as written by Scott Snyder.
Learn You a Haskell (or LYAH as it’s known on Stack Exchange and other parts of the internet) is the most often recommended resource for learning Haskell. I think it has a lot of things going for it.
1. It’s available on the net for free if you don’t want to (or can’t) buy it
2. It’s got a conversational tone that reminds me of what I love most about the Perl O’Reilly books
3. The author does a good job comparing and contrasting with imperative programming languages (almost all the ones you’ve heard of, if you’re heard of any programming languages).
I received this book for free as part of the 2021 Hugo Voting Packet
This was a great, fun book. The only point I really had against it is that eventually with all the fantasy names and locations and history, things eventually got a little convoluted to where I couldn’t remember who was related to whom and it really starts to matter in the last quarter of the book. The book has an interesting framing device - one of the book’s characters, Thurvishar, has written a report to the Emperor to document what happened. The introduction even includes a bit of lampshade hanging about the fact that he’s going to have to tell the real-world reader some things that the in-world reader (the Emperor) would already know.
This book is the story of the beginning of computers, written in the 1980s. I’d already read about many of the events portrayed in the book via other books or magazine articles. But this was nice and detailed. I like Steven Levy’s style. He really brings the people profiled to life. Knowing where computers have ended up - which companies and movements have won - makes it an especially interesting read compared to when it was first published and people weren’t sure where the industry was going or if it would crash like the Atari crash of the 1980s.
This strange, COVID-filled year was the year WorldCon was local to me, so I figured it was the best time to check it out. I didn’t need to pay for a hotel or flight, just a few days of parking and metro line fees. Overall, I thought it was fine. I enjoyed the panels I attended, especially when Scalzi read from his upcoming book, Kaiju Preservation Society. But I didn’t become a convert like the folks at the First Time Attendees panel who have been attending for decades. Outside of that, I had a few thoughts about my experiences this year:
I got this book for free twice: Tor.com ebook club and Hugo Award nomination
This book was very, very hard to read. It ripped open so many of the psychological wounds from the past decade in which I finally, truly understood the injustice of being black in the 2010-2020s. That we STILL haven’t healed past the original sin of this country. This book force-feeds you the pain of the lived experience. It takes place in our world until it splits off into a 20 minutes into the future - a future that seems all too likely to happen. Where we continue to give up more and more to algorithms and surveillance. I’m in the tech industry, I’ve seen the tech that’s coming. There are some folks trying to help, but we still keep making unbelievable errors. It’d be so funny if it wasn’t so (bleeping) sad.
I received this book for free as part of 2021 Hugo voting process.
Also, a reminder that I use the Goodreads tooltips for ratings - 3/5 means “liked it” - it’s not a bad rating. Let’s use the whole scale, guys!
I have been following Lindsay Ellis on Youtube for a few years now - both with her older videos that originally appeared on some other website (and no longer exist on YT as of mid-2021) and her newer stuff. I love her deep dives into various story-telling concepts and it’s pretty clear she definitely understands what she’s talking about. So I was pretty excited when I found out she released a book.
Throughout this re-read I have asked a question in my reviews: Is this a good jumping on point for The Discworld. I have tried to give justifications for an answer in either direction. This is the first book where, at least in the version I have - American Paperback - Sir Pratchett himself mentions that to really enjoy this book you need to have been following the last few Witches books. In fact there’s even a potential reference made by Weatherwax to the seemingly retconned Equal Rites. Mostly the book is an almost direct continuation of Witches Abroad, picking up where the previous one left off as the Witches arrive back home in Lancre.
Well, that was quite the trilogy! Scalzi took all that he had been building up over the three books and used them to create a satisfying ending. If this isn’t your first Scalzi series you won’t be surprised by the ending. Don’t get me wrong, it had all kinds of twists and turns that surprised and delighted me. But I mean Scalzi is the kind of author where the protagonists aren’t all full of plot armor. Brandon Sanderson is often (although not always) like this too. I prefer the higher stakes compared to, say, X-Men where any death is temporary annoyance.
If you want to learn Django, definitely get the newer version of this book that covers Django 3. That said, this book was VERY helpful in getting me started with Django for the first time. My brain tends to work better with “by example” or project-based books because it shows how the pieces come together. Whenever I’ve come across programming languages and/or frameworks (Django, Rails, Flask, etc) that only have toy examples I’ve often had a hard time moving from there to a real application. (or at least a harder time than when I have those project-based examples)
I got this book for free by being a World Con member for the 2021 convention. It’s part of the review packet.
So, that was really flippin’ good. I wasn’t sure how well Martha Wells would do at transitioning from novella length Murderbot to full-length Murderbot. Not because I doubt her skills - she’s been writing for a long while (mostly in fantasy, I believe). But we all know that what works in a short-form doesn’t always work long-form. But this book rocks. I would say there was only a very small section - maybe 1 or 2 chapters that seemed to drag a little bit. Otherwise, the scope was just increased to keep a similar pace.
Wells also introduces a lot of new potential directions for this series to go. If nothing else, there’s a big difference with (view spoiler)[ the introduction of SecUnit 3 (hide spoiler)]. We get the return of ART who indeed seems to continue to deserve the moniker that Murderbot has given it. Wells also does a good job of moving everything forward with Murderbot, Dr. Mensah and the others rather than remaining static. Overall, it’s a huge triumph and I need to get to the next Murderbot book after I’m done reading for the Hugos.
Right now, between this series and The Interdependency, this one edges out the win. I still have a few other series to read for the series category, but I REALLY love this Murderbot series. If you liked the Novellas, I think you’ll like this one a lot.
This is my second time reading this book. I dropped the rating from 5/5 to 4/5.
As usual, Terry Pratchett uses the fantasy of Discworld to shed light on reality. This book is less whimsical than other Discworld book although it does have its humor and does get a bit silly with the philosophers in the Discworld equivalent to Ancient Greece. He takes the same concept as (future?) collaborator Neil Gaiman’s American Gods- a god’s power is relative to the amount of believers it has - and uses it to provide a withering look those who go along with the excesses of the church without even truly believing in their god. Om, god of the Omnians has been reduced in power because he has only one believer left. This despite Omnia being a theocracy with enough pilgrims to keep the Omnian Dibbler working and a large Inquisition that everyone is afraid of. People are essentially operating out of fear (of the system) and habit. Even more than when I first read this 10ish years ago, this just makes me think of the American Christians who are super Christian when it comes to hate and yet forget Christ’s own words when it comes to caring for the poor, sick, defenseless or turning the other cheek or giving up all your riches to follow him (looking at you, Prosperity Gospel Preachers).
This is one of my favorite collections of stories and one of the best anthologies/magazines I’ve read so far in 2021. A lot of the stories in here a phenomenal. There are also a lot of authors in here who, in the past 6-7 years have become quite a bit more famous. That’s fun. The essay section was a little sad in the repetition of negative situations the women found themselves in. There were rays of hope in there, too. And I hope things are getting better. I’m certainly trying with my kids to raise them without gender limits.
Scalzi continues to kick butt in the second book of The Interdependency. I’m used to the second book of a planned trilogy to be all setup for the third book which can mostly be climax. Yet, within this book Scalzi continues to have mini-climaxes and story beats and surprises.
The story continues to be a sort of updated Dune/Game of Thrones type story with multiple families vying for control of the Emperox. Some of them want to manipulate her and others want to unseat the Wu family from their position at the top. There’s also what seems to be a throwaway line involving some simulated folks that isn’t paid off in this novel, so I assume it’s going to turn out to be a huge plot point in book three. The big difference is that Emperox Cardenia is coming into her own rather than being sideswiped by the events and deaths in book 1.
Our third outing with the Witches and the second one that includes Magrat Garlick. This one is part parody of the travelogue and part parody of Fairy Tales and Fairy Godmothers. It also introduces the Discworld version of dwarf bread; my first time hearing about it. This made it extra funny when I encountered it in the Lord of the Rings books.
I listened to the audiobook narrated by Greg from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend as I drove the 900-something miles from Maryland to Florida and it was better than I thought it would be. Ms Collins has avoided most of the annoying tropes that often plague prequels. There aren’t too many of what I call “cute” moments (eg in the Star Wars prequels seeing the Death Star original plans). Mostly those are limited to District 12 once again being the focus, the Hanging Tree song’s origins, an appearance of the katniss plant, and the origins of Mockingjays.
I can’t believe I waited so long to read this book, it’s so great. The quick summary: Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series meets the family competition dynamics of Frank Herbert’s Dune. Interesting to read at the same time as The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Both books use the idea of segregated resource management as a form of control. In Hunger Games’ Panem it’s each district being in charge of a particular resource. In The Interdependency it’s each family guild controlling a resource.
This is the perfect ending to the original Murderbot novella quartet. All the threads from the previous three books finally line up in a way that sets Murderbot up for its debut novel. Murderbot takes everything its learned and developed in order to solve the biggest problem its had yet.
The first couple novellas could have been picked up as standalones, but this one really only truly makes sense as the finale, so don’t bother picking up unless you read the first three.
Another great entry in the Murderbot novellas! Our favorite SecUnit is once again involved in a mystery while working on the overarching plot of the novellas to figure out what happened during the incident that led it to override its governor as well as help out the humans from the first novella in their legal fight.
After reading the second entry in The Murderbot Diaries, I’m sold on why this is such a hit with everyone. Martha Wells takes what was great about the first one - an android who just barely understands human irrationality (although suffering from some himself since he’s made of both synthetic and human tissue) and has to solve a mystery in an update from the older Golden Age format of I, Robot - and changes just enough to keep it incredibly interesting. Tore through this one in just two days and I’m already a few chapters into the next one. This one’s definitely going to be a strong contender for Hugo for best series.
I got this book for free from the Tor.com eBook club. Also, would have gotten it for free from the Hugos 2021
I know I’m late to everyone’s favorite genderless, somewhat on the autism spectrum, Murderbot but I really loved this book a lot. I had no idea what to expect because when I’m going to read something, I tend to avoid all spoilers, even the back of the book text. What I found was a a great mystery story with a murderbot that’d been put on protection duty. The irreverence Murderbot has for their job and for humans in general reminded me a lot of what I really liked about the Knights of the Old Republic character HK-47. The book was funny without being slapstick or parody. It was more or less the perfect length so we’ll see what happens when I get to the novel-length entry eventually.
This book was the perfect cap on the trilogy. Told in a series of POV chapters that shuttle back and forth through time, the book forms the perfect meta-analogy to the way the gods experience time. Their personal time is moving forward even as they move forward and backward through our timeline.
We also get a perfect conclusion to the story of The Just City and why Athene was allowed to set it up. The scene with Zeus reminded me of the Christian gnostics and it really provided a very interesting answer to the question Christians always ask - why did God create us? The answer is (view spoiler)[ as we learn more and become more excellent, so does God (hide spoiler)].
Black Powder War is another great entry by Ms. Novik in the Temeraire series. It picks up almost immediately after the previous book ended. Now Temeraire and crew must head to the Ottoman Empire. Oh, and for variety, Ms Novik has their ship burn down so they have to travel along the ancient (and at this point mostly non-existent) Silk Road.
I got this book from a Story Bundle called “Immerse or Die”. The editor of the bundle had a process that went something like, “I got on the treadmill and started reading. If the book wasn’t pulling me in by the time I finished my 30 minutes, it was eliminated.” I didn’t find it quite that engrossing, but I did enjoy it and by the time the climax arrived, I kept wanting to turn the pages to see what would happen next.
This is my second read. I have dropped the rating from 4 stars to 3 stars
I love Discworld’s Death. He makes any book better by his presence and so I especially love the books that feature Death. In this book Death is the A story. As we’ve seen throughout the previous 10 books, he’s developed a slightly more human personality. There was even that book a while back (Mort, I believe) where Death became a short order cook for a while. Apparently the auditors of reality don’t like this and Death now has a life timer. He ends up living out the rest of his life in a rural town and has a character growth arc.
My enjoyment of this short story (or was it long enough to be a novella?) was only marred by the fact that the story is so famous that I’ve seen it referenced and parodied a million times. Of course, that’s part of what made me want to finally read it.
First, point of clarification, I always thought the “game” in the title was the hunt. But “game” refers to the animal. As in the phrase “an elephant is a game animal”
I was a kickstarter backer on the campaign for this book
I’ve been waiting for this book for a while. This game, along with Chrono Trigger, was very formative in my early gaming years. The book decides to focus on one of the greatest things about Final Fantasy VI (FF3 in the original US release), the music. I can’t argue with the fact that Uematsu’s music is incredible - I own a bunch of Final Fantasy soundtracks. That said, my preference would have been for a few chapters on the music. Mr. Deken’s work views FF6 entirely through the lens of music. It is definitely a unique lens and one that he is very well situated to opine on. It makes this book special compared to others that would tackle the same subject. It’s also what you get with a Boss Fight Book - a book that is HIGHLY dependent on how the author relates to the subject - for better and for worse.
As the back of the book (so to speak…this is only available as an ebook at the moment) says, this novella is a chance to see what Amos’ old colleague Erich is up to. The novella starts off with a quote about a changing of the guard that mirrors the opening to The Churn. It appears that Erich has learned the lessons of that book and applied them to his current enterprise. At the same time, this novella really isn’t about Erich and his crime empire at all. (Although that probably would have been a pretty great novella in its own right). Instead it’s about Governor Rittenaur and, despite being listed as #8.5 in the series, it might reasonably fit in better as 7.5. The plot takes us back to right when Laconia has taken over and Governor Rittenaur is sent in to be in charge of the most important star system in terms of riches and potential scientific developments. It’s a story about colonizers and colonies that is mature enough to show that neither side is perfect. In a way, who you side with in this story says more about you than it does about anything else. Within that story, it’s also about ideological purity vs the real world. As we’ve already seen in a few novels, Duarte’s leadership style enforces and creates a hierarchy that does not tolerate deviations because they’re so certain that they are on the right side. One can form so many parallels to history in that.
If Goodreads had half-stars, I’d definitely give this one 4.5 stars. Butcher has taken everything I like about the Dresden files and eliminated a lot of what was annoying. Dresden has FINALLY earned the trust of Murphy on the SI unit at the Chicago PD. It was getting tiresome having them fight over dumb stuff. By the same token, Dresden is finally not trying to be such a hero that he holds back info from Murphy in a way that both endangers them and causes her not to trust him. Over the last couple books, Dresden and Marcone have reached a level of respect for each other. Sure, Dresden still would prefer to keep Marcone uninvolved, but at least he’s realized he shouldn’t be so childish.
This was a GREAT issue. I don’t think there was one story that wasn’t top-notch. My favorite SF stories were Codename: Delphi and Exhalation. My favorite fantasy was The Only Death in the City. The Afterparty excerpt was great and I added the book to my To Read list. As I normally do with collections or SFF magazines, below are my reviews per story. (They roughly align with my status posts, but sometimes I have to trim the statuses to remain within the character limits)
Anyone who has followed my book reviews on Good Reads or my blog knows that I have read quite a bit of video game history. Whether it’s a history of video games starting with the miltiary and university campuses, a book like A Mind Forever Voyaging: A History of Storytelling in Video Games or the Boss Fight Books series - I’ve gone through quite a bit of video game history. So when this one started off with Atari and the ET game I was a little wary. By this point anyone my age or older with any bit of knowledge of video game history knows of the crash in the 80s and how it was (at least partially) caused by Atari’s horrible ET game. The Indiana Jones game would have been news to me if I hadn’t seen a long Ars Technica article about it last year. So a slightly boring start for me.
I’ve effectively finished this book, although I’ll admit to skipping the section called “reference”; the book had already gotten deeper into the weeds than I needed at the moment.
I’ve read a lot of programming books over the past 15 years (and a few before that when I was a young buck trying to learn exactly what one could do with “computers” or on the “Internet”). But rarely have I read a programming book as delightful to read as this one; especially since it focuses so much on the internals of the language. But the book is written with that dad-joke-ish programmer humor that keeps it from ever getting too dry.
This is my second time reading as I do my Discworld re-read. Dropped the start rating from 3 stars to 2 stars.
This one seems a slight step backwards in the progression of Discworld novels. It’s not really about any character growth and we more or less get a sitcom-like reboot at the end. It appears Pratchett had not yet decided that we wanted to continue to modernize Anhk-Morpork as he would in the later novels. We do get a few new characters. Windle Poons is introduced here and continues into the next book, Reaper Man. Our main character’s class mate later features as a grad student who does the Discworld version of particle physics research. Otherwise, it’s another story in which too much magic allows Lovecraftian monsters a way to come in from the demon dimensions. Other than that it’s almost a Flintstones-level parody of Hollywood in which you look for the Discworld equivalent of real-world things - like 20th Century Fox being Century of the Fruitbat Pictures.
Over my many years as a programmer (and now boss of programmers) I’ve read many of O’Reilly’s series - Learning {language}, Programming {language}, {language} in a Nutshell, {language} Pocket Reference. This is the first time (that I can remember) that I’ve read a book in the “Introducing” series. I’d say this book is great for someone who already knows how to program, but wants to get a feel for the syntax Go uses. That does mean that the early chapters that introduce conditionals and loops are a bit elementary, but I have a hard time feeling that someone who’s never programmed before would really get the later chapters with pointers. Each chapter ends with some questions that makes me wonder if this book was developed to be a textbook for an introduction to programming high school or university class. It would certainly work well for a dev who has the support of a teacher and/or TAs.
A reminder that I go by Goodread’s tooltips for the star ratings. At the time I’m writing this, 3 stars is “liked it”
This is a very compelling short novel (or maybe novellette? or novella?) That jumps back and forth between 3 time periods, although eventually two of them coalesce into one. In the future (2035) humanity is hanging on by a thread after some kind of world-ending disaster has struck. The best parts of the story focus on the interpersonal conflicts in a “society” that cannot afford them. More than at any time in which you’ve ever hear the platitudes, the group really does need to be put above individual needs.
This novella is a great wrap-up to the story of Stephen Leeds. Now that the trilogy is published as one volume, I think that’s going to be your best way to get into the story. For this final entry, we find that Leeds seems to be losing a grip on his ability to keep himself sane by expanding out into various aspects. It’s such a short story there’s not too much more to be said about it, so I’ll consider the entire story.
As per usual, I had a lot of fun with this historical fiction taking place in Ancient Greece. Just like the first book, the story revolves around cousins Menedemos and Sostratos and their journeys around the Aegean during the trading season. Looks like Mr. Turteltaub wanted us to have a different experience than last time - and that makes perfect sense in terms of keeping readers from getting bored. And so while the first book had lots of chapters revolving around various symposia, this time there was none of that. Instead, in addition to the usual bits of haggling, we get to meet Ptolemy who happens to be in one of the cities they stop in for trade. So this book gets to veer a bit into the Ancient Greek version of a military novel as the cousins end up doing a few missions for Ptolemy.
This book gets a few extra points from me for taking place in Australia. All too often we get zombie/vamp tales taking place in the USA, England, or Europe (in that order). In fact, the only other apocalyptic Australian book I can remember reading is Jam.
Anyone who’s read my reviews for a while now knows the following:
- I have lots of books I didn’t specifically buy - they came from Humble Bundles, Story Bundles, or free books from Barnes and Noble or Amazon
- I create my Digital To-Read bookshelf every 1-2 years, setting my reading order
This is a pretty rough book. I mean, I think it probably wins for most trigger warnings for a commercially released comic. Since Watchmen we’ve had a few different takes on super heroes being less noble than the DC and Marvel heroes we all know. Irredeemable, Vol. 1 has most of the heroes remain good, but their pettiness causes issues. Jupiter’s Legacy, Vol. 1 explores super heroes as a metaphor for pop stars who have a complete lack of accountability. What The Boys does differently (at least in Volume 1) is to provide a a check against the heroes by the group funded by the CIA.
This book picks up right where the previous one left off - Iris Lei and the rest of the abolition are trying to plan out their next steps. From there, the plot goes off into a few twists, but in a fairly expected progression. The end is satisfying on its own, but it seems like Ms. Fan might have been setting up at least a trilogy if not an on-going series.
This is my second time reading the book. Dropped rating from 4 stars to 3 stars
A seemingly novella-length tale featuring the return of Rincewind, unseen since the events of Sourcery. The story is a parody of Faust (my paperback version even has Faust crossed out and replaced with Eric in the header for each page). As such, it’s a return to the earliest Discworld books - a series of pastiches as each of Eric’s wishes goes all malicious genie on him. The B story is a slightly more conventional story involving hell as a parody of office culture. The head demon has made hell incredibly boring with memos and team building and all the things that the movie Office Space made fun of.
We finally are introduced to The Patrician as he will be portrayed for the rest of the Discworld books. He’s no longer the overweight Patrician we saw in the first two books. He’s infinitely more cunning and frightful, especially because he’s not overly mean or violent. We’re also introduced to my favorite character in Ank-Morpork: Carrot, a human raised by dwarves. His innocence and literal-mindedness remains a wonderful trait throughout the series as Pratchett uses the City Watch as both police procedurals and to explore ideas of diversity in a fantasy world. Colon and Nobby are a fun straight man, fun guy pair - reminds me somewhat of Wax and Wayne (from Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn Era 2) although the class difference isn’t quite as pronounced. I will grow to like Vimes eventually, but not the Vimes from this book. Lady Ramkin is also a great parody of how the confidence of privilege can really skew how you view the world. Of course, it also leans hard on the comedy trope that’s in a lot of British novels - if you act like you *should* be in charge, people will comply.
Another fun entry in the Investigators to read with the kids. The cast of characters continues to grow and reward re-reads of previous books with lots of references to previous events. It’s evident now that Green has written each book to lead into the next. I wonder if he has an endgame in mind or is just taking it one book at a time. Once COVID is over, if he comes back to Baltimore Comic-Con I’ll be sure to talk to him about it.
My preschool kids have been enjoying Shannon and Dean Hale’s The Princess in Black series (I reviewed a few entries last year). So when I found out that Shannon Hale also does middle grade and young adult books, I recommended them to my oldest, the nine year old. After she read the trilogy, she asked if I could read it with her at night so she could share the books with me. So we began a semi-nightly ritual of reading a chapter a night.
Welcome back to the crapsack/grimdark world of America in the 2020s as created by Octavia Butler in the 1990s. It is sometimes eerily prophetic. More about that later.
The addition of Lauren’s daughter’s (Larkin) annotations to her mother’s journals provides a very interesting context to the stories. Similar to the chapter openings made up of Encyclopedia entries in Asimov’s original Foundation book, it helps to prove a premise that has been making the rounds on the internet for some five years now - that spoilers aren’t necessarily bad. When we read Larkin’s annotations, we understand something about the future. We know that Larken suvives to adulthood. We know that she resents her mother and Earthseed. We know that Earthseed as a movement lasts. But we still want to read on to learn the details of how we got there. It’s why people went to see Titanic in the 1990s even though they knew the boat was going to sink.
This is my second time reading this book. I have dropped the rating from 5 to 3 stars
This book is all but divorced from all the other Discworld books. There’s at least one other one like this one - Small Gods. In that sense, it makes a sort of nice introduction to Discworld because it can be read on its own and one can understand Pratchett’s Discworld humor. There is some slight continuity - the idea of Ank-Morpok having crime guilds to regulate the amount of crime. Death, of course. But for the most part, it sits fine on its own.
I’ve had this book for about four years, ever since I got it in a Humble Bundle. I knew that I wanted to read Octavia Butler some day, but I hasn’t gotten around to it yet. Then NPR’s Throughline decided to do an episode about Octavia Butler and I wanted to read something before listening to the episode. So I asked the hosts via Twitter what book I should read. They recommended the two Earthseed books. I tore through this one, finishing it in just four days.
I got this book as part of the Storybundle.com Extraordinary Steampunk Bundle. I had no idea what to expect when I started reading it. Based on the cover, I figured it was basically a Steampunk novel taking place in India rather than England. That, alone seemed kind of interesting. As I read through the book, it quickly became apparent that this was actually taking place in an alternate Earth with an India-like culture spread across three countries. After just a few chapters, the book becomes a spy thriller and I found myself unable to put the book down. Many times, while reading, I would keep telling myself “just one more chapter.” While this trilogy seems to have been plotted as one large story, this book has a story that comes to a satisfying ending.
This is my second time reading this book. The rating went up from 3 to 4 stars
This book revisits Granny Weatherwax, but while it keeps a lot of her personality traits, it seems to at least half-retcon the events of Equal Rites. The earlier book seemed to point to witches sticking strictly to headology while this one just has it as a preference. While Pratchett does keep Granny’s unreliable broom, she seems a lot more comfortable on it than she did in the previous book. Did she grow to like it or simply an outgrowth of ignoring the first few Discworld books?
This book was quite a slow burn. (And I know some of the later books in this series are strongly disliked for keeping the story running in place) About a quarter of the way through the book I was certain this would be the end of my stroll through the Wheel of Time. But, gosh darn it!, Robert Jordan pulled it through at the end. The climax was pretty incredible and we learned some very interesting aspects of the in-world history. I thought the best part was the damane sul’man backstory which reminded me a lot of the backstory to The Handmaid’s Tale. There was definitely some schaudenfreude there.
Well, that was quite an excellent book! My 9-year-old read it and then wanted to share it with me, so she asked me to read it to her before bed. I must say, this book was a lot more sophisticated than I expected from the title and from the expected audience. It’s quite a mature take at the subject matter; T. Kingfisher definitely believes in the maxim of not talking down to her audience. There are themes of death, PTSD, fantasy racism, wrongful arrest by the state, war, and so much more. It really does prepare kids, mentally, to deal with the fact that the adults don’t have it all together. The key, of course, that it does so realistically. It’s not the cruel or ineffectual adults of British kids novels, these are adults doing their best and still failing; or acting under selfish motives.
Many of you may be familiar with Scratch if you’ve got kids about 15 or so years old or younger. It’s the hot language for the elementary and (in some places) middle school set to teach programming. It’s particularly great for the younger kids because programming takes place using blocks that slot into each other. This allows for the kids not to have to worry about spelling or curly braces or semicolons. You just plug blocks into each other and code. I scoffed at it at first until I saw the complex programs kids can create with Scratch. Scratch Jr is almost exactly the same thing, except it’s for younger kids and it’s a tablet program.
I believe this book marks the inflection point from the retconned books to the more continuity focused books. It appears that Equal Rites has already been retconned away by this book or else Rincewind is ignorant of those events when he tells Conina that no women enter the doors of the university. Although, I guess we can’t trust him too much because I believe even this one mentions that women work in the kitchens and so forth.
I dropped the rating from 5/5 to 4/5 because I’m using the tooltips for the ratings. I really enjoyed this book a lot. In my re-read this is the first tone I have enjoyed without any reservations. But it wasn’t “amazing”.
This is the first Discworld book that can be read completely independantly of the others. Are there some Easter Eggs if you’ve read the first 3 books? Sure. There’s mention of Granny Weatherwax’s Discworld version of “marital aides”. You’ll know why the librarian at the Unseen University is an Orangutang. And this will be the second time you meet Death’s adopted daughter. But, outside of that, this really is a great standalone book. If I wanted to do a survey of British fantasy humor (say I was a University professor), I could assign this book and folks would get the idea without feeling that they were being dropped 4 books into a 30-something book series.
This is DEFINITELY a book of its times. I remember in the late 80s and early 90s there was a lot of fiction around whether women could really equal men in the workplace. Why then? I guess because it’s one generation removed from the Civil Rights era in the 60s and 70s? I know the backlash had grown by then, leading to Atwood to write The Handmaid’s Tale. Of course, that leads later into the Girl Power movement.
This second time around I dropped the rating from 4 stars to 3 stars. The book is definitely an improvement over The Color of Magic. I think, perhaps, Pratchett was starting to consider that Discworld might extend beyond a couple books. That said, from my memory, there’s about 1-2 more books that contain plot points that are effectively somewhat retconned later. A the very least, Equal Rites seems to never be spoken of again - and Discworld seems to revert to male wizards and female witches. And I can’t remember if Sourcery has last consequences or not.
This year continued last year’s trend of Sequels, Sanderson, and Science Fiction Magazines. Every series I mentioned last year was a series I continued reading this year - The Expanse, The Asylum Tales, Red Rising, The Dresden Files, The Mogoliad, Wild Cards, and the Illumination Paradox. (The only exception was Red Rising - I’m done with that series after the first trilogy.) I also continued to read sequels in The Wheel of Time, The Powder Mage series, The Just City, and Temeriere. As I did last year, I also read lots of books on electronics and programming as I started to beef up that chunk of my hobbies. As you’ll see if you read my 2020 programming post, this was a good year for me in programming. I also continued trying to catch up with Clarkesworld Magazine.
When I started out with this book, I wasn’t sure if I was going to like it. It seemed to lean a bit heavily on the young adult plot with the love triangle aspect and the whole wanting to be Internet famous subplot. But it turned out those were just there to introduce the reader to the world and provide some stakes for our main character.
I enjoyed this entry to the trilogy more than the first book. I think it might have to do with the fact that most of the world-building took place already. Or maybe it’s because it’s essentially just focused on one mission, giving that mission more narrative room to breathe. I also had fun getting into the weeds with the powers granted by Calamity now that we had the over-arching idea. Sanderson explores ideas of self-control, addiction, power over others, and fear. It ends up being pretty deep for a super-villain/freedom fighter book. I also think Sanderson does a good job of setting up some red herrings, even if the ultimate ending is somewhat easy to predict (then again, it is a YA book).
Dropping the rating from 4 stars (original) to 3 stars (second time through).
This is my second time reading through this book. First time was somewhere between 10-15 years ago. Going through it again, I realized just how much Mr. Pratchett improved as he iterated upon Discworld. Or, perhaps, it’s more accurate to say that this book had a different purpose than later Discworld books. This one is, essentially, a parody of where fantasy had evolved in the decades since The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. Pratchett takes tons fantasy tropes, hero’s journey tropes, fish out of water tropes and obliterates them or subverts them. A lot of what he introduces here continues throughout the 30+ book series, but there are places where I’m sure he would have done things differently had he known he’d carry on beyond a couple books.
Another masterwork by Brandon Sanderson in his Cosmere. I will say that, at times, some of the story seemed to drag, particularly character growth of the main characters. But not only is this made up by the incredible payoff at the end (I literally kept waking up the night I finished it as my brain obsessed over the epilogue and what it means for this series and the Cosmere as a whole), but the reader needs to consider this is book 4/10 in a planned series. Even with Sanderson having planned Stormlight as two five-book arcs, that would still mean that the climax of the arc would lie in the next book.
I got this book as part of a Humble Bundle years ago. It was my first occult horror, unless you count Dean Koontz books, which - now that I think about it - seems to share at least some genre space with this book. Quick note for anyone new to my reviews - I use the Goodreads tooltips to inform how many stars I give a book. At the time I’m writing this review, 2 stars is “it was OK”.
This is the second time I’ve read this book. This first time was something around 20 years ago and it was definitely a 5-star book to me at the time. I’d never read anything like it. Reading it in 2020 is very interseting. Some of the things have come true and other, like the Metaverse, seem to be on the cusp of actually happening.
Given the way 2020 is going, Stephenson’s neo-liberalistic view of the world with burbclaves (an idea he continues in The Diamond Age) seems realistic and every time I read about for-profit prisons I think back on this book. Yet, for a book “in the future” it’s just so interesting to see the anachronisms - lack of smart phones, in fact stating that very few folks have computers or internet access, the fact that hackers would necessarily be affected due to being able to understand binary. Not so much anymore - there are many hackers like myself who primarily use higher level languages. Even game designers, who used to be the last holdouts of C are using C++ and C# (in Unity) and even Python-like languages (in Godot).
A mini issue to get folks ready for the relaunch of Apex Magazine. I truly enjoyed the stories in here and I can’t wait until the next real issue in January. Below is what I thought of each story:
The Legacy of Alexandria: a dystopia with elements of afro-futurism that seems every so prescient with the moment we’re in right now. The biggest bummer of the author now being an editor in Apex is that the magazine won’t be graced with this work for the foreseeable future.
When I first heard about this book, I was slightly skeptical. An entire book on brisket? Really? Isn’t it just (maybe) two ways? Dalmation rub and spicy rub. Maybe 4 ways if you count low and slow and Texas Crutch style. But no, Raichlen presents nearly every way to make brisket from around Planet BBQ; from Texas smoked to Jewish braises to sandwiches from all nationalities - it’s all here. The result is a book that takes you from the practical to the impractical (brisket chocolate chip cookies? really?) and gives a little history throughout to explain the history behind various dishes. I put lots of recipes on my list of dishes to try; I’m especially excited to try the German bierfleishe. He’s also got a bunch of recipes to use up leftover brisket including breakfast hashes, ramen, and salads.
I really enjoyed this short story collection about Maester Aemon’s brother when he was a squire for Sir Duncan the Tall. I think, perhaps, because these short stories didn’t have to do the heavy lifting for the main narrative in A Song of Ice and Fire, they get to be lighter and more fun fare. At the same time, it does fill in a bit of backstory for Westeros and provide the ability for GRRM to give us examples of how history repeats itself.
Disclaimer: I was a kickstarter on the campaign that provided an early copy of this novella a reward
This was a great book. It is also fascinating in the sense that, as I was reading it I kept thinking that you could about 80% read this book without having read the preceeding 3 books (and 1 novella) in The Stormlight Archive. You wouldn’t understand ANY of the implications of the final chapter or epilogue, but I think you probably could have enjoyed the story anyway.
If you’ve been following me for a while, you know I’m not a huge romance person. This is my second romance, and coincidentally, also my second paranormal romance. But I’ve got acquired some romance books via giveaways, Humble Bundle, Story Bundle, and Amazon’s Kindle First giveaways. I am trying to read “all” my books rather than constantly spending money on the next new thing. So I ended up getting to Bait.
Reading this book was very interesting. I don’t know what edition I happened to pick here, but the edition I read was a Barnes and Noble giveaway from years ago when I first got my Nook. As such, it had a nice, long intro into Louisa May Alcott’s live, the story, and some modern interpretations of the story. As to Ms. Alcott’s story, I was already familiar with it from an episode of The History Chicks - it was bonkers and she knew most of the literary geniuses of the time as family friends. The book also had tons of footnotes to explain slang and other terms that have fallen out of disuse.
I participated in the Kickstarter for this anthology because of meeting Crazy 8 author Mary Fan at Farpoint. I’m quite glad I did because nearly all of these knocked it out of the park! And those that didn’t were still good stories that I enjoyed reading.
I’ve been into pulp fiction ever since picking up the Big Pulp series at Baltimore Comic-Con nearly a decade ago. There’s something really fun that can come from allowing a story to go whereever it goes - even if that ends up being a prurient place. Additionally, the tropes behind these stories have been done to death - so in 2020 you know that authors are going to be playing with reader expectations to provide new kinds of twists. Or they will bring to the surface what was only coded before - like LGBT characters (for which you could actually go to jail for having in your stories back in the day).
It’s not quite as Indian as I’d hoped, but that’s not what it claimed to be. It actually is exactly as promised: an American-Indian fusion collection of recipes consisting mostly of recipes from the author’s mother. I did write down a few recipes to try.
This year one of my goals was to learn a new programming language. Ruby is supposed to be pretty easy for beginners so I figured it’d probably end up being a snap for someone like me who’s been programming for a while. The only book I happened to already own was this kids’ book that I had bought for my kids. They haven’t yet wanted to use it (although they’ve gotten into Scratch)k but it worked fine for me. Indeed it was, and I couldn’t help making comparisons between Ruby and Python the whole time. The two languages are incredibly similar. Ruby clearly seems to be inspired by Perl, but is still a lot more readable as almost plain English. (Although some of the shortcut refactorings can be pretty hard to get if you’re not a Ruby person)
Like, I imagine, most Americans (or at least most Americans 40 and under - ie Millenials and Younger) my only exposure was to Disney’s The Jungle Book. I had no idea the original was a collection of short stories. I’d heard it was “Old School British Racist"TM. But I’m on a Project Gutenberg quest to read the classics that I never got to (school never assigned it). This was one of them. As I write this, I’m also reading Little Women for the first time. Overall, I liked The Jungle Book. Seems like it was meant to be an asiatic Aesop’s Fables. It’s cute and I’d probably share it with my kids. I didn’t really care for all the songs/poems, but it’s a neat bit of flavor. Yes, it does have some attitudes against Indians that are racist, but it doesn’t permeate the stories. I think, depending on your ability to read those things, it’s fine. And since it’s free on Project Gutenberg, it’s not like you’re enriching someone for these attitutes.
This was my second time reading this book. I got it back when I was getting a bunch of similar books - I have Gospel According to the Simpsons and Philosophy of Seinfeld books as well. For this particular one, I didn’t enjoy the format as much as I remembered enjoying it the first time around. At first the chapters just follow one another, building up on the previous chapters. Then they become somewhat more self-sufficient. What I enjoyed most was remembering about the Gnostic Gospels and how much the Wachowskis really put into these movies.
Although I liked the concept behind Hippopotamister, my oldest (the right age for it at the time) didn’t care for it. But now, one of my twins is really into his other series - InvestiGators. Since the second book still isn’t out (I think it comes out at the end of this month), I got them Hippopotamister. It was a huge hit tonight.
This book was a great cap to the long trilogy (although - put together I think it’s not longer than a Brandon Sanderson Stormlight Archive book). While the first third of the book continues to build things up, we’ve met just about everyone by the time we’ve arrived here and so the last 2/3 of the book is a wild ride. It feels like the tension just keeps building until you’re on a giant roller coaster ride to the bottom once the climax proper begins. I can’t really talk about too many specifics in the third book in a trilogy without getting into spoilres, so instead I’ll talk about what I thought was best about this book.
I first read this book in middle school because I really liked Home Improvement. Kind of reminds me of the joke Eddie Murphy tells in Delirious when he sees a young kid in the audience. “You thought I’d be up here at Buckwheat saying ‘o-tay’ and all that”. I read above my age, but it didn’t mean I was ready to understand everything in the book, particularly the more adult stuff like married life or being a parent. It did leave an impression on me because I was able to completely remember the first chapter.
As usual for a book by America’s Test Kitchen, there’s a good combination of educational content and tasty recipes. I’ve already made a few recipes from this book, most recently the spiced ragu which had a unique taste due to its use of Five Spice Powder. It was not out of place, after all, for a while the spice trade passed through Italy. But it was also not a boring same-old Italian recipe. It went over pretty well with the family, as well.
This issue’s stories didn’t really work as well for me as the last few issues have.
Thoughts per story:
The veilonaut’s dream: explorers at a spatial discontinuity explore it for money. Partially a tale of exploitative labor and partly a tale of the stages of grief.
The Anchorite Wakes: There are little hints here and there that something odd is going on. It is all revealed in the last few pages and it’s quite an incredible world hidden from us until that point. Very neat story and ending.
Read this to my four-year-olds and I found it to be a blast. Most of the word-play went over their heads. In fact, after finishing it with my four-year-olds, I recommended it to my 8-year-old. We’ll see what she thinks. This is definitely one of those books you can read with the kids and, if you like Dad Jokes and Puns, you’ll be enjoying it rather than wishing you were doing something else.
A good intro to the Onion Omega2 and Omega2+ boards. Unfortunately, the Onion folks have changed their interface, making a large portion of the book no longer accurate. You can kind of work your way through it if you’re technical and have a history with Linux on embedded devices.
I haven’t soldered in at least a good 15 years, if not more. I couldn’t remember the technique and I didn’t want to mess up my components for a new project I’m working on, so I read this book. It does a VERY good job of walking you through the basics, including what to do when things get messed up. It even has an advanced chapter at the end for surface mount soldering. I would highly recommend anyone who’s either new to soldering or wants to renew their skills.
An almost perfect issue (in terms of my tastes) in which I loved all but one of the stories. Here are my thoughts-per-story, which may have some more text than my status updates if I came up against character limits during updates:
Gubbinal: In a future where we’ve colonized Saturn’s moons, our protagonist hunts for artifacts created by self-replicating robots. The plot then shifts into something perhaps more fantasy than SF and ends in quite a fascinating way.
This book is a great introduction to creating electronics projects with the smallest raspberry pi at this time. Seriously, it’s the same size as an Arduino MKR board - like a stick of gum. I wish I’d read it before starting my raspberry pi adventures, because I learned a few tips, particularly for running headless. The author spots a good job providing code examples and a decent variety of projects. The wearable project is the most impractical when you compared to an adafruit flora, but still provides important information. Overall a great resource if you want to go the raspberry pi route for electronics hacking.
This trilogy is definitely turning out to be one of those 1 book broken up into 3 trilogies than a series of stories following the main characters. The last book was a slightly cleaner break, but still ended with a lot still unresolved. This one, on the other hand, ends on a cliffhanger….well on a cliff….a mountain. Almost nothing is resolved in this book. Although one of the plots was, thankfully, resolved; that’s a good thing because I don’t think the protagonist involved in that plot could take much more.
This is one of those issues where I liked every story and every non-fiction essay. Read below for my thoughts per story.
A space of one’s own: a whimsical dystopia that reminds me of the Terry Gilliam film Brazil. I’m a world of overcrowding buildings can be resized and reconfigured.
Vault: another dystopia. This time there is a bit of a video game metaphor (at least to me) in the fact that the protagonists gain energy based on how many athletic tricks they do while traversing a planet. Explained away as causing their suits to collect more sunlight. The climax comes late, but could be an interesting universe for more stories.
This is one of those issues where I liked every story and every non-fiction essay. Read below for my thoughts per story.
A space of one’s own: a whimsical dystopia that reminds me of the Terry Gilliam film Brazil. I’m a world of overcrowding buildings can be resized and reconfigured.
Vault: another dystopia. This time there is a bit of a video game metaphor (at least to me) in the fact that the protagonists gain energy based on how many athletic tricks they do while traversing a planet. Explained away as causing their suits to collect more sunlight. The climax comes late, but could be an interesting universe for more stories.
A nice balanced collection. My favorite was Cold Comfort. Below are my per story reviews and/or thoughts.
---—-
A Vastness: A very interesting story of what we do when we’re so driven, we are willing to risk everything. And a great ending that was very unexpected. It felt a bit shorter than these usually are, so it was extra neat to have it work so well.
While this continues the shonen tropes of the hero who can’t be beaten just because of his “can-do” attitude, Mr. Mashima increases the stakes and gives a compelling story behind the rise of Demon Card and the paths of the two Gales. It even has a silly joke to make up for the ridiculous name “Demon Card”. Apparently it was supposed to be “Demon Guard” and a typo messed it up. I wonder if it’s one of those katakana/kanji jokes or not.
I’m a huge world-building junkie. It’s one of the reasons I love science fiction and fantasy. And, as I realized while writing the previous sentence, it’s also why I love history non-fiction books and podcasts. I love learning about the society and what drives people to act the way they act. Humans are all human and have always had the same desires, but how those manifest and how we react to them are defined within our cultural contexts. An insult that might have demanded a duel in 1800s America might now simply result in a screed on Twitter. So, I loved the first book’s building up of Radchai culture. In the first book, the plot was almost incidental. It was a TRUE trilogy in that it reads, in retrospect, as the beginning of an incredibly long book.
A nice, solid collection this month. Here are my per-story thoughts:
Carouseling: An extremely sad and touching story about a couple and an experiment at a CERN-like lab. Wonder if the story was written/conceived back when everyone was afraid the collider would make a black hole. (That’s not what happens, but I could definitely see it as an inspiration).
We learn a bit more about what’s going on with Rabarrier, but mostly it’s a volume that is the continuation of the fight started in the last volume. (And it doesn’t finish here, either) Manga is the master of decompressed storytelling.
A nice mix of some silly chapters and finally getting a lot closer to the mystery of Haru’s dad. Actually, with where we are now in the story I’m curious how there are some 20 more volumes.
The book that had me saying “wtf?” in a good way from the get-go. The first chapter is like The Princess Bride in that it sets up what I believe is a fictionalization of the author, but not as a forward or introduction - as the first chapter. So for the first few pages I have no idea what’s going on. Once I get it, it’s pretty interesting - especially given the title page and the fact that, apparently, this is officially Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children’s Crusade.
This was a much more beautiful Cinderella story than the Disney one and a much less gruesome one than the original German one, even if there was still some foot destruction. First of all, this is my second fairy re-telling by Ms. Donna Jo Napoli, having read Sirena last year or the year before. Both times, she was a master at putting us in the head space of her protagonist and creating a compelling story.
Although this volume is full of a lot of gobble-de-gook about the end of time, we do get a relatively fun fight that consumes most of the chapters. Kind of reminds me of Dragon Ball Z in that way. Also, if Seig Hart can be believed, not only do we learn about Elie’s past, but we also learn about the origins of Rave. Things might change, but for now I do give the author credit in that (unless I missed it) it wasn’t one of those things where Dark Bring was also created at the same time. Also, we got this supposedly touching moment:
I don’t know if they did this consciously or if it was simply the consequence of a series that started in the 1940s and ended in the (at the time) present day of 1980s, but I think it’s fascinating that this first trilogy (in a 19ish book series) has each successive book compressed in time. The first book is a regular shared world anthology in which it’s clear who wrote each story and each is self-contained - if providing a history for the next one. It takes place from the 40s to the 80s. The second book is one story in which POVs change with each chapter. It spans a year or so (if memory serves). This book is one story in which each chapter is a POV change, it’s impossible to know who wrote which characters, and it only takes place over the course of about 24 hours. It definitely gives a certain feel of whiplash like slamming on the breaks to have the timelines compress like that.
Mostly cookbook and part history of the Cuban diaspora and those still in Cuba. I really enjoyed the stories that surrounded each recipe and chapter. It really put many of the dishes into a personal space for the author.
I’ve already cooked a few dishes from the book and they were great. It’s a good time for me to get to a book like this because it is not as precise as America’s Test Kitchen, but I have the cooking skills necessary to do well with the recipes. A few years ago I wouldn’t have done very well at all.
This book explores the consequences of the first book’s revelation: Temeriaire is not just a Chinese dragon that was meant to be a gift to the French, he is a Celestial - the breed of the imperial family. Thus, after a bit of British bureaucratic struggle, Laurence and Temeraire are off to China. The plotting of this book is relatively slow outside of the four battle scenes. This is not a negative - I think Ms. Novik uses it to properly convey to a modern audience just how long a boat trip from England to China would take.
The story has kicked into manga overdrive. Lots of mysteries all over the place. Hints that Haru Glory’s dad is maybe in Demon Card. Finally some clues about who Elie might be. The former is more likely to be a red herring, the latter seems to pretty strongly be true. This volume is dominated by a fight scene that’s been coming since the first volume. But Mashima also gave the side characters (both protagonist and antagonist) their own battle while the main one was raging on. All of the Demon Card enemies have special powers and one of the goons can shoot glue out of an eyeball-looking thing on his head. Which led to this…
Some COVID-circumstances led to me finishing the second-half of this two months after starting. So I don’t quite remember the themes that piece together this issue, but here are my per-story thoughts:
The Rains on Mars: A delicate story of loss and how running away from loss can have consequences. Very nicely done.
Crossing LaSalle: Complex issues surrounding mortality and self-worth in a world in which people can have their brains loaded into new bodies.
If you read the first two books with your kids and then were about to give up, do not do so! When I read the second book, about Princess Magnolia’s birthday, to my four-year-old twins I was disappointed. Just like the first one, the princess has someone snooping around as she runs off to fight monsters. Also, there was no payoff on the Goat Herd Boy wanting to become a super hero. Sure, this book series is for Kindergarten to Second-Graders, but it was just too repetitive.
Part of me wonders - is this just meant to be a comedic manga hero’s journey or is it a straight up parody? I can’t tell from this volume. Story-wise it concludes the story from the previous volume about the town where it always rains. I thought the plot twist for that section was interesting, even if the overall story is kind of lacking in stakes - which is why I wonder if this is meant to be parody. Afterwards we continue the medium-term arc of trying to get a piece of Rave that landed in a mountain. Once again, a few interesting story points, but no real consequences yet.
An issue in which I enjoyed pretty much every story. I didn’t detect the theme as easily in this issue as I usually do. The novella that anchors this issue, The Persistence of Blood, is really well-written.
Here are my per-story thoughts:
Tool-Using Mimics: The author takes a photo - perhaps a real take or perhaps from a copypasta forum and comes up with a bunch of possible micro-stories that could go along with the photo.
If you have little girls or little boys who love princesses and a little mischief, this book is a great first chapter book. I read this to my four year old twins and they really loved it and immediately asked for the next book. I’m going to admit that some of the jokes and sarcasm DEFINITELY went over their heads. But if they re-read it when they’re in first grade, I think they’ll be the perfect age to get all the jokes. Additionally, it introduces them to the idea of chapters without the chapters being too long. Overall, I think it’s a great kids book with great illustrations.
All the manga tropes continue piling up. This book has the “pervert who wants to watch the girl in the hot springs” trope. Compared to the last two books this one is just wrapping up the last storyline and then ramping up for the next one. Kind of a weird set of chapters to package together because while the story they tell is necessary, it makes this book on its own kind of dull. The story was originally serealized, so maybe that has a factor in the pacing. I think at this point you’re either into the story of the RAVE MASTER vs DEMON CARD or you’re not, so you’re moving on to Vol 4 or have already quit.
There are a lot of crazy burgers in here. What did you expect from a book inspired by a blog inspired by burger puns in a cartoon voiced by H. John Benjamin? And yet… the authors worked with some chefs to massage the blog’s burgers and, while I’m not going to try all of these, I wrote about 2 dozen burgers recipes in my To-Make list. If you like puns and Bob’s Burgers, you’ve basically got reason enough to get this book. But if you don’t mind getting a little adventurous with your burgers (which I do, although I find my smash burgers to be the holy grail of burgers), there is some real value in owning this book. If you’re looking for a more serious one, I’ve done a lot of recipes from Weber’s Big Book of Burgers: The Ultimate Guide to Grilling Backyard Classics and highly recommend it. (Their grilled fries recipe tasted a LOT better than I thought it would)
This issue was full of longer piece, but also pieces I loved so much. I was cracking up so much with Solderin’. I felt pretty emotional with Umbernight, especially as I am getting older like the protagonist and slowly being replaced by the next generation. I also really enjoyed The Power is Out - I couldn’t stop reading that story. And The Girl-Thing was a good story, despite the few nits I had to pick with the narrative style.
This one was a tough choice between three stars and four stars. The stories I didn’t like: “Say it Low, Say it Loud” and “Her Smoke Rose Up Forever” I REALLY didn’t like. But from the stories I liked, some of them like: “A World to Die For” and “Lighthouse Girl” I REALLY liked. And the Non-fiction section helped push it over the edge.
Nobody does comics storytelling like the Japanese. Some 400 pages in we’re still meeting new characters and we haven’t really gone anywhere story-wise. Plotwise it’s a pretty standard journey plot a la Journey to the West, Dragonball, or even Pokemon. Haru, our main character, is battling foes with nonsensical magic/karate and joining up with other youths who have other insane powers. This volume introduces us to Ellie, a typical tsundere heroine who leaves destruction in her wake. Overall it’s fun, but we’ll see how it goes since it’s looking like the plot itself probably isn’t going to matter as much as the journey.
I had no idea how the story could continue after The Just City. It seemed to have such a finality to it. Yet Ms Jo Walton has really shone with this sequel. It finds a way to build on just about everything from the first book in a way that makes perfect sense while continuing to introduce even more ideas. Just as with the first book, it’s told through diary entries of the main characters and so it’s it’s an exploration of Platonic ideals as they interact with reality. One of our point of view characters is a child born after the events of The Just City, so we get a new perspective from someone who knows about the successes and failures of the first city.
I think this is the first manga I’ve read since DeathNote. I’m having a little trouble getting into this, but maybe it’s just one of those stories that starts off a little strange and then finally builds up to a plot? It does tell the story over 30-something books.
Of course, there are some gems of dialogue like this (read from right to left):
I got it as part of a Humble Bundle, so I’ve got the whole series, leaving me without any reason not to go on. So we’ll see where this goes.
I believe there’s only one book left in the series and it’s pretty apparent the way everything was coming together in this book. It also strongly rewarded readers who’d read the novellas. Having done so provided advanced knowledge of who Timothy was and also a better understanding and empathy with Cara and Xan. They weren’t necessary for getting this book, but they sure made it a lot more fun to read.
Things continue to evolve in Dresden’s Chicago. By this point it’s become obvious to me that the main series (as opposed to short stories) requires the reader to read them all in order rather than just jumping in to any particular case. Like a season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, each story builds upon the previous one. This one contains characters from Fool Moon playing a huge part, a deal that Dresden made in Grave Peril forcing a big part of the plot, and both women in his life only have resonance if you’ve been reading since the first book.
As far as the case, I think it proceeds on a good pace. While, as usual, I couldn’t solve it ahead of time, all the clues are there for you to trace back and see that Jim Butcher isn’t cheating. This one involves The Fae and so it’s a good thing that over the past 3 years of fantasy humble bundle books, I’ve been learning about faerie rules. They do a decent job explaining stuff, but knowing that there are Summer and Winter Sidhe Courts ahead of time allowed me to just focus on the story.
As I was recommending this book to a fellow SF fan, I realized that this book (and the series so far up to this book) is VERY male-gaze-y. It doesn’t bother me, but knowing about that (and this book was - SURPRISINGLY - written almost TWENTY years ago), does make me think twice before recommending it if the person might take that the wrong way.
Anyway, I’m definitely enjoying the series and it’s on to book 5 whenever that shows up in my To-Read list.
This is the second book I added to my to-read list after meeting Ms. Fan at Farpoint 2019. Even though both Starswept and this one are rated 4 stars, that’s more a consequence of only have 5 stars to choose from, because I enjoyed this book more than Starswept. STaBD had two things going for it steampunk and immediate action. Taking the last one first, as I noted in my Starswept review, the early, slow chapters are key in providing a base from which to deviate in later chapters. But there’s just something so exciting about a book opening up with a bunch of warrior women fighting demons that makes you want to keep going. (By the way, I’ll admit to my unconscious bias - until specifically called out, I’d assuming our main character was a man)
So … Steampunk. I’m not the type of person who cosplays Steampunk or anything, but as a genre it always starts things at a higher level when I find myself in a Steampunk world. Ms. Fan, however, has given me something new and fun here. Most Steampunk takes place in England, The Commonwealth, and occasionally, on The Continent. But this story takes place in Victorian China. And it has demons and ghosts and stuff and my ignorance over Chinese mythology leaves me unsure how much is made up by Ms. Fan and how much is known mythology.
The story turns out to be part mystery, part unwanted arranged marriage, part Mulan, and part romance. And it works! Sure, Anlie is a bit of a Tsundere character and that can get a little tiresome, but she does eventually learn some character growth. If you like Steampunk, but are tired of the same old stuff, check this out and you may find yourself pleasantly surprised.
It is a real bummer for me to give this book 1 star. I really enjoyed the first book in the trilogy. The second book was fun. But this book… kind of just felt like perhaps this series should have been a duology instead of a trilogy. While the first third or so was a good bit of fan service, it could have maybe just been a post-script novella? The rest of the book was just full of the introduction of all sorts of new rules and technology to the way the world worked that I didn’t think made sense in the third book of a trilogy. On top of that, the last chunk - from when our main characters end up in a canyon until the end just didn’t make any god forsaken sense. (view spoiler)[Who rebuilt the dead people? I kept thinking it was all going to end up being a dream or parallel universe or something (hide spoiler)]
This book might be great for you. And that’s OK. I don’t want to “yuck” anyone’s “yum”. But it did not work for me. This is why there was such a gap between updates towards the end. This is why I read more than one book at once. So if one isn’t motivating me, I’ve got others to still be excited about. Anyway, a real bummer because I believe Ms. Garlick had a blast creating this series and really seems to love the characters. I enjoyed interacting with her on twitter while reading the first book and going through all the fun twists and turns there. Anyway, I’m rambling…
This is an AWESOME book that has completely transformed the way I code in Python. That might sound like the opening to a parody review, but I’m being sincere. One of the best things about Python is that it has a low barrier to entry and it’s easy to get started programming. One of the worst things about Python is that it has a low barrier to entry and it’s easy to get started programming. I’ve been going through the past 15ish years with just a surface-level understanding of my favorite programming language.
On my biggest, most used (by others) Python program, I’ve gone from code to looks like this ( https://github.com/djotaku/ELDonation…) to a package that’s published on PyPi ( https://pypi.org/project/eldonationtr…) and auto-generated documentation( https://eldonationtracker.readthedocs…), pulling from my Python docstrings ( https://eldonationtracker.readthedocs…) with even more ways I’m going to fix/optimize my code and make it more Pythonic. I think this is the best book I’ve read on Python programming since the Mark Pilgrim book that got me into Python that decade and a half ago.
This is the second time I’ve read this book, the first time being nearly 20 years ago when it first came out. A few key bits had stuck with me, like Menedemos’ womanizing and a battle at sea. But after 20 years, most of the details had faded, so it was almost like reading it anew.
As a history geek, I found it a lot of fun to read historical fiction that isn’t set in one of the traditional time periods like Victorian England or Napolean’s Reign. The two characters also make great foils for each other, impulsive Menedemos and his philosopher/wannabe-historian cousin Sostratos. While it’s obviously a work of fiction, it was neat to see what things are the same about humans no matter how far back you go (haggling, superstitions, balancing desire with prudence) while other things are so different (how they viewed meals, technology, gender relations).
Perhaps obviously, since the main characters are sea traders and the majority of the book takes place during the trading season, it’s structured almost as a series of episodes, each taking place in a new city. There isn’t a truly overarching plot and it’s both metaphorically and literally about the journey, not the destination(s). The biggest narrative momentum comes from Sostratos’ character growth, but even that is relatively minimal.
Overall, I think it’s a pretty fun read, particularly if you’re interested in ancient Greece.
I wasn’t quite into this one as much as some other recent issues. Here are my reviews per story:
Prasetyo Plastics - Less of a traditional story and more of a meditation on unbridled capitalism that does not descend into a libertarian dystopia. Rather, it’s another that asks if we truly realize what we’re doing to this planet on a scale that we believe has never been attempted before.
I met Ms. Fan at Farpoint 2019 at her booth after seeing some of the panels she was on. We started talking about her books and I was intrigued and put this book and Stronger Than a Bronze Dragon on my To Read list. I also started following Ms. Fan on Twitter, and from getting to know her via tweet, she has put a lot of herself into this book: She went to college for music and has original compositions on her site: https://www.maryfan.com/songs.html. There are silks performances in the book and Ms. Fan is currently attending classes to get better at performing silk (Cirque de Soliel type stuff) routines.
As for the book itself, let me start off with non-spoilery stuff. First off, as you can see, I gave it 4 stars. So if you like YA science fiction and are willing to stretch your definition of what can be in SF, you will probably enjoy this book. This book is very focused on the performing arts aspect of our protagonist, Iris Lei, with mostly backgrounded science fiction elements until the latter parts of the book. And it never becomes hard SF. Again, if you’re OK with that, I think you’re in for a real treat.
The book has a slow start, which can be tough for some, but I think it’s important for many reasons: it really drives home how dedicated to the craft Iris Lei and her fellow students at Papilio are; it serves to really highlight Iris’ relationships, which is a KEY plot point in the second 60% of the book; and it really makes us crave the inevitable scene change, allowing Ms. Fan to really make that an emotional hit.
The only thing that was a bit of a miss for me was Iris’ love story plot points. I don’t have any problems reading YA, but the further I get away from it, the less I can truly relate to the relationship woes of the main characters. Intellectually, I know it feels like it’s the most important thing when you’re that age. But knowing how much it’s not just takes me out of it.
I think the novel comes together well. It was clearly written as a trilogy (almost nothing is resolved at the end of this book), so we’ll have to see how it all works as a narrative, but I liked the story.
OK, Spoiler time now. The rest of this’ll be spoiler-filled so I can better talk about the plot. You should have everything you need to know above about whether to read the book if you can’t stand any spoilers.
The plot has a lot of similarities to A Planet for Rent by Yoss, but with a different set of metaphors. A Planet for Rent was, obviously, a metaphor for a post-Cold War Cuba with the Aliens serving as the First World and the way they treat the Cubans. Starswept felt to me like it contained two separate metaphors. Part 1 of the book clearly seemed like a metaphor for college debt when doing a degree in the arts. The Papilians LIVE for their performances. Some may have more or less intense feelings than Iris Lei, but they seem to all be doing it for a love of performance. Yet, just like in real life, most people who are awesome musicians are not going to be in the London Philharmonic (assuming there’s good pay that comes with that prestige). Some will end up in orchestras where they need a spouse to support them. Many will end up teaching the next generation. And nearly all will end up with crushing debt they don’t have the ability to pay back. But, as long as they’re not starving, the joy of performance may outweigh the financial issues.
Starting in Part 2 of Starswept, the narrative changes to a slavery metaphor. I was a little torn about what the best real-world analogue was. On the one hand, we eventually discover an Abolitionist movement and the characters are treated as little more than objects by the Adryil. So that would seem to point to African slavery of the 1600-1800s. But then there’s the aspect that the Earthling performers are being told they’re getting a better life and their government is complicit in understanding that they’re being sold into slavery. This points to a couple potential sources. The simplest, of course, is modern slavery. There are people right now who were told they should go to the USA, Japan, or the UAE to get better jobs. Once they get there their passports are confiscated and they become slaves and/or sex workers. There may also be a tie to how the Chinese workers who came to the Americas were lied to. They were shipped over to work here and then told they needed to pay their way back, but were paid such a low wage that they were stuck here. This leads to many Chinese populations in the Americas, including the Chinese population in Cuba. Either way, while we have lots of foreshadowing that things are not what they seem (especially once Damiul starts teaching Iris how to not be mind-controlled), I think Ms. Fan does a good job of portraying how bad things can go for those who are unknowingly sold into slavery.
I’ve been really improving my cooking by leaps and bounds thanks to America’s Test Kitchen’s books. They make sure recipes are perfect (or as near as can be) in terms of directions, ingredients, etc. They have truly spoiled me to the point that I often hate other cookbooks. But, as my wife says, you’re not truly cooking until you can just look at the ingredients in the house and come up with food on the fly. Or know how much salt the food needs by tasting it. So, after seeing Samin Nosrat’s Netflix show (which shares its name with this book), I added the book to my wishlist.
I received it as a gift and I’m very glad that I did. While it’ll definitely take me a few times of re-reading the first half of the book (the part that talks about how to use salt, fat, acid, and heat in cooking without presenting any recipes) to absorb all the ideas, I’ve already been able to use some of the ideas (particularly around salt) to improve my ability to improvise in the kitchen as well as finally be able to do that enigmatic part that ends most ATK recipes - “salt to taste”.
If you’ve a 100% beginner cook, I still recommend America’s Test Kitchen as the best training wheels you can find. I’m still planning on using my ATK books and getting more because when you’re doing an unfamiliar recipe (say, from another region of the USA or another country) it’s pretty hard to improvise because you don’t know what the platonic ideal tastes like. But if you want to move to the next level, I’d put this near the top of your list by Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Food Lab (I haven’t read it, but EVERYONE loves it) or McGee’s “red book”.
The book that was used by Ron Howard, et al to make the Apollo 13 movie!
I got this book as part of a space-themed Humble Audiobook Bundle. As I was choosing the next audiobook I’d listen to whenever I ran out of podcast, I decided to go for non-fiction book. And so I started my journey through a couple decades of NASA history. Once things get going (ie the men are on their way to the moon), Chaikin does an excellent job of switching POVs throughout the mission to give us some insight into each man’s thoughts, challenges, and even prank ideas. Since hacks/hackers originate with the MIT train team and the Stanford/Caltech student pranks, it’s no surprise that NASA missions had the same kinds of Easter Eggs one finds in video games (especially in the more wild-west era of video game development before everything became AAA multi-million dollar games in the late 90s; of course with the re-emergence of indie games you’re seeing them again). As examples, there were jokes embedded in their instruction manuals, various parts of the spaceships, or in coded messages back and forth with NASA HQ.
As someone born a generation too late, with the much less exciting Hubble, Spacelab, MIR, etc in my lifetime, Chaikin did a great job of both putting me into the mindset of America at the time and humanizing the astronauts. (Like the best historians do for the Founding Fathers we always learn about from a distance in school). If you’re interested in NASA history, I think it’s harder to find a better recommendation than this book.
As usual, the per-story reviews are below this section. But first, a ranking of said stories.
The stories I REALLY liked: The Sum of Her Expectations, The Last Boast-Builder in Ballyvoloon, Intro to Prom, Shiomah’s Land Great: Red Lights, And Rain Good: The Psychology Game Not a fan: The Nightingales in Platres The per-story reviews:
The Sum of Her Expectations: First of all, I love what the title is a reference to within this story. I like the idea of the aliens and I also love the possible metaphor of what happens with the contruction bots in the planet they’ve left behind. In the end, the story is a metaphor for dealing with trauma and I really like how it came together.
The Nightingales in Platres: An alternate future story in which some Greeks get on a generation ship to try and emigrate to a new planet. I’m not a fan of how the story went, but they can’t all be something I love.
The Last Boat-Builder in Ballyvoloon: A future in which we created an AI “organism” to remove plastics from the sea and things got out of hand. I think more of the public needs to read stories like this before we try some hare-brained idea to deal with climate change or pollution.
The Psychology Game (translated): A future (except it takes place in 2020 ;) ) in which there’s a reality TV show where people get psychological help. The twist is that the psychologist might be an AI and neither the patient nor the audience knows. Turns out to almost be in the structure of some of the non-fiction in Clarkesworld where it’s exploring a non-fiction subject with some fictional examples. Also, never thought of this before:
“And to be honest, human therapists have feelings too. If you keep on unloading your emotional garbage onto them, wouldn’t they suffer too? Sometimes I think using human therapists is kind of inhumane.”
Intro to Prom: Oh, man - what an incredible story. A perfect tale of corporate greed and how it affects the little folks. I can 100% see something like this actually happening (which is sad and scary). WOW.
Shiomah’s Land: I correctly guessed what’s the twist would be in terms of the origins of this world. But that did not take away from how well-written it was and how it made me feel the emotions of the main character. I’d love to read another story in the same universe.
Red Lights, And Rain: The fallout from a time war. It takes a lot of good twists and turns and I was not expecting the ending.
It is a real bummer for me to give this book 1 star. I really enjoyed the first book in the trilogy. The second book was fun. But this book… kind of just felt like perhaps this series should have been a duology instead of a trilogy. While the first third or so was a good bit of fan service, it could have maybe just been a post-script novella? The rest of the book was just full of the introduction of all sorts of new rules and technology to the way the world worked that I didn’t think made sense in the third book of a trilogy. On top of that, the last chunk - from when our main characters end up in a canyon until the end just didn’t make any god forsaken sense. (view spoiler)[Who rebuilt the dead people? I kept thinking it was all going to end up being a dream or parallel universe or something (hide spoiler)]
This is an AWESOME book that has completely transformed the way I code in Python. That might sound like the opening to a parody review, but I’m being sincere. One of the best things about Python is that it has a low barrier to entry and it’s easy to get started programming. One of the worst things about Python is that it has a low barrier to entry and it’s easy to get started programming. I’ve been going through the past 15ish years with just a surface-level understanding of my favorite programming language.
This is the second time I’ve read this book, the first time being nearly 20 years ago when it first came out. A few key bits had stuck with me, like Menedemos’ womanizing and a battle at sea. But after 20 years, most of the details had faded, so it was almost like reading it anew.
I wasn’t quite into this one as much as some other recent issues. Here are my reviews per story:
Prasetyo Plastics - Less of a traditional story and more of a meditation on unbridled capitalism that does not descend into a libertarian dystopia. Rather, it’s another that asks if we truly realize what we’re doing to this planet on a scale that we believe has never been attempted before.
I met Ms. Fan at Farpoint 2019 at her booth after seeing some of the panels she was on. We started talking about her books and I was intrigued and put this book and Stronger Than a Bronze Dragon on my To Read list. I also started following Ms. Fan on Twitter, and from getting to know her via tweet, she has put a lot of herself into this book: She went to college for music and has original compositions on her site: https://www.maryfan.com/songs.html. There are silks performances in the book and Ms. Fan is currently attending classes to get better at performing silk (Cirque de Soliel type stuff) routines.
I’ve been really improving my cooking by leaps and bounds thanks to America’s Test Kitchen’s books. They make sure recipes are perfect (or as near as can be) in terms of directions, ingredients, etc. They have truly spoiled me to the point that I often hate other cookbooks. But, as my wife says, you’re not truly cooking until you can just look at the ingredients in the house and come up with food on the fly. Or know how much salt the food needs by tasting it. So, after seeing Samin Nosrat’s Netflix show (which shares its name with this book), I added the book to my wishlist.
The book that was used by Ron Howard, et al to make the Apollo 13 movie!
I got this book as part of a space-themed Humble Audiobook Bundle. As I was choosing the next audiobook I’d listen to whenever I ran out of podcast, I decided to go for non-fiction book. And so I started my journey through a couple decades of NASA history. Once things get going (ie the men are on their way to the moon), Chaikin does an excellent job of switching POVs throughout the mission to give us some insight into each man’s thoughts, challenges, and even prank ideas. Since hacks/hackers originate with the MIT train team and the Stanford/Caltech student pranks, it’s no surprise that NASA missions had the same kinds of Easter Eggs one finds in video games (especially in the more wild-west era of video game development before everything became AAA multi-million dollar games in the late 90s; of course with the re-emergence of indie games you’re seeing them again). As examples, there were jokes embedded in their instruction manuals, various parts of the spaceships, or in coded messages back and forth with NASA HQ.
While I continued to read lots of cookbooks in 2019, this was the year of Sequels, Sanderson, and Science Fiction Magazines. On the sequels front, I finished The Cosmere (except for White Sands Vol 3), continued The Expanse, The Asylum Tales, Red Rising, The Dresden Files, The Mogoliad, Wild Cards, and the Illumination Paradox. For Sanderson, I not only finished the Cosmere, but I also started The Reckoners and read from his mentor (Robert Jordan - Wheel of Time) and his protege (Brian McClellan - Powder Mage Trilogy). As for magazines, it was all Clarkesworld, but I wanted to keep the alliteration in that sentence.
Can Sanderson write a great non-Cosmere book? The answer is a resounding ‘yes!’
I’ve read quite a few superhero decontructions and reconstructions (most famous being Watchmen and Irredeemable), but Sanderson brings something new to the genre, partially by focusing on the folks affected by gods walking among men. (Which, I just realized, brings the idea of superheros being our version of the Greek gods full circle) This is also what I loved about A Song of Ice and Fire that got swept away for the Game of Thrones adaptation. When the powerful bicker, it’s the powerless that suffer. This book is also a bit of a mystery as we are missing a lot of information and while David, the main character, knows a lot more than we do when the novel starts, he still is missing a lot of information. Sanderson does a good job of planting lots of little clues so that the plot twists are well-earned. Even though I guessed one of the plot twists, I was thrown off by the way in which it manifested. (view spoiler)[Yes, Prof was an epic. No, he wasn’t working for Steelheart to infiltrate The Recokoners (hide spoiler)] The ending really hits hard and works quite well.
I guess I’m spoiled by Milk Street, Meathead Goldwyn, and America’s Test Kitchen, but reading a collection of blog posts put into a book with a bunch of vague recipes (although some seem to be better written) was just kind of meh.
Antarctic Birds: Some kind of science experiment with genetic engineering - I’m a little confused at first about what’s going on. My least favorite kind of story - at the end I still barely understood what was going on.
Little /^^^\&- - A very weird story about planet-sized aliens (or planets that have gained sentience?) messing with Earth. Wow, that ending was profoundly weird. It was still a pretty fun read, though.
I had been waiting to mark this book as read until I finished all the projects, but the reality is that might take years; not because the projects are hard, but because I can’t quite get the wife to justify all the extra expenses for toys.
With this issue, there were a ton of stories that had killer endings and worlds that I wanted to spend more time in. Strongly recommend!!! See below for a per-story review that may expand on my status updates:
Twisted Knots: A story involving a character who sees the world in geometric terms. It turns out to be a beautiful story about loss and dealing with loss.
Harry Dresden continues to grow, making less of the same mistakes and earning new friends. I particularly loved his partnership with Michael and how their personalities compared and contrasted. This entry in the series finds Harry trying to figure out why there are more ghosts than usual terrorizing Chicago. This one was a little harder to try and predict the solution to the mystery, but it did make sense as things went on.
Another awesome series of stories compiled by Mr. Neil Clarke. I loved all but the last fiction story and enjoyed the non-fiction. Here’s what I thought of each story/article:
An Age of Ice (a translated story): A story involving a multi-generational family and a world in which cryonics are realistic. About how the world changes because this exists. It’s a very short story, but quite poignant.
Ms. Garlick picks up exactly where the last novel left off, so I would recommend reading this immediately after the first book, since I was a little confused for the first little bit until I remember what was going on. She uses this book to push the readers further into this world in two ways. First of all, she expands the POV characters so that we can get a first-hand look into more than just Eyelet and Urlick’s thoughts. Second, she dramatically expands on the world and the magic of the world that our characters live in. Primarily, and incredibly scary, is the exploration of the kingdom’s madhouse which not only leans hard on all the tropes of the evil madhouse, but also adds on top of that a layer of malicious magic. There is a bright spot with the comedic relief character in the madhouse that had me alternately laughing and gasping, given the circumstances.
I love the various titles in the Boss Fight Books series; all the moreso when they involve games that meant a lot to me. NBA Jam (which I had filed in my head as NBA Jams), is one of those games that my brothers and I sunk countless hours into. We were always more into arcade or silly sports games like Ken Griffy Jr. for the SNES or Midway’s NHL game for the N64 than sports sims. NBA was right in that perfect spot where it wasn’t too focused on b-ball and having lots of players on the screen. Instead it was fast-paced and easy and fun and silly - great for pre-teen to teen Eric and brothers.
Some pretty awesome recipes that I can’t wait to try and one I’ve already tried. While not as full of photos as their Illustrated line of cookcooks, it’s still got a lot of great photos to showcase what your finished dishes should look like. It’s also got the signature America’s Test Kitchen recipes that tell you why the recipe works as well as where they’ve taken shortcuts that make it easier to cook without sacrificing on taste.
I think the only story I wasn’t into was “Neptune’s Trident”. Otherwise, a top-notch issue. Especially liked the non-fiction essays this time around.
My thoughts on each story (a slightly wordier version of my status updates where character limits kept me from expressing it all)
Fool’s Cap: I was *so* sure I’d guessed the reveal, but the author got me. There were a couple subtle clues of what the ending would end up being, but I was already too committed to the one I thought was coming.
After last month’s reveal of James Tiptree, Jr as a pseudonym, pretty funny to have a story of “his” in this issue! Overall another great issue. I think my favorite universes were from “We Who Live in the Heart” and “Running the Snake”.
Here’s what I thought of each story (a slightly more wordy version of my status updates):
This book was depressing as hell. I added it to my To Read list 5 or so years ago when I heard about it on Fresh Air. Don’t get me wrong, the author has an entertaining style. There were lots of chuckles as I read various witty things she said. It’s just that the core thesis of the book - or at least the thread that seemed to tie everything together - was that the modern world was screwing over everyone with breasts, men included.
This is, as per usual, a great issue of Clarkesworld Magazine. Once again Clarke’s affinity for bringing Chinese SF to the fore gives us a great, fun story in The Robot who liked to tell tall tales. The non-fiction section also has some really great essays that made me think while also being entertaining.
The book was fine. The projects in here didn’t draw me in as much as some of the other Make electronic books I’ve recently read. I think it’s because most of them were a bit less useful in my house given the need to satisfy the wife aesthetically.
I typically read 1-3 fiction books at once (depends on whether I’m caught up on my podcasts and listening to an audiobook), going back and forth between books I already own (say from Humble Bundle or Story Bundle) and books I have to buy. I don’t usually have to worry about getting confused about the plots or anything because the books are pretty different. Somehow, this time I ended up reading two supernatural detective books at the same time - this one and Dan Shambles #5. Not only that, but both books had cases involving multiple types of werewolves. The only deleterious effect is that I kept forgetting that Dresden is in Chicago instead of New Orleans.
The world of Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I. is a fun world full of dad jokes and groan-worthy puns. The author doesn’t take himself too seriously and so it’s easy to have fun and roll with it rather than end up rolling your eyes at it. This collection of Dan Shamble short stories does a good job of introducing, and then having fun with, the regular cast of characters. If you like your noir/hard-boiled detective novels with a bit of camp, this is for you. Here’s what I thought of each of the stories within:
This initial Red Rising Trilogy is a little like the original Matrix Trilogy (if you haven’t heard, there’s apparently a fourth in the works). The first one was a triumphant, mostly fun story. At the end, our protagonists haven’t 100% won, but you could imagine it happening. Then the second one just crushed all that hope and made you feel dumb for believing in the narrative of the good guys always winning. Finally, the third entry in the story keeps that crapsack worldview and manages another, less satisfying ending.
Donat does a great job of giving the reader everything they need to know to build a rover (like the Mars rover) out of a Raspberry Pi and some motors and sensors. It’s definitely a project I intend to add to my ever-growing list of hardware hacking projects. This book gives you enough info to get started while also pointing out places where the user could go off and make it their own. Very great balance and I heartily recommend.
I don’t know if Robert Jordan knew this series was going to be a ton of books, but he clearly knew it was going to be more than one. In a book about the making of Star Wars, the author uncovers that the old rumor that Lucas spread that he started in the middle of the story because it’s more interesting than the beginning is a lie. However, the concept he was falsely trying to get across certainly is true. This book is SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW. The reason I gave this book 4 stars instead of 3 is that, like Lord of the Rings, which every high fantasy book written since is in conversation with, the extra slow beginning is important as a contrast for the adventure our protagonists go through.
This is a really GREAT book that, more than some of the other books with the same title, is about Getting Started with electronics; the Raspberry Pi, in this case. The author does a REALLY GOOD job explaining the basics of getting started with the Pi, the basics of Linux, and a bunch of ways to use the electronics part of a Raspberry Pi with some fun real world examples. (Controlling a lamp over the net or making a Photobooth that can automatically add mustaches, hats, etc) If I’d had this book back when I bought my Raspberry Pi B (back when that was new), I would have done lots of projects with it by now. Instead, it’s been sitting in my basement. (Now, the new RaspPi 4 is great enough to easily play 1080p vids over the net and I’m loving running Librelec on it)
On the plus side, this book gave me the knowledge I needed to finally complete a GUI for my Extra Life Donation tracker program ( https://github.com/djotaku/ELDonation…). I’d tried many different GUI toolkits and none of them was getting me what I wanted. I wanted to use QT since I love using KDE, but it was just too complicated and free posts on various blogs didn’t quite take me far enough. So for that I’m grateful to this book. There are also future improvements I’ll be able to make to my code thanks to this book.
First of all, lots of kudos for the authors including lots of photos. Many of the other microcontroller books I’ve read from MAKE have had illustrations, but this one actually has photos and that’s very helpful when illustrating sewing.
After reading this I’m inspired to mess around with some wearable tech, but also extremely terrified of screwing something up as someone who’s done little to no sewing. However, I might end up teaming up with my mother-in-law who’s a great seamstress to work on some projects. Just need to decide on a plan of attack first.
Massimo and his co-writer do an excellent job creating an introduction to the Arduino board. I started mucking around with the boards before reading this book because I’d done some projects with Atmel chips in undergrad (a couple decades ago) and I do software programming on the side. But I wish I’d read this book first as it would have saved me time on figuring stuff out on my own that’s unique to Arduino as well as stuff that I’d forgotten in the intervening decades. Programming hardware chips is very different from general purpose programming for a computer or cell phone. Not only are resources on the chip a lot more limited (although, in the case of the Raspberry Pi - getting closer and closer to a regular desktop), but input and output is also more limited. These microcontroller boards are meant for automation projects where you set something up (like a system to water your plants based on whether or not it is going to rain) or limited interactions. They’re running in a never-ending loop and that requires a different mindset.
Beautiful photos and well-written recipes fill this book. I’ve added lots of them to my to-cook list. My only disappointment is that the BBQ section is more about grilling indoors than true BBQ.
Since Maddy Gaiman wrote this when she was 8 and I have a nearly-8 year old who loves to read and write, I figured it’d be a fun book to read together. She enjoyed it even though poetry isn’t her thing. I thought it was pretty neat that Maddy and Neil Gaiman write poems to each other. Overall, it’s a pretty neat collection.
I met Ms. Usher Evans at Baltimore Comic-Con a year or two ago and she is a very prolific author. If any particular book of yours isn’t your cup of tea, you can try another - she has magical school YA, fantasy, and SF as well as others. This book is one of her science fiction books.
To me, this book is Buffy meets Ready Player One done well. As I discussed in my RPO review, it was just way too overhyped for me vs what it delivered. This one, on the other hand, seemed to come from a more genuine place and fit in better into the story. Also, I love Buffy while dystopias (which I’ve been reading since middle school are starting to really bum me out). Anyway, this isn’t an RPO trash session, let’s get to this book.
As I’ve said many times before - I’ve been exploring more genres recently instead of locking myself into just one. I don’t remember how this ended up in my To-Read list back in 2014, but it’s definitely different than my usual fare. That said, my preferences for stories in this collection mirrored my preferences in the video world. I’m not a consumer of erotica movies, shows, etc. I don’t find sex entertaining for its own sake. But I do think that sex can be very contributory to a plot. Sometimes it can be a move forward for a character (see the many permutations of that in 1999’s Cruel Intentions) and other times it can just make the plot more true to life (see various movies either about dating - the opening to Train Wreck or the quarter-point of Forgetting Sarah Marshall - or married life) So in this collection I preferred the stories that were good Steampunk stories that happened to have good sex vs the ones that were just the literary equivalent of porn. The highest compliment I could give to any of the stories in this collection was some variation on - “I want to see more in this story’s universe!”
“Two Ways of Living” - A world in which humans can essentially hibernate by eating a ton of calories and then a chemical cocktail to go unconcious. Additionally, the person does not age. The short story essentially serves as a meditation on what kind of person would do such a thing and what their reasons might be. I’m not sure how I feel about the ending.
Prequels can be a tough thing to get right. The reader/audience already knows where things are going. Can you have any real tension? Well, if you’re JSAC, you know a great way to do it - by having it involve none of the characters of the main series and setting it generations in the past. Considering the point of this story is to document how the Epstein drive comes to be, it’s surprisingly touching and personal. Or rather, not surprising at all because my favorite aspects of JSAC’s writing have been the way they can write both a very character-centric plot and keep attention to the details - whether scientific, political, or economic.
I think the best way to describe this book is to reference the last chapter and Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s catchphrase on his podcast - the Cosmic Perspective. Even though I already knew a bunch of the info in the book (at least at the basic level), when I really thought about it, it was so hard to wrap my mind around the infinitely large and small quantities referenced by NDT.
“Assassins” - At it’s most basic level, this is a story about people forming emotional attachments with virtual characters. What I think makes this short story so compelling is that this is already the case with much less fidelity than a Star Trek holodeck or even convincing virtual reality. People form emotional bonds with video game characters - the previous book I read (A Mind Forever Voyaging) - documents this happening back in the text adventure days. It still happens today. And it happens with book characters, anime characters, characters on TV shows… So it doesn’t take a huge leap of faith to understand the emotional attachments in the more VR-capable world of the short story. Additionally, the main character has her own emotional issues and perhaps some neuro-atypical things going on. As a short story it’s masterfully told, but I think it would also be fun to explore this world some more in another short story or in a longer story.
It was nice to take a break from fiction to read this analysis of the evolution of video game narratives through time. Chronologically, the game goes from text adventure games through point and click adventure games to JRPGs and then to the blending of narrative with FPS engines before ending with Heavy Rain. The book is relatively short for its subject matter and decades of coverage (200-something pages on my Nook in epub format including the glossary) so the author has to cut out a lot. He’s honest and upfront about this which, for me, took the sting out of “why did he mention this one and not that one?”.
I added this book to my To Read list back in 2014 after hearing Ms. Thompson interviewed on Sword and Laser. I had a slightly different impression of what the plot would be - I think the interview focused on the character of TwoBlood - but the story I got was still great. Since I really liked the world Ms. Thompson creates here so much, I want to start with what I didn’t like about the book rather than ending with what I didn’t like. In list notation:
If you are really into The Cosmere you tend to REALLY be into the Cosmere (just take a stroll through r/Cosmere on Reddit). So it would be a shame to miss out on all this background information about the Terrismen in this Mistborn series even if you’re not going to play the RPG. Don’t read this book until after you’ve read Misborn 1 or you will be spoiled story-wise. I think it’s pretty safe to read after that as the spoilers it has for book 2 are pretty minor. It MAY spoil a death from book 2….it has been over a year since I started reading this, but other than that, I think it’s pretty safe to read after book 1. I wouldn’t read it too long after the first Mistborn Trilogy because it has pretty much no relevance to the Wax/Wayne series since that one takes place something like 700 years after the first trilogy.
As I work through my To-read list, we come to another book I added around 2014. This one was after Mr. McClellan had been interviewed by Sword and Laser (and 4 years before I’d ever heard of Brandon Sanderson). His idea of powder mages - a Napoleanic look at magic sounded incredibly refreshing. I was never a big fantasy person, preferring science fiction, but so much of the fantasy I’d come across was stuck in Tolkien’s shadow - medieval-ish with dwarves and elves and so on. Of course, in the time since I heard about this book I’ve read all of Sanderson’s Cosmere novels and others have also taken a look at other fantasy genres like Silk-punk. But that didn’t make this book any less good, only less special.
This is a very hard book to properly review. Unlike a typical book in a trilogy (or however many books it ends up being - at the time this book was published it was a trilogy), this book does not contain a story that begins and ends within the larger story. But as this book started I realized this would be the case. It essentially just continues exactly where the last one left off as if this was not a series of books, but rather one large book that’s been split into publishable chunks of 300 pages each. (Although, to put the lie to my point, the final chapter does have a very satisfying final sentence for ending a book)
This is some old-ass science fiction. It’s interesting that on my recent trip I ended up reading 3 SF stories from my to-read list that were all from the 1950s. It’s definitely got a lot of that Zeerust where we’re incredibly far into the future, but it’s still analog interfaces to computers and they still take up entire buildings. At one point someone who’s essentially the human representative from the world gets faxes from all over the world in order to know what’s going on. Of course, some of the female representation is dated - although not as badly as the PKD short stories I read on the same trip I read this book. And there was a great intro to the version I read which was written in 2000 in which Clarke acknowledges how the world passed him by as well as including a revised chapter one written in the 80s.
Another Philip K Dick story from the 1950s. This one falls squarely in the pop SciFi of the magaines of the times. The science is so bad it’s hilarious. What was a lot more fun was all the anachronisms from that time. Yes, we have spaceships that can travel to other systems in no time, but people don’t have portable computers - they take paper files around. And the battle displays are clearly analog. It’s definitely in that very old Asimovian storytelling style where the story is a bit of a mystery that the reader and protagonist have to solve. Of course, it’s also incredibly a product of its time when it comes to women. The story ends with the protagonist’s wife (who divorced him) essentially being kidnapped and forced to repopulate a planet with him. And, after a passionate kiss it’s all good.
This story is so short, the Gutenberg license at the end takes up the majority of the pages, but it’s still a fun story. Or, well it is to me and I imageine my boss would also love it. But we’re both degenerates who LOVE puns. This is also a great short story for kids around 3rd or 4th grade when they’d really and truly understand all the idioms being used. Essentially, a short story from the 1950s in which the protagonist reads a book containing a bunch of English idioms that convinces him the characters are aliens. If you love puns, you’ll love it. If you hate puns, run away from the story right now
Only my third 5-star review for 2019, but boy does Ms. Leckie deserve it here. It’s everything I love about SF including a gigantic, fully realized world with a culture that makes sense as a consequence of the world she’s created. It really reminded me of the worlds I’ve come to know in Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere.
Interestingly, for a year in which I also read The Just City, Radch society seems to be a corrupt Plato’s Republic and/or Confucian China situation where tests determine how awesome you’re supposed to be, but some apparent corruption affects parts of the narrative, esp with Lt. Awn. As always with one of these narratives, there’s the tension between feeling like the powerful families are powerful because they’re meant to be (whether because of God or not). There was also the cocus on tea, Bollywood-like films, and many-armed gods and goddesses. South Asian/Asian (if you look at the Confucious stuff) space culture maybe? So I thought it was interesting she mentions Roman society during the extra interview included at the end of my ebook version. Of course there’s some of that too, particularly in the social stratification among the powerful families.
Another book that was on my To-Read list since 2014. I *think* I heard about it on Boing-Boing, but I wasn’t making good use of my GR shelves that way back then to keep track of such things. Wherever I heard about it, I was expecting this to be a retelling of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid. (Looking at the other Donna Jo Napoli books I have on my To Read list - Beauty and the Beast, Mulan, etc - it’s not hard to see why) But this turned out to be so much better for my sensibilities - it’s really more of taking the barebones of the Anderson telling and porting it back to the original Western source of mermaids - the Sirens of Greek Mythology.
Wow, Ms. jocelynn Drake did something pretty rare among the trilogies I’ve been reading for the past half decade - she made a second book in the trilogy that doesn’t end on a cliffhanger. My memories of books I read when I was younger have this happening more often. But I know I have written many, many reviews on Goodreads where I talk about how hard it is to rate the second book because it’s a setup for the third. So it was nice and refreshing to have a second book in a series where if Ms. Drake had never continued, we’d be satisfied with the ending. That said, she certainly provided enough change in the status quo that I’m curious to read the next book and find out what happened.
As with the best books in this series, Ms. Corriea has a deep passion for the game she’s writing about and it had a profound impact in her life. Over a number of chapters, she makes a great case for why this series is capable of deeper reflection than it would seem for a game with Donald, Goofy, and Cloud McCrono-face the protagonist (Sora). She does a great job blending the history of the series as well as pulling in information from later games to show the deep universe the creator put together in this series. It’s a game I own, but never got to play as I got it in college and from that point on I’ve had trouble finding the time needed to complete a jRPG. After reading this book, I’m keen for my kids to play it during that magical 9-14 years old where jRPG melodramatics play so hard. (And I think part of why FF6 and Chrono Trigger hit me so hard while I never really got into FF7 - FFX)
As usual for an anthology, I’m going to post my thoughts on each story, but before I get to that, my thoughts on the book as a whole. It was a big change from the previous book and that might be good, bad, or neutral to you. The first book, our introduction to the Wild Cards universe, was basically a series of stories that took place in the same universe and used the same characters (everyone LOVES to play with Croyd) but there wasn’t any unifying story outside of Dr. Tachyon coming to terms with the effects of the virus. But the stories mostly stood alone and even explored different narrative techniques like a Hunter S. Thompson parody. By contrast this book is one tight story that goes from beginning to end strongly being involved in each of the stories. It also once again expands the Wild Cards universe, more literally than metaphorically. Where this works best is with the theory of the small man of history. Many of the characters are just doing their own thing and only tangentially interacting with the PlotDevice.. It’s constantly changing hands and driving the plot and almost no one understands what’s going on until near the end of the book. But everyone’s actions are leading towards the various major plot points of the anthology.
I added this book to my Goodreads To Read list in 2014. The reasons for doing so are lost to time and slightly baffling. I don’t believe I had any previous experience with Ms. Naomi Novik. I’m not a big fantasy person (I’m certainly much more of one thanks to Sanderson than I was in 2014). That leaves 3 possibilities: a recommendation from someone whose opinions I admire, a fondness for historical fiction, and/or my love of counter-factual history. Either way, five years later it had big expectations to fill. AND IT SUCCEEDED. I’m kind of mad at myself for not getting to this earlier.
My favorite part of this cookbook has been the intros to each chapter. Mrs Zoe Nathan has organized the chapters into the time of day needed to start working on the items to be ready to open Huckleberry for breakfast. Her stories are entertaining and reveal a lot about her personality. My second favorite part is that each recipe has an intro that explains the origins of the dish as well as pairings and substitutions that work well with the recipe. The only bad thing is that her recipes use a LOT of butter. A LOT. So while all baked goods are less healthy for you than, say, veggie dishes or even some burgers, these are not for those taking lipitor. That said, I ear-marked a good 2 dozen or so recipes I’d like to make, including a banana-poppy seed muffin I can’t wait to make this weekend.
I decided to participate with the Sword and Laser book club for the February 2018 pick. Before I get to the review proper this was a very interesting time to be reading this particular book. At Farpoint 2019 I attended a panel about SFF books in alternate timelines. Simultaneously I read The Just City which makes the point that our moon missions should have been called Artemis, not Apollo for Apollo is the god of the sun and Artemis of the moon. I wonder if it was just in America’s 1960s we couldn’t name something as militarily important as the moon missions after a goddess? Also, in the book they think about launching from Brazil and I just saw a headline a few weeks ago about one of the US private space companies considering launching from Brazil. And I recently learned that female astronauts were a real thing that politicians killed because of ego.
I didn’t know there could be so many kinds of Grilled Cheese Sandwiches, although as a coworker remarked - “Technically, most of those are melts, not grilled cheese.” Fair enough, but I still loved the various suggestions for different sandwiches. If I’m at home I usually end up making the same roast beef or smoked ham sandwich, so it’s nice to have someone say, “hey, these tastes all work really well together!” Because once you get past a PB&J, for all the effort it takes to make a sandwich (including washing and cutting the veggies, cheese, etc) you really don’t want such a basic food to taste bad. Also, to be honest, I’ve NEVER been a basic grilled cheese person. They always just tasted greasy to me. Even better, and elevating this book into 4-star territory is the chapter that provides recipes for soups to pair with the grilled cheese sandwiches.
This is the first time I’ve read a cookbook written by a European and it was interesting to see where they are similar and different. Some of them really intrigued me and some of them were a bit too far. But I look forward to making a few of them, particularly the tomato soup with chickpeas as croutons.
I’d had this book on my To Read list since 2014 when I read about it on Boing-Boing. I don’t remember what they said about, but something piqued my interest. Of course, when you have a To Read list that’s hovering near 400 books, it takes a while to get to things. In his case, it was a good thing because eventually I nabbed it for free from the Tor eBook club. If you’re into SFF, I think it’s one the best deals you can get in exchanged to be emailed at from a company. So what about the book?
Holy Time-Skip, Batman! As is clear from the first chapter (and maybe the synopsis? I never read those once I know I’m going to read a book because they tend to spoil a bit or mess with my expectations) we’ve jumped 30 years into the future. I would have to say that is probably the second ot third best thing James S.A. Corey have done in this series. Yeah, earlier on there was a five year time-skip, but things for the crew of the Roci and the Solar System as a whole hadn’t changed much. But with this book we get something that I wish more authors (and the comic book industry) would do - show us what happens to the characters we have become attached to when they’ve grown old and had to deal with the consequences of their actions. (Or, in the case of the Mistborn series of trilogies - what happens 700 years after you massively change the world) I was constantly enjoying seeing the world that was the consequence of the actions of book 6 (and, to some extent, all of Holden’s life since the Protomolecule).
Even though I started this book nearly a year ago, I haven’t made any of the recipes yet. This is mostly because I didn’t get a stand mixer until late last year. That said, I’m very confident I’m going to really enjoy this book. Why? Well, I’ve made recipes from Dinner Illustrated and the multiple pictures is VERY helpful when you’re trying to a new cooking skill. Second, I’ve made their bread recipes from their magazines and other books and they’ve often been really awesome (with only a few misfires - and those could have been chef error). Tonight, for example, I made their recipe for North Carolina Cheese Bread from Cook’s Country June/July 2017 and it was a huge hit with both myself and the wife (and she will NOT hesitate to tell me I’ve “ruined her dinner” if the food isn’t up to par for her). Like most of ATK’s topic-based cookbooks, the intro section is VERY comprehensive and has everything you need to know to start baking so that you have a one-stop shop to learning how to bake bread. Often the same cannot be said of most cookbooks which assume some domain knowledge. I’ve used some of the intro section from this book when baking bread and biscuits from other recipes.
BOWLS! They’re both a new phenomenon and one of the oldest ways to eat food. My younger brother recently suggested eating at one of those food-court style places that are really trendy right now and nearly all ten of the restaurants there had at lest one dish that was a bowl-based dish. The first 2/3s of this book are great for the cooks like my wife and mom who just need a suggestion and can use that to come up with wonderful food. The last third was for me, who needs recipes of an entire dish which I can then make small modifications to.
I think the recipes in this book allow your veggies to be first-class citizens on the grill. Plus they provide some pretty awesome items for your vegetarian friends to eat instead of the usual mushrooms or tofu burgers. The dishes I’ve made have been pretty good and I hope to try many more of them.
Last summer I made the grilled breakfast quesadillas and just that item is worth the cost of this book. Also, grilled bacon turned out to be pretty awesome and way less messy than in a pan. That said, a good chunk of this book is going to have to wait for next summer, for while I BBQ and Smoke in the winter, grilling is a lot harder because it tends to involve opening the lid a lot more or even not using the lid at all. That said, Raichlen does have a few smoke-roasting recipes here, in other words, indirect grilling. I have less experience with Raichlen recipes than Meathead recipes, but the few times I made his recipes last year I was pretty happy. One I’m looking forward to trying is a hot and fast version of pulled pork. I love my low and slow 12 hour pulled pork sandwiches, but if the faster way can work some of the time, that’s a much faster route to some extremely delicious food.
As per usual with these reviews - I’ve already made a couple recipes from this bundle of 2018 Cook’s Country issues. It was, of course, great! In 2018 Cook’s Country continued the tradition of recipes from around the USA with fun stories about the food origins along with the special sections at the end: 5 Ways to make a dish, Cooking for Two, Master Class, One-Pan meal, and slow cooker recipe. It continues to be a great resource for cooking although if you get America’s Test Kitchen’s various cookbooks you’ll inevitably end up with some duplicated recipes. Right now the recipe I’m most looking forward to trying is Amish Friendship Bread.
This review will contain spoilers for The Expanse book series, but not this book.
When we last left the universe of The Expanse, the good guys appeared to have won, except for the ship the rebels had sent into one of the gates. It was implied (or maybe outright stated, I can’t remember) that they were working on tech related to the protomolecule to use as a weapon for the rebels. Or maybe they were pretending to do so because there’s no honor among thieves.
It’s very interesting to be reading this (well, listening as an audiobook) at the same time as The Calculating Stars as both of them tackle women’s issues, the Baby Boomer Era America, and space travel. But whereas I’m really enjoying The Calculating Stars, I really did not like this book.
Supposedly (according to the cover on the version I selected on Goodreads) this was made into a movie. I found this so incredulous that I looked it up on IMDB. Apparently it was made in 2000 and is rated R so MAYBE there’s hope it actually comes close to this book. There are parts of this story that hinge on the main characters (especially the kids) saying “fuck you” to someone and there’s some very young kids fooling around. But Sandlin also wrote the screenplay so maybe it’s as close to the book as he wanted.
It seems every year I’ve been reading a book about a detective working in our world, if our world was an urban fantasy. The last two I’ve read Dead Witch Walking and Neon Noir: A Delilah Street Paranormal Investigator Anthology were in an alternate Earth where it was known that there were supernatural beings. This book is more like Buffy in that a couple folks know that the supernatural - Angels and Demons in this case - are real. Otherwise it’s more or less a normal world. Although, unlike Buffy, God’s side actually has something to do rather than sit by as demons just run things.
The book starts off with a biography of the author, one of the founders of the Texas de Brazil restaurant chain. It then gives a brief history of where Churrasco came from in Brazil. After a primer on the tools and cuts of beef they get to the recipes. Interestingly, there are a decent amount of non-grilling recipes in here.
I don’t usually say this because I can understand people having different opinions about fiction, but I’m baffled by the higher scores on this book. The first two in this quartet had a conventional plot; even if the stories were mostly about the journey with just a little twist tacked onto the end. But on this one I didn’t even understand how the two stories fit together. The book provides a history less at the end so we understand in which way Mr. Sales different from our timeline, but I almost feel the fact that this one hewed so close to reality that he had to do that was a failure compared to the other two books. Oh well, we’ll see what happens with the fourth one.
As per usual, the second volume in a trilogy keeps setting things up without any resolution. The same applies here. That said, I do like the forward momentum in Kenton and Kris’ respective stories. While it is nice to see an illustrated version of Mr. Sanderson’s work, I can’t help wishing this were just a prose novel. There’s so much detail that I know we’re not getting because comics are a “show, don’t tell” medium. Still, the story’s kind of neat and it’s fun to see a new magic system. Interestingly, Kenton helps someone named Trell and I could have sworn that’s the name we’ve heard about in Mistborn Era 2? Clearly this story takes place before Mistborn Era 2 because we know that Kris has been exiled from her planet and we know that she’s on Scadrial around the time of Mistborn Era 1 books 2 and 3. So maybe this Trell ends up on Scadrial somehow? Or maybe (and this is rare for Sanderson) it’s just reuse of a name that has nothing to do with it.
This is definitely one of those stories that’s more about the journey than the destination. I was wondering the entire time what the point of the story was going to be. It literally took place en route somewhere and in flashbacks. Overall an OK story with a heck of a twist at the end. Felt very pulp science fiction. It appears the four short stories (of which this is the second) don’t have anything in common other than the first story introduced the idea of alternate timelines and so each is in a different NASA timeline. (Which actually reminds me somewhat of Hickman’s The Manhattan Projects, Vol. 1: Science. Bad.)
I gave this book a three, but it’s really more of a 3.5 rating. The stories of all the pitmasters that Matt Moore interviews are a 4. They really bring to bear the diverse people who work the pits to make BBQ throughout the south. The recipes are a 3 as compared to the recipes Steve Raichlen, America’s Test Kitchen, or Meathead provide.
I’ve rarely done object-oriented programming in Pytnon and haven’t done any serious OOP since undergrad, nearly 20 years ago (and in Java). i found this book to be very well written and a good way to become an expert in the Python way of doing OOP. I discovered new and more efficient ways to write functions I’ve been writing that should allow me to have more easily maintainable code.
The first book I started in 2019! I started reading it yesterday while working on photos (sometimes writing metadata to the files takes a little bit so I wanted to have some reading to do while waiting). That evolved into me just reading and forgetting about my photos and, therefore, finishing in one day. (Well, I had read a lot of the novellas earlier because I’d received them separately via the Sanderson humble bundle) Why? So many reasons.
I first heard about Ms. Rokudenashiko on the Daily Show years ago. A couple years ago I remembered her story and added the book to my wishlist. In 2018 I got it for Christmas. I had no idea the book was a manga, I thought it was just a regular prose book. It works so well as a manga, I’m glad the story was told that way.
This year I continued last year’s trends of reading cook books and stories I’d purchased as part of a Humble Bundle or Story Bundle. This led to some great surprises like Singularity Girl, which I really liked and Kissing Booth Girl which had a bunch of haunting short stories. Because it was the 200th anniversary, I started off the year reading Frankenstein for the first time ever. I read that together with the Sword and Laser book club. Much later in the year I also read Zer0es with the book club. This year I read my first Cuban SF novel with A Planet for Rent and that was a really neat read. But there were two big universes I tackled in 2018. I read nearly all of the novels in The Expanse and I read nearly all of the remaining books, short stories, and novellas in Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere. In fact, reading all of Mistborn Era 1 and 2 and the Stormlight Archive books 1-3 (all that’s out now) took up nearly all of my reading time. I’d set a goal of reading 45 books. I read 81, but would have read many, many more had it not been for the 1000+ pages of each of the Stormlight Archive books.
This book is probably the most direct sequel so far in The Expanse. It pretty much picks up right where the last one left off (not counting the interstitial novella). One thing JSAC use for great effect in this book (and I think more than any of the previous ones) is to use the POV-ness of the chapters to jump back and forth in time. So chapter X ends and then chapter X+1 actually rewinds things a bit and provides a new perspective on what happened in chapter X. It mostly worked well.
Written by the owner of a bakery, this book has relatively easy-to-follow recipes and beautiful photos of the muffins and biscuits. I’ve made one biscuit recipe in here and it’s already a staple of our weekend big breakfasts. Many recipes end with instructions for variants you could make from the base recipe. If you’re looking to expand your muffin and biscuit repertoire, this book is worth having.
Another anthology. As usual, I’ve included my status updates with some spelling fixes. Overall it was a very uneven collection in terms of what I enjoyed. The stories all seemed to run hot or cold for me with nothing lukewarm.
This is a very comprehensive look at the history of video games going way, way back. I’m familiar with a lot of the main points from having read lots of industry histories. Where this one excels is in going to the smallest of details and talks about a lot of the personalities and more obscure companies involved. So even if you already know a lot about video games history, if you’re interested, you’ll end up learning things you most likely didn’t know. Most importantly it is stuffed with first-hand quotes from interviews and other published material.
A fun little short story about an election in a very diverse district. I kind of want to see more of this world which I think is the mark of a good short story.
If you are an aspiring writer, Scalzi tells it like it is and gives you a good feeling for what it might be like to be a modern writer. No writing tips here - that’s for other types of books. This one is about being a writer and making a living.
It’s very odd reading a Sanderson comic rather than a prose book. So much of what’s great in his books involves the background information and the inner monologues of the characters. That said, it is neat to see a visual representation of his world. There are some setups here that seem easy, but that’s usually not Sanderson’s way. Then again, this was one of his first stories. His intro mentions being inspired by Dune and it’s not hard to see where that fits in with the story thus far. It’ll be interesting to see how this fits in with the rest of the Cosmere. Onto volume 2.
This book might be for you. It was most assuredly not for me. The world was OK, but three things kept me from enjoying it:
- The reveals or answers to the cases seemed to come out of left field (compare with Sanderson where a reveal or twist makes you realize all the hints that were dropped all along)
I want to start off by thanking Tor.com for being DRM-free. It’s great to see a major publisher doing this.
With that out of the way, this was a massive story. It’s quite a different pace from everything I’ve read so far (Elantris and related stories, Warbreaker, Mistborn Era 1 and its Ars Arcanum stories). Mistborn, the previous longest story I’d read, was structured more like a traditional trilogy. The first book was satisfying on its own. The second one was mostly setup and the third one was the climax. With The Stormlight Archive being a 10 book series made up of two five-story arcs, this book was almost entirely setup. That’s not to say there wasn’t character growth, because otherwise it would have been a poor and boring story. Dalinar and Kaladin have quite a bit of growth. Syl surprised me although she’s still a bit to much mystery. Shallan and Szeth have fascinating storylines with insane reveals near the end. All the interludes are full of great characters. But in terms of the story, not too much happens - this is what kept it from being a 5 star book to me.
Halfway through 2017 the magazine underwent a visual revamp to modernize the look. I think it works fairly well. What I continue to enjoy about Cook’s Country is the back half which is both educational and contains tailored sections - a recipe for 2, a one pan recipe, slow cooker, etc.
As usual for this series, it’s a combination of a history of the game covered and an autobiography of author. Although I never played Megaman 3 (or played very little of it) I did own Megaman 2 and so it was great that the author touched on the entire series and the spinoffs.
A nice hit of nostalgia from another gamer who grew up in the NES era.
When it comes to my experience of this book, there are a few things that marred my enjoyment. When I first heard of it and didn’t know all the info about it I did by the time I actually read it, it sounded interesting and I added it to my To-read pile. Problem is, if I bought every book that caught my attention, I’d be broke. So things languish on there there for years. Meanwhile, I buy book bundles from Humble Bundle or Story Bundle (and not all of those or I’d be broke, too) because if they have authors or a theme I’m really interested in, it’s usually about a dollar a book. Both of these combined to make me enjoy this book less. On the former, everyone I know (mostly family) who’d read the book made a big deal about how it was definitely a book for me since it has video games and lots of 80s references. So a bit of over-selling there. Then, from the latter, I ended up with Massively Multiplayer in one of the book bundles. It was actually published a year before Ready Player One and, on a basic level, has the exact same plot. It even has the exact same Moral or Lesson at the end of the story. So when I decided to move Ready Player One to the top of my queue before the movies meant that everyone (not just book readers) would know the plot and it’d be too hard to keep from spoilers, I ended up reading an over-hyped book with a plot that was already stale.
I’ve already made some recipes from this collection of all the 2016 issues. As usual, the test kitchen rocks. The few I didn’t like were recipes where I was challenging my tastes. The learning, 5 ways, dinner for two, and slow cooker sections are great ways to expand your skills. While I like both this and Cooks Illustrated, I do like that Cooks Country is in color.
I’m not a dice RPG gamer, but I did want to read the short story in here - “The 11th Metal”. It’s a prequel for the first book of the first Mistborn trilogy. That said, it’s definitely best not to read before having read the first book of the trilogy unless you want some spoilers. Actually, I think the best place for a reader would be to read it after the second book as the reader would be able to get even more out of it. Story-wise it’s in the category of the fan service prequel. There’s no reason to read it other than to see a main character from the first book before that character was good at their job. Nothing is revealed that wasn’t already sufficiently revealed in the first book. So it’s all fan-service fun. That said, if put together with revelations from the last book in the trilogy, it does raise some interesting questions.
I cannot believe how well Sanderson made this entire trilogy fit together. Each book was amazingly plotted and, as a whole, the trilogy is so well put together. No part of the trilogy was wasted and each detail Sanderson provided was vital to the story as a whole. Some of the key plot points for this book went all the way back to the first chapters of the first book. The ending to this book would have had me flipping tables over and yelling from how well it all worked if everyone hadn’t been asleep in the house.
The biggest weakness this book has is that the author was in a hurry to get it out before the elections were over because he assumed Americans make decisions based on being informed instead of based on emotions. If he’d waited a bit, not only would the book contain the outcome, but also some more recent revelations, like the Facebook and Twitter stuff.
I like to avoid spoilers wherever possible, I even stay away from reviews and trailers for most movies and books. But in the last few years I’ve come to the conclusion that (with the exception of detective stories and murder mysteries) if a story is good, it will still be good if you know the ending. For example, any historical non-fiction book and even some historical fiction. This book is a great example that this can definitely be true. The reader learns in the first chapter that The Witch of Portobello is dead. The rest of the book is essentially the story of how she ended up dead. But knowing where the story is going does not detract from it. Au contrair, it actually leads to a kind of reverse mystery story.
Once again, a great cooking tome by America’s Test Kitchen. Opens by explaining the Mexican pantry. Then recipes that are well-structured with great explanations. So far I’ve made one recipe and the family loved it. I can’t wait for it to warm up a bit as they have a lot of grill recipes in there (although it’s mostly indoor cooking)
I read this book in 10 min - 1 hour chunks so maybe I missed something. But who the (expletive) is Caliban and why was this his war? (If it’s a spoiler don’t tell me. If it was (view spoiler)[ Nguyen’s (hide spoiler)] first name, you can gently remind me.
There are multiple times I found myself staying up so late I’d only get a few hours sleep before work because James SA Corey found a way to make this book even more action-packed and exciting than the first one. Perhaps that’s because this is the second book in a nonology instead of a trilogy. Or maybe it’s because of the introduction of such awesome characters as Crisjen Avasarala and Bobbie Draper along with more time with the amazing Alex. Seriously, I never knew political thrillers could be this great (and I already appreciated the genre), but I think Avasarala made it so great. And her magnificence made the twist in her plotline land even harder.
As expected from a Philip K Dick book, that was trippy. Talky in the style of golden and silver age science fiction, but I have a fondness for the style as some of my first science fiction exposure was in that style.
Not a bad plot, it’s a quick read and available free from Project Gutenberg.
This book upended the way I’d thought about the Star Wars movies and stories for the past 20 years. First of all, given George Lucas’ original intention of having an endless James Bond-like serialized series of movies removes any arguments I had about what Disney has been doing with what has frankly been a mostly neglected franchise (film-wise) since the first movie came out in 1977. Second, the book explains why Lucas changed his mind - a combination of his divorce draining him of money and the movies draining him of life. Third, and the biggest reason Kaminski wrote this book, it dismantles the legend of episodes 4-6 (as we now know them) having been the middle of a story that Lucas always had in his head. The truth is both better and worse; especially as we see other ways the story could have gone if he hadn’t been drained by the experience.
A recent Humble Bundle featured a sampler for Jimmy Palmiotti’s Paperfilms indie publisher. I was intrigued and went to the site where one can buy DRM-free versions of the books. Pulp is a lot of fun and it has a long history with comics so I figured I’d check it out.
Indeed, this is some grade-A pulp. Two stories are contained within and both contain sex and violence. The first is a Taken-esqu romp through the seedy part of Portland The second is an homage to Rear Window.
Over on the Cosmere subreddit (one of the good ones in which most people are very nice and just getting together to geek out on something), when I finished The Final Empire they warned me that The Well of Ascension was kind of stationary - not as action-packed or information-heavy as the first book. I wasn’t surprised to hear this. As I’ve remarked countless times, most trilogies have a first entry that kind of stands alone and the second one ties strongly into the third one. (EG The Matrix, The Hunger Games)
I thought the first book was a great example of how erotic fiction could also be a work of art. Jess Fink did so much with so little. Despite a lack of dialog, a great story was told and titillation was had.
This one builds on the last and goes in a slightly different direction. The first book is an artful story of love. This book attempts to do more and so while it loses the beauty in simplicity of the first book, it gains in demonstrating how a complex story can be told without words. (and also be erotic)
The old cliche is that no one watches porn for the story. But books and comics have always had the ability to be more cutting edge; perhaps because the budget is so much smaller, making the stakes lower.
Somehow, Jess Fink elevates things in Chester 5000 XYV. It starts off with the unusual setting of steampunk Victorian times. While I’m sure tons of erotic fiction has been written to take place in Victorian times, it’s still a fascinating period considering the attitudes of gender roles and sex at the time. But what I think really makes this book special is it’s lack of dialog. There’s something special about a silent comic that requires extra emotion to be expressed with half of what makes up a comic missing.
This is one of the top five weirdest books I have ever read. It takes place in a world of stuffed animals, but that has both almost no bearing on the story and is key to the main plot. What I mean is that it’s never revealed that actually they’re toys in a toystore or a messed up version of the 100 Acre Woods. The fact that they are stuffed animals is not part of some plot twist. (The thought that it might be a twist kept distracting me the entire time trying to find out the clue) But at the same time, the entire plot of the book, which in a way I don’t wish to spoil, revolves around life and death depends entirely upon the fact that, as stuffed animals, they can’t be killed in the ways that we can.
Well, that was nothing at all like I expected. I’m not entire sure what I expected, having never read anything by Agatha Christie. Mostly I expected it to be stuffy and I expected it to suck. It was written so long ago, I was sure all the tropes would be stale. But I actually enjoyed myself quite a bit with thie book I’d gotten for free during a Barnes and Noble free book Friday many years ago.
I read this book without knowing anything about it other than the fact that it takes place on the same planet as Elantris, Part 1 of 3. I didn’t have the book description as I got it from the Sanderson Humble Bundle and often their ebooks are missing metadata. I’m glad I didn’t know anything about it, because that made the plot, as it unfurled, even more amazing. I was expecting the book to revolve around the magic of the Dor or something related to Elantris, but it was completely separate outside of mentioning a couple cities/regions from Elantris (the book, not the place). In fact, the most recent reading order from the Cosmere subreddit has this book taking place before Elantris. If you want to have as much fun as I did, stop reading this review now and go read the novella.
I got this book in Storybundle’s LGBT+ Bundle and the title and description of this book are what got me to pick up the entire bundle. I didn’t even realize I already knew A.C. Wise’s work from its appearance in Clarkesworld Magazine. As I mentioned during a couple of the status updates, Wise seems to be a thematic protege of Philip K Dick. A lot of her short stories involve unreliable narrators who often aren’t sure if they’re dreaming or remembering things correctly or even being honest with themselves. It’s certainly not the first time I’ve come across unreliable narrators, but with how intimately Ms. Wise writes her characters it’s even more jarring not to know how much of the story is “real” and how much is not even real to the narrator. It really does put the reader into the position of TRULY being in someone’s head, with all its messiness; a strong contrast to other books that are written from a 1st Person POV but are very clear-headed.
Well, that felt like reading a JRPG - in fact there are some (very, very loose) alignments with the plot of Final Fantasy VI. But what I really mean by that is the fact that Sanderson’s Allomancy ends up reading like the mana draws one has to undertake in those games. Although the different metals vice just one mana source can also draw parallels to the magic system in The Witcher (game, not books - I haven’t read the books). There are three things that made me love this book and push it into 5-star territory: tight plotting, a comprehensive magic system, and a great heist plot with memorable characters.
I already knew almost all of this; well, the outline, anyway. I’ve been reading comics on and off for three decades and ever since discovering sites like Comic Vine and reading Grant Morrison’s Supergods, it’s been easy to learn about plots and trends that took place when I wasn’t reading. (Or even before I was born) In fact, it’s almost requesite when reading Grant Morrison’s comic work if you want to understand all the references. And for the way that I and my infrequent collaborators on www.comicpow.com write, it’s important to understand the history of the characters or writers. But what Waldon provides is a great sense of context for all the trends in Superman’s history. He provides a through-line that shows how the trends that have buffeted Superman have swung pendulously. He also emphasizes the true essence of Superman and that any deviations from that essence are when changes go too far and end up rejected for they leave us with a hero that is Superman in name only.
I finally read Frankenstein. Coupled with Dracula a few years ago, I’ve now read both famous monster books. Even moreso than with Dracula, the book was a far cry from the popular conception of Frankenstein.
Things that are completely different:
-the monster is not created in a castle in a town of villagers -> it’s done in a college dorm
-therefore no pitchforks and no Frankenstein defending his monster -> he regrets bringing him to life immediately after doing so
-there is no Igor -> Frankenstein keeps the secret of the monster to himself for the entire book
-the monster doesn’t roar or speak in caveman-speak -> he speaks more eloquently than anyone you know today
Another book I got via a bundle (either Humble Bundle or, more likely Story Bundle), not because I’m a pre-existing fan of Mr. Morin. This book continues in a universe Mr. Morin created, but starts a new series that that does not seem to require any knowledge of the prior one. He takes great advantage of the world of technology and has links at the beginning of the book to a web page that explains the key tenets of his universe.
Clarkesworld Magazine has wonderful metadata for their issues and anthologies that requires little work from me:
Tor books had an awesome DRM-free policy that I love and that allows me to go to the ebook vendor of my choice. And they give away a free book every month as long as you agree to get some marketing emails from them. But their metadata is not so great:
Come on, Tor! You publish Science Fiction! Let’s get some better metadata on those ebook files!
There there 3 big trends in my reading in 2017: 1) I decided that my new policy for making sure I got to all the books I was buying in Humble Bundles and Storybundles (and, therefore, not just wasting my money on a “good deal”), was that every time my To-Read list would get to its end, I would start with the earliest book I’d added to Calibre and then work my way up, adding at least one book from each bundle or Project Gutenberg raid. This is why I ended up reading books like Hunt at the Well of Eternity and Black Mercury. 2) I read a LOT of cookbooks. A couple years ago I got into serious BBQing and grilling rather than simply throwing some burgers on the grill on Memorial Day and Independence Day. This year I got into indoor cooking. It started with making bread in a dutch oven and just cascaded into me making 1-2 of our family’s meals per week (on average). 3) I started series I’d been hearing about or discovered via Humble Bundles. This includes getting sucked into Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere universe of books via Humble Bundle, starting GRRM et al’s Wild Cards series, and finally starting The Expanse. I’ve also continued my trend of reading multiple books at once. This has the side effect of keeping me interested in reading as I don’t get trapped by a boring book.
I got the book as a part of a bundle, and I’ll say that the cover (same as the one currently associated with the book on Goodreads - a red-head in a backless top and black pants) kept me away from the book for a while. It seemed it might not be up my alley. Interestingly, the cover is a counter-example to the Trope “Covers always Lie” (mostly attributable to comic book covers). It is essentially a depiction of the opening scene of the novel.
I finally got the last hardcover book and I can read Chew in its entirety. I’ve only read the first five trades. After that the anticipation was driving me nuts, so I resolved to wait until the series was done to read it all in one shot. That’s what I’ve just started this week. In the end, I’ll have a massive review of the series. Today entry #3.
---–
I finally got the last hardcover book and I can read Chew in its entirety. I’ve only read the first five trades. After that the anticipation was driving me nuts, so I resolved to wait until the series was done to read it all in one shot. That’s what I’ve just started this week. In the end, I’ll have a massive review of the series. Today entry #2.
---–
2011 review:
Chew: International Flavor # 1 – Chew: International Flavor
This book is just as great as the first one. We take a bit of a pause from what I believe to be the main storyline – the reason Mason left. Still, there are plot threads from the first book that get some more play in this book. So it’s not ignoring continuity at all, but it is definitely taking its time to get to resolution.
I finally got the last hardcover book and I can read Chew in its entirety. I’ve only read the first five trades. After that the anticipation was driving me nuts, so I resolved to wait until the series was done to read it all in one shot. That’s what I’ve just started this week. In the end, I’ll have a massive review of the series.
---–
As per usual for anthologies, a collection of my status updates:
“Interrogate my Heart Instead” - an interrogation in a fascist regime that goes to some interesting places because of its brevity and the look inside the interrogator’s head.
“What Blooms in Winter” - HOLY MOLY! Now, that’s a poem.
Book #71 for 2017 was this gem I’d overlooked on previous trawls through Calibre to select which book I’d read next. I’d have to check Calibre later to check my tags, but I’m pretty sure I got this book from one of the Storybundles - maybe Steampunk or maybe Alternate History. Either one works given what we learn of the world throughout the book. This is a long-winded way of saying that I didn’t choose this book on its own merits, I own it because it was part of a bundle I found interesting.
I was excited about this project because we need a laugh from politics now. Also, it was going to be style parodies of various magazines. But, I forgot something - humor is very subjective. And so I often found myself wondering when I was going to finally finish this blasted thing. Just as with my biggest criticism of SNL for the past decade or so - the smaller articles tended to work best. The longer ones just stretched what was usually a pretty thin joke even thinner.
I recieved this book in exchange for a review (I think - I can’t remember, but I know it was something I either got for review or as a free prime read-ahead book)
This book combined a few things I enjoy: space sci-fi, religion, first contact, and thriller mysteries. Overall the combination works well. Paskoff does a good job nesting the mysteries so that the reader is still discovering new truths about the plot at the 95% mark. I also appreciate that Paskoff knows his strengths and weaknesses and so does fade to black sex scenes rather than subjecting us to potential entries to the awkward sex scenes article the guardian puts out every year.
While this book started off kind of slowly, it does eventually pick up and get pretty darn interesting. The story begins with the last of the nomes making a desperate play to try and leave their lives behind because they’re in danger of going extinct. The lack of nomes doesn’t leave them with enough “manpower” to hunt or keep predators away. They end up at a department store and discover that thousands of nomes live there.
The story of Tally Youngblood is over. At least, the Extras chapters that were included at the end of this book seemed to suggest it was a kind of epilogue to the Tally Trilogy.
I didn’t like this book as much as the the first two. The thing is, I can’t quite put my finger on why that is. Westerfield certainly writes great chapter-ending cliffhangers. This is probably one of the fastest completion times of any books I’ve read this year. It pulled me in enough that I spent the last few nights reading for half an hour before passing out asleep. Yet, as a whole it didn’t pull me in. My pop-psychology studies have warned me that trying to put a finger on why you like or dislike something tends to end up with your brain making up a plausible answer that isn’t necessarily the right answer. But, I guess if I had to put my finger on it it’s that some of the wins like (view spoiler)[ Shay converting over in Diego (hide spoiler)] felt a little unearned after all the animosity between them. The book, for all its setup (especially if you include Pretties) seems a little rushed at the end.
So, I’m late to this series. There’s 7 books out of a planned 9 (plus novellas). There’s a TV show that I hear the authors love, despite its deviations from the books. (I haven’t seen it yet) I heard an interview on Sword and Laser with the two men who make up James S.A. Corey and the series intrigued me; especially the part where the first book was a noir detective story. I LOVE those. Plus I’ve really been getting into working-man-in-space stories since many of our SF stories are about the best of the best (or people destined to become best of the best). JSAC makes a reference to Alien in an interview added to the end of this book and I agree with that.
I think this book would probably pair quite well with Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration, although I haven’t read that one. If it’s about the movies they were making at the same time that this book takes place, that’d be brilliant. If it’s also about management, that wouldn’t be horrible - at the very least it would be told from a different point of view - from that of an insider. This book is about how Steve Jobs tapped Lawrence Levy to be the CFO of Pixar in its darkest hour. Levy then leads the company through a series of situations that without a combination of his skill and some luck would have left us in a poorer cultural state.
As you know by now, I like my recipes to have introductions. These can serve many purposes. They can introduce an unfamiliar recipe, contain a bit of biography, or explain different techniques the author has tried so that as you improvise you don’t repeat mistakes unnecessarily. Chris Kimball does all of that and also has some ideas about replacing ingredients if you can’t find the ingredients he’s talking about.
Everything you ever wanted to smoke, plus a bunch of tips. Very clear guidelines on the tools you need and what food to buy. A great intro paragraph or two on why Raichlen likes this food and why his recipe works. Also, sometimes some alternate ways to cook - like grill vs smoker or hot vs cold-smoking. Note, this one is not for tyros. Newbies would be better served by Raichlen’s BBQ Bible or Meathead’s book: Meathead: The Science of Great Barbecue and Grilling
I’ve only made a couple recipes from the book, but I love a lot about it. I like the technical section that opens the book. I really like all the descriptions that preface each recipe. It gives you an idea of what they tried and how it screwed them up - key since everyone I know who’s a really good cook improvises. So why end up making a mistake they already made? It also gives context to the recipes and where they come from. I added a good chunk of the recipes to my to-cook personal wiki. I’ll adjust the stars later if the recipes turn out to be hard to follow - but that usually isn’t the case when it’s something from America’s Test Kitchen. (This is from the Cook’s Country side of the house)
What it says in the title and more. It’s burgers, dogs, etc. All the stuff you think of when you think of prototypical non-nerdy American grilling. Lots of good recipes with lots of variation - including lots of variations on veggie burgers that aren’t mushroom-based. There are a few even I (an avowed carnivore) would like to try. If I had to fault the book it would be that, unlike Meathead, America’s Test Kitchen, or Milk Street - there’s no context to the recipes. You just have recipe after recipe. No mention of why the ingredients work or where Jamie Purviance got the recipes from. I’ve grown to really appreciate this context and how it helps me appreciate the recipe and understand how it was put together so that I understand how best to modify it as I go through iterations.
Raichlen has put together a great book on all the things that add flavor to our grilled, BBQ’d, and smoked foods. As is his style, he adds a biography for each of the recipes that explains where it comes from or where he discovered it and what it goes well with. He also includes a few recipes that include both the meat and the accompaniment. I wish he had more pointers to recipes from Project Smoke or the Barbecue Bible to help provide more illustrations of what goes well together. A lot of it was “this goes well with grilled beef”, but I wish I had just a few more examples of which flavors go well together. Especially when talking about bastes and butters that would likely be combined with rubs, seasonings, or other flavorings. Speaking of which, he has lots of sections with definitions and I now know the difference between those.
What I like about this book is that Raichlen gives a little biography about each burger recipe. I’ve got tons of new recipes to try. I also like that he’s got some recipes for sides and sauces at the end. It’s not as comprehensive as some of his other books, but I got it free in exchange for getting his newsletter, so I wasn’t expecting too much.
Once again Will Wheaton knocks it out of the park as narrator.
Kushner does a great job telling the story of The Johns who created Doom. I was just a kid when those games were coming out and while my dad didn’t mind us playing Castle Wolfenstein and Doom, my mom wasn’t cool with it. So most of this was on my periphery and it was great to read the history of how transformative this game was and what a genius Carmack was with his engine work. I wish the book was an update version that covered the VR work Carmack has done recently - it ties in perfectly with the threat Kushner was pushing about VR and Snow Crash and how Doom was the first step in that direction.
This book grew on me slowly. At first I was intrigued, but wasn’t hooked. But eventually I grew to really love both the Gansukh/Lian chapters and the Korean/Japanese fighters’ chapters. The historical fiction is Neal Stephenson at his best and I did eventually enjoy the chapters with Cnan and the Shield-Brethren.
To some degree the western chapters are a medieval road trip/quest story. The Gansukh chapters are a palace intrigue story. They don’t really overlap other than both have Ogedai Khan as a central character.
This is a good book with a lot of useful info if you’re into charcoal grilling and BBQing. It also has a lot of recipes. I’ve tried a few and I found them tasty. Added a bunch to my list of recipes to try. If this were my first BBQ cookbook, I probably would have rated it a 4 or 5. It has beautiful photos of the end result and a dozen recipes by award-winning grillers and pitmasters. But I’ve been spoiled by Meathead’s cookbook. Meathead’s cookbook is incredibly comprehensive and he used to work in the newspaper industry so he’s a wiz at explaining things to the reader. Compared to that book, this one is OK. It’s also a lot less scientific - relying more on hand tests than thermometers.
To be fair to Mr. Brown, I find it hard to fairly rate second books in a trilogy. They have to both be the middle part of what is essentially one large story split into 3 books (or pdfs or epubs) and also as a standalone book have a beginning, climax, and resolution. So this tends to leave them a little unfulfilling. I’ve noticed (and mentioned in a few reviews) that with most modern trilogies the first book is more of a complete book in order to get the reader hooked into the series. The second one seems to be disappointing because it can’t resolve anything or else there wouldn’t need to be a third book. So this book might have a lower rating than I would rate the trilogy as a whole.
This book was a free giveaway for Tor’s ebook club
This book checks a lot of boxes for me: thriller, science fiction, multiple universes, alternate histories. But I just couldn’t get into it as much as I wanted to. I think it was mostly around the way Stross writes his dialogue. I can’t quite figure out exactly what it is about it, but it just didn’t do it for me.
Earlier this year I read The Forever War for the first time after having read Starship Troopers. So when there was a Humble Bundle with a bunch of books I didn’t care about, but which had a book by Joe Haldeman, I jumped on the bundle.
Having read these two books, the biggest thing I’ve noticed abut Joe is that he is GREAT at world-building. It doesn’t mean the story suffers, but I almost want to read more to wander around his worlds than I do for the story to continue. What’s the world here? Some scientists invent The Styleman procedure - undergoing this procedure reverses the aging process. As long as you go through it every 10 years, you can remain a perpetual 20-year-old (body-wise). That, by itself, would be a near world. But in order to get the initial financing to setup The Styleman Institute, they wanted to use it to redistribute wealth in the world. The process would cost $1 million dollars and the person who did it would have to give away all their money and posessions to the institute, which would then spread it around various charities. This is also a world where people take pleasure trips out into space and where there are lawless colonies among the asteroids. (And also on Florida)
There are literally tons of BBQ cookbooks out there. Why this one? Well, Meathead does something most of them don’t - he backs up his techniques with science. BBQ has existed as long as mankind so a lot of what we do is just father->son or mother->daughter (or some combination of gen 1 to gen 2) and a lot of it is wrong. Humans suck at intuition. So Meathead along with Dr Blonder use science to backup their techniques and ideas. This leads to 2 great benefits.
I heard about this book when Steve Attewell appeared on Boars, Gore, and Swords - my favorite Game of Thrones podcast. On that episode he mentioned how both GoT and the books pull from a variety of historical periods, not just dark ages England. The fact that he is a real historian analyzing the books seemed too great to pass up so I got the book.
While reading The Lives of Tao I kept having this nagging feeling in my head that there was something familliar aobut this story. Then it hit me, it seems as though Wesley Chu was given the writing prompt, take Scientology and make it into a viable science fiction story: Aliens in people’s bodies responsible for the pain in the world.
Weinersmith acknowledges on the last page that he may have ignored notes from PhDs to make a joke work. That said, there’s enough truth in here that every one I’ve shared the section of their degree with has found it really funny. It’s a quick read and a great gift for the science nerd in your life.
This book is like God Is Disappointed in You except each book of the Bible is only 1-2 setences. Like the other book, the humor comes from finding a funny way to express what’s actually in there. I think this book (if you bought the e-book version) makes for a bunch of fun pages to put up on your cubicle or print up in a calendar with one book per month for a few years. But I enjoyed GiDiY more because the extra text allowed the satire to be a bit deeper by being even more truthful to content of the Bible. That said, it was pretty fun to read the entire Bible in about five minutes.
As I mentioned in my review of the previous book of this Duology, I got this book free and so I went back and bought the first book. Where the first book is a self-aware reconstruction of the thriller action book, this book is more of a detective novel; in SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE! So it’s a MUCH, much slower pace than the first book. As I mentioned in my status updates - that’s fine with me because the pacing should serve the story. And detective stories are usually a much slower pace than thrillers.
Let me start off with the only thing that bothered me. Our protagonist, David Dixon, is so genre savvy that he knows he’s in a thriller novel. Not on a 4th wall breaking sort of way, but I’m his inner monologue he knows all the tropes to avoid. He even refers to the McGuffin as the McGuffin. But for the plot to kick off, he has to hold the idiot ball for the first couple chapters, ignoring sign after sign that something is up. The inconsistency threatened to take me out of the story for the first bit.
With anthologies, I *usually* just present the status updates I made while reading, sometimes with some modifications since there are character limits on the updates. However, Wild Cards is a bit different. Like the Machine of Death anthology that Dan gave me, Wild Cards takes place in a shared universe. However, MoD was very loose in its canon and sometimes the stories even contradicted each other as long as the premise of how the machine worked remained. Wild Cards is more like the comics it is adapting to a novel format - it’s a shared universe with a coherent timeline and characters appear in subequent stories - especially Croyd. So I’ll have a slightly more conventional review followed by my traditional anthology style.
A great issue. As always Neil Clarke selects some pretty amazing stories for this issue.
The Ghost Ship Anastasia - It’s the space trope no character is ever wise to - you DO NOT inspect a distress call on a space ship!
So of course things go pear-shaped. The specifics of this story involve ships run by AIs and an experimental Bioship in which the ship is partly metal and partly living matter.
Well, I’m done. That is one heckuva first-time novel for an author. I have a feeling this Sanderson kid is going places. Joking aside, it was a well-done novel that leaves the world open for a slew of books in the universe, but if we never get another, it’s still a great story. I covered a lot of themes for this story in the other two reviews so I’m going to try and stick to new themes as much as possible for this one.
First of all, I listened to the Graphic Audio version and I don’t know why they switched narrators from the main book. The narrator is fine, but pronounces everything completely differently. Sometimes I didn’t realize the narrator was talking about a character I already knew.
As for the story it’s completely unnecessary. Unlike other side-quels that deal with a very different location (and perhaps plot) from the main story, this one takes place alongside our story. It provides no drama since we know what is going to happen to the Elantrians. And a story without stakes is a pretty boring story.
Infomacracy is depressing to read. It’s fun to read. It’s a good political thriller, particularly if you happen to be an Internet junkie. I’d recommend it to anyone. But it’s depressing. Before we get there, let’s talk about the less depressing stuff. The book cover I have mentions Snow Crash. Unlike Snow Crash, a lot of the tech is just minutes away from existing.Back then, the idea of the information overlay in the real world was still science fiction. Now, we have had Google Glass. While the first version was a spectacular failure, more and more companies are piling on the augmented reality bandwagon and my sister-in-law has use her phone to do real-time translation of signs in another country. I’ve been waiting for this world since I was a kid and it’s finally nearly here. That’s exciting.
I never knew I wanted to read a Dan Brown-style thriller that takes place in Victorian England. But one day I became Goodreads friends with Anne Hannah because I love her review style. I especially love her no-nonsense take on comics. One day Sean Gibson started making funny comments on her reviews. I went over to his reviews and immediately became GR friends with him. It may or may not be your cup of tea, but his reviews were right up my alley. Back in may he mentioned on his GR author’s blog that he’d be giving away copies of this book for a review. I read the description and it sounded nuts. And I was afraid - what if Sean is great at funny GR reviews, but not a great author? What if I have to give the book a low review? But my curiosity over how this plot could work over-rode my fears.
As the middle section of a novel, it was mostly concerned with expanding backstory and a few false starts at the climax. (Intentional false starts….more of a meta note) The three main thesis Sanderson seemed to have for this part of the book were:
1. Intellectual faith vs emotional faith - This mostly concerned the Doraki priest. (I’m listening to the audiobook so I’m going to go with the spelling of Hrathin). Sanderson continued to make Hrathin’s plot much more complicated than a simplistic good and evil plot. Yes, he’s part of an empire that sees itself as under a godly mandate and yes he must convert the city or they’ll be destroyed by the empire, but while the religion is being forced upon these people, he’s not an evil person. In fact, I wonder if Sanderson, who I found out via the Cosmere reddit is a member of the LDS, didn’t see some comparison to the Prophet Jonah. If you weren’t raised religious or didn’t pay much attention to the actual Bible you probably only know him as the guy who was in a whale’s stomach (like Gepetto in Disney’s Pinocchio). But the story in the Bible has God telling him that he needs to convert the city of Ninevah or else God’s going to destroy them. (Sound familiar?) Of course, things diverge there because Jonah hated the Ninevans and wanted them to die so he skipped out on his deal - hence the whole whale thing. In Hrathin’s case, he is a more militant follower so he does not skorn the idea. In fact, he is haunted by the massacre that followed his previous success at city conversion. While modern humans in non-theocratic countries view it as bad that he wants to force-convert the citizens, he really is trying to save the lives of an entire city. But getting back to plot point in this book - he struggles with the fact that his relationship to his religion is purely intellectual. His intellect makes him a very entertaining sparring partner with Serene, but it means he cannot compete with Deloth over followers. He can logically get you to see his point, but most people need that emotional connection to join a religion. Of course, the emotional followers are the fanatics and this is causing a bigger and bigger problem for him.
It’s been over a decade since I read Battle Royale. It was a book that amazed me with its emotional resonance. It was the first book that ever made me tear up with the lighthouse scene. The author did such a great job building up both the stakes and the relationships, that it was devastating to read. I have enjoyed many a book since then, but few in number are the books who have affected me so much.
This is one of Sanderson’s earlier books and it’s exploring similar themes as Warbreaker, so while I’m enjoying it, it’s definitely not as good to me so far. What does it share with Warbreaker? The idea of divinity on Earth vs a god you can’t see, humans becoming divine, and an arranged marriage between royals who haven’t met. What’s weaker from Sanderson’s lack of experience - The Prince seems to be a bit of a Marty Stu so far - a little too perfect in every way.
Yet another demonstration of authors who are doing great things with the short story format. I’ll definitely be buying other issues. As usual for magazines and anthologies, a collection of my status updates.
“The Uncanny Valley” - An intro and the the mission statement of the magazine.
“If You Were …. White” - About Jungleland and a premise not unlike Roger Rabbit (the movie, not the book) where all the animal actors in movies were sentient.
First of all, let me say that the voice acting and foley/music is so great in this series. In this third installment as characters reveal their true natures we end up with different voice performances from the actors. Very good job.
That out of the way, onto the review. It’s possible if I were more familiar with fantasy tropes I might have seen the twists coming, but I was caught completely by surprise as more and more of the story unspooled. In the best cases, I was only one step ahead of Sanderson while I’m often able to spot all the Checkov’s Guns (or wands) in literature, TV, and movies. As is always the method of a good writer, it was all there. Even the prologue gives a hint as to who Vasher is.
Yet another demonstration of authors who are doing great things with the short story format. I’ll definitely be buying other issues. As usual for magazines and anthologies, a collection of my status updates.
“The Uncanny Valley” - An intro and the the mission statement of the magazine.
“If You Were …. White” - About Jungleland and a premise not unlike Roger Rabbit (the movie, not the book) where all the animal actors in movies were sentient.
Sanderson continues to weave together 3 narratives in a way that makes me really invested in each one. Well, to be fair, for most of this part of the book I viewed Vivena’s sections with resignation. Interestingly, both sisters are naive in their own ways. Vivena is naive through an overly focused education and a position of privilege. Siri is naive from always blowing off her education and those around her having a vested interest in keeping her in the dark. The difference is that Vivena comes off as a stuck up snob for most of her character arc in this part, although things rally near the end when she finally starts to accept her status as a blasphemer and tries to use it for good.
I’d like to start off by addressing the big thing I’ve noticed with this story - while it has 3.5ish stars on Goodreads, a quick scroll through the reviews reveals that’s mostly the average of 1 star reviews and 5 star reviews. There are very few people who “meh” this story. They either love or hate it. My current theory, mentioned in one of my status updates, is that this is because a huge swath of the world (or at least the Anglophile world) grew up with Harry and Co as their buddies. It was both their intro into magical fantasy and a friend who was going through the same age-related issues (until the civil war at the end which would only be relevant for a certain chunk of the world). This didn’t happen for me. I think I was in high school when they started coming out - I was certainly done with college by the time the last books and movies were coming out. So the Boy Who Lived was a well-conceived and well-fleshed out story to me, nothing more. Never waited to get the books at midnight. Shoot, by the time I wanted to read the books, I waited a few more years for Ms Rowling to offer them DRM-free on Pottermore before I’d buy them. So I read them last year or maybe 2015.
I said it in a few status updates, but after I finished the book last night I was even surer in my convictions, this should be animated. Why not live action? Well, as we’ve seen in all the super hero movies, actors hate having their faces obscured - it’s their biggest asset. So they keep it visible even if it doesn’t make sense in the context of the plot. In this book, the characters spend 1/3 to 1/2 of the book sporting completely different faces. That wouldn’t fly in Hollywood. Also, Hollywood tends to think you’re dumb so they’d resist it thinking the audience would get confused. The success of the Adult Swim shows and Archer have shown that there’s an audience for animation that falls outside the realm of an animated sitcom. With the tone of the book, it could succeed in an Archer animation style - perfect by that team when they worked on Sealab 2021 for adult swim. It could also beautifully work with Watanabe’s Cowboy Bebop style. (Although that would perhaps be too expensive for American TV? Maybe Netflix would do it?)
I am pretty sure I’ve never read Sanderson before. I’ve just not historically been that much of fantasy guy. I’ve read more fantasy in the past few years than I have in the preceeding decades. However, I do know the name and I know he’s supposed to be very good. So when they had a Sanderson Humble Bundle a month or so ago, I jumped on it. The bundle contained a bunch of audiobooks and a couple days ago I finally had listened to all my podcasts. So I loaded up the first Warbreaker audiobook by GraphicAudio.
This book was a good read. That said, I was disappointed, given the title of the story - The Trinity PARADOX. I thought it was going to be like Back to the Future 2 where our main character ended up in the alternate timeline and then had to somehow stop herself from creating the alternate timeline. Or multiple people would try to change it or something like that.
I wanted to read this book before talk of the TV show caused the plot to enter the wider zeitgeist and ruin it for me. I’m going to put any big spoilers in the spoiler tag, but this is a book from the 80s and there’s a TV show now that everyone is talking about. (At least 2 podcasts I listen to have spoken abou it) So if you want a pristine read - stop reading this review or anything else online and go read it! Amazon said it’d take 5 hours to read and I think that’s more or less on point. You can finish it over a couple of afternoons if it’s that important to you. OK, now that we have those preliminaries out of the way we can begin with the review proper.
Got this as part of a Humble Bundle in 2015, I think. Finally got around to it. There were some really great and moving stories in here. As usual with anthologies, a collection of my status updates:
“Things Undone” (Novella) - That was a crazy emotional ride. We often read time travel stories concerned with what might change.
This is a great book that I think would have blown my mind if I hadn’t already been listening to Mr McRaney’s podcast for the past few years. However, if you’re in to amateur psychology and understanding all the ways that your brain is getting in the way of your life, this is a great book. It’s also great for understanding the world. There’s a chapter that explains why people end up with Realistic looking Sex Dolls (those creepy Japanese ones you’ve probably seen) or super old men. Another chapter explains why we always have issues telling if someone is flirting with us or just being nice. Overall it’s a fun read - David used to be a journalist so he has a conversational style that works well.
This book was hard to read. I enjoyed it, but it was definitely hard. Goodreads says it’s the second book of this series and it probably is (the info is populated by GR people who volunteer to be librarians and is sometimes wrong). So I’m sure part of my difficulties come from jumping in past the initial narrative. Ms Bear has created a semi-alternative world that is complex and full of complex characters. This realism to the characters is what drew me in despite how much I had to work. Ms Bear also did a great job at making this an acceptable entry point into the series as she explained characters’ relationships to each other whenever they were introduced.
I discovered Ms. Leigh Alexander when she appeared on one of the E3 podcasts at Giant Bomb. I found her perspective fascinating in a sea of men. I was still too new to this world to understand why this led to so much hate and abuse that she hasn’t been back on. (At least that’s how I understand what happened) Since then I’ve followed her on twitter (and even made an ass of myself with a tweet to her) and I generally enjoy her reading of the industry and games. From her pieces, she seems to be slightly older than me, but we’re roughly from the same era in video games and so it’s a voice that speaks with the same cultural background and that’s always neat.
I got this as part of a bundle - probably Storybundle as I’ve bought nearly all their video game bundles - and I had put it off in favor of other books because I don’t have a strong connection to Prince of Persia (POP henceforth). My family was working poor until I was getting into later elementary school, by which time a lot of computer game industry had lost its first “death” to the consoles. By the time I was playing computer games, it was mostly just RTSes hanging on and we weren’t anywhere near the Steam Renaissance that would make the PC the best place to play games again (except for bad ports).
Well, this story functions quite well to continue the story from Black Mercury. We see the fates of many of the characters from the previous novel, but this really is quite a different story with a different focus. The series is going from mostly Steampunk to Steampunk Fantasy in this book while also exploring ideas of colonialism, fallen empires, and racism. (Also university and identity politics)
This book started off seeming as though it would be some sort of Victorian, Steampunk Speed Racer. But that turned out to just be a red herring to introduce us to the characters and set up some of the conflicts. I also thought it would focus more strongly on the floating island, Inselmond. It seemed as though it would be one of those islands that feature in many anime and JRPGs where the rich or magical live. Nope, that served as a McGuffin of sorts - although in a lot of ways the Black Mercury of the title is practically a McGuffin, but there might be some debate about that.
I don’t really think this book was “AMAZING”, but I gave it an extra star for doing a good job of messing with my expectations. I’ve been reading nearly 30 years now so it’s very hard for an author not to fall into the trap of various tropes that leads me to be able to guess the plots of most books before they get to their twist. (With the exception of noir or detective novels and some POV books like ASOIAF because the characters have an extra-limited perception of what’s going on)
I’m pretty dang sure I got this book during one of B&N’s free ebook fridays. I don’t know if they still do that, but it’s something they used to do when I first got my Nook. There’s no way I would have bought this book on my own. That said, this book is just as pulpy as you’d expect from the cover - a painted look from back when they would use illustration rather than photos for book covers and a mostly naked woman watching a muscular man dispatch someone else. This cover’s pretty accurate to a scene in the book except that the woman isn’t wearing a bikini - she’s fully clothed, but her recently ripped shirt has exposed her bra.
Disclaimer: I was a kickstarter backer on this book
I Kickstarted this book because I liked Weiner’s work on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and because the description sounded appealing to me - create a book that would appeal to a young, nerdy female. I’ve two daughters and the one who can talk (the other is only 15 months old) appears to be genuinely curious about the world around her and might relate to Augie in this book.
While in some ways this is an OK thriller, it makes for a very fun read. Ms Drake has created a very interesting universe which has the relationship between witches/warlocks and humans as the inverse of Harry Potter. In HP the magical world is kept hidden from muggles to prevent persecution. But in this alternate version of our world, humans know that warlocks have god-like powers and are keen to make themselves scarce when warlocks and witches are around.
This is the middle book of a trilogy (I think….maybe a quadrilogy? Because there’s another book called Extras). Therefore, not much happens narratively. I think it continues to have pretty good metaphors for teen life revealed via this dystopia, but it was slightly disappointing to not really move forward very much compared to the first book. In fact, it takes the entire book to do what they planned at the end of the first book. Like the middle book in a trilogy, there is a lot of fleshing out of the world, and that’s neat.
Disclaimer: I was a Kickstarter backer on this anthology.
As usual for an anthology, here’s what I thought of each story.
“Standing Still - A police psychologist confronts someone that looks liek he’s going to blow people up. The entire short story is their conversation. I think it suffers only slightly from being in a time travel anthology because it takes a while for one of the characters to admit that. I thought I knew what the twist was going to be, but damn you, Donald J Bingle, for screwing with my emotions on that ending.Great job”
When I first added this book to my To-Read list on Goodreads about 3 years ago, I thought it was another take on the Akira concept - some kids being experimented on by the government and it turned out they made the kids too awesome and so the kids murder everyone and escape. It turned out to be much, much worse. I’ve read a lot of dystopias, but this one was the most disturbing one I’ve read. If you want to go in completely ignorant of the rest, go read it now. The rest of this review will contain mild spoilers (as in revealed in the first chapter) and any heavy spoilers will have the spoiler tag.
This version of The Forever War contains an intro by Scalzi. In it he basically talks about how he somehow avoided reading TFW when it first came out and it’s a good thing because he would have done Old Man’s War differently. He mentions that lots of fans and haters assumed he stole from Haldeman. I DON’T see it. At. All. Starship Troopers - that’s different. A case can be made that Scalzi updated Starship Troopers for OMW. (That, of course, is unfair to Scalzi and the creativity that went into OMW….I’m just saying if you’re going to be making “plot stealing” comparisons….that’s a much better one).
Before I get to my usual anthology review in which I collect all my status updates into one place, I wanted to mention a bit about why I kickstarted this book and how I like the overall collection. One day I was trawling through the fiction section of Kickstarter when I came across this book (which had a different title at the time) and it ticked a few boxes for me. First of all, I’ve always found it fun to read a story from the villain’s point of view. So often authors take the easy route and create an anti-hero if they want to tell a story without a goodie-two-shoes protagonist. To make a villain sympathetic takes work. Second, it was clear some of the stories would take an irreverent tone. While good parody and satire are hard to pull off, I’m pretty tolerant about mediocre parody and satire. Finally, while LGBT characters are starting to take off - especially in YA fiction, it’s still somewhat of a relative rarity. Even harder to find is a LGBT character that doesn’t conform to heteronormative tropes: the sexy lesbian, the lispy gay guy, etc. Most aren’t aware of bears and other categories and that LGBT people come in as many shades of the rainbow (no double-entendre intended) as straight people do. So it was fun to read about things like seduction from a woman’s point of view, from a bi point of view, from a transgender point of view and see how they’re the same and how they’re different. And there are stories in which it matters that the characters are gay super heroes and stories in which it matters as much as the super hero being left-handed.
I never saw the movie that came out in the 90s (or was it 2000s) and it seems like that’s a good thing. From everything I’ve heard from others it has about as much to do with this book as World War Z has to do with its namsake. I added it to my To-Read list ages ago because I read somewhere - Wikipedia or TV Tropes that The Forever War was at least partially a response to Starship Troopers by someone who viewed war differently because of the Vietnam war. Both are often cited as seminal to the genre of military space science fiction. So as I continue to read the classics of both literary and genre fiction, I figured I’d check this one out. Boy am I glad I did.
I am too young to have experienced it first-hand, but for a minute there in the 70s pornography went mainstream. Everyone was talking about it. It was “in” to see it. Regular theaters (as opposed to shady sex theaters) were showing movies like Deep Throat and Debbie Does Dallas. It was being discussed out loud rather than in hushed tones. To me, that’s what the buzz around Tampa about three years ago was like - everyone was talking about this book. While I do follow some smut fans on here who write VERY entertaining reviews, this was more like EVERYONE talking about it. So, after reading a portion of the first chapter and seeing the hyperbolic inner monologue of our main character, Celeste, I put it on my To-Read list. Also, it takes place in my home state of FL - where all the nutjobs live. There it sat for quite some time.
Got this as part of a bundle at Storybundle.com and I have to say that it was more enjoyable than I thought it would be. Frankly, some of the stories are scary in that the crime depicted is horrific and yet it’s told in such an engaging way. Also, this is a book in which reading the introduction is a good idea.
And so my first book of 2017 is done, although it’s a bit of a cheat as I started it at the end of 2016.
I purchased this book as part of a book bundle - I think it was on StoryBundle.com. The relevance of that is that I didn’t buy the bundle for this book and I hadn’t realized until starting it that it was the fifth book in a series. As far as that goes, I think the book functions quite well as a standalone book. Taking a quick look at the descriptions of other books in the series - it appears that only book 4 (the one preceding this one) is directly related to the characters here. So other than not knowing the conceit of the way the world works in the Numinous World series, you’re not out of luck starting here.
It’s a bit late in the year for this, but it’s been busy. 2016 started off with me heavily reading comics, but that petered off as I took on more and more responsibility for the twins. It takes time to write articles of the quality I prefer to write for Comic POW!. It’s also the year in which I read George RR Martin’s series A Song of Ice and Fire. You might have heard of it? The first book in the series is called A Game of Thrones. I enjoyed reading it and it provided a lot of insight to the show. It was also a good time to read it as it is generally no longer spoilery for the show. The extreme length of the books, however, meant I read less books than I might have otherwise read for the year.
I’d like to start off with my one big criticism of this book - not enough images! I understand why they had to do it. When you’re printing a book, each page is expensive, especially when you’re printing in color. But when you’re covering an industry based on images and we only have 1-2 images per creator, it’s hard to get a good feel for the creator’s body of work. I think it would have been nice to have a supplementary PDF with a few more examples per artist. (Yeah, I know I could Google them, but for a curated product, it’d be nice to do a little less work)
“Maybe,” he said in a slow, rural drawl, “you could explain to me why I found you in the middle of an orgy.”
“Well,” I said, “if you’re going to be in an orgy, the middle is the best spot, isn’t it.”
I’ve heard of the Dresden Files before, but I’d never checked it out. I thought it was about World War 2 and I constantly confused it with Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five for some reason. But in a great example of the value of book bundles (like Humble Bundle or Story Bundle), I ended up with this book via a book bundle and when I looking for a new book to read recently, the description stood out. I also recognized Butcher’s name, having spent the last few years listening to Sword and Laser and getting a feel for a bunch of SFF authors I hadn’t been familiar with.
A book that passes the Bechdel test with flying colors. All the important characters are women and the guy who would be a love interest in any other telling of this story only appears sporadically and only gets a couple kisses near the end. Maybe it’s just the circles I run in, but it seems if you want good genre fiction led by women characters, look no further than steampunk. Although, this book is like steampunk’s weird cousin.
This is a book that either anticipates or was written in reaction to gamer-gate. I think wherever you fall on that is probably the biggest predictor of whether you are capable of liking this book. I’m not saying if you were on the side of the journalist that you will automatically think this was a good book, but if you weren’t I find it hard to believe you’d like this book at all. A quick primer if you pay no attention to video games journalism or think pieces about the harassment of women online. A woman, Zoe Quinn was (still is?) working on a video game. Her ex wrote a blog post saying she slept with some guys for positive coverage for her game. Then, out of proportion to the fact that whether or not she did this, it’s just video games (for CTHULHU’S SAKE) people started harassing her and sending her death threats and all kinds of stuff. Google it if you care.
As usual for an anthology I will post my status updates per story. Before I get to that, I wanted to note that this is the first time I’ve read anything Lovecraftian. (There were Eldritch horrors in the first couple Discworld books, but I had no idea what that was at the time) I think these authors did a great job creating stories based on or inspired by his creatures. If, like me, you’re a Lovecraft neophyte, be sure to read the introduction as it helps explain some of the concepts. And now the stories:
Like a beautiful fractal, this book is doing the same thing on the individual story level and on the series level: joining together all the threads. This book starts off with Quentin trying to get money on by participating in a magical mission impossible after having been kicked out of Fillory in book 2. It then pivots to Janet, Eliott, Josh, and Poppy in Fillory where things are going a bit screwy. By the end of the book the two plots have not only joined, but have revealed themselves to be workings towards the same goal from different ends. In the same way, this book ties together all the plot threads from books 1 and 2 and has characters and plot points from all of those joining together. I’ll get back to this below in the spoiler section. Before I get to the spoilers, I do want to say that Grossman also does a great job with the fact that our characters have grown over the seven years we’ve known them.
““I’d rather find a call box,” Nyx said.
“God does not answer the phone.”
There isn’t one person among us heavy users of Goodreads who doesn’t know the truth behind taking the phrase “don’t judge a book by its cover” literally. Now I have found incredible books by being attracted to their covers, but sometimes you miss out if that’s all you depend on. Take this book, for example. I don’t remember when or how I got it. It might have been back when I was religiously (no pun intended) making sure I took advantage of Barnes & Noble giving away a book every Friday or it might be from a Humble Bundle or something. Either way, I’d skipped over it because the cover and description made it look like it was going to end up being a Romeo and Juliet story. She’s from country X and he’s from country Y and they have to learn there’s something more important out there!
“Well, good. don’t go digging too deep, Quentin. Don’t stir. Shit. Up.” Fogg enunciated the obscenity crisply. “Right now you have the air of somebody who thinks he knows better. Humility is a useful quality in a magician, Quentin. Magic knows better, not you. Do you remember what I told you the night before you graduated? Magic isn’t ours. I don’t know whose it is, but we’ve got it on loan, on loan at best.”
Well, that was a great little read. If you were worried John Scalzi was a one-trick pony, worry no more. This thriller is a great little romp through a world in which no one dies anymore…or at least, can’t be murdered. Scalzi does a bunch of great world-building in which he shows us what happens to a world in which you effectively can’t die because of murder anymore. It’s alternately bitingly witty and a little sobering. I’m not entirely sure if I want more stories in this universe or if it’s best that you just have this little tidbit before things fall apart from too much introspection.
As far as Star Wars stories go, it was OK. It goes along with Dark Empire in the immediate aftermath of Return of the Jedi. Everyone’s making their power plays after Emperor Palpatine’s death. I haven’t seen Star Wars VII so I don’t know what direction Disney has taken the franchise, but what I like about these pre-Disney Star Wars canon stories is that they show that rebellion is not just overthrow the Emperor and then everything is fine. There’s still an entire bureaucracy with some inertia and people who were doing just fine under the old system and would like to have it stay, thank you very much.
This Manga Guide has more of a story than the electricity one, but less than the calculus one. The style is very wacky - like a comedy manga and it reminds me a lot of Azumanga Daioh with all the digressions, daydreams, and general surrealism. It does a good job explaining physics, especially if you’re learning physics without calculus. Like many other books in this series, it uses real world examples (primarily tennis in this book) to explain the principles and why a student should bother learning physics if they aren’t going to become an engineer or scientist.
Well, that was quite a ride. I’ve come to the conclusion that calling this book Harry Potter in College does a disservice to Lev Grossman’s creativity and sets the reader up for false expectations. This story is a trilogy, but it does not cover three years in our protagonist’s college life. Instead the first book covers at least 6 years if not more of Quentin’s life. Instead this book is a mix of the idea of a Wizard School and the Chronicles of Narnia. Before I get deeper into that, one more thing to address: the way the main characters act.
While the book didn’t happen to explain calculus in the way I best understand it, I think it did do a pretty good job of explaining it. More importantly, I think the book does an excellent job of explaining why calculus is important outside of engineering. I’m not sure if my undergrad requires Calculus for journalism students, but the journalists at the center of this book certainly make an argument for how it can help data-driven journalists derive good first-order approximations for their stories and fact-check data given to them by others. All too often kids fail to glom onto subjects because they can’t see how it applies to them in the real world.
I think it was a cute way to get across the basic principles that govern electricity. I’d recommend it to anyone who has an interest in the way electricity works. It works fine for adults, but if you have a kid who’s maybe 10 or so who’s getting into electricity and the types of kits they used to sell at Radio Shack, this would be a great way to explain the way electricity works. It’s fun while being quite informative.
I’m in a sweet spot now where there are a lot of authors that seem to be about the same age as me give or take a decade. So I’m starting to see more and more references I can relate to. The main character of this book, Ariel Blum, seems to have also grown up in the video game revolution of the 80s. I appreciate his not-Laura Croft, Dana Light, in a way that I doubt those much older or younger than me would. And, while it’s not singular in this respect, a book told mostly through blog posts, IMs, and emails, definitely speaks to me as someone who straddles the Gen X/ Millenial age cutoffs. Ariel’s work on phone games continues to be more and more relevant as clickers and free to play games become ever more prevalent.
I finally caught up with all the others on my feed and read this book. I don’t know if it was part of some book club or if it just spiraled as each person I follow recommended it to each other. This is another book from s book bundle I’d bought (I think Humble Bundle).
This was an example of one of times where the book cover kept me from reading it earlier rather than encouraging me to read it. The title “Uglies” together with a sheet over someone’s head and the blue fingernails; I thought it was going to be some teen drama book or something I wouldn’t enjoy. Instead I found a YA dystopia that kept me glued to the page. As a testament to Mr Westerfeld’s writing ability, although I had fun pointing out dystopia tropes in my status updates, he proves that tropes are not necessarily bad by incorporating them in an exciting way. So, if you’re familiar with dystopias (particularly of the YA variety) you’ll be familiar with the story beats, but not necessarily with the execution.
This is the first time I’ve read this book. Until now I’d only read The Hitchhiker’s Guide series. It definitely has a different tone to it while still being a very British and funny book at its core. That might have to do with the fact that it was originally an unused Dr Who script or it might just be that Mr Adams was writing in a different universe with a different tone. There’s definitely something very modern in a sort of 80s or 90s way about this book - the way it talks about computers and algorithms that we just don’t talk about nowadays. We take PCs for granted, but Adams, like Richard, was a computer geek when that was still a pretty new thing.
Another book from that Humble Bundle that had a bunch of Simon and Schuster YA books. This book was OK. Not my cup of tea, but not bad. As I said in my status updates, Ms Black is pretty good at subverting my expectations. I’ll get back to this in a moment.
For someone who could not really care less about “the fey” as fairies are apparently called, especially if they’re spelled “faerie”, I’ve ended up with a lot of fey books via various bundles. So there are lots of tropes I’m not familiar with, like the fact that faeries are apparently deathly allergic to iron. Why is that? Does it have to do with why we don’t see faeries now? Because of the iron age of humans? Luckily, this book was written for people were a little less familiar because it explained things like changelings, kupies, and the iron allergy.
It has been very interesting reading this book. As someone who started reading SF in the 80s, I’ve read my share of American Cold War SF. But I’ve never read a full length Chinese SF novel. As I’ve often commented, what’s interesting with other cultures is seeing where we’re similar and where we’re different. For example, Da Shi, the cop, is similar to a detective cop in a American fiction. That makes sense - a detective is essentially an amateur psychologist. And humans are very similar in a lot of ways, including in the way in which criminals think. Some of the differences in the way the characters think or act defy an easy characterization, but showcase how our cultures think differently.
So, I’m done….I’m caught up. What a journey this has been. If one of the previous books was about the fallout from the War of Five Kings upon the smallfolk of Westeros, this book was about the fallout among the prominent families and rules of the kingdoms. It looks like everything is now ready for the climax of book 6 and denouement of book 7.
Even though I’m older than the author of this book, I have a different, though similar, relationship with this game. I don’t know if it’s because I didn’t have a lot of friends growing up or because my parents were (at the time) struggling to make ends meet, but I completely missed the marketing blitz of SMB3. I only heard of The Wizard a decade or more later.
I bought this book as part of a Humble Bundle. This book wasn’t the reason I bought the bundle. I avoided it for a long time because the cover made it look like something I wasn’t going to enjoy - perhaps a romance or paranormal romance. But two things made me start reading it:
I’d read a romance by Marjorie Liu last year and it wasn’t horrible. I wouldn’t actively seek them out, but apparently they’re not all cheesy bodice rippers.
I kept going back and forth between 2 stars and 3. I’d probably consider it 2.5 stars, but that’s not an option and I felt like giving the book the benefit of the doubt. I purchased the book as part of one of the first book-related bundles I ever bought. (I *think* from Storybundle) This wasn’t the book that made me buy it.
The previous book was mostly about how the war had affected the common folk. While some of that is still present in this book, this time it’s mostly about how the aftermath of the war affects the noble folks. Mostly they’re working on dealing with consequences of their scheming. It’s almost entirely based out of King’s Landing, but includes their deals with the Freys and others. It’s interesting seeing how complicated unwinding some of those deals are. It would be an exaggeration to say it was a Pyrrhic victory, but it wasn’t nice and tidy either.
The story had some fun elements like a steampunk Jedi with a steampunk spaceship. But overall, it was a flat sequel that undid a lot of what mattered in the previous story without doing much the advance that main story. That’s probably because the source material, unless I’m misremembering, was a couple graphic novels. There isn’t a lot of room there to change a lot about the Star Wars extended universe. The only thing that made me groan was the catch-phrase-ification of a lot of the main characters’ famous sayings from the first trilogy.
Like Wool, a series of short stories that slowly reveal more and more if this world. It’s hard to say too much without ruining the beauty of this story. Let’s just say that it is much more terrifying than I thought it would be from the descriptions. And, as I predicted, when you get to the last story, it really hits you with a real whammy.
It was interesting to read about this game from someone that had a similar upbringing and encountered it for the the first time at church, as did I. It was always a weird thing to exist, especially since I didn’t know at the time why it was a blue cartridge. He does a great job of reviewing the history behind the company that ended up creating the Wisdom Tree subsidiary. It was a crazy time to be in the games business and the company was no exception. I also enjoyed the look at the games that came out after Bible Adventures and how they were similar and different in scope and intent. As always, I love the personal story adject of the book as well.
As usual for anthology-type things, an expansion on my status updates. But, before that, let me just say that I love science fiction and fantasy short stories and listen to SFF/F podcasts to hear them. So this was a very fun read.
“No time like the present” - One of the things that I both love and hate about short stories is starting in media res. It feels like short stories aren’t allowed to introduce the world. You have to figure it out as the story goes along. Sometimes this can be fun in a detective sort of way. Sometimes it can be frustrating as you learn something halfway through that completely changes your understanding of the first half. Again, sometimes that can be fun like in Fight Club. Sometimes it’s just annoying. This time it was fun and I think having a kid narrator was part of the reason.
Well, that was quite a journey - both in the amount of time it took me to finish the book and in the scope of the book itself. I guess I’ll consider it in that order. This book, like all sci fi books that deviate so much from how we live today that everything has a new name, is hard to get into. While it is good narrative form to jump into the story without walls of text explaining everything, when it’s as alien as this (no pun intended) it becomes impossible to know what’s going on. And that makes it hard to get invested in the story. Additionally, in order to have the big payoff at the end, Herbert spends a lot of time without much going on. I know I spent a lot of time wondering why this was such a heralded book in our fandom.
As I usually do with an anthology-style product, I’m just moving over my status updates.
“Big Buck- I’ve seriously misjudged this game all these years”
“King of the Ogres - Although I never got into WOW, I’ve faced similar issues with others (sometimes peers and sometimes the older generation) not understanding games as a diversion as valid as whatever they do for fun.”
This book had a lot of great scenes - my favorite scenes from the TV show and more. (view spoiler)[I’m INCREDIBLY surprised that the TV show thus far has not incorporated resurrected Catlyn (hide spoiler)] This was where the two versions of this story began to diverge wildly. Overall, I continue to understand why various choices were made given that HBO only has 10 hours a season to get their story told. However, I also now completely understand why people got so upset about the extra rape and anti-women stuff. The reunion scene between Jaime and Cersei in particular was quite a different tone.
As I said with the previous book, there probably isn’t too much that’s new to say about this book given its age and the popularity of the TV show.
I think I once read that ASOIAF was originally meant to be a trilogy and this book definitely has a feel of expanding the narrative without resolving much. A lot is set up and I’m definitely ready for book 3, but if I’d been reading this when it first came out, I wonder if it would’ve contained enough forward momentum on the plot to keep me engaged in the series.
As I said in one of my status updates, this is no longer canon as Disney erased the Extended Universe canon when they took over the franchise. I’m not bothered - we comic book fans are used to canon being changed and alternate universes. I can still enjoy the story.
What’s interesting is that this is a radio play based on a comic book. If I remember correctly, it’s by the same people who did the NPR radio play of the original trilogy. The voice acting is a little wooden, but Billy Dee Williams stops in to do Lando and his acting is great.
This radio play reminded me that Return of the Jedi is the Star Wars movie I like the least. The plot isn’t all that interesting and the parts that are supposed to resonate most with Vader and Luke just don’t do it for me. I think the first two are much better. This is also the first of the radio plays that doesn’t have Mark Hammil as Luke. Overall it’s a good radioplay, it’s just that the source material wasn’t as good.
Great voice acting all around. Not as much extra supplementary material compared to A New Hope, but still some fun extra scenes and exposition because it’s a radio play and they have to describe stuff that’s happening.
As before, I highly recommend for anyone who enjoys Star Wars.
This was a lot of fun. Instead of an audiobook, it’s basically a radio play. The movie balloons from 2ish hours to 4 hours, but it adds in a lot of backstory that gives some of the characters, especially Leia, a lot more complexity. I definitely recommend it!
What can I truly say? This book is about 20 years old and obviously it was exciting enough to make in into the HBO show. For a long time I resisted reading because I’d heard there were a lot of departures from the show (like characters getting combined) and I didn’t want to get confused. I also didn’t want to start until all seven books were done. At his current rate, the series may not end before GRRM does.
Disclaimer: I got this book free in exchange for a review
Rarely does my opinion of a book change so drastically from beginning to end (and throughout). When I started the book, I was wary of where it was going to go. It seemed a bit too nice and clean. Then, mid-way through I started thinking I’d give it maybe three stars. And at the end it ended up with 4. It’s not a perfect book by any means. But it won me over, by golly, and somehow I just ended up really liking it.
When I was a kid I was a huge Bible nerd. I read The Picture Bible at least 5 times front to back (one of my first comics, now that I think about it). I’ve read MOST of the Bible a few times. (I usually skimmed Numbers and Deuteronomy). Back then I used to fantasize about someone writing the Bible in the regular vernacular. I’d mostly grown up with King James and NIV. NIV wasn’t bad, but it was still hard to get a perfect grip on things. After a while, I came across more translations and a few of those Bibles had good intros about how hard it is to make a good translation. Essentially you can either go for literal exactness or the spirit of the words. And those choices make a big deal when you’re talking about fundamentalists choosing whether or not to hate someone based on what the Bible says. So I gave up on my fantasy.
This book is completely different from the movie it inspired, the movie I’ve loved since I was a kid and have found layers to appreciate as an adult. It isn’t bad, it’s just wholly different. I’ve written in some reviews on here and in other places that in the past few years I’ve come to terms with the idea of adaptations. Movies and books will never be perfectly similar because adaptations require each to play to the strengths of the medium in which it’s in. This, however, is much more than an adaptation. The movie took 80% of the same characters and the thinnest connection to the plot in here and then made its own thing. And that’s good, because this book’s plot points are quite a bit too convoluted for a movie, especially a mass-market movie.
This book is as fitting an end to the series as the third one was. Scalzi does a good job of wrapping things up so that if this book truly was the end of all things Old Man’s War, you’d be pretty satisfied. I don’t know if he knew whether his $10 million deal with Tor would pan out or what it would contain specifically, but we know now he’s contracted for one or two (I can’t remember the exact number) more books in this series. Still, if he died tomorrow and/or never wrote another book in the series, this would be a good end.
As I stated during one of my status updates, the structure of this book reminded me of I, Robot. In that short story collection, Asimov has a couple guys who work for US Robotics (or whatever the company’s called) who somehow always end up being on the scene when one of the robots finds a loophole through the Three Laws of Robotics. I loved both the “cruelty” of the situations Asimov put the guys through and their logic steps as they solved the problem. I don’t know if Scalzi was directly influenced by I, Robot, but the crew of The Clarke end up in a similar situation with Wilson and Schmidt playing the parts of the two guys from US Robotics. The book is also structured as a series of short stories with a bit more of an overarching plot linking them than in I, Robot, but they almost function as singular stories.
This year I took ebooks and comics with me when visiting the in-laws and took advantage of having books on my phone to read in idle moments when listening to podcasts wouldn’t make sense - say I needed to be able to hear my name being called. So I was able to read 86 books this year (287% of my Goodreads goal of 30). Although audiobooks mess this stat up, I read 21,160 pages according to Goodreads. Also according to Goodreads my least popular book was Big Pulp: Ted Bundy’s Beetle which was only read by one other person. My most popular book was Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone which was read by nearly 4 million other people.
I understand what Mr Knuth was trying to accomplish with this narrative. While the plot twist was neither original nor unpredictable, it really wasn’t the point of this story. In fact, while reading I was thinking this book would warrant a 1 or 2 star rating. It took a long time to get anywhere and seemed to be too meandering. I figured that’s because it was book one of a series and we weren’t going to get a conclusion. But no, this book stands alone just fine.
First of all, I strongly recommend reading this right after The Last Colony. It’s been as long time since I read it and so it took some effort for me to remember the original story beats this was supposed to be referencing.
Second, Scalzi does a great job retelling the story and adding lots of depth to it. It brought a new perspective to events from the last book. The contrast between the way adults and teens handled things seemed spot on.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is a character study; a respite from the almost non-stop action of the last five books and the action that must follow in the next one. Therefore, barely anything happens in this book. It even has the delightful audacity to begin with a very British comedy scene involving the [metaphorical] heartburn suffered by the Prime Minister of England when visited by the Minister of Magic.
Harry’s always been wary of his celebrity status, but this book is the first time he’d really rather not be Harry Potter anymore. We learn more than ever about the wizarding world and finally see the Ministry of Magic. In an earlier book this would have been a whimsical journey of wonder. Here Harry learns a dark truth - the adult world is petty and unconcerned with justice. But let’s back a up a bit. The last book tore the last bit of the mask of a children’s story off as Harry had to watch a classmate die and come face to face with Voldemort and his top Death Eaters. It still came as quite a shock to find that Death Eaters had made their way to Uncle Vernon’s suburb and terrorize Dudley.
Everything Ms Rowling’s been setting up since at least book two came to a head in this book. Death Eaters, Dementors, the return of Lord Voldemort, why Snape is trusted by Dumbledore, and more. She had me on the look out for red herrings and I STILL got surprised by the villain (outside of Voldemort). The level of tragedy she allows to befall the characters continues to grow as her presumed audience continued to grow in age. This raises the stakes on Harry Potter and his allies as they are even more likely to run into trouble.
First a quick note for when this appears outside of Goodreads (on my blog, for example): This review will have SPOILERS and outside of Goodreads I don’t think the spoiler tag is going to work to shield you from the spoilers. You have been warned!
In my last review I (rhetorically) asked Ms Rowling to surprise me - to make Harry lose sometimes and perhaps have the kids not always succeed at saving the day. Ms Rowling gave me that and so much more. As I noted before, she delights in Red Herrings (these books being something like Teen Wizard Noir), so my attention was on high alert this time around. Looking back at my status updates I was right or almost right about the following (will be in a spoiler tag):
A mixture of a growing Ebook library, tracking my goals in Goodreads, and Calibre’s ability to generate a catalog have made me decide to start tracking things quarterly in the book dimension as well. Here’s my second report.
Total Ebooks: 419 (includes catalogs; increase of 2 books)
Total Unread: 304 (decrease of 9)
Goodreads 2015 Challenge: 65 of 30 books complete. Last time I went way over. We’ll see what this year brings.
Thanks to insomnia this morning, I am now done with book 2. Ms Rowling has hit another one out of the park. While the beginning seemed a bit repetitious for a series that I doubt would have had many readers who hadn’t read the first one, the pace quickly picked up and we were off for a new adventure.
What can I say that hasn’t already been said? This is a good middle grade book that hits a lot of topics that are important for children and resonant to adults: fitting in, feeling different, when courage and bravery serve one well and when it can get one in trouble, adults are flawed but most of them are trying their best, and, finally, admitting that the world can be a dangerous place. I think one of the hardest things about being a parent is finding the balance of hope and realism to impart to your child as he or she gets older. Too much of either sets the child up for an unhealthy view of the world.
There are a few things in this book that are a bit on the nose - for example, there’s a distinct Moon theme going on with a bunch of things and the main characters are Skye and Dawn. However, the deeper you get into the book, the more these things make sense. There are similar themes are Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz that are referenced via the names of things. At first I found it slightly annoying, but eventually it just seemed like a crazy meta commentary on how there are no truly original stories and everything is borrowing from the stories that came before it. So what starts off clunky ends up being much more seamless at the end.
This book was more than just more stories in the Machine of Death world. It was also the Machine of Death in fantasy worlds and science fiction worlds and all kinds of creative new worlds. It was a lot of fun and a great followup to the first book.
Once, a long time ago, I starting reading The Illuminatus Trilogy. I’m not sure why, but I think someone who was also into scifi had recommended it to me. Between its strange pacing and storytelling and sexual content I wasn’t quite ready for, I didn’t get it and quit early.
This is best read right after the original trilogy so you can get all the references. As these are Jane Sagan’s BrainPal diary entrees, Scalzi doesn’t over describe the references.
It’s much more poetically written than other Scalzi stuff I’ve read, so it was neat to see him showcase some of his other writing talents.
Full of inside jokes for readers of the first trilogy and a chance for Scalzi to expand on Perry’s thoughts which would have been too awkward to fit in during the original narrative.
I set out to see if I could enjoy a romance book. I got this Marjorie Liu book for free from Barnes and Noble in a Friday giveaway. The cover promised a cheesy romance, but I knew going in it was Liu who I loved on X-Men and I knew it was a paranormal romance, to which my wife said “like the movie Ghost?”
A mixture of a growing Ebook library, tracking my goals in Goodreads, and Calibre’s ability to generate a catalog have made me decide to start tracking things quarterly in the book dimension as well. Here’s my second report.
Total Ebooks: 417 (increase of 54 books)
Total Unread: 313 (increase of 45 so I’m reading them faster than I can add them…good)
Goodreads 2015 Challenge: 38 of 30 books complete. Last time I went way over. We’ll see what this year brings.
This book is, in a way, not what you think it’s going to be when you read the premise. Essentially it’s a dozen or so Oedipus Rex stories - in the oracle sense, not the incest sense. There is a machine called The Machine of Death and it tells you how you will die. Not when (except in one story). Just how. So if you get CANCER you might die of cancer in two months or at age 99. Sometimes, like Oedipus, what you do to avoid it causes it to happen. Other times that’s not the point of the story, but it can’t be avoided. If your death is EATING A PEANUT you cannot commit suicide by any way other than eating one. The predictions are also vague and/or ironic. OLD AGE might mean you die old or it might mean a senior citizen kills you. So I thought this would be a bunch of stories of people trying to outwit the machine. Instead, what I got were about a dozen stories in which the authors explore how our world would change with the existence of the Machine of Death.
This book is like the 90s movie Booty Call. It’s funny in a really dumb, immature way. What’s sad is that the tips in all those women’s magazines should be treated with about as much seriousness as these tips, but some people actually take them seriously. It also includes some hilarious joke sex positions and reader-submitted stories.
I have rapidly become a Scalzi fanboy. I’m proof of the sentiment behind Scalzi’s new $3 million deal - when someone reads one Scalzi book, they read them all. I don’t believe it discounts what I’m going to say, but it’s worth noting up front. Starting with The God Engines and going through Red Shirts, I’ve built up a huge enjoyment for Scalzi’s style. What style is that? I’ve had a hard time articulating it to friends and family. Here’s my best shot - Old Man’s War is not a comedy, but it’s funny. It’s an like action movie, but it’s not dumb. The humor mostly comes from witty or sarcastic responses by the main characters. Even though it’s framed as a military action book, it’s mostly a series of character studies. I also enjoy that both within a book and within the series, Scalzi only doles out information as needed. This has two good effects. First, there are no info dumps - or if there’s more than one paragraph of explanation, it’s the only way Scalzi has of conveying it Second, as we learn more of the universe - either through our POV characters learning more or by going from regular army to special forces, it forces us to re-evaluate what we learned before in a new light. Most apt in that comparison is the scientist telling our main character early in the first book about how the space elevator is designed in such a way as to be a symbol of how much more advanced the Colonial Union is than Earth without revealing just how advanced. With all that’s learned (mostly in the second two books), the scale of that deception is truly realized.
I haven’t read a lot of autobiographical books, but this is one of the more entertaining ones I’ve ever read. I think part of that has to do with Wil Wheaton’s writing style - I particularly enjoyed his teen-to-adult filters. I think it also is partially due to the fact that many of these stories originally came from his blog. While I’m sure his editor helped him clean it up a bit and make it slightly more bookish, it still retains a lot of that conversational style.
That was an unexpected short story. For one thing I went into it thinking it was the story of how Scalzi proposed. But once it was clear it was fiction, it still took me by surprise and the ending was unexpected. Scalzi continues to be my favorite source for funny (non-slapstick) science fiction. This story made the collection it came from worth getting.
Like other Boss Fight Books, it’s a great look back at a classic game. What was most interesting to me is that Doki Doki Panic actually started off as a prototype of Super Mario Bros 2. Since as all gamers my age or older know, that game was reskinned for USA SMB2.
I bought this anthology last year at Baltimore Comic-Con because Dynamite had awakened within me the idea of enjoying modern pulp fiction. Whether the collection succeeds as pulp depends on how strictly one hews to the definition of pulp. However, I did enjoy more stories than I didn’t. Even many of the romance stories were enjoyable to someone who doesn’t read within that genre. As I do with story collections, below are my thoughts on the individual stories.
This book was an experiment in funding and creating a book that I’m pretty sure came out before Kickstarter was as big as it is today. You have to hand it to Cory Doctorow, he lives what he preaches. He’s been releasing books that are not only DRM-free, but are also Creative Commons licensed. Even though this means it’s legal to get the book for free and share it for free, he’s been able to make a living on his writing. (Probably helped by living in Canada and England where healthcare costs are not the same concern as here) Still, all those books were released via a publisher. He wanted to try out the self-publishing model to see if it would work. I listened to the audiobook and he has a bunch of his friends each read one of the short stories in this book. I recognized some of them from other short story podcasts I listen to.
This book was an improvement over the first. First of all, there were less missing apostrophes. But, second, the plot moved along a lot better. I’m not sure if it’s because of the changes in the plot structure (which we’ll get to) or Mr Wolfer had yet another novel under his belt, improving his prose, but I enjoyed it more.
I think all the problems I have with this book can be summed up with one sentence. This book needed an editor. If it had an editor, it needed a more experienced one. I am not going to fault someone for small spelling errors and grammar mistakes -I make them all the time in reviews and blog posts. But there were a lot of grammar issues, especially apostrophe use. Still, what an editor would have done is tighten up the story a bit.
Hugh Howey does a masterful job in this book. It is definitely a contender for my favorite book of 2015. So much of what makes this book great is how Howey subverts all of our expectations. It is technically a dystopian book, but it is unlike any I’ve read before. One of the ways in which it’s unique, for example, is how the dystopian element is almost irrelevant to the story. I found early on that it reminded me of the video games Analogue: A Hate Story and Hate Plus with many of its elements. The video games take place on a generation ship that’s had so many generations removed from its initial launch that some of its early history is viewed as perhaps just stories. Additionally, there’s the erasure of a previous uprising from the computers. There’s also a dictator-like government masquerading as a democracy. That’s not to say that it’s entirely irrelevant to the story. After all, it is essentially the MacGuffin, in a way, setting the story into motion. But the story is more a character study than a treatise on the dystopia.
A mixture of a growing Ebook library, tracking my goals in Goodreads, and Calibre’s ability to generate a catalog have made me decide to start tracking things quarterly in the book dimension as well. I’ll start off with a simple set of stats and we’ll see what comes to me as time goes by. (Ebook will include both books and Magazines such as SF&F anthologies)
I received this book as part of a manager training seminar I attended. It’s not my first management improvement book and it’s not my first touchy feel-y self-improvement book. My dad had me read Dyer, Chopra, Tony Robbins, Maxwell Maltz, and Stephen Covey. But this is the first time I’ve read a touchy feel-y management improvement book since finish my first assignment as a manager.
This book is a matter class on Mario. I thought I knew all there was to know about Mario. Not only have I read a lot of the histories, but I was there. Mario was my first game; the ur experience. Every game, from real platformers to games with platforming life Uncharted, is judged in my mind against Mario. It is not a mere history lesson for me.
On the negative side, I didn’t realize beforehand this was written by a venture capitalist guy from the point of view of running companies. That made it less fun than if it’d been about the amazing and revolutionary games these companies made. However, it still ended up being pretty interesting in two main ways for me. First, seeing how much money was needed to start up changed through the decades. Second, seeing that there is no one right way to run a company. Some were family-friendly and others were time-sucks. But all of them made innovative games and were successful. One other takeaway is that some companies lasted a long time and others were closer to one-hit wonders before they either closed or were bought.
I’ve been involved in projects from all levels: developer, Project Manager, Manager of PM, and customer of project (technically this is everyone everywhere, but I’m talking about at work). This book has really changed the way I view Project Management. On the next project I start (or inherit), I want to make sure I try out the diamond principles mentioned here. Even if they aren’t a panacea, they appear to change the way everyone involved thinks about the project. Often perspective changes like this can have huge knock-on effects in large companies. Results that previously seemed random now make sense when viewed in this framework.
For some reason, I’ve found myself reading a lot of YA fiction over the last couple years. On the negative side, it appears that Dystopias are the genre du jour. Nothing wrong with them, and I think something about them speaks to teens. When I was a teen, that was my favorite genre - 1984, A Brave New World, and many others. But I think there can definitely end up being a bit of fatigue from reading books where the conflict is with the evil government rather than internal or with other peers.
This was my first Chuck Wendig book. If I’m thinking of the right author, all I knew about him before going into this is that he apparently likes to use a lot of profanity in his books. This one had more than most, but not an obscene amount.
If I had to describe this book in just one sentence it’d be: Irregular Creatures is like a bunch of Twilight Zone episodes if Twilight Zone was rated R. That said, most of the stories were probably closer to PG-13. I’d watch a one-season HBO TV adaptation of this book.
Just a little under five years ago, I started looking at the possibility of Ebooks again. Two months later I bought a Barnes and Noble Nook. For a long time I was very casual with my Ebook reading. I had the Cory Doctorow books and several months worth of free Nook books which more than made up for the cost of the hardware. Really, the best part of fully digital distribution of books (and games) is revolutionary in the way it can allow the purchase of giveaway of media which would be cost-prohibitive if the company had to pay for the physical object or shipping fees. I installed Calibre for the free EPUBs, but it didn’t touch my Barnes and Noble purchases.
That is definitely not what I thought it was going to be. I was sure that somehow this actor would be transformed into a monster.
What we got instead was a short, witty, and fun book that posited an alternate World War 2 strategy to win the war - (view spoiler)[ create Godzilla (hide spoiler)]. The book’s main character is great, especially when trading verbal barbs with an anti-semetic FBI agent.
In my Homeland review, I mentioned that many of Doctorow’s novels post-Eastern Standard Tribe are depressing reads; especially Little Brother, Homeland, and For the Win. Since he’s trying to spur people to action by making them realize how the world works, they can be pretty dark. Thankfully, while Pirate Cinema did have some moments of depression, there was some hope. While Homeland describes the world as it is - the dirty tactics used to arrest protestors and keep us from expressing ourselves as outlined in our constitution/Bill of Rights - Pirate Cinema describes the world as it could be. So it’s possible that, with some work, we can prevent Trent’s world from coming about.
I don’t know what’s different this time. Maybe it’s me; maybe it’s Sir Pratchett. This book just never seemed to have a climax. Had the journey not been sufficiently fun I might have scored it 2 stars.
This book reminds me of what was to be Five Iron Frenzy’s last album. The ska band had its fair share of joke songs - at least one per album. For its final album it had one song that tied together all the joke songs and references from the past decade. Similarly, this book seems to have a cameo or mention of everyone you’ve ever seen in the Discworld. Anyone who is in Ankh-Morpork makes an appearance. From the newspaper guys to CMOT Dibbler to the Wizards. The main plot even references Small Gods. I would have to say that this is the first Disworld book that cannot be enjoyed if you haven’t read most of the old ones.
I know there are a lot of weird things in legal documents that aren’t actually enforceable. It’s one of the reasons every contract has a part that says invalidation of one part of this contract doesn’t invalidate the whole contract. But this one makes 0 sense to me for eBooks:
“You may not:copy or burn the book or extract to a device whose principal function is to act as a storage device, for example, a CD/DVD or USB stick;”
So, we have book one: satire of reality TV, book two: propaganda, and now book three: the reality of revolution and civil war. This trilogy is a perfect example of how YA and children’s literature is often subversive - this is why there are so many book burnings and book censorships.
The first book is an entertaining satire of the 2000s-2010s told through a futuristic hellscape. But taken together the trilogy is somewhat of a primer for the YA reader to begin to question ideas of propaganda - is everything I see on TV real even if it’s the news? It also is a good introduction to a very hard idea - often both sides of a revolution contain despicable people. To tie it back with the first point, there are no guarantees that the freedom fighters will treat people any better than the “evil” government.
My undergraduate degree is Electrical Engineering, but the most important thing I learned was not anything about Maxwell’s Equations or electrons and holes - it was how to view the world in order to ask questions about it. That’s what Munroe does so brilliantly on his blog, What If? This book is a collection of posts from What If? and a few extra questions. The negative compared to the website is that there aren’t mouse-over jokes (although sometimes he puts that in there as a caption). The positive is that if you have the book, you have it forever. The website may or may not exist in a few years. I recommend for any scientific types in your life and anyone who likes to explore.
The book continues where the last one left off: with Kanako desperate to get intimate (physically and emotionally) with her adopted brother. While not biological incest, I still am not completely comfortable with it. Of course, coupled with the fact that she’s constantly doing what would be considered rapist behavior - impersonating others to get in bed/kiss/etc with him, tying him up, refusing to take “no” as an answer - it’s a bit much.
I only have a bit of free time each day - usually no more than about two hours when you add it all up. So whichever of my hobbies tends to catch fire is the one that gets the majority of the attention. 2013 was a pretty good year for video games, but in 2014 I did not play very many. By contrast, 2014 was an AWESOME year for reading. I track my reading on Goodreads for a variety of reasons including having conversations around books (most people I know don’t read and those that do read different books than I do). I looked at previous years and decided I’ve give myself a goal of reading 23 books.
While the first book was a satire of reality TV (including the wrap up episode), this book is about the importance of controlling messaging and of revolution. Collins explores how The Capital controls what the districts see and know in an effort to limit the likelihood of rebellion. Having seen the Arab Spring and movements like the 99%, it’s clear that this book is one of the more realistic science fiction rebellion portrayals. (It really drives home the lack of the info wars in the canon star wars movies. Where are the accusations that the rebels are terrorists? )
As I mentioned in my first status update, I’d always dismissed The Hunger Games as a European Battle Royale. And, superficially, it appears to be an apt comparison. High school kids are forced to battle each other until only one is left. With all the white-washing and remaking of Japanese movies and TV shows (still upset at the possibility of Keanu Reeves as Spike Speigel) I didn’t want to give it a chance. Then I got The Hunger Games as part of an audio book humble bundle. The entire trilogy plus a bunch of other books for a minimum of $15. So if it sucked, I wouldn’t feel gypped. (As of now I’ve only listened to the first book, so no series spoilers in the comments, please)
Quick note: If you don’t like sci-fi - you can probably still enjoy this book. The main character can teleport and that’s it. The reasons, science, etc are not explored. It’s just a plot device and the rest of the story is pretty much devoid of anything sci-fi.
Boy this kid really starts off in a crap sack world. It’s no wonder this was the most banned book in the 90s.
My brother Dan recommends a lot of stuff to me. I don’t always have the time or money to get to it right away, but when it comes to books, music, and comics I’m usually very in sync his recommendations. (At least when it comes to his recommendations to me, it’s been a bit spotty in the other direction) Examples of good recommendations include World War Z, Chew, Jonathan Hickman’s body of work, and Lucky Boys Confusion. Dan recommended the Thursday Next novels years ago. (At least five because it was way before Scarlett) I recently got a $10 credit on B&N Nook books so I went and grabbed the first book, The Eyre Affair.
Cory Doctorow - you upset me so much. Your books continue to rock. But, recently, you’ve gotten too real with your stories. They are still awesome stories. But they upset me because they make me feel impotent. All the ideas in Little Brother, For the Win, Homeland, and even Makers just remind us how stuck the system; how our momentary wins are usually negated within days and months.(eg The Occupy Movement) Please take a break and write something like DAOINMK or EST again.
This book is a meta-fiction work of art. It is told from two perspectives - that of an assassin writing a guide book to future assassins at his firm, HR, Inc and that of an FBI investigation into our main character. The premise is that the firm takes advantage of interns being unnoticed, but key to any business to allow them to assassinate some very powerful people. Our main character, John Lago is on his final mission because he’s 25 and, in his words, “that’s the oldest someone will accept that you would work for free.”
Disclaimer: I got this book for free as part of Good Reads First Reads
I asked for this book because I find it interesting that it’s actually mentioned in by canonical books in the New Testament, but the book itself did not make it into the canon - at least not in the Protestant churches I attended growing up. So I thought it would be interesting to see what’s in there. Instead I got something much, much larger.
Disclaimer: Got this book free as part of Good Reads First Reads
You can take something horrible and push it so far that you move into the realm of absurdity. Some of my favorite media do this. Kill Bill takes violence to such ridiculous levels (with blood spurting everywhere) that it’s become no different than the cartoon violence of Tom and Jerry. (Which, if you forgot, has Tom being diced up, pumped full of bullet holes, blown up, and pretty much everything shy of decapitation) Or look at Mel Brooks taking something horrible like the Spanish Inquisition and making it OK to laugh at in History of the World Part 1. But you can push something so far that it goes back around to offensive again. I feel like that’s the problem with this book.
Disclaimer: I got this as part of Good Reads First Reads
This book reminded me a lot of Tim Allen’s books ( like Don’t stand too close to a naked man). The author’s humor shines through, but humor is not its purpose. Unlike the Tim Allen book about quantum mechanics, which is about a weekend he had to himself to think, Aasif’s book is a collection of essays that forms the rough outline of an autobiography.
Disclaimer: I received this book for free for review purposes
Let me just say this up front: I believe Clive Lee deserves high praise for his writing in Coral Hare for maintaining a balance of spy thriller tropes and historic realism. So, yeah, Mina (our main character) is going to somewhat improbably meet up with certain nemesis at nearly every turn and somewhat more improbably continue to fight after having endured grave bodily harm. At the same time, the novel maintains its historicity; Mina is brave, but has moments of weakness; and the spy gadgets are grounded in reality.
This book is a must read for anyone in supervision or management. It will change the way you look at your employees’ interactions and the relationships they form. There may be hidden networks that are hindering your work. Conversely, there may be hidden networks where the loss of just one person would cause the whole thing to crash like a house of cards.
I had to read this book as part of my graduate work and I’m glad I did. It is an important look at how we can better work on reducing industrial accidents like oil rig explosions, airline crashes, and nuclear power plant explosions. A large part of the problem, in the author’s studied opinion, is the way we assign blame. We blame the person who had an accident rather than the system that created the situation for the accident. Except for extreme cases of negligence or criminal activity, this shouldn’t be the case and causes us to learn the wrong lessons; preventing a chance at stopping it from happening again.
If you take Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods and combine it with Scott Snyder’s American Vampire, Vol. 1, you’d have a pretty close approximation of what this book is about. Given that this book has been out since 2001, I’m not going to bother with marking spoilers. I’ll say here at the top that I really enjoyed this book and recommend it to anyone who enjoys mythology. Also, not for the faint of heart - lots of profanity, violence, and explicit sex.
In my first status update I was unsure of whether the book would catch on with me. I’d bought it as part of a bundle, and it wasn’t the book that sold me on that bundle. The concept was interesting, but I wasn’t sure. The main character was a girl, in fact a cheerleader. And she played a WoW-like game. A Venn Diagram in which I was one of the cirlces would have pretty much no overlap with Reagan, the main character. Well, other than that I also lived in Oregon, but what was when I was in middle school, not high school. I also wasn’t sure of whether the premise rings true to today’s high school kids. When I left HS nearly 15 years ago, gaming still wasn’t as pop culture as it is today. As I said in the status update, with dude-bros playing Call of Duty, should Reagan actually feel paranoid for playing computer games? Is that the sole provenance of nerds? I think I would have found it slightly more believeable if it was more explicitly about the MMO. I could buy that most people in her high school gamed, but still made fun of her for MMO gaming which still seems to have a tinge of nerd to it. But, in the end, it’s a quibble (a quibble I’ve wasted a paragraph on); a MacGuffin.
That was extremely intense. I don’t think I’ll ever look at zombies the same way again. I got this book as part of some pay what you want bundle. I never would have bought it on its own - I’m not a big zombie person. I read World War Z because everyone spoke about how incredibly good it was. And, just like The Walking Dead (pretty much the only other zombie story I consume), World War Z was about the people, not the zombies. Really the enemy could have been a contagion virus or out of control vampires like The Strain.
This book is Simon Peg/Nick Frost meets World of Warcraft. I can’t remember if I got this in the same ebook bundle as Jam or a different one, but I chose Jam of this one to read first because it sounded like I’d enjoy more. I never played WoW or any of its ancestors or any progeny. As of this writing never even played Diablo or any of its clones. So Jam seemed more up my ally - especially after I confirmed it was more of a spiritual successor to Mogworld than a Sequel. (One of the programmers in Mogworld is a character in Jam, but other than references via t-shirts, posters, etc there’s no reason to read Mogworld first) I really only read Mogworld because a) I owned it and b) I really enjoyed Jam.
This book is exactly what I hoped it would be. It is a deconstruction and reconstruction of the plot; it is an examination of what made the game so special. And it is a chunk of the author’s autobiography.
Unlike the author, and perhaps unlike most Chrono Trigger players, this was my first Square RPG. My brothers and I saw it in a used game sale bin at our local game rental shop. Attracted by Toriyama’s art more than anything else, we bought it for about $20 by combining all our allowances. It is no over exaggeration to say that purchase changed our lives. We had no idea such a game could exist.
(This ended up becoming almost more like a blog post than a review, but let’s call it new Books Journalism - a riff on new games journalism, which is really just Gonzo from the 70s repackaged for the children of the 80s and 90s)
According to the books I’ve put on Goodreads (which I’ve only been using for a few years), these are my all-time most read authors.
1. Terry Pratchett (40)
2. Isaac Asimov (7)
2. Michael Crichton (7)
4. Neal Stephenson (5)
4. Mark Waid (5)
4. Cory Doctorow (5)
4. Douglas Adams (5)
8. Alan Moore (4)
8. Brandon Graham (4)
10. Dean Koontz (3)
Just as with my music listening and how the top 15 artists usually are no more than 30% of the total listens for a quarter, I read a lot of one-off authors so the numbers very quickly tail off. Dean Koontz is #10 with 3 books and John Scalzi is #15 with 2.
I knew that one of the things Castro prided himself on was ridding Cuba of the influence of the American Mob, but I had no idea just how entwined they were with the Batista government. It was also incredible what long-range planners the mobsters were. If younger Americans know anything about these events, it’s from the events of The Godfather, but that movie (or is it part 2?) places the mobster meeting the same week as the revolution. In reality it was decades earlier. In fact, Al Capone had dreamed of Cuba being a Gangster’s Paradise.
The best way to describe what I just finished: a series of short stories in genres I may not have read as standalones but which combined into a highly enjoyable book. Not perfectly true as they all tended to have a bit of science fiction and a bit of detective fiction. But I do not think I would have sought many of these out.
This book is a little Enders Game, a little Battle Royale, and a little 1984 with a dash of Harry Potter.
I don’t usually write such short reviews, but in some ways, while a lot happens in this book, not very much happens. Which is to say that it’s the first book of a trilogy so nothing huge can get resolved. It’s a lot of setup in 3 parts, each with their own beginning, middle, and end. That’s what Pierce Brown does so well and which keeps me from being TOO upset at the fact that at the end of this book, things are only beginning for the main character. Yet we have already seen him have 3 arcs. He’s grown so much in the approximately 2 years in which the book takes place and yet he also reminds somewhat blinded in simplicity by his goal.
Let me begin by saying that I enjoyed this book. I won it as part of Goodreads’ FirstReads program. The title looked insane and so did the description; the subject of many an Internet joke and comic strip: if you could go back in time, should you kill Hitler? The Aeon Flux-looking woman on the cover was interesting as well. Unfortunately, I was delayed by a couple weeks in getting the package because I had a business trip. When I did get the book, I was amazed at how thin the package is. Other than, perhaps, The God Engines, this is shortest book I’ve read in a long time.
This book deserves all the praise that has been heaped upon it. Brooks does an excellent job putting together a history of both how the zombie virus became an epidemic and how the human race came on top. He gives each character their own voice and style. I really felt as if it were a real documentation of history. I also enjoyed the meta-story told through both the names of the countries/provinces and the introductions to each section.
I had no idea what to expect when I started reading this book. All I knew was that I found Yahtzee Croshaw’s reviews at Zero Punctuation to be pretty funny. I’d acquired Mogworld and Jam via Humble ebook bundles. I’m not sure, but I think they were in two different bundles. I can’t remember. Anyway, after looking at all the descriptions, it appeared that Jam was just Croshaw’s next novel, not a sequel to Mogworld. So, since the description of Mogworld sounded a little too close to what I do for a living, I went with Jam. It is a standalone book. I ALMOST changed my mind when one of the characters in Jam turned out to be a Mogworld developer, but that was of no consequence. The character may or may not be in both books, but it appears they merely take place in the same universe without any part of Mogworld being necessary before reading jam.
It’s always tough when people redo Shakespeare. Sometimes it works really well and sometimes it’s just horrible. I absolutely loved the way Scott Tarbet resets a Midsummer Night’s Dream in a Steampunk Victorian England. He was able to use Steampunk to handle the existence of fairies in the original and he uses wordplay to deal with stuff like the ass. It was only the love potion that had to resort to hand-waving to work with the story. I didn’t mind it too much.
Let me start with what I liked. Wilmar does a good job creating a believable female hero. She has flaws. She sounds like a woman; not a man with breasts. At the same time not a caricature of womanhood or a ditz. The sisterly relationship seems like a girl’s version of what I’ve seen with my brothers. While the dialog sometimes fell a little flat, the martial spat and relationship and sexual dysfunction seemed realistic.
I enjoyed all the stories but one on here - the one about the pick-lock. One of my favorites turned out to be the last one, which I think is the shortest story. But the there’s still a very compelling story told. I was disappointed with the GRRM story because I thought it was going to be an original short story. It just just part of a Dany chapter from ASOIAF. But, on the plus side I got to compare how it’s different from the HBO show, I got to see that I enjoy the way GRRM writes, and it was my favorite part - when Dany reveals to the Astaporians that she understands Valarian. As I mentioned in my updates, I enjoyed the Conan story and other than the vocabulary being a bit more formal, not much gives away that it was written 70-80 years ago. Also, having just read Gail Simone’s first Red Sonja arc, it was neat to see one of the stories call out Red Sonya (who Sonja is based on). Other top story was the one with the “Chinese” soldier. But really, lots of them were great.
Parodies are hard to do well. The worst parodies are unbearable, the best deconstruct the tropes. I was afraid The Mocking Dead would be the former, but since I got it as part of a huge Humble Bundle, it was nearly free for me to check out. Luckily it turned out to be less Scary Movie and more like something Mel Brooks would put together.
I’ve listened to somewhere between four and five dozen audiobooks (used to be an Audible subscriber) and the voice acting/narration on this book is definitely in my top three, if not in the top spot itself. Although the narrator slipped a bit in the last chapter with Garcia sounding a bit like Chad, it was otherwise an amazing performance. The narrator did something like 15 different, distinct voices. It’s not always necessary and it’s distracting if done poorly, but for this book it really brought something special. I’ve been a huge opponent of those who have used ebook DRM to prevent book readers from autoreading books to the sight-impaired. This book is a perfect example of why they shouldn’t prevent sight-impaired people from having a machine read a book. That’s just someone reading a book. It’s nothing special. But a performance, like in this recording of Striptease, that’s something worth paying for and something MANY years away when it comes to machine reading.
There’s something to be said for the rough style of this graphic novel. It goes quite well with the subject matter. There’s also a bit of - “oh, the gore’s it’s not so bad if it’s in black and white” like Hitchcock’s Psycho. And, like Psycho, there’s the added benefit of us being able to suspend more disbelief because it’s in black and white. Hitchcock used syrup or chocolate, I can’t remember, for the blood. Similarly, we can get caught up in the story and the gore without being taken out of it with the blood being the wrong color. Also, as I’ve mentioned on some of my reviews here and on www.comicpow.com , color affects the way you interpret the comic - is it more cartoony or realistic. I remember a few years back hearing someone having issues with a sci-fi comic because the palette was all wrong. All that said, the lack of color and the rough drawings sometimes made it hard for me to keep track of who was who.
This is not a book about how the mind interprets music or why we make music from an evolutionary point of view (although the topic is explored in the last chapter). It is probably more suitably titled How Music is Made - although I can see why they didn’t pick that title - people might expect a set of steps for making music on their own.
This book is a great primer on mythology. Although it spends a lot of time with the myths we are very familiar with (middle east, Greek, and Roman), it does also cover lesser known myths like Indian and Chinese. The best part of each section is the list of gods. I would recommend the book as a jumping off point for anything that interests you about mythology.
It’s been nearly 15 years since I first saw Fight Club, the movie. Since then I’ve seen it front-to-back maybe twice. But it really stuck with me. As I listened to this audiobook I found myself wonder when this or that scene would come up since the movie turned out to be an incredibly faithful adaptation. There are a few key differences, most notably the ending. But also a more sympathetic Marla in the book. But, for the most part, all the best lines in the movie came from the book. It’s rare for such a perfect adaptation to work, especially with a narrated book. But somehow it did. I also loved the narrator of this version and how he did different voices.
Escalator is a series of short comics, all by Brandon Graham. Although I routinely read short science fiction stories and anthologies, it’s much rarer for me to come across comics anthologies. This collection contains some of Brandon’s oldest non-porn comics. I think it’s an interesting insight into his mind as well as look into how his work differed in the 1990s. A lot of is it autobiographical or semi-autobiographical and that adds a little something special to the stories as well.
What this trade adds to the Image Comics series is the first issue from Oni Press which sets up some of the characters as well as why they leave the city. It also includes the porn comic that originated the characters. The porn comic wasn’t my cup of tea, but as a completist, I did want to see where the characters started off. Interestingly, with each edition of the comic, Graham draws Nik with less hair. He has a full beard in the porn comic, a goatee in the Oni Press comic, and a clean-shaven face in the Image Comics issues.
The book was a fun read. I first did Hamlet Sr, then Ophelia, and then Hamlet. I decided to go with the Shakespeare option each time, essentially turning the book into a modern English version of Hamlet (with commentary). The main thing I learned is that Shakesspeare relies on a lot of silly tropes that only worked because they were new back then.
I first saw the movie adaptation in middle school. The youth ministry pastor decided to share it with us. I fell in love immediately. When I came across it again in college, I bought it and my wife and I have seen it so many times we can more or less recite the movie. Outside of Disney movies the only others we know so well are Snatch and The Birdcage. While I was in college I came to realize it was based on a book. At the time I was a huge Audible fan and I got it as an audible book. The weird narrative structure didn’t make sense to me as a audio book. So I put it off for about a decade. Then, I suddenly decided to check it out from the library.
Reading this inspired a discussion in the Goodreads sword and laser group about what makes fiction YA. This book has a lot of adult stuff. Depending on your views you may wish to restrict it to older teens. (contains, among other things: mentions of erections, the word fuck, and bestiality)
I don’t care for zombies or unicorns. I can understand their metaphorical place in storytelling but other than the walking dead comic I don’t consume any zombies media. Yet I found this book supremely entertaining. It’s a great anthology that hits pretty much every emotional note; a well-balanced collection.
On the third mission to Mars things go horribly wrong and Mark is left for dead. It seems like a pretty grim premise, but this book was a very fun read. I love Mark’s logs, which are - essentially - Mark’s inner monologue. This was not “watch one man go mad in isolation”; it was a test of one man’s ingenuity.
This book has answered so many questions I had growing up reading the Bible. Assuming the acceptance of what the gospels said Jesus did- a lot of it is now put in perspective by understanding the world he lived in. I also have a better understanding of the seeming contradictions in the epistles. It is mostly due to a theological struggle between Paul and James.
If you love or have ever loved reading comics, you need to read this book. It is essentially a love letter to comic book fans. This is a world in which the characters are slightly self-aware. They don’t really know they’re in a story, but it does still have some of the same vibes of Redshirts. The characters know that they always come back after death (view spoiler)[(a tragic fact considering how the book progresses (hide spoiler)] and they know they monologue and then save the world. But they don’t necessarily know they’re in a book or comic.
If you’re purchased comic artists’ sketch books before, you probably have a good idea of what you’re going to get. However, unlike other sketch books I’ve seen, this one contains little mini-comics scattered among the more traditional sketches. It’s also neat that he includes some sketches his wife has drawn since they often draw together. Also fun - his reinterpretations of some Marvel and DC characters.
It’s definitely hard to read books when you have other obligations. This year I had two semesters of graduate school and the majority of the second year of Scarlett’s life. Now I know why my mother, who loved reading, would only make it through a couple books a year. Frankly I only got through this many books through a combination of reading during my lunch break and the fact that I’d rather read than watch TV most any time. (Links below go to my reviews of these books on Good Reads)
It’s December and I should have gotten all of my Kickstarter products by now. But that’s not exactly what happened. Every single one of my Kickstarters was late except the one I had the least faith and relationship with - Random Encounter’s Let Me Tell You a Story.
I’m writing this in late August - by the time this post appears I should have received all of my Kickstarter goods or they should be in the mail. Interestingly, even though the Kickstarter backer cycles were spread over about a three month period, they’re all supposed to be delivering the product at around the same time - 4th quarter of this year. As of the time of this writing, this is the status of my Kickstarters:
With this book David Sedaris is a modern day Aesop. In the same way that we use Science Fiction and Humor to allow us to discuss our condition without chafing (they’re not talking about good ole ‘merica, they’re talking about aliens!), by using animals Sedaris is able to get us to think about the way we interact with others and how we fit into society. Sure, sometimes of the time the metaphor/analogy doesn’t work perfectly as in a story that involved a breeder dog and was about infidelity. But it was still a pretty poignant story.
This is a very short book. Well, technically it’s a novella - it even says so on the jacket flap. The MSRP is $25 and I think it’s not worth all that for how short it is. However, it’s $9 for hardcover or $5 on Kindle right now and I think that’s a fair price. Because it is so short, I finished it in one day over about two hours, but that’s actually an indication of how good I found it. Last night, just before bed I planned to read 2 more pages to finish the chapter I was on. But I was very intrigued by what had just happened in the book. I didn’t want to stop reading. I look at at how many pages I had left and spent the next half hour finishing the book. Had it been a longer book I would have put it aside and gone to bed.
(warning: This whole review is full of spoilers!) When I first heard about this book I thought about it in the same way that I thought of the Battleship movie. The Red Shirt joke is a fun joke that’s been parodied endlessly. But is it enough to sustain a book? Yes, and it works because of the way that Scalzi does it. He essentially turns it into a space version of Stranger than Fiction. The characters learn quite quickly that things are a little off and that some of the individuals on their ship appear to be impervious to death. They act with a realistic amount of skepticism until too much evidence mounts for them to be able to ignore the idea that something screwy is going on.
Earlier in the year I came across an io9 article around 15 science fiction and fantasy novels that were rejected by publishers. The implication, of course, is what fools those publishers were - look at how many sales these books got and how how popular they remain today. Some of the books included The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, Animal Farm by George Orwell, Carrie by Stephen King, and Ha rry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J,K. Rowling. It’s a fun tale to tell ourselves. Look at all studios that could have made billions if they hadn’t passed on an aspiring writer with a little movie called Star Wars. But we’re just being tainted by Survivorship bias
Although I enjoyed Bill Bryson’s other book A Short History of Nearly Everything, I actually didn’t know that when I picked this book up. I had heard the other book as an audio book so I didn’t remember the author’s name. Also, it was nearly 10 years ago. My interest in Bryson’s book came from the media blitz he did to promote it - including NPR’s Fresh Air and, if I’m not mistaken, The Colbert Report. I put it on my TO READ list here on GoodReads and waited for a chance to read the book. That chance came when I flew to Florida for a family visit. However, now that I know it was written by him, it explains the style of the book.
Entirely separately from my recent reintroduction into the traditional comic world, I’ve been into graphic novels, as you’ve probably read on this blog. An article I read on Cracked brought The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (LoEG) back into my consciousness and then I read the [non-comic] books The Map of Time and Dracula. So I was primed for another story that takes its literary cues from the Victorian Age. The only other Moore books I’d read are Watchmen and The Killing Joke. I enjoyed them both and so I looked forward to this one.
Dracula is, like Frankenstein, a book that has influenced so much of our pop culture that we don’t even question that we know the facts of the book without having even read it. Before having read Dracula, I’d experienced Interview with a Vampire (book and movie), Discworld’s vampires, Dracula: Dead and Loving It, Blade, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV Show, not movie), Vampire Hunter D OAV, From Dusk til Dawn, the Twilight Series (exposed to bits and pieces by the wife), and countless Hanna-Barberra or Saturday Morning cartoons that had vampire characters. In a lot of ways I knew about the original Dracula by what these other works of entertainment had done differently. For it seemed to be a game among authors and directors to take delight in having a scene in which one of the characters thinks he knows just how to kill or keep vampires away only to be chastised by the Vampire for believing such silly nonsense. So I set about reading Dracula, noting the differences from what we’ve come to know about Dracula.
disclaimer: I won this book from Good Reads First Reads contest
This review originally appeared on the Good Reads website
Unsurprising for a novel about time travel, the contents of the book are not strictly chronological. Do not despair, this is not done for the purposes of obfuscation, in fact, the book is almost exactly like Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction in narrative structure. The book is told in three parts. Each of these parts is, as in Pulp Fiction, a story that stands on its own with a beginning, climax, and an end. But they all overlap with each other causing or being affected by the actions of the other story. And, the story as a whole also has a bit of an arc, again, like Pulp Fiction.
It took a bit of convincing from Dan, but eventually I read the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels. I knew right away that this was a book written for people like me. Just like Dr Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog, people older or younger than me would never get the full appreciation of all the references. I thoroughly hated the eponymous protagonist until I got near the end of the book and realized why he was so annoying. So, once my brother got the movie on Blu-ray, I knew it’d be just a matter of time before I saw it. I think the movie’s casting was spot-on. The actors who played Kim Pine, Knives Chau, Wallace Well, and Young Neil were perfect. Their delivery (and, to some extent, appearance) was exactly what I pictured it would be like. Michael Cera was even a really good choice for Scott. He wasn’t as perfect, but he did a good job and it fit his acting abilities. Ramona Flowers’ actress was also good, although not as great as the others.
On my trip to the Grand Canyon I read Cory Doctorow’s second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe. The book begins in media res with the main character informing us that he’s in an insane asylum and that he is deciding whether to give himself a lobotomy with a pencil. We also quickly learn he believes himself to be set up. I always find it to provide a very interesting tension when experiencing works of art that begin in the middle. Most of the time, as happens with Eastern Standard Tribe, the current story is interrupted to tell how we got here. Of course, this leaves the reader (or watcher in the case of a movie) playing the mental game of trying to figure out how we end up back at the beginning. You know the main character can’t die (unless it’s a work in which resurrection is allowed - plus some other ways that writers can be tricky and mean) and you know that no matter where he ends up going, he’ll end up in the location at the beginning. Regular books, as you know, leave you in the dark about where you’re headed. Doctorow chooses to tell the story in the same manner of Momento, switching between the past and the present, rather than focusing on the past until we’re caught up. This technique made it fun because even as you see how he ends up imprisoned, you are seeing his plans for getting out.
Today I just finished Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. It’s the first epub book I’ve ever read and the first ebook I’ve read that I hadn’t previously read as a physical book. I’d been wanting to read the book for a long time, but the idea of sitting at my desk to read or plugging my laptop in and reading wasn’t appealing. In fact, I almost bought the Barnes and Noble Nook to read Cory’s book, but I’m convinced there’s a pricedrop coming given the Kindle’s recent price drop. Finally, I took at trip Let me just say that I recommend it to anyone who’s a fan of science fiction. I will now get into my thoughts about the book - there will be SPOILERS!
I read somewhere, maybe even Wikipedia, that the reason Bud dies so early in the The Diamond Age is that his character represents a stereotypical cyber-punk character and Stephenson is signaling that cyber-punk is over - this work of fiction is going beyond that. Stephenson then does a 90 degree turn genre-wise and does a historical fiction with Cryptonomicon. And he deepens that with The Baroque Cycle. Recently I read Anathem, a more typical science fiction novel in that it ostensibly involves aliens instead of a future Earth. Yet the steady stream that unites all of these books as Stephenson titles is the constant exploration of technology and its effects on society. It doesn’t matter whether that takes place in the future, during World War 2, or on another planet.
Last week I finished the Discworld Series. I started with a few books early in 2008. From the first book, The Color of Magic, I fell in love with the series. Although I have found British television and movies to be hit or miss, I have loved all of the geek genre British books. So I read the first four or five books here and there. Then in November Borders had a “buy two get the third one free” and my wife bought me the remaining 20-something books for my birthday and Christmas. She also let me start reading in November. I started reading them during my lunch breaks at work, on business trips and - when things were getting really interesting - at home.
I am now done with the entire story of the hobbits. Overall, I have enjoyed the books more than the movie. Here’s what I have to say about The Return of the King:
I found the characters in the book seem a lot more hopeless than in the movie. I mean, the movie does a good job of showing the despair of the city Minis Tirith, but the book really shows it much better. I found myself at times forgetting that I already knew the ending and that most of the characters would be fine. Speaking of already knowing the story, I kept waiting for the part where Gollum tricks Frodo into thinking that The Fat Hobbit has eaten the bread. It’s not in the books - they added that for the movie.
I finished up The Two Towers a week or so ago and I have to say that “Trudging” no longer describes my experience (for the most part). While I preferred the first movie to the first book, I mostly feel exactly the opposite about the second book/movie. The only annoying thing was that we didn’t get to Frodo and Samwise until page 208 of a 352 page book. I can’t remember exactly, but I think the movie goes back and forth a lot more instead of doing like the book and telling each person’s day and then backing up to tell the next person’s day (if the party has been separated).
A few days ago I finished The Fellowship of the Rings. Things picked up in the second half of the book and they accelerated in the last quarter. I’m enjoying The Lord of the Rings a lot more now that Tolkien has gotten Tom Bombadil out of his system. In the Wikipedia article, even Tolkien seems to understand how much Tom annoys the crap out of people.
“Tom Bombadil is not an important person — to the narrative. I suppose he has some importance as a ‘comment.’ I mean, I do not really write like that: he is just an invention (who first appeared in The Oxford Magazine about 1933), and he represents something that I feel important, though I would not be prepared to analyse the feeling precisely. I would not, however, have left him in, if he did not have some kind of function.”
I’ve read time and again that the Lord of the Rings Trilogy (which is actually not a trilogy, but one massive book published in 3 parts) has all kinds of allegorical content and contains a lot of stuff Peter Jackson had to leave out of the movies. Well, they’re certainly right about Mr Jackson leaving material out of the movie. I’m on page 160 (reading during my lunch breaks) and I’d have to say that roughly 90% of what I’ve read does not appear in any form in the movie. I’m about a little less than halfway through the first book (in the size they’ve printed) and the main characters JUST got to The Prancing Pony. I think this happens in the first 10 or so minutes in the movie. And what a great idea to cut all that chaff was!
First off, the production values on the audiobook are great! The main narrator does the many voices very well, especially Mickey7 and Marshall. The female narrator mostly narrates for a computer system. Chats have radio static behind them so that you know they are chats and not the narrator speaking to someone in person.
By complete coincidence I ended up watching Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Friday (each for the first time) back to back this week. I watched Fast Times because it was being covered by Paul Scheer and Amy Nicholson were covering it on Unspooled, their film podcast. As for Friday, well, that’s a slightly more convoluted story. Five Iron Frenzy, one of my most consistently favorite bands, was doing a Kickstarter for their new album. As part of promotion for the campaign, Reese Roper appeared on Mike Herrera’s podcast, The Mike Herrera Podcast. Herrera is the lead singer and songwriter for MxPx, a band I’ve been listening to off-and-on since 1996ish. The Roper episode led me to lookup MxPx’s latest release, MxPx. There’s a song on there called Friday Tonight that had some lyrics that didn’t make sense to me:
I used to hate Hunger Games because I considered it to be yet another example of America getting credit, fame, etc from another culture’s work; Battle Royale in this case. Eventually, I got the Hunger Games Trilogy from a Humble Bundle and read it, realizing that while the plots were the same in the abstract (kids are sent to an Island to kill each other in a dystopian future) they were different in the messages they were communicating to two different cultures. In the case of Battle Royale it was a response to a growing distrust of the younger generation that led to a novel in which the youngsters are sent to compete both to sow seeds of mistrust, but also as a punishment. In Hunger Games it’s less about being able to mistrust your best friends and more about mistrusting people from other states (or districts in the parlance of the book). That youth are used is more a function of entertainment value (kids at or near their physical peak) and the first book is almost more of a satire of reality TV with a lot more of the typical YA dystopian tropes coming in the second and third entries in the series.
I was watching Gold Diggers of ‘49 the other day with my daughter as we made our way through old cartoon shorts. That’s how I grew up - on Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and the other WB shorts along with the Disney shorts. Sometimes, late at night, they’d show the black and white cartoons like this one, but I mostly found the black and white cartoons boring. They came from a time when animation was very experimental and new so people were impressed that these drawings could move around. There often isn’t much in the way of plot and the jokes are usually broad gags carried over from vaudeville.
Everywhere on the net that I go where any discussion of media takes place, people get upset whenever someone takes a critical look at the roles the women play in any one piece of media. But Caroline Siede has the perfect explanation in her most recent AV Club article titled, If you like Return of the Jedi, but hate the Ewoks, you understand feminist criticism:
“ Return Of The Jedi is great, but the Ewoks are so annoying.” That’s a pretty common refrain from Star Wars fans. In fact there are whole fan edits dedicated to removing the little fuzzy bears from the film’s climax; I can only assume they’re made by the most hardcore of Star Wars lovers. The idea that a movie can be good despite its weaker elements is one of the most basic tenets of film criticism. Yet when it comes to dissecting films from a feminist viewpoint, we seem to have trouble keeping that in mind.
In some ways, this is so incredibly shortsighted. Here Sony is so committed to the idea that torrents can’t be shown to have any legal, non-infringing uses (even though there are plenty), that it won’t even allow its own staff to experiment with ways to use the new technology to their own advantage. But just the admission in the email alone shows that Sony’s top execs know damn well that there are legitimate, non-infringing, uses for BitTorrent, and they’re deliberately trying not to use them just to make BitTorrent look much worse than it is.
I haven’t seen Gone Girl, but my wife condensed the 2 hour movie into a 30 minute play-by-play summary. There are three things I don’t like about the plot. (In case it’s not obvious….spoilers ahoy)
In a world in which women already have a hard time getting their rape allegations believed, the plot point in which she fakes a rape to ruin her ex is quite damaging. Not quite Rolling Stone “we made up a story because it was too perfect to fact-check” sort of damaging, but still provides a frame of reference for everyone who doesn’t want to believe a rape victim.
It remains to be seen how well this works for anyone in practice, but I can imagine defense attorneys mounting the “my wife is Gone Girling me” defense in mariticide. At the very least, it may be just enough to create a shadow of a doubt in juries given how popular this movie is and how much it’s penetrated the popular culture.
This is the least offensive point as it can be used against anything: movies, video games, books, etc : It’s probably given some of those less balanced members of society ideas they may not have had. Just as playing Team Fortress 2 or any other shooter hasn’t made me shoot up the world, most normal people wouldn’t act on this movie (starting with the fact that things need to go perfectly correct for this to play out well in real life), some people out there might now be planning some interesting scenarios.
This isn’t the first time I mention this song on here. But I’ve been thinking about the lyrics a lot recently as it continues to play on the radio at the gym. A conversation on twitter yesterday with @AprilTara spurred me to put my thoughts on the blog. At first blush, the lyrics seem to be a positive antidote to the rampant Photoshopping and fat-shaming we’ve been railing about in vain for at least two decades:
Yesterday I saw the new Star Wars trailer. I told my wife I was disappointed that if they were going to have a black Storm Trooper, they didn’t pick Donald Faison. His Storm Trooper on the Robot Chicken Star Wars specials is my favorite part of the specials. Apparently I wasn’t the only one to have this sentiment.
Other thoughts:
I’ve seen images from the trailer along with the quote from Spaceballs (which did have black storm troopers) “We ain’t found shit”
So are Storm Troopers no longer Fett clones? Or is he just dressed as a trooper like Han and Luke did in Ep 4?
As I read with my daughter I realize I had forgotten a large part of The Car in the Hat. Also watching the old Disney shorts with my daughter. Both Mickey Mouse and the Cat in the Hat were often jerks before they became mascots for their companies. Now they are goodie two shoes.
I’d love to see either (or both?) Quentin Tarantino or Kevin Smith take on an updated film adaptation of Catch-22. The dialog is so important in the book and those guys are masters of dialog.
String: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/38.0.2114.2 Safari/537.36
Group: (is filled in automatically)
Append?: Select ‘Replace’
Flag: IE
Click on Permanent Spoof list and put netflix.com in the domain (and select the rule you just made from the drop-box). Then click the add button.
Go to Netflix and watch instant videos.
And it works! So linux is perfectly capable, but apparently it’s not supported. I guess I can understand not wanting to support the infinite versions of Linux, but why not Ubuntu or Fedora? Maybe it’s coming? That’d be great.
I’ll later check if if it works on Ubuntu, too, with with this method.
[caption id=“attachment_6143” align=“aligncenter” width=“449”] lil kids - CC licensed by jepoycamboy[/caption]
I titled this Part 1 because I am sure I’ll have to revisit this topic in the future. Scarlett is only 1 and she barely cares for television, much less Disney animated films. However, if you don’t think about the future, it has a way of surprising you and finding you unprepared. Of course, as a kid, I loved the Disney cartoons. It was only in the last ten years or so that I came across any articles critical of Disney and how it might be corrupting our daughters. There’s always going to be some degree of hate towards the creators of mass media because we are powerless against them. They’re able to use emotions and psychology to affect us (or those around us) and bypass our rational thinking. Try telling some kid back in the late 90s he can’t have a Power Rangers toy because it promotes violence. He doesn’t know or care about that. He just wants to have one of the rainbow of action figures to play with his friends. Mass media is everywhere and the only way to keep it from affecting your kids is to lock them in the basement - they’ll see it on TV, movies, radio or from friends, teachers, and family members. And Hinds over at The Atlantic recounts how he was unable to keep his daughters from learning about the princesses, despite his best efforts. Interestingly enough, Hinds doesn’t really dwell much on why he’d want to do this to his daughters - it’s considered to be assumed knowledge - of COURSE people want to keep their kids away from Disney Princess Culture. But why?
I recently saw Terry Gilliam’s Brazil after hearing discussion of the main character being a hacker as part of a recurring segment on The Command Line where the podcaster compares characters from literature and movies to hackers (in the original sense of the word). Watching this 1985 movie in 2011 was a very interesting experience.
***WARNING: there may be spoilers ahead***
Just to get this out of the way: Brazil does not take place in Brazil. It takes place in some unnamed country full of British speaking people and a couple of people with American accents. The title of the movie comes from a famous song (in our world as well as the world of the movie) that often has its title shortened to Brazil. Temporally, the movie takes place “in the future”. The country depicted in this future is very similar to George Orwell’s 1984, complete with Ministry of Truth-like propaganda posters up all over the place.
After this blog post it shouldn’t be a surprise that I was quite annoyed at the United Artists AFI edition of the movie, “ Fiddler on the Roof”. I was watching it for the third time a couple weeks ago and, as is our habit, I turned on subtitles. Neither Danielle and I are deaf, but we often turn on subtitles to make sure we can understand everyone in the movie. Sometimes they have accents that are hard to decipher and sometimes they’re blocked out by ambient noise in the movie or in the real world.
As I mentioned yesterday, all went to see Toy Story 3 (in 2D) at a 2230 showing. We mostly had the theatre to ourselves – it was somewhere between one quarter and one half full – great for a movie that hadn’t been out very long. But, we are odd ducks in our hatred of 3D. I thought the movie was the perfect ending to the trilogy. You never know when the entertainment industry is involved and there’s money to be made, but I’m pretty sure I’ve read that the Toy Story franchise is done as far as feature-length movies go. Given the nice, neat close this movie gave to the characters, it’s probably best that way. I’d like to get into some potential spoiler material to explain why I enjoyed the movie so much. I’ll probably go in order along with the movie so you can decide when to jump off if you think it’s too much information.
It’s been 65 years since World War II ended. We seem to be more obsessed with it than ever. There are two big reasons for this. First, WWII is the last war we unequivocally won and which had a clear, morally reprehensible enemy. Korea was a tie, Vietnam was a loss, and our only other official war (not currently being fought) — Gulf War I didn’t get rid of the tyrant. It was the last war (not currently being fought) that wasn’t a war of choice. Korea and Vietnam didn’t attack us; we just had to protect the world from communism. Gulf War I was about protecting our allies and sources of oil, no one attacked us. Second, *because* it’s been 65 years, most of the veterans are in their 80s and 90s.
I’m a big Tim Burton fan and I also tend to like his casting of Johnny Depp. But I’m no fanboy: I found Tim Burton’s take on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to be worse than the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The first thing I have to get off my chest and the thought that was pervasive in my mind nearly to the point of preventing my enjoyment of the movie is that this movie should really have been titled Return to Wonderland. If you’re into movies, you probably already knew this, and so did I. But I can imagine lots of people who just see a commercial or see the name and think it’ll be a live action version of the old Disney movie. (It doesn’t help that Disney is behind this version as well) So, in this version, we have an adult Alice about who runs away from her marriage proposal and into the rabbit hole.
I don’t recall if I’ve ever mentioned it on this blog, but I hate going to the movies. I’ve nearly given it up. The only exceptions are Pixar movies and the very few movies that I can’t wait until they come out on DVD to watch. So today I went to see WALL*E with my wife and slightly younger brother. It is, literally, the BEST Pixar movie ever created. The only reason I’m okay with the fact that they waited this long to come out with the movie is because it allowed them to get so awesome at creating movies that it looks beautiful!!!
I am not an unreasonable man and I full understand your need to focus on making your “watch now” feature debut available exclusively to Windows users. After all, they do make up about 90% of computer users. However, I do have some problems with this as a long time plan.
First of all, it does require me to use Internet Explorer. This is extremely shortsighted. What about those of us who use Firefox? My wife was excited about “watch now” until she found out that IE was required and said, “f&ck that!” So you should open up this service to other browsers.
Looks like, mentioned a couple of times in this post that there will be a Dilbert movie. This one seems to hint that it will be a live movie rather than a cartoon. I think that would be a horrible idea. Cartoon/newspaper comics make lousy movies - see The Flintstones movies and The Dennis the Menace movie. I was excited with the first and disappointed with the second one. However, he seems to mention in the first one that he doesn’t think it’s actually going to get made. (That, IMHO, would be a good idea)
A group has redone the entire Star Wars Episode 4 in ascii art. You can see the javascript version of Star Wars Ascii Art here. Or, if you don’t have javascript, just telnet to towel.blinkenlights.nl.
The website is a better experience because it comes in a little faster and you can fast forward and skip around. These are some ridiculously talented guys.
Want to crack up? Want to see the movie sure to be so cheesy it MUST be watched, then check out Fight Club: Members Only. A Bollywood remake of the Ed Norton and Brad Pitt movie.
As you doubtless know, the Superman franchise is coming back. After a false start in the 90s where Superman was going to go crazy (inspiring the song Kryptonite by 3 Doors Down), they are actually working on this one. It’s supposed to fit in the timeline after Superman II with Christopher Reeves and is titled Superman Returns. While reading an article about the upcoming movie in the June 2006 issue of Wired Magazine, a side panel titled “The Myth of Superman”, reminded me of one of my favorite monologues in Kill Bill Vol. 2. First what Niel Gaiman and Adam Rogers say in their article:
On the face of things, Theora seems to be a better codec simply based upon the fact that the OGG file is 50 MB compared to the 185 MB MPEG file. I still have to do some tests to see if this comes at the cost of worse quality in the picture or sound, but if it’s equivalent, then OGG is clearly the best format for storing DVDs. Not only is it free (and allegedly taggable via metadata), but it’s also smaller in file size.
To encode your video in a free codec (ie not proprietary), use Theora from Xiph.org. This codec is still in ALPHA stage (as in, not even beta!) so don’t use it for mission critical stuff just yet. However, xine and mplayer already play the codec. If you try to convert an avi to theora (using ffmpeg2theora) the audio will be out of sync with the video. So either encode the original video as an mpeg or type in the following:
The movie was great and a faithful adaptation of the play. There were only a few differences I didn’t like as much.
--------------- Warning: Spoiler ———————
A lot of the smaller singing parts were converted into speaking parts and that kinda ruined some parts for me. For example, when Angel saves Tom Collins and they sing, it’s a little more evident that they like each other. This isn’t really revealed until later. Also, some of the dialogue isn’t as effective when spoken when compared to singing.
Rent comes out tomorrow! Ever since I saw the play in NYC I thought about what it would be like as a movie. Tomorrow I’ll get to find out and I’ll let you all know what I thought.
Friday I went to go see Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, as you may recall. I was quite excited about seeing it as I had read one of the five books and watched the old BBC adaptation. The movie certainly started off very well with an entertaining opening sequence, but I was left quite dissapointed. Why? At first I couldn’t really articulate what it was about the movie that was lacking. There wasn’t anything specifically wrong with it, but then more and more things came to mind and I realized why I didn’t like it.
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy comes out and Daniel’s girlfriend comes up to Ithaca.
I’m really excited about the movie because it’s been getting some awesome reviews and I think that it is a wonderful and smartly funny story. Douglas Adams is awesome.
I’m happy that Ash is coming up because that makes my brother so happy. Anything that makes my family happy is awesome. I know he misses her a lot so I hope she arrives on time and they have have a good week together.
About four and a half years ago I posted about the stickers on my laptops. I noted that I first started doing this after attending DefCon. Since then I got a new laptop and so here is what that laptop lid looks like:
I want to share this out to the world because it really helped me. When I would connect my Garmin Forerunner 945 to my phone, the sync status kept saying an update was being sent to it, but it would never actually finish the update. It was frustrating the heck out of me. After doing a bit of searching, I found a suggestion to use Garmin Express to update it because it might need to update its maps and that can’t be done over Bluetooth. I connected it today and it’s now updating TopoActive North America (which is scheduled to take an hour to do). I’m hoping after this update it will no longer pretend to get an update that never truly updates.
Last weekend I started seeing a lot of people I follow either posting or boosting posts about Bitwarden no longer being open source. I did a bit of Googling and, at the time, the only news story I could find was this story from Phoronix about Bitwarden. It wasn’t quite clear exactly what was going on. I waited all week for Ars Technica to cover the issue, but unless I missed it, they never covered it. So I was confused - was this a real issue or people panicking on social media? Then I saw this video by Brodie Robertson:
I can’t find the exact blog post, but some time in the last few months I had a throwaway line about how I was a little frustrated in how D&D’s digital assets were handled, particularly the fact that they are tied to platforms. That is to say, if I bought the 2024 Player’s Handbook on Roll20, I wouldn’t also have access to it on DnDBeyond. I think there are really 2 reasons this hasn’t blown up more: 1) many of the platforms only require the DM to purchase content (if it was required of all the players, I think there’d be a revolt) 2) D&D is still primarily an analog, pencil and paper game. That said, this issue has started to become a bit more relevant to me, so I wanted to get some ideas out there (and maybe vent a little).
Woke up this morning to many news stories that the Raspberry Pi 5 was announced (after the head of Raspberry Pi had said there wouldn’t be a Pi 5 in 2023). Interestingly, if you subscribe to the Raspberry Pi magazine, you’ll be first in line for pre-orders. After having read 5 articles summarizing all the new features ( ars technica article, very detailed hackaday article), here are my thoughts as bullet points:
It’s awesome that you get about twice the processor speed for only $5 more than what the Raspberry Pi 4 is now selling for.
However, at $80 for the board (with the need to buy power, case, cooling, etc) the Raspberry Pi is moving out of the realm of an impulse buy item. And, for non-tinkerers, why not buy a Chromebook?
Somehow it has taken 11 years, but we finally have a power button built into the Raspberry Pi 5. Hurray! Supposedly, pushing it will trigger a controlled shutdown.
Unfortunately, there is no longer an no audio out jack. I use one of my Raspberry Pis as an MPD daemon device to play music for the kids at night. In the future I would either need to get an audio hat or a set of USB speakers.
If you prefer watching a video about the new features instead of reading one of the articles above, you can watch Jeff Geerling’s video about the Raspberry Pi 5:
As you know, I’ve been using Vivaldi as my default browser for a while now. I like how they continue to innovate in the browser space while Firefox and Chrome as just standing still. (Which, to be fair to the other two, makes sense given their general purpose audiences) The latest Vivaldi update has some nice theme updates for folks that like to customize their browsers, but what I really like is their addition of Workspaces. Similar to the way that many of us use Virtual Desktops (or the Windows and Mac equivalents) to organize our open windows, Workspaces allow for organizing your tabs. Combine that with tab groups and you get the kind of 2-dimensional organization that I like with KDE Plasma and their use of both Activities and Virtual Desktops.
There’s apparently a bit of a software fail for the LEGO company. When you launch the LEGO Boost app, it won’t continue until you’ve updated the firmware. It asks you to connect so it can update it, but it never actually updates. As I learned in this reddit thread, you actually need to get a different app and use that to update the firmware. Having to use a different bit of software while making you think the software you expect to use can handle the firmware upgrade is a HUGE fail in my book. Hopefully they fix this soon, but if they don’t -at least this resource can be here for anyone searching Google for the answer.
Quite a bit has changed since I first started this series about 18 months ago. Back then I was sure I would only be trying Microsoft Edge on Windows and that I would be sticking with Firefox on Linux. Yet Microsoft Edge is now available for Linux, Mac, and Android. On my laptops I continue to prefer non-Firefox browsers. Things continue to be interesting in this realm.
One of the categories of software people often go to /r/selfhosted to ask about, is for software to host music. This has become even more important with the dissolution of Google Music and Amazon and others removing the ability to upload your own music to listen to. I’ve got some experience with both FunkWhale and Ampache, so I decided to create a video to compare and contrast the two.
As I mentioned before, I got a Raspberry Pi Zero W to replace my Arduino MKR WIFI 1010 and ENV board in the bathroom. My Pimoroni Enviro Mini pHAT (or bonnet, as Adafruit calls them) finally arrived a few days ago, so I setup a git repository for my code. The Pimoroni git Enviro+/Enviro Mini repository has a one-line configuration, but I’d rather do things manually so I know what I’m doing and also so I can set up a proper requirements.txt in my Python venv.
As things continue to happen in the commercial IoT space like Wink switching to requiring subscription fees, I continue to feel happy that I’m creating my own Internet of Things solutions rather than relying on commercial vendors who can decide to disappear or suddenly start charging fees. The cost for me is that things go at a slower pace and, obviously, don’t have sleek packaging. I think I can live with that.
Recently I got a bunch of manga through a Humble Bundle sale. Having read “authentic” style manga before, the Kobo Clara HD seemed to be about the right size to read manga without having to do any zooming. So, naturally I uploaded the .epub for the Kobo. It was HORRIBLE. It cut off part of the image and made it impossible to read. After a bit of Googling around, I found the suggestion to use the .CBZ file, as the Kobo was capable of reading it. That worked very well. The only real bummer is that it has a margin around the page that makes it just SLIGHTLY reduced in size. It’s not a problem for the text, but some of the fine details can be a little hard to make out. Overall, it worked VERY well and I recommend it as a way to read manga in ebook form (allowing you to carry all of a modest run on your device). (But might not fit all of, say, One Piece or Dragon Ball.)
BBQ Thermostat: Arduino MKR 1010 and Therm Shield measuring temperature during a smoke
Today I was smoking a turkey so I figured it was a good time to do a live test of my project. There was good news and bad news. I think it’s illustrated quite well by the following graph:
Grafana graph of my BBQ Thermostat while measuring the smoker temp
Three years ago I wrote a post (along with a Youtube video) about how to set up a KVM VM with Dual Monitors (or even triple monitors). Since then there’s been a bit of a change. I loaded up remote viewer and, for some reason, I couldn’t add more monitors to my Linux KVM VM. Turns out what you have to do is look at the Video (QXL) section in virt-manager. Look at how many “heads” it has listed. For example:
I’ve been hearing about Podman for a while now - at Red Hat Summit and at various local Red Hat presentations. I’ve seen the slides where the RHEL presenter (it’s always the same guy, but I’m terrible with names - after a bit of research, I think it’s Dan Walsh) asks you to pledge to call them container images, not Docker images, etc. But up until now, even though I’m a huge Red Hat fan, I’ve continued to use Docker as my container engine because I am just running a few containers for myself. I don’t even use a one-machine Docker Swarm. I use docker-compose. And that’s just not something that Podman is ever going to officially support. This makes sense because Red Hat is thinking enterprise. And in the enterprise there are two scenarios: 1) Orchestration - vanilla Kubernetes, OpenShift, etc - and 2) are devs running docker run (or podman run) to test the images before putting them into the orchestrator. I’m an anti-pattern, even if I’m not the only one doing things this way.
Just in time for Halloween I discovered the Dracula set of dark themes.They’ve got themes for nearly every code editor and shell/console program you can think of. Here’s Yakuake with the Dracula Konsole theme:
Yakuake with Dracula theme
And here’s Kate with the Dracula theme:
Kate with Dracula theme
I like the color scheme, but the font’s a bit small, so I might make a variant theme with a slightly larger font size.
Clarkesworld Magazine has wonderful metadata for their issues and anthologies that requires little work from me:
Tor books had an awesome DRM-free policy that I love and that allows me to go to the ebook vendor of my choice. And they give away a free book every month as long as you agree to get some marketing emails from them. But their metadata is not so great:
Come on, Tor! You publish Science Fiction! Let’s get some better metadata on those ebook files!
Yesterday I was at a conference dedicated to DevOps and so Red Hat and Google were there to talk about containers, especially Docker and Kubernetes. While summarizing it to some of my employees today, I was asked about what I see as the benefits of Docker containers relative to Virtual Machines. I mentioned that one of the great things is that Docker containers are immutable. All of your data’s actually written to a folder that’s essentially mounted in the container.
Stevens researchers discovered that the motions of your hands as you use PIN pads, which is continually and automatically recorded by your device, can be hacked in real time and used to guess your PIN with more than 90 percent accuracy within a few attempts.
The Stevens team outfitted 20 volunteers with an array of fitness wristbands and smart watches, then asked them to make some 5,000 sample PIN entries on keypads or laptop keyboards while “sniffing” the packets of Bluetooth low energy (BLE) data transmitted by sensors in those devices to paired smartphones.
There was a good chunk of time where I was converting all my Canon Raw files into DNG files on the thought that it would be better and make them more readable in the future. But with KDE able to read Canon files as well as the libRaw in Linux - it seemed a waste of time.
This article by a professional photographer gives another reason. Certain software may not be able to produce as good a result from DNG as when the files come unadulterated from the camera.
Thanks to mom, now I have 18 GB of triple RAM on Bowser. Incidentally, it’s the first time I’ve used the Task Manager in Window 10 and it’s really slick! I like it - it matches the look/feel/usability of the similar utilities in KDE’s Plasma 5.
I found one way around the situation involving a DNG going to RawTherapee and creating a JPEG image that’s missing the title and tags when read by Digikam’s Exiv2 library. It may not be perfect, or even the best way. But it’s one way around the issue that I was easily able to confirm with about 5 minutes of messing around today. First up you want to tell Digikam to make XMP files to go along with all files:
I still really love using Linux, but I don’t follow the Linux press like I used to. I’ve settled into a comfortable zone where I only follow Fedora and KDE news since that’s what I use. But I followed it very closely for nearly 10 years. Every year there’d be multiple articles asking whether this was the year of the Linux desktop, meaning people would finally see the Microsoft hegemony for what it was and throw off the shackles of proprietary software. It never came. Thanks to Ubuntu and Vista, we almost got there. Then there were the Netbooks, but the manufacturers chose horrible versions of Linux and underpowered machines and Microsoft came out with Windows 7 starter edition. And people went to Macs instead of Linux in the biggest tech comeback of … ever.
I started off the year with a Samsung Galaxy Victory. It is a decent and capable smart phone, but I like to use a lot of programs like Doggcatcher and SmartBooks and the phone was having issues working correctly when I had more than a few programs running. So I switched to a Nexus 5 and it’s working perfectly for me.
I heard today that AOL is getting rid of Moviefone. Makes sense, I haven’t used it to find movie times in at least a decade. Shoot, I rarely even go to the Moviefone website. I just use Google’s ability to show showtimes, go to the actual theater’s website, or Fandango. Lots of people remember Moviefone from the pretty funny Seinfeld episode in which Kramer answers the phone number (when the phone numbers get switched?). My favorite line: “Why don’t you just tell me the name of the movie you want to see?”
The account sign-up was painless and pretty quick. The part where it did a bunch of stuff to my phone took a couple cycles to take, but once that was through it worked perfectly sing. I decided not to do VOIP for calls at home as I thought I would. As I went through the instructions, it turned out to be too complex and unreliable. People complained that it turned off their alarms (which I use to wake up for work) and other strange nonsense. I decided not to stress it. I barely talk on my phone anyway - ever since my parents became business owners, it’s been a lot harder to get a hold of them. At the end of my fist month I only had used a little over half of the smallest chunk of voice minutes that Ting sells. I’ve decided that whenever Hangouts for Android gets feature parity with iOS and allows VOIP calls, I’ll investigate that. Strangely, the one time I tried to use Hangouts on a desktop to call, it didn’t work as a touchtone phone.
[caption id=“attachment_7470” align=“aligncenter” width=“449”] LG Chocolate Touch - the phone I will be talking about in this paragraph[/caption]
Around three or so years ago I was ready to get a new cell phone. My phone was no longer maintaining a charge and a new battery was more than the nearly free phone I could get by renewing my contract. Smart phones had been around for a few years, but I didn’t want a smart phone. I just wanted a phone with a decent camera. I absolutely love my dSLR; it helps me take the best photos I’m capable of taking. But I rarely have it with me unless I know I will be going somewhere I want to be able to take photos; I always have my cell phone. I spent an hour in the Verizon store finding just the right phone - it looked and behaved like a smart phone (for the most part) and it had a great camera compared to my dying phone. I got the phone and the agent told me I’d need to get a data plan. I informed him that I didn’t want one. He told me about all the functionality I’d be missing. I didn’t care. This phone did what I wanted - it made phone calls and it took nice photos for a point and shoot. OK, he did some wrangling on his computer and told me the data plan was removed. I fought with verizon every time a bill arrived because the system kept adding a data plan. Eventually, I was told I couldn’t have it without a data plan and so I got rid of the phone.
Especially because I would expect this to just be automated. Someone at Amazon decides to put jerky on sale, it should auto-generate the email title. It should NOT be written by a human that could end up with a weird typo like this!
[caption id=“attachment_6153” align=“aligncenter” width=“450”] Firefox (aka Red Panda) busy Not Spying on You[/caption]
A 1 May Ars article and 30 April Wired article mention that a UK company known as Gamma International is selling spyware that pretends to be Mozilla Firefox. Both articles mention that repressive governments have used it to spy on dissidents, but it’s unclear from the article whether the company purposely sells to evil governments or whether it sells this to anybody, including foreign governments. The Wired article mentions that Gamma markets it to governments in general and so, if pressed, would probably say that it’s not meant to be used by evil governments - just people like the FBI trying to catch criminals. Either way, Mozilla has sued for trademark infringement. I applaud them for doing so. Governments may have both legitimate and illegitimate reasons for spying on computer communications, but I don’t think they should be abusing the good will of other companies to do it. Imagine if Gamma was selling Ford cars that were bugged. No one would want to buy a Ford car for fear it might be a bugged version. Come on, guys! Figure out a solution that doesn’t screw over the folks at Mozilla.
[caption id=“attachment_5672” align=“aligncenter” width=“500”] xbmc - default skin as of 20121031[/caption]
I have linked it up with trakt.tv to track my tv and movie watching (just like music scrobbling with last.fm) Using it has allowed me to catch up on shows that I might not have otherwise had the time to watch. It was easy to start going through all the Buffy episodes while waiting to feed Scarlett at night since they were sitting on my computer and I didn’t have to go find the DVDs.
Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote about replacing my file and print server with a Pogoplug. Overall, it’s worked perfectly. I even made it my DNS server because the number of internet connected devices in my was growing so much and on some computers (like the laptop and netbook) I was constantly changing distros so DNS became preferable to maintaining a bunch of /etc/hosts files.
Everything was working just dandy until I wanted to install mysql to have all my xbmc installs reference one library. I wasn’t able to install it because the mirrors and package lists were out of date. Being unfamiliar with arch, I decided I needed to upgrade my system to get that ability. And, as part of the upgrade, yes, it did update the mirrors and package lists and I was able to install mysql. But it also did something that killed ssh. So I could no longer connect to my Pogoplug (babyluigi).
It’s my second time in Vegas and I definitely think that the best way to first experience Vegas is arriving at night, as I did this time. The city really looks wrong and ugly during the day. Like a bar where they need to keep the lights dim so you’re 100% sure what that person you’re flirting with looks like. Today I was up early (0700) to make it to the conference. Vegas is weird early. Most of the tourists are sleeping so they do all the maintenance work that you don’t see at night. It’s very weird as if all of Vegas is on some walk of shame after an all-night bender.
I write this to you because you are the largest and most powerful companies in your ecosystems. The digital world has become ridiculous and you need to be leaders in rectifying the situation. Let’s start with Amazon. The two biggest digital things you sell are books and music. Back in the analog world before commerce became a Wonderland distortion, if I bought a book or CD, any member in my household could access this item. It didn’t matter if I bought the book or my wife bought the book. We could both read it. The same went with a CD. Either of us could grab the CD off the shelf and put it into our portable CD player. But now go to the Kindle (or any other e-reader system) and Amazon CloudPlayer. Sure, either of us could pick up the e-reader to read a book. But what if we both want to read a different book at the same time. How can we access each other’s libraries? What about if we each want to listen to the same music library from Amazon CloudPlayer on our smart phones or other devices? For various reasons, like Amazon recommendations, it makes sense for us to have different accounts instead of a family account.
A little past the end of February I started having problems with my internet connected devices. In the basement we have a Roku box that the wife uses to watch Netflix. She reported that it was no longer connecting to Netflix. We’d had issues before with it needing to be re-registered with Netflix, but that did not seem to be the case. I’d click on the Netflix channel and it would say “retrieving movies” for a while and then pop back to the main menu. At first I thought something was wrong with the Roku box, so I tried the Amazon channel, but that worked and I was able to watch my content. I figured it’d resolve itself. So she just popped in the latest DVD from Netflix into our DVD player. Later that night she was in the bedroom and learned that our Samsung BluRay player was no longer connecting to Netflix. I thought that was weird, but figured maybe it was a Netflix problem. I checked on my computer and I couldn’t log into the Netflix site. Neither could Danielle on her computer. These were Linux boxes (Fedora and Ubuntu respectively) so I tried on my Windows computer. Strangely, that one could log in. That’s weird. I tried on both Firefox and Chrome with no difference. So then I tried the guest computer - that computer hadn’t been used since December and I knew it was working for Netflix back then. That would help me eliminate the possibility that I’d installed a distro update that had killed it for me. (I knew that didn’t totally make sense because of the BluRay Player and Roku) That one could reach it either. What was going on here? Was Netflix blocking Linux? Well, I figured it might go away so I waited until the next day.
I wrote this code a while back because a website that does the same thing seemed to miss my posts every other week. So I figured I’d write my own in python to do the same thing to me. Then I just put it into a cron job to automatically run it every Sunday. I’m going to be posting the code on my GPL code page. Here it is for you to see and for Google to index. Just fill in the appropriate variables with the secret keys you get from each site’s API.
After writing my Boxee review based on my experience over the weekend, I tried to use it again Tuesday and Wednesday. There two shows that I watch Tues-Friday: The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. I’m not sure what API or screen scraping Boxee uses for these sites, but it needs to be improved. When I went to look for Monday’s episode on Tuesday, it wasn’t there. And Colbert didn’t appear to have any shows since mid-November. That tipped me off to check their websites and see that they did, indeed, have new episodes. Very disappointing. I don’t want to pay $200 for a device that works worse than a web browser on the shows that are important to me.
So, a while back I caved and got an iPod shuffle. While it worked well at first, over the last year it has been a constant pain in my butt. All I want to do is use gPodder to get my podcasts and listen to them on the way to work and at the gym. I went with the iPod shuffle because it was sub $100 and I didn’t really need to spend the money for the screen in the Nano. Not having a screen meant just listening in order and having to check gtkPod to make sure I’d listened to all the podcasts before clearing the iPod. Let me get into my workflow and why the shuffle became a real pain.
I forgot what post online got me thinking about this stuff, but I really don’t customize my computers’ desktop environments much. Generally, I tend to change the background image and leave it at that. I took a look over my desktop image gallery here on the blog to confirm my suspicions.
Starting at the bottom with Windows, you can see that until 2009 I was just going with the default look. I tended not to add launchers to my panel because, with Windows XP, it ended up really limiting the space for listen the open programs. I also didn’t have too many launchers on the desktop. I tend to always have programs maximised if I’m in front of the computer, so the only programs shortcuts I’d leave on the desktop are programs I’d be likely to launch upon starting up the computer. In fact, whenever I pay attention, I tell the installer not to put icons on the desktop.
I never really knew much about how CPUs worked until I took a class in CPU design at Cornell. Until that point I never knew about registers and cache and pipelines. Ever since then I’ve been growing in my understanding of how the CPU works and how all the parts fit together. This culminated in me building five or six computers for myself and relatives. In that past few years, these computers have been dual or quad core computers. I’ve been using a dual core computer for my Linux computer for around a year now but I didn’t really think about it too much until this weekend. I was working on a new strip for my webcomic, " I’m Not Mad" (which I do with Nothing to the Table’s Daniel). A particular panel was taking forever to render, so I opened up the system monitor to take a look. The image was split into a bunch of squares and each square was given to a CPU core to work on. And, for basically the entire render time, both CPUs were maxed out as I expected. When it only had one square to do, one of the CPUs dropped to idle because there wasn’t anything for it to do. Nothing out of the ordinary there. But then I noticed this crazy pattern:
This year I attended my first HOPE conference. HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth) is a hacker conference organized by 2600 The Hacker Quarterly. After hearing about the talks they had at 2008’s HOPE (The Last HOPE) when I was listening to the 2600 podcast, I knew I had to attend this year. I was not disappointed.
HOPE, if this one is an indication of how they usually are, is like an East Coast version of Defcon. Really, the only difference is that the atmosphere of the talks is slightly different given the HOPE being located in NYC vs Defcon being located in Las Vegas. While the playful hacker spirit is present at both, there’s usually an extra bit of an anything goes feeling in Vegas. There were also a few talks that were presenting preliminary versions of the data they hoped to present at Blackhat/Defcon. It makes sense, since those are the more prestigious hacker cons.
[caption id=“attachment_2818” align=“aligncenter” width=“1036”] Apparently I mostly shoot wide[/caption]
Nearly 60% of my photos are in the wide to short telephoto range and nearly 40% is exclusively wide. Now, I do have SOME photos from others in my Lightroom catalog, but not enough to skew the results. I would say the reason for the huge concentration of photos in the 33-82mm range comes from the kit lens and its equivalent focal length USM version that I shoot a lot of photos with. The large concentration around the 308-330mm range comes from the 1.6x crop factor of my XT and XTi on the Tamron 55-200mm I use for wildlife photography.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Kinda like this. Only with wires and computers and, really, having nothing to do with clouds.”] [/caption]
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Thanks to podcasts, NPR maybe be obsolete”] [/caption]
I am a huge listener of public radio programming, but I no longer listen to my local NPR station. Most of the time I just listen to podcasts of the shows that would otherwise be broadcast on NPR. The basic force behind this is the same as the reason why I loved my MythTV when I had cable TV. I don’t want to have to do appointment radio listening any more than I want to do appointment television. In many cases this is because the shows I enjoy listening to come on the air while I’m at work, in the gym, or sleeping. The shows I listen to are produced by NPR, Public Radio International (PRI), and American Public Media (APM). That includes Fresh Air, Talk of the Nation, On the Media, Media Matters, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, Away with Words and On the Money with Christ Disimio. Together with other non-radio programs and some BBC programs, these provide for all of my radio-listening needs. This started out (and a big reason I got into podcasts a few years after most techies had) because, in Baltimore, the local NPR station at 88.1 is interrupted by XM (or Sirius) FM transmitters. So I got pissed that whenever I happened to be available when a show I liked was on, every time someone with satelite radio passed by I couldn’t listen to my program. This is why I donated to the Washington DC NPR station - that one isn’t subject to interference so I’d rather pay for a station I can hear.
One of the new features of Gnome 2.22 is the fact that Totem now has a plugin to access your MythTV programs. I installed the plugin and found myself wondering what to do next. I checked on Google for totem mythtv and didn’t find anything until today when Google finally got around to indexing a forum post about it on the Ubuntu Forums. I followed the directions about editing Gconf and had success!
Whenever you’re working with the file directory structure or with text in general, you can’t do any better than using the command line. For example, I was recently copying a bunch of files off of some old CDs because I was noticing that they were starting to develop bit-rot. (I couldn’t access all the files anymore) For reasons I don’t wish to get into right now, it’s easier to not have spaces in filenames in Linux. It’s not because Linux can’t handle spaces in filenames - it can. But if you’re a semi-hacker like me, spaces in filenames can wreak total havoc on your scripts. So I wanted to remove spaces off of around 200 or so files.
Long time readers will know how much I love building computers. And I have been given the chance to build another one! This time it’s for Danielle’s aunt who saw the one I built for my father-in-law. Her old computer is not fast enough for what she needs it to do so she asked me to design her a new one. I decided to go with a nice, sleak Shuttle case since they don’t have tons of room in NYC for the uber-towers I typically use for myself. Also, it’s pretty much 100% likely that she isn’t going to upgrade it - ever.
Time and again I’ve warned my readers of the perils of DRM. (Specifically here and here). That’s why I don’t buy music on iTunes and have given all of my digital music patronage to Amazon.com. Even my wife, who’s not as into FOSS and all that as I am, has become disgusted as she’s understood what DRM means for her - regular Jane Consumer.
I’m not the only one who’s made these claims. Yet others say, “you guys are just using that as an excuse to malign DRM. It’s necessary for protecting content from piracy and you just want to pirate stuff.” Oh yeah? Well, are you prepared to give up your rights to expect your paid content to work when you come back to it in the future?
For the last few years, the movie industry’s battles with Internet pirates offered an entertaining diversion during Oscar season. Their problem: they need to “leak” their films to Academy members for consideration, but don’t want those official leaks to fall into the hands of pirates. In 2003, the MPAA banned all screeners, causing a massive uproar from directors, actors, critics and indie studios. The plan was eventually scrapped in December 2003
So, readers may remember that when I upgraded to Fedora Core 6, I lost dual screen abilities. Well, after today’s update of the nVidia drivers from livna, it suddenly was working again (after I tried to set it up). But then compiz no longer wanted to work! That frustrated me as I wanted to have both the advantages of dual screen as well as the helpful and fun eye candy of compiz. Well, Yupman in Fedora’s freenode chat helped me through it and showed me how to change my xorg.conf to make it work.
I have finally uploaded my public encryption key to the main pgp server that is the default on KGPG, the encryption program I use on my Linux computer. I also set up my Thunderbird email program to digitially sign all of the messages I send with my public key so that anyone who gets an email from my Gmail account will now have the assurance that I sent them the email and not someone spoofing me. In fact, if they have the ability to check GPG keys on their computer, they will be able to check the key against the server and make sure that the email has not been changed since I wrote it.
I was trying to pay my Verizon Wireless bill a few weeks ago and it kept having problems. I checked the credit card number, the expiration date, and every other field, but it was still not working. Finally I got fed up enough to call tech support rather than risk being locked out or something. So I gave them a call and the lady says to me, “oh, you’re using Firefox aren’t you?”
“Yes I am” (because I don’t like viruses and other M$ exploits taking over my computer)
“Oh well, I’m sorry, but you can’t use that browser here to pay your bills.”
“What?”
“Oh, don’t worry, our engineers are working on it.”
Most days I only check Bluesky and Mastodon for a few minutes while I’m in between sets at the gym. When I happened to have loaded up Bluesky recently I saw a variant on those old email chains that seem to reappear on each new social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc). This one was asking people to post the first album they ever bought. Thinking back to my first ever CDs, I knew the first 3 or 4 were birthday gifts. Eventually I figured it was most likely Going Public by The Newsboys. When I had both a CD player and enough money to buy my own music I was basically only listening to oldies (thanks to my parents) or Contemporary Christian Music (thanks to my faith and the fact that it was the only rap or rock that my parents approved of). But then I thought a bit more and I realized I bought an album before that…only I bought it on cassette tape.
Overall, this year I listened to tons of Chillhop while at work. Since 99% of Chillhop doesn’t have lyrics, this would allow me to have some background music that wasn’t distracting. As each new Chillhop album was released for the current season, I would listen to it on loop for a while. I also made playlists of all the albums per season that I would listen to as well. Every once in a while I would listen to all my music on random (as I usually do), but this was a year in which I was more focused on listening to newly acquired albums when I wasn’t listening to Chillhop.
As I told someone the day after attending the concert, there’s a reason that humans eventually came upon the format for a church service that we currently have. There is something powerful about a room full of people all singing the same song, in one room, with one purpose. You can get a similar feeling at an arena (whether for sports or a concert), but there’s extra special connection when you’re shoulder to shoulder and jumping around together. (Not to mention the inherent trust in your fellow concert-goers when crowd surfing) This particular November has been a little hard for me. I can’t quite pinpoint the source of the general malaise, but I spent a good chunk of the month in a real funk. I was just starting to recover when I went to the concert and it just super-charged me. I think it really helps that ska, in general, is a positive force in the world. Many ska bands tend to support important causes, including participating in collaborative albums/concerts like Ska Against Racism. As I mentioned in my review of Kill Lincoln’s No Normal, the band grew on me and I enjoyed last year’s concert for their This is New Tone documentary so I definitely wanted to attend their release show.
This year I continued to get new ska music from Bad Time Records, including this album by Kill Lincoln whose frontman is the head of Bad Time Records. Modern ska has gone off in many directions. Some bands, like Calamatrix, have gone back to their reggae roots. Half Past Two, who has an album I’ll be writing about soon, has a third wave ska 1990s sound. Kill Lincoln is squarely in the ska-punk realm. It’s fast, it’s hard, and it’s loud. It took me a while to get into the sound, having discovered ska via the 1990s Christian ska bands The Orange County Supertones and Five Iron Frenzy and the secular band No Doubt. (Interestingly, FIF have gone the rock with horns route while No Doubt has gone a more reggae route)
I first heard MxPx 28 or 29 years ago. At the time my family was still a church-going family. This was my first experience with the idea of a youth group that played rock song versions of the praise music. So I was jazzed to go to church every Wednesday and Sunday. The middle school youth group also had a CD lending library. Thus was I introduced to DC Talk, Newsboys, Audio Adrenaline, and MxPx via their album Teenage Politics. At the time, although my household wasn’t one of those that was against dance, alcohol, or whatever books religious folks paniced about (since Harry Potter wasn’t out yet), we weren’t allowed to listen to current secular music because it was a bad influence. We mostly didn’t really know what we were missing. We didn’t have to listen to the religious station because, again, my parents weren’t fanatical about secularism, they just didn’t think rap and modern rock was something we should listen to. So we would listen to the oldies station. To this day, I know just about any pop song from the 50s or 60s. All this is to say that I had no reference point for punk rock. Compared to the other Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) artists out there, this was fast and hard and loud. I was fascinated. Also, unusually for CCM artists at the time, the music was more about being a teenager than it was about God. That’s not to say that God and religion aren’t mentioned on MxPx albums, but they weren’t the majority of what the songs were about.
Another year has ended and so it’s time to take a look at the music I listened to all year. First of all, it was yet another year in which I grew my personal music collection. I’ve seen more an more artists removed from places like Spotify, Apple Music, etc, so it’s still important to me to own my music.
New albums
C. Tangana - El Madrileno.
Chill Hop Music - Essentials Winter 2022(?), Essentials Spring 2023, Essentials Summer 2023, Essentials Fall 2023, Winter essentials 2023
The Midnight - Monsters
Anberlin - Convinced
MxPx - Southbound to San Antonio, Find a Way Home
Thundercat - It is What It Is
Seeming - The Birdwatcher’s Guide to Atrocity
Lzls - discography - mostly vaporwave covers of Final Fantasy music
The Pirates of Drinax (part of a humble bundle)
Rifti Beats - Chocobo and Chill
Smooth McGroove - New Super Mario Bros Overworld Theme
The One-Ups - Secrets of the Forest (Solid Gold version)
Less Than Jake/ Kill Lincoln - Wavebreaker 1
Haircuts for men - sampler
Girl Ultra - Adios
Una Noche Con Ruben Blades
Submotion Orchestra - Kites
Gifts
Orquesta Akokan - 16 Rayos (gifted)
Prince Welcome 2 America (gifted)
Herbie Hancock - 5 original albums (gifted)
Taylor Swift - Midnights (gifted)
Gorillaz - Cracker Island (gifted)
Lana Del Rey - Did you know there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd? (gifted)
A few other things happened in 2023 to affect the trends. Early in 2023 I asked Dan for suggestions for Spanish non-dance music and he gave me a couple suggestions. The one that I really liked a lot was C. Tangana and his album El Madrileno. It’s a great album and I listened to it a few times. Continuing with Spanish music, the Alt. Latino Podcast introduced me to the band called “Daniel, Me Estas Matando”. Their music reminds me a lot of the music the older generations used to listen to when I was a kid. Finally, Alt Latino also had an interview with Karol G and I listened to her on Spotify for a few days in a row.
I like listening to NPR’s It’s Been a Minute and today’s episode was a real doozy. Here’s the descriptive paragraph from the NPR page for the episode:
Every couple of weeks there’s a new story of a fan at a concert misbehaving. One fan threw ashes at Pink, another hit Drake with a cellphone, Miranda Lambert stopped her show when fans took selfies with flash photography. Extreme instances have landed performers in the hospital, but more often attendees have noticed the audience has gotten louder and more distracting than ever. Where is all of this coming from?
Noticed the Catbite sticker on the wall with the others
As I mentioned during my 2022 Music Wrap-Up, I got back into modern ska via Bad Time Records. So when Bad Time Records announced their Bad Time Records Tour 2023 featuring We Are the Union, Kill Lincoln, and Catbite - it was a no-brainer to buy the tickets. As a bonus, they’re also filming a concert film/documentary during the tour called This is New Tone. The show was at Union Stage in Washington, DC. It was my first timewer seeing any of these bands live, my first concert of 2023, and my first time at Union Stage.
Another year, another look at my music trends for the year. It was another year of music acquisition (supporting the artists, ftw! - I knew Spotify wasn’t paying artists well, but Corey Doctorow’s book, Chokepoint Capitalism really brought home how much they’re screwing over artists), although I think things may slow down in 2023. Here are the albums I purchased in 2023:
The Protomen - Presents: A Night of Queen
Encantó soundtrack
Moderator - The World Within
Kognitif - Soul Food
MxPx - Horns, Plans within Plans, Let’s Rock, Left Coast Punk EP, The Rennaisance EP
Packy Lundholm - Track Sabbath Vol 1
Lana Del Rey - Blue Banisters
Catbite - Nice One
Macroblank - entire discography - 14 albums
Vicente Garcia - Lomas de Cayenas
Girl Ultra - Nuevos Aires
The Shape of Ska Punk to Come
Me Like Bees - Songs from The Realm
Kill Lincoln - Can’t Complain
Jokabi - Chilltendo Deluxe
Turning Red Soundtrack
We Are the Union - Ordinary Life
Chillhop Music - Essentials Spring 2022, Essentials Summer 2022, Essentials Fall 2022
The last concert I attended was Jonathan Coulton with Paul and Storm back in June of 2021. At the time we thought perhaps we were out of the woods with COVID. Instead, variant after variant has COVID a never ending fact life. For a while I was thinking that perhaps we’d eventually vaccinate our way out of this situation, but the vaccines haven’t proven to quite work that way. So, after passing up on a bunch of concerts this year, I decided to go see I Fight Dragons with MC Lars and Schaffer the Dark Lord. I just decided to wear a mask to keep myself from getting sick (especially since I’ve still got a few races and meets left this year).
After spending the last year and change filling in the holes in the MxPx discography from when I last was an active fan with 2000’s The Ever Passing Moment, I have arrived at the final full album I was missing, Plans within Plans. I still have a couple EPs to buy, but this will probably be the last MxPx album review I write until they release their next album. As we went through the discography we saw the band evolve a bit and, either under label pressure or from wanting to explore musically, seem to veer into the territory of bands like My Chemical Romance and Panic! At the Disco. Plans Within Plans is MxPx finally coming full circle towards their original sound while also having evolved since their early albums. To me, this album sounds like MxPx just being MxPx, not sounding like any other band. They’ve learned and grown and both the music and lyrics reflect that, but they’ve come to appreciate who they really are as a band. This was one of those albums that took a few listens for me to truly appreciate. Onto the tracks.
Rap lyrics as a confession isn’t a new topic or question. I remember hearing about this a few years ago with someone who had rap lyrics on their Facebook page that was arguing it should be inadmissible in court. Just Googling “rap lyric confession” gave me these examples:
This year I was able to attend the Paul and Storm / JoCo concert that COVID stole from me last year. While there I bought the entire Paul and Storm discography, but I think because I listened to it so much on Spotify in the past, I didn’t listen to it as much as I thought I would.
This was not one of those years where I came out ahead by not paying for Spotify. I bought a lot of albums, including starting on my quest to get the entire MxPx back catalog from the time I stopped listening in high school until now. (This is reflected in this year’s numbers)
I continued to catch up with the MxPx back catalog and purchased both Panic and Secret Weapon. My initial feelings upon listening were that I liked a lot more songs on Secret Weapon. But maybe, as with Before Everything & After this would turn out to be just a first impression where when looking at each song one at time would leave me feeling differently.
Elisa is currently the “default” KDE music player, replacing Amarok. I am just taking a guess, but I think that Amarok just ended up with too large a codebase to be maintainable at a reasonable pace. I’ve been using Cantata, an mpd player for KDE that’s currently on maintenance mode. On the one hand, I know that for many folks last.fm scrobbling (logging the music you listen to) is something they left behind in the 2010s. On the other hand, I’m not the only person who has commented on the ticket to get the Elisa devs to add support for it. (And you know I love the stats for my end of year posts)
On 30 June 2021, I attended my first concert since COVID-19 started. I was masked since the Delta variant is a thing and singing indoors is definitely an activity that increases transmission. Despite that, it was awesome to get to do it again and there was a real sense of joy in the room from both the audience and the performers at once again being able to engage in the ancient human ritual of enjoying music as a crowd.
Last October I came back to MxPx, as I detailed in this post about how the lyrics for Friday Tonight led me to finally watch Friday. Over the past half year I would return to their self-titled album on Spotify. (I don’t subscribe to Spofity, but I do use the free tier to discover new artists) Eventually I decided to go ahead and buy the Deluxe version of the album directly from MxPx. It doesn’t appear they’re selling the CD anywhere else (at least it’s not on Amazon).
(the first 3 paragraphs are a slight modification of what I wrote for an Amazon review)
Album front cover
The headline kind of gives it away, but this album definitely sounds like a cross between early/late MxPx and Good Charlotte. You can see on Wikipedia and other places that this was part of a 3ish album trend where MxPx moved more towards the pop part of pop punk. Kind of interesting coming back to it now. I was listening to MxPx albums as they came out in the 90s, but fell off with The Ever Passing Moment. I even briefly joined the fan club and still have the shirt. Because of Reese’s interview on Mike Herrerra’s podcast, I recently started listenign to their self-titled album, which sounds like their early stuff except with lyrics that match grown men the grown men they now are vs kids they were when writing Teenage Politics.
Over its long tenure as a band, Five Iron Frenzy has had some really silly songs. Songs like “Arnold, Willis, and Mr. Drummond”, “Oh, Canada”, “Blue Comb ‘78”, “The Untimely Death of Brad”, “Where is Micah?”, and many others. But they’ve also always been a really political band. On their first album, Upbeats and Beatdowns, they had the song “Anthem” which spoke about politicians wrapping themselves in themes of nationalism. “Milestone” also dealt with racism and prejudice. “Beautiful America” tackled both politics and another constant theme across FIF’s albums - rampant capitalism. Over the rest of the discography there was:
Thanks to COVID I missed out on the concert where I was going to see Paul and Storm and Jonathan Coulton. Compared to last year, I also barely bought any music.
This year I switched from using Ampache to listen to my music at work, to using Funkwhale. The more responsive interface has led to me playing a lot more albums as well as doing “artist radio” mode which plays all of an artists’ songs at random. This may have concentrated the scrobbles rather than having them be as random as in the past. That said, I did make good use of Funkwhale’s “Less Listened” radio to keep things fresh. At home I’ve been using Cantata’s “similar artists” dynamic playlists a lot which may also have contributed to a concentration of artists this year.
One of the categories of software people often go to /r/selfhosted to ask about, is for software to host music. This has become even more important with the dissolution of Google Music and Amazon and others removing the ability to upload your own music to listen to. I’ve got some experience with both FunkWhale and Ampache, so I decided to create a video to compare and contrast the two.
Like, perhaps, many of my readers, I knew Jane Lui’s music mostly from her cover songs. But I really liked her voice and so I decided to back the Kickstarter for her new album, Surrija. By the time this review is published, I’ll have had the album for about 2 months. For this review I’ll first focus on my initial impressions and then my impressions after having listened for a while.
In 2019 I went to 5 concerts, starting with Neon Trees and Fitz & The Tantrums in May. Then I saw a bunch of my favorite smaller bands like The MiSbehavin’ Maidens, The Doubleclicks, Lionize, and The PDX Broadsides. Anberlin came out of retirement and so it was great to go see them in concert again for the first time in years.
I also got a LOT of albums in 2019. Some were Kickstarted and others were freely available. Others still were purchased for family members. Here is a mostly complete list of all the albums I added to my collection in 2019:
I would have backed The PDX Broadsides’ Kickstarter for Relatable Content no matter what because I loved Trust Issues and I enjoy nearly all of their older songs. But the thing that made me spread the word everyone and try to get more backers was that they had a goal to do an East Coast tour. When they came to the New Deal Cafe in Greenbelt, MD I was finally able to see them live for the first time. It was also my second time seeing The Misbehavin’ Maidens, who opened for The Doubleclicks earlier in the year.
Scarlett was watching Peg + Cat which has an episode called Mack the Fork. So she asked me if that was a song and I told her that Mack the Knife was a song and she asked me to play it. Then the following exchange with my 3.5 year old happened:
I have been following I Fight Dragons for almost a decade now, including their journey from self-produced to being a label band and rejecting that to going back to being self-produced. I was a backer on their last album, the ambitious concept record The Near Future. That was a seemingly long five years ago. I’ve said before that I ended up enjoying the B-side of the record a lot more, and I think that’s because the lyrics resonated a bit more with me. But for a while I thought maybe the stress of the Kickstarter (in which they ended up ditching an almost completed version of the album and starting over) had split the band.
When I backed The PDX Broadsides’ Kickstarter, they pointed out their friends, The Misbehavin’ Maidens, also had a Kickstarter campaign going on. As I mentioned in the review forRelatable Content, The PDX Broadsides started off as a pirate shanty band. The Misbehavin’ Maidens still are a pirate shanty band, or at least a few of their songs on Swearing is Caring follow sea shanty song structures and melodies. And, other than tamborines and drums, they’re an acapella band.
This year I have sponsored a lot of Kickstarter creative work, including lots of music. One that I was very excited to support was The PDX Broadsides’ latest album, Relatable Content. They started off as a pirate shanty band and have evolved into a nerd filk band whose songs range from silly to profound. I really enjoyed their last album, Trust Issues, which had some pretty timely songs like Noncompliant (superficially about the Bitch Planet comic, but actually about the Me Too era) and We Want Rey (about representation in nerd toydom). It also had some fun songs (both feature Christian as the lead) like Tiny Little Octopus and Robot vs Boy (which I want to see made into a mini-musical). Their last Kickstarter also had a dirty album called Lust Issues that continued their trend of Shakespeare music with the great Dirtbag Romeo and their dirtier songs from their pirate shanty days with It’s Just Sex.
My fourth concert of 2019 was also the first one in which I had someone else go with me as Danielle went to her first concert of 2019. It was fun to have someone to share the experience with, especially her. Anberlin was the first band I introduced her to that she also came to like. Many of their albums were bonding moments for us from dating through our married life.
This concert was at a venue that was new to me, the Oliver Brewing Company. Lots of restaurants and places call themselves a brewing company, usually to signify that they will have some of their own beer on tap. But this was literally a factory floor that had been cleared to set up a stage. I could see all the empty, unlabeled aluminum cans that would eventually hold their different brews. Perhaps because it was a factory floor and not a club or concert hall, the acoustics were pretty amplified. The venue seemed to know it was an issue because they were selling ear plugs for $1 each. (Probably from the stash they give to their factory workers during a regular day) At any rate, it was the first concert where I actually wore ear plugs because it was just too loud for me to enjoy; especially because my OSHA training kept reiterating that hearing loss is not recoverable. Surprisingly, it simply dampened the sound, but I was still able to hear the vocals everything. If anything suffered from the plugs it was a slight loss in the higher frequencies that I noticed during Lionize’s set. One other thing I noticed - of all the concerts I’ve gone to in the past few years, this is the first time I wasn’t one of the older audience members. There were a fair number of grey beards there to hear the different bands.
My second concert of 2019 was almost the exact opposite of the first one. The first one was a big outdoor concert venue (it was in Boston, but was configured like Pier VI in Baltimore) while this one was in the basement of a pizza place called Joe Squared. The first one featured pop artists that everyone has heard while this one featured niche bands that mostly nerds have heard. The first one featured full bands while the Misbehavin’ Maidens performed acapella and The Doubleclicks used an electric cello and other stringed instruments.
At the end of Red Hat Summit 2019 (post coming about that soon) there was a double-header concert with Neon Trees and Fitz & the Tantrums. Neon Trees started things off for the night. I didn’t look them up ahead of the concert, because Fitz was a huge band so I thought Neon Trees was just a local band opening for Fitz. Their section of the concert was a lot of fun even though I didn’t know any of the songs. The lead singer had lots of fun banter and seemed to really be enjoying himself.
Partway through the year Spotify broke at work and, shortly after, Youtube Music appeared along with (likely) rumors that Google Music will be nixed in favor of Youtube Music. So I finally followed through on the work necessary to get Ampache up and running. I also experimented with Funk Whale - an open source attempt to resurrect Groove Shark. Funk Whale had some issues with the version of Firefox we have at work, so I went all-in on Ampache. It’s been really awesome to have access to my entire music collection at work. Hearing my favorite music just gives me such a pick-me-up when the day is wearing at me. Also, it’s great not to have ads interrupting my music listening.
I hadn’t seen I Fight Dragons on tour since Warped Tour three or four years ago (I missed an opportunity to see them at MagFest a couple years ago), but I really enjoyed that set and I’ve been enjoying their work on their new album. They’ve been sharing the progress of songs from acoustic roughs to rhythm roughs, and so on. It’s been a lot of fun to see how the songs evolve. Tickets were only $15 and it was at the Metro Gallery in Baltimore, so I figured I’d go check it out.
This year my music listening is under-counted because of a few factors. 1) Spotify scrobbling stopped working at work, 2) I listened to a lot of bandcamp at work (not scrobbled), and 3) for K-Pop I mostly just watch it on Youtube (not scrobbled). That said, I have been listening to music slightly more often. I’ve spent the last couple months listening to music that I’ve never listened to on my computer (as far as Amarok knows), so while that’s contributed to scrobbles, it’s going to mean that the scrobbles are going to be long-tail, ie they won’t make dents in the counts of top artists, songs, etc.
At the time that I’m writing this, I’ve had Trust Issues for a few days. I signed up for the Kickstarter campaign after The Doubleclicks mentioned them. I then went to the PDX Broadsides’ bandcamp page and ended up buying the entire back catalog.
After having heard the album a few times, here are my first impressions:
Favorite Song: Robot vs Boy - although it seems like it should be the first track to a concept album and leaves me wanting to know more about the story
Most beautiful song: Dolores - about HBO’s Westworld
For now, my music listening continues to be in decline relative to earlier in my life. Because the babies are often napping, I don’t have music playing throughout the day. And if I’m playing video games I’m usually not listening to music so I can stream. That said, when I do listen to Spotify at work, it usually Scrobbles and that has increased the number a bit higher than it would have otherwise been.
It’s been a long time since I last took a look at an innovative music player. Back in 2006 I explored Songbird and in 2008 I looked at some of the unique features over two posts: Taking Another Look at Songbird and Play the Web. The ability to grab MP3s off of sites, in particular seemed to be a great way to take advantage of the music blogs as a way to discover new music. Some of this has been superseded by certain browser plugins that can grab all files off a webpage based on regular expressions. In the last decade, there has been a big change in the way most people experience digital music. Most people have stopped buying music in favor of either using Youtube or a subscription service like Spotify, Rdio, Amazon Prime Music, or Google Music.
Lots of artists made their spot because I attended a concert or discovered them this year and got very enthusiastic about listening to this new artist. There are also lots of Spotify scrobbles, but not as many as there would be if work’s firewall didn’t keep scrobbles from being counted.
Artists
Anberlin (427 listens)
Fall Out boy (239 listens)
Jim Guthrie (221 listens)
I Fight Dragons (214 listens)
Paul and Storm (190 listens) - A nerdy folksy group that I really like. Their irreverence is my kind of fun.
The Beatles (136 listens)
Anamanaguchi (130 listens)
Lionize (130 listens)
Five Iron Frenzy (128 listens)
Louis Jordan (113 listens)
The Protomen (104 listens)
Beebs and Her Money Makers (104 listens)
Willy Chirino (93 listens)
Katy Perry (93 listens)
Ignacio Cervantes (92 listens)
Songs
Interestingly, only two new songs made the list this year - Talking Body and Know Yourself. Because I don’t listen to the radio, I discovered these via Spotify. The rest are all older songs that I happened to listen to a lot. And Chandelier came from Danielle getting the album and asking me to play it in the car.
This was not a big quarter for listening to music for me. That’s mostly because Sam and Stella were born and so I didn’t have much ability to listen to music as I needed to be able to hear if they were crying or if someone needed help with them. According to last.fm I went from 1,104 scrobbles in Oct to 288 in November.
Beebs and Her Money Makers (94 listens) - one of the songs came up randomly in Amarok which led me to listen through the albums a few times.
The Beatles (55 listens)
Kenny Clarke (44 listens) - A Fresh Air review of a new collection got me interested in him so I added it to my Spotify tracks. Really fun music.
Anberlin (34 listens)
DJ Cutman (33 listens) - I don’t know why, but I ended up with a lot of DJ Cutman music on my new phone and since I don’t like to use bandwidth while I’m driving, I’ve listened to it a lot in the car.
Ignacio Cervantes (32 listens)
Fall Out Boy (29 listens)
Danny Elfman (28 listens)
Katy Perry (26 listens) - all from Scarlett requests
Relent K (25 listens)
Five Iron Frenzy (24 listens)
Jonathan Geer (19 listens)
Vampire Weekend (18 listens) - heard a song so I wanted to re-explore the band. Some of the songs still hit me hard and others have faded.
Sergei Prokofiev (17 listens)
Anamanaguchi 16 listens)
Stats:Total Songs (in my collection): 16985 (Up from 16088 ) – Mostly from buying CDs with 100 tracks of various classical artists.
After getting to MGMT alphabetically, I tired of going through the list alphabetically. While I have rediscovered some music, I wanted to go back to my auto-playlists which would give me my favorites. I could always get back to going through things alphabetically in the future. One way to accomplish what I wanted was to see which songs don’t have a score - another would be to create a low score playlist I could run every once in a while to see if anything that had scored lowly was now something I wanted to hear.
Concerts are certainly a funny bit of entertainment. When you go see a movie, you are going because you like the director or the actors or the idea sounded interesting. You see that movie and that’s the end of it. The same holds true for Broadway shows or Operas. But when you attended a concert, you have a few opening acts you probably don’t know. This is somewhat alleviated nowadays for the well prepared by a quick trip to Spotify or Youtube. After finally seeing The Protomen during last year’s Warped Tour, I was excited about seeing them in concert. My ticket informed me that I’d also be seeing Cowabunga Pizza Time and Lionize. Of course, the difference between concerts and other forms of entertainment is no accident. Opening bands are limpets on the bodies of larger acts, hoping to gain exposure to the fans of the main act. This works best when the organizer has paired up bands that work well together thematically. But, this is the obvious reason why you never know the time the main act is going on stage.
1. Anberlin (171) - Almost the same number of listens as my top artist last quarter (179 for I Fight Dragons). As usual, I continue to enjoy their music and have grown to appreciate some of the ones I didn’t like before. And some of the older stuff seems trite in comparison.
2. Jim Guthrie (168) - As I’ve mentioned before, his folk song compositions are mostly really enjoyable and I like his work on video games and soundtracks.
3. Paul & Storm (138) - I discovered these guys via John Scalzi. I was hesitant to back the Kickstarter for Ball Pit, but I’ve been enjoying the heck out of it on Spotify.
4. Fall Out Boy (101) - A lot of this is from a few recent road trips in which I didn’t want to use data and happened to have Fall Out Boy already on my phone. Doesn’t mean I don’t like the music.
5. Jonathan Coulton (61) - I’ve said so much about how much I enjoy this over the years. Recently Scarlett’s been asking me to play The Princess Who Saved Herself because I got her the book from Greg Pak’s kickstarter.
6. Louis Jorda n (58) - I like to kick it to Louis Jordan on the weekends when I want something classic.
7. Anamanaguchi (56) - Some of this was from the high of seeing them live. Some of it was just from really enjoying the music no matter what, especially Endless Fantasy.
8. Jack White (54) - Another artist I’ve been listening to a lot of because of Spotify. His album Lazaretto does not do well on 30 second preview on Amazon. But because of Spotify, I want to buy the album.
9. Kanye West (42) - Most of this came from listening to my music alphabetically.
10. Lostprophets (41) - I may hate what the singer was accused of doing, but these songs still mostly rock.
10. Lana Del Rey (41) - Something I can throw on that both my wife and I like
12. Willy Chirino (34) - Most of the listens came from a greatest hits album on Spotify.
13. Buddy Rich (33) - Another album I wasn’t sure I wanted until I listened to it on Spotify. It reminds me a lot of the music in Cowboy Bebop
13. Five Iron Frenzy (33) - Perennial Favorite
15. Thelonious Monk (31) - something else I like to throw on Sunday mornings.
I’ve been a fan of Weird Al for about 17 years. I used to have the Disney special Weird Al Going Home, but unfortunately, I lent it to someone and never got it back. Yet, in all the time, I’d never seen a Weird Al concert live. Finally, Weird Al came to Baltimore as part of his Mandatory Fun Tour and I was able to experience an Al Tour. It was a pretty neat experience. It’s only something like the fourth arena concert I’ve been to (even thought it wasn’t technically in an arena). The last arena concert I went to was Rihanna. Interestingly, Weird Al had WAY more costume changes than she did. He had just about one outfit per song with few exceptions. While he was changing, clips played from nearly every video Weird Al has ever been involved in.
This may not be your thing. I’m pretty sure my wife will hate it, but I think Pogo’s work is a perfect example of why culture needs to be free and with less onerous copyright rules. I’m pretty sure all of this is within fair use, but it would take a legal fight for him (or her) to win rather than just give up to Disney’s (and other studios) army of lawyers.
Originally my first concert of 2015 was going to be a little later in the year, but with Danielle away for the weekend, the email letting me know about a concert in just a few days seemed quite fortuitous. I’d had a couple chances to see Anamanaguchi in concert, but the timing was never right. This time it was perfect - weekend and wife out of town. So I decided to go.
1. I Fight Dragons (179 plays) - Over this quarter I have continued to really enjoy the B Side to The Near Future and listened to them a lot after work. Scarlett likes quite a few of those songs as well.
2. Anberlin (74 plays) - For the concert last year I put all their albums on my phone. So when I listen to my music already on the phone, Anberlin comes up a lot.
For (hopefully) obvious reasons, we didn’t listen to Prince when I was a kid. (Which was when almost all his albums came out). After hearing about him a few times on Giant Bomb and today’s AV Club article, I hit Spotify to see what the fuss is all about.
At the end of my interview about starting the Kickstarter project, Brian Mazzaferri of I Fight Dragons opened the door to speaking with him about the process when it was all done. It was, as is the case with many Kickstarter projects, very exhausting and we only recently had time to actually do the interview. In the interview I briefly mention the delays in the vinyl album. This actually a pretty big problem in the music industry at the moment. Demand for vinyl has increased to a point where the record pressing plants can’t keep up with demand, but not yet to the point where it makes sense to open a new factory (with all the upfront costs involved). Even The Protomen’s new album The Cover Up has had its vinyl release delayed due to production delays. Of course, the new old tech is cassette tapes, so perhaps vinyl demand will fall a little. Time will tell. Without further ado, the interview:
Once again Scarlett had a hand in determining the year’s winners. However, sometime around June she stopped requesting Disney music all the time, allowing others a chance at the spotlight. Still, while other artists were able to take the top artist spots, I didn’t listen to any one song often enough to undermine the Disney songs taking the top spots there.
Artists
1. Alan Menken (450 listens) - THE Disney songwriter
2. Mandy Moore (332 listens) - 100% all of these are from the Tangled soundtrack
2. Five Iron Frenzy (332 listens) - I just enjoyed the heck out of FIF music this year.
4. The Beatles (329 listens) - As usual, this is a mix of me picking something different when the family’s together and just enjoying listening to it myself.
5. Anberlin (247 listens) - I had Google Music load all the albums to my phone in preparation for the concert. This means when I listen to music in the car, Anberlin is very likely to come up.
6 .I Fight Dragons (207 listens) - As I mentioned in the Q4 post, most of this is due to the new album coming out this year.
7. Donna Murphy (139 listens) - A great performance on the Tangled soundtrack.
8. Chance the Rapper (116 listens) - Many of these are from early in the year. I still really enjoy Acid Rap, but am also ready for something new.
9. “Weird Al” Yankovic (115 listens) - A new album produced most of these scrobbles. It’d be slightly higher if the Android app didn’t have a problem with the quotation marks in the artist name.
10. Childish Gambino (113 listens) - I went through as part of listening to my music in alphabetical order. It reinforced that I probably am done with him for now. Lyrically my wife can’t stand it and I shouldn’t listen to it in front of the toddler.
11. Celia Cruz (100 listens) - The Queen of Salsa.
12. Brad Kane (97 listens) - From the Aladdin soundtrack.
13. The Beach Boys (96 listens) - I continue to love Pet Sounds.
14. Billie Holiday (93 listens) - She’s so great it’s too bad she isn’t really played on many radio stations anymore.
15. Jonathan Coulton (92 listens) - Wow, didn’t realize I listened to so much JoCo.
1. Five Iron Frenzy (147 listens) - Many of these came from me continuing to go through my collection in alphabetical order.
2. I Fight Dragons (102 listens) - IFD’s Kickstarter album finally came out. I really like it a lot. I’ve been listening to the B side more than the song cycle, but that’s mostly because those are more easily listened to here and there while the song cycle is best heard all at once.
3. Anberlin (98 listens) - Tried to listen to a bunch of Anberlin to get ready for their farewell concert.
4. Fantastic Plastic Machine (71 listens) - Also from the alphabetical listen.
5. Fall Out Boy (63 listens) - Partly from the alphabetical listen and partly from Scrobbles from Spotify of their new singles.
6. Final Fantasy (Soundtracks) (50 listens) - from the alphabetical listens.
7. Edith Piaf (44 listens) - from the alphabetical listens. I’d completely forgotten we had a bunch of her music. We used to listen to it more often.
7. Doctor Octoroc (44 listens) - from the alphabetical listens. I really don’t like the albums anymore.
9. Willy Chirino (43 listens) - Mostly from listening to his great Christmas album. The only Spanish-language Christmas album I have.
10. Relient K (41 listens) - I felt nostalgic for some Relient K. Still love the earlier stuff.
11. DC Talk (40 listens) - While I still like some of the songs, others have not aged well.
12. Dj CUTMAN (39 listens) - I just love these remixes.
13. Celia Cruz (38 listens) - Put on some Celia because Scarlett really likes to dance to salsa.
14. Elvis Presley (35 listens) - Going through my collection of #1s.
15. Taylor Swift (32 listens) - Danielle got the new album and, unsurprisingly for Ms Swift, it’s quite catchy.
Technology continues to complicate the media landscape. The other day I learned on the Fedora Planet how to send Pulse Audio over the net - allowing one computer to listen to music (or other audio) from another. But, in the context of music, who cares? I have all my music on Google Music. I can just plug my phone into the sound system and listen to music (or any other speakers). This also eliminates my need to use DLNA / uPNP servers/clients to play my music. (They never worked all that well anyway)
I’ve been really loving my favorite new Florida-based Ska band, Beebs and Her Money Makers since I saw them in concert last year. I really enjoyed their new album Wurst Album Ever which I crowdfunded.
Check out the new 70s-tastic video for Death to Ego:
I continued listening to artists alphabetically on my computer and randomly on my phone.
1. Childish Gambino (92 listens) - Came across his music in my alphabetic romp. Currently conflicted. I enjoy the verbal jiu jitsu, but find a lot of it whiny (after hearing for the 15th time) and just so overly aggressively sexual I feel wrong listening to it with my daughter around.
2. Billie Holiday (64 listens) - long-time readers know that Danielle and I listen to pretty much everything from the latest music to the oldest music. Billie Holiday is awesome and more people need to listen to her.
3. Danny Baranowsky (61 listens) - Listened to the Super Meat Boy soundtrack. It was fun.
4. Chance the Rapper (47 listens) - Still really enjoy Acid Rap and don’t enjoy #10Day.
5. The Black Keys (46 listens) - I always start off happy listening to The Black Keys, but the sameness drags on me by the end.
6. Alan Menken (45 listens) - for Scarlett.
7. Celia Cruz (44 listens) - I can listen to Celia Cruz at any time. Really enjoyed revisiting these songs.
7. Brave Saint Saturn (44 listens) - Although the first album’s a tad cheesy, I really enjoy where Reese took things for the second two albums. I continue to hold out hope that he will do another one.
9. Mandy Moore (43 listens) - Scarlett wanted to listen to a lot of Tangled this quarter.
10. Anberlin (31 listens) - Maybe it’s just the quarter in which I bought it, but the last album failed to make a lasting impression. I’m sure, with time, I’ll come to enjoy it as much as I enjoy the other albums.
11. Christafari (30 listens) - The music is a great groove. I have the first two albums and I think I like more songs in the first one, but I do like a lot of the second one. Although no longer an evangelical, I still find it to be pretty uplifting.
12. Ben Shive (29 listens) - There’s a certain timelessness to the songs. Some of them remind me of a subdued Billy Joel.
13. The Chipmunks & The Chipettes (28 listens) - Playing some Chipmunks for Scarlett.
13. The Weeknd (28 listens) - I know there are issues with some of the lyrics, but I do like the sound of a few of the songs. Especially “High for This”
13. Ben Prunty Music (28 listens) - The FTL soundtrack. Quite moody. I enjoy it.
I was explaining bands to Scarlett and she wanted to see an example. The only concert movie I had was from the I Fight Dragons Chicago show. I put that on and she rocked out; And asked me to dance with her. The first video (blurry because she’s so close, I think) she is spinning on my finger. The second she’s dancing on her own. I didn’t think to record video until well into things so she’s not going as crazy with the dancing as she had been.
Suddenly Charlie XCX seems to be everywhere. In reality she’s been slowly appearing in and writing lots of pop songs for the past few years. But I had no idea who she was or anything. So I was surprised to find I had “What I Like” from her True Romance album on my computer. Must have been one of those MP3s Rolling Stone used to give away weekly.
How did we get to the point where certain singing voices are racialized? Everyone I’ve spoken to (and me too) was surprised to discover (a few years ago) that Adelle was not black. Now it’s happening all over again with Meghan Trainor and “All about that Bass”. I’d heard the song at the gym and looked for the music video, when Ms Trainor appeared I was shocked. As was my wife when she walked into the living room. I’ve polled a bunch of others in the office and they were all shocked as well.
This quarter was a mix of new music, continuing to listen to my music in alphabetical order (by artist), and whatever I happened to listen to on my phone. And that resulted in a little something like this (a lot more ties than usual):
1. The Beatles (243 listens) - For the first time in a long time the Fab Four are back on top. I continue to love their later stuff although their older stuff is played out having spent my childhood listening to oldies.
Posts like this one and others I’ve mentioned recently help explain why I’ve had an increase in hatred of pop music as my music tastes have expanded. (Although I don’t think there’s anything wrong with enjoying Bubblegum - as it was once known - most of it is garbage) The record industry, as with any established industry (and not too differently from fast food chains), hates risk. They take artists who put out amazing mix tapes and make them bland. As a corollary, when I do enjoy mainstream acts (as opposed to indie), I tend to enjoy the songs they don’t play on the radio. (Lana Del Rey and Fall Out Boy are perfect examples)
I started 2014 with a bunch of music I’d acquired in 2013, but which I still hadn’t listened to. So I created a playlist with a high weight on unplayed music from Q4 2013 to Q1 2014. I changed my Amarok settings so that instead of populating the next 11 items, it would populate the next 3. That way if I was getting bored with the new music (a lot of which is music I got for free so sometimes it’s awesome (to my tastes) and sometimes it’s just OK) I could switch to another dynamic playlist for a while and I’d just be three songs away from hearing some music I know I like. I also bought an album with 100 of the best Beethoven compositions. However, since I’m scrobbling the orchestra that played it (not the composer), I’m not sure if any of them will end up dominating the list. (They didn’t)
I was inspired to ruminate on this from this Boing Boing article featuring a Dust & Grooves interview with Sheila Burgel. The series seems to use interviews as an excuse to photograph people’s vinyl listening rooms. Many of these are quite beautiful, even if the beauty is just in the size and organization of the collection. I thought of my childhood.
Growing up, my mom always had music playing when she was cleaning the house. Ninety percent of the time she didn’t listen to the radio or tapes. Mom listened to her records. In fact, I only really remember tapes ever being played when we were in the car. Even when I was in high school and we had concert DVDs and CDs (and I was starting to get into the MP3 scene), mom would put on her records. That hiss and pop and then BOOM when the record goes from the non-audio grooves into the record mean “something’s coming” to my brain.
On 6 Nov I went to my 2013 concert. Because of time and money concerns, Danielle and I typically go to a maximum of two concerts a year, and usually just one concert. I was completely unable to resist seeing Five Iron Frenzy in their first tour since breaking up nearly a decade ago. I didn’t really care for Reel Big Fish and I hoped that Five Iron Frenzy would go first as Co-headliner so I could leave early. In fact, although being a fan of ska, the only Reel Big Fish song I’d ever heard was “Everbody’s Doin’ the Fish” because it was the Florida Marlins’ theme song for a season or two. A large part of that comes from the fact that when I got into ska, in the 1990s, I was only into Christian music to the exclusion of secular music - as was encouraged by my middle school church. (My high school church actually shied away from Christian music, which I thought was weird, considering how good it had gotten by the early 2000s) So I listed to Five Iron Frenzy, The OC Supertones, and The Skadaddles. This was going to be my first Five Iron Frenzy concert in nearly 15 years when I saw them at a festival in Florida (and actually filmed a pretty decent video bootleg)
This year I bought LOTS of albums. I don’t know if it’s the most albums I’ve purchased in one year since writing these blog posts or even since keeping track of Scrobbles. I do know that while I listened to my music randomly, in general, I did also listen to entire albums whenever I purchased one. Sometimes I’d listen to the album a few times and other times I’d take the album purchase as an opportunity to review the artist’s previous work. I know that was the case with Five Iron Frenzy (although that was also concert prep as I mentioned a few days ago), Relient K, I Fight Dragons, and Fall Out Boy. It was a very fun year for me, musically. Kacey Musgraves, for example, was a reminder that country music doesn’t have to suck. Disclosure made me realize that I could still like loop-heavy electronic music. I hope that I can continue to explore new sounds in 2014.
This quarter I mostly listened to my music on pure random with a few variations which’ll be accounted for below. This finally allowed The Beatles to place in 2013. In the last few weeks I just listened to music that I added in this quarter to make sure I had a chance to get to know some of the newer songs.
It’s December and I should have gotten all of my Kickstarter products by now. But that’s not exactly what happened. Every single one of my Kickstarters was late except the one I had the least faith and relationship with - Random Encounter’s Let Me Tell You a Story.
When I was in middle school in Oregon I was introduced to the concept of non-worship Christian music for the first time. Up until that time the only English music we listened to was Oldies and 70s music. I’d catch a pop or rap song here or there - mostly because the public school buses I rode would listen to the pop or rap stations - but that was it. I think it was like 10% shielding us from the “bad messages in pop music” and 90% my parents just listening to what they enjoyed - which was the music they grew up with. And since those stations were always on when we were growing up, that’s what we grew to like. It’s why I’m the only person in the circle of friends in my age group that knows all the Doo-Wop standards.
I’m writing this in late August - by the time this post appears I should have received all of my Kickstarter goods or they should be in the mail. Interestingly, even though the Kickstarter backer cycles were spread over about a three month period, they’re all supposed to be delivering the product at around the same time - 4th quarter of this year. As of the time of this writing, this is the status of my Kickstarters:
This article on AV Club considers how A Tribe Called Quest’s most critically acclaimed album is their worst artistically. I felt the same thing happened with GRITS - I LOVE their first two albums, but hate everything after that - which is when they started to pick up steam and be featured on MTV. It’s not some kind of hipster hate of the popular - I kept buying the albums hoping they’re return to a sound more like The Roots. Eventually I gave up. I feel like the same happened with Childish Gambino - I really don’t like his first commercial release, but I loved his mixtapes. I hear the same said of Lupe Fiasco.
This quarter was a mix of listening to the music I had at work and listening on pure random. Once again Amarok lost the first played and last played stats. Of all the stats to lose, these are the least detrimental, but it makes the “don’t play songs I’ve heard in the last x days” playlists not work. So I just went on pure random and rediscovered some music I’d forgotten about. Once again no Beatles on the top 15. We’ll see if they can rectify that next quarter. (Note: I have added Amazon affiliate links this time around. If you use them to buy the music, it helps support this site)
This article explores a side of the blues I never knew existed. Apparently there was certain degree of openness about lesbian blues singers when it was indie that I wouldn’t have expected to find in 1920s America (as well as hidden via slang and double-entendre references to lesbianism)
Saw this on Boing Boing a while ago. It saddens me that girls and women are treated as second class citizens within geekdom, but it heartens me that women like these don’t let it keep them from their geek pursuits. I hope to raise Scarlett to be just like them - self-confident enough to pursue whatever she wants, regardless of what others think.
This reveals more about my stereotypes than anything else, but I was extremely shocked to find out that the lead singer from The Offspring (yeah, the Pretty Fly for a White Guy band) is a molecular biologist. He’s working on helping to kick AIDS in the butt. Who would have thought?
A few months ago Lifehacker had people post images of their Smart Playlists. So I decided to share some of my Dynamic Playlists from Amarok so that others could see the syntax needed for various types of playlists.
Those of you who have been reading this blog long enough know that I often write my blog posts during my lunch break at work and set it to post at some point in the future. I’m writing this post almost 1 month before it is to appear on the blog. So in the middle of July I find myself in what many who have backed projects probably experience as the Kickstarter Lull. I backed a project by I Fight Dragons and interviewed them about it here and I backed a comic project by Greg Pak and Jonathan Coulton. During the backing period as a way to drum up support there was a constant stream of both updates and digital goodies. IFD, in particular, gave backers 2 albums (live concert recording and a conceptual album) and a concert film. A little while after the backing period was over, the projects contacted us for the info they needed to fulfill our backer rewards. Since then I haven’t heard from either of them. On the rational side, I’m glad they’re focusing on creating what we paid them to create. But after the constant communications it just feels odd to have “radio” silence. Now we just wait for the products to be created. In the case of these two projects, the members involved are all veterans: IFD put out records before having a record company contract and Greg Pak has already done about a half dozen Kickstarters. So, outside of catastrophe, I don’t fear for my money. I could see where this silence might be more disturbing with an unproven team.
K-Pop has been making a splash in America in a big way. Although they have nearly subsumed all music in Asia and are getting big in parts of Europe and the Middle East, K-Pop in the USA seems to be about where J-Pop was during the height of the anime/manga crazy in the last 1990s and early 2000s. That is to say, huge within a niche group that’s made up of expat/second gen immigrants and Americans who love asian pop culture despite often not completely understanding all the lyrics. Of course, things were brought into mainstream attention with last year’s “Gangnam Style”. There are quite a few articles that examined why Psy emerged as the face of K-Pop. If I had to pick out the top reasons, I think it would be the easy and silly dance, the catchy beat, the fun of yelling “Oppa Gangnam Style!”, and the fact that he’s a pudgy Asian man who doesn’t threaten America’s notions of Asians. As to that last reason, Dan sent me a few articles during the height of the Gangnam craze that suggested part of the reason other artists like Rain have had a hard time penetrating is that American can only accept the goofy asian (Jackie Chan, The Donger, Kevin Jeong, etc) or the Karate Asian (Mr Miyagi, Jet Li). Even though the 1800s are long behind us, we can’t accept the pop star sex symbol Asian man. If there is interest among my dedicated readers, perhaps Dan can post links or do a followup blog post. At any rate, there’s a much higher chance of female-led K-Pop groups infiltrating the USA - given that we already have the stereotype of the sexy Asian woman coupled with the fact that there is a huge emphasis on gender, sexiness, and cuteness in the K-Pop system.
For the second quarter in a row The Beatles have NOT made the list! But that’s easily explained: I have been listening to a lot of new music and a lot of playlists that don’t include The Beatles. But as you’ll see, they kinda snuck in sideways. This quarter I spent a lot of time listening to Jonathan Coulton and I Fight Dragons because of their Kickstarters, which I backed. I Fight Dragons released two albums as Kickstarter bonuses - a live recording of their most recent concert and a remix album of sorts in which the band members sung different arrangements of the songs. There was also the new Fall Out Boy album, Save Rock and Roll. I really enjoyed the album but it was overtaken in my mind by the previously mentioned IFD and JoCo music and I quickly forgot they had a new album out. Again, that’s a shame since I did enjoy it and while I was in Florida last week I quickly tired of “My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark”. Incidentally, I was reminded of why I stopped listening to live radio - it’s far too repetitive. I think the true problem is that it’s too formulaic in its repetition. I didn’t mind hearing “The Princess Who Saved Herself” every day for a week because the songs surrounding it were always different. On a separate note, I got some music for Father’s Day and I’ll mention that below.
Back on 4 May I backed a Kickstarter project for the first time ever - I Fight Dragon’s Project Atma. Anyone who’s been following my last.fm posts knows that I really like the Chicago-based band. I first discovered I Fight Dragons when listening to a web comics podcast that featured “No One Likes Superman Anymore” from 2009’s Cool is Just a Number EP as the closing song. I have no idea if they had permission from I Fight Dragons, but it was quite fortuitous for the band as it led to me buying Welcome to the Breakdown and Kaboom! (and participating in this Kickstarter) As I’ve said before, the band is the inverse of Anamanaguchi. They are a rock band that uses Nintendos and Gameboys to create extra background instruments (whereas Anamanaguchi tends to have the instruments take the background to the chiptunes). Here’s one of the songs of their new album, Kaboom!
[caption id=“attachment_6093” align=“aligncenter” width=“300”] Fall Out Boy - Save Rock and Roll[/caption]
The new Fall Out Boy album, Save rock and Roll, came out a few weeks ago after five long years. Having listened to it about a half dozen times now, I figured I had a good enough handle on it for a review. For context, I enjoyed the last three albums. I enjoyed Folie à Deux the most - I felt it was the peak of their maturity both musically and lyrically. (According to a recent Rolling Stone article, I’m in the minority)
In light of the semi-recent news that most kids nowadays use Youtube to discover music and that leading to Youtube views being counted for music charts, I thought I’d talk about how I discover and/or acquire new music. For the record, the wife also uses Youtube to find new songs. It’s one of the first things she thinks of and I’m always left thinking “Oh yeah”. How I discover music to listen to depends on a few categories.
For this quarter I’ve gone back and forth between picking albums to listen to and having dynamic playlists determine what I listen to. For most of March I was listening to a bunch of free South by Southwest samplers with some pretty GREAT music. Not a lot of repeat among the artists there so none of them appear on this list. Some of those songs could potentially end up in the most listened song list at the end of the year.
In 2012 I accelerated my trend of listening to new music. More than ever, I experienced new music via various outlets that provided free music like Jamendo, Rolling Stone, and others. I discovered some great music that I really, really enjoyed. Since it mostly consisted of singles, a lot of the new artists I discovered aren’t really represented in the lists here, but it does contribute to lower numbers for the usual artists.
Throughout the month of October I alternated between listening to newly acquired music (of which I had quite a bit) and a dynamic playlist that was weighted so that most of the music had auto-ratings above 90, less music above 75, and even less above 50. Any song that I listened to only once would fit in the third category. After that, if I skipped it just once it would fall out of the group. So it gave me a nice mix of music including forgotten favorites. Now that I’ve listened to a good chunk of my library since the last time the Amarok database was corrupted I may modify the playlist to include the caveat that it couldn’t have been played in the last x days. I’m not sure if I want to make the date large enough that I only hear songs once per quarter or my standard two week waiting period. Given how little time I have to listen to music nowadays I might go for the 90 days. I also spent some chunks of time listening to my music on random on Google Music. That’s completely random so I end up hearing some songs I didn’t even remember ever acquiring. A lot of my new music came from Jamendo when I got an email with the month’s most popular songs and I decided to do a search for ska. Although I really enjoy ska, I got into it rather late so I don’t have very much ska music. (Mostly just Five Iron Frenzy, Save Ferris, No Doubt, and the Orange County Supertones - who are an OK ska band - I mostly like their least ska songs)
Recently I was looking at this old post and the screenshots of Amarok 1.4 reminded me of something I loved about that version of Amarok - the stats that would display when you were playing a song - like if you were playing a Five Iron Frenzy song it would tell you your three favorite (or most played) Five Iron Frenzy songs. That functionality never made it back into the Amarok 2 series. So when I was looking through the Amarok scripts in the script installer I came across Rating Statistics. It basically gave me everything I wanted other than being linked to the currently playing song. It allows you to search your favorite songs based on all kinds of criteria like number of plays, user-assigned rating, or auto-score. You can also assign some weights to it and get your best songs based on that weighting. Here are the stats about my library:
[caption id=“attachment_5661” align=“aligncenter” width=“500”] last.fm top artists[/caption]
This has been the configuration of the top eight artists on last.fm for a very long time. Only Five Iron Frenzy and Weird Al have traded spots. Everyone else has been secure in their position for years. The Beatles might soon overtake Anberlin. Both of them have a long time to go to unseat Fantastic Plastic Machine. But the weird thing is how long Andrea Echeverri has been ther.e I haven’t listened to her in at least three years. There are two really close artists and a third not too far behind, but it is definitly interesting how quickly the listens fall off. The 15th position is 300 listens less than Andrea. We’ll see how things continue to evolve as the time passes and I abandon some artists that I no longer like and listen to others that I’ve newly discovered.
For the first time since I started keeping track The Beatles did NOT make the list! That’s mostly because I have been acquiring TONS of new music (over one thousand tracks) in this quarter and haven’t really been listening on random as much. Although my #1 artist doesn’t have as many listens as some other quarters, I think this is the first (or second, at most) time where my #15 artist has more than 20 listens. There are some great new artists making their debuts on my list and hopefully you can discover some new music to listen to!
I started off this quarter using a smart playlist that only played songs I hadn’t heard in the last quarter in an attempt to listen to even more great music, but Amarok lost my library which clears out the last played field and so I ended up with lots of repeats again. Oh well! It’s all great music!
1. Five Iron Frenzy (65 plays) - I continued to listen to some great music from my high school years
This quarter my listens were a bit lower than they would otherwise have been because a lot of time I would have spent in front of the computer was spent with my new daughter. But, as she grew and now spends time in her “baby gym”, I sometimes put on music for her both so that she can hear complex music and for my sanity. There are only so many times I can listen to “itsy bitsy spider”.
So here’s my top listened artists for 2011. Some of these entries are a surprise and others are expected. I can’t wait to see how many of these artists are on this list next year. Well, let’s take a look.
1. The Beatles (492) - No surprises here; the ancestors of nearly all pop and rock in America has been on top every quarter. So of course they’d top this list.
For the last fourth of the year I continued to listen to my music on random via Amarok’s dynamic playlist. I set it to only play songs that I liked, but other than that left it up to chance. For the most part, the only exceptions were when I had exams to take and wanted some non-vocal music or to listen to new songs I’d downloaded from Rolling Stone’s website. Here’s how the artists fared.
For this Quarter I continued listening to my music in order as I attempted to go through my entire catalog so that Amarok could auto-rate the songs I liked and I could switch to a dynamic, random playlist. I actually finished going through all my music A-Z (and Japanese characters) - except for songs that didn’t have the Album Artist set.
Through a quirk of the way Amarok is programmed and the sorting I’ve selected, a bunch of artists who had the Album Artist blank did not appear along with the artist. In other words, if a Kanye West track had an album artist of either Kanye or Various, it would appear under Kanye. But if that field was blank, it appeared under “various artist” at the top. It’s a strange quirk and as I go through this final category in Q4, I’m trying to remember to fix as many of those as possible.
I started off this quarter ending my random listening. I wanted to listen to certain artists I really enjoyed. I figured I could go back to random once I got bored of choosing the artists I was listening to. Additionally, in between picking certain artists if I wanted to hear a certain song, I started going through my library alphabetically by artist. Let’s see how these trends panned out over the quarter.
Monday night, as I walked to the Ram’s Head Live concert venue, I had no idea what to expect. Earlier in the year Daniel had retweeted some strange, witty tweets from some dude named Childish Gambino. Based on the name I thought it was some weird Italian joke tweet account. Then, a few months later, I joined tumblr after seeing Dan’s tumblr posts on his blog’s sidebar and determining there was some neat stuff going on there. That’s when I came across the site Hipster Childish Gambino and saw posts like these:
I wanted to take a look at my music listening habits quarterly to see how each quarter’s stats stack up against the final numbers at the end of the year. I started off the year listening to some of the new artists I’d bought, then just switched to random listens for the rest of the quarter.
1. Girl Talk (294 plays) - I discovered Girl Talk at the end of 2010. I really enjoyed the latest album. Quickly acquired the rest of his albums. I enjoy all of them other than the first one. Listened to each of the albums a few times. Then when I put my playlist on random, of course a few of them kept coming up because of how many tracks there were.
2. Doctor Octoroc (279 plays) - I got into chip tunes at the end of 2010/beginning 2011 via I Fight Dragons. That caused me to check out Anamanaguchi, who Dan had been recommending for a while. Then I came across Doctor Octoroc. Got his chiptunes version of the Dr Horrible soundtrack and his chiptunes album “After These Messages”. Enjoyed it for a while. Quickly tired of it. I don’t think I’ve listened to it once since the initial push.
3. The Beatles (132 plays) - I went through my Beatles rush in 2010 when I first got all the songs. The Beatles are in third place solely on the basis of having SO MANY songs that they’re bound to come up often why I’m listening to my entire collection on random.
4. I Fight Dragons (109 plays) - I have all three of their EPs. One was available for joining the mailing list - the other two I bought. I really enjoy this group. They’re a regular rock band that embellishes their sound with chiptunes. The topics are not as nerdy as you’d expect from a chiptunes band. They have a good sound, the singer has a good voice, and the songs are good. I wouldn’t say they’re awesome, but they’re enjoyable enough that I always get happy when their CDs come up in my rotation of CD-Rs are work.
5. Anberlin (89 plays) - I own all their CDs so I’m surprised they didn’t come up more often. I like all their albums to varying degrees. I’m partial to their earlier work, although their latest CD had me falling for them again.
6. Relient K (54 plays) - I also own all of their CDs. Although the first two CDs are awful compared to their later albums, there are still a few songs I enjoy on the first two. I’m not a big fan of their absolute latest album, it forays a bit more into a country type of sound. I’ll probably have to listen to previews of their next CD rather than blindly buying it.
7. “Weird Al” Yankovic (49 plays) - I have a ton of his songs, but I often had to skip them to keep from annoying Danielle. Perhaps now that I’m mostly listening with headphones there’ll be more listens.
8. Billy Joel (43 plays) - nearly all of these plays come from a greatest hits album of his that I bought. Around this time, I stopped listening at random in order to listen to my newly bought music.
9. Five Iron Frenzy (40 plays) - I’m a huge fan of Five Iron Frenzy, but they’ve fallen to the wayside as I’ve explored other non-ska music recently
10. MxPx (33 plays) - I hadn’t heard any MxPx music in a long time. They were one of my favorite bands from middle school through high school. But I hadn’t listened to any of the three of four albums I own in a long time. Listening to my collection on random brought them back into my radar.
11. GRITS (33 plays) - all their plays came from listening to my collection on random. After their second album, I only like selected songs from their further albums.
12. The Hangovers (29 plays) - all from their latest album Three Sails to the Wind. I really enjoy this album a lot.
13. Anamanaguchi (28 plays) - I really enjoy listening to this group. It’s weird having groups producing music without vocals nowadays. But I wonder if this is the future evolution of symphonic music.
14. Tom Lehrer (27 plays) - A great musician who rivals “Weird Al” for making me laugh.
14. ???? (Nobuo Uematsu) (27 plays) - I don’t have any of his solo work. All these are from Final Fantasy soundtracks. He is a great composer. I think some of his songs rival movie soundtracks.
I was born and raised in the USA, so I am not sure if it’s fair to call these songs racist, I think that racism requires malicious intent. And, given that the US has a different and unique relationship with its non-caucasian descendants than Latin America, I’m not sure there’s the same level of maliciousness as in the US. All I can do is view these songs through the perspective of an American. The song that sparked this article is by La Banda Gorda and is called “El Negro Pega Con Todo” which means “black matches with everything”. I’d heard it before, but I was listening a little more closely to the introduction this time around.
I wrote this code a while back because a website that does the same thing seemed to miss my posts every other week. So I figured I’d write my own in python to do the same thing to me. Then I just put it into a cron job to automatically run it every Sunday. I’m going to be posting the code on my GPL code page. Here it is for you to see and for Google to index. Just fill in the appropriate variables with the secret keys you get from each site’s API.
So, as I mentioned before, I wanted to try and make sure to get mostly unheard music on my random playlist so I could go through all my music. So I put in a bias to make sure that there was an 80% that the next song picked was unplayed. I started getting even more played music showing up than before! I was baffled! Then I realized it was my piss-poor understanding of statistics at fault. Telling it that there should be an 80% of the music selected having never been played is equivalent to saying there should be a 20% change that the music selected should have been played before. What the heck is going on? So, if you look at my collection - when I moved to KDE 4, it lost the previous stats. So all of my music was unplayed. Let’s say I have 10,000 songs. So when I tell it to randomly play music (with no bias), there’s, at first a 0/10,000 chance of a played song coming up. After that, there’s a 1/10,000 chance of a previously played song showing up. After a day, there’s a 26/10,000 chance of a played song coming up. So because of randomness I could end up with previously played songs. Stats only tell us what will happen in the long run. In 10 flips of a coin you could get 10 heads. But in infinite flips you should get half of them heads and half tails. 26/10,000 = 0.26% chance of a previously played song coming up. So, when I set the bias so that theres a 20% of the songs that come up will have been played, I’m greatly increasing my changes of hearing a song again vs just leaving it on random! At least for now. Once I’d listened to most of my collection, it should flip. There will be so many previously played songs that those will be random enough to satisfy me. Right now not enough of them have been played relative to my collection’s size so the same ones keep coming up.
So, a while back I caved and got an iPod shuffle. While it worked well at first, over the last year it has been a constant pain in my butt. All I want to do is use gPodder to get my podcasts and listen to them on the way to work and at the gym. I went with the iPod shuffle because it was sub $100 and I didn’t really need to spend the money for the screen in the Nano. Not having a screen meant just listening in order and having to check gtkPod to make sure I’d listened to all the podcasts before clearing the iPod. Let me get into my workflow and why the shuffle became a real pain.
[caption id=“attachment_3694” align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“My KDE 4.4 Desktop”] [/caption]
At first I was confused because the desktop background was not carried over to my right monitor. When I went to change the background I saw that they no longer put it all into one dialog. You need to go to each screen and manually set the background. While counterintuitive at first, it actually makes more sense this way. You can see my micro-blogging widget, calculator widget, and some folder views. The taskbar is looking nice and slick now. The KDE version of the system try is looking really nice. It has a very good slickness to it; to quote Aaron Seigo, “like something that might come out of Cupertino”. My FAVORITE part of KDE 4.4 vs Gnome 2.30 is the little “i” i the right corner. If you click there you can scroll back through all the system messages. So, whereas you might miss that in Gnome if you’re looking somewhere else or away from the computer, you can easily find and review the messages in KDE. At first the desktop was really slow and I thought “here we go again. I’m going to have to once again write off KDE 4.x as useless.” But it turns out that it was just Strigi/Nepomuk indexing my home folder. It’d be a year or more since I last loaded KDE 4, so it had a lot to index. When I also had some errors with Amarok (which I’m about to get to), I gave it a reboot in case KDE was having a fight with SELinux (as has happened in the past). Anyway, when I came back, Strigi was done and KDE was much more responsive. Konqueror had also been slow during the indexing, so I’ll want to test that in Part 2. I took a look at my old friend, Kopete. It was looking nice, if a bit cartoony compared to Pidgin. I’ll also want to take a closer look in Part 2. It didn’t support Facebook chat (as is supported in Pidgin via a plugin) which isn’t a killer, but it’s not good. Perhaps there’s a plugin there too? I’ll have to investigate that. What I was most curious about was Amarok. It was one of my biggest anchors to KDE back in the day and really my favorite music player.
Dan’s not the only one that can post videos. Here’s one I really enjoyed. I heard about this guy in a podcast that covered a steam punk gathering in London.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“The BSO Warms up for the Concert”] [/caption]
Danielle and I recently went to see " Peter and the Wolf" at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Danielle and I both grew up watching the Disney animated adaption of “Peter and the Wolf” and we loved the idea of being able to listen to the music as performed by the BSO. I don’t care how amazing the speakers are in your home theater system, nothing sounds as amazing as the orchestra.
I just got Anberlin’s latest album, “New Surrender”. I was pretty lukewarm about “Cities” and Danielle just about hated it. We both loved “Blueprints for the Black Market” and “Never Take Friendship Personal”. This album is a return to the sounds and lyrics of those first two albums. I loved it upon first listen. Danielle summed it up best, “It’s like their first two albums, but more mature.” I’ve only started listening to it for the second time, so I’m still picking up the lyrics. What I’ve heard so far continues their tradition of poetic lyrics that take a few listens to fully appreciate. If you’ve been on the fence about this album after hearing “Cities”, definitely get “New Surrender”. If you liked “Cities” and hated the first two albums, you probably won’t like “New Surrender”.
One of the killer features of Songbird is that when you view web pages with MP3s, it presents a very easy way for you to download the songs. I noticed on my last.fm home page that there were a few free MP3s available for download, so I decided to test this out.
I went to the Birdhouse because that seemed to be the way to type in an address to go to.
Last.fm is getting close to relaunching their site and I was invited to participate in the beta program. I think the new design has some great new features and I wanted to share it with you so you could get excited about it too.
Here’s the main page as it appears now:
The most important thing to notice is how cluttered it is. Look at the proposed layout under beta:
It’s been a really long time since I last looked at Songbird. In fact, according to my blog, the last time I checked it out was version 0.2 back in October of 2006. The UI certainly has a bit more polish. I submitted some bug reports on their Bugzilla about Metadata problems with WMAs and problems with podcasts. Eventually, I just got frustrated and stopped using it. I updated to version 0.4 a while back, but it still seemed a bit unstable. With Rhythmbox and Amarok meeting my needs on Linux, and with me hating Windows Media Player so much, I’ve pretty much stopped listening to music on my Windows computer.
Back in High School I got The W’s Fourth from the Last album and one of my favorite tracks was titled “Hui”. I thought that, like some of the other songs on the album, it was just a nonsensical song and that calling the thugs on the beach “The Hui” was just because it sounded really funny. Well, I finally found out that the song was about a real-life gang of surfers called Da Hui. They get a brief mention in the Local Surfers section of the Surfing article in Wikipedia. Interestingly, The Offspring also wrote a song about “da hui”. Well, I’ll certainly think of that song differently next time I hear it!
I’ve noticed for some time now (yet, despite what I thought, have not blogged about) that when I listen to all my music on random, it doesn’t appear to really be random. It’s mostly random, but not random enough as I noticed some songs coming up more often than they should. At first I chalked this up to the fact that humans are horrible at figuring out stats and how often things should occur. But then I had somewhat concrete proof, I had some artists with lots of songs and those artists were being played less than artists with just a few songs. Recently I found the culprit - when Rhythmbox plays random songs, it weights the songs you like heavier so they appear more often.
I’ve already spent around $11 on Amazon.com’s MP3 download store. Why? Because they are selling MP3s of my favorite artists without any digital restrictions management (DRM). This is what has been keeping both my wife and I away from iTunes. Oh yeah, and the songs are cheaper than iTunes! It appears that all of the day’s Top downloads are $0.89 and the rest are $0.99. On iTunes the DRM-free songs are $1.89 or something like that. Looks like Apple’s going to need to do a price drop or there’s going the be a mass exodus to Amazon.com.
Often the biggest gripe people have about CDs is that they are two or three hit singles packaged with a bunch of crap to justify selling it to you for $12 or more. I’ve felt that way many, many times. The phenomenon is a large part of the reason behind models like iTunes. In fact, the record companies STILL don’t get it - that’s why they offer you a discount if you buy the whole album vs the singles. One day they’ll learn that artists should only release their good songs. People will buy them a la carte.
A while back (6 mo to a year ago), I tried Rhythmbox and found it too buggy for me. I absolutely hated it. I loved Amarok so I used that within KDE, but it took forever to load within Gnome. So what was I to do? Ever since Fedora started packaging Mono, I’ve been using Banshee. But I find it extremely slow, less featured than Rhythmbox, and without Podcast support. I hate iTunes, so my podcast support has been coming from Songbird. However, they have a really annoying bug that makes using it for podcasting horrible. (I’ve filed a bug report, but no fixes yet) Here’s an example of what the podcasting interface looks like: (click the image to see it full size)
(all of these are pictures of Relient K, even in the sections when I’m talking about other bands)
My wife and I went to the Relient K concert yesterday in Baltimore. We were the oldest people there as I’ve been following them since their first album (which came out around 8-10 years ago), while many of these kids just started listening to them ever since they started getting airplay on Mtv.
The opening act, Sherwood, was actually really good. I like them a lot. Their style sounds pretty similar to Relient K. Pretty happy music overall. Some girls in front of us knew every word and were bootlegging the performance on tiny video cameras. I’d buy their CD if I had some extra cash.
The second group, Mae, was not so good. At least, I didn’t like them. Unlike the other two groups, they didn’t have the same type of sound and their singer, in my wife’s opinion, couldn’t sing. We took their set as an opportunity to go outside and get some fresh air. It was funny to see all the parents there.
The first battle in our war against those who would wield DRM to prevent us from having fair use over our movies and music has been won. EMI, a Bristih Music label with bands like The Rolling Stones, has agreed to release songs on iTunes without DRM. Please, try and support them and show them this is a good idea. Yeah, it costs thirty cents more, but you also get 256kbps instead of just 128. Buy from them and don’t rampantly share with others so that the rest of the music labels can follow suit.
“What happened to Roper? Is it dead? - Yes. Roper was a project put together by 5minutewalk records. We had a falling out with them, and are too lazy to start over again. Everyone has real jobs now, and although we miss seeing you all, we are just going to let it die. Unless you are a record company executive that wants to give us an enormous signing bonus and not make us tour.” -Reese Roper, source: Wikipedia, Roper entry.
if anyone can tell me the name of a group and album in which one of the tracks is simply a female who keeps repeating “eight foot fiberglass penguin”, let me know. I’ve searched google and everywhere else and can’t find it. Thanks! (I heard it on NPR, if it helps….)
As I read my Linuxtoday.com RSS feed today, I discovered a new piece of software. Songbird aims to be, in their words, “the Firefox of media players.” They seem to be on the right track. First of all, it works on all majors operating systems: Windows, Mac, and Linux (and by extention BSD). Second, it has taken a good, intuitive interface which appears to have based on a cross between Linux’s Rhythmn Box and Mac/Window’s iTunes. I downloaded developer release 0.2 to see what the fuss was about. Frankly, it’s doing quite well for just being a developer release!
last.fm has had a facelift! It looks quite a bit more sleek! The biggest change seems to be adding artist and album pictures near all of the stats. Check out my last.fm page.
Thanks to Danny, I am now a member of the yet another addictive internet site. Last.fm, which works with the Linux music player amaroK will collect all the songs you listen to. It will then display it on a webpage such as this one. If this was all it did, it would be mildly fun, but it combines the best of the social web phenomenon involved in web 2.0. Clicking on a song will tell you how many users listened to that song from that artist. It also has a “neighbors” feature where it lists other users that have the same musical taste as you. This should be interesting given the variety of music I listen to. Also, I have added a plugin to the sidebar here so that you can see the latest songs I’ve listend to on my Linux computer. These are the invasions of privacy I don’t mind since I’m volunteering this information. It’s when programs, websites, and ISPs take this information without asking me that I get annoyed.
Christian Rock/Pop music has been around since the 1970s when Larry Norman pioneered the genre. Since then it has become a HUGE market encompassing all areas of music from rock to ska to punk to rap. There is a large popuplation of Jews in the US, so why wouldn’t there be Jewish music? Finally, our country has put enough of our prejudices aside that I heard Matisyahu’s single “King Without a Crown” on the pop radio station here in the Baltimore Area.
Ever since I heard this song on the radio in Ithaca because my computer was broken and I had to listen to the radio to get some music, I’ve wondered what the heck the lyrics were about. I finally decided to google it and here’s what the singer, himself has to say about it.
In 2001, Brian Vander Ark explained what the song means to him:
WHEN I WAS YOUNG I KNEW EVERYTHING. We all think we know everything at a young age. I thought I did. I realize I didn’t know sh*t until i was 36.AND SHE, A PUNK, WHO RARELY TOOK ADVICE. How many people do we know like that? NOW I’M GUILT STRICKEN, SOBBING, WITH MY HEAD ON THE FLOOR. Something happened, that caused this reaction, but I wouldn’t want to give that away this early in the song, so let’s through in an some ambiguity: STOP A BABY’S BREATH, AND A SHOE FULL OF RICE, NO. First of all, forget the NO. Stop a baby’s breath is just that. Abort the baby. A shoe full of rice is a result of a wedding. So - stop a baby’s breath AND then you stop a wedding. She’s pregnant, get her to abort, and then there’s no wedding. And you know what? I CAN’T BE HELD RESPONSIBLE, CAUSE SHE WAS TOUCHING HER FACE. When I wrote this song, The Divinyls had a song out called I touch myself. The TV was on, she was touching her face in the video. Very sexy. So, I can’t be held responsible because she was trying to be sexy, trying to seduce me, etc. I WON’T BE HELD RESPONSIBLE, SHE FELL IN LOVE IN THE FIRST PLACE. I didn’t tell her to fall in love. FOR THE LIFE OF ME, I CANNOT REMEMBER WHAT MADE US THINK THAT WE WERE WISE, AND WE’D NEVER COMPROMISE. What was i thinking back then. Who am I to put a girl though that? Why was I unable to compromise? Guilty feelings. FOR THE LIFE OF ME, I CANNOT BELIEVE WE’D EVER DIE FOR THESE SINS, WE WERE MERELY FRESHMEN. We were just kids, let it go, we all make mistakes, etc. MY BEST FRIEND TOOK A WEEKS VACATION TO FORGET HER. He needed to get away because of what happened. HIS GIRL TOOK A WEEK’S WORTH OF VALIUM AND SLEPT. This is why this song is not that strong literally - it’s confusing. HIS girl is MY girl. the same girl that had the abortion has now killed herself. NOW HE’S GUILT-STRICKEN SOBBING WITH HIS HEAD ON THE FLOOR, THINKS ABOUT HER NOW AND HOW HE NEVER REALLY WEPT HE SAYS. He has the same guilty feelings that I do about the abortion and death. WE TRIED TO WASH OUR HANDS OF ALL OF THIS, WE NEVER TALK OF OUR LACKING RELATIONSHIPS. We rarely spoke after the incident - we just tried to forget it. We never spoke of her or the fact that we can’t have a decent relationship with anyone since then. WE FELL THROUGH THE ICE WHEN WE TRIED NOT TO SLIP. No matter how careful you might be, there are other perils out there.
The girl is real, the abortion is real. the death is not. it’s poetic license–to make the story more interesting.
She’s got the time
says she got time on her side
Running the rule
Commanding the late boys eyes
She runs around, knows all the streets by name
So mysterious, shadows meet James Dean
She’s intoxicating, soon your favorite drink
Your black dress in disarray
Only dance floor prayers can save you
Temperatures rise and I start to move
But it’s you that’s coursing through my veins
Say she’s got hope
Took shelter to the Hollywood list, taking control
Wanted my heart but I gave her my soul
She’s like a Paige Davis with a Monroe kiss
Disappeared today, left no trace
But someday I’ll know your name
Don’t need no drugs, you’re my chemical
Now I’m dependent, swear I’m clinical
Addicted to those glances, taking chances tonight
I need a fix in those heroin eyes
Don’t need no drugs, you’re my chemical
Now I’m dependent, no not cynical
Addicted to those glances, taking chances tonight
I need a fix in those heroin eyes
She’s no saint but she’ll take you to your knees
Try her boy, but she’ll still do what she please
Do you believe in science? She prefers chemistry
She wanted my love but I gave her the rest of me
Dear Stephen Patrick:
You’ll adore me before the night is over
If London’s calling don’t you dare pick up the phone
Only you entwined
could make this orphan feel at home
Lips that need no introduction, but now waiting for your call
if picture’s worth a thousand words
Then your touch is worth them all
Galaxy Song - Monty Python
Whenever life get you down, Mrs. Brown,
And things seem hard or tough.
And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft,
And you feel that you’ve had quite enu-hu-hu-huuuuff!
Just - re-member that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving
and revolving at 900 miles an hour,
It’s orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it’s reckoned,
the sun that is the source of all our power.
The Sun and you and me, and all the stars that we can see,
are moving at a million miles a day,
In the outer spiral arm, at 40,000 miles an hour,
of the Galaxy we call the Milky Way.
Our Galaxy itself contains 100 billion stars,
it’s 100,000 light-years side-to-side,
It bulges in the middle, 16,000 light-years thick,
but out by us it’s just 3000 light-years wide.
We’re 30,000 light-years from galactic central point,
we go round every 200 million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
in this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,
in all of the directions it can whizz,
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light you know,
twelve million miles a minute, and that’s the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure,
how amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space,
because there’s bugger all down here on Earth.
Just got back from a Relient K concert in Philly. My wife and I were lamenting not having ever been to a Relient K concert despite the fact that they are on our top tier of bands when I decided to check the website. I found out they were playing in Philly and wouldn’t be anywhere else near us for the foreseable future. So, after a few phone calls determined that tickets were still available, we got into the car and drove the two hours to the concert. It was Rufio, Relient K, and MxPx; we stayed for the first two. I like MxPx, but not quite as much as I like Relient K; Rufio went first so we had to see them. It was weird being the oldest people there besides parents who took their tweens to see the concert, but we had a great time.
I recently found something interesting - a record label which releases all of its music under the Creative Commons license. In particular you are allowed to copy the music as long as you don’t make money off of it. One of their strategies? If you rip a CD for a friend and they really like the artist, they will buy the music. I think this is true as I have recently bought “Mmmhmm” by Relient K, “Dichotomy A” by GRITS, and other CDs I could have easily downloaded. Below is a letter written by one of the founders/owners of the record label - Fading Ways which I loved. I will reproduce it and write comments where appropriate.
Life always good - today it was better than usual. Can’t talk about it right now because of professional reasons, but I just have to thank God for being in control and also giving me a little to chew on here and there so I don’t get too impatient.
Also, later today, the big slope day expose. Tune in for nudity, Snoop Dogg, and more drunken college students than you can shake a stick at.
There’s a very hackneyed saying, “don’t put off for tomorrow what you can do today.” For a while now I had been putting off talking about the new Anberlin album and now Andrew beat me to it. I had been listening to “Ready Fuels” for almost six months before I got around to buying the first album, Blueprints for the Black Market. I almost immediately fell in love with the band’s music. I put it on my workout playlist and it was what I listened to for about a month and one half while working out. My fiancee said it was the first time she had heard an album where she liked every single song. When I found out they had come out with a new record in February, I set out to buy it.
I bought the Erace album when it first came out and I think I was just a freshman in high school if not younger. I really liked the rap put out by Gotee records courtesy of GRITS, et al especially because back then they had more of an experimental and underground sound. They’ve recently sold out, in my opinion, by sounding like every other rapper out there. But that’s not the subject of this post, so I’ll save it for another time. At the time I was unable to realize just how creative this song was. I used to play it over and over because I really liked the beat and the raps weren’t too bad.
This Roper song is my second favorite song on the album Brace Yourself for the Mediocre. Although I was quite young at the time, I still identify with a lot of the aspects from “my decade”.
“1985”
By Roper
On the back of the schoolbus singing,
“I Love Rock and Roll”
put another dime in the jukebox,
Let the Good Times Roll
Grab the back of a Buick Skylark
just like Michael J. Fox
Grind the trucks on your brand new skateboard
just like Tony Hawk
Delorean those days are gone
We could breakdance, Pop-lock our wrists kid
before your grunge rock ever existed
This song is one of my newest favorite songs and so I thought I’d share the lyrics with you. Part of what I love about this song is the fact that I was acting this way for a while at Cornell and I could have used a song to point out how ridiculous I was being. It’s about trying just hard enough to not be the worst. For a while I just wanted to get the curve. Then I realized how bad that was. I needed to strive for the absolute best and never settle with being on the curve. The lyrics are great and Reese proves once again why he has a legion of fans.
Every year we have a celebration on the final day of the school year on Cornell’s Libe Slope. It used to be a drunken orgy but it has morphed, in recent years into a concert with over-priced food and an ugly orange fence which makes getting to classes very hard. A couple of years ago Fat Joe was the lead act. Last year Kanye West was the headliner, although I didn’t get to see him because they weren’t allowing video cameras in and it was too much of a hassle to get back to the apartment. This year we’re getting Snoop Dogg along with some no name rapper. What’s interesting to me is the fact that a school as white as Cornell has had rap acts for the past three years. I’m not being naive or racist, saying that white people can’t listen to rap. I know they listen to rap.
Ark of Light (Victor Lavalle) - a bit of micro-fiction about using sci-fi to escape. Political of you consider when it was written. Potentially timeless otherwise. I thought it was a great example of what you can do in just a few pages.
How We Burn (Brenda Peynado) - this short story immediately made me think of China’s One Child policy taken to the extreme. It does a great job of showing the burden of being the only child with many prior generations depending on you.
The Miracle Lambs of Minane (Finbarr O’ Reilly) - The story has an indirect way about it that I usually don’t care for, but this time it works for (and is almost key to) the story. There’s always a potential conflict between what society declares is good and right and what works for any given individual. This story tells of a future just slightly past where we’re at and how folks have to deal with an age-old situation. It goes to show that SF doesn’t have to be about robots and space and The Internet.
If you’ve been reading my blog for the last few months, you know that I have fallen in love with the TTRPG publisher Kobold Press, creators of Tales of the Valiant. They recently held their second virtual convention, KoboldCon. I wanted to write up a quick review of what is effectively my first TTRPG convention.
First of all, the virtual aspect of the convention. During the COVID pandemic convention season (2020-2021), I attended quite a few virtual conventions - usually programming language conventions like PyCon. Many of those attempted to recreate the physical aspects of the convention like having virtual hallway tracks and profile areas where you can get to know your fellow attendees. Kobold Press went for a lower tech solution, but one that I think worked perfectly for what they were trying to do.
I gave a short reply, but I felt Twitter was inadequate to truly express myself. Of course, Diversity Panels have been around long enough that by 1997’s Chasing Amy (source of the header image), they were already making jokes about how some folks were always relegated to the Diversity Panel (click to play):
Because I had to fix a bunch of posts on here due to the transition from Wordpress to Hugo, I was reminded that I wrote a bunch of posts when Civilization IV came out 20 years ago. With the massive changes to the game mechanics in Civilization VII I thought I would at least make a post about my initial impressions of Civilization VII.
Unlike last year I didn’t play any of my narrative games, despite my best intentions. Unlike with my end of the year music post I don’t usually make graphs for my end of the year video game posts, but if I did you would see that games 1-3 were played WAY more than any other other games I played this year. It was truly the year of Against the Storm, Cities: Skylines II, and Balatro. I don’t know too much about what 2025 will bring, but I am sure it’ll at least have a bit more of each of those three games. I would like to actually make a bigger effort to get through my narrative games this year, but I’m not sure how much that desire is worth when I consider that I didn’t play any at all in 2024. As usual, you can enjoy the YouTube video below that will have highlights of the games I played this year along with narration that matches the text below. After that are the images of my Steam Year in Review and, finally, my Top 20 overall games since 2011.
I’ve been working on Milford County for quite some time - nearly a year at this point. I was inspired by the way that City Planner Plays designs his “cities” in Cities: Skylines and Cities: Skylines II; he makes regions that eventually become a megalopolis rather than simply designing one city. While I did orignally start out trying to think of things in story terms as he does, I am not quite disciplined enough to do that. However, I do think that building regionally is one way to end up with more natural looking cities rather than just having a gridded city. Milford County is starting to reach the level of development where I will start merging areas, so I wanted to do a small tour of the region as-is. First off, here is the region from above. I couldn’t figure out how to get the camera to zoom out far enough, so this is from the normal game view with the tools cropped out. (In hindsight I think I could have probably played with the camera settings to zoom out)
After all these years, there’s finally a Humble Bundle that redeems keys to GOG! I don’t have anything against Steam, per se, but I always hated the lack of diversity of locations to redeem your keys. I’m hoping this eventually means that games sold on Humble Bundle through their store (ie not part of a Bundle) will be redeemable on the user’s preferred store.
I came across this video that’s a pretty in-depth history of video game controller that taught me quite a bit I didn’t know and helped bridge some connections between the different companies throughout the industry’s history.
In my 2022 year-end blog post, I thought I was going to focus more on finishing up the narrative video games I started in the prior years. I definitely made some good progress on Disco Elysium, but not nearly as much as I wanted. I didn’t finish any of the narrative games. In January, I didn’t play any video games as I worked on my end of the year blog posts. In February I got re-obsessed with Monster Train and spent a good chunk of my free time trying to unlock all the boss characters. In March and April I tried to get a little more consistent about my gaming and also started trying to take advantage of all the extra buttons in the gaming mouse that Dan got me for Christmas. In June we took a bunch of family vacations and so I got back into Gwent, which I could play on my phone and my non-gaming laptop. In July I was back to Monster Train. In August, as the advertising hype started picking up on Cities: Skylines II, I started spending a lot of time playing the original game. Once the game came out in October, I spent nearly all of the next two months playing it. Then, out of nowhere, I heard just enough about Against the Storm to buy it and it was all I could do, almost to the exclusion of all else.
I’m all-in on 8bitDo. Prior to getting on the 8bitDo train, I was mainly focused on PC gaming, so I would get Xbox controllers (whatever the latest was at the time). But with 8bitDo supporting PC, Switch, Android, and (I think) the Xbox and PS4/5 with addaptors - it’s a no-brainer to go with 8bitDo, especially since you can choose the form factor most comfy to you - PS/Switch Style with the Pro or Xbox style with the Ultimate.
A video version of a large chunk of this blog post
1. Gwent (1 day, 5:50:44): Around May I found out that CD Projekt Red had changed the rules around the Gwent Journey, so that journeys were no longer time-bound. This meant I no longer felt pressured to play every day in order to progress. Freed from feeling forced to play, I once again caught the Gwent bug and, as you can see, it became my most-played game. The addiction was also facilitated by playing on my phone (although that time is not captured here). Eventually, around September, I had to stop when the heft of the phone was giving me RSI issues. I had moved on to other games on my PC, so I took a break from Gwent. The developers announced that the game only has one more update coming, so we’ll see if the community around the game remains. That will dictate how much I continue to play Gwent because, after all, a multiplayer game is no fun if there isn’t anyone to play with. I expect I’ll get readdicted some time in 2023. ( Last year 23 minutes)
This year I played a LOT less; partly because I wasn’t home as much as I was in 2020 due to the COVID mitigations. Also, it was partly because I focused on programming with older Advent of Code challenges. Last year I wanted to make a list of games and go in order, but that fell apart when I got stuck on The Witcher 2 and stopped following the list. First up, a video of the games I played this year. Second, the text version of what I said in the video. Right before my Game of the Year selection, a graph of this year’s gameplay.
Ever since a class during my undergrad which mentioned technology that can help make sure the real world is accessible to all folks no matter what their physical limits may be, I’ve been very interested in the topic. It’s led to my interest on web accessibility (although I’m not always perfect when it comes to this blog) as well as in other realms. One of my favorite series from the Game Maker’s Toolkit Youtube channel is his yearly wrap-up on how accessible games were that year. Here is his 2020 video:
Because the pandemic left me at home for a couple months, this year I played about double the amount of games from my previous record. You can watch the video below or read the text below that to find out what I thought of the games I played this year and which game I named as my 2020 Game of the Year.
Gwent (73 hours 24 minutes): Other than playing the beta a few years ago, the last time I played a CCG was Magic the Gathering back in the mid-1990s. I had no idea I would end up so addicted to this game for the first half of 2020. Eventually what took me away from the game is the fact that to maximize your experience with the game, you have to play every day. And I just have so many other games I want to play, books I want to read, the kids and wife to hang out with. I couldn’t give that much to a game. I do still have it on my rotation, so I get to it now and again. When I play, I find it quite fun, so I think Gwent will be with me for a while.
As I mentioned last year in my 2019 in Programming post, I created a bunch of 2D games in Unity by following along with the Gamedev.tv classes. I would watch the videos on Linux and jump over to my Windows computer for the programming, learning how to use SourceTree and Microsoft Video Studio in the process. But for some reason, going back and forth with the KVM when running Unity would sometimes freeze up the Windows computer. So when I saw someone on Fedora Planet running Unity Hub, I thought I’d see if there was a Flatpak - and there IS! Also, I’ve fallen in love with JetBrain’s Pycharm, so I thought I’d go ahead and use their game dev IDE, Rider. ( There’s a Flatpak for that, too!) So, let’s see how well this works!
This year I’ve added some narration to the video which is duplicated below for the hearing impaired. Below all that you’ll find my favorite video game of 2019!!
&feature=youtu.be
Stardew Valley: I was a big fan of Harvest Moon when it came out on the GameCube. My future wife and I spent way more time than we should have playing it instead of studying in college. When Stardew Valley first came out, it piqued my interest. Maybe it could scratch the same itch. But I was busy at the time so I put it off until this year when it was on Sale. I immediately loved the trip back to SNES-era graphics and the love and care that ConcernedApe obviously put into the game. As I advanced in the game, each new level of skills brought new fun to the game. It’s pretty easy to see why it has such a dedicated fan-base on its subreddit. I will say that I’m a little surprised when I see people on the subreddit who have farms that are way past year 3. There’s definitely a lot to do in Stardew Valley, but the biggest reason I haven’t finished (get to the end of year 2) is because I’ve reached a point where I essentially have infinite money and nothing else I truly want to buy - it’s the same thing that ended up killing Harvest Moon for my wife. Now, I *do* understand the replayability factor - there are many reasons for that, including the fact that there are 4 or 5 different maps which require different farm strategies. I hope sometime in 2020 to “finish” the game and maybe in late 2020 to start a new farm.
The sixth, and final, game of the Udemy class on Unity 2D was a tileset Metroid-Vania game which the instructors named Tilevania. I never played Metroid and maybe only played Castlevania once, but its legacy does persist in some newer games like Spelunky.
Tilevania in the Unity UI
This was the closest I’ve come to making a Mario clone. My favorite part of the development process was creating the tile editor rules that allows me to drag around the tiles for the foreground and have it automatically determine if it should be a grass piece, dark, or full of rocks. As usual with the games we used to learn concepts for the course, there is a lot left to do to make a fully-fledged game. I made note of a few items in the tickets on the Github page.
We learned a lot of techniques and reinforced even more, but the biggest thing I learned was how to do Sprite Sheet animation. Having done bone-based animation in Blender years ago, I have to say that in comparison, sprite sheet animation is easy-peasy. The tradeoff is less flexibility - you only have what your artist drew (or you bought or got for free online), but it essentially automates everything about animation.
The fourth game we worked on was another game that I spent a lot of my childhood playing. We made a Galaxian/Galaga clone:
Laser Defender - a Galaga Galaxian clone
My mom’s youngest brother had a Nintendo and lots of arcade ports. When I was young he lived in the condo above my grandmother’s condo and whenever we’d go visit her, I’d ask if I could visit him so we could play games. The game I loved playing the most there was Galaga because of the frantic pace.
My journey through 2D game development using the Unity engine continued with our third project: a clone of Brick Breaker or Arkanoid. In case you’ve never seen it before, this is Arkanoid:
Arkanoid
It’s got a pretty important legacy, Breakout, the version that Atari created, was an important stepping stone for the two Steves of Apple (Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak).
So it makes sense that this would be one of the games we would use on our learning journey. This is what my first level looks like:
I’ve been playing video games since I was somewhere around 5 or 6 years old and got a Nintendo Entertainment System for my birthday from one of my aunts. I also inherited a Tandy computer from my dad when I was younger. We had a bunch of edutainment games - like this Sesame Street game (that unfortunately a quick search on Google Images does not turn up) where you had to suck the Tweedles (bugs from Ernie’s flower box) to solve math problems. I also, and I’ve mentioned this before in several places on the net, learned to program from a book on BASIC and made myself a bunch of simple games, including Madlibs clones.
In 2018 I played a little more than double the amount of video games as I did in 2017. There are a few reasons for this. First of all, now that the twins are older I don’t have to watch them as diligently. I can’t be as off-hands as I was when it was just Scarlett at this age, but I can spend a little more time on my hobbies. Second, a pretty good chunk of that time (15 hours) was spent playing video games with Scarlett so it just took the place of other potential Father/Daughter projects. That said, with me bouncing around various hobbies, it doesn’t matter that I have more free time now because of the kids getting older because I’m splitting it over more tasks. As I write this I’ve really gotten back into programming. It’s all I think about in the pool and whenever I’m not doing it. So much so that I’m 3.5 months behind on organizing and editing my photos. This bouncing around between hobbies is something I’ve documented many times on this blog. It happened a lot throughout the year so there were times where I’d play games for tons of days in a row and then not play video games (other than my Civ VI multiplayer turns) for months. I’d legitimately forgotten about having played some of these games until I went back to compile the list for the year.
Scarlett drew this back in September when the kids were playing a lot of Spelunky. It’s interesting to see which parts of the game imprinted on her mind.
It was a pretty busy year for me in 2017 as I got more into cooking as the twins got older and I didn’t have as much time to myself. I felt I hadn’t nearly played as many games in 2016. But when I started gathering the stats, that’s when I realized just how much less I’d played. In 1016 I’d played 132 hours of video games compared to only 42 hours in 2017. And over half of that was in Civilization VI - once again proving to me that it’s the one game that’s worth spending my money on as I’ll always go back to it. Just writing this makes me itch to get back to the game.
Things are busier now, especially as the weather warms up and we begin to do more outside, so I’m switching from keeping track monthly to doing so quarterly.
What a year for gaming. I tried to take advantage whenever I could to get a chance to game and I was able to do a nice mix of newer and older games. I also made a bit of a dent in the list of games I got as part of a Humble Bundle. Well, let’s get into it.
Another five years passed and so and so another entry in the civilization franchise was released. This time they made what is probably the biggest change in the series thus far, they exploded the cities out onto multiple tiles. That really revamped the planning and for once I couldn’t just make every city make all the same improvements. I’ve enjoyed it and hope to get more time with it in 2017.
The latest iteration of this series I’ve been playing for the past 25 years was released and the changes have made the game more dynamic and, for the first time in the series, have really made it so that I can’t just do the same thing every game because of how much the terrain makes a difference. It’s been neat and with the reduced gameplay over the past two months, it’s displaced all over games.
Civilization III (15 minutes)
It came a bit later than I wanted it to, but I started playing Civ III in an attempt to play Civs III-VI between the end of September and the end of October when Civ VI comes out. (Unless things went horribly awry, it should be out by the time this post is published)
I decided to play a little more and work on creating an overlay that allows the game to be full screen while also still presenting my Extra Life information. After a of couple tries, I like where it ended up.
I thought this was just going to be a quick Eric Checks Out, but it turned out to get me really addicted to the point where I wish I was playing it every night before bed. Of all the rogue-likes I’ve played, I feel like this one gets the best mix of allowing you to die without it hurting too much.
I started off playing the same multi-player games we’ve been playing for years now. Then I heard Civ VI comes out this year and so that inspired me to play a solo game.
I just wanted to test how well it would work on my Linux computer with Steam Big Picture. For some weird reason, it didn’t work with the Xbox controller despite the fact that I was able to use the controller with Big Picture and with Poker Night 2 (at least when streaming from the Windows computer). It worked OK with the keyboard. Strangely the mouse was a bit offset from where it was clicking.
Proving the worth of Let’s Play videos to anyone on the publishing side who still doesn’t believe, when Dan first told me about Spelunky! it didn’t sound like something I’d enjoy. When I got around to watching Dan’s Let’s Play videos, I decided it was indeed something I’d enjoy. Five hours later….I’m still enjoying it - mostly because of the endless variety that comes from the walls that are constantly shifting.
By the time I was done with February I was nearly done with XCOM: Enemy Within. It was a fun revisit of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, but I think I’m done for a while. That’s a good thing since I hear that XCOM 2 has some beefy PC and graphics card requirements.
A quick thank you to the developers of OBS for adding the latest features in OBS Multiplatform 0.13.1. It was already a great platform, but with Studio Mode and video sources starting anew when going to a scene, it is near perfect for my use. All this by volunteers and for all three major OS platforms: Windows, Mac, and Linux! It is now extremely competitive against XSplit and competition among software devs always leads to better stuff for users!
Because I’ve staggered the publishing of new videos on Youtube, not all of them may be visible on the embeds in this blog post on the day it goes live. For example, I think I created 14 videos for Torchlight in January, but at the moment only 11 are live.
Torchlight (23 hours):
I decide to check out this spiritual successor to Diablo, having never played Diablo. It is a nice game to play after stressful day - just clicking on bad guys and traveling around without much thought.
One of the great things about Steam and the internet is the cloud save. It means that you can go from computer to computer and, as long as it’s connected to the Internet, you can pick up your game where you left off. In my case, I have a Windows computer and a Linux computer both capable of running games from Steam. I wanted to see how well XCOM was ported to Linux so I launched it and didn’t have any of my saves! It turns out that the saves are in a folder called SaveData on Windows and savedata on Linux. (In the path: ~/.local/share/feral-interactive/XCOM/XEW - remove XEW if it’s not Enemy Within) Those aren’t the same thing in Linux. So you need to delete the folder savedata and then make a symlink to SaveData where the symlink is savedata. Once you do that it works perfectly. To give credit where it’s due, here’s the forum post where I fond the info.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that all the digital stores would move in this direction, but I was surprised to see that GOG has come out with their version of Greenlight: Games in Development.
At least I can get Greenlight-quality games with DRM-free and if it completely sucks, I can get a refund.
I used to have a Team Fortress 2 server on CentOS 6 with Virtual Box. Now that I’m using KVM/QEMU/Libvirt, I wanted to set up a new one. Also, Valve somewhat changed how they worked a few years ago and I wanted a clean slate. I started with a VM with 40GB. It’s not supposed to take that much, but I remember last time it took much more than the 10GB I’d given the VM and I don’t want to have to increase the disk size again.
2015 turned out to be an incredible year for videos games for me. That’s a good thing because I was playing for the Extra Life charity to raise money for Johns Hopkins. I’d heard about it when the Giant Bomb guys spoke about it, but this year I had a reason - Johns Hopkins had saved Scarlett’s life twice! I’d experimented with recording myself playing video games when Dan started his Let’s Plays and used Camtasia. But there was no way I could justify paying $100 to record myself playing games. Then I discovered OBS which was, in typical FLOSS fashion, impossible to figure out. But then I found XSplit which had recently gone to having a freemium model. Once I learned what all the terminology was in XSplit I was able to go back to OBS - which I did because they actually catered to Linux in addition to Windows. The most fun moments have been when people have stepped into my Twitch or Youtube Gaming channels and chatted during the game. It brings back the social aspect that I grew up with back before everyone had internet.
I wanted to finish XCOM: Enemy Unknown before 2015 was over and I succeeded. Despite being screwed over by scripting errors in the big “dungeons”, I had a lot of fun with the game. The ending was slightly anti-climactic, but then again, this game only had the barest of storylines. I’d DEFINITELY play it again….once I finished going through the hundred or so unplayed games I already own.
There are many times that The Giant Bombcast or other video game podcasts have led me to discover games I wouldn’t have otherwise considered: Peggle, Saint’s Row the Third, Assassin’s Creed, and The Witcher. But there was one time they did me wrong: XCOM: Enemy Unknown. They made it sound like it was just an exercise in frustration in which you died at every turn and it since it was made by Firaxis, I thought it was just going to look like Civ. Nothing wrong with that, but I already had Civ. But Dan got an extra copy at some point and gifted me this one. It’s been a blast and I’ve loved playing it even as it has started to kick my butt as the difficulty ramps up. If I had more time, I’d be playing this game A LOT.
I’m a seasonal Team Fortress 2 player. Although I play it here and there at any time of year, I tend to really play a lot during October for the special Halloween missions. This year Valve was busy working on a new mode that was released earlier this week so they released a community-made Halloween mode: Invasion. It’s the first time I’ve spent any money since I spent $2.50 to get a bigger backpack a few years ago. Overall, the new modes were a lot of fun and I’m glad that Valve has gone from what should be the basic level of video game company support- supporting community mods- to allowing the best of the best to make money by sharing in the profits made during community events.
Yeah, so the first video I recorded in September is missing the video game footage. Whoops! Either way, I finished The Witcher this month. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned, this is another game I tried thanks to the Giant Bomb guys - specifically Vinnie. I thought the game was overall a lot of fun. I feel like the throughline of the story could probably have been done a little better. Even before I spent a couple months away from the game, I was only tenuously connected to how my actions were leading to anything being done other than being against the Salamandra. Still, the story was neat and the twist at the end was pretty crazy in a good way. I look forward to The Witcher 2, but I probably won’t get to it until 2016 due to some family stuff coming up over the next few months.
I’ve been dreaming (no foolin’) about this for two or more years now - having one computer running Linux with a Windows VM for gaming when there aren’t Linux ports. Less hardware overhead for me. But until now VMs haven’t been able to gain native use of the graphics card. This guy figured out how to do it and it’s great. I’m likely going to do this next time I do a CPU/Motherboard refresh.
The Witcher (3 hours): Finally had some time to get back to The Witcher. It definitely isn’t the type of game where you want to have long gaps between playthroughs. But there isn’t much I can do about it.
Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (30 minutes): Scarlett just asked me if we could play Sonic. So we tried to get past the third world for a while, but I kept slipping up.
I still love the innovation coming out of Valve (like their VR and controller work), but today I listened to the Beastcast Episode 2 and saw that Steam is implementing game refunds. This is something GOG has offered for quite some time now. It appears that GOG is starting to eat Valve’s lunch as it’s getting more Triple A games DRM-Free! I have no issues with Valve and I don’t consider them evil or anything hyperbolic, but here’s how healthy competition helps. Now Valve has to match GOG for refunds just as GOG has had to create GOG Galaxy to match the Steam client. I hope they continue to challenge each other in the market and create a good environment for us that is pro-consumer since digital has been anti-consumer for so long. (DRM, games/books/movies/etc being pulled without notice)
Yesterday I put in for the GOG Galaxy Beta and today I got my invite. I couldn’t wait to get home to see it in action. I did not bury the lead, it was exactly as I state in the title, A Good First Start. The settings are so minimal at this point that it doesn’t have any tabs:
GOG Galaxy - Settings
As you can see, many of the most exciting features are marked as coming soon. Still, it’s exactly as I hoped they’d do it. I meant to remark in my last blog post that I hoped they’d make the game pages just like their webpages. I find their webpages very, very useful. It’s less cluttered than Steam and brings the reviews to the fore. Let’s take a quick screenshot tour of the client. (I was going to do a screen capture video, but the client is so simple at this point that a few screenshots will do it justice)
If I mentioned it on this site, I wasn’t able to find it in a search because of the generic word, but I was very annoyed and pretty upset about EA’s Origin store and platform. Part of what I enjoy so much about playing PC games is that the only limitations on what you can run are based on OS and the power of your hardware. In the console world there are games exclusive to Playstation or Xbox and for the non-exclusive games I have to figure out (if I’m planning to game socially) which platform my friends and family are going to buy the game on. For PC games that’s not an issue. All games run on Windows and a greater and greater number run on Linux and OSX. Usually, no matter the OS, everyone can play together online.
Although I didn’t play as much on average, I did take advantage of one weekend to do a mini marathon in my Extra Life playing. It led to my biggest donation yet!
The Witcher (17 hours)
I’m still having fun playing this game, mostly due to the great dialogue writing. I’m at a point in the game where the main quest has narrowed to one path and it’s a little boring with their enforced seeming passage of time where I have to leave and then come back when someone says “I need to think about this”. There isn’t any real indication of when I’m supposed to go back. I’m itching for the story to pick up a bit.
Assassin’s Creed was the first game series Vinnie of Giant Bomb convinced me to try by talking about it endlessly on the Bombcast. The Witcher is the second. (This is why I miss his voice on that podcast so much) It has turned out to be a lot more fun than I thought it would. It’s based on the Bioware engine of the time, so it plays a lot like Mass Effect 1. The story is good so far and full of nice little jokes. You can watch my progress (I’ve been recording it for Extra Life) on this Youtube playlist.
Civilization V (30 minutes) - We got a few turns in our multiplayer games, but other important things (like planning weddings, perhaps) have kept my brothers from sending me new turns.
Pac-Man Championship Edition DX+ (38 minutes) - I got it as part of a Humble Bundle because eventually my PS3 will die or be remotely disabled. As I have just transferred my Steam library to a new hard drive (more about that in a future post), I’m more confident in my ability to be able to play these games for a long time. Played a bit on the last day of Februrary to test my new Xbox 360 for Windows controller. It’s still as much fun as I remembered.
Civilization: Beyond Earth (7 hrs): This game was a great evolution on Civ V. I enjoyed that they continued with the same sense of humor. I also thought they did a good job evolving things so that it felt different enough. It’ll probably take a few games before I get the hang of all the government options.
Super Mario Galaxy (1 hr): Just wanted to get past the opening section on my emulator so I could not have to repeat that silly story section again if I even want to play some SMG. Also wanted to test the USB sensor Dan got me for Christmas.
This year I did not play as many new games as in previous years. I was deep in my graduate degree and most of my free time was during work travel. Since I don’t have a powerful laptop (and Steam on Linux was just taking off early on this year anyway), most of that time was spent reading. Still, I did play some great games and still managed to log in quite a few hours.
Poker Night 2 (2 hrs) - Played with Danielle thanks to Steam in-house streaming. Also played alone to unlock some more skins.
Xenogears (1 hr) - After having wanted to play this for around 15 years, finally started. So far my best friend is getting married, I was raised by the Elder, and people fight with found ancient tech giant robots. The anime cutscenes are well animated, but the voice acting is flatter than a mathematical plane.
Civilization V (1 hr) - Dan, Dave, and I didn’t play too much because life got in the way and then the GMR servers went offline. We hope to play some more in the following month.
Poker Night 2 (30 minutes) - Testing out Steam’s internal streaming from Windows to Linux.
I still really love using Linux, but I don’t follow the Linux press like I used to. I’ve settled into a comfortable zone where I only follow Fedora and KDE news since that’s what I use. But I followed it very closely for nearly 10 years. Every year there’d be multiple articles asking whether this was the year of the Linux desktop, meaning people would finally see the Microsoft hegemony for what it was and throw off the shackles of proprietary software. It never came. Thanks to Ubuntu and Vista, we almost got there. Then there were the Netbooks, but the manufacturers chose horrible versions of Linux and underpowered machines and Microsoft came out with Windows 7 starter edition. And people went to Macs instead of Linux in the biggest tech comeback of … ever.
So…I doubt I’ll be getting a PS4 or any next gen system. I could get by with a Roku (or Google or Amazon or whoever streaming stick) and a laptop to stream my Steam games (if I want to play them on the big screen).
I noticed Dan was on my borders right when I started having the Cho Ku Nu, my special unit. Having played civ and RTS games with Dan, I figured it was strike or be struck. So I went to war. Unfortunately, Dan fights better than AI and because of the terrain features, it became a war of attrition that favored Dan. After a stalemate war, I offered peace and Dan accepted.
Poker Night 2 (3 hrs): Before going on my recent business trip I wanted to take a small break from school work so I played PN2 the night before my trip. I reached the point where I’ve heard all the in-game dialogue so many times that I don’t even listen any more. I can generally last a while, but I wasn’t able to win any tournaments. I usually got knocked out by the last man standing.
Civilization V (7 hrs): Met Dan in Mesa Bros; Waiting in Lefties Game
May:
Civilization V (11 hrs): More of the multiplayer games.
June:
Civ V (3 hrs): More multiplayer games.
Super Meat Boy (30 min): I played a few levels until it began to get too hard for me. It is a very well-designed game, but I was never that good at platformers. Really, I just stuck to Mario and Sonic growing up. The others were often too hard for me; at times even Mario and Sonic were too much. I don’t think I ever beat a Sonic game although with one of them (3 or S&K) I used to always get to the final Robotnick.
Only Civ this month as I’ve been focused on my semester work.
Civ V ( 29 hrs):
Mesa Bros:
It was my oldest game that didn’t yet have any war, but Germany broke the peace. In general, my style seems to be OK with AI warfare. Usually I can ramp up my units quickly enough to stave them off until they exhaust their units while I build up my army. However, I’ve noticed a slightly higher aggression rate in Civilization V compared to previous Civ games so I’ve started trying to keep my unit counts high enough that most civs won’t spontaneously attack me. Didn’t work with the Germans, but after rebuffing their first advance, I may be able to steal a city. Especially since right after they attacked I was able to upgrade my catapults to trebuchets. We’ll see how this goes because at a theoretical max of 30 turns per month (usually because of our schedules I can’t do more than one turn per day and some days we miss turns), I may or may not have finished attacking the first city before April’s up.
Skip to 28 seconds in. Sure, there are way too many Super Mario Brothers covers, but that theme is amazing as is seeing this performance of the theme on an ancient Chinese hyper flute. The instrument looks like something out of a science fiction movie.
Dido tried to be opportunistic and attack me while I was at war with the Celts. Now she is facing my wrath. I will not stop until she has been wiped off the map.
[caption id=“attachment_7750” align=“aligncenter” width=“480”] Poker Night 2[/caption]
Poker Night 2 (8 hrs) - I find Poker Night 2 to be a bit harder than the original. Not sure if they upped the AI or changed anything about it, but I find it a lot harder to win Texas Hold ‘Em in PN2. Luckily, this game also includes Omaha Hold ‘Em and I have been doing a lot better with that game. While I enjoy Samson, I find the Banter to be a little lacking compared to the original. I think the developers did a better job of defining the player’s relationships with each other in the previous game and that led to somewhat better banter. Still, it’s fun to play Poker without worrying about real money and it’s a lot of fun so I’ll probably put some more time into the game later in the year.
[caption id=“attachment_7243” align=“aligncenter” width=“604”] Civilization V - against Dave - Fighting Barbarians at the Gates - 2620 BC[/caption]
Civilization V (48.5 hrs): As is usually the case, spent a ton of time with Civilization this year. Played about 3.5 hours less than last year, but had way more fun by playing with Dan and Dave. Things have gone a little slower recently because we’ve all been away for the holidays, but I actually feel like there’s a good chance of us finishing the game. At least the one I have with Dave which is much further along.
Civilization 5 (5 hours): Still haven’t caught up on the blog posts. Still entirely consists of games with Dan and Dave. Dan gifted me the latest expansion pack during the Winter Steam Sale, so I may fire up a solo game. Time will tell - I still have a ton of indie games from Humble Bundles and even games Dan gave me for my birthday last year like LA Noire.
Skullgirls (<1hr): This game is a ridiculous fighting game that doesn’t take itself too seriously when it comes to the story. It’s a return to the fun of fighting games of the 1990s. At the same time, the mechanics of gameplay are no joke - we’ve been in a fighting game renaissance for the past five years or so and this game does not ignore that. I played it during a Steam free weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it. If I had the time to dedicate to a fighting game, I’d buy it in an instant. If you enjoy games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, but think they’re a bit too self-serious, this game should definitely be checked out. Also, if you’re into anime (and I think there’s a lot of overlap between these groups), there’s a lot of poking fun at tropes of both fighting games an anime.
[caption id=“attachment_7503” align=“aligncenter” width=“480”] Back to the Future: The Video Game - The Pseudonym Fun of the series continues[/caption]
Back to the Future: The Video Games (5 hrs) - As is the usual situation with these types of games, I figured out I had to get to the 1920s about 2 hours before I had triggered the right series of events that would allow me to get there. Got to see the sense of humor of the writers as I ended up meeting the high school principle’s sister who’s just as crotchety as he is. Apparently Doc is in trouble for starting a fire. Other than that I don’t know much as I wasn’t able to play very much of the game beyond the first 1920s scene with the principle’s sister.
Civilization V (8 hours) - Keep following the tags ( Civ V: Lefties and Civ V: Mesa Bros ) or check out my Saturday posts (although this week I didn’t have one)
LIMBO (3 hours) - Here is my review of the game up to what I finished in September:
The order in which I play games is sometimes a little unnecessarily complicated. I’m often balancing many different variables when determining the next game to play. This time it was the fact that I wanted to listen to the LIMBO soundtrack. I’d obtained it as part of the Humble Bundle that gave me the game and because soundtracks can sometimes spoil plot elements, I didn’t want to listen to it until I’d played the game. The rest of this review will contain spoilers. The game is about 3 years old now, but if you want to play this game, go play it before you read anything about it.
[caption id=“attachment_7342” align=“aligncenter” width=“604”] Civ 5 - Against Dave - Choosing Meritocracy[/caption]
Once again we made a choice to go with a new guiding principle in our governance. This time it was Meritocracy. By rewarding those who do the best work, our citizens become happier.
[caption id=“attachment_7347” align=“aligncenter” width=“604”] Civ 5 - Against Dave - Trade Route[/caption]
If I may step out of the fictional narrative mode I’ve been using for a few weeks now, I have to say that it’s a shame these two games are my first Civ games in somewhere between 6 months and a year. Unfortunately, I didn’t listen to my brain for the first half dozen or so turns in which I wondered what in the world this Chinese-specfic building the “Paper Maker” was. Although, in my recollection, Civ IV also had the Cho Ku Nu for the Chinese Unit, it had Pagodas or some other either cultural or happiness producing building. It was only after being annoyed for Civ V not allowing me to see what it does while loading (I thought one of the older Civ games did allow you to hover over the special units and buildings to see what they do) that I went onto the Civ V Wikia during my lunch break. To quote the Bluth family, “I’ve made a huge mistake.” It’s meant to give the Chinese a huge early science boost that would help me not only combat the fact that I’m up in the arid north, but also would help me get a head start on Wonders. (I never have problems with Wonders when I’m only playing with AI, but my brothers often make it to the Wonders before me) Luckily for me, the game in which I have the biggest challenge - Dan and Dave - is also the slowest-going. So I’ve wasted less turns doing the wrong thing in that game than I have in the game with Dave.
[caption id=“attachment_7211” align=“aligncenter” width=“493”] Civilization 5 - against Dave - people from ancient ruins join the Chinese Empire - 3220 BC[/caption]
One of the ancient ruins explored by our soldiers had a group of uncivilized survivors. Seeing the awesome nature of our forces convinced them it would be in their best interest to join the Chinese Empire. Their extra labor was quite welcome.
[caption id=“attachment_7110” align=“aligncenter” width=“604”] Civilization V game against Dave - 4000 BC[/caption]
Civilization V (31 hrs) - I’ve been playing with Dan and Dave via Giant Multiplayer Robot. You can follow posts about the game with Dave here. You can follow the posts about the game with Dan and Dave here. There will be a long overlap between those two, however, the one with Dave started a few weeks earlier and should finish earlier.
[caption id=“attachment_7159” align=“aligncenter” width=“604”] Civilization 5 against Dave - 3460 BC - Ancient Ruins[/caption]
The first group of warriors we went out have reported back to me that they have found some ancient ruins. I have instructed them to search these ruins in the hopes that they will find the secrets of an ancient civilization or perhaps the remnants of some ancient civilization that may wish to join the Glorious Chinese Empire. These ruins are within a dense forest so it is no wonder they have been lost to time. The timber should prove useful as the empire grows. We have begun preparations for expanding the empire to a second city, but with how amazing our Empire is, it will take a while to have all the supplies ready. In the meanwhile we continue to explore this land.
[caption id=“attachment_7140” align=“aligncenter” width=“604”] Civilization V against Dave - 3700 BC[/caption]
As I continue exploring, I discover that I have a City-State to the South. That’s going to put a damper on my expansion south unless I destroy them. Also, if they end up best buds with someone else that’s an enemy on my doorstep. They may be the first casualty of living near the Great Chinese Empire! I’m now beating Dave by one point! Yes! Even when I play on my own, I tend to use the last turn to queue up all my production so I don’t have to remember what my plans were. That’s extra important when I’m playing 1-2 turns per day. So I finally got around to that in this game.
[caption id=“attachment_7124” align=“aligncenter” width=“604”] Civilization V game against Dave - 3760[/caption]
I had my KVM set to the wrong computer so I accidentally fortified my warrior on the first turn. I didn’t realize this when the second turn started (getting used to playing hot seat) so he sat around for a turn. I started moving him around and discovered that I seem to be in a resource-rich area. This is good for me in the early game as the marble will allow me to build some buildings more quickly and the gold (bottom left of the screenshot) will allow me to build more buildings before I go into debt. The dyes will be good in the mid-early game by helping my citizens be happier and giving me something to potentially trade with the AIs. I think I know where I want to put my next city, but it’s going to be quite some time before I can do that, unless my production picks up when my city grows. Speaking of that, my city will reach a size 2 population in one turn, woohoo! I assume Dave’s in a higher-growth area and that’s why he has a higher score than me - either that or he has a civilization with a high culture rate and has already expanded the culture zone around his city.
Ever since the play by email (PBEM) feature in Civilization IV, I’ve tried to play multiplayer games with my brothers. It’s pretty ridiculous in this day and age that Civilization has Nintendo-level abysmal support for asynchronous play. The games often take 40 hours to complete solo and even longer when playing live so asynchronous play is the only way that makes sense to play a game.
This time around there’s a website called Giant Multiplayer Robot to handle passing the files around. Before I’d run a program with Civ IV to make it work more easily than emailing the games around, but GMR makes it extremely easy. You just install its client and authenticate with Steam. Then it lets you know when you have a turn to play.
Assassin’s Creed: Revelations (4 hrs) - I finally started playing Ass:Rev nearly 7 months after I got it as a gift. I’d been putting off playing it because it’s a lot easier for me to play computer games at night than it is to play with the Playstation at night. I was able to play 2 two hour sessions over two subsequent weekends. I’m….just not quite as into Assassin’s Creed as I was after completing Brotherhood. The gameplay and story elements were a huge jump from the first to the second installment. Even Brotherhood brought along the new play style involving your recruited assassins. Revelations just isn’t quite as innovative. It’s not a huge shock since the series was annualized; there was no way for Ubisoft to continue the pace of innovation. Still, the story of Abstergo and how the Templars were affecting everything in society was a fun tale. I loved solving the puzzles in AC2 and Brotherhood that had such creepy moments as when someone called about seeing his vitals in his cable channels and then his implied death.
Costume Quest (7 hours) - I completed the main Costume Quest and then continued on to the DLC. The game continued to be charming and I enjoyed playing it as well as the simple story arc of the brother and sister realizing they didn’t hate each other that much. Gameplay-wise the game is not too forgiving when you make a mistake. There aren’t any items to use for healing so any mistakes in the Mario RPG-like mechanics (hitting a button on a certain timing to empower your attack or reduce an attack against you) could lead to losing an encounter quite quickly. I think it took me about 5-8 tries on the final boss of the main game to get just the right combination of add-ons (which increase HP or allow you to retaliate when hit) and costumes to make it through to the end. It also doesn’t help that the enemies appear to level up with you. That is to say, if there’s enemy X at the beginning of the game and you come up against him later, he has more HP and hits harder. That’s a bit different than the mechanic used in most of the Squaresoft RPG games I played in my youth. That said, there aren’t really any consequences to losing a fight. As far as I can tell, you don’t even lose candy when you lose a fight. You just end up right where you were before and you have another chance to start the encounter again or move away to change the costume equipped.
Quantum Conundrum (3 hrs) - I started playing the game early this year. I really, really enjoy this game, but the imprecision of the moves really bugs me. I’ve been playing it with a keyboard and mouse, does anyone know if it plays better with a control? I keep dying because I go too far in my jumps and it’s annoying when I’ve figured out the puzzle but keep dying because of platforming issues. In other words, when I play Sudoku I don’t fail because my pen lands in the wrong box when I try to write a number. The thrill of the game is solving the puzzles. I enjoy teasers and, while I admit I sometimes have to use a guide to solve the puzzle, I always try really hard to see if I’ve considered all the possible ways to use the game’s elements to solve the puzzle. I don’t know if the game is evenly balanced, but I think there are three halls and I’ve finished one of them. But I spent around 30 minutes of of the three hours this month trying to get through a puzzle I’d solved but I kept falling to my death. So I put completion of the game on hold to play other games. I may not ever finish this one. We’ll see.
[caption id=“attachment_6344” align=“alignleft” width=“478”] Chell from Portal[/caption]
Gender is a pretty interesting concept when it comes to video games. Putting aside “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, video games are unique in that the players are active in constructing the narrative. Some games, like puzzle games don’t REALLY have a narrative (but that doesn’t mean my brothers and I didn’t come up with the “story” behind what was going on in Tetris - paragraph seven) But the rest have stories and put the play on a spectrum from games like Mario to games like Mass Effect and all the way to the The Sims franchise in which you have complete control of the narrative through player agency over all the characters in the house. (See here, here, and here) As the player plays, the player takes the character’s story onto him or herself. This is at least partially the rational for the dearth of female protagonists. Everyone “knows” that not only are all the gamers male, but they also couldn’t stand the idea of playing as a female. Off the top of my head the only top tier female protagonists I can think of are Laura Croft and the girl from Heavenly Sword. There’s also Samus Aran, but that’s also a bit of a cheat since she’s nearly always armored and the reveal that she was a woman was one of video games’ first huge reveals. But I know this is untrue - at least among the video game aficionados I know. Dan, members of the Giant Bomb Squad, and others who write about games online played Mass Effect as a female Shepard. Ryan or Jeff (or both, I can’t remember) of Giant Bomb plays as a female every time a video game gives him the option.
It is a fact of life that things will be bootlegged. (commonly called pirated, but this is one area where I strongly agree with rms. Piracy is a horrible thing where people get kidnapped on the ocean and die. I have in-law relatives who have died from pirates. So I don’t find it cute to compare that with people who acquire things without paying for them) We usually think of digital items, but go to Chinatown in New York and you’ll see the same thing going on with physical objects. So what’s a company to do? My least favorite route is digital restrictions management (DRM) because it just makes things a real pain in the butt for legitimate users. (It also makes criminals of people who just want to rip their DVDs and BluRays to their laptops or media centers) My favorite tactic (which works best with games, but I’ve seen it with music and movies), is to mess with the person who didn’t pay for it. I’ve seen games that are extremely mean about it (mean being in the eye of the beholder since these people didn’t pay for the game) where they make it so that the final bad guy is unbeatable (after all those hours!). Others glitch out halfway through. Game Dev Tycoon developer Greenheart Games was able to use the subject of their game (in which you’re a game developer - META!) to come up with a unique solution. On the same day the game came out, they started a torrent with a slightly modified version of the game. It works just like the paid version for a while. Then you get this message from your developers:
In addition to the game I played this month, I’ve decided from now on to include a running total of the top games to see if/how they change with time. For example, when I wasn’t paying attention, Saints Row: The Third made the Top 7. (Which, raptr, is a weird number. Usually these things are multiples of five)
[caption id=“attachment_5996” align=“aligncenter” width=“480”] Elites have some NICE houses in Cities XL[/caption]
I am really, really enjoying building up my city. There are new zoning densities that open up as you get more and more populous. For a while I was using a strategy similar to what’s going on in my in-law’s neighborhood - raze the single family homes to build apartments. Then later raze those to build sky-rises. But then I abandoned that for suburban sprawl since the map was so huge. As most people (I think) do in these city simulation games, I started off with an area similar to what happens in real life. In order to keep taxes low, you don’t want long roads separating your citizens from their jobs. So the first residential area is kinda dingy and exists near some really dirty industrial manufacturing. So I decided to build a nicer part of town, with more parks and cleaner air, across the river. However, they still needed to get to work, so traffic started building up on the bridge. So I had to make another and another and…..
[caption id=“attachment_5941” align=“aligncenter” width=“480”] Saints Row: The Third - End Credits[/caption]
Saints Row: The Third (3 hrs) - I finished Saint’s Row: The Third in March. Overall, my enjoyment suffered a bit from a lack of play, but it was necessary due to planning for Scarlett’s birthday and starting a new semester of my graduate work. In the final mission you’re given a choice of pursuing Killbane or saving Shaundi. Angel de la Muerte asks you to go after Killbane because of their personal relationship, but I went after Shaundi because I thought that’s what my character would have done - he goes back with Shaundi way further than with Angel. Also, I was reading a walkthrough to help me get through the last mission as quickly as possible and (which influenced me to upgrade to the point where I could summon tanks and helicopters). So I knew I’d face off with Killbane in the Ganstas in Space DLC. The mission was awesome with “I need a hero” playing in the background as I raced to save her. It’s the perfect song for looping without getting annoying. But I felt the ending was way too anti-climactic. There isn’t even any fallout from Angel for having not chosen to pursue Killbane. Then I got to Gangstas in Space. The walkthrough I’d been reading didn’t mention it was essentially the movie the Third Street Saints were in. (I think it was mentioned throughout the game, but I’d forgotten) So while I DID faceoff with Killbane, it wasn’t a true battle.
[caption id=“attachment_5961” align=“aligncenter” width=“480”] My Cities XL Region - 1 city with 75 thousand residents[/caption]
I first played Cities XL in May of 2011. I last played a year ago in April 2012. At the time I said I couldn’t wait until Sim City came out. However, we know what a fiasco that has become. So, discouraged about playing Sim City I decided to load up Cities XL. This is the first one - not 2011, 2012, or Deluxe. The graphics are pretty amazing and rival anything in the current Sim City.
[caption id=“attachment_5858” align=“aligncenter” width=“480”] Saint’s Row: The Third - Playing with Dan - the only way I could beat this mission[/caption]
Saint’s Row: The Third (15 hrs) - I played a lot of fun missions, including Deckers.die, but in order to get there I had to get Dan’s help on this helicopter escort mission. It was fun having him join in. I might need him in March as I finish up the game.
First of all, a quick reminder that my Game of the Year doesn’t necessarily have to come out in 2012. Because I don’t have the time to dedicate to video games, the price premium of buying it new rarely makes sense to me. So my Game of the Year will be my favorite game that I played in 2012.
As I compiled my list I realized that I played a lot less games in 2012. I may not have played a lot less hours (I haven’t bothered comparing the totals with 2011), but I definitely had a lot less variety. A lot of that has to do with the birth of my daughter this year. Only as the year has gone on have I been able to carve out some time here and there to play story-based games. In addition, I resumed pursuing my master’s degree in the fall, right around the time I was able to have a bit more time to myself. I didn’t have any gameplay at all in March, September or October.
[caption id=“attachment_5805” align=“aligncenter” width=“480”] Saint’s Row The Third: The Ho Boat[/caption]
Saint’s Row the Third (14 hrs): I got a lot of video games for my birthday and Christmas (mostly on Steam). So I wanted to finish up the last narrative game I had started before playing those games. I played a few missions in Saint’s Row The Third. As I had surmised before, the loose narrative based mostly on archetypes and stereotypes made it extremely easy to jump in. It wasn’t like in Mass Effect or Final Fantasy 10 where I couldn’t remember why I should be caring about these characters. The missions with the VTOL planes (STAG missions) were pretty hard.
Civilization V (17 hrs) - I took advantage of the Steam Fall Sale to finally pick up the Gods and Kings expansion to Civ V. I have enjoyed founding my own religion, Otakuism. Religion plays a much more key role than they did in Civ IV. In the previous game, I would pretty much just found a religion because each city would pay me gold (with certain buildings or government choices) and I’d get a window into cities. In Civ V the religion plays like another level of policies. You get to choose a series of attributes for your religion such as temples giving you gold or faster territory expansion. It tends to make the expansion of religion to other cities and civs a much more important task than before. I’m still a little unsure of how cities pressure other cities to adopt religion because I seemed to have one city flipping even though I couldn’t see any reason for it. (Could have been another civ sending prophets my way) Spies are also added. The spy missions remind me of Assassin’s Creed:Brotherhood assassin missions. Unlike previous iterations of Civ, the spies aren’t on the map. You assign them to a city or city-state and then they either steal you tech (which may not be useful if you’re super advanced and/or playing normal or easier), rig elections in city states (gaining you influence), or protect your cities from being screwed over by other spies. I must admit that I haven’t done much investigating in the civclopedia, but I can’t really see how to generate more spies and so the whole system seems like a mini-game diversion. I continued my strategy of non-aggression unless another civ attacks me or denounces me. Then I drop my hammer on them and take over their capital city and, sometimes, eliminate them entirely. I like that the requirements on resources for building some units has been reconfigured. I usually ended up not using a lot of early-game siege weapons because iron tended to be too scarce. I think it’s a lot more balanced on which units need resources like oil, iron, and horses than before the expansion pack.
[caption id=“attachment_5709” align=“aligncenter” width=“400”] Final Fantasy VII on pcsx-r[/caption]
Recently I was putting away my old video game systems into deep storage. The Playstation 2 hadn’t been played in a year and I didn’t want to clutter up my entertainment console with unused systems. So I started exploring the emulation landscape on last generation’s systems. Would I be able to play last generation’s games on my computer if it tickled my fancy? It turns out that, at least for Playstation 1 and 2, they work just as well as on the system for all the games I own. When I first discovered emulators, I used them to play Chrono Trigger in the high school library when I was bored. When I went back to them in college, it was to play arcade games from my childhood on MAME.
[caption id=“attachment_5677” align=“aligncenter” width=“480”] The Walking Dead video game[/caption]
The Walking Dead (14 hours) - I played the latest episode of The Walking Dead. Because you can’t just save wherever you want, I ended up with 14 hours of playtime. I still haven’t finished episode 4.
I started a new feature over on Dan’s blog since his blog is so focused on video games. It’s called You Never Forget Your First Time and it’s about reliving the first moments with a game. The first entry is here.
[caption id=“attachment_5592” align=“alignleft” width=“480”] Saints Row: The Third - My Engineer Mask[/caption]
Team Fortress 2 (5 hrs) - a lot of this time was spent testing out my new private server which I described setting up in this post.
Civilization V (1 hr) - played a little bit in the game I’m documenting at onemoreturn.ericsbinaryworld.com . Been too busy to play much more than that.
I first heard about virtual machines about six to seven years ago. I couldn’t see a point in wanting to run another computer inside your computer. A few years ago I used VMs to test and blog about Linux distros. In the past year I’ve used it to preview new features in Fedora while the next version was in beta. This week I used them in the most useful way yet: to test server software before implementing them on my public, paid server. These were some of easiest installs I’ve ever done - even easier than Wordpress’ famous Five Minute Install.
[caption id=“attachment_5589” align=“aligncenter” width=“480”] The Walking Dead - “Oh, FL…..too often the butt of jokes”[/caption]
The Walking Dead (7 hrs) - I had no reason to play this game. I like point and click adventure games, but I don’t read The Walking Dead or watch the TV show. I don’t really care much for zombie games although I’m not opposed to them. But the same was on sale during the Steam Summer Sale and Dan bought it for me. This is a really, really good game. While you can probably really appreciate it if you’re a fan of the comic or TV show, I’m enjoying it without the need to know anything about what happens in that fiction. I think is easily accomplished because the game serves as a prequel to the comic (and, by extension, loosely a prequel to the tv show as well). So I don’t need to really know anything or have unnecessary character exposition to set up the world. You’re playing as the zombie apocalypse happens.
Civ V (11 Hrs) - talk of the expansion pack made me want to play some more Civ. I played a scenario and then I played a regular game. I had a blast and I can’t wait to buy the expansion pack.
Peggle Deluxe (5 hrs) - Worked on some of the challenge puzzles
Team Fortress 2 - (3 hrs) - played when the Pyro pack came out. Really enjoyed the new mode.
Got a little bit of time to play games while waiting to do midnight feeds. I’ve already spoken about these games a bunch of times, so it’s going to be a short post.
Civilization V (2 hrs)
Team Fortress 2 (2 hrs)
Cities XL (1 hr) - fun, but I can’t wait for Sim City 5 to come out!
[caption id=“attachment_5482” align=“aligncenter” width=“480” caption=“Mass Effect 2 Space Graves”] [/caption]
Mass Effect 2 (19 hrs) - I knew my wife was getting close to delivering our first child, so I was rushing as quickly as I could to save the galaxy. I got to it with one week to spare. Phew! I didn’t enjoy the story as much as Mass Effect 1, but the gameplay was orders of magnitude better. For one thing I didn’t have to worry about having too many guns. (A frequent problem in the first entry) I also enjoyed the characters a little more (some of them, anyway). I ended up doing a lot more side missions and I felt they were well designed. If too much time doesn’t pass between when I finished the game and when I get free time to blog, I’ll do a writeup on Mass Effect 2 and how I liked it vs the first one. However, it would mostly be a long-winded version of what I said above and with the baby…. well, don’t hold your breath.
There aren’t any new games on here, so I’m only going to mention some quick comments on each.
Plants vs Zombies (29 hrs) - threw a bunch of hours into this game because I just had a handful of achievements left and for some reason I wanted to finish it off. 2 or 3 to go
Civilization V (9 hrs) - still love this game. I wish I had more time for it
[caption id=“attachment_5231” align=“alignleft” width=“150” caption=“A new level in Bastion”] [/caption]
While I’m not some video game hipster that doesn’t enjoy the Triple-A games, I have found myself increasingly having my most compelling game experiences on games created by indie or small studios. I think this is because indie studios are no different from starups, indie bands, and indie film makers in their willingness and ability to explore risky and new ideas. I felt the same way about Braid when I played it in 2009 as I do about Bastion this year.
Civilization V (75 hrs) - What can I say about this game that I haven’tsaidalready? This is the series that made “One More More Turn…” famous and it still works today. If I were to start a game tonight, I would not go to bed at a reasonable time.
With school over I had plenty of time to get back into video games last month. I had a blast!
Team Fortress 2 (6 hrs) - Got back into this game because my brother-in-law wanted to play it. I’d forgotten how awesomely fun it is to play this game!
Plants vs Zombies (5 hrs) - I wanted a quick game of fun so I went after some achievements in PvZ. I also found this game to be a blast.
For people of my generation (and the younger ones of the previous one) video games are cultural phenomenon no less important to the way our brains work than books, music, or movies. So it’s no surprise that our music, which has been inspired by books and movies in the past is now being inspired by video games. What was surprising to me were all the different manifestations this inspiration has taken.
[caption id=“attachment_4997” align=“aligncenter” width=“400” caption=“Saren is not a believer”] [/caption]
Sorry I took so long to get to this. My last post had me finding out that the Reapers were actually the most ancient species I’ve heard about until now. And after my face off with Saren on Virmire, I thought I’d have to chase him to Ilos to finish the game. But, nope, I was able to do whatever I wanted. This was kinda weird timeline-wise, but I already discussed the disconnect that makes you realize this is a game last time around.
For those who are new readers, I’m keeping track of the games I’m playing monthly (via Raptr) and then writing a little blurb on the games. This is in prep for my year-end blog post.
Team Fortress 2 (4 hrs) – I continue to really enjoy this game. I think of all of non-story-based games I have, this one has one of the fastest completion times for a single game. Civilization 5 can take me a week or longer to finish. And my other games fall somewhere between these two. (With a few exceptions like Pacman CE DX)
Last time I blogged about Mass Effect, I had just finished up with a planet where a plant was controlling everyone. After that I did my first real tour of my ship to go talk to all the people who had joined my crew. I got to sneak up on Ash talking to her sister and learned she had a crush on me. I decided to nip that in the bud because I found her personality annoying compared to Liara. I also found out about her background. She was religious, but I wonder if Christianity has survived in the Mass Effect world or it’s something similar to that.
Mass Effect (2 hrs) - Dan tells me that if I don’t go for the optional quests, I could be near the end. After the next major story beat I’m probably going to write up my next Mass Effect blog post. I’m really enjoying the fiction.
Team Fortress 2 (60 hrs) - I didn’t think I’d ever enjoy playing this game. I am not an FPS person. But it recently went free to play so I figured “why not?” I started playing the game and it’s every bit as fun and funny as the “Meet the X” videos. It’s a lot of fun to formulate the strategies for the game. I’m still learning a lot about that. And just when you think you know what to do, there are the extra weapons you earn for getting certain achievements. They don’t throw off the balance because they give with one hand and take with the other. The Heavy’s gun Natasha, for example, has a higher chance of critical hits, but it takes longer to spin up.
Just one game this month, it’s been quite a busy month for me!
[caption id=“attachment_4589” align=“aligncenter” width=“480” caption=“Walking Around in Mass Effect”] [/caption]
Mass Effect (8 hours) - This is a great game that I’d heard about for a long time, but never got around to playing. A recent Steam sale made it cheap enough for me to give it a try and I’m really enjoying it. I’m writing about my playthrough and you can read the first part here and the second part here.
Sometimes I think what I want is Mass Effect: The Laserdisc game. I love the story and I love the Codex entries. Just getting completely engrossed in the Mass Effect world. What I don’t enjoy is the fighting. This isn’t because I’m bad at it. My cover-based shooter noob days are long behind me with Uncharted 1. But the story’s so awesome and sometimes I have to wait hours between story beats while I fight my way through the Geth. That gets old pretty quickly.
Portal 2 (3 hrs) - finished multi-player game with Dan. That game is AWESOME. I was only bummed that the puzzles never truly got hard. There were only 3 (max!) that left Dan and I scratching out heads for a long time. Perhaps they wanted to make sure everyone finished the story events and so they didn’t make it hard. Or maybe they had as hard a thinking with four portals as we did when we were first getting used to it. I can’t wait for the DLC as I hope we get some more challenges. Heck, we didn’t even have any white gel in the multi-player games.
[caption id=“attachment_4589” align=“aligncenter” width=“480” caption=“Walking Around in Mass Effect”] [/caption]
I recently bought Mass Effect in a Steam sale that knocked the price of Bioware’s RPG to $5. Thanks yet again to the guys at the Giant Bombcast (seriously, this is the second or third I’ve bought because of them and fourth or fifth from podcast recommendations), I’d wanted to play the game, but was waiting for a sale price since I have tons of other games I haven’t even started yet. Having finished Final Fantasy X and the single player mode of Portal 2, I started on Mass Effect.
note: this game came out ten years ago, so I’m going to speak about spoilers freely
I finished Final Fantasy X a few weeks ago. I’d started playing it a long time ago, but the horrible voice acting grated on my nerves and I stopped playing. But, as I was making a list of games I owned but hadn’t completed, I decided to give Final Fantasy X another shot. And I ended up getting sucked into a story that I enjoyed for its uniqueness. Final Fantasy VI and VII are essentially the exact same story. In fact, the reason I have always been mystified about the love for Final Fantasy VII is that Final Fantasy VI did the same thing with a larger cast and more emotion. And Final Fantasy IX was essentially a love letter to Final Fantasy fans full of inside jokes and references. Final Fantasy X is, to borrow a phrase from The Giant Bombcast, a Japanese-ass game.
There was a time when I loved video games. I subscribed to EGM and EGM2. I trolled the nascent World Wide Web looking for video game news. I read IGN religiously. The most powerful systems out there were the Nintendo 64 and the Playstation. Then I discovered girls and dropped the subscriptions. Most of the video games of that time period were still very arcade-y in nature. Or they were platformers like Mario or Tomb Raider that had the flimsiest excuse for a plot. Yo, the princess got kidnapped again. Run through a bunch of levels to get to her. No exposition or reason for anything going on. You just needed to complete these tasks to unlock the final boss fight. Of course, games were starting to have cut scenes between levels to keep the narrative going. And I remember the great FMV flame wars that caused. Were you just working to unlock expository videos? This was better than the Mario case, but there was still just a small correlation between what you were doing to get through the level and what was going on in the story. The biggest exception was the movie tie-in game, but those tended to have gameplay elements that were full of suck.
It’s been a little over a year, so I wanted to make a new, updated list of the podcasts I’m currently listening to. For shows I covered before, I’m just going to copy the description over, verbatim.
Science
The Naked Scientists - This has nothing to do with nudity. It’s a British thing, like The Naked Chef. This great British radio show covers science topics equivalent to what you’d read in Discover Magazine in the USA. It’s informative while being entertaining, and I learn a lot every week. (Approx 1 hour long)
Final Fantasy X (36 hrs) - I started playing this game again to get away from computer games. It was hurting my back to sit at the computer. I could just stand in the guest room, where the PS2 is. I hadn’t played for months or maybe even a year, but I hadn’t gone that far in the game, so I wasn’t too lost. (Unlike when I finished FF7 and didn’t even remember what the point was) I’m still not done, but it’s already knocked Assassin’s Creed II from long-time position as my #6 most played game raptr. It’s already taken me longer than Final Fantasy IX. There’ll be a review once I finish. I’m so close, but the final boss keeps kicking my butt. I may need to do some more grinding.
If I have to sum up Portal 2 in one word: brilliant! I really enjoyed the first Portal a lot. The sense of not knowing what’s going on and GLaDOS’ obvious demented nature made for a dark video game the likes of which I’d never experienced. It was an artform as much as any other movie or book. And the puzzles were great fun and really got my brain going. But I wasn’t hooked. In fact, there was a two year gap between when I started and finished the game.
Civ 5 (70 hrs) - In March I fired up Civilization V for the first time since 16 Nov 2010. What was the catalyst? My wife asking what happened to all the enthusiasm for the game when it first came out. Well, as I’ve mentioned before, right after I got the game I played it for a week straight. Then I went on vacation to the Grand Canyon, to NYC for Halloween, had Thanksgiving and Christmas at my house, and a stronger focus on my webcomic. Her question reminded me of how much I loved the Civilization franchise. So I started playing and was reminded of why I loved it so much. It took me most of the first game to get back into the groove with Civ 5’s new quirks, but I really appreciated the improvements to AI. Civ V is now my most played game with 117 hours. (Finally surpassing Civ 4) Most of that time was added in March as I got sick and spent a few days home. The achievements in Civ 5 really played a key role in keeping me interested over so many hours. I did things I never would have done in order to get those achievements and now I have a much better understanding of how best to use those Civilizations.
Again, just a small blog post to document the video games I played with throughout the year to make it easier to do a recap at the end of the year.
Assassin’s Creed II (30 min) - I booted this sucker up to get some of the easy trophies I’d missed while playing the game like the Red Light District and Ivory and Ebony trophies. Reviewed it here
Assassin’s Creed: Brootherhood (30 min) - I wanted to see what the online gaming portion of this game was like. Discovered one of the things you give up when playing games long after they come out is that it’s harder to play online. It took a long time for the servers to find people to put into our games. The games were fun. It’s very hard to hide and act like an NPC and also kill people so it’s a fun challenge. Not fun enough to get me addicted, though. Previously reviewed here
This game that’s been capturing nearly all my free time in February was an impulse buy. At $10 I might have passed it up, but in a midweek sale it was $5 and I decided it looked interesting enough to pick up. This is a great example of what I spoke about here with respect to getting more people to buy a digital good by putting it on sale even if they don’t have shelf space to clear. Part of what drew me to the game was the decidedly retro-futuristic art style. It gives the game a very unique set of visuals. The 1920-40s music (I’m not 100% sure which decade) also helps add to the atmosphere.
This is just a mini blog post I’m going to try and remember to do monthly to keep track of the games I played to make it easier to tally up for the end of the year “Games of 2011” blog post.
Assassin’s Creed II - 27 hours
Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood - 25 hrs
blogged about them here and here.
The Secret of Monkey Island - 4.5 hrs
blogged about it here.
Greed Corp - 8 hrs
An awesome little game I bought on Steam on a whim during a mid-week sale. More to appear about this game in the future.
[caption id=“attachment_4108” align=“aligncenter” width=“400” caption=“Assassin’s Creed II (photo by SingleBuilder)”] [/caption]
Back at the beginning of January, I compared the first and second installments in the Assassin’s Creed main line of games. A couple weeks ago I finished up Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, a continuation of Desmond and Ezio’s stories. I don’t have too much more to add to what I wrote about the second game before. For the most part, I feel the same about it as before. The ending was pretty awesome. It took what you learned about the pieces of Eden from the first game and turned it to 11. Reading through TVtropes, I learned that I missed out on a bit of backstory in the first game by not getting on the Abstergo computer. The same could easily happen if you don’t do the optional Subject 16 puzzles in Assassin’s Creed II. As someone who LOVE getting into a game’s universe/backstory I’m a bit miffed that these bits are so optional. On the one hand, it’s great for those who don’t give a crap about the backstory and just want to assassinate some dudes. But it’s really easy to miss how epic the game really is. If it weren’t for the backstory, I wouldn’t be as anxious as I am for the next installment to come out. Unfortunately for my pocketbook, the smart money is on Ubisoft annualizing the Assassins’ Creed series. This may mean we don’t get a good, conclusive ending. Of course, they could go in the super-creative route and give a satisfactory ending and then have new games just fill in story in the past or with other assassin groups.
As with my discussion of Recettear, playing The Secret of Monkey Island involved revisiting a gaming genre from my past. Unlike Recettear, TSoMI is not a parodic look back at an old genre, it is an original game from that time period. TSoMI is an adventure game, a genre that is pretty much only kept alive through the LucasArts Telltale Games ( edit: thanks for the fix, Dan) who is re-releasing old games like the Monkey Island series, publishing new takes on old games like Monkey Island, Sam and Max, and publishing completely new games like Back to the Future.
[caption id=“attachment_4063” align=“aligncenter” width=“406” caption=“Yes, patience may be needed….”] [/caption]
It’s funny, growing up, I loved Square’s RPGs, but I really only played two of them - Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6 (originally released as 3 in the US). They just left THAT MUCH of an impression. And not just on me, they profoundly affected Dan as well. Alas, Nintendo losing the license to the Square games resulted in my losing out on playing the games as they came out. It was the main motivation for me buying a used Playstation in college and for eventually getting a PS2. I’ve played way more on my PS3 (which I’ve only had for about a year - 2 years max). Why? Because I kinda lost the somewhat infinite free time I had in my youth. On top of that, when I’ve played through 7, 9, and parts of 8 and 10, I start to wonder if maybe these games were more amazing to my middle school self than they would ever be to my adult self.
During Giant Bomb’s Game of the Year deliberations, one of the panelists was talking about how the difference between Pacman and Pacman Championship Edition DX reflects the difference in video game design over the past thirty years. The original Pacman is a stress-enducing game while Pacman CE DX is an empowering experience. Pacman punishes you for the smallest mistake, only gives you four power pellets per maze, and gets more punishing the further you go. By contrast, Pacman CE DX uses a bullet-time effect to give you a chance to turn past ghosts you might otherwise have crashed into, the power pellet regenerate, and the game becomes generally more fun the faster and more frenetic it gets. The ghosts, save one or two, follow you around and aren’t much of a menace unless you come back around to your tail as in the game snake or need to exit through a hole where a sleeping ghost waits. And this wasn’t limited to Pacman, tvtropes has a whole trope dedicated to this called Nintendo hard. Why has this change come about?
Because I rarely play games when they first come out, I had the occasion to play Assassin’s Creed and Assassin’s Creed II back-to-back. As I’ve mentioned before ( near the end of the post ) getting to experience sequels one after another can yield some benefits over waiting years in between. (Plus, in the case of stuff like Harry Potter (which I haven’t read yet) you don’t have the tension between books) In this case, it was interesting to see how much had changed while keeping the core game the same. There may be some very mild spoilers below, but I’m trying to keep it so that you can read it even if you intend to play the games.
I played a lot of games this year. Perhaps more than in any previous year since leaving high school. Since I usually don’t buy games when they first come out, the winner will not necessarily be a game that came out this year. I went to my raptr page and took a look at all the games I played this year. Following is a list of the games and a little about what I thought of them. At the end will be my pick for 2010.
I was on the phone with my dad a couple weekends ago and he asked if I was playing Civilization 5. He’d heard that Dan was playing it and was surprised that it was still around and Dan and I were still playing it. I told him I was playing it and reminded him that it was he who indirectly got us stuck on the series.
Back in the old days of the early 1990s, no one gave a second thought to sharing computer software with each other. Most people didn’t know about the public Internet or BBSes so, for the most part, there was no onerous digital restriction management (DRM) to keep people from sharing software. Some games had codes that you had to type in which were found in the manual, but manuals could be photocopied - after all, there were no authentication servers to connect to. I’ve spoken about this before, but those early “wild west” days lay the seeds for my software purchases over the last decade. A friend lent me 3.5” disks of Sim City 2000. I played that sucker everywhere. I’d take it wherever there would be computers and install it there to play until my parents said it was time to go. To this day, I’ve bought all the mainline Sim City products and expansion packs. So, who’s to say that today’s illicit software users aren’t building up affinities for software brands they’ll be loyal to when they have the cash.
To finish up talking about the game I left off in my last post, I won my first civ 5 game via conquest - a new one for me. I usually turtle and do a culture victory or science victory. It was only near the end of my time playing Civ IV that I started to become comfortable with domination victories. I ended up with a score of 2679, a score I have yet to best. The way the ending is now structured makes it easy to miss the old charts and graphs they’d always make you click through. So on that first game I missed out on finding out what historical leader I compared with. And, there doesn’t seem to be a way to access that. Other thoughts from this first game include that the construction pace feels a bit slower (like less buildings units built in a game) and Dan concurred once he played his own games. Great people now make their buildings outisde the city. This makes using them to make their special building more of a strategic process than in Civ IV. Great artists make monuments and those could end up obliterating a farm or some other tile modification. A final fun bit of art imitating life: in this game the Americans had taken over middle east.
?At first I ridiculed achievements/trophies. The idea that grown men and women (and, heck anyone over 12 years old) would care about getting these achievements enough to continue playing through their games until they earned them all seemed ludicrous. Then, I acknowledged it was a fun way to compete with friends in games that are otherwise single player experiences. In time I came to understand the idea behind achievements, both for compulsive people and regular folks. From my non-scientific observations, it appears that people who play video games tend to be more likely to be compulsive people. The video game companies figured this out and then realized that if they created trophies for all kinds of situations in a game, that most people would keep playing until they got all of them. Perhaps this would keep them from trading in a game long enough that it would kill the market for used games.
[caption id=“attachment_3621” align=“aligncenter” width=“480” caption=“Civ 5 tells me I need to set some city production”] [/caption]
Interestingly, the game appears not to pop up and tell you to choose city production, you have to notice that in the bottom right, same for science and so on…..At least it doesn’t let you skip a turn before you worry about that. So I actually like it better. It was far too easy to say you’d deal with something later and then forget. And all the messages queue up there for you to read. I used ALWAYS lose track of those in civ 4. Especially since they used to appear when I was busy on something else and disappear before I could act on them. And here’s what it looks like when you decide to what to build.
[caption id=“attachment_3606” align=“aligncenter” width=“480” caption=“Civilization 5 choosing the game to play”] [/caption]
The opening movie is AWESOME. Most of the visuals were from the trailers, but the frame story was great. Best intro thus far. I decided not to play the tutorial first since it appeared to be for those new to the Civ franchise. I chose Wu Zetian of China since I’ve been playing the Chinese almost my entire time with Civ IV. She has the “Art of War” which makes Great Generals spawn more often. Also the Cho-Ku-Nu unit (like Civ 4) and Paper Maker. I did a small continents map. And I made myself Settler, marked “for learning the game” so I figure it’ll be tutorial enough. And a standard game pace. I REALLY like the new menu system. It’s very well done. Sounds like Leonard Nimoy is still the narrator. I love how it describes my ruler and China in history. Pretty awesome. I let the wonderful narration read out before I “begin my journey”. I take a while to look for the screenshots and it comes up with hints. Pretty awesome. The Chinese music is great. Here are some screenshots. Another post later. Right now I want to play and the game gets annoying (freezes cpu) if I alt-tab out of it to get the screenshots.
Starcraft 2 recently came out so, naturally, I just installed Starcraft for the first time. A few years ago, I decided to atone for that summer my brothers and I had played Warcraft III from an illicit copy by buying the Warcraft III Batlle Chest. It was a pretty awesome deal - for $20 I got the main game, the expansion, and strategy guides for both games. The following year I bought the equivalent bundle for Starcraft. I would have played it about six months ago when Dina’s boyfriend, a Starcraft (and Blizzard, in general) fan was over the house. But, a bug in Windows XP kept the game from installing. When I tried it again this weekend, it worked.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“If Bloomberg can ride the train, so can Batman”] [/caption]
Sometimes jokes can be very misleading to outsiders. For a few months after hearing jokes about how gamey it was that Joker’s henchmen lost track of Batman as soon as he went up onto a gargoyle I didn’t have any inclination to play the game. It just seemed like it would be too jarring to have enemies shooting at me and suddenly be unable to follow the fact that I went up onto a gargoyle. The truth turned out to be a good compromise. But it brings to light an uncanny valley of a different sort. As games become more and more realistic, how do you represent super heroes in a way that doesn’t destroy the video game?
There’s a new system of exchange of goods and services that threatens to rock the economic system and it’s not some new form of derivatives. Digital goods and services are growing larger and larger, but economics has not yet caught up. This is scary because more and more of our economy is based upon digital goods. In order to understand why I’m raising a fuss about this, we have to do a quick review of economics 101.
I’ve been listening to podcasts for about two years now. I got into it because I love listening to some NPR programs, but they are always on when I’m at work or asleep on the weekends. Eventually, I heard on NPR that they have podcasts of various shows. I checked it out right away because in Maryland NPR is on 88.1 which is always being interfered with by SiriusXM radio receivers. At first I only listened to a few podcasts because I didn’t own an iPod and I so I burned the podcasts to a CD-R every few days. That got expensive, so I got an iPod shuffle. Since podcasts don’t take up too much space, I started getting into more and more podcasts. Some I discovered in magazines and others were recommendations from Dan. So, I thought I would share the podcasts I listen to so that those following this blog could perhaps discover some new podcasts they didn’t know about. Dan, for example, recently got into This American Life. (I think after I kept telling him about it - but he may have discovered it independently) I’m going to put links to the actual podcast URL, so just copy that into your podcather or iTunes.
[caption id=“attachment_3224” align=“aligncenter” width=“480” caption=“Civilization IV: Colonizaton: My First Colony”] [/caption]
Do not be fooled by the Civ IV part of the title to the updated to the classic Colonization. You do so at your own peril; well, your colony’s peril. Colonization is primarily a game of economics while Civilization is primarily a game of domination. In Civ you work the tiles around your city and either get “money”, production, or food. In Colonization you work the tiles around your city and get cotton, tobacco, ore, sugar cane, and probably some other stuff I’m forgetting. And, while in Civ you simply use the production to build units and city structures, in Col you take all these raw products and produce finished products: cloth, cigars, tools, guns, rum, and coats.
This is a game I have been waiting for ever since I played New Super Mario Brothers on my borrowed Nintendo DS. This is the purity of Mario. Screw all this 3D stuff. Yeah, it rocks to have a 3D space to run around in, but that’s not Mario. Mario is a side scroller and its charm comes out best that way. Or maybe I’m just an old codger nostalgic for what I grew up with. It’s probably the latter given that the Mario theme in New Super Mario Brothers Wii (NSMBW henceforth), a modified version of the original with a little “ah” a capella thrown in, excites me in ways I cannot express. Apparently it also excites the goombas and turtles because they do a little dance move during the a capella parts.
Tetris is the first video game I was unable to shut off on command. Players of Sid Meier’s Civilization are familiar with the problem of “one more turn”, similar to the bookworm’s “one more page”. Tetris was my first “one more turn” game. I first played Tetris when I was five or six and received my Gameboy for my birthday or Christmas.
[caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“237” caption=“Tetris on Gameboy, the definitive version in my eyes”] [/caption]
Don’t worry, this blog isn’t about to become some weird fan tribute blog to Braid. It’s more of a case of trying to make sense of the game I’ve just played. There’s really no reason to make sense of The Beatles Rockband. You are one of The Beatles playing music. There’s nothing to “get”. But finishing Braid has left me with more questions than answers. Braid has the potential to leave you frustrated in the same way you may end up frustrated at a particularly dense painting where you see that there is a table of objects, but can’t figure out the significance of the objects. It just looks like a cluttered table until the docent explains that the book with a skull on it represents that man will never understand his world until he dies.
warning: The following contains many spoilers about Braid. I, personally, feel that your enjoyment of the game will be greatly reduced by reading this ahead of time. You have been warned!
I finished Braid last night. I did cheat a little. Of the 60 possible puzzle pieces, I used a walkthrough to get about 10 of them. Each of the ones that I used the walkthrough for (and I did not do this until I had spent a good chunk of time trying everything I had learned up to that point and even afterwards (since you could revisit worlds) were puzzles I would have NEVER solved. For example, the puzzle piece that is accessed by moving around the giant replica of the puzzle in the level would never, ever have occurred to me. Someone of a certain type of mind would surely have realized that the puzzles would not exist in the world if they did not have a purpose, but I could not figure this one out. And the fact that most of the puzzles are one-offs means that you never do this again.
That a game like Braid can exist is a statement on where video games are as an art form with a well-established history and canon. To make a parallel in the paint world: without a long canon of traditional paintings of tables with fruit and bread, people wouldn’t have really understood the “parody” or “remix” of a Cubist rendition of such a painting. In the same way, Braid is most enjoyable to those of us who have been playing video games for the past 20 years, growing up with Super Mario Bros. as our first video game experience. In fact, Braid does indeed make a few callbacks to this classic game which has almost become a scripture to us. Any game that allows users to design levels (eg Little Big Planet) cannot exist for more than a femptosecond before at least four people have recreated Super Mario Bros. World 1-1. Braid does nothing so brash and that’s where the game design genius begins to show. The game designer does not ape Mario, but hints at it here and there. One can almost see the developer giving you a knowing look and a nudge in the ribs. “Look here, I’ve made this or that subtle reference.” I don’t want to ruin it by speaking of it even though this game has been out for ~ a year already. It would ruin the delight of experiencing it.
I finally finished Final Fantasy IX. Took me a little over 30 hours. I didn’t do all the side quests, but that’s more of Dan’s thing. The characters I played with the most ended up at about level 52 - if that tells you anything. Except for a little bit when I was trying to learn some skills, I didn’t do any grinding. That’s the big difference from when I played Final Fantasy VI as a kid. I don’t have quite as much time. Whenever I got to a complicated dungeon, I consulted an FAQ. So what are my final thoughts? Here’s a rambling, stream-of-conciousness review of the game after finishing it up.
After playing Final Fantasy 9 for a few days, here are my first impressions.
the graphics are a little distracting - it’s kinda like an uncanny valley thing. It’s not quite as nice as the new stuff, but better than the SNES graphics. But there are a lot of closeups because it was state of the art when it first came out.
There appears to be a lot of slapstick with Steiner. But then again, there’s always some slapstick in Final Fantasy games.
Like pretty much any Final Fantasy game, after the first disc, I’m still not sure what the plot is. Just like anime/manga, the plot is usually not evident in the first few hours. After playing for just about eight hours I still didn’t know what was going on.
At first I thought I had acquired an airship VERY early for a Final Fantasy game, but then quickly lost it.
I have a lot of love for Squaresoft (well, now they’re SquareEnix), despite the fact that I’ve played relatively few of their games. I think Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6 (originally released as Final Fantasy 3 in the US) are the pinnacle of their jRPG work. I’ve also played Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII, and Chrono Cross. I didn’t really enjoy Final Fantasy 7 nearly as much as everyone else. I think it’s partly out of spite. All these new jRPG fans think that Final Fantasy 7 is the greatest Final Fantasy game ever. But they’re never played the SNES Final Fantasies. Nothing is better than Final Fantasy 6 story-wise. And Chrono Trigger is unmatched for the amount of differences your actions could make to the game. When I finally got a Playstation in college, I was lucky enough that all the Final Fantasies released up to that time had become “greatest hits” and were available for $20. I bought them all. I finally got to play Final Fantasy 7. I had tried before on our computer, but it just wasn’t up to snuff. Even owning it on Playstation, it took me two attempts to get through it thanks to real life getting in the way. When I finally finished it, I just didn’t see why everyone thought it was so awesome. It might partially have to do with the fact that I had a 2 month gap in the middle of my playing the game, but I just didn’t get what made it so amazing.
A few days ago, I saw the heavy boots story on digg and shared it with Dan. To quickly sum up, in case the web page dissapears into the great bit bucket in the sky, a physics major was told by his philosophy TA that the astronauts on the moon didn’t float away because they had heavy boots on. That prompted Dan to share this post with me again. After leaving a Dr Horrible reference, I started thinking about this. And I came to see Final Fantasy as one of the largest exercises in suspension of disbelief. The most egregious aspect is with the weapons. Because of what is often a very tedious menu screen, I usually do not sell back all of the old, useless weapons back to the shop when I buy new ones. So, technically, my characters are running around a HUGE world map trying to save the world, while at the same time lugging around hundreds of pounds of useless weapons. Quite ridiculous, no? On top of this they may have as many as 99 tents, 99 sleeping bags, and pretty much 99 of any item. Think back to the smallest you could ever fold a sleeping bag. Now, imagine going hiking through the woods with 99 of them split up over, at most, four of you. So, it’s 25 each for three of you and 24 for some lucky bastard - probably the girl in the short skirt with the large breasts who’s always complaining of back problems. This is where gameplay mechanics start to mess with your mind too much if you dn’t suspend your disbelief. Because sleeping bags are not prophelactics, you can use them over and over. But the game makes you discard one each time you use it. Of course, within the game thsi makes sense because you’d otherwise be able to heal up to full every time you were in the map screen. I never questioned it as a kid. I was just glad to have a tent or sleeping bag to heal my characters. But when you think about it, it doesn’t make very much sense. This, of course, naturally leads to the other problem with SquareEnix jRPGs - passage of time. For obvious reasons (mostly related to grinding), time doesn’t pass in these games unless you’re at a milestone moment. So while there’s a meteorite coming towards earth or some jerk has decided to use earth magic or magical-people magic to destroy the world tomorrow, you can sleep in an inn over and over. And while the game never explicitly states you stayed in the inn overnight (except when it’s part of advancing the story - clever, clever they were in those old SNES RPGs) it does often imply it, with transition effects that seem to suggest you were there overnight.
As 2008 has proven - draconian digital restrictions management (DRM) does not stop people from illicitly using computer games. Spore, whose DRM was so bad they got ratings bombed on Amazon.com, was the most pirated game of 2008. The DRM caused hassles for legitimate users and did nothing to stop illicit use. This is always the case. Ever since the beginning of DRM on video games there have been people getting around it. These DRM schemes are not cheap. They are licensed from companies who tell the video game companies that this is the only way to protect their games.
First I updated Wine to 1.0.0 (It didn’t work properly on 0.94) on Ubuntu. In there I have D as the CDROM drive. So I typed wine d:\install.exe This installed just fine
Here’s what happened with 0.94 when I first started this post:
But the first time I clicked to play it, it did not work. The screen just went blank.
When I restarted X, edited the registry keys as it says to do on the Wine site and started it up, this time it started up
When I tried to play the first campaign it froze up Gnome so I restarted X again
Wine FAQ says the movies folder should be renamed for stability reasons
Got Spore on Saturday and I’ve been playing it more or less non-stop since then. It was very, very fun! A lot more fun than I expected from the reviews. I don’t blame the reviewers since the game had been hyped for the past three years. I think the cell stage sucks and I don’t know if I’ll ever play it again. It’s very boring and there isn’t much to do other than eat red or green dots. The tribal stage was also boring and needs some tweaking - perhaps a la expansion pack. All the other stages have been a lot of fun - especially the creature stage.
I played some Beyond the Sword this weekend. First game was my first civ game in what has to be at least half a year. I’ve just been busy with other hobbies/games. This was the first time I was actually able to have a Corporation. I built the Sushi and Cereal corporations. Pretty interesting concept. And I founded one or two cities in my neighbor civ and they opened branches all over their land. (More money for me!)
I heard this on The Linux Outlaws Episode 42 and I thought it was a pretty awesome idea. Up until now Valve has been pretty hostile towards people asking them to release onto Linux, even threatening to ban anyone who brought it up in the forums. Apparently someone has convinced them of the merits because here’s the story that led Linux Outlaws to report the headline.
My brother, who is really into video games, has informed me that pretty much every computer game developer plans to release via Steam in the near future. This means that most people, who are always mentioning their only reason for keeping Windows around is to play games, can finally get rid of Windows for good!
This song is awesome and, best of all, it’s been released under a Creative Commons license, so I can share it with you all without fear of the RIAA breathing down my neck!
I first heard Code Monkey on a recent episode of Linux Outlaws. It’s a song about a code monkey who is having a hard time with his boss and with unrequited office love. It’s a tale any code monkeys will find familiar. You can either download it at this post or, if that takes too long, off of Jonathan Coulton’s blog. His l ast.fm page says he came out with a new song a year for a whole year, so check that out. There may be some other really awesome ones.
Ever since I first started playing computer games in elementary school there have been three categories of games that I’ve loved: puzzle games (eg Lemmings, Tetris, Puzzle Bobble), simulation games (eg Sim City), and real-time strategy games and the related turn-based strategy games (eg Command and Conquer, Warcraft, Civilization). I play other types of games periodically, but these are the ones I always return to.
There are essentially 3 main RTS games and all other games usually license their game engines. These are Command and Conquer (C&C), Warcraft (WC), and Age of Empires (AoE). I cut my teeth, so to speak, on C&C with a disc a friend lent me so we could play against each other over the net. I then played a shareware version of WC and a demo version of AoE.
I’m writing this Sunday, but I am trying to limit my blog posts to one a day so that there can be something for my readers each and every day.
I couldn’t wait for Mario Kart Wii to come out. The Mario Kart series has been my favorite on the Nintendo and Mario Kart Double Dash is the reason why my wife bought a Gamecube. We’ve had countless hours of fun playing and when the release got post postponed until today we were pretty bummed. So today we were at Best Buy right when it opened to make sure we’d be able to get a copy. There were enough, although I wouldn’t be surprised if they sold out by the end of the day.
I received Super Mario Galaxy for Christmas and I must say that I’m quite happy with the gift. This is the most talked about Wii game for the end of 2007 and not without reason. Everyone who’s into gaming kept mentioning that Mario Galaxy is the true successor to Super Mario 64 on the Gamecube. Pretty much everyone, myself included, thinks that Mario Sunshine was a piece of sod that should never have been made. Mario Galaxy, on the other hand, has a lot of the same charm that made SM64 so much fun to play. My only complaint, and this is a very tiny one, is that the puzzles are a bit easier than Mario 64. I remember racking my brain with my brother trying to figure out how to get the each of the stars for SM64. With Mario Galaxy, I feel that most of the stars are a lot easier to get. However, as I write this blog post I realize that I played Super Mario 64 approximately 10 years ago, so it’s possible that the puzzles that were so hard for me back then would not be quite as hard now. That said, I beat the game in two days with about 20 hours of gameplay. That is, I beat the final Bowser, but was only about half way through collecting all of the stars.
The word irreverent is tossed around way too flippantly these days, however, if there’s one site that deserves it, it’s ZeroPunctuation. ZeroPunctuation is a site where a British guy living in Australia reviews video games within a video format weekly. He often makes fun of games and the genres they belong in. The animation is extremely simple, yet remarkably effective. It’s slightly more than xkcd, but not much more than stick figures. The way he does this is brilliant and it must be seen in order to explain it correctly. Just one warning, if you get queasy over profanity, do NOT visit his site.
My brother introduced me to “Guitar Hero” over the summer. I couldn’t really get into it at the time. There were basically two reasons for this. First of all, I just wasn’t in the mood for that type of game on the day he brought it over. However, the concept stayed with me and whenever I hear rock songs, I imagine how easy or hard they would be to play in “Guitar Hero”. The other reason I didn’t get into the game when Dan brought it over is that I didn’t know any of the songs, but one or two. It’s really hard to get into playing the guitar for a song you’re not really into.
Actually, it’s Warcraft cosplay. Why not? They do it with anime. I’m not sure how long the video will remain up, but enjoy it while it’s there. But, can someone who knows the game tell me wtf is the checkered cube?
Will be out either tomorrow or wednesday. Gamestop says tomorrow and Best Buy’s website says Wednesday. I played one last Warlords Game and did pretty well. I think this was my third best score in the expansion pack. So you can download it and play this last turn and add it to your high score if you want something to beat or something to laugh at. Eric XI of the Chinese would be happy!
Ok, ok….it’s not really by Square-Enix, but it IS an RPG of Columbine. It’s actually not as bad as your gut reaction might say. According to this review in wired, it’s actually a pretty thoughtful game meant to make you think about their motivations and frame of mind. Check out the link above there.
According to “Power Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life” (p17) Steve Jobs created Breakout! That’s right, that wonderfully addictive game, second only to Tetris for most, was created by the man who created Apple, NextStep, Pixar (via financing), and the iPod. Is there anything the black turtle-neck clad man hasn’t had his finger in?
Someone at MIT has used a Nintendo emulator to deconstruct Mario as you play it. You can see just what was going on in the Nintendo’s RAM as you played the game. It is a very neat hack and definitely worth checking out!
So, on Retrozone, you can buy adapters to plug in your old Nintendo controllers to your Wii. This is for use with the service Nintendo provides to allow you to play on your Wii nearly every Nintendo game that ever came out for any system. I’m extremely surprised that Nintendo didn’t see this coming! They are going to lose out on potential business! They should have released Wii versions of the old control. Sure, they had a “normal” control in addition to the Wii stick, that looks like a cross between a Gamecube and a Super Nintendo controller, but it’s not the same as playing your old games with the old controllers! I predict that the prices of old Nintendo controllers being sold on Ebay will rise.
I don’t have one, but I can pretend I do by reading this review. Makes me glad I didn’t get one. Sounds like they have a lot of issues to work through.
Just finished my first Warlords game and I won a domination victory with my highest score ever! 12108!! Got ranked as Charlemagne! Save file to uploaded in the future.
There is a new, war oriented opening movie that kicks butt! The opening screen no longer plays the happy Lion King-like theme, but a more ominous one. Instead of a nice happy world in the background to the main menu, we have an impatient looking warrior who likes to twirl his sword. Impressive!
Before I get to playing civ4: Warlods, I wanted to share my best high score ever in civ4. It was as the Eric-Chin IV of the Chinese. My final score was 7217 (the next one is 5699! as the japanese) and I finished in 1988 AD with a Domination victory in Chieftain difficulty. I might have finished earlier and had a higher score if I had realized I wouldn’t have my domination victory with the civs I was fighting. If only it had been a Warlords game, I’m pretty sure I could have had some vassal states which would have allowed me to have finished earlier! I can’t wait to buy, install, and play Warlords. To add this game to your hall of fame, just right-click the link below and click save as. Play my last round and it will record my score.
I played a civ4 scenario for the first time last night. I played the American Revolution as the British. The map was really neat to play on, as they duplicated the eastern US pretty well. Each side starts out with about half of the cities on the map. Various actions cause loyalists to join the British or Colonials to take up arms. Also, accurately enough, the British are reinforced by German Mercenaries. From time to time British reinforcements arrive in Canada.
Wired Magazine’s April 2006 issue explored this premise in a very unique way. Instead of saying that we still don’t have conclusive evidence that video games do any damage (and in fact there is some that they are helpful in some instances) they mentioned that the battle between older adults and younger adults/kids is age-old. Below are the quotes they used in their article.
Novels
“The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth; and prevented others from improving their minds in useful knowledge. Parents take care to feed their children with wholesome diet; and yet how unconcerned about the provision for the mind, whether they are furnished with salutary food, or with trash, chaff, or poison?” - Reverend Enos Hitchcock, Momoirs of the Bloomsegrove Family, 1790
The computer kept declaring war on me and finally I got sick of being on the defensive. To speed things up, I declared war on EVERYONE! It still took a few turns! This time I’m playing as my original civ, the Japanese. Let’s see if I can lead the Japanese to victory at Warlord setting.
I’ll post my file from my last game soon. Just started a new civ4 game with 2 new elements. First of all, I’m playing pangea so boats are irrelevant. Second, I’m playing Germans which have some differences from previous civs I’ve played (Japanese and Chinese). One primary difference is that the German special unit comes much later in the game. The Chinese get theirs very early, allowing me to kill the Japanese very early on before wars take too long. Japanese get their Samuarai mid-game which can be good as you’re trying to expand that last bit of land. But I chose Frederick because of his creative side which gives extra culture (I’m a big culture person and always win a bunch of cities from the opposition on culture) and philosophical which helps in Wonders. Execellent! I’m still Cheiftan, but I think next game I will go to War Lord. I still won my last game by a large margin.
At first, Civ4 seemed not to play much better on this computer with twice the stats of my old machine. Yeah, the game didn’t take 15 minutes to load, but it wasn’t as close to instantaneous as I’d hoped. But then I slowly began to see the places where Civ4 was much better on this computer. The first thing I noticed is that the Wonder videos are no longer out of sync with the sound, so I was able to watch them and enjoy what the programmers had put together. Then I noticed that the scrolling was much, much smoother than it previously had been. Finally, I was able to talk to other civs without that causing me to have to wait 3 minutes for the other civ to load up. I finished yet another game, this time as the chinese, and I’ll be uploading that soon.
As I was driving home last week, I heard something interesting on NPR. I knew that people had been selling their MMORG characters on Ebay. They would spend a few sleepless nights getting their character up to a really high level and then sell the character on Ebay to the highest bidder. I’ve heard stories of people making thousands of dollars! But this story on NPR took the cake! People were buying in-game money with their own real money. Of course, as the point was made in the story, our money is no more eral than the money in the game, if people have faith in its redemption value. Apparently there are websites which peg the US dollar to the Everquest Gold Piece! But that’s not all!
Started playing Final Fantasy 8 once I finished up 7. I’ve played for about 3 hours and have already found the obligatory Wedge, Biggs, and Cid. In case you’ve never played the Final Fantasy Series, ever since 4 (I think - but definitely 6) there have always been some characters named Biggs, Wedge, and Cid. Cid is usually a mechanic or inventor or something scientific. In 8 he’s the headmaster of a training school for mercenaries. Biggs and Wedge (after who my brother names a lot of his online personas) are like the people who wear the red shirts in Star Trek, they show up for a little while and then are killed. They usually provide some comic relief, although it’s not a requirement.
I was surprised that, by only raising the level of difficulty by one, the computer opponents in civ4 began to fight each other. In this instance, it was to my advantage because Washington of the Americans attacked Peter of the Russians, who I was planning to attack anyway. I think I will play my fourth game also at this difficulty level or I fear they may annihilate me. I’m not quite ready for that yet.
I finally beat Final Fantasy 7, it’s what has been occupying all of my time this weekend. I never had a Playstation until College, but I really loved Final Fantasy 6, so as soon as I could, I bought a Playstation. Later my brother-in-law got me a PS2 so that I could play FFX and X-2. I wanted to play the games in order, so I started 7, but then came my wedding, the move, and a bunch of other things. So it dragged out for months. Frankly, I don’t recommend doing that for Final Fantasy or any story-based game. What I usually love about Square RPGs is the bond you feel with the characters. But with so much time between playing, I barely could remember what was going on, much less bond with them. However, as there was still a lot to do in the part I’ve been playing for the past week, I was able to get back into the game.
Apparently, MS’s new $400 console is having a lot of problems. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t be happy if I plunked down enough money to buy a cheap computer and my video game console didn’t work correctly. However, the real problem for Microsoft is touched upon in this blog.
In the past, such a faux pas would have taken weeks to get attention. One person would have a broken box and think maybe it was just them. After a few weeks of reports, someone at a store like EB would leak the problem to the press and THEN it would be a big deal. That’s how things used to work. Unfortunately for MS, that’s not how they work anymore.
My second civ4 game is over and I did MUCH better this time! I won a Space Race instead of just having the highest score upon end of turns like last game. This earned me a score of # - Neville Chamberlain!
I’ve got a little more than 100 turns left in my second game ofciv4. As my first game served to teach me many new concepts in the civ series, I have fared much better. One of the key concepts I’ve learned is that barbarians are everywhere, even in Settler mode. Previously, in the easiest difficulty level the barbarians did not attack too much. In fact, I remember being shocked about how often they came when I went up one difficulty level in civ3. So, until barbarians stop appearing on the world map, it is extremely dangerous to send settlers to build new cities without first protecting the cities. Take the extra few turns to send at least a warrior (preferably a bowman of some sort) to protect the newly founded city. Also, if you are building near the edges of your boundaries, be sure to send the unit along with the settler to ensure its safety as it makes its way to the new city site.
Here’s a save file from my first civ game. All you need to do is load up the game and hit “enter” to complete my turn. This will give you something to compete against in your Hall of Fame - unless you’re way better than me. My brothers and I started doing this with Civ3 sine we each had our own computers so the score from the others wouldn’t show up in our Hall of Fame. It’s fun to compete against yourself, but not as much fun as competing against others.
If you think that my review of Civ4 was a bit too rosy, check out this review by Tara, who has a review close the middle, but a little more towards the negative side. A verteran civ gamer, like myself, she found herself basically feeling something was different without quite being able to put her finger on it.
One thing we both noticed was that the huge map is much smaller than a huge map in civ3. I felt as though the map wasn’t as large, but I wasn’t sure if it just felt that way. Good to see someone else agree. Check out the review - it’s well written and have even more screen shots!
Here are some more screenshots from my first Civ4 game.
Above you see some of my cavalry units preparing for war. This unit has a lot of cavalry on the map representing the upgrades in defense I have given it.
In the above shot you can see both the industrial era worker as well as the rifleman.
Here I am in the midst of a war with cavalry against spearmen. You can see the gunblast from the cavalry units.
Another area where civ4 has become more balanced for me is in the role the sea and air units play. Although I was always primarily a winner by culture in civ3 and space race in civl/2, whenever I *was* faced with aggression, it was usually my armies that did the heavy lifting. I almost never had a navy save for the purpose of transporting units around. Since my rivals didn’t have navies, I could let my tranports roam the seas unattended.
A score of 3447 in Settler mode is enough for me to no longer have the leadership skills of Dan Quayle, but of Ethelred the Unready. “The Unready” - doesn’t sound like much of a promotion, eh?
In Civilization 4, one of the most significant changes outside of the civics and religions, is the expanded role given to workers. Previously, it was very easy to know what to do with your workers. If a mountain or hill was involved, put a road and mine; otherwise irrigate and road. Jungles and forrests had no purpose except to make your cities sick or deprive you of an irrigation spot. However, if you eliminated them, you would miss out on certain key game resources which only appeared in jungles and forests. So you had to just deal with the sickness and hope that a resource would appear nearby to validate your city’s sufferings.
Welcome to my first look/impressions of Civ4. As you can see, I began the game with a settle and a warrior. The first things you will notice are that they have changed the icons so that a unit is represented by three units instead of one. Although, considering how many units are used in a war, defend a city, etc, it’s obvious that a unit still represents many more units than three. However, it’s pretty neat to watch battles now. Also, there are cows and horses on the map! You can make pastures for these and they will provide you with health/food/etc. If you irrigate or anything else, you lose the animals.
Wondering if anyone else has experienced the following with civ4 special edition. According to the manual and discs, it says that disc 2 should be the disc to play from. However, on my computer it only loads off of disc 1.
Second, I read the terms of usage (the license) when I was a little bored today on time off from work. Did you know that to use a drive emulator like Alcohol 120% or others is against the license? I didn’t know that!
Civ4 was amazing to play yesterday and I took a bunch of screenshots. However, right before I was about to save and quit the game for the day, my video card died and shut down my entire computer. This was the same thing that happened when my cpu/motherboard died freshman year of college so I was very worried at first. However, I unplugged and replugged the computer and it came on, but there was no picture. I swapped in the video card from my wife’s dell and it worked. So it seems the problem was the video card. I’m really ticked because I just bought that PNY nVidia card around one year ago. I checked my power supply and it’s 330 W and the video card asks for 220 W if I have a lot plugged in. So I am pretty sure it was a faulty card. Things usually don’t fail so quickly for me, so I don’t have the warranty. (I know, that’s MY fault) I’ll be buying a new BFG nVidia card - it’s all I can afford for now and is equivalent to the one that just died in terms of power - and as soon as I get my computer back up, I’ll post the screenshots and descriptions.
Here’s what I picked:
-continents
–temperate climate
-medium sea level
-huge world
I picked the japanese because I’ve played them since Civ2.
Tokugawa is the emperor. He is aggressive and orgnized. We start with fishing and the wheel! Excellent since you can’t build roads without wheel.
I picked settler difficulty since they’ve changed a lot since Civ3; I was amazed reading the manual how much had changed.
Here are some things I noticed while reading the civ4 manual at work:
1. there are now worker boats to improve the ocean squares!
2. settlers move 2 squares now
3. you can now move on the same square as an enemy and not attack them!!!
4. mounted unites can’t fortify
5. you can fortify til healed
6. other civs can’t go in your territory until they have open borders treaty with you
7. you can have mult religions present in a civ
8. cottages give you commerce on a square now - not roads
9. frams are like irrigation
10. also camps, pastures, plantations, watermills, quarries, etc
11. You can have a jewish temple, christian temple, etc
I came home for lunch and am now the proud owner of Civ4 Special Edition! The special edition is awesome! The cover is amazing and the …. wow! I’m installing it now. Look for in depth coverage when I play after I get back from work!
It’s been confirmed by BigRedJeffdom and others - Civ4 has been pushed by one day at the retail stores. It makes us civ fanatics angry, but it’s life. At least it’s one day - not a week or even a month.
Reading on the Civilization IV developer’s blogs, I gleaned the following great tidbits!
On Great People:
“Great People are created at the city level, as each city can generate “great people points” based on conditions and structures in the city. You can affect the amount of people points generated in several ways. One very dramatic way is through the creation of a great wonder. For instance, building the Pyramids will make it more likely the city will generate a Great Engineer, while building Stonehenge will make the city more likely to generate a Great Prophet. You can also generate more great people points by taking city population away from working the land and turning them into specialists. Certain Civics choices can work to make your specialists more productive and that can also have a positive effect on your great people point production.
Just reserved my copy of Civilization IV Special Edition at EB. You can bet I’ll be all over that sucker tomorrow after work. Hope to have a more substantial blog post later. q;o)
Oh yeah, people are coming back to my blog! About four hundred unique visitors have come in the last couple of weeks.
“Save often and Save Well” that was the motto of one of the best pioneering games of the 80s and 90s, King’s Quest. They spouted that advice because it was easy to make the wrong move and have your character die. If you hadn’t saved, you could lose hours and hours of game play. As anyone knows, it’s just too frustrating in those circumstances to play the game over. The same shoud go when writing a blog post. I had about two paragraphs I had been writing about how I kept forgetting what I had wanted to write so badly while I wasn’t home. One click too many in Firefox killed that sucker. Just like the video games, I don’t feel like writing it again. I’ve always felt that way about writing - unless it’s ridiculously important to me, I just will let it go. On to some of the other things I wanted to write about.
Video game fans may recall the dissapointment when, last year, uS courts forced Bnetd servers to shut down. Bnetd, short for Battle Net daemon, was created by some hackers who had become very upset with Blizzard’s Battle.net. There was rampant cheating and latancy problems. They did what any hacker would do when confronted with a software problem - develop new software that fixes is. They created their own servers to play Warcraft (and Diablo, etc) on and life was good. that is, things were good until Blizzard too,k them to court and won an injunction against them. The judge had cited that law which I hate so much, the DMCA, as one of the reasons why this software was illegal. Also, he said, Blizzard’s license (which you have to agree to or else can’t play the game) says that you can’t do this. Aha! I knew I should have been reading that crap instead of just clicking next to install my favorite software.
You may or may not know this, depending upon how technologically inclined you are, but you can buy ROMs of the old classic arcade games like Ms Pacman, Arkanoid, Spaced Invader, and much more. (You can also download them off of limewire or kazaa, but that’s illegal if you don’t own the arcade machines) Then there is a group which has developed a program known as the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) which you can use to play these old games. “So?” you may be thinking, “I can find shareware versions of all of those games.” Yes, but this is the actual original version of the game pulled right off the arcade machine without any changes to it whatsoever! What could you do with this? You could do what thousands (or at least hundreds) have already done: build your own arcade machine! There are a few webpages and books on the subject, I know there is one really good book on the subject available at Borders, I can’t remember the title, but it’s fairly obvious. Something like, “Build Your Own Arcade Machine.”
You may have noticed that almost everything in life is organized into catch-22 situations. The video game situation in Linux also follows this law. We’ve got the following dilema: we can’t play regular, consumer PC video games on a Linux box, but if they were made available we would lose a bunch of freeware game developers. Like others, I often wish developers like Maxis would make a Sims 2 port for Linux, allowing me to play the game without having to go through programs like Cedega by Transgaming, which charge a monthly fee for usage. It would make life a heckova lot easier for those of us who wish to legally purchase video games and be able to play then without being locked to the Windows desktop.
I wrote a long time ago in It’s A Binary World 1.0 about all of the symbolism in Chrono Trigger. That game was extremely deep for a video game, but Square (now Square-Enix) has been known to have some very intellectual aspects to their games. Before, I spoke of Massamune, the gurus of time, and how certain aspects of the game spoke to racism. This time I uncovered another metaphor in the video game by watching a movie.
This year was a bit light on programming. I was focused a lot on gaming, cooking, and Tabletop Gaming. (No surprise if you’ve been reading my December blog posts) I constantly found myself desiring to code and I definitely had a few ideas - like a utility to extract EXIF data out of my images for use in Hugo. But when I would sit down at my computer I often found myself preferring to play Cities: Skylines II or Against the Storm. (More on that when I post my EOY video game post) As per usual, let’s go month-by-month (after the first quarter that is)
Today I did not attempt the advent of code problem. It involved solving a word search in which there could be overlapping words as well as, if I read it correctly, multiple words starting from the same place. I’m guessing it’s to be done with a depth-first or breadth-first search in which you kill off searches if you can’t continue. I know these sorts of problems present themselves every year, but I never have time to learn during the AoC period (with work, life, and Christmas in the way) and I never make it a priority to relearn (I was taught this back in undergrad). So rather than waste my time on something I know that I won’t know how to do, I’ll save it for another time - maybe when I’m taking time off closer to Christmas/New Years Day.
Time once again to review my Advent of Code solutions! Also the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar; scroll below the AoC code to see today’s die.
Advent of Code
As the years have piled on, Eric Wasl has thrown in references to past years’ problems. However, as of day 3 we now have 2 references (perhaps that’s what the historian story line is about). Day 02 had you visit the location of 2015 Day 19 and today visited the location of 2020 Day 2 (my first year doing Advent of Code!) The only thing I’m slightly worried about is if this signals that this year will be a grand finale for the annual event.
Time once again to review my Advent of Code solutions! Also the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar; scroll below the AoC code to see today’s die.
Michael Kennedy from the podcasts Python Bytes and Talk Python has recently written a couple blog posts that I wanted to highlight here. First up is his post about rewriting the Talk Python site in Quart (aka async Flask). Three and a half years ago I wrote about realizing that it’s not about Django vs Flask vs FastAPI, but actually about finding the right framework for your workload. I didn’t completely state my current thought process in that blog post, but I was pretty close to the advice I currently give. If you want a Python-based site that needs CMS features and you don’t want to have to reinvent the world, Django is your framework. If you are making websites where you want to be in control of every puzzle piece, then you want flask. You only bring in what you need. And if you’re writing REST API based site (controversy about whether REST truly is REST aside), you want FastAPI. Well, I respect Michael Kennedy’s opinion on this matter for a few reasons:
December has finally arrived and with it my favorite activity of the month - Advent of Code! I also wanted to give myself a fun little present this year, so I bought the Dice Envy Advent Calendar. Every day I’ll get a fun new die (or dice!). Scroll below the AoC code to see today’s die.
Advent of Code
Let’s start off with Advent of Code. This year I haven’t done any of the Advent of Code problems ahead of December so I was a bit rusty. One is not often using the same algorithms or libraries for Advent of Code as one does for everyday programming. I started off with Python since that’s my most comfortable language. First you can head over to today’s page to see the prompt. If you’re not solving the problems yourself, you won’t be able to see the prompt for part 2, so in summary:
This morning I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, Decoder Ring. The most recent episode had a very interesting title: If You Give a Mouse a Cookie…Will he want a Welfare check? I don’t remember this book from my childhood, but I do remember reading this one (and others in the series) to my kids. The podcast explores the fact that, starting around 2015, this book started to become known by conservatives as an allegory against the welfare state. While this podcast episode eventually interviews the author and confirms this was not her intention, I can certainly understand how the book could be read that way. It’s a great example of how art (literature, movies, images, music) becomes “property” of the culture once the creator releases it into the world. In many ways it doesn’t matter what the creator wanted (although I always find that fascinating), but what the culture does with it.
This year started off pretty light when it came to programming because I’ve been addicted to the video game Against the Storm since last winter. But I eventually started working again on various projects - some old and some new. I didn’t do any programming in January, so we’ll start in February.
February and March
Over these two months I worked on my replacement for web access to my Taskwarrior TODO list because Inthe.am had shut down. In February I got the podman containers set up - one to run the taskd server and one to run the website I’d coded up in Flask. In March I had to write some rudimentary Javascript to get the website to highlight the selected tab (Overdue, Today, This Month, etc). The rest of the interactivity on the site works using HTMX, letting me focus on Python instead of Javascript, but I just wasn’t able to get that part of the site to work without a tiny bit of Javascript. I also added some fixes because the date/time widget assumes UTC. Of course, now that I have it all working correctly and get lots of use for it (especially when I’m at work and I want to quickly get something out of my brain’s short-term buffer), Taskwarrior went to 3.0 which completely changes the way the program works, the API, and the way syncing works. I think in the end it’ll be for the best, but it’s annoying that I need to figure this out. That may involve finally learning how to use PyO3 to interact with Rust or re-writing part of my backend in Rust. We’ll have to see where that goes.
Just a few thoughts on programming languages that have been rattling around in my head this week, but which don’t each merit a full blog post. The main theme is that the culture behind each programming language leads to some interesting choices, as is the case with spoken languages.
This week I started learning how to program in Rust. Even though I’m using the project-based Command-Line Rust to learn, the author still went with the traditional “Hello, world!” project for the first intro to the language. I was also working on a Go project last week and so it immediately stood out to me that (at least as taught by this author) Rust has the print! macro that allows you to succinctly print to the command line. By contrast, Go requires importing fmt before you can print. This was the first topic that was swirling around in my head this week. What makes language designers choose whether printing output (one of the most basic things a program can do) is built-in or requires an import. I even remember back when I was learning Java in undergrad (I think it was Java 1.8, but I don’t remember) we had to use the savitch library just to get program input (another very basic computer program concept). As I thought about it, I wondered if it has to do with thoughts around compilation and whether the language designers think you’re mostly making user-interactive programs or libraries? It makes sense to me that scripting languages like Python, Ruby, and Perl would have print built-in since you always have to have the interpreter along with you, so all the basics should be there. (The original Batteries Included Python promise, for example) But perhaps the Go developers thought you wouldn’t always be printing to the command line so a more efficient binary could be compiled by forcing you to import the functionality? I’m not entirely sure.
The intro mentions the natural language nature of Javascript. I wonder if the book had been concieved a few years later if it would rather have been Python or Ruby - both of which are way more like human language than Javascript.
The book is fun and I mostly get it, but to truly get what the author is doing here, I think you would need to be a Javascript dev. The whole point is that the author is nerding out not only on the writing style of the authors they have chosen, but also converting that into Javascript coding styles. As someone who programmed in many languages, but hasn’t touched Javasscript in the the mid-90s, a lot of the elegance of this book is lost on me.
I didn’t really use any new programs this year. I just continued expanding on programs I’ve used in the past.
Python
For Python I continued to mostly use Pycharm. I’ve spoken about it for the past few years, but JetBrains continues to add features that make it easier to work with Python. For example, this year they added a model explorer to have better visibility into your models in Django. They also make running development servers for Django, Flask, and FastAPI a breeze. (Including restarting the server after every save).
In 2023 I just didn’t have the urge to do as much programming as in years past. I felt more of a tug towards video games, reading, and baking/cooking. So this recap will be quite a bit shorter than usual. A couple upfront themes and ideas: The programming was essentially Go and Python. I started reading a book about Julia, but didn’t do any new programming in Julia. I mostly worked on new code vs maintaining older code.
In March I continued to work on my programming projects as well as a little more Advent of Code.
Things started off with me finishing up my dreamhostapi and Dreamhost_DNS_Go projects in Golang. I got the API working under all the conditions that I need and I worked on both the output of the program and the logging. It now functions quite well for me to keep my dynamic DNS URLs up to date. My next step is something I’m going to do in a few of my cron scripts - have a separate JSON log that could be interpreted so that I could either have a daily email to let me know that the scripts all ran correctly or so that I can load them into Prometheus/Grafana to see on a dashboard how all my scripts are doing.
I recently used Mastodon to ask for recommendations for Go podcasts and one of the suggestions was Go Time. One of the recent episodes in the feed was a rerun of an older episode about " How Go helped saved HealthCare.Gov". This was extra interesting to me since I wrote my Master’s Special Project on Healthcare.gov. (I haven’t read it in nearly a decade, so I don’t know if it’s cringe-worthy at this point). The episode had on one of the programmers who helped get things back on track for the site. It was incredibly informative about the problems that led to the site not being responsive enough and how they were able to help fix it without scrapping the entire site. No matter what side of the political spectrum you’re on or if you’re even an American, the episode is fascinating for understanding how things can go wrong even when everyone has the best intentions and how to fix a large, complex code base.
January was a relatively light programming month for me. I was focused on finishing up end of year blog posts and other tasks. Since Lastfmeoystats is used to generate the stats I need for my end of year music post, I worked on it a little to make some fixes. The biggest fix was to change the chart titles not to be hardcoded. I didn’t realize it until I was reviewing my blog post, but I had hard-coded the year when I first wrote the code a couple years ago. I also changed the limits on some of the data I was collecting so that I could do more expansive trending for my overall stats.
I started off the year mostly working on Python projects. For January and February I finally started making some great progress with understanding modern web frameworks and use of CSS frameworks rather than rolling my own. This not only helped with the Prophecy Practicum project, but would form the backbone to a lot of coding this year. I also wrote a utility to tally up my videos for my end of year video game roundup, saving me literal hours of time. As you can read from following the link above, I also worked on my long-running Extra Life Donation Tracker code.
December was wholly dedicated to solving the Advent of Code 2022 problem set. Our job was to help the elves trek through the jungle to get magical starfruit. It was a lot of fun to do it live once again! This year I also had experience from the previous years (both live and on my own pace) that gave me the skills to solve some of the puzzles, including some puzzles that were variations on themes I’d seen before. In the end, I collected 36 stars, near my average for number of stars collected during AoC. Between work, family commitments, my programming and problem solving skill levels, that’s about the most I can usually do during the live period in December.
This year I really worked a lot on Python web technologies so I came to appreciate all the work that the JetBrains team does to make all the little things (like running Django test server commands) incredibly easy. I essentially did all my Python development in Pycharm. I’ve had access to the paid JetBrains suite because of the work I’ve done for my open source project: Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since development has slowed a bit on there, I may not be able to renew the subscription. If that’s the case, there’s a big chance that I’ll start saving up some money for a Pycharm Professional license. The only real exception to using Pycharm for programming was when I was editing code on a server. There I would use vim or nvim (more on that later).
November was not a huge programming month for me. On the weekends I was a little more focused with family stuff and videogames. But I did manage work on a couple projects.
As October came around, it was time to get ready for Hacktoberfest. I’ve been participating for the past few years and I love the fact that DigitalOcean supports this project which gets more people to contribute to free and open source software.
In the past, I’ve often contributed to my Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since the program is pretty mature at this point, most of the issues I have would have taken me too long, especially with how busy I’ve been with non-programming projects lately. So I dedicated my efforts to helping with some quality of life issues for the Prophecy Practicum (Django Version) that I’ve coded up for my friend.
This month I wanted to practice Go outside of Advent of Code puzzles. So I decided I would port over my Dreamhost DNS updating script from Python to Go. This would have the advantage of being a compiled program. Every time I update Python on my system, the virtual environment points to the wrong Python version and my program breaks. But, boy is parsing JSON in Go (at least with the built-in JSON tools) a real pain in the butt. I have to make a struct to hold and parse the data, but it comes back from Dreamhost as a 1-key dictionary holding an array of dictionaries. After a few hours of trying to figure out how to get Go to parse the JSON I was still unable to get the struct right. I may do a little debugging to see if I can figure it out before searching for any simpler JSON libraries.
August was a programming-filled month for me. It focused entirely on Python and I mostly continued working on established projects. Let’s jump in!
Amortization
I wanted to re-calculate the amortization table for my home loan for the first time in about a year. As a refresher, I created this program (vs using Excel or an online form) because we are not consistent in the amount of extra principal payments we make. For example, if I get a bonus at work, I might throw all of that bonus into the loan payment. So this program takes variable extra payments into account when creating the amortization table.
I started working my way back towards spending more time programming as the summer started (in between getting re-addicted to CDProjektRed’s Gwent).
I started off by working on my btrfs snapshot program, Snap in Time. I finally added in the ability for the remote culling to take place. (My backup directories had started getting a LITTLE too big) I also added in official text log files so that I wouldn’t have to rely on my cronjob log file hack.
In March I went back to Advent of Code 2016. In an effort not to get stuck, I decided to go as far as I can in Python before going back around and working on the other languages. So I did days 6 and 7 in Python. Overall, relatively easy Regex problems.
And that’s it. It was not a big month for programming. I mostly focused on playing with the kids and cooking. May/June are looking like they’re going to contain quite a bit more programming, at least relatively speaking. I’m hoping to both get back to work on some of my projects and also get back to Advent of Code.
I started off the year not expecting to do much programming. Compared to some months in 2021, I barely programmed, but I did end up programming much more than I expected. Let’s take a look at what I worked on in the first sixth of the year.
Python Programs
End of Year Video Games Helper
Coming off of last year in which I finally used Python to pull my last.fm data and create graphs, I decided to do the same for my End of Year Video Games blog post. I haven’t posted the code to Github, but here it is:
I’ve learned a lot of great tips and about a lot of awesome packages (hello, rich), but the best thing I’ve ever learned isn’t even Python specific. The most recent episode mentioned https://regex101.com and I don’t think I’ll ever again find myself banging my head against the wall when my regex isn’t working! Thanks @mkennedy !
Overall, there was a continuation of trends from last year with just a few changes.
Python
Pycharm
PyCharm has continued to be my IDE of choice for Python programming. The devs haven’t been resting on their laurels, either. Recently they added some extra features to support FastAPI. And they also added some features that I don’t 100% understand that make it easier to test against fake HTTP endpoints. It’s really awesome and definitely worth the price if you program primarily in Python. As I predicted last year, its git features ended up making GitQlient and Git Kraken (on Linux) more or less obsolete for me.
As I did last year, I’d like to take a look at how well my predictions matched up to what ended up happening:
Working on my Extra Life Donation Tracker: Yes! I made a bunch of releases last year to fix various bugs for my users. I also finally broke out the Donor Drive Code into its own project so that my code could be used as the basis of non-Extra Life Projects
Moving Prophecy Practicum to Django: Yes! I did this and my colleague has been using it for about 6 months now. I have some quality of life issues to fix that will help me get better at Django and maybe CSS.
Redoing flickr views project: Nope. Completely forgot about this.
Progress on my Unity Game - Eric’s Comet Cleaners - None.
Learning new programming languages: Yes! Haskell and Go, through Advent of Code problem solving. Also got better at Ruby and Perl.
Electronics: Some Adaboxes, but no work on my BBQ ThermostatKids: A little more Scratch with the twins. No “real” programming languages with Scarlett.
Compared to last year I had 10 more commits to Github. Pretty consistent!
In these last two months of the year I only worked on Advent of Code.
November
In November I worked through part of the 2016 problem set. I didn’t get too far because of how many languages I was doing at this point. Eventually I decided to allow myself to get a bit further in Python and then catch up with the other languages. Whenever I’d get stuck I’d go back to the other languages. Overall, once I’d figured out Python - Ruby, Perl, and Golang would be pretty easy. Haskell would still be hard, but I started getting the hang of it near the end of the month.
Across both September and October I got a decent amount of programming done. I just about finished the Learn You Haskell for Great Good book (got up to just before Monads) and started Head First Go. Once I had enough Go language to get started on AoC, I knew I’d be ready for the 2016 problem set. Let’s get into the nitty gritty!
Python (not Advent of Code)
Impractical Python
I finished chapter 11 which contained my old friend the Monty Hall Paradox. I’ve had a version up on my site for a very long time based on a PHP tutorial in Linux Format Magazine. This time I was able to code it in Python as well as creating a GUI version. Chapter 11 also touched upon The Birthday Paradox.
Throughout the spring and summer of 2021 a few of the times that I mentioned on the Advent of Code subreddit that I was doing the 2015 problem set in all 3 languages, some folks said they’d be interested in a writeup on the experience. Now that I’ve finally finished 2015 (my first set of 50 stars!) it’s time for that writeup. Before I continue, I’d like to thank everyone on the subreddit who has helped me. I have a README.md for each day’s problem and you’ll find my thanks to those who helped me within those READMEs here in my repo.
I didn’t do much coding in July, so I decided to combine the July and August wrap-ups.
Python
Dreamhost Dynamic DNS
I decided to clean up and update some code that uses the Dreamhost API to allow for Dynamic DNS. I cleaned up the logging output so that I could figure out why it was sometimes deleting one of my domains rather than just updating the IP. The original programmer had it printing out to the terminal. I used the logging package to send logs out to a file. While I was improving the logging, I also decided to use f-strings to make it more obvious what was going into the output string.
June was mostly Python, although I did do chapter 1 of Scratch 3 Games for Kids with Sam. He really, really enjoyed it and I anticipate doing the challenge problems and maybe chapter 2 in July or August.
Books
I read the intro and first couple chapters of both Flask Web Development, 2nd Edition and Data Visualization with Python and Javascript, both from a recent Humble Bundle. The Flask book may be useful for learning more about creating a non-Django site and, even if I mostly stick with FastAPI, it should provide some concepts that are applicable across both frameworks. With the data visualization book, I would love to use that to better visualize my annual Last.fm stats.
There’s a lot to be said for doing the Advent of Code in December along with a few thousand other programmers. It’s fun to be part of something with others and you get to all the neat and wacky solutions that others come up with.
On the other hand, going at my own page with the 2015 problem set allows for interesting little coincidences to form. What I did one day (when I was at about Day 7) was to go through all the remaining days and write some first impression ideas at solutions. This got my brain thinking about what I needed for each day. One day, before getting to the Day 10 problems, I was idly flipping through the book Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! As I was trying to decide if it would be one of the languages I’d add for 2016. I ended up coming across a built-in library that would have made solving Day 10 a real breeze. Day 10 is the Look and Say sequence. I’m sure by paying close attention to that Wiki entry I could have figured out an algorithm. But, basically I just needed to group together each repeated number and then I could take the length of that list/array to find out how many numbers. That becomes part of the new number. Unfortunately, as far as I could see, that functionality was not built into Python. So my Python code looked like this:
I had a lot less variety in my programming month, but still had a lot of fun doing it. In fact, Programming consumed most of my leisure thoughts. More about why I was doing it below, but I’ve been reading Programming Perl as well as skimming through Introducing Go and Learn You A Haskell for Great Good!. Ever since some folks used Haskell during last year’s Advent of Code and this guy’s videos that I mentioned in an early 2021 blog post, I’ve been very curious about the language. In fact, at this point I’ve decided that Go and Haskell will be the next two languages I learn.
A few days ago I read this article over at Tech Republic about how, Mozilla’s greatest achievement is not Firefox, but the Rust programming language. They point to Firefox’s declining numbers in the face of Chrome and Chromium-based browsers and I’m inclined to agree with the author. There is, of course, a kind of poetry to this. Although Netscape was one of the first dot-com companies and beat Microsoft to the punch at creating the first mainstream web browser, it’s not Netscape Navigator which is its greatest legacy. Instead it’s spinning off into Mozilla and, the most poetic part, the creation of the Javascript programming language. (Javascript was written in just a week and a half and this episode of Red Hat’s Commandline Heroes podcast does an excellent job documenting it)
I started off the month thinking it was going to be Python heavy and ended up doing a lot more micro-controller programming. To be fair, I was mostly programming in CircuitPython, but it definitely came out of nowhere.
Python
Civilization VI Webhook in FastAPI
Last month I created a webhook program in Flask to generate notifications when it was someone’s turn in our multiplayer Civilization games. When I posted about it on reddit, someone suggested that I would be better off using FastAPI instead of Flask. I’d been hearing about FastAPI for months on Talk Python to Me and Python Bytes, but I always got the impression that it would only be useful if I was writing my website to be async.
This is my seventh year raising money for Johns Hopkins Children’s Center via the Extra Life gaming charity. When I started back then I was brand new to streaming or recording video game play. In fact, just a few years before that I hadn’t even understood the point. I found out that you could somehow display your progress towards fundraising on your screen while you played. I had no idea how to do that and, at the time, I’d only done commandline programs. So I found bfinleyui’s web-based program. I set up XSplit (which I was using at the time) to capture the web pages and was able to have a great first year. The following year he created an app with Adobe Air that was even better. The GUI for this app would become the inspiration for ElDonationTracker; what I aspired to eventually build. My first commit to the repo for ElDonationTracker was that year. I was exploring how to get the API data via the commandline, but I wasn’t too hurried because I had the Adobe Air app. Unfortunately, the following year Adobe killed Adobe Air. So it was now time for me to try and make my own app. Unfortunately, I’d never done GUI programming before and my experiment with the TKinter GUI framework didn’t quite work.
It’s been a pretty busy 2 weeks. I’ve basically either been finishing up end of year blog posts or programming. Let’s jump in!
Extra Life Donation Tracker
I have the 5.3 release of my Extra Life Donation Tracker. I had a few minor refactoring goals for that release, but also a few user-facing enhancements. I added in the ability to grab the user’s avatar as well as their team’s avatar. They can now use that as an input in either XSplit or OBS. During these two weeks I also fixed a user-reported bug on crashes if a donor had emoji in their name. Oh emoji, you’re the bane of my programming existence!
I last wrote about the software I’m using while programming back in March. I think at the time I was thinking of writing quarterly updates, but my preferences didn’t change with that much regularity. I decided to make it one of my annual posts instead. So here is the software I used in 2020 to program.
Python Projects
PyCharm
For my Python projects I transitioned fully to PyCharm Community Edition. I documented my reasons for moving towards Pycharm in this post with a followup here. As I was writing this, I learned of a Real Python guide to Pycharm that taught me a few things I didn’t know about how to make better use of PyCharm. PyCharm has made Python programming a real joy. For any libraries I have imported (or standard libraries), it provides excellent code completion as well as context for function or method arguments that saves me time vs looking it up in documentation. The git integration is also great and I’ve recently started exploring usage of the lower git window which may make GitQlient obsolete for my Python projects. I haven’t made the best use of the debugger yet, but I’m slowly learning how to take advantage of it in my larger projects. If you’re a Python programmer I can’t imagine a better IDE. I did have access to Pycharm Professional for a while in 2020, but I wasn’t doing any Flask or Django work, so I didn’t really notice anything useful over the community edition.
Back in 2019, when I did my programming retrospective I made a few predictions. How did those go?
Work on my Extra Life Donation Tracker? Yup! See below!
Write more C++ thanks to Arduino? Not so much.
C# thanks to Unity? Yes, but not in the way I thought. I only did minor work on my game, but I did start a new GameDev.tv class.
Learning Ruby? Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say I learned Ruby. I did finish the book Ruby Wizardry and I took copious notes. But until I do some practice - maybe via some code katas, I don’t think I’ll have solidified it in my mind.
3D Game Dev? Nope, not really.
Rust and Go? Not even close. Although I did make sure to get some books on the languages.
So, what happened? On the programming front, I wanted to continue my journey to truly master Python after having used it at a surface level for the past 15ish years. I dedicated myself to doing the Python Morsels challenges (more on that below) and working through various Python development exercises. Outside of programming, the time I had off from COVID was used to play with my kids and they wanted to play lots of video games. So we took advantage of having way more time than usual to do that. So a lot of my goals slipped. We’ll get to 2021 predictions at the end, so let’s take a look at 2020!
What’s incredibly beautiful are the Haskell and APL solutions. Whereas every other language requires multiple lines, Haskell solves the problem in just one line. And APL is just a few symbols.
Here’s the same guy solving a problem from the Leetcode challenge in a few languages. Once again, it’s pretty neat how the elegance of the solution varies across languages:
Back when I was doing GameDev.Tv’s Unity 2D class, I really wanted to know how to do multiplayer games (I also wanted some better support on using Xbox/PS3 remotes in games). Well, this year they released their Multiplayer class. So, naturally, I bought it up. I started working on it, resulting in two Github Repos. In the first section we were learned the basics of the Mirror add-on. I’m currently working through the second section, where we will create a basic RTS. I haven’t reached a real differentiation point from the GameDev folks. That may come later after we get past the basics.
As you recall from the previous blog post, I’d installed Unity and JetBrains on my Fedora 32 computer via Flatpaks. I was going to use them for the Unity Multiplayer course I was taking on Udemy. Unfortunately it was an immediate fail and in lesson one after they have me install a new inputs library and restart Unity, it would always crash upon loading the file. I’m currently installing Unity 2020.1 on my Windows computer where I don’t expect to have that issue. Assuming I don’t, then it’s a big fat nope on using Unity on Fedora via Flatpak (at least for this class). Which, to be fair, is not on their supported OS list - which is only Ubuntu and CentOS 7. (And the latter for movie-making)
As I mentioned last year in my 2019 in Programming post, I created a bunch of 2D games in Unity by following along with the Gamedev.tv classes. I would watch the videos on Linux and jump over to my Windows computer for the programming, learning how to use SourceTree and Microsoft Video Studio in the process. But for some reason, going back and forth with the KVM when running Unity would sometimes freeze up the Windows computer. So when I saw someone on Fedora Planet running Unity Hub, I thought I’d see if there was a Flatpak - and there IS! Also, I’ve fallen in love with JetBrain’s Pycharm, so I thought I’d go ahead and use their game dev IDE, Rider. ( There’s a Flatpak for that, too!) So, let’s see how well this works!
I just found out today that PyGame 2.0 was released yesterday, on the 20th anniversary of the software. One of the first steps I took with Python was a series of games I made from tutorials in Linux Format Magazine. On Github I’ve got my shifter game and my Space Invaders clone. The shifter game is a little wonky since I haven’t touched the code in over a decade. But I was able to make the one shift needed to make the Space Invaders clone work on Python 3. So you can enjoy those and celebrate that PyGame development has picked up steam again.
Spent the last week debugging that script. Turns out the key to getting it to run in cron is to add export DISPLAY=:0 && before your command. That’s because Chrome will not launch without a display to send Chrome to.
Python Morsels
The most recent Python Morsels exercise was to figure out if a number was a perfect square. Trey began his problem statement this way: “This week I want you to write a function that might seem simple at first, but there’s a number of ways to solve it.” It definitely took some out of the box thinking for me to figure out how I was going to solve the base case. The math.sqrt() function returns a float so that it can give answers for non-perfect squares. So I kept thinking and I realized that any perfect, non-complex square root must be an integer. So I came up with the conditional to return. (And after all this Pythonic learning, I’ve learned not to evaluate for truth and then return a variable. Just return the evaluation)
Been quite busy with Python, keeping me away from other pursuits, like video games. (Although the kids have been requesting Spelunky 2 whenever it’s time to hang out with them)
Extra Life Donation Tracker (eldonationtracker)
For my Extra Life Donation Tracker I pushed out a new release, v5.2.2. A user of my program (man, I never get tired of how awesome that is!!) had wholly anonymous donors which was causing an issue I thought I’d handled. But it turns out that the folks that run the Donor Drive API are a little inconsistent in how they handle that in the donor endpoint vs the donations endpoint. So I pushed that fix out and now things should be dandy for game day (about 2 weeks away!!)
You may notice it’s been a while since I last wrote about programming. Well, a lot of the programming I was doing with the kids was due to having more time on my hands thanks to COVID. With Scarlett back in school full-time, there’s a lot less time for that as we focus on making sure she gets the most out of her education as well as teaching the twins to make up for not being in preschool this year. This has left me with reduced time for all my projects and entertainment (games, TV, and reading). Up until now that has meant the programming was put off to the side - kind of. Because I’ve been loving my exercises from the Python Morsels website and I’ll be talking about that when I get to the Python section. But first up, Ruby!
Because I’ve been busy with programming and other tasks (including getting re-addicted to Cities: Skylines), I’ve got a roundup from about the last week or so in programming.
Python
Python Morsels
I got the mid-tier of the Pycharm Humble Bundle which came with a bit of a subscription to Python Morsels. Every week Trey Hunner, a Python trainer, sends subscribers a problem to solve along with a few bonus questions to deepen the learning. Here’s what I’ve loved so far:
Spent the last few days finalizing the 5.0 release of my Extra Life Donation Tracker and then pushed ahead to get version 5.1 out. Here’s the PyPi page if you want to use it for your Extra Life live streams.
Arduino
I got back to my BBQ Themostat project and did some minor programming while trying to figure out how to run a computer case fan. So far I’m still working on the wiring aspect of this part of the project, but some folks on reddit did point out that part of my problem was getting a pair of my BJT connections mixed up.
With the twins, I messed around with a Neopixel strip. Not sure what I’d do with one in a future project, but at least I know how to program it in MakeCode now. Our project:
Since I’ve been making a lot of great progress programming with the kids in Scratch, I bought some Circuit Playground Expresses to program with the kids. The Circuit Playground Express can program in Arduino’s C dialect, CircuitPython, or Microsoft MakeCode, which uses blocks like Scratch. Today Scarlett and I made our first useful bit of code, a digital spinner we called The Sibling Chooser. Here’s the code, and you can see that it is indeed like Scratch:
I noticed that something had gone screwy with the Raspberry Pi 1B in the garage that was monitoring the garage door. I restarted it and discovered that last time I was coding and working on making it more robust if it had a temporary lapse in WiFi (so it wouldn’t crash), I’d created a little error. Fixing that error led me to realize that my new code for robustness had introduced an unfortunate artifact in that it would pass a status of “unchanged” to MQTT. So I fixed that. Code’s now in a good place. I just need to add a few more config options to make it more usable for others who aren’t me. Then I’ll make another release.
The next project I wanted to work on was to see if maybe my environment monitoring might be slightly more reliable with a Raspberry Pi than with an Arduino. So I wanted to do some comparisons. For my bathroom IoT project, I am using:
Because last week was busy with house projects, this week I continued the ocean/water-themed programming from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The first project was a game I made with Stella (her first computer game creation), a boat race in Scratch. While we mostly stuck to the tutorial, we did partake in the challenges, including adding a shark and figuring how to have background music (which Stella chose on her own). That turned out to be really tough as my attempts to figure out how to use the loops led to stuttering. Eventually I figured it out and you can see what I did, the rest of the code, and how the game plays by watching the video below:
Starting off with this code from the Raspberry Pi foundation, Sam made his first ever video game. I then modified it so the shark would close his mouth when he eats the fish and added a sound at the end when a score of 5 was reached. Here’s a video of Sam playing his game:
For Python I continued to work on writing unit tests for my Extra Life Donation Tracker. Doing so helped me find a few bugs and a few functions that I was able to combine to reduce the code complexity. Overall, this has been a very productive phase for the project, even if it has been very frustrating figuring out how to mock out certain functions like those reaching out to the net or those writing to disk. Depending on what I can do with some help that someone offered me on reddit, I will either go back to the extralife_io.py file to try and finish that one up or I may declare unit testing completed for now and tackle that later when I’ve learned even more about how Python works and how to test it.
I’ve mostly been working on version 5.0 of my Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since I adopted the Semantic Versioning principle for the project, an API change means a major version change. I’ve been taking everything I’ve learned about Python programming from 2019 and 2020 and tried to make my code both more Pythonic and more sophisticated. I’m also trying to move towards 100% code coverage. That is to say, I’m looking to try and make sure every line of code is covered by a test. While 100% test coverage doesn’t guarantee perfect code (after all, the test itself could be flawed or I might not be considering corner cases), striving for it usually has a few benefits:
I don’t know how long I intend to keep doing this, but I decided I wanted to document my programming as I went along. So yesterday I worked on Scratch and here’s today’s entry.
Ruby
A while ago I got a bunch of kids’ programming books in a Humble Bundle. I tried showing Ruby to my oldest, but I did it one year too soon (she wasn’t yet reading as well as she is today and couldn’t type as well as she can today) so for now she’s not into programming. But I was curious to see how it was presented since the book uses a story to present it (quite different from the Python book in the same bundle). Went through chapter 2 today and, so far, it seems that Ruby is pretty readable like Python is. That said, I’m not sure puts makes more sense than print, but maybe if I delve into the history of Ruby, I’ll understand why it’s puts? The author of this book uses snake case for variable names. I wonder if that’s because it’s the Ruby standard to use snake case instead of camel case or just to make it easier for the kids following along. I *did* really like the built in next and pred methods on numbers. Definitely more readable than a var++ or var = var + 1. Or rather, if you don’t have decades of programming experience (as I do), I think it’s just a faster bit of cognition to see var.next and understand it vs the older ways of doing the same thing.
Somewhere around 15 years ago, I started learning Python because I’d gotten deep into genealogy and started using the free and open source project Gramps. As I was also pretty deep into free software (somewhere around that time I became a supporting member of the FSF for a few years - and I think my smile.amazon.com still donates to them) I got interested in the idea of helping projects by contributing code. Python seemed like it wasn’t too hard to learn (compared to C++), so I started learning. I never did end up contributing to Gramps as I found GUI programming incredibly hard. In fact, it was something like 6 years ago before I created some useful GUIs (that weren’t copied out of tutorials) and only last year that I started making good, competent GUIs using the QT toolkit.
11 years ago (HOLY MOLEY WHERE DOES THE TIME GO?!?) I wrote about Jeffrey Friedl’s LR Stats plugin. As you know if you’ve been around my blog for a while, I love stats! It’s the biggest reason I do my end of year posts with my music, reading, and video game stats. Well, I haven’t used Lightroom for a few years now, and for some reason I was inspired this past weekend to recreate this ability. So I started on photostats, which will present a lot of the same stats that his Lightroom plugin does. On the plus side, my Python program is app-agnostic!
I’ve been using PyCharm for about a week now across a couple projects. I’d like to note a few things I’m really enjoying:
PyCharm is aware of your venv config and you can use it to pip install new packages. Ok, so pip is easy to use for installing. But it also provides a quick at-a-glance view of the packages you’ve installed and their versions - and I find it easier to view than a pip freeze.
I know KDevelop has this for C++, but it doesn’t really have the same support for Python - being able to run my Python files from within PyCharm as well as being able to run the debugger from within PyCharm is like how new cars unlock for you when you get close. It’s not necessary. It’s not even that huge of an improvement. But it’s a quality of life thing that you miss when it’s not there.
PyCharm is very smart about git. With KDevelop, I could add files withink the GUI (which is nice for making sure the project is aware of the file and provides a quick visual cue). But then I had to remember to git add it (either in the GUI or on the commandline). With PyCharm, every time I add a file through the GUI, it asks me if I want to add it to version control.
PyCharm asking if I want to add the new file to source control
I decided to document the tools I’m using for development since the various programming subreddits I frequent always have someone asking what tools they should be using.
Its built-in Python parser (working with flake8) has helped me find a lot of issues before getting to the stage of running flake8. The GUI for pushing commits to git has been very helpful in helping remind me what has changed and even (sometimes) noticing something I forgot to add to git. Its project-wide search has been invaluable when refactoring or renaming functions/classes. When it comes to large, complex programs, it’s hard to beat KDevelop when using KDE. That said, it’s only recently that the developers have started focusing away from being only a C++ editor and as you’ll see at the end of this blog post, for my Python workflow, I might be switching away.
Back in September I wrote about moving to KDevelop for my larger Python projects and also staying with Kate for my smaller projects. I’ve REALLY been enjoying all the features as I work on more and more complex packages involving lots of files. But for a few episodes of Python Bytes now (and/or maybe Talk Python to Me - they share a host) they’ve been talking about how awesome it is to use an IDE that has a Python debugger built in. It may be that KDevelop has that ability (I’m pretty sure it does for C++), but I’m not sure. I am nearly certain that Pycharm does have a debugger built-in. A while ago I’d set up the Pycharm COPR repo on my laptop. I tried playing with it a little at the time, but I was coding on a very small project without a venv, so things didn’t work out well. (Pycharm is pretty opinionated about the way a Python project should work)
It’s been 5 months since I last wrote about ELDonation Tracker, my software for tracking Extra Life donations for use during a livestream or VOD. I’ve been quite busy since then! First, I used Github pages to make a site for the software to make it a little easier for those who are just users and don’t intend to do any development. They don’t have to navigate Github to try and figure out how to get the program and use it. Then, by reading Serious Python I learned about Sphinx, which can automatically create documentation out of your docstrings. I also learned that all these “readthedocs” pages I’d seen springing up with all the projects I care about were leveraging the fact that readthedocs.io will use your Sphinx documentation to create hosted documentation. So now I have some great documentation for my software. Finally, it’s my SECOND bit of software to go up on PyPi:
I wrote about GitQlient a while ago. A few days ago I got a GitHub notification that GitQlient had finally reached 1.0. Consequently, the author created an Appimage version of the client so I was finally able to try it without having to compile on my own. As I started taking screenshots for blog post, I realized that the points I wanted to make would be more easily made if I could show them via a video, so I made a video comparing the two.
I was reading Serious Python by Julien Danjou as well as looking through other Python repos when I realized that my Extra Life Donation Tracker repo was a mess. (It’ll be different by the time you read this, but here’s how it looked at the time) After learning about how things should be structured and reading Mr. Danjou’s book about how I could use Sphinx to auto-document my code, I decided to undertake the challenge. However, there was a lot to learn and this code is used by many others for their Extra Life campaigns. I wanted to start off with much simpler code, so I started off by packetizing my lastfm-twitter code. It was a fun journey over the last week or so as I learned how to restructure my code and auto-document. (I also learned a lot about how to use Drone CI, which I’m using for my home projects that aren’t on GitHub) As the final lesson, I taught myself how to create a package for PyPi via Drone CI and so, I now have a PyPi package that anyone can import with pip!
I had been hanging on to these books in case I ever found myself wanting to do some Java programming. But as I’ve come to learn (mostly because of Python, but also through following the Perl 6 saga), languages change and evolve and so a couple books from nearly 20 years ago probably won’t be more useful than a newer book or a good Google search.
Cornell’s CS101 class textbook back when I was a freshmanI don’t remember what class this was for, but Cornell sure loved Java back then.
Over on Adafruit they asked the community, " What do you want from CircuitPython in 2020?" What’s CircuitPython? It’s a subset of Python that’s meant to run on embedded processors. Essentially I could use it (on compatible boards) in place of Arduino’s subset of C++ or TinyGo. As you know if you read my 2019 in Programming post, I love programming in Python and I love making GUIs with Qt. With Adafruit’s PyPortal, I was looking at making a GUI interface for some usecases here, but from what I can find on Adafruit’s tutorials THIS is how you make GUIs. Ugh! I mean, it’s kind of in the whole DIY spirit to make your GUI out of basic elements like circles, squares, and triangles. But, since Qt is available for embedded devices, I’d love to be able to use Qt5 Designer and pyuic5 just as I do with regular Python to create awesome GUIs for my CircuitPython projects (when they have a fully-featured screen, of course).
This was a VERY busy year for my coding. This year I had over 769 commits to GitHub; my previous best was 58 in 2014. The commits were very unevenly distributed. If you look at the graph of my commits, outside of a busy week in January and another in May, I didn’t really start coding until August.
GitHub activity graph
But perhaps commits to GithHub isn’t the best metric. If you look at what I accomplished in the second half of 2019, I worked on an incredible number of projects.
BBQ Thermostat: Arduino MKR 1010 and Therm Shield measuring temperature during a smoke
Today I was smoking a turkey so I figured it was a good time to do a live test of my project. There was good news and bad news. I think it’s illustrated quite well by the following graph:
Grafana graph of my BBQ Thermostat while measuring the smoker temp
The sixth, and final, game of the Udemy class on Unity 2D was a tileset Metroid-Vania game which the instructors named Tilevania. I never played Metroid and maybe only played Castlevania once, but its legacy does persist in some newer games like Spelunky.
Tilevania in the Unity UI
This was the closest I’ve come to making a Mario clone. My favorite part of the development process was creating the tile editor rules that allows me to drag around the tiles for the foreground and have it automatically determine if it should be a grass piece, dark, or full of rocks. As usual with the games we used to learn concepts for the course, there is a lot left to do to make a fully-fledged game. I made note of a few items in the tickets on the Github page.
We learned a lot of techniques and reinforced even more, but the biggest thing I learned was how to do Sprite Sheet animation. Having done bone-based animation in Blender years ago, I have to say that in comparison, sprite sheet animation is easy-peasy. The tradeoff is less flexibility - you only have what your artist drew (or you bought or got for free online), but it essentially automates everything about animation.
This used to look pretty regular. Just two parallel lines with the devel branch connecting into the master branch here and there. But then I merged master into devel because I added issue templates on the github website directly into master. Things got….interesting….
The fourth game we worked on was another game that I spent a lot of my childhood playing. We made a Galaxian/Galaga clone:
Laser Defender - a Galaga Galaxian clone
My mom’s youngest brother had a Nintendo and lots of arcade ports. When I was young he lived in the condo above my grandmother’s condo and whenever we’d go visit her, I’d ask if I could visit him so we could play games. The game I loved playing the most there was Galaga because of the frantic pace.
My journey through 2D game development using the Unity engine continued with our third project: a clone of Brick Breaker or Arkanoid. In case you’ve never seen it before, this is Arkanoid:
Arkanoid
It’s got a pretty important legacy, Breakout, the version that Atari created, was an important stepping stone for the two Steves of Apple (Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak).
So it makes sense that this would be one of the games we would use on our learning journey. This is what my first level looks like:
When I wrote about checking out KDevelop, I mentioned that it was due to a blog post by the Kate developers about how to evolve Kate going forward. Last night I came across a new article in the same vein in which they looked at potential git GUIs to use from within Kate. In my KDevelop post, I mentioned that I use QGit, but it can look a bit small in the screenshot of my 3 monitor desktop. So this is my typical QGit setup:
I’ve been playing video games since I was somewhere around 5 or 6 years old and got a Nintendo Entertainment System for my birthday from one of my aunts. I also inherited a Tandy computer from my dad when I was younger. We had a bunch of edutainment games - like this Sesame Street game (that unfortunately a quick search on Google Images does not turn up) where you had to suck the Tweedles (bugs from Ernie’s flower box) to solve math problems. I also, and I’ve mentioned this before in several places on the net, learned to program from a book on BASIC and made myself a bunch of simple games, including Madlibs clones.
I’m getting really close to finally getting this program to where I wanted it to be 4 years ago. My most recent release adds in the Team info to the GUI (and the previous release, which I didn’t blog about added team info in general). I’m getting feature requests and bug reports and all those kinds of encouraging things that make people want to provide programs for others. Also new as of a couple releases ago is the fact that I’m using Github’s CI (called Github Actions) to produce binaries for me that I can attach to releases to make it easier for folks to use the software.
I recently started an electronics hacking project to build a thermostat for my Weber Smokey Mountain. You can find details at Hackaday.io, but if you’ve been here long enough you know that I don’t trust other sites to continue to exist. (It’s why I copy my book reviews over from Good Reads). As of right now I’ve got the board able to read temperatures from a thermocouple that I send, via WiFi, to an MQTT broker. Then, via Python I take subscribe to that MQTT topic and put it into InfluxDB. From there I use Grafana to graph it. Here’s an early beta where I was trying to make sure it was working from end-to-end:
When MakeMKV added a new requirement for ccextractor, allowing it to grab subtitles that are encoded on the DVD or Blueray as Closed Captioning instead of subtitles, there wasn’t a package available for Fedora. (There is now, but at the time where wasn’t) So I wanted to make an RPM that I could host on Fedora’s COPR for others who needed the package. There was a problem with their shell script for building RPMs. At the time I just kept hacking away at it until I was able to build RPMs. But I didn’t think about how the manual process wouldn’t be sustainable as changes were made to CC Extractor. They weren’t having releases too often, so I didn’t worry about it. But then they made a new release and I knew that this time, having leveled up on my git-fu, I would try and figure out how to fix that problem and submit a pull request.
A couple days ago, I wrote about giving KDevelop another look and posted it to reddit’s r/kde. In my post, I’d said it was annoying to have to configure the color schemas per file. Someone commented on the subreddit that if you use the View->Schema menus it’s per file while if you go into Settings->KDevelop settings you can change it for all files.
As a side effect I explored the same options in Kate and set it up like this:
When I first started programming it was just at the prompt of my Tandy computer. Then it was in the QBasic text editor on the IBM computers at school. But when I started programming again with “real” languages, I ended up going with Emacs. Although I was first annoyed at the way commands like save were prefixed, it became my favorite editor. I think that was partially because of diving headfirst into the free software movement and partially because I didn’t like vi’s different modes and how annoying that made things if you didn’t realize you weren’t in the text entry mode. Eventually, I moved on to Kate because I love KDE (been running it as my main desktop for over 10 years now) and I loved the features it enabled. Also, since vi (or vim) is found EVERYWHERE while Emacs usually requires installation, I ended up switching to vi whenever I’m ssh’d into a computer. If you add plugins like powerline, it can be pretty awesome to use. Even on my desktop if I’m editing /etc/fstab I’m more likely to pull up vi than the weight of KDE (not that it takes up THAT much RAM).
After a bit more work since my 21 July post, I’ve finally reached what I can consider to be beta status for the GUI. Things have matured to the point where it works well on both Linux and Windows and I’m now using it every time I game. I created a bunch of issues on Github to track new features I want to add in order to get to what I think will be a 1.0 release. I’m excited at the progress I’ve made and that the software continues to have interest. As always, the code is available on Github. Here are videos on how to use the GUI:
If you follow the blog, you remember I’ve been working on a GUI for the donation tracker. Part of making that work involved changing the code to be object oriented. Also, it required moving the user-defined configs to be moved out of the main code. I’ve done that and finally tested that it works (I had a silly bug involving a typo that I had to correct) and merged the code into master over on the github repo. The new code required a change in the directions, so I made new instructional videos to go along with those changes:
Three years ago I created ELDonationTracker to use the Extra Life API to provide donation alerts on my screen while I’m streaming or recording games. About a year and a half ago, I actually had to start using it because the previous donation tracker I’d been using stopped being maintained. Since then I’ve been steadily improving it, but there’s still a bit of functionality for the alerts when someone donates that I was missing by running a commandline utility. A year ago I tried creating a GUI with Tkinter, but I just found it too hard to figure out. What I really wanted anyway was to do it in QT or QML. A few months ago I saw that it appeared the company being QT was going to finally take Python seriously. While looking up some tutorials on PyQT I found out that I could use QT Designer to do a WYSIWYG design and then a simple utility to convert it to Python code. Since designing GUIs is a real drag and takes away time from doing the coding to make the GUI work, I was jazzed. So I threw this together over a couple days, copying the interface from the program that was no longer maintained:
Back in October I created a GUI for my Python amortization table program. One of the things I lamented was that the buttons in QML look like crap. I want my buttons to look like buttons, not blue patches no a white screen. I don’t really know what made me look, but yesterday (during the No Snow Snow Day) I was looking through the file system and it turned out I had Plasma Components installed on my system. So I added
A while ago I wrote about my first ever useful GUI program. And in one of the series of posts that followed I explained that the reason I hadn’t made a useful GUI program before now is because all the typical stuff has already been made over and over. We don’t need any more tetris clones, word processors, or music programs. Recently I had reason to create my second program. A while ago I created a an amortization calculator in python which you can find here.
Back in February I posted the code to the data engine I developed for my plastmoid. At the time I’d wanted to clean up my plasmoid before posting it on here, however, I’ve become stuck on a key feature so I was hoping that maybe by posting the code I could get some help. (As well as provide an example to others)
First of all, plasmoids need a certain structure to the folders. Here’s what mine looks like:
. ??? contents ? ??? ui ? ??? Button.qml ? ??? Button.qml~ ? ??? content ? ? ??? ItemDelegate.qml ? ? ??? ItemDelegate.qml~ ? ??? flickrhelpers ? ? ??? addtogroup.py ? ? ??? addtogroup.py~ ? ? ??? removefromgroup.py ? ? ??? removefromgroup.py~ ? ??? flickrviews.py~ ? ??? flickrviews.qml ? ??? flickrviews.qml~ ? ??? test.qml~ ??? metadata.desktop ??? metadata.desktop~
I figured it’d be neat to show you how my plasmoid works so you could use it when developing your own plasmoids. Here’s the main.py of my data engine. The indentation is off, in case you try to copy and past this in.
Here are the imports:
from PyQt4.QtCore import *
from PyKDE4.kdecore import *
from PyKDE4 import plasmascript
#for flickr
import views
Those are pretty standard. The last one is the part of my engine that interacts with flickr. Right now I have some work to do to get that presentable, but all you need to know is that it outputs XML to this main part of the data engine.
I did it! I have created my first ever useful GUI program. After all these years of thinking that all the useful GUIs had already been invented - I found an itch to scratch. And here’s how the final, working version looks:
And so there it is! I was actually surprised that this last little bit of the program wasn’t as hard to finish up as I thought it would be. So, as currently implemented, when the plasmoid loads up it makes the data engine fill itself. Once that’s complete you can click on the buttons along the top to load up all the photos from that group that are ready to be promoted to the next group. Clicking on a particular photo loads up the small thumbnail. View on flickr allows you to jump to the website in case you want or need to do that. Originally I implemented it so that if the next part was hard, I’d at least have the functionality of the command line version of this software. Then came the new part that happens to be easier in a GUI than on the commandline. You can add the photo to the next group and remove it from the current one. The reason I did it that way was so that if the photo couldn’t be added to the next group, it wouldn’t be removed from the current one. I tested it first with a fake group and then the real thing and it works fine. Before I post the code for my data engine and plasmoid, I have some cleaning up to do. I also need to add in a bit more functionality for robustness. After that, if I’m going to make it so that anyone can use it (and post it on kde-look.org), I will need to do some extra work. So that’s version 0.1. For version 0.2 here’s what I’d have on my TODO list:
OK, so it’s been a year since I last blogged about working on this program. I tried working on the data engine in August and then got stuck right around the time I started my first semester of grad school so I had to drop it, even though it got stuck in my head and I was thinking about it for weeks until the light bulb went off. I wrote my idea and just had the idea to work on it recently. I have to say that, overall, QML is pretty awesome for making a quick GUI. I’ve always struggled with GUI code, but with QML I was able to put together a quick GUI in about 20 minutes. Now, don’t judge QML too harshly because my plasmoid looks ugly. It looks ugly because I just put together the minimum GUI to implement grabbing data from my Data Engine. Once I get everything working right, I’ll fix it up. After all, GUIs are really so easy in QML that it can be the icing on the cake in the end.
I have three main hobbies: photography, my webcomic and programming. After spending a year working on my 365 Project, I’ve been taking a lot less photos as that part of my brain takes a break. After working with Dan to get the story for INM worked out through May of this year and working on strips that will appear this March, I wanted to take a bit of a break from that. The one bit of code I wrote for myself that I use on a daily basis is my flickr views code.
What I love about programming is the instant feedback. In most programming languages, after you set up a framework for the barest bones of a program you can then run it at every step of the way to confirm that you are moving towards your goal. What I love second-most about programming is the fact that I am using my computer to solve a problem and free myself from tedium.
I was curious how they stacked up and I wanted to see if I could detect any patterns. Except for a few outliers, they’re mostly below 50 views per photo. I also expected to see more views after I started adding my photos to more 365 photo groups, but this is not the case. There do appear to be clusters of views. In other words, one highly viewed photo seemed to lift the ones by it. That one huge outlier is my photo making fun of causes of the swine flu. The other big one is my Heroin Chic photo, no surprises there. It was fun to create this and I learned a new python module. Also, even though it probably took me a bit more time to program than to do it manually, it will now automatically generate whenever I want, and that’s worth the time it took.
People often groan when they hear of someone making another game of Tetris, Window Manager, or audio program. After all, people ask, “Do we really need another? Why can’t you just contribute to fixing annoying bug X in gTetris/KDE/xmms?” I’ve always been on the side of the argument that said - “So what! They’re doing it for free. Not only that, but they’re not getting paid for this. It’s their hobby. So you can’t tell them what to make. If they don’t WANT to help Amarok, then leave them alone. Don’t download their program and they will eventually lose interest.” I’ve never been one for telling people what they should do in their spare time. (Not in any serious sense, anyway)
Hardly a day goes by that I don’t see an article on Linux Today about Moonlight and what a horrible person Miguel de Icaza is. So I thought I’d go ahead and do some exploration of what’s going on with Moonlight and Silverlight. First of all, what’s Silverlight? Check out the Silverlight article on Wikipedia. Basically, Silverlight is Microsoft’s answer to Adobe’s Flash. MS is pretty peeved they haven’t been able to get people off of PDF and onto their own format. They waited way too long while the rest of us realized that PDF is great if you want to make sure that the document you create is displayed the same way on everyone’s computer regardless of the fonts they have or which version of Office they have installed. (Or if they even have office installed)
I think that nearly everyone who has ever learned about the Fibonacci Sequence is fascinated by how quickly it grows. I wanted to illustrate that, so I created this collage with some modifications to J im’s makeCollage.pl script. The rules were that each picture takes the place of a number on the Fibonacci Sequence and is displayed that many times. Of course, I skipped Fibonacci number 1, which is 0. No point in having a picture show up 0 times. So the first picture is shown once, as is the second. Then two times, then three, then…..
That collage was created by a program. I certainly don’t have the patience to arrange all of those photos one-by-one!I told the program to download all of my pictures tagged with Eric Danny David and Danielle and create this collage.
But does that make this any less of a work of art? I think the answer is no. The artwork was just created procedurally instead of visually. To argue that this is less artful is to say that the The Lion King isn’t art because the wildebeast scene was created procedurally. Of course, in this situation I don’t see myself as the artist, but the guy who wrote the program is the collage artist. It’s his procedures which created the art. His name is Jim Bumgardner and he’s a really nice guy who helped me fix up the script. I copied it from his book, Flickr Hacks, but unfortunately, as the code he relied on has changed, it didn’t work as posted. In fact, here is the fix you need in his program, makeCollage.pl :
Over the last two days, between playing Portal and Age of Empires III (both of which are…awesome!), I’ve been doing a little more flickr hacking. This is very closely related to my previous Flickr program where I checked if my pictures were ready to be moved into the next views groups.
This time I wanted to see which of my photos were not in any groups. So in the case that I’ve missed putting a photo into the 25 views groups because it’s a few pages back and I really don’t have time to go back through all of my photos to find the pictures to put into the groups. I tried that once and it was excrutiatingly slow - even slower than figuring out if it was time to graduate my pictures out of the views groups. So here’s the output of my current program:
My Vietnamese Zodiac program is on the first page of Google when you search for the term! In fact, that about 24 people have come to my site looking for that from a search engine as of 29 February! That’s exciting because I know a lot of people don’t look past the first page of search results in Google.
I forgot to post this about 1 or so weeks ago when I finsihed up the script. So here’s how the output looks on my flickr views program:
Now my next step is to put it on the web. However, the Python API I’m using doesn’t do web-based program authentication. It also doesn’t handle multiple user authentication, which I’d eventually like to do. Right now I’m thinking of porting it to Perl or PHP. I’ll keep you posted.
So, thanks to a problem I had with rigging up Nick in " Sugar", I’ve temporarily lost interest in animation. This happens to me all the time, and I think I’ve mentioned it before in previous blog posts that I’m too lazy to look up before that I tend to gain and lose interest in my hobbies. For example, I haven’t touched the Wii since I beat Mario Galaxy during Christmas and until this recent problem with “Sugar” happened, I hadn’t done any programming in about a year. Even my interest in photography has ebbed so much that I let my subscription to Digital Camera Magazine lapse.
I’m pretty sure this is the first GUI program I’ve ever gotten to a useful state. No source code yet, as a lot of the buttons don’t work, but the basic functionality does. It’s a GTK-based RSS reader. I did it based off of code in LXF# 91. They called theirs Chomp. Since Mono is Spanish for monkey, I called mine Monkey Bites. Enjoy some screenshots.
It was another toy program, although a bit more useful than last time. It reads through a directory and recurses through subdirectories to fine all txt files and builds up a cache. Then it searches those for any text you want to search for.
Perhaps I missed a subtlety, but it appears to only search on one character searches as opposed to a whole word.
Next issue begins a real program - an RSS reader. Since I have that issue, I think I’ll do it tonight and then turn in for the night.
Just tested and, yes, for the small, uncomplicated Hello World program it works just fine on Windows XP. I just had to install .NET. (It took about 10 minutes….I don’t know why)
You can find it here or on the right-hand side under “My pages”. This is a program that’s been in my head for about four days and which I spent most of yesterday working on until I realized I was going down the wrong path. Ah, but I’m getting ahead of myself. This program is my attempt to bridge the borders which artifically divide us in the blog world, while also providing myself with a convinience. The page, if you haven’t visited it yet, displays blogs from my blogroll all on one page. Live Journal, a blogging site, allows you to do this, but only with other LJ users. Similarly, Tripod blogs allow you to do it only with other Tripod users. However, they failed to appreciate the power of hacker bloggers, such as myself.
As we all know, Linus Torvalds created Linux out of his frustration with the lack of features in Minix, a teaching OS meant to duplicate a POSIX-compliant Unix system. Well, as a great followup to Saturday’s Post, why not check out Minux yourself? A new group has begun developing Minix3, in the hopes of getting into a niche somehwere between FreeBSD and Linux: tiny, old computers. All you will need is the VMWare Player and Minux source. Typing root at login gets you in without any passwords. Tinker with Minux3 and tinker with a bit of history. It’s not EXACTLY the version Linux used, but it’s still pretty darned cool!
It took me the better part of about 2 hours to figure out how to get everything to work correctly, but I am finally done with my program, GNaughtyNice. It figures out how naughty or nice a word is by using the Google search API and searching once with the porn filter on and once with it off. You can access this great feat of programming at http://server.ericsbinaryworld.com/GNaughtyNice.html
I think it’ll probably make a pretty god party game. You also need a Google search API key because I only get 1000 searches which could get used up quite quickly if this were to become popular enough.
Frustrated with the lack of an easy way to create a video DVD on Linux, I decided to write a program to do just that! I wrote a program that will generate the dvdauthor.xml file needed to create the video DVD. Then I realized that if I had been so frustrated, perhaps others were too, so I created a project on Freshmeat.net.
The title of this post is, of course, a play on words. The company Ximian has developed Mono, an open source competitor to MS’s .NET. Mono is spanish (and probably latin) for monkey. The reason I’m excited is that according to Gnomedesktop.org, Fedora Core 5 will have mono! This means we’ll get great new programs being coded in Mono such as F-Spot, a photo organization program, and Beagle, an AMAZING search tool on par with the search tool in the latest Macintosh. Basically, it indexes the file system in such a way as to be able to look through not only filenames, but also tags in photos, music, and documents. Beagle even searches through AIM logs created by Kopete and Gaim. But the COOLEST thing is that, unlike the search in Windows which takes forever, this is instantaneous since it’s always indexing your computer. In fact, there are demos you can see by clicking on the beagle link on the right-hand side of my blog, that show a search being conducted and as the author write stuff in his IMs, it appears in the search. I can’t wait for this to be available to us Fedora users!
Well, actually, it’s not mine. It was a script in Linux Format Magazine a few issues ago. As hobbyists have done since the beginning, I copied the code down to see it actually work.
First the background on Monty Hall. Here it is from Wikipedia.com:
The Monty Hall problem is a puzzle in game theory involving probability that is loosely based on the American game show Let’s Make a Deal. The name comes from the show’s host, Monty Hall. In this puzzle a player is shown three closed doors; behind one is a car, and behind each of the other two is a goat. The player is allowed to open one door, and will win whatever is behind the door. However, after the player selects a door but before opening it, the game host (who knows what’s behind the doors) must open another door, revealing a goat. The host then must offer the player an option to switch to the other closed door. Does switching improve the player’s chance of winning the car? The answer is yes — switching results in the chances of winning the car improving from 1/3 to 2/3.
One of the best things about Linux is the ability to write shell scripts. These are most often used as utility programs to do repetitive tasks for you. I just wrote my first one on Sunday and here it is followed by commentary.
Today I finished up yet another class. The first one I finished up was a project where I was conducted a study for the School of Electrical Engineering to switch over to Linux and open source alternatives. I also published my study as my first publication at Lulu.com. It was great to have one class out of the way, especially one which was such a joy to participate in.
Today I wrapped up another favorite class, microcontroller design. As my faithful readers know, I’ve been providing the source code to each of the labs we completed during the semester. Well, today my group demoed our final project to our professor and TA. They were quite impressed with the progress we had made on the code, despite its limitations. Our final project, a web server on a microcontroller, was a lot of fun to work on. There were a lot of frustrating times, but it’s the good kind of frustration that motivates one to try as hard as they can to get around the problem. One of my favorite taks is to participate in design and debugging, trying to get my design to work because I know it *should* be working, so what did I forget? Was it simply a semi-colon? Was it something more significant, some kind of oversight? It was hard sticking to the project and keeping Rich from rewriting it from scratch, but I think we had a much better product because we sat through all of our problems and figured out what the original author of the source code we were basing it off of had done. After all, in a real work environment you have to figure what the previous guy did. There is no time to rewrite the code, no matter how awesome you are at coding. I will be posting the code and my report soon, probably over the next few days. I invite and challenge anyone out there to work on the code and make it more robust and reliable, there is PLENTY of room for that. You just need an Atmel Mega32 and STK500 development board. (As well as the computer on which one does the programming)
I have posted the latest code from the work Rich and I have done for our microcontroller class at Cornell. We are releasing all of our code under the GPL license so feel free to use it, modify it, and have fun with it. The code is modified C code and assembly language for the Atmel Mega32 chip running on an STK500 board. It should be easily available from Atmel or perhaps your local electronic hobbyist shop.
If you go to my main page, you can see where I have added a new section, C code from a class I’m taking this semester. We’re making a lot of really cool designs based upon the Atmel CPU, which is readily available for those who like to tinker. I’ve put up my first project, a reaction time tester. It has the user push a button, waits approximately two seconds plus a random amount to keep the user from guessing, and then displays the user’s reaction time. It also keeps the user from cheating by detecting if they are holding the button down.
Michael Kennedy from the podcasts Python Bytes and Talk Python has recently written a couple blog posts that I wanted to highlight here. First up is his post about rewriting the Talk Python site in Quart (aka async Flask). Three and a half years ago I wrote about realizing that it’s not about Django vs Flask vs FastAPI, but actually about finding the right framework for your workload. I didn’t completely state my current thought process in that blog post, but I was pretty close to the advice I currently give. If you want a Python-based site that needs CMS features and you don’t want to have to reinvent the world, Django is your framework. If you are making websites where you want to be in control of every puzzle piece, then you want flask. You only bring in what you need. And if you’re writing REST API based site (controversy about whether REST truly is REST aside), you want FastAPI. Well, I respect Michael Kennedy’s opinion on this matter for a few reasons:
As there are many people who are currently looking for alternatives to Wordpress in light of a little…. instability… I decided I would document my migration process. I figure my case is one of the more extreme cases, as I ran a self-hosted Wordpress instance for the past 19 years (since Feb 2005) and have ~4000 posts that needed to be migrated. I also have lots of photos, videos, and other media. Finally, I have made heavy use of many Wordpress features.
I’ve moved from Wordpress over to using Hugo to power my blog. If you’re still using RSS to follow this blog you’ll need to update your feed reader to the following URL: https://www.ericsbinaryworld.com/index.xml
So far, with the help of a few scripts (both bash and Python) I’ve been able to get most of the site back up to the way I want it to be. Most of the images should be working now. I still have to create and run another script for the way that this theme wants cover images to be references. I think that does bring to light one of the annoyances with Hugo vice Wordpress. When it comes to themes, each one expects things to be organized differently. It is much more chaotic than WP. Perhaps the type of person who runs Hugo is more likely to roll their own theme? Or will pick one and not change until they abandon their blog?
I’d been thinking about moving to a static site generator like Hugo, Jekyll, or Pelican for a while now. I probably would have used them from the beginning vs a fully-fledged CMS like Wordpess had they existed back then. But the recent shennanigans with Matt Mullenweg and Wordpress were the catalyist I needed to make the move. I’m going to try it out for a while and if I don’t like it, I can always go back to Wordpress. (I haven’t deleted my content.) For now most of the images on the site will be broken until I update them to exist on Hugo.
I had to change my wordpress username as it contained characters that were fine back when I started this blog in 2005, but didn’t work for federation. So this is a test to see if the post will properly federate now that I’ve changed the username. Here’s hoping!
I’ll be getting caught up on book reviews, so through the end of the year you’ll see at least one book review per day. I’ll still be occasionally writing my usual blog posts, but the most consistent content will be book reviews.
Then you can follow and see all of the blog’s posts. There is a bit of an error with my author posts, but since I’m the only author on this blog (I think there are maybe 2 posts by my brother), it’s not a big deal. I’m not sure what the etiquette / norms are if someone has a blog on the Fediverse. Is it gauche for me to also post about those my blog posts on my own Mastodon account? I expect the norms will evolve along with the Fediverse, especially as it expands to include Facebook and Tumblr (assuming their owners go along with that idea). For now I’m probably going to post a limited number of blog posts on my Mastodon account - I guess as a way of boosting. Or maybe I’ll just boost my blog’s posts? Again, I imagine it’s going to evolve for all of us as time goes on. (Although, as I wrote that previous sentence, I guess boosting it makes the most sense)
I just moved this blog to slightly different hosting infrastructure. Because of that I had some funky issues with character encoding yesterday. I believe that’s fixed now, but there may be other things that take me time to notice and fix up. Also, I still have a couple other things to set up so that I can FINALLY have https working for this blog. As part of this infrastructure change, I discovered and fixed at least one long-running issue that was causing problems with that. So if things are offline for a bit over the next few days or weeks - that’s why.
I’m not a huge fan of plugins for key parts of the site. There are some blog posts that no longer make sense because they used, for example, the iframe plugin to embed Google Maps. That said, my previous solution for displaying code on the site - special CSS is also brittle because I lose it whenever I change themes. I think at some point I also lost it when I upgraded a theme. So, since Wordpress is all about blocks now, thanks to Gutenberg, I’ve decided to try out this Code Syntax pluginI heard about on Wordpress Tavern.
When I switched to Twenty Nineteen almost a year ago, I wasn’t sure if I was going to stick with the theme so I never did my theme documentation blog post. So here’s what the previous theme, Twenty Sixteen, which I had for about 2.5 years, looked like:
I’m not sure I like how the main blog page looks. While it seems to copy something like Ghost or Jekyll (some of the Wordpress competitors popular among the technical set), It has something of an unfinished look to it. I do really like the way individual posts look, particularly when they have a featured image set. And, to some degree, thanks to Facebook, Twitter, and other sites - users are much more likely to land on a blog post than on the main blog page. But right now I’m not sure I’m happy with the theme. I may switch back early next week. If I stick with Twenty Nineteen, I’ll make my usual post about changing themes that contains some screenshots to remember how the blog looked with Twenty Sixteen.
I haven’t completely changed hosting for all my domains, but I have changed it for this one. So it’s possible things may be broken for a bit while I root out all the errors. Or maybe I got lucky and everything will be perfect after the DNS is done propagating.
Another event has once again cemented my thoughts that the informed technical person needs to run their own services rather than depend upon the benevolence of companies. It started with Google closing Google Reader. Then Facebook and Twitter got extra censorious. During all that, people started abusing DMCA requests on Youtube. Recently Google decided to close Google code. Now there the Ars Technica story that SourceForge is installing malware on software that is considered abandoned on their site.
Almost exactly two years ago, I changed to the Twenty Thirteen theme. It was a breath of fresh air after what I’d used before. The font is beautiful and it was much less cluttered than the themes I’d used before. One of the things I like is that the color scheme quickly tells the user what kind of post I’m making. In practice, the post types made a bit less sense for the way I blog than if I were a Tumblr refuge, but it does make for a nice, colorful theme.
I’ve been hearing about the members of the Giant Bombcast talk about participating in the Extra Life video game marathon for a few years now. For some reason, when the 2014 event happened, I decided to look into it to see if I could participate this year. When I started looking into it around a month ago, I realized I wouldn’t be able to participate in the big 24 hour day because that’s when someone’s getting married. But, then I found out that the organizers are OK with creativity in the marathon was run. There are others, like me, who raise money and play games throughout the year.
I can’t believe I’ve been blogging on here for TEN YEARS! Here’s a link to my first post. Time has really flown by! Ten years ago I didn’t even think blogging would still be a thing in ten years time. So far I’m still on Wordpress, although I finally moved away from the server. prefix in the domain name. I still enjoy expressing myself and I still love when I get engagement from my readers.
Five Years Ago Today: A review of Dan’s Blog. I know Dan’s been really busy. But Dan needs to get back to blogging. I love Dan’s blog posts. Dan! BLOG!
Finally did the move, I’m at www.ericsbinaryworld.com instead of server.ericsbinaryworld.com/blog ! Whoo! No more annoying URL! There may be a few funky things here and there until everything’s ironed out, but for the most part it seems to be working just fine.
Every day Boing-Boing posts a blog post from a year ago, five years ago, and ten years ago. I think it is pretty revealing and I want to do it too since I’ve almost been blogging for 10 years now. We’ll see how long I can keep it going.
That this blog is at the strange URL of server.ericsbinaryworld.com/blog is the product of the circumstances at the time that I got my first ever URL - www.ericsbinaryworld.com. That URL went to my tripod site, the only way I knew how to do hosting at the time. In 2003 I wanted to play with using Linux to host my own server, hence the server.ericsbinaryworld.com. And I wanted to do other things than just blog, hence the blog being in a subdirectory. Time has passed and Wordpress has grown to be a full CMS. I’ve gotten more sophisticated when it comes to the Internet and understanding how things work and should be structured. I’m not 100% sure right now, but I’m leaning towards moving the blog in Mid-April to www.ericsbinaryworld.com for simplicity and elegance’s sake. I’m not 100% sure because I’ve been at this URL FOREVER. At the same time, the Internet has wonderful things like redirects and since pretty much every domain registrar provides subdomains for free, I’ll be able to handle people coming to the old URL seamlessly. I might also condense a few of my other URLs to reduce the amount of money I’m paying each year to register my domains - especially since most of them are not getting enough traffic that it would matter if I gave them up. Unlike Jeff and some of the other Giant Bomb guys, I don’t have enough money to throw away on URLs just for fun. When the time comes and it’s certain, I’ll make another post so you can update your links, bookmarks, and RSS feeds.
[caption id=“attachment_6755” align=“aligncenter” width=“400”] This blog was on the server on the right, the left is a server for Phi Sigma Pi[/caption]
Nine years ago today I started blogging using Wordpress. I’d been blogging for a little bit before that on Tripod (and I’ve been copying those posts over to this blog, so that post might not appear to be the first one. Those are the posts that start with [1.0]) , but this was when I took blogging into my own hands. I just can’t believe it’s been that long - it certainly doesn’t feel like I’ve been blogging for that long. The blog has moved from a server running Fedora Core 1 in my apartment in college to a server running BSD in my first apartment after marriage to being hosted on ServInt.
Cleaned up the header menus (it was really bugging me that the second row only had one entry on most desktop computers) and added a Comment Policy page.
My stats say there have already been 43 visits today, so some of you may have seen the header while in its state of flux. After talking it over with the wife (who also thinks the new theme looks more pro! yay!) and sleeping on it, I got the header to about 1.0 stage. I have a couple ideas on how I want to punch it up a bit more, but I want to give myself some time to mull it over.
Just got the new header image up. At least the first draft of it. I’m CLOSE to where I want to be with the header, but it’s going to take some thinking about it to see exactly what I want to change. Slowly, but surely, the website is moving towards what I want it to look like.
I’m not somewhere between halfway and three-quarters done with fixing the site to align with my new theme. I moved all but the ads to the footer. (No one’s going to pay to not be seen) I actually like the new design philosophy. Why constantly distract the viewer’s eye form your content with links to other posts or other sites. That can be saved for the end. I’m done with this post - now what? Well, what about these links here at the bottom. I might still need to move some of those around.
I mentioned about two weeks ago that my scheduling for the site might temporarily fall apart. I finally got caught up so now I should be able to focus on meeting my weekly schedule. I’m going to try not to let things get that far behind again because I had to discard about a dozen blog post ideas because, while I saved the URL, I didn’t really feel the passion to write about that topic anymore. In some cases I couldn’t remember exactly what point I wanted to make. In other cases, I just couldn’t muster the same feelings for the topic so I just dropped it. I hope you do enjoy what I’ve written and queued up. I know I’m enjoying the comments of my regular readers.
When I decided I was going to blog 5 days a week, I picked five categories I wanted to blog about: Fatherhood/Family, Technology, Culture, Photography, and Politics. And because I only have a certain amount of time to write throughout my day - usually during my lunch break at work with a little bit at home - I started keeping a list of topics I wanted to talk about. The list has grown unwieldly and it’s getting to where I can’t remember the point I wanted to make on some of those posts. Sure, some of that is fixed by better note-taking, but a lot of it is that the way I like to write involves being in the moment. When it’s a month (or more) later, I might not really be in the same headspace to talk about that topic. So I’m going to work on paring back the list. I’m going to keep the same days for each topic so that there might start to be a few gaps in the schedule, but it should roughly even out.
You may have noticed the images overlapping with the right-sidebar. That’s because I tend to write my posts ahead of time and I was expecting to have Wordpress 3.6 and the new, wider theme by now. But I’ll keep going things this way because while it might be a bit uglier now, it’ll look nicer in a few weeks when the new theme is finally out.
Additionally, I’m making some changes in my screenshots page to make use of galleries. Hope you find the new method a bit more organized-looking.
In response to the fact that most of the spam comments on my site are on older articles and given that historically no one has commented on posts older than a couple years anyway, I’m enabling Wordpress’ auto-close on comments for posts older than 2 years.
I’ve had the same tagline for a long time, but it hasn’t always been the same. In 2007 I had a focus on computer animation where I now focus on photography. I’ve been watching a lot of presentations from Wordcamp 2013 and one of them inspired me to focus on trying to blog every day (just as how I did photography every day for a year to practice photography and get better) and to focus on a certain topic per day.
Know that there are a lot of errors on upgrading. Some files are not updating correctly via SVN. I had to do a fresh install and copy in my config/plugin/theme files. Annoying, but it’s done. I probably won’t be upgrading my other WP sites for a while.
Unlike some other web admins, I respect your ability to choose to have ads blocked. The ad providers brought them upon themselves by making ads really freakin’ annoying into the mid-2000s. I just want to say that I don’t run any of those kinds of ads on this site. I have an ad for Servint, the company where I have my site hosted. By clicking on that ad or the link for Servint in this post, you can help me recoup some hosting costs. If you sign up via that link, I will receive some amount of time (depending on the package you choose for hosting) of free hosting. I also have an affiliate program with B&H Photo and Video. I chose to have an affiliate program with them because I buy all of my camera equipment from B&H. Ever since I went to their store in NYC, I was very impressed with their customer service. Anything you buy from B&H from that link in this post or the ad on this page will net me some percentage of the cost which I will use to offset hosting this site. I also have some Google ads, but it’s against the terms of service to tell you to click on them. Instead I’ll tell you that you probably shouldn’t block Google ads in your adblock program because they are very unobtrusive and usually are only text so they won’t sap your bandwidth. Also, they are usually very relevant to the post or my site in general.
I’m going to be moving my domain over to a new registrar in the next day or so (edit 14 Dec - I got extremely busy this weekend, so expect the possible change next weekend. At least this way there’s more warning time) and this site and other sites on this server may go offline temporarily while everything is sorted out.
Looking over my search statistics I saw the searches that had recently led to my blog. Here are the most recent ones with comments on the strange ones:
mythtv totem
makehuman review
mario 64 3D model - I don’t think I’ve even mentioned this before. I’ve written about Mario and 3D models, but not 3D models of Mario
“Rudy Winston” +Canon - I spoke about Rudy Winston’s talk at B&H. I wonder who’s searching for him and connecting him with Canon.
rockbox anime themes - I haven’t really spoken about this
hitchhikers guide to the galaxy binary - What would that binary be of?
alvarez guedes diary joke
gentoo vs opensuse 11.1 - Check out my Gentoo Posts and Opensuse 11.1 posts and compare.
Garmin eTrex HCx tutorial
bunny binary - binary bunnies? Hmm….
crunchbang rocks - It certainly does!
ati fglrx sabayon 4.2
ta spring gentoo binary - Not sure what this means
credit crunch bunny animation - what does the credit crunch have to do with a rabbit animation?
top ten web of world pictures
digital world human world interface
opensuse 11.1 review
1) I fixed up a bunch of my links. Some of them led to websites that no longer existed, one domain had been bought by a pr0n website. So all my links should go to where they’re supposed to now.
I haven’t updated to Feodra 9 yet because I keep hearing that Fedora really jumped the gun on this release and there’s still a ton of stuff broken. Since I use Fedora as my main daily computer, I can’t really sit there wasting time debugging it - especially since I’ve got a few animations that I’m working on. I’ll move it it when it gets a bit more stable. I’m thinking of maybe moving to another distro in the future. Perhaps Mandriva….we’ll see.
Since Wordpress 2.5 supports Gravatars, I discovered them and have enabled it. Gravatars are images that appear next to your comments next to this blog. To get one, go to http://en.gravatar.com/ and register one with your email address. Then use that email address when you leave comments on my blog. Right now I’m only allowing images rated up to PG, so keep that in mind.
In celebration of the new year, and to solve a problem that I explain on the page, here’s a program to figure out which Zodiac animal corresponds to each year:
Vietnamese Zodiac
I’m still working some kinks out such as the fact that unicode is currently not working on my blog so depending on whether I’m testing a new feature there may be some breakage.
The electric company gave us a letter today stating that they’ll be doing some work on the lines and we may/will lose power on 27 or 28 Dec. Because I’m going to be extremely busy with my family at that time, I may not be able to get the server back up until 1 Jan 2008.
Sorry if that keeps you from enjoying my blog or Andrew’s blog or drop the bomb productions. I’ll get it back up as soon as I can.
I looked at the top 60 of 365 search strings people type into search engines when they come to my site. These represent 34.14% of the search terms people type to get here.
It seems that most people come here looking for:
Relient K ( 7.4%)
Gnewsense ( 5.2%)
Fedora 8 ( 4.71%)
The best thing is that ever since I switched from blog posts with URLs that look like http://server.ericsbinaryworld.com/p?923 to http://server.ericsbinaryworld.com/year/month/day/posttitle/ the search engines have been bringing more and more relevant searches over to my server. Before they were way off topic due to the fact that the search engines were not picking up on my topics efficiently enough. As you know, I love having more people come because it means more readers and I don’t feel like I’m typing for no reason. Also, especially when it comes to Linux issues, I’d like to think that my posts can help others who are going through the same situations. When it comes to the specific search terms that people are coming over for when it comes to Fedora 8, it’s obvious they are coming with questions I provide the answers to. Here are some examples:
I’m going to see if I can fix up my blog’s style so that it’s not so narrow because, otherwise, I’ve grown to like this theme. So if the blog looks a little messed up for a little while it’s because I’m editing the style sheet.
We keep losing power around here. I’m not sure who’s to blame. This time even the server lost power. That means that the power outage lasted longer than the UPS could handle. That’s quite a few minutes, so it wasn’t just a blip in the electricity.
Sorry if the outage kept you from getting somewhere on the server you needed to get to.
I just upgraded Andrew’s blog and his went much, much smoother than mine! That’s a good thing because I had left him behind in WP 1.5 because I was scared of messing up his blog. Now he’s caught up with WP 2.3.
I had the ramart theme for over 2 years, since announcing it in this post. I’ve had it for practically the entire life of this blog, so I thought it would be fitting to record how it looked. Perhaps I can go back to it if I can convince someone to redo it as a Wordpress 2.3 compliant theme or perhaps it’s time to move on. I haven’t really decided just yet.
First of all, I was unsuccessful in getting my previous theme to work with the new features. Second, the current theme I have selected is god-awful. However, I really, really like the widgets idea a LOT! So I’m going to need to find a better theme that supports widgets. I tried about 4 different ones, but this one was the best. Really, the only thing I don’t like about it is that images flow out of the boxes instead of the boxes expanding. I’ll work on it or just roll back to my old one and forget about widgets.
Finally went through what I needed to do to get the permalinks working on my blog! Now you can have nice URLs for my post which are easier to remember than before.
The reason behind the lack of my news or politics-related material recently is due to a very simple fact - the world has become boring. I haven’t seen anything new happening in months. The war in Iraq continues, stagnating at the pace of a glacier. Has anything new happened there? No. US soldiers continue to die every day. Sunni and Shi’a continue their slaughter. Iraqi politicians resign and rejoin, but no legislation of any consequence is passed.
Live near a big city with mass transit? Need to know how to get somewhere? Then use the RandMcNally of trains, HopStop.com. Also available on my blogroll, under the links category.
Don’t forget to be careful of what you write in your blogs, myspaces, etc Express your opinion and interests, but be careful not to give away enough information that criminals can use it against you. Don’t talk about vacations ahead of time or what time you get off work normally and other such things. It’s hard and I’m sure I’ve made a mistake or two, but keep it in the back of your mind and the your time on the Internet will be much more pleasant.
I don’t know wtf is going on with Google, but according to my web stats, 66 of you came here looking for info on anime conventions (this month alone). I’ve never talked much about them except to put up a picture of someone from an anime convention. It was this one or two:
Apparently there aren’t too many other blogs/sites out there talking about it or I wouldn’t get so many people coming here looking for it. The above pictures are probably responsible for the 32 people coming here looking for cosplay. (The second top search term) Another one that brought about 20 people here is the Order of the Engineer, which I blogged about the day I got it. Since then I haven’t mentioned it until today.
Today I was looking back through my original blog, It’s A Binary World (now 1.0), and it was interesting to see what I was writing about. I found some really fun posts. Here are links to the posts and some highlights.
Why does technology excite me so? I think because my knowledge of technology frees me from the slavery of others. I can run my own server with as much space as I want on it. I can post any content I want (as long as the goverment doesn’t shut me down q;o) and I can be free of paying for software that doesn’t work right out of the box -> by switching to Open Source alternative. Also…I’m a bit of a geek. q;o)
Sorry about yesterday. Apparently my dynamic DNS hostname decided not to be dynamic. So, after about 30-40 minutes of checking and rebooting my machine (which had 65 days of uptime! - I think a power outage occurred two weeks ago), I realized the problem. If you can read this, it has propagated to your DNS server.
So lycos died today and they provide the name servers for my blog. So my server, all tripod, and all angelfire pages were inaccessible today. Didn’t see anything about it off their home page, but the roughly 6 hour outage was annoying as heck!
Well, after fixing it up the first time to deal with the fact that I had uploaded my videos to Vimeo, I found that the site looked a bit clunky. So I revamped the opening page and fixed up some of the organization of the content pages as well. In some cases I deleted references to obsolete things (such as 56k modem download times) and in others I added information about the Creative Commons. I also added a “legal” page where I discuss the Creative Commons and some of the legal implications of remixing my clips.
Now that I have begun uploading my videos to Vimeo (and intend to digitize my portfolio) I have revamped my video production site to be much better organized. I will be adding new content in the next few months. A lot of it will be in my “Early Work” category as I upload videos I created during my High School years. If you haven’t seen any of my work, give it a shot. There’s stuff in every category from silly to serious!
I realized the Monty Hall PHP program I had written didn’t really have any kind of description of what you should do on the page. So I went back through my blog and found the description and fixed that sucker up. So if you went there in the past and didn’t get what you were supposed to do, go ahead and give it another shot.
I also fixed my blogroll because a bug from Mauricio’s blog had been causing it to choke. That is now fixed as well and you can go ahead and check that page again.
You may have noticed a new addition to the top of my page. I’ve decided to add in some Google ads to my page. Nothing else will change, I’m just trying to help earn a little extra cash. I’m new to the AdSense program, so be patient with me if things look weird or ugly until I get the hang of it. For now, it looks like they are showing PSAs, which they show if there aren’t any ads to serve up. Thanks guys.
there are some rendering problems with my blog right now and it is putting the sidebar - usually on the right side here, all the way at the bottom - very annoying. Just wanted to let you know where it is.
This server is now running on a FreeBSD box instead of Fedora Core 1. It’s also 1 GHz instead of 300Mhz. Man, I have gone from being scared to install anything that wasn’t an RPM package a few years ago to where yesterday I compiled a custom kernel for the first time ever!! That is a right of passage all free and open source hackers go through on their way to fully grokking the OS. It always sounded a bit scary and risky to me - recompiling the one program that determines how EVERYTHING on your computer talks to the hardware. But I did it after just two tries! This whole experience has been a lot of fun and now we FINALLY have enough space on the server to allow the members to post all they need to and I can post more screenshots, pictures, and civ4 save files!
Well, I’ll tell you one thing - FreeBSD does NOT hold your hand like Linux does. This has had both frustrating and enlightening effects. On the one hand, it’s been very annoying to have to deal with all manner of config files I never had to deal with before. Apache and MySQL didn’t just work as soon as I compiled them. Apache needed me to change the server’s name to an name actually resolvable and MySQL needed me to chown the directory it had installed to. Webalizer wasn’t automatically installed and I had to manually configure it.
I now have a FreeBSD 6.1 computer which will eventually take over the job of the server. It could take anywhere from a few hours to a few days to get everything set up correctly, but I’ll be sure to make a post when it’s ready.
Danielle’s job is getting rid of some old computers - all of which are way, way better than my current server. My current server is a P II 333 Hz computer!!! And it only has a 4 GB hard drive, most of which is full! By contrast, the cheapest computer they’re selling at Danielle’s work is an 800 Mhz machine and we’re trying for a 1 Ghz machine! The hard drives on all the computers were 20 GB. Given its track record, I will be switching over from a Fedora Core 1 server to a FreeBSD 6.0-series server. I’ve been itchin’ to do this ever since I first read about the BSDs and their legendary status in the server world. Also, I’ll be able to implement a nice clean server as this server was originally a desktop install subsequently made into a server. Thus it’s cluttered with a bunch of useless stuff. I’ll also be able to implement file quotas from the beginning for those whose sites I am hosting here. It’ll be a fun little adventure for me, and a chance to start with the right intentions. Here’s hoping everyone didn’t already bid out the computers!
As part of my tasks today, I decided to clean up my home pages and eliminate a lot of the crud and invalid links. I just wanted to make it a bit more pleasing upon the eyes of my visitors. I still have some work to do at http://www.ericsbinaryworld.com, but I think that I like how http://server.ericsbinaryworld.com/ looks now.
I’m feeling really frustrated right now because, for the last week, I have felt that I had a picture idea or blog idea, but when I sit down to write or get my camera in hand, suddenly I can’t think of it. It’s right at the edge of my brain and I wish I could figure out what’s blocking the way or why I can’t just let it flow like usual. It’s especially unnerving when I read other blogs and see their thoughts flowing freely - easily translated from the firing of synapses to bits on a server somewhere.
Technorati.corn is a blog search engine. (They also search flickr images, but that’s a minor part of their operations) They are considered to be so important that, on more than one occassion, I have seen CNN’s Internet reporters referring to technorati’s top search items as expressive of what Americans (and others) are interested in. The top search items, appearing under the search bar in the home page, are updated every hour to reflect what most people are searching for.
About 1-2 weeks ago, I finally joined technorati. I had always been pinging technorati, but you have to claim your blog for the results to show up publicly - at least that’s what it seemed like in my experience because when I searched for stuff I had blogged about before joining, it was not displayed.
You may have noticed some instability in the blog recently. This is due to the fact that the place where my server is held recently switched to an ISP that blocks port 80 due to the Code Red Virus. As I’ll be moving soon, it didn’t make sense to enter into a contract with a business tier ISP for the server, so I had to do a few hacks to get the server running. A few more hacks this morning allowed me to get the blog working, since the blog kept looking for the old URI and I had to do some creative things with the URI in order to keep the same one working for those of you who have linked to the top level of my blog.
I have chosen the ramart theme, developed by the owner of a blog about Weird Al Yankovic. After going over all of the available themes, I chose this one because it best reflects what my blog has evolved into. As a blog mostly about technology news and the GNU/Linux operating system, I feel this theme best conveys my content. However, don’t worry that I won’t be talking about personal things, politics, or religion - it’s just a realization of the main topics of this blog as well as the fact that I ’m a VERY technological person. I mean, how many other people have three computers they use on an everyday basis, including a server. Finally, with the theme I was previously using I didn’t like the font as much - some of the letters ran together such as a c and an l - looking like a d.
I believe that websites, magazines, blogs, and other media that people become accustomed to should always look the same. Afterall, that’s what people become comfortable with, so why change it up? However, I also realize that these things always change and it’s often for the better. In that vein, I am going to be changing up my blog a little bit. I don’t like that I’m just using one of the default templates for WordPress because what is it that distinguishes my blog from Andrew’s Blog or any of the others using the default template. It may take me a while to customize the template the way I want it, but I don’t want to take the server down again - it’s had enough downtime recently. Therefore, you may notice some changes on your visits until I get everything tweaked the way I want it. Thanks for you patience and see you on the better side of “It’s A Binary World 2.0”.
Just wanted to remind people that the comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks on this site are moderated to help prevent comment spamming. Your comments probably won’t be posted for a few hours after they are made, so there is no need to double-post.
As we switch the server over to Fiber Optic lines (providing faster experience for you), you may experience some periods of downtime on the server. I hope to have things resolved by the end of the week.
I will be going on my honeymoon pretty soon and so my server will be the last thing on my mind. Besides that, there won’t be any Linux computers easily accessible because I’m not taking my laptop. This is bad news for the server because of the constant thunderstorms in Tampa. For the past two weeks we’ve had thunderstorms every day and we even lost electrical power a few days ago. Since a UPS costs money and I neither have paying advertisers nor paying hostees, if the power goes out, rebooting my server, there won’t be any service until I get back. Of course, this is sad for me too because it means you won’t get to read any of the pre-written posts I wrote, but, in all honesty, that’ll be the last thing on my mind. See ya when I get back!
It has been a wonderful journey with this server. I have been able to be liberated and have my very own server. I am limited only in the space and hardware constraints of the machine. I can have SQL databases, php, and whatever else I wish to support. I have been able to have my own blog, fully customizable in the way that no other is. I have provided space for my friends; Andrew Laine used it to the fullest. That’s why I’m so sad to have to shut it down. But don’t worry! It’s just temporary! I plan to have it back up as soon as I can when I get back to my parent’s house. Then it will run until I move to my job location. After that it should be running for another long period of time.
While it turns out that the place I’m living at never went with wireless, thus allowing me to keep the server running, I know for sure that we will be shutting down soon. There is always one problem with running your own server at home - when you move there’s no way to keep it on and connected. I’ll be leaving this place in about two weeks. After that I’m not sure how long it will be before the server is operational again. Ideally, it would be the following week. Since I’m also getting married soon, the timeline might be a little different. So if you try to come by two weeks from now and the site isn’t here - don’t worry, it’ll be back really soon.
Andrew Laine who you may know from Temporary Insanity, a site hosted on my page, asked me today to hook him up with a blog. I was more than happy to oblige, as I had offered a blog to all those hosted on my site. Within five minutes he was set up and you can now see him at Andrew’s Random Ramblings. Apparently, just like me, he’s a big Spiderman fan. As you will remember, just days ago I wrote about Spidey in a 8 April post about buying the Amazing Spiderman collection on CD-ROM.
I have reached a few server milestones this month. My previous post on this blog was my fiftieth post. Not bad for only two month’s worth of posting. Also, not only did I break 1 thousand visits, I surpassed it, and the month isn’t even over yet. I have come very close in the past few months, but I couldn’t get past the thousand mark.
A couple of things have helped to boost my visits. First of all, this blog is the most accessed page on my server. Out of the visitors to my server 1400 of the pages they visited were this blog! A lot of people have come over from the posts I made to the WordPress website. Many, Many others have come from search engines looking for Numa Numa information. I guess it pays to be talking about popular current events. In fact, about 70% of the visiors who came to my site from a search engine were searching for that phenomenon.
Hey, I finally got the MyMooMus plugin for WordPress working after taking a look at the code and clarifying the way to use the tags. I had originally misunderstood the way it worked and was a little frustrated when it appeared not to be working right. You’ll notice on the rest of my posts that I will be having my mood and the song I’m listening to posted. This was the last feature I was missing from my Tripod blog. Now I am 100% fully content with this software.
What’s RSS? It is a syndication protocal allowing you to get people’s blogs and news websites’ headlines delivered to your email or web browser client so that you don’t need to surf to each and every one of them to read them. You can also save them onto your computer for future reading!
Wow, that sounds great! How do I get It’s A Binary World 2.0 Syndications?
It’s very easy, especially if you are using Mozilla’s Thunderbird. In Thunderbird, simply click on “manage subscriptions” under “news and blogs” and then click add. You want to have the url:
I’m not sure how many people have visited this blog site yet or how many are coming here independently through other sites. I know of one person who has confirming coming here and subscriping to the RSS feed. Anyway, you may have noticed I made some cosmetic changes to the site. I’m not 100% sure if it’s going to stay this way. I generally like to leave things the way they are. Since, however, I don’t know how many people are coming here right now and I intend to relaunch the site in a few months anyway, I figure it’s still ok. I put the calender above the links because as the links list grew it would have pushed the calendar way too far down the page. I also moved the categories above the links. I’m not sure if I will emulate the original It’s A Binary World on my tripod page and put the links over on the left side or if I will keep it all as one column here. The center may end up a bit too squished if I go for that, but stay tuned.
This year I wanted to take the twins’ portraits outside. I’d been wanting to do it at the park for a few years now, but this year the timing actually worked out well. Unlike in years past, Sam wasn’t as keen on having his photo taken so he went full anime on this one:
Even throwing Stella into the mix didn’t get him peeking:
About a year ago, I wrote a blog post about how my kids got themselves (and, by extension, me) into Dungeons and Dragons. I wanted to reflect on how far I’ve come since then and where I might go in the near future. Starting off with a quick recap of the linked blog post, my brother David had introduced the kids to D&D via Muk, a module for introducing your kids to D&D. Unfortunately, it was written for an experience adult D&D player or DM to DM for the kids, so we had a few fails with my first time as the DM. Then we moved on to DnD Adventure Club. That was, and continues to be, a huge hit with the kids.
Last weekend I decided to try the Humblewood D&D campaign setting with the kids. For the past year (give or take) we’ve had a lot of fun playing DnD Adventure Club campaigns. Our one major foray in to regular D&D, Dragons of Stormreck Isle, was a failure. I think there were a few reasons for that. First of all, I was fairly new to DMing and so probably not doing as good of a job as I am a year-ish later. Second, since it was a campaign meant to introduce people to both playing and DMing, it came with pre-made characters. I think that meant the kids had less of an attachment to the characters. Also, the session went very slowly as I had to go back and forth through the player handbook, monster manual, and campaign sheet to look up spells, monsters, etc.
This weekend we finished The Wild Trilogy from DnD Adventure Club. The first challenge involved sneaking around an Owlbear. The kids asked about their options and I noted that in addition to sneaking, they could try and distract it. Sam’s dwarf, Grumpy McGrumbles, has a cooking hobby, so he took hits pots and pans and made a bunch of noise so that the Owlbear would follow him around the camp.
After that there was a mini “dungeon” crawl in the basement beneath a wizard’s tower. The girls finally started to get the hang of investigating chambers rather than blindly setting off traps.
Scarlett was inspired by my previous post and made an animatic-style drawing of some of her favorite moments from the campaign.
The top panel is the party questioning the guards. (The ninja-looking character is Sasha, the character that Scarlett plays)
The next panel is Grumpy using intimidation to question a gnoll. The middle panel is the throwing of gnolls I referenced in my previous post. The last panel on that row depicts the characters examining someone who was shot mid-exposition.
I was DMing the first third of a DnD Adventure Club campaign for my kids today. My son likes to mostly play as Grumpy Mcgrumbles, a dwarven fighter. The kids were attacked by a group of Gnolls. Normally, most of the time, the kids play pretty straightforwardly although they are starting to get more creative. My son decided that since he’s a strong dwarf, he wanted to pick up the Gnolls and throw them into the river or into each other. I wanted to encourage the creativity, so I had him do an athletics check. Between his +7 and a series of lucky rolls, he ends up almost always successfully tossing the Gnolls and the kids and I erupted into fits of laughter as the battle became more and more chaotic. It was even funnier when he finally had a bad roll and so he just picked up the Gnoll and dropped him at his feet.
When I went to visit my grandfather in September, he brought out some Havana Club Rum that someone had brought from Cuba.
As best as I can understand things, after the communists took over and nationalized Havana Club, the original creator-owner sold the recipe to the Bacardi family, who’d fled to Puerto Rico.
I’m not a huge drinker, but I can appreciate a good spirit. I did not enjoy drinking this.
This year Scarlett did hip hop as her dance class and the instructor selected a Pink Ladies meets Hip Hop sort of outfit for the kids. Like last year I did a portrait session with Scarlett in her costume. Unlike last year, it actually came out nice this year. (Last year I rushed it and the lighting was off)
Scarlett's Pre-Recital Portraits
Scarlett's Pre-Recital Portraits
Scarlett's Pre-Recital Portraits
Scarlett's Pre-Recital Portraits
Scarlett's Pre-Recital Portraits
Scarlett's Pre-Recital Portraits
After seeing another dad do it last year, I decided to rent a lens this year so I could have much better low light performance. I rented the 70-200 II IS L lens. On the plus side, I was very happy with how close I was able to zoom to Scarlett without having to push the ISO past the limits of my camear. On the minus side, I just don’t have that much experience with dance photography and this year Scarlett’s class only had one dance. So although the lens was a reasonable $100 to rent, I am not sure if I’m going to do it again next year (assuming Scarlett does dance class again) since I only got 3 photos worth sharing.
Back in November we took the twins on their first trip to Disney. This time around Scarlett wasn’t as interested in the parades as she was last time, but the twins were REALLY into them. Surprisingly, both twins ended up warming up to the characters. Sam’s reluctance with Mickey on the first day made me think he was going to try and avoid them the entire trip. But as you can see in the video, he eventually got into interacting with the characters.
This year Scarlett concluded a season of ballet and tap with a recital. It was pretty neat to see it all come together after having seen it in bits throughout the season. Here are some of the photos I took. I think next year I’ll do the same thing the guy behind me did and rent some f2.8 glass so I can freeze the action a bit more and get less motion blur.
We’ll see what happens spring 2017, but I was surprised they were a little more patient than Scarlett and so didn’t fall on account of running on the steep (for their little legs) incline.
When I was dating Danielle, during one of the trips to her house I asked to see old family photos. That was a big tradition in our house as I got the bug for documenting things with photography from my mother. Each of my brothers and I have about two dozen photo albums full of photos of us from back when you had to pay for film and pay for development. They had but a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the photos my mom did, but one photo that cracked me up was a photo my future father-in-law had taken of Dina (future sister-in-law) and one of Danielle’s cousins punished, crying against the wall. It was a funny image, but baffling that it’d be something worth capturing, especially in the film days. And I saw him do it with the new generation of kids as Danielle’s cousins started having kids.
There’s a story about my childhood my mom is fond of telling. My dad asks Daniel (the brother born after me) to do something. To my father’s consternation, he refuses because it would make me mad. It’s funny to see a similar situation going on with the twins and Scarlett. Part of it is familiarity - Scarlett is home with them every day; but the kids will smile or laugh more easily with her than with me. This video is an example of that which I found amusing. We’ll see if I find it amusing if I find myself in a situation similar to my father.
Scarlett had been obsessed with Mickey and the Beanstalk so I HAD to snap the photo that heads up this post. But there were also some interesting things going on at PDX as I made my way home:
The day after the wedding we headed out to Mount Hood. While I learned how to ski at the Sugar Mountains in North Carolina, I did most of my skiing at Mount Hood when we lived there. When we first moved up we went to Mt Hood in August and there was some snow there. This was a much hotter year, so you had to go to the top of The Magic Mile to get some snow. I actually heard some people complaining about the quality of the snow….in July…..
This year happened to contain one of the driest summers the Pacific Northwest had seen. There were lots of fire raging, some intentionally set and some caused by nature. On the way to the Bachelor Party caving trip, I saw this immense plume of smoke from a fire.
I’d been to lots of caverns before, so that’s what I expected from this bachelor party trip. I first suspected I was wrong when I couldn’t find a sign for the place. My suspicions grew when Dave arrived (along with other attendees) and we just started walking into the woods. As we arrived at the entrance Dave told us that one can be sure he’s arriving at the entrance to a cave by spotting mosquitoes. Turns out we were going into a lava tube. I thought that meant we’d be walking in a cave that was fine as glass. Instead it was as if someone had chosen a cave to dump a bunch of rocks. We did see some baby stalagtites, though.
A while ago I went to the Pacific Northwest for Dave’s wedding. I finally am getting caught up with my photos from back then. It was a fun trip because we’d lived in Oregon for a few years when I was a kid so I was able to revisit some fun areas.
First up was Multnomah Falls. It is the second tallest falls in the US and it’s a really neat hike. Because of timing and Scarlett being 3 (and unlikely to be able to hike back and forth) we only went up to the lower level. But it was still neat to be reminded of the great outdoors areas in Oregon.
Scarlett had a good time picking apples, so Danielle thought it’d be neat to take Scarlett strawberry picking. I was pretty surprised at how many people were there.
When we arrived, they gave us a box to fill with strawberries. Scarlett was quite excited about carrying the box over to the fields.
Unsurprisingly, it was mostly Danielle and I - with Scarlett putting in one or two strawberries at a time.
This post is meant to be a followup to last year’s post, Visiting Walt Disney World with a 2 Year Old. I’ll be referring to, and updating, that post with the elements that were different this time around. For one, I said she wouldn’t remember the first trip. While that’s certainly true in the long run, three year old Scarlett definitely remembered the previous trip. She asked for rides she’d been on last time and she remembered going on the monorail.
For a while during Scarlett’s second year Danielle and I went back and forth on whether we should take Scarlett to Disney just before her second birthday or whether we should wait until she was older. On the one hand - she’s not going to actually remember this trip. Or rather, any memories she has are sure to be false memories triggered by the photos and videos we took. On the other hand - whether or not she remembers it, it’s still forming her base memories; memories that anchor most of the subconscious feelings we feel about our lives.
We were raised with the constant reminder that we needed to care for our parents when they got old. They spent countless hours and money to raise us - it’s the least we could do. We always said, “Yes” or “Of Course”. It’s funny, I always thought I appreciated what my parents had done for us. For most of my childhood my parents had very little. It wasn’t until around the time I was in high school that they were solidly into the middle class. Yet they made sure we did sports (which are very expensive) and had a computer and nice clothing. And I truly appreciated all of that; I appreciated it more and more each year as I matured and and realized what these things cost. But until I became a father I didn’t truly understand the time and emotional investments that kids are. I now truly realize how much they gave me. The only situation I could see for having to have my parents not live with me when they get uber-old would be if they required some kind of medical equipment that couldn’t be installed in my home or care that a live-in nurse couldn’t take care of. (Well, other than if they decided to live with one of their other six kids rather than me - for whatever reason) But, you know, that’s supposed to be way out in the future.
Memorial Day was pretty awesome this year. All three original Mesa Brothers were reunited for the first time since Christmas. It was my third major holiday celebration since Scarlett was born (in 2012 we only celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas), but it was the first one I hosted. Even with Danielle’s family only 3 hours away we rarely have an opportunity to have a BBQ out in the yard. I find this lack of BBQs irksome as my childhood involved lots of house parties since our entire extended family lived within 30 minutes of each other. What is the point of having a yard and home in suburbia otherwise? So I took the rare chance to take out the speakers I bought back in High School for my short DJ career and set my netbook to play from Google Music. I created a playlist of songs with “summer” in the title since Memorial Day is the cultural start of the summer in the USA.
[caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“368” caption=“My grandfather smoking a cigar - the way I will remember him for all of my life”] [/caption]
It really sucks that I’m so far from my family. My sole living grandfather, pictured here, is turning 70 this year. Although I’ve always been closer to my mom’s family - I really, really love my grandfather. His humor, which was passed on to my father and which I hope to pass on to my son(s), has always cracked me up. In different circumstances I think he would have liked all the same comedies I do.
I think that the single largest source of mirth at the Thanksgiving dinner was Dan’s xkcd tshirt. Dan and I were the only ones who knew what this meant. Dave was the only other person capable of grasping it. Everyone else kept asking Dan to explain the shirt over and over. No matter how many ways he tried to do it, the response was always “I don’t get it”. Later on the response was a sarcastic “OK”. Later on in the evening/night everyone was sudo ordering people to do things even though they had no idea what that meant. The person who was ordered to do something would invariably answer “OK!” IT was hilarious and maddening at the same time.
When my brothers and I were young, influence pretty much flowed in one direction - from me to my brothers. Whatever music, movies, or video games I was into they also wanted to experience. It’s not that they didn’t also have their own likes and dislikes. They did like some stuff I didn’t and disliked some of my choices. Overall, however, I probably played a larger role in influencing my brothers than even my parents.
So you may be wondering what’s up with the lack of posts. It’s not that I don’t have things I want to write about. I actually have a ton to write about, but I’ve been (nearly obsessively) working on my family tree using the FOSS Linux program GRAMPS. There’s a link for the page over on the right panel of my blog. The software is AMAZING! I really think they have done an great job. If you want to keep track of your family memories, this is the program to use! I showed my family members what the output can look like and they are impressed. Not only that, but it has also energized them to help me get more information and media! Go check them out and see how awesome they are!
Ashley has posted an apology on her blog. I accept that apology on behalf of myself. I don’t know how others who were affected feel. Perhaps next time, do not post hurtful things unless you truly mean it. You really hurt all of us, especially by talking about our mother. (Especially when they are vicious lies)
The inflammatory post which spurned us to write what we did has been removed. For the sake of understanding what got us into such a tizzy, I’ll post a copy of it.
Here it is:
I’m definitely in the anger stage of grief, but bear with me
I have always tried to believe that everybody has good in them. I’m not perfect-I react to the things people do that I don’t like, but in the end I usually try to understand that people are the way they are because it’s the best they know how to be. And so when Dan’s family treated me like shit and barely like a person, I tried to understand where they were coming from. I tried to see what I was doing wrong with myself. And yes, they fed me and took me places and paid for me, but they never ever stopped manipulating Dan to turn against me when I wasnt there. And if they were pissed, they didnt mind throwing a tantrum and not looking me or Dan in the eye. And his mom competed with me, and she denies it, but everything he did for me, she wanted him to do for her. And I tried to put up with it. And I hated it, but I pushed him to keep a good relationship with his family no matter how unfair they were acting. But ya know what? I’m stronger now, and I’m pissed at the way I was treated. I’m pissed that they raised Dan to only trust his mom and that being dishonest is no big deal. I’m pissed that Dan’s siblings don’t see that she did the same thing to his brother’s wife before I came around. When dan’s brother got married, all he and his wife worried about was making that awful woman happy, and ya know what happened? She complained the entire time anyway. Yeah, on their wedding day, where they should be worrying about themselves. And I had the stupidity to feel bad for them, and try to understand them. It was stupid because when the criticism turns to me, they buy into it. That’s why Dan’s mom is so good at what she does, because she gets you in her group to complain about other people and tells you how she manipulates them, but no one relaizes she does the same thing to them. Yeah, Eric, your family used to talk lots of crap about Danielle until I came around, and I know they did because I spent time with both Dan and Dave before I was ever in the dating picture, and David has a harder time hiding things, and you all probably know that, but yet I’ve heard her making comments about Dan and I. Maybe people are just glad to have the heat off them, but that’s bullshit, because I tried to not join in on the crap talking about Danielle. And the thing is, I think everything gets denied by everybody because it’s such a habit to judge other people that they’d have to realize a fundamental flaw in their everyday thinking and they just don’t realize it. So deny away, but you’d be seriously insulting my intelligence. And yes Dan’s mom does nice things for people, but you know how you can tell that even that part of her is selfish? Because she doesn’t do nice things without telling everybody and getting mad if she doesn’t get something back. She likes to raise kids because something inside of her needs people to need her to a level that is so absurd that some of her offspring never learned to form healthy relationships with other women. On Christmas Eve, that woman actually turned to me and said “Why do you make my son so miserable?” Who say’s that to people? That is not a nice thing to say, but I just kept my mouth shut-I was dumbstruck. And she would never apologize for anything like that. And that is the kind of person I dealt with for a year and 8 months. I know I make mistakes, I know I couldve been better in some areas, I know I didn’t always do the right thing, but at least I can recognize my own flaws. And I feel regret for the bad things I do.
By the way, how is my mom obsessive and controlling if she let us move to Maryland and go to school at Cornell? YOUR mother is the one that had you go to school just 45 minutes away.
And how is she selfish if she paid for your damn Disney ticket?
And my parents took out $70k in loans to let me have my dream of going to Cornell! They could have forced me to go to school locally where it was free. You are just weird.
When Ashley left comments on my AIM like “lies may be ok in your family, but mine,” and “Your family can be really hard on girlfriends,” Danielle asked me if I was goign to mount a response. I told her I would not. Although I disagreed with Ashley’s contentions, I told Danielle, “I feel that no good can come of starting a flame war. It would only bring more negativity to the universe.” Yes, although you dno’t hear too many Christians speaking like that, I feel that I feel that the beliefs expounded by the practitioners of transcendental meditation do not clash with what Jesus taught with respect to “turning the other cheek and giving a man your shirt if he asked for your jacket.” I do not like to yell or be proface with the peole who are always calling my house soliciting money even though they annoy me to no end. I do not believe that we should have attacked Iraq just because Saddam was a jerk. However, there comes a point in one’s life when an affront is so hostile that, like the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor, one has to put his pacifistic, philosophic point of view aside and press teh button. That’s right, the glvoes are off and the napalm is on its way. What triggered this change of heart? This attack on my family. Like the Cubans of the 1800s or the pre-WW2 Japanese, I cannot tolerate an attack upon my family’s honor.
While talking to my mom last night she asked me to do her a favor. For today, her mother’s birthday, she asked me to write a message on a balloon and let it go into the air, metaphorically going to my grandmother in Heaven. I did it, taking pictures to document the act because that is a symbolic thing to me as a visual person and photographer. I was fine while I did it but when I came inside and looked at the weight which had kept the balloon down while in the supermarket, I was instantly depressed. I was having one of the most amazing days of my life, propped up by the fact that my blog was back and this was just like jumping into one of Ithaca’s gorges. I didn’t even feel like having dinner anymore. Eventually, I got it out of my system and I feel better. I am still a little down, but nowhere near as bad as before. Stay tuned for the next part, where I put up some pictures of the event.
I wanted to wish a happy birthday to the most special girl in my life (other than my mother) who is the best cook in the world - my fiancee - Danielle!
Happy Birthday!
It’s too bad we couldn’t be together on your birthday this year, but that will never be a problem again once we’re married.
If you are in a hospital, you will know you’re about to die when your entire family suddenly starts coming in with more and more frequency. My grandmother died today after nearly eight decades of life. I was really close to her and I loved her so much. Ever since I was a little kid we would see her nearly every weekend. On week days my mother would take her to the stores since she couldn’t drive. I remember being dragged along, but now I treasure those moments. That’s back when she could walk and dance and play without pain.
This week my grandmother will probably be diagnosed with lymphoma, cancer of the lymph nodes. This is one of the worse types of cancer for two reasons. First of all, it is attacking the very part of your body responsible for keeping the body healthy. So this cancer leaves the person extra debilitated as they not only have cancer, but lose the ability to fight off infections. Second, because the lymph nodes can’t be removed like bone or even lung can, there are no surgical procedures which can be performed. The patient can participate in chemotherapy or some of the newer drug therapies.
This year I wanted to take the twins’ portraits outside. I’d been wanting to do it at the park for a few years now, but this year the timing actually worked out well. Unlike in years past, Sam wasn’t as keen on having his photo taken so he went full anime on this one:
Even throwing Stella into the mix didn’t get him peeking:
I love the idea of having art on the gates that come down when the the restaurant is closed. Rather than the ugly grey, possibly tagged with grafitti, we get this amazing art.
I saw this when I was doing a boardwalk run this summer. I’d been visiting Coney Island for nearly 20 years at this point, but the recent revitalization has been impressive to see. That includes ideas like this art that bring happiness and joy even when Nathan’s is closed.
I made some portraits of Scarlett. I used the same setup as when I did Sam and Stella’s November portraits, except with the octobox on the left this time.
As I’ve done for the past few years now, a self-portrait at the end of the year to document how I looked this year. This year I went with both a split-tone shot and a black and white shot.
Scarlett created these models one day in October when she was feeling creative. I liked the models so much that I built a small box for photographing them. I fell behind on my photos, so I’m posting my favorite poses now.
Somewhat without intention, I’ve ended up alternating portraits for the twins between outdoor portraits and indoor portraits. This year was time for indoor portraits. (Although, to be fair, if it hadn’t been freezing, I might have ended up breaking the tradition) Here’s the setup I used:
It’s a variant on a setup that has been very successful for me with portraits of the kids. I went back to a white background for the first time in a few years. The last time I used it with Scarlett I had an uneven white that looked horrendous to my eye and was a real pain in the butt to try and correct in Photoshop (or was it GIMP?). I never got it quite right and ended up sticking to the black background for a while. But I wanted to do something different. So this time I grabbed my two studio strobes (I believe they’re 100W strobes that someone got me as a present some 8 or so years ago) and threw them into umbrellas to make sure the light would hit the background evenly. With these lights I had to go to somewhere around 80% power in order to get a pure white background according to the spectrograph in camera. Then I posed the twins in front of those lights, so they needed a light for themselves. I used my old Canon 580EX inside of my gigantic octagon (I think it’s somewhere around 3 feet or more in diameter). I wanted to shoot at F8 to try and get the best chance of ensuring the twins would be in focus, so I had to push the 580EX to full power. After this session, I ended up buying a bracket so that next time I can throw my 430EX in there, too.
Sparklers were an ever-present feature of my childhood 4th of July celebrations. This year we introduced the twins to sparklers (I’m pretty sure Scarlett has used them at least once before). They kids had a lot of fun and there were a couple burn-scares, but I think it was worth the slight parental anxiety. (Did our parents care? They seemed a lot more laize-faire about us with sparklers, but maybe they were just good at hiding their fears?) Took out the DSLR and introduced the kids to light painting. Scarlett had the winning light-painting photo that made it past the multiple discard passes.
Because of my age relative to the era of computer, for a good portion of my life computers were Serious Things used for work and school. They also belonged to the family and there’s no way we could have gotten away with putting stickers on them without getting in trouble. So back in 2006 when I went to Blackhat and Defcon, for the first time I saw people’s laptops covered in stickers. The EEE PC (new at the time) had a meetup session where I saw others who’d painted their machines various colors. I’d ended up with a bunch of stickers after Blackhat and Defcon, so I decorated my first-ever laptop, an Acer.
I love just about everything in this shot. Even the hair is pretty neat, although I would have preferred for it not to cross the middle of Scarlett’s face.
There was something about this image that reminded me of older snapshots. I think it’s the fact that it’s a candid moment, not perfectly sharp as Scarlett moved out of the focal plane; but it’s not out of focus - you can see that from the shirts. So when I was processing the shot, I went for an older look. I think I ended up applying a Kodachrome effect.
It was time to take some portrait shots of Scarlett. As I was getting set up, I decided that I wanted to try something new; something I’d struggled with before, but never been able to succeed at - a flash highlight of a black background. I’d seen Gavin Hooey use the technique to great success on his Adorama TV show on Youtube. But somehow I’d just never been able to get it to work well. So I decided to try and mess around with the setup before the photo shoot. Eventually, I found something that worked well for me. I think, reviewing the photos for the fifth time now, that as I have it set up, it works best for the closeup shots. For the 3/4 shots, it probably should have been either dropped a little lower or maybe pulled away from the background a bit more to spread it out a bit more. The setup looked like this:
I thought last year’s description was perfect, so I’m going to repurpose it here. Yeah, yeah – even before Instagram was a thing my family was already making fun of me for taking self-portraits or for my 365 project of self-portraits 8 or so years ago. But for me this is part of my most primal photographic urge; even stronger than the urge to create art. It’s the urge to document my life and the life of those around me. And so I take these self-portraits at roughly the same time every year to be able to view them as a series documenting my aging. And so here is the one I took in 2019.
Over the years I’ve taken many, many photos of my kids at Coney Island. Lots of them have come out great. But I think this batch of photos is among the best photos I’ve taken of the kids at Coney Island thus far.
In some cases, it’s the expressions on the twins’ faces.
I’m on a motorcycle!
I see you!
Yeah, I know how to use this
Other times, I succeeded in getting the perfect action shot.
Baby birds in BBQ prep station - the mom thought it was the best place to make a nest
I thought I’d blogged before about the bird who made a nest in my BBQ prep station, but a couple quick searches didn’t find it. So the background is that this bird decided the best place to nest is at my BBQ prep station which has a couple shelves that basically look like a bird house (a small, circular hole). I tried to frustrate the bird out of doing it by dumping out the nest daily. At some point I let the bird win. A few months later, these baby birds were born.
Based on the file modification dates, I went from using the Digikam SQLite database to using their embedded MySQL database in May 2018. I did it because at the time everyone was saying that for a large database it’s better to use SQL than SQLite. For a long time it seemed to work well enough like that. But, for the last few months, MySQL hasn’t quite been right. It’s been complaining about issues with InnoDB. Unfortunately, in my Googling I couldn’t figure out how to attempt to fix that issue with an embedded database. All the solutions seemed to involve using a “real” MySQL. So, sick of all that, I decded to go back to SQLite. Since launching Digikam (for the past two days) just causes my computer to go to a load average in the 50s and lead to an unending stream of SQL errors, I had to move the folder that contained MySQL and start from scratch. It was also an opportunity to do what they recommend and have the database reside on an SSD.
Back in March we went to the Baltimore Zoo and I took my 120-400mm lens. I think this may be the first time I’d taken that lens to this Zoo (although I’d taken it quite a few times to the National Zoo in DC). I took lots of photos, but some didn’t come out the way I wanted and others just looked too much like they were in a zoo. I wanted (as much as I could) to have photos that could have been taken in the wild. I didn’t succeed with all the photos I chose for this post, but I was happy with the way they came out.
Back in March it was an incredibly windy day so we decided to go to the park to fly a kite. I also took my DSLR because it’d been some time since I’d used it and thought I might get some good shots. This one was my favorite one and I thought it really captured a special moment.
As I continue to work through my backlog of photos from last year (I’m finally done with 2018 after this post!), I come to my annual self-portrait. Yeah, yeah - even before Instagram was a thing my family was already making fun of me for taking self-portraits or for my 365 project of self-portraits 8 or so years ago. But for me this is part of my most primal photographic urge; even stronger than the urge to create art. It’s the urge to document my life and the life of those around me. And so I take these self-portraits at roughly the same time every year to be able to view them as a series documenting my aging. And so here is the one I took in 2018.
If there’s one pleasure I was denied by growing up in Florida, it was getting to play with the fall leaves. (Of course, I was spared having to rake them - something that takes me a good afternoon here if I do it well). But my kids get to enjoy it.
Sam in the leaves
Sam’s expression notwithstanding, I wonder what it is that kids enjoy about it. Is it making a mess of a pile? Is it the crunch of the leaves? The novelty of it all? Scarlett’s been doing it for a while and she still enjoys it. Whatever it is - I’m glad I get to be there to see it and enjoy their enjoyment.
Just as with the farm portraits, this year both kids were enthusiastic about the portraits. I was bracing for Sam to once again hate the idea of portraits, but his urge to do what his sisters were doing was stronger - or maybe he’s just over whatever he hated about it last year. I’m really happy with how the portraits came out this year - particularly for Sam. It helps that the little guy is ALWAYS smiling (unless he’s been told he can’t do something). Here’s my favorite Sam portrait:
Another year and the kids grow older. Last year was a disaster - the twins did NOT want their photos taken. We didn’t get any good portraits. This time everyone was game and we got good portraits - at least the first time around. When we reconvened a little later, the kids were over the idea of pumpkin photos, or at least Scarlett was.
Funny thing about this is that I could say this reflects their moods, but really only Stella is being genuinely Stella. Usually you can’t catch Sam without a smile on his face (although he *is* going through the whiny 2 year old phase), and Scarlett’s the most neutral.
Danielle and I went to Mount Vernon back when we first moved here and were exploring new things to do in our free time that were unique to the area.
We’d thought of bringing our parents to see Washington’s house and property, but the timing never quite worked out - you really want to visit in the Spring or Fall, not during the Summer or Winter. So it remained a place we’d only been to once even as we made multiple trips to the same couple Smithsonian museums and zoos.
This Easter we went to the farm so they kids could hunt for eggs there and then enjoy the farm. Unlike my childhood, Easter’s pretty cold up here as you can see.
It’s pretty ridiculous to me, considering almost my entire childhood consisted of going to the local park.
Stella’s been enjoying horseback riding for a bit now, but this was the first time she was old enough to do it on her own without me holding onto her the entire time.
I brought out all my old cars for the kids to play with. They’re having a blast even if they don’t know who any of the old McDonald’s toys are representing. I have the Chip n’ Dale Rescue Rangers DVDs, but the kids haven’t shown interest in it yet. (They find it way scarier than Duck Tales)
For the past couple years (ever since my mom got back into photography), I’ve been trying to get her to come in the winter to go photograph American Bald Eagles at Conowingo Dam. They tend to be there from around November to about early January and I usually go in December. This year at the semi-last moment she decided to visit and I suggested we go try and photograph some eagles. So she brought her long lens and we took off. Of course, the one day we had available to do this also happened to be the coldest day of the 2017-2018 winter so we were physically being tortured. I had told her ahead of time to make sure to get long johns, so we didn’t get hypothermia.
I took Sam and Stella to the park on Columbus Day (Scarlett was in school) and they were finally old enough that I could step back to take photos while they worked their way through the jungle gym.
I had been experimenting with a Van Dyke and I would soon be shaving it off, so I took a few self-portraits with the facial hair. First a straight-forward one:
Then I couldn’t decide between a high key (which I rarely do) or a straight-forward black and white, so here are both:
Going back to where I was before posting Halloween costume photos, a baseball game I went to as part of Dan’s wedding festivities. Got some good shots relative to my usual luck. Had to push things a bit to be able to get the shutter speed I needed so the ISO’s a bit higher than I would have preferred.
Jumping forward (I’m still generally working on photos from August because I’ve fallen behind with other responsibilities and playing some video games for Extra Life), we get to Halloween photos. Once again these awesome costumes were sewn by my mother-in-law.
I got pretty lucky to arrive as they had some neat birds out where you could get right up next to them. There were also some cool birds out in the bird sanctuary area.
Each of the three kids is a little different, of course. Sam LOVES loud things. He loves cars and trains and planes and …. lawnmowers! When I cut the grass he follows me around. When others cut the grass he wants to follow THEM around.
The weather was finally improving and so we figured it was a good time to take the twins to the zoo for the first time. When Scarlett was around the same age she didn’t care for the animals as much. She was much more interested in the kids around her. So we weren’t sure if the kids would enjoy it. The National Zoo seemed like a wise choice since it was free to enter.
Got together with Scarlett to shoot a portrait session for her fifth year of life! I can’t believe 5 years ago she was fighting for her life at the Johns Hopkins NICU. (Support them through my Extra Life campaign) Thanks to Dan getting me a boom stand for my birthday or Christmas (I don’t remember which) I could have a hair light and keep her hair from fading into the background as I made sure it was pure black (or close enough).
Every year I do a self-portait to document the passing time and to keep up to date on various studio lighting techniques. Here’s the series I did last year:
One of my favorite photo sets was from the first time Scarlett was running around chasing bubbles. I tried to do the same with the twins, but since they were less familiar with bubbles, they decided to catch them with their faces…
The photos appearing over the next few days are from the first time we took them out to run around on the driveway. Before that, they’d always been pushed in tricycles or strollers.
Year one with Sam was a year full of smiles. There almost isn’t a thing you can do that he won’t smile at. I think the only times I haven’t seen him smile were during teething and when someone took a toy from him (usually Stella).
We did it, we got through a year with twins. We had a lot of help - mostly from my mother in law, but also from my parents and with a little help from our friends. With Stella it was extra tough because we didn’t know for the first couple months that she was lactose intolerant. Once we figured that out, she was less miserable and life was good.
Finally got time to review the photos from the birthday party. We got lucky because we took a bet that the weather wouldn’t be too cold to have an outdoor birthday party at the park. Everything worked out and the weather was great! Sam and Stella were still a little too young to enjoy the park, but the older kids had a blast. Dina did a great job with their birthday cakes, recreating the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse in fondant. Overall, Sam and Stella behaved really well - not trying to smash the cake or anything - and it was fun all around.
[caption id=“attachment_12341” align=“aligncenter” width=“840”] Sam’s First Carousel Ride[/caption]
Why do kids enjoy carousel rides so much? Shoot, why do we have so much nostalgia for them as adults? I have no idea. I could probably put together some BS about a cultural memory of horseback riding, but frankly I think it’s just the first amusement park ride a kid is able to go on. This is Disney before your tiny brain can even comprehend the existence of such a place. And, unlike a car, I think it’s pretty evident even to the kids that there is no utilitarian function here - you end up roughly where you started.
I figured this might be the only year I can pick their costume, so I *had* to go with The Wonder Twins from the old Super Friends cartoon. My mother-in-law sewed up the awesome costumes.
That near-year flew by! I can’t believe a year ago we were nervously attending Dina’s wedding, unsure if the kids were going to want to pop out early and steal the show.
Every year since Scarlett was born we’re been going to Clark’s Eliok Farm to get a pumpkin to decorate the house (and in later years for Scarlett to carve). This time was the first year for Sam and Stella. Overall they did extraordinarily well for 11 month olds who’d never been to a pumpkin patch before. Only Stella cried and that was only after it had gone on for a while.
When I went to do the 10 Month Photos for the Twins, Scarlett really wanted to participate. She helped me with the color picker and white balance. Then, afterwards, she wanted to do these veil photos. My favorite thing is that I didn’t tell her to do ANY of this. This is what she wanted to do and I just photographed. I enjoy her creativity.
Thanks to having Scarlett be the first photo with a color checker that has a white balance section, I was able to get the lighting and white balance perfect in that photo and then copy those settings to the other photos. After that, just a few tweaks to get each photo perfect. Allowed me to make the most of my limited time. Enjoy the photos!
Once kids learn how to open doors, drawers, etc - it’s all they do. Overall, it’s not too bad - they’re learning how the world works, gaining physical skills, etc. But unless you’ve child-proofed the crap out of every single thing that can be opened, it becomes very easy for the kids to make a mess. Since they are (as of late September/early October) currently obsessed with opening their drawers, we practically never play with them in their rooms.
Once again just assigning intention to some random toddler stuff, but I just love how he looks like he just heard his favorite team won the World Series, or something.
While I think that part of what really makes this image work is the way I converted it to black and white, I do really envy my wife for having a good eye and good timing to capture the photo.
I just noticed there’s a watermelon on the ground next to Scarlett. That isn’t some kind of asian ritual, shame on you if you thought that. Anyway, Scarlett had her first day of school a while ago. I guess it can be an emotional time for some parents - that’s what I’ve heard on the grapevine. For me the only emotion was excitement! I was curious to see how she’d do in school and what she’d think of it. She’d never been in daycare, but we did do a couple one-week classes this summer and she seemed to enjoy those. Turns out that school appealed to some of her nature - wanting to know things and wanting to be around other kids. She’s excited about school every day and sad on the weekends when she doesn’t have school. Couldn’t ask for a better start to her educational career.
It’s a recurring theme that we forgot that our kids are people, just tiny people who perhaps haven’t finished developing all of their mental and emotional abilities yet. You expect them to eat the same thing every day and like the same TV shows and songs. But we aren’t like that, why should they be? That’s often made pretty evident to me with Scarlett and photos. Sometimes she’s dying to be in photos and ends up photo bombing everyone. Other times it doesn’t matter how much it means to me to have a photograph of a particular event or moment in her life. She does NOT want to be photographed and nothing can make her participate.
Sam constantly reminds me of Linus from The Peanuts. He loves nothing better than to cuddle with a nice soft blanket or toy and he can’t keep his thumb out of his mouth. I was successful in keeping Scarlett from getting into that and we had to make Stella stop because she kept throwing up. No luck with Sam, but I’ve yet to see a mentally stable adult sucking their thumb, so we’ll get through it eventually. (First time parents should remember that with everything - like potty training - have you ever seen someone who doesn’t have mental issues who isn’t a potty trained adult?)
I am flabbergasted at the level of detail in the items created for the Calico Critters toy franchise. I’m not surprised it’s Japanese (although I wouldn’t have been surprised if it were German either). But what fascinates me more is how Scarlett uses the toys to approximate her life. It reveals what she pays attention to and what she imagines is going on in the heads of the adults around her.
Scarlett’s first time at the beach was much younger - five or six months - but with the twins it was just a lot harder to go on vacation. There are two of them to deal with, to pack formula for, etc. Also, for a long time Stella would spontaneously throw up. We’d dealt with that with Scarlett when we went on the trip to her first Christmas - where she kept throwing up in the car. It’s not fun.
It’s pretty crazy how much Scarlett has grown since she first started going to Coney Island. Before, there were only a few rides she liked or could go on. Now she’s going on roller coasters! I wonder if she’ll want to go on adult coasters with me when she’s old enough. I guess we’ll see what thinks about being twisted and turned about.
I was surprised I was able to get a decent fireworks shot with my cell. Of course, compared to my DSLR, it was a lot more random and i had a lot more crap shots that I couldn’t use than I get with my DSLR where I have exact control of f-stop, shutter speed, etc.
When I saw this happening by my garage it freakin’ BLEW MY MIND! As a kid who grew up in America, I’d heard about spiders and their proclivities for climbing water spouts via kiddie propaganda - aka Nursery Rhymes. But I’d NEVER, in my 30+ years of life, actually seen a spider climbing a water spout before.
I did not stay long enough to see if the rain would wash the spider out and if he would climb again if the sun came back out. I’ve got stuff to do, I’m a grown up! WITH KIDS, EVEN!
I’m catching up on my photos before I get further than 2 months behind and I came across this panorama that I didn’t even remember creating.
It’s interesting that, at least to my eyes, it’s easier to see the second rainbow on the left and I don’t even see it on the right. Also, this What If is particularly relevant and I’d read it just before going to the party.
This is a short series I’m going to run here on the blog featuring photos from my most recently developed roll of medium format 120 film taken with my Yashica A twin reflex lens camera. I’m grouping photos together by subject.
Between the last post and this one is one photo that didn’t turn out. I’d taken a photo in the woods during my Nude in Nature photo shoot that, unfortunately, was severely underexposed. For a year the camera sat untouched. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to shoot. There isn’t as big a street photography scene here as there is in NYC. Because I had ISO 160 film in the camera, I couldn’t use it for indoor shots. So what to do? Well, I started talking photography with one of Katie’s aunts and so I decided to bring the Yashica to Dan and Katie’s Engagement Brunch. And, who better to take a photo of than my grandfather. He’d probably been photographed with 120 film when he was young. It’s not a technically great photo what with the leaf shadows. But I like it. Still, this is what shooting film helps you remember - you need to look at all the detail before you shoot. You don’t get a redo by the time you have the film developed.
This is a short series I’m going to run here on the blog featuring photos from my most recently developed roll of medium format 120 film taken with my Yashica A twin reflex lens camera. I’m grouping photos together by subject.
It’s interesting that after the photos I took at the park, I put the camera away for almost exactly 4 years - these photos are from 13 April 2015. We don’t go to the Cherry Blossom Festival every year because it seems pretty pointless. The same trees and masses of people do not make for the best of times. But, with Scarlett finally 3 years old we figured she might enjoy it this time around.
This is a short series I’m going to run here on the blog featuring photos from my most recently developed roll of medium format 120 film taken with my Yashica A twin reflex lens camera. I’m grouping photos together by subject.
These photos were taken on 30 April 2011 when Danielle and I went to Centennial Park. I tend not to be an absolutist with most things. I am neither of the opinion that digital is the only way nor that film cameras are some magical instrument capable of some authentic capture that cannot happen with digital. Instead I cherish each for their different properties. One of the neat things with film cameras (especially given that we have digital cameras and film is just extra), is forgetting what you shot and being pleasantly surprised when you get your roll back.
Well, everyone’s growing up. Dan’s the last to get married (the youngest three siblings don’t count because there’s too big a gap). Here are some photos from his engagement party.
Stella and her great-grandparents at Dan's Engagement Party
Eric and Dan at Dan's Engagement Party
Eric, Dan, and Katie at Dan and Katy's Engagement Party
Double Rainbows!
Double Rainbows!
Dan, Katie, and Rainbows!
Dan, Katie, and Rainbows!
Somewhere over the rainbow!
Dan, Katie, and Rainbows!
Scarlett and the Rainbow
Scarlett and Abuelo Roman at Dan's Engagement Party (and a rainb
Scarlett and Abuela Carmen at Dan's Engagement Party
Scarlett and Abuela Carmen at Dan's Engagement Party
A great photo doesn’t necessarily need good planned posing. Take a look at this shot of Tony, Alex, and Scarlett:
I didn’t plan it, but I did have to wait for the right pose to present itself. It would be a tighter story without Scarlett, but I think it still conveys a coherent message: kids enjoying ice cream and conversing. A kiddie version of going to the bar, essentially.
Lots and lots of people ask on Reddit every single day how to get photos that look like they were created with VSCO. Basically - crushed blacks and split-toned. Everyone always gives instructions on how to do it in Lightroom. But no one ever talks about how to do it in RawTherapee, so I decided to create this little tutorial.
Take what you learn here and adapt it to fit your style.
We’re hardly ever dressed up so nicely. So when we all got dressed up for Dan’s engagement party, I wanted to get a quick family portrait before we left. The pose wasn’t perfect due to the rush, and I’ll be elaborating a bit more on that in a future blog post, but I do like it as a bit of record keeping. Slightly more than a snapshot, but not how I’d have done it if we weren’t in a hurry.
After we were done doing our multi-generational photos, my mom put Stella on the grass to take some portraits. If you follow her on Facebook, you already know how those turned out. I took a few. These two were my favorites:
Ever since Sam was born, I’ve been looking forward to a 4 generation male portrait. I’d done a female line portrait with Scarlett up to her great-grandmother. It was finally time to do the same for me. While we were out there and dressed up, we took a few other configurations of family photos. All the males are wearing guayaberas, a traditional shirt worn in the Caribbean, especially in Cuba.
It’s a time-honored tradition for us to photograph babies in the purple bucket. We did it for Nam, Lan, and Scarlett. Now it was time for the twins to do it.
Twins in Purple Bucket - 2016-07-04--004-1
Twins in Purple Bucket - 2016-07-04--021-1
Twins in Purple Bucket - 2016-07-04--032-1
Twins in Purple Bucket - 2016-07-04--034-1
Twins in Purple Bucket - 2016-07-04--046-1
Twins in Purple Bucket - 2016-07-04--047-1
Twins in Purple Bucket - 2016-07-04--055-1
Twins in Purple Bucket - 2016-07-04--060-1
Twins in Purple Bucket - 2016-07-04--063-1
Scarlett wanted to do it again, so now we have this comparison. Baby Scarlett:
I wanted to take a photo of Scarlett on this background with this dress. She’s in her crazy 4 year old phase, so the poses were all of her own design0. The only one I was able to direct her to do was the one with the glasses. Here’s the lighting diagram:
So much I want to say all at once…I hate when that happens - makes me wish we could speak in parallel threads. Well, I guess I’ll start with the credit. There are lots of photos I’ve posted on here taken by Danielle. But usually by the time I get a chance to post photos I can’t remember for sure who took the photos. Generally, if the photo is taken with the Canon Powershot S100 it’s a greater than 80% chance it was taken by Danielle. But not only has not much time passed since the photo was taken (allowing me to know it was Danielle who took it), but it’s just so perfect, I had to make sure to credit her for having the photographic eye.
I meant to write about the lighting setup in the blog post in which I uploaded the photos from the 7 Month photo shoot, but with twin 7 month olds, there’s never enough time for anything - even with my mother-in-law in town helping us out. Oh well, at least I don’t have to pay per post.
First of all, I’d like to discuss the concept I wanted to go for. For the Five Month photos, I went with the balloon theme I posted about here. For month six, I didn’t do anything special. Danielle did her usual couch portraits. But this time around I had a bit more time for the photos and I started thinking about it a week or two in advance. Unlike 2 months ago, both children were able to sit on their own now for extended periods of time. As of when I took the 7 month photos, the only thing that made them tip over was when they got over-excited and tipped back. It’d been a while since I had done portraits with the black background and I wanted to switch it up a bit. Because I don’t have any formal photography training, I like to browse the work of other photographers to get ideas I can take and make my own. Gavin Hooey, who has a great series of videos on Youtube through the photography store Adorama, has a dark grey background at his studio. He likes to have a highlight behind the model rather than just a plain dark background. If you look at his photos, he does it more often than he doesn’t. I figured it might help with the look of the photos. If you don’t do it, then you really do need to use a light as a hair light in order to keep dark-haired subjects from merging into a black background.
Most of the time I avoid taking my camera to the park because I know I’m going to be busy playing with the kids and the camera would just get in the way. But this weekend I brought it for some reason and I was able to get some fun shots like this one.
One of Scarlett’s favorite things to do is to slide on this slide and then have me touch her so she can discharge all the static onto me. Sometimes enough charge has built up that it actually hurts!
When Danielle brought out a hoodie for Sam a few weeks ago, I knew I had to photograph him in it for the incongruity of him just being a little baby in a hoodie. But I wasn’t sure what look I was going to go for. Then I remembered my snoot. Hooked that up to the flash and boom, no need for Photoshop or anything - this is exactly how it came out of the camera.
Danielle mentioned that it looked like I’d messed around with the image because the strings on Sam’s photo looked fake. Actually, that’s how it was captured in the camera. The strings were reflective and, as I’m about to get into, there was a lot of light in this shoot. There are only two things I did to edit these photos. For both of them, the balloons ended up floating higher than the backdrop. So I had to extend the backdrop digitally. Luckily for other reasons that I’ll get into in the lessons learned section, I’d been trying to blow out the background and make it pure white. In computer terms, I wanted it represented by (255,255,255) or pure white. So it was less of a pain to extend the background to make it look real - I didn’t need to use a clone or healing brush. It was already white so I just painted in white (I actually did something a little more complex, but this is fine for the analogy). For Sam’s photo, the balloons and strings caused a bit of a shadow behind the strings so it’s not pure white there. The strings are so skinny that it wasn’t worth trying to paint over this with white. I tried a couple times and then gave up and reverted it.
Now that Google has released the Nik Collection for free, I wondered which is the best way to convert a color image into a B&W image. So I wanted to compare the results from RawTherapee, GIMP G’MIC Plugin, and Nik Collection in Photoshop. What follows are four videos as go through the processes.
On my way out of the house in the morning, and this great bit of art just happens due to the sun being in just the right place. I’ve never seen this in the half dozen years I’ve lived here. But this morning, it was there to give me a little mood lift.
I know that Scarlett is just 4 and she’s still learning things like putting in pupils and giving people proper heads and bodies. But sometimes I wonder if I have the next Tim Burton living under my roof. Plus I think the thick, black marker adds to the effect.
As an adult I have discovered a love of cooking. Sure, it can get mundane on a day-to-day basis, but I enjoy creating something tasty. I especially enjoy learning how to cook food that is much more expensive to eat out. Recently when I went to Costco, I was in the pork section and noticed they had pork bellies. So I wanted to try and recreate a Samgyeopsal-gui dish. So I found a recipe that included the sauces that go along with the dish and tried it out. It was a hit on the first try. Enjoy some images of my cooking:
You never know what’s going to happen when you try to take portraits of babies. Throw in the extra unpredictability of kids of any age and it’s a crapshoot whether a photo shoot is going to turn out to be fun with rewarding photos or a series of photos of your children crying.
One thing we have on our side with the studio being in the basement is that we can take photos when the kids are ready, not on a hope and prayer that they’ll be ready when we get to Sears, Target, or wherever people are getting portraits done nowadays. So we started off with easy portraits in the morning on the “Baby Portrait Couch”. Hey, it’s a tradition started with Scarlett!
I’ve been watching Gavin Hoey’s GREAT series on studio lighting. While he has a better studio than I do, he still has a small home studio so I find his advice and tutorials match what I’m able to accomplish. When I saw this video ( https://youtu.be/PIoWwx-elCE) I really wanted to try it out.
You might remember the photos from Scarlett’s birthday party. For some reason Dina wanted to hide when holding Sam. Her shoulder and back ended up being incredibly distracting in the photo. It would have been better if she would have just stood up and held him normally rather than pretend he was sitting on his own. Since we weren’t planning for this shot, I didn’t have a corresponding shot of the blank wall. Because she was not surrounded on both sides by the wall, it was hard to use the healing brush. So the guys over at Pixls.us helped me figure out this technique.
It was raining and a solitary flower had bloomed in anticipation of a spring that ended up being delayed by a sudden cold front and snow just before the first day of spring. I went out with my macro lens and the ring flash mom got me recently for Christmas.
Just in case the captions for the photos don’t appear on your RSS reader or on Facebook, here’s what I wrote as the caption to the photos:
“Inspired by title I chose for my photo for the twins’ four month photo which didn’t come out quite the way I wanted it to, I decided to do this image. I love how it came out.”
I also usually don’t post more than one version of a photo - I have a definitive version and just go with that, but this time Scarlett came up while I was trying to to figure out which one I preferred and she insisted on a different one than I would have chosen, so I decided to share them all.
I wanted to do this earlier - somewhere around 2 month portraits. I was re-energized to try the idea after seeing someone do a photo that made it look like their kid was bounding out of the crib with her stuffed animals. I did not take the Sam and Stella images from some other random image. They were right there where you see them. All I did was erase my body (or I’d be in here thrice). Still, if I were to do it again, I’d have Sam and Stella flying near me rather than against the wall. They end up too small and it lessens the impact of the shot. Well, there’s always next time. (And there’s always less edited shots!)
Welcome to a new set of posts in which I take a look at the t-shirts I’ve accumulated and comment on why I have them and what they mean to me.
It was the 1990s. I was fully into my Christian revival and the USA was into swing music. I was at a concert to see my new, favorite ska band, Five Iron Frenzy.
Back in October, I created a video showing my workflow with Digikam and RawTherapee. After spending lots of months working with both programs and tinkering to see what works best, I have updated my workflow. Based on the current versions of the programs, here is my updated workflow:
There was a good chunk of time where I was converting all my Canon Raw files into DNG files on the thought that it would be better and make them more readable in the future. But with KDE able to read Canon files as well as the libRaw in Linux - it seemed a waste of time.
This article by a professional photographer gives another reason. Certain software may not be able to produce as good a result from DNG as when the files come unadulterated from the camera.
They always say to use a little extra cable because you’re going to kick yourself in the butt if you’re short by an inch. But this is a bit ridiculous in terms of how much slack they have.
I believe that’s the cable for the traffic camera on this intersection. After seeing it a few days in a row during part of my commute, I just had to take a photo to share just how much slack they have here.
I’ve never seen it this empty before, but it still had more food than most grocery stores, including Trader Joe. (Last image will be Trader Joe chips aisle)
I’ve reduced the size to make it load faster on the net. If you want a larger size for printing out a photo, let me know. (Although these might be good enough for 4x6 in photos)
I could have gone for something more elaborate, but at this age, it’s a lot just to get them awake enough for portraits. There are plenty of months for crazier shots.
Been taking lots of shots of the kids, but one finally came out nice!
(edit: Ah, I figured it out, I can’t let the blog create resized versions of my giant files. To get the original size file (for printing) click here! It will look horrible in your web browser)
Mom got me a new LED ring flash for my birthday. I’ve wanted one for a while, but they were always too expensive for a niche subject (they’re mostly only useful for macro shots). But with an LED ring flash, the flash can be cheap because it doesn’t need to be TTL or E-TTL. It is always on so the camera just uses that light as the ambient light calculation. Again, it works best when you’re doing a macro shot. As a test, here’s my mom’s eye:
We went apple-picking just about midway into October, but this year only the Stayman apples had ripened by that time.
Larriland-Farm-2015-10-11-016
Larriland-Farm-2015-10-11-047
Larriland-Farm-2015-10-11-045
Larriland-Farm-2015-10-11-040
Larriland-Farm-2015-10-11-032
Larriland-Farm-2015-10-11-026-1
Larriland-Farm-2015-10-11-026
Larriland-Farm-2015-10-11-064
Larriland-Farm-2015-10-11-084
Larriland-Farm-2015-10-11-078
Larriland-Farm-2015-10-11-073
Larriland-Farm-2015-10-11-071
They had this creepy-looking building near the apples, so I decided to take a photo. While I was processing it, I couldn’t decide which look I liked best, so here are my favorites:
A while back I wrote about geotagging my photos when I was using Lightroom. I wanted to demonstrate how much easier it is with Digikam as everything’s built in and it works nicely and quickly.
For the first time in something like 3 years I took my Sigma 120-400mm lens to the zoo. I had intended to get some Firefox (Red Panda) photos and videos, but they weren’t there. That was also a bummer for Scarlett as seeing the Red Pandas was the reason she’d asked us to take her to the zoo.
First off we saw one of the pandas:
But what was a lot of fun was taking photos of the birds; birds that would have been quite hard for me to see in the wild. I think they came out pretty nicely considering the darkness in the bird house and the fact that I was hand-holding the lens. It seems like some of the higher ISO photos didn’t even have too much noise, so I’ll explore using it in the future to get the exposure a little more correct in camera. (if the photos look blurry when you click on them, give it a little time to load)
Recently we went to the pumpkin patch to get a couple pumpkins for the house and for Scarlett to have some fun at the farm. Here’s a gallery of my favorite photos from that visit and aftermath:
Back in May I posted a video of my RAW Workflow in Adobe Lightroom. Now that I’m fully on the Linux photography bandwagon, here’s a video of my current workflow with Digikam and RawTherapee:
Coney Island is quite photogenic at night, but even I surprised myself (who had gone a few years ago specifically to take photos there are night) with just how photogenic when I got on the carousel with Scarlett (and her cousins). Here are some photos from that night:
We had an inflatable pool for use with ball pit balls, but I thought it would be fun to take it outside so Scarlett could play with a water in a different way than usual.
Back when I was looking into doing all my photography on Linux I saw that whenever I would add a tag to a bunch of photos that it would crash Digikam. I filed a bug and was told it was a problem with Baloo that would be fixed in Digikam 5. I wanted my photos to have metadata that would be indexed in Dolphin and Baloo search, so I tried to deal with it as I moved to doing all my photography on Linux. But after it kept crashing as I worked on my July photos, I had enough. I turned off Digikam and Baloo integration and am no longer having crashes. Here’s what it needs to look like in the settings if you’d like to do this too:
I’ve been looking forward to this moment for a long time - Scarlett finally plays on her own, allowing me to photograph her. It’s much harder to capture the awesome moments if you’re also playing along with your little one. I have lots of spontaneous photos of her extended cousins (and even my adopted brothers) at a young age, but a lot less of her because of that. Here’s a batch from April:
This year was the first year since Scarlett was born that we went around the entire Tidal Basin. I’d say it was well worth it as we all had a good time and I even got some good photos out of it!
Scarlett and Danielle at the Cherry Blossom Festival
I found one way around the situation involving a DNG going to RawTherapee and creating a JPEG image that’s missing the title and tags when read by Digikam’s Exiv2 library. It may not be perfect, or even the best way. But it’s one way around the issue that I was easily able to confirm with about 5 minutes of messing around today. First up you want to tell Digikam to make XMP files to go along with all files:
Issues with tags and titles aside, I am really liking RawTherapee so far as my Lightroom RAW processing replacement. I wanted to document my process for getting to a black and white photo that I like both as a tutorial of sorts, but also to document for myself how it works with RawTherapee.
I’ve activated here one of my favorite features RawTherapee has that Lightroom does not, two windows showing just a small region up close. Too often I’m stuck zooming in and out of an image to check various parts of the image as I make changes. It’s not as crucial with this image, but I just wanted to test out the feature.
After having filed some bugs and spent a bit of time trying to figure out what’s going on, it appears that the issue with the metadata not carrying over from my DNG and CR2 files to the JPEG is not in any way RawTherapee’s fault. The problem is where Exiv2, the library used by Digikam, is expecting to look for this data. Of course, what I don’t understand about this is that Exiv2 is what wrote the data to begin with. Why write it to a location they were not going to be able to read from? Or maybe they only expect it to be there in DNG and CR2 files, but not JPEGs?
Two redeeming bits of news for RawTherapee (even though one of them means there’s still something to be solved before I can switch completely to this new bit of software).
When updated to the latest RawTherapee (the version in Fedora 21’s official repositories is old), the issue with pink images disappears
RawTherapee is indeed preserving the metadata in the JPEG. The problem is that it’s doing so in a manner that Digikam does not read through the exiv2 library. I’ve filed a bug report and hopefully this can be resolved. Once that’s done, I’d be able to leave Adobe Lightroom behind. If I wanted to, I could use the new software now, safe in the knowledge that the metadata was being written, but until it’s time to replace my photo hard drive (later this year), I won’t be moving the photos over to Linux.
Last Fall I started considering moving away from Lightroom after having used it for nearly a decade. Back then I was making use of the student price to actually be able to afford it. Competition from Apple Aperture and other programs caused it to eventually drop to $150 per version. But Adobe seemed to be moving more and more towards a subscription-only model. Lightroom is still available standalone, but it appears the rest of the CS suite (including, for example, Photoshop) are on the treadmill now. While there are surely some benefits to being able to rent Photoshop and Adobe’s awesome video editing software when you need to do a project rather than for a thousand-plus fee, one way I’ve afforded Lightroom is not upgrading every year. So while it’s cheaper to pay monthly than buying outright (at the prices they had when they went subscription), I rarely found the upgrades worth is and so was able to save some money. I started considering alternatives. But I’d had Lightroom 5 on my wishlist and someone bought it for me for Christmas. So I figured I’d be a Lightroom user for a few more years.
note: This is a blog post about fine art nude photography. While there is no pornography or erotic image on this page, you may not want to load it up at work. Also, to see all my work with this model on flickr, you’ll have to sign in so they can verify that you’re old enough to see the photographsTo keep my front page from being NSFW, I’m going to use a MORE tag to make you jump to see the photos themselves. See you after the jump.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
Scarlett at the Beach in Florida and my dinner at Universal Studios.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
This time from the Cherry Blossom Festival. The blooms were predicted to come early that year, but lots of the trees weren’t in full bloom because of a cold front that came through.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
This time from our trip to San Francisco for Daniel’s wedding
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
I think this is the first time her face looks really similar to the way it does now. (Only it had more fat back then)
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post (ok, I think this’ll probably be the last one in a row…I’ve been busy!) . For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
The National Christmas Tree (it’s too bad that because of my schedule I won’t get to see it this year) and a few other random shots from last year’s period just before Christmas.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post (yeah, they’re back to back this time). For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
More Scarlett - this time getting the Christmas tree. It made me sad that we didn’t do the lights on her again this year. Then again, she might have wanted to do it all the time - so maybe that’s a good thing.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
Once again a focus on Scarlett. Looking back on these photos I realize how easy it was to get to smile back then. It sounds ridiculous to say she’s gotten more jaded - she’s not even two, for Pete’s sake. But she does spend more time brooding and is a bit more specific about what makes her smile. Perhaps this is part of the reason why some couples decide to have more children - to get back that ultra-innocence of baby-hood before the slightly less innocent toddler-hood what with its tantrums and such.
Scarlett first did this about three weeks ago before she started watching Disney’s The Little Mermaid non-stop. I was playing with her in the living room and she was making her various stuffed animals dance to the music. Then she took two animals - a dog and a cat or something and put their faces together and said “kissing”. This was baffling to me because Danielle and I don’t really have lots of PDA. It’s not a conscious decision, it’s just that we’re usually trying to juggle about three things at once when Scarlett’s around. And she pretty much only watches PBS and I doubt there’s much lip-on-lip kissing on there. So I wonder where she picked it up? It may be like the other things that people blame on daycare (biting, hitting, etc), kids just pick it up from the ether or they see it once - that one time you had some TV show on or that one time the wife and I kissed in front of her - and it just gets ingrained in their heads. Not sure, but definitely fascinated that it happened.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
Once again I can’t believe how young she looks. But, having gone back to the pumpkin patch, I can say it was definitely easier to take photos when she was younger.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
A break from the Scarlett photos as all the photos in this photo time capsule are from Baltimore Comic-Con. As I mentioned before, I’m sad I couldn’t go this year, but I did get to go to the pretty awesome Color Run in Brooklyn. Perhaps those photos will make it next year!
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
In this installment: the first time we ever took Scarlett to the beach. Heh, I’d completely forgotten about that car-walker.
If you’re taking concert photos professionally, you will get access to the pit area and will be able to photograph there for the first three songs. Put your camera into manual mode and, depending on the lighting, manual focus and try to get original and heartfelt shots. This blog post is for the rest of us.
First of all, unfortunately, you probably (MOST LIKELY) won’t be able to take your SLR and the lenses you’d need to properly photograph the event. The reason the photographers get to take photos for only the first three songs is to make sure they don’t disturb the people behind them so they aren’t going to take kindly to an amateur ruining things for others. At best you can bring in a premium point and shoot like the Canon S110 or G15. At worst you’ll be using your cell phone. The most important thing to know is that you need to turn off your flash and pump up your ISO. Anyone more than a couple rows back does not have a flash powerful enough to reach the stage and all you’ll be doing is lighting up the heads of the people in front of you.
It’s once again time for my biweekly Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
I think in these photos Scarlett is finally starting to have the same facial features as 1.5 year old Scarlett.
Whether or not you consider my 365 Project to be a year’s worth of selfies depends largely on whether you believe in the point of 365 projects. But I would say the selfie is more like the pictures you see on Facebook. Like others I viewed them with disdain. Then I came across an interesting article.
I know most people hate selfies. They groan and complain about them, from the duck lips to the filters. Why, just the word “selfie” can induce legendary amounts of eyerolling.
If you have a huge party like someone’s 60th or a graduation party that you want to take photos at, there are basically three things to remember whether you’re doing it for money or just to document a special time for the family and friends.
If You Can, Get Photos of the Preparations/Empty Venue
Once the people arrive, it will probably be a controlled chaos that you’ll be trying to capture. People often put a lot of thought into decorations and centerpieces. Take some time to document them.
Back in 2009 I went to Manhattan at night with my Rebel XTi and my 50mm f/1.8 to do some night time photography at Times Square. The 50mm was key because its wide aperture allowed me to keep the ISO low and get nice, clear photos. (Although there’s something to be said for the aesthetics of grainy night shots of busy cities) Of course, it also helped that Times Square is quite well lit. Cities like Toykyo and New York City are well-served by color photography when you’re trying to document the crazy, colored buildings, but I think when doing street photography, it helps to have the output be black and white so that to focus is on the people rather than the colors. Here are my best shots from that night:
It’s once again time for my biweekly Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
Again mostly Scarlett, but also a scan from a photo I took when I was in High School. Dan’s all the way on the left, in the water.
It’s once again time for my biweekly Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
The video called Keyboard Scarlett comes from the fact that I found out I was able to make her laugh hysterically if I moved her hands back and forth on the table like Keyboard Cat. Interestingly, now that she has full agency over her limbs, she hates when I do anything like this.
Summer is here and for many of us that means going to a beach - whether it’s just a drive away or a cross-country flight. But that doesn’t mean you have to give up on photography! There are great opportunities whether you want to do landscape photography, wildlife photography, or portrait photography. Let’s start by talking about equipment. The equipment you bring to the beach depends on your purpose for being at the beach that day or that session. If you’re going specifically to take photos, then you’re probably OK bringing your dSLR and, optionally, flash. If you’re going to the beach to enjoy it and also want to take photos, you’re best off getting an underwater housing for your camera or getting a weatherproofed camera. Sand and sea salt (which is in the air at the beach) are both VERY bad for cameras and could wreck your expensive camera. If you will be having fun you don’t want to take the chance that someone who’s with you or a stranger kicks sand onto your camera accidentally. Also, sometimes waves can come up farther than you realized at first. An underwater housing or weatherproof camera is protected from the elements. It also has the bonus of allowing you to carry it with you into the water (should you happen to be at a beach where you can get into the water) and lessens the chances of your camera being stolen.
It’s once again time for my biweekly Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
Of course, it consists of Scarlett photos. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again, I can’t believe now much she’s changed in just one year!
It’s easy to lust after photo opportunities elsewhere as I did in a recent post. But when you find that happening, just remember there’s a whole world in your backyard. If you live in an urban neighborhood like the protagonist of Pecker, you can focus on portraits and street photography - candid or otherwise. But if you live in a suburban or rural area, you’ll find a lot of naturalistic photo opportunities in your backyard. For inspiration, take a look at these photos taken in my backyard and my parents’ backyard. (I’ve stretched the definition of backyard a little to include the surrounding neighborhood that’s within a short walk - say, within a mile) (Yes, a lot of them are birds, but that’s what really interests me outside)
Unsurprisingly, Scarlett is once again the subject of the Photojojo. Also captured, a visit by the in-laws. I think the most interesting thing is that I find her way cuter as she looks now vs a year ago. But back then I found her way cute. Scientists say it peaks at age 4. I guess we’ll see.
[caption id=“attachment_6300” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”] Aida at the Park back before digital[/caption]
I have mentioned many times before how much I was into photography back before digital existed. Despite film and developing costs subsuming all my allowance money, I still took tons of photos. Three years ago, I decided to check out the film photography renaissance. In April I got my first batch of film and a Holga. And soon I had shot some photos. And a few weeks later I had my Holga and Yashica film back. And since then I’ve … not shot very many more rolls of film. There are a few reasons for this; some of them don’t even have to do directly with film. For example, I’m just taking less photos in general. A lot of that has to do with Scarlett. I have lots of photos of other kids in the family because you can hang back when it’s not your kid. You don’t have to worry about anything- someone else is taking care of him or her. But children, at least at the toddler and below stage, require a lot of attention. Also, I want to be present in her life. In order to photograph you have to withdraw a bit. And that’s fine when they’re five or six and off playing on the playground on their own. But Scarlett needs our assistance and attention to be able to use pretty much any part of the playground. Indirectly, because I have a desire to play with her in a way that my father couldn’t (his 9-5 rarely ended at 5), I have to be a better manager of my time. And I have committed to writing more this year. And there are some games I want to play. And there’s TV and time with the wife. Also, I am traveling less and I don’t happen to find Baltimore anywhere near as photogenic as New York city or Oahu.
It’s once again time for my biweekly Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
More Scarlett photos. The one of her sleeping on me, melts me. The one of me talking to her with her eyes open like “WTF IS GOING ON?” is hilarious. (the last image)
I don’t think any father ever sets out to spoil his daughters. After all, not only does that lead to a mal-adjusted human, it makes her more likely to make bad decisions. But when she’s capable of looking this cute (at least to me, but all parents get like +100 cuteness points on their own kids over strangers’ kids), it’s so hard to be cross with her for long. In fact, I don’t know if this theory has ever been discredited, but some scientists think that kids look cute exactly for this reason - so we don’t lose our cool with them as much as otherwise would - at least until their brains have developed to the point where they can be liable for their actions.
[caption id=“attachment_6229” align=“aligncenter” width=“683”] Tony Hangs On[/caption]
This photo is a great example of the magic moments you can capture when you’re not focused on getting kids to say “cheese”. Just hang back and go to the most telephoto you can and you’ll capture some magical moments.
One of the biggest trends on flickr is to start a 365 Project. This usually means taking one self-portrait a day for an entire year. This project is often misunderstood by those outside of flickr, especially since they’re used to the selfie-culture of MySpace and Facebook. It’s not a vanity project. A 365 Project is about taking the adage about becoming a better writer through writing every day to photography. It also has a special bonus of teaching the photographer what it’s like to be the subject. Many of us photo-geeks are behind the camera way more often than we’re in front of it. Sometimes we struggle with how to communicate to our subjects how to achieve the vision we have in our head. By being both the photographer and the subject, we learn to appreciate both points of view.
It’s once again time for my biweekly Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
Scarlett’s only 2-2.5 months old in these photos and the most striking things are how tiny she is and how much in awe she seems of the world around her. No mean feat considering how tiny she remains compared to her peers. But it definitely takes a lot more to astound her than it did a year ago.
Every phase of life the children in your life go through presents different sets of challenges. For example, take a look at this photo of Scarlett’s first Easter:
[caption id=“attachment_6095” align=“aligncenter” width=“450”] Scarlett’s First Easter[/caption]
She couldn’t sit up and she didn’t have the slightest clue of what was happening. We could try to get her to look at her mom, but it didn’t hold her attention for long and she might start crying on a dime. Now, take a look at her as a toddler:
It’s once again time for my biweekly Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
I took a long time to publish the previous post, so here we are again. It’s mostly Scarlett Easter photos. As I sit here and look at a photo of this year’s Easter photo, it’s pretty awesome to see how much she’s changed. For one thing, she’s mobile now, so it was a challenge to get her to sit there while we took the photo. For another, she can actually sit on her own.
It’s once again time for my biweekly Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
The biggest takeaway which is SOOOOO crazy is how much Scarlett has changed in just 1 year. Only 365 days. And she looks COMPLETELY different!
So…..apparently the most interesting photo has nothing to do with Scarlett being born? It must be based on when I uploaded it, not when the photo was taken.
Apparently, I only had one interesting photo last January. (Makes sense - we were probably spending all our free time getting ready for Scarlett’s arrival. I expect she’ll be a huge chunk of the photojojo in the coming year)
Interestingly, this year we had some snow in Dec, but if my title is correct here, the first snow of last year was in January.
Yesterday we took a look at the most interesting, now let’s look at the most viewed! Two photos of Nam that I took with my holga have really been taking off.
The last time I could quickly find where I did this was last January. While there are some photos that are similar, there’s been quick a shake-up on the Most Interesting Photos (as determined by flickr’s algorithms).
As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I’ve been into photography since I was five years old. That’s when I got my first Kodak Instamatic camera and started shooting photos and creating photo albums. I have about ten photo albums, with most of them coming from when I got to high school and could really afford film and developing. Ever since I got my first digital camera in my second semester of college, the number of photos I’ve taken yearly has increased nearly exponentially. Because I’m an organized person, I started off putting my photos into event-based folders. Once I realized that’d quickly get unwieldy, I decided to put them in folders by date. Eventually, software like Picassa, Lightroom, and digiKam came out which would have allowed me to continue to to organized my photos by event because they could read the metadata and reorganize them by date. However, I’ve found that my system has two main benefits 1)my photos remain organized even if my descendants don’t have access to programs that can read the metadata on the photos. 2) it’s very easy for me to very quickly find a photo. It would be somewhere like 2010->Jan 10->So and So’s Wedding.
Back when I compiled the Top 200 Photos feature, this was #10:
and now it’s:
which was not in the top 20 before, so it has really gained a lot of views. That comes from the fact that it’s on Pixel-Peer as an example of that lens’ abilities.
The original Top 200 Photo #16 was:
and now it’s:
which has fallen just one position from #15. Pretty funny that they’re both fireworks - although on very different scales!
The original Top 200 Photo in the #18th spot was:
and the current #18 photos is:
this photo has been on the rise ever since Bradley Manning’s trial started up.
Since it took about a year for my Top 200 photos feature to run its course, I wanted to go back and see how things changed within the Top 20 in that year. When I posted the feature, this was #20:
I’ve fallen a bit behind on these photo time capsules. Here’s the one from early December. Apparently, all my interesting photos from back then were taken in NYC.
Just click on the image. Then right-click and set as desktop background or save it to your computer and use your OS’s methods for setting the background.
This is from my first Otakon photo shoot - the one I mentioned before in which I had no idea Otakon was even going on until we arrived in Baltimore. He was one of three people I photographed. Why? Because, even though I’d never watched it, I actually knew what InuYasha was. InuYasha is a manga/anime by Rumiko Takahashi, the creator or Ranma ½. Because manga artists tend to have a very recognizable style, I knew it was by her just from the character designs. The main characters look like Ranma and Akane.
I called this photo Ghetto Shoes because I’ve only seen this type of stuff happen in less well-off neighborhoods. It was a pretty regular site in the neighborhood where I grew up. Thinking about it, it probably happens anywhere there are teens and preteens, but more affluent neighborhoods tend to have their phone and power lines buried. I have absolutely no idea why this photo has 5400 views.
“How do you do?” And shake hands. On this Top 200 Photo
photo #3 is:
I’d been reading online about how awesome the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade was. In 2008 Dina and Brian went and confirmed that it was pretty awesome so Danielle and I decided to go because it was falling on a Saturday in 2009. Eventually we decided we’d go ahead and get dressed up as well. We thought about it for a while and realized that 2009 would be the last year for a while in which it would be original to be a character from Alice in Wonderland since the Tim Burton film was coming out in 2010. So we had Danielle’s mom make us costumes.
The final appearance of these two in this Top 200 photo
photo #4:
And so these two show up once again with 2579 views as of the time I’m writing this (in March). I’m not quite sure what it is about this particular photo of a Soul Eater Cosplay has garnered it more views than the others. It’s technically an inferior photo when compared to the others. Part of the awesome hat on the left is cut off. And the woman on the left has her eyes closed.
The final Cornell-based photo in this Top 200 Photo
photo #5 is:
I think is it bizarre that, as of the time of this writing, nearly 2.5 thousand people have wanted to see a photo of my standing in front of a statue of Ezra Cornell. After Danielle and I got out cap and gown, we thought about what a circus it would be on graduation day. Everyone and their 20 family members would probably be trying to get family photos by all the famous Cornell landmarks. So we went around campus and took a series of photos, most of which are just sitting on my hard drive. One of the ones I took of Danielle ended up becoming her “official” graduation photo. Sometimes I wish I’d done more at Cornell, but I couldn’t have done much more and still graduated with an Electrical Engineering degree.
I got this shirt when I went to visit MIT in 2000. We were on a visit of universities along the East Coast so I could decide where I wanted to apply. I guess it also functioned as the same thing for my brothers because I don’t remember them going on separate college visit trips.
I liked the shirt because it was quirky and had equations on it and mixed with religion. It wasn’t until my Sophomore year at Cornell that I found out these were Maxwell’s Equations. It was such as awesome epiphany when I realized the equations we were studying in class were on my shirt. Since most engineering exams at Cornell were either open book or allowed cheat sheets, I used to wear the shirt during exams as a little joke. It wouldn’t actually have been practical because I would have wasted too much time reading it upside-down. And it was on my front, so it didn’t help my fellow students either. I love this shirt, but it became ridden with holes after all these years and it had to go.
This is Pope John Mole IV. Back in High School, many moons ago, we had to make stuffed moles when we were learning about moles in Chemistry. They had to be creative, usually revolving around work play with the word mole. This was mine. The idea was completely mine. But my mom actually made it. All throughout elementary school she used to make my science project boards (while I did the actual work). I think this mole she made for me in HS was the last time she helped me with my homework. It’s kinda nostalgia-inducing to think of it that way. While we lived in the apartment, it was on the bookshelf along with a bunch of other knickknacks we had all over the bookshelves.
This is the reflection photo that started them all. It broke 1000 views in less than a year and was the first one to over-take photo #9 (back when it was my #1 photo). We were just looking for something to do on a boring day. We took out the camera and started experimenting with different ideas. When we finally came up with this idea, we must have tried at least a dozen variations to try and make sure to get it right. It is, to this day, one of my absolute favorite photos.
The penultimate Cornell photo in this Top 200 Photo series
photo #9 is:
This photo is, other than my Last Supper Photo (link), my favorite Photoshopped photo. This photos is my most commented on, my most favorited, my highest position on Explore, and was at one time my most viewed. I took my camera to class and just placed it on my desk. I turned off the flash and just took shot after shot as the professor taught. The title, “he Impression Left On Me by the Offspring of Euler", comes from the fact that he can trace his PhD advisor lineage back to Euler. At the end of the semester I sent him the composition and he loved it.
And we finally make it to the last 10 photos in the Top 200 Photos
photo #10 is:
This is part of that reflection series I mentioned a LONG time ago. This photo used to be quite popular. In fact, four years ago it was my #3 most viewed photo. Now it has sunk to #10. Will its being featured in this series revive it? I don’t know; time will tell!
This is the last time these photos appear in the Top 200. I had no idea they were so highly rated. I think they look so awesome if you look at them at “original size”. They lose a lot of impact at the size at which they’re displayed here or flickr. I’m definitely going to zoom in or crop the photo next time I do something like this.
Another example of the beauty of Ithaca, NY in the summer. Cayuga Lake is in the distance. Again, it’s just a shame that almost the entire school year takes place during the part of the year with horrible, horrible weather.
This is another photo that’s featured in the blog’s header. In case you don’t know, this is The White House, the mansion where the President of the United States of America lives. As I was thinking about what to write for this photo, I noticed the title, “My first daylight pictures of the Whitehouse 2". I meant it was the second photo I’d taken of The White House in daylight. But the alternative reading, that this is the sequel is also correct. The original White House was set on first by the British in the War of 1812, a side conflict of an early World War.
I was looking for stuff around the house to photograph (something you have to do if you don’t live in a big city) and decided to use my wife’s wedding ring and a wedding anniversary gift I’d given her. I thought it was a pretty neat arrangement and so have a lot of others because it has, as of this writing, 1669 views. Unfortunately, I learned after this that she’s not into Precious Moments or any kinds of collectibles.
It’s pretty funny to have this photo of firecrackers appear right above the photo of fireworks. After all, it’s just a mini-version of the same thing. While I’ve been to a ton of Vietnamese weddings and this is the only one that had firecrackers - I was told that they’re traditionally set off during weddings.
This photo is also featured on the Pixel-Peeper site for the Sigma 10-20mm (B&H link). I’d taken photos of fireworks before, but they seemed to be missing something compared to other photos I’d seen. Then I learned that many times (although not always) these photos were really long exposures. What you do is use something dark to cover the lens between fireworks explosions to keep the shot from getting over-exposed. Then you can get a sky full of fireworks. Both methods produce pretty different exposures so it’s worth experimenting.
When I went to England in 2006 the Iraq War was in the middle of the worst period for American and allied deaths. This bunch of protest signs was sitting across from Parliament. The interesting thing is that no one was there guarding them, yet no pro-war people were defacing or removing them.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the 13th most viewed photo in the Top 200 Photos
photo #18 is:
triscadecaphobia (also spelt Triskaidekaphobia) is the fear of the number 13. I don’t have triskaidekaphobia - I am not paralyzed on Friday the 13th. However, I do get bad vibes from the number whenever I see it. On the other hand, 2, for me, is a conforting number. But I like it in script better than printed.
Until I went to the Grand Canyon and saw an awesome rainbow there, this was the only photograph I had of a rainbow. I was going to a work breakfast when I was working at P&G and when I got out of my car it was there. I decided to photograph it before going inside. It languished mostly unseen until I posted it to a photography related forum. Then it shot up to 200 views in one day (from <50). Now it has 1239 views.
When I was first learning about stroboscopic images, I wanted to do something with humans, not just bouncing balls and scissors. It would be a while before I could get Dave doing martial arts. So I tried a few things, but it was hard to keep from interfering with myself and ending up with an indistinguishable mess. So I figured I could extend my arm out so each pulse would have my arm in a non-overlapping position. As you can tell, I started off fast and then realized I was going too quickly so the last few pulses are closer to each other.
I finally figured out the right number of flash pulses so that the separate images of David could be distinguished. I think it was the best photo we came up with that night.
And so, we as are about to enter the top 20 images, this image has, as the time of this writing, 1151 views.
This photo was taken on the first time I discovered Otakon in Baltimore. We were just walking around Baltimore and noticed cosplayers here and there. At first I thought it was just a strange group of friends. But when we kept seeing more and more of them, I figured something was up. I didn’t know it yet, but it was the last day of Otakon. Since it was the last day and the convention was officially over, people could just walk into the convention center and so I did and took some candid shots with my 55-200mm lens. I didn’t know at the time that these people wanted to be photographed and were used to being photographed. So I was doing most of it candidly.
I created this during my earlier Photoshop period. It’s called “How the Ad Industry Sees Us”. I really like it a lot and I think it still stands on its own as a statement.
I previously featured the writing desks you can see at the very bottom of this photo. This is a wider view of the Andrew White reading room in Uris Library at Cornell. It has a somewhat magical and surreal feel to it. Part of it is from the fact that walkways are everywhere and part of it is the lighting. It’s a pretty awesome room to be in and looks like something out of a Hollywood set.
It’s one of my early images from when I thought you had to Photoshop images if you wanted people to stand up and take notice. (I spoke about this earlier in the Top 200 Photos series) I still think it was a creative idea. However, with what I am capable of now, I can see that it’s pretty sloppy photoshopping and I probably would have used some of the 3D tech in Photoshop (or combined it with Blender) to make it look more like a bunch of masks hanging there.
We return to the stone pier in Oahu, Hawaii for this Top 200 Photo
photo #29 is:
As I mentioned before, I saw these two on a stone pier that jutted out into the Pacific. I mentioned that I was bored so I went for a walk to take some photos. Looking over the sets that the photo’s in reminds me that I actually went out with a challenge - take 10 photos of 10 people at one photo length. I chose 50mm so I actually had to get pretty close to my subjects. This resulted in my having to get over some of my fears of getting close to people to photograph them rather than zooming in.
When I was playing with the macro mode of my Fuijifilm Finepix S7000, I started to get into flower photography. This flower was on the other side of a small wall on the walkway that leads to Ho Plaza, near Olin Hall. Thanks to the position of the sun, the wall gave a nice black background for the shot.
It was quite a challenge to paint my house when we first moved in. Of Danielle, her father, mother, and I, neither of us had painted before. Her mother had done some painting under the direction of her uncle, but not on her own. So over the course of a weekend we slowly figured out different techniques to speed the process up while still getting good results. At the eleventh hour (unfortunately, figuratively and not literally), Danielle’s mom remember this technique for protecting the area being painted when painter’s tape couldn’t be used. I just took this photo to document the technique for the future. Thanks to google hits, this one ended up with 928 views as of the time of writing.
This annoying orange fencing is what I spoke about when I said that when Slope Day became an official event, it became annoying to navigate around campus. As I mentioned in my Libe Slope panorama, nearly all the upperclassmen have to pass through it to get to class and not everyone is able to party on Slope Day. I’ve been in classes that had quizzes, exams, or labs on Slope Day. It doesn’t matter that it’s Slope Day, it’s still the last day of class.
Much like the Nam photo that was #40, in this photo I am taking advantage of the effects wide angle lenses have on their subjects. Things closer to the lens look much larger (compared to a normal lens) than those further away. Like the candle photo, this one only ended up with this many views because it was used on a website. In this case, it is Pixel-Peeper, a site that contains example images to see how well lenses perform. On that page I linked, this photo is, at the time of this writing, the number one image on there. This has led to this going from an obscure photo to being the most-viewed photo in my 365 project. This is annoying in the sense that I feel I have lots of photos in my 365 which are much more creative (like The Last Supper, or the last five photos), but neat because, as an artist, I want as many people to see my work as possible. So if this leads to more views on my 365 photos (and it has) or of my stream in general, then it can’t be that bad.
I opened the battery compartment to my Fujifilm camera and dumped the batteries out. I was going to throw them in the charger when I realized I really liked the arrangement they’d fallen into. So I decided to practice with my camera’s macro mode and shoot the photo. For a while it was one of my favorite macro shots. And it’s one of my few photos to be used on another website thanks to the fact that it was licensed under the creative commons.
It was one of those trips to Hawaii without Danielle. I was really bored so I went out onto the beach since my hotel was right across the street from the beach. I found this long concrete pier that had a crowd of people on it. I figured I’d go check it out. Essentially, people were waiting until the waves stopped, then jumping into the water. It was a good 20 feet or more to the water below. The reason for waiting for the waves to stop is that otherwise they’d slam you into the concrete pier. Also, you had to launch yourselves a ways out because you didn’t want a wave to arrive as soon as you’d landed. I was standing behind two girls (who you’ll see in photo #29) and they jumped in one-by-one. I love shots of dynamic action like jumping because it tends to look really cool. I missed her friend, but I got her jumping in.
These were the computers I was using in 2005. The one on the left was running Linux. The Laptop was running Linux. The computer on the right was running Windows XP. I no longer have any of those computers, monitors, speakers, or mice. They all either broke or were replaced. The longest lasting was the computer on the left which was my print server until recently. (/2011/02/11/replacing-the-fileprint-server/)
I forgot about this little project for a while, but I remembered in time to make October’s background. I’ve decided to stop making the square versions of the background. If I get enough people who actually want it, I’ll reinstate it. To set as your background, click on it then right-click and set as desktop. If that option’s not available, save it to your computer and use your OS’s method of setting the desktop.
More stroboscopic photography for this Top 200 Photo
photo #37 is:
Galileo postulated that in a vacuum (in other words with no air drag) that any two items dropped should fall at the same rate regardless of their mass. I didn’t hold both of these scissors at exactly the same height, so to compare you have to look at the distance each travels per unit of time. Of course, it is right (and has been tested in space).
I have forgotten whether I was inspired to go shoot at the Maryland State Fair at night by a magazine or if I came up with the idea on my own. I really enjoyed all the photos I took that night and it has inspired me to go and attempt lots of other night shoots. I like the look of the lights at night and how they cast different shadows and give the objects different appearances than during the day. I also played around with different shutter speeds to be able to see things differently than with the naked eye.
There are three differences between this photo and the previous similar one: Dave is not stifling a laugh, Dave is wearing a shirt, and it’s in color. But it has a bunch more views. What does that mean? Do people not like topless Dave? Do they hate black and white martial arts photos? Or is it Dave’s serious face? Or maybe it’s just completely random.
This photo, again, is from before Nam was afraid of my photography. I was in town for the Lunar New year and just doing some kid photography of him by getting to his height to take the photos. He was interested in my camera and started getting closer and closer so I had to keep zooming further and further out. So I ended up at 17mm and that makes his head larger than it would otherwise be because of where it is in the frame. (Somewhat ameliorated by the fact that I shot this photo on a crop-sensor camera)
I think this is now the third time Mai has appeared on this list. I speculated about her smile, but I’m not really sure what it is that flickr loves about my portraits of Mai.
We’ve finished another twenty photos and are now, at the time of this writing, at 819 views for this photo.
This is a photo of our cars in the parking of the Apartment Complex we used to live at. It was probably right after the snow had finished falling. We used to think that was a lot of snow. Now (after the 2010 storms) we know better.
Danielle gets very restless being stuck at home all the time. Since Maryland isn’t like NYC where you can just go walk around the city, Danielle has ended up gaining an appreciation for nature. Over the last six years she’s gone from someone who’d grimace at the mention of a hike to the person most responsible for getting me out of the house on the weekend.
Drip….drip…drip…. it’s time for another Top 200 Photo
photo #44 is:
This is another photo from when I was playing with my flash and attempting to catch water droplets forming those cool patterns they sometimes do when they hit a body of water. Going over these has definitely made me want to try it again.
Titled “The Last Supper”: this is, I think, my most ambitious digital composition. I was deep in my 365 project and I didn’t know what to do for the 264th day. I had thought of this idea once before, but not in any depth. Originally I thought about doing it at the dining room table so it would be closer to the famous painting. But it turned out that even with my new wide angle lens, (B&H link) I wouldn’t be able to fit 13 copies of myself in that room. So I moved it to the living room. There is one pita chip on each plate to represent the bread. And one cup of wine from the tradition that one cup was passed around. As you know, if you’ve been following this Top 200 Photos series, I’m no stranger to composite photos. But this time I wanted to do it right. So I found thirteen different shirts to wear. Because it might be a little hard to notice at the size at which this photo is posted, notice the text on Jesus’ shirt. (If you don’t get it, read on)
This is an ad I used to pass by every day and night while I was in Las Vegas. Because of the glare it may be a little hard to read the text of the ad. It says “Always a Happy Ending at Tao” which is described as an Asian Bistro, Nightclub, and Lounge. I took this photo because I was unsure of how I felt about it. In case you don’t know the idiom, a “happy ending” is a euphemism for getting oral sex at the end of a massage (it could also mean masturbation - but not by the self). It originates from using massage parlours as a front for prostitution in places where prostitution is illegal. This allows the owner to claim (or ATTEMPT to claim) that he had no idea what his masseuses were doing. He thought everyone was just getting massages back there. These erotic massages and the term “happy ending”, in particular, are heavily associated with asians. Additionally, the billboard employs the image of a naked woman and either Chinese or Japanese script. (I know it’s not Korean which is bubblier)
This is the black and white version of a photo I mentioned before. As I mentioned then, I prefer the black and white version. Apparently the flickr community agrees since this one has so many more views.
This photo is from that wedding at which I was the official photographer. A few hours into the wedding I realized I didn’t have a post-ceremony photo of the bride and her sister. So I got them together and we started riffing off each other because I wanted them to express how close they were as sisters. I ended up with this fun photo. I think it’s in my top 5 favorite photos from that wedding.
Otakon and some familiar faces for this Top 200 Photo
photo #49 is:
These Soul Eater cosplayers have appeared before on this list and will appear at least once more. I think this photo is unique in showing them from head (or hat) to toe. For the first time, I’ve realized that the woman on the right has “elf shoes” or shoes with curly toes. I think it’s pretty odd how much of a gap there is in the number of views between all these photos of the same subjects.
Las Vegas is a really weird place. There are many reasons for this, including squaring gambling, family friendliness, and topless revues. As I mentioned before, I was in Vegas to attend BlackHat and Defcon. For the three days of Defcon I would walk all the way from Caesar’s Palace over to The Riviera. From what I could tell from the dilapidated looks that part of Vegas was the oldest surviving area of the Vegas strip. There were empty lots that were soon to get new casinos and old ones that looked like you’d get a disease just from stepping in the front door. I wonder what the recession has done to the construction efforts there.
I’ve always loved how trees demonstrate fractals and I think that’s almost nothing so beautiful during the winder as a tree covered in a small bit of snow. It really brings out the structure of the branches and makes it easier to notice them.
Another computer project for today’s Top 200 Photo
photo #52 is:
I built this computer for Dave when he graduated from High School. I learned that, although Windows XP 32-bit should have been able to read 4 GB of RAM, it wasn’t able to. It had the most powerful graphics card I’d installed up to that point because Dave was a big WoW player at the time. It really transformed how well the game played for him (graphics and speed) and that was satisfying to see.
Here’s yet another Coco Peli. I wonder why he was in the middle of these palm trees. Here’s some more info on Coco Peli, from wikipedia:
Kokopelli is a fertility deity, usually depicted as a humpbacked flute player (often with a huge phallus and feathers or antenna-like protrusions on his head), who has been venerated by some Native American cultures in the Southwestern United States. Like most fertility deities, Kokopelli presides over both childbirth and agriculture. He is also a trickster god and represents the spirit of music.
This is from the Greenwhich Village Halloween Parade. If you want to see some of the best costumes outside of an anime or comic convention, you have to go to the Greenwhich Village Halloween Parade. This photo is not representative of some of those amazing costumes, but those will show up in a future post. I think it’s pretty obvious these are supposed to be three breasts. Other than that, I’m not sure what the connection is. I just always think of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s mention of the Triple-Breasted Whore of Eroticon Six. Danielle always thinks of the girl from Total Recall.
This photo is not photoshopped in any way. This photo, taken in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, is just an example of how cameras can help us see things differently. If you leave the shutter open long enough to have the scene lit up, you can some unique colors. In this case, I left it open for 5 seconds. So as the photons collected on the camera, the scene lit up in a way I could never experience with the naked eye.
Back to wedding photography for today’s Top 200 Photo
photo #56 is:
Any wedding photographer can get the usual shots (and better if he doesn’t want to lose business). Shots like this one are the ones that set you apart. Once you’re done with the ones you need, just follow the bride and groom around and stop directing them. Let them do what they want to do and they’ll do some great stuff that will reveal their personality and give them something to talk about when they go over the album.
This is the computer I built for my father-in-law. At this point I was essentially done putting it all together. It was time to test it before closing it up.
Baltimore’s Farmer’s Market in Today’s Top 200 Photo
photo #58 is:
We were looking for something to do and decided to check out the Baltimore Farmer’s Market. It was OK. As always, it’s a hard decision to make because it’s great to support local businesses, but I don’t run a charity and if I spend my money on that produce I can’t spend it on other things. And, nowadays, more and more grocery stores are buying locally anyway.
Once again we find ourselves at Cornell for this Top 200 Photo.
photo #59 is:
I think my flickr description is perfect:
Every year on Columbus Day our Native American and Hispanic groups on campus protest the celebration of a man who began the genocide of an entire race of people. The photographer (myself) currently does not hold an opinion either way, but since this occurred in the middle of the Cornell, Ho Plaza, I wanted to record what was going on.
When Danielle and I went to London for about 24 hours, we had no idea we’d be able to see nearly every landmark. It was pretty awesome to be able to achieve it all. I think all we missed was the Tower of London. (And a leisurely stroll along the Thames) I love this shot of Big Ben, Parliament, Westminster, and the Thames and it’s currently on display in our dining room.
The only reason this photo even made it into the ranks of the Top 200 is that it was featured on a website talking about how to remove candle wax from a carpet. That led to 474 views in one day! And hopefully some of those looked around my photostream and became followers of my photography.
While putting some lotion on Danielle’s back, it looked to me like the way they prepare cakes at nice restaurants. I hadn’t purposely tried to do this, so I *had* to photograph it!
It took forever to get the Photoshopping just right for it to look this good. In the end, lighting kinda messes up the effect, but I think it’s my most meticulous surreal photo.
In a very strange role reversal, I was the only one out of myself, Danielle, Dina, Daniel, Marlene, Brian, Ho, and Lauren who knew this girl was dressed as Katy Perry from her “California Girls” music video. Usually I don’t know jack about pop culture. I’d seen the video on youtube because it was the explanation behind someone’s flickr photo idea.
This it not the oldest Synagogue in the USA, but it’s one of the oldest. I found it during a walk around Cincinnati during a trip P&G sent us on to see corporate headquarters.
This is from the Anberlin concert I’ve mentioned a few times here. This was my third photo to be published somewhere. In this case it was WNYC the NPR affiliate up there. That was really awesome and really made my day.
I don’t remember if he’s messing up while doing a jump or coming off the ledge. I know this might sound racist or something, but it’s more a case of being ignorant - until I came to the Maryland/DC area, I never knew there was a skateboarding African American sub-culture. I lived in Miami and in Portland, OR. Both places were pretty devoid of African Americans. Sure, there were people of African descent in Miami, but most of them tended to be Latin American - and that’s a VERY different culture from Africans who’ve been here for generations. And in Oregon, there just wasn’t a strong presence. In fact, as we lost our tans from not being out in the sun 365 days of the year like in Florida, Dave, who was like 6 years old, said, “I know why there aren’t any black people in Oregon! They all lost their tans!”
Again experimenting with my strobe and Dave’s karate skills, we went out into my parents’ backyard. This shot is at 20 Hz, meaning twenty pulses of flash for every second. That turned out to make the photo a bit too busy. So I had to lower the frequency. I also had to work on the timing with Dave because, as you can see here, I was starting while he was still running into the jump.
Dina decided to do a “V for Victory” pose while wearing her light-brown wig due to a tendency of Japanese women, especially in the USA, to dye their hair that color.
This is from the periphery of Coney Island. I’m not sure if this ride is still there after the restructuring of the area in an attempt to revitalize it. With the how crowded it gets on summer nights I’m not sure how much more revitalized it could afford to get. We’ve all been on rides like this at the fair. It’s a fairly basic ride. You spin around, usually backwards, and loud music blares. I used to always ride the one at the state fair. Like most of the rides at Coney Island, I’ve never been on this one.
Objection! This photo should be ranked higher in the Top 200 photos!
photo #73 is:
This is a cosplay from Phoenix Wright. It’s a video game where you play a defense attorney. You’d think that couldn’t possibly be fun, but it can actually be quite a bit of fun to play.
Computers are once again the focus in this Top 200 Photo
photo #74 is:
I love building computers. So, when my father-in-law needed a new computer, I jumped at the chance to build it. It was a small form factor computer about the size of a pizza box. (A little bit taller) This is the motherboard with the CPU already installed.
Back to that surreal October for this Top 200 Photo
photo #75 is:
This was tougher to do than you might expect. It’d be a piece of cake if someone else was at the shutter. In a rare move, I also uploaded a black and white version which might appear later on this list. Usually I pick one interpretation or the other. But in this case I did both. And I tend to actually like the black and white version better.
I had to go to Hawaii a few times for work. It didn’t make sense financially for my wife to accompany me each of those times and waste her vacation time. So I would walk around taking photos to keep myself from getting too bored. I used it as an opportunity to get some non-NYC candid street photography.
Another water splash photo for today’s Top 200 Photo
photo #78 is:
Here’s another photo where I used the flash to freeze the splashing of the water. I’d like to try this again in the future with dyed water and a colourful background.
I love how impossibly large these beaks are. I also love how ridiculously colorful these birds are. The beak itself is about 3 different colors. Then the bird itself is another 3 different colors. I really like the depth of field effect in this shot.
Well, we’ve made it to photo #80 and the images are starting to spread out more. Basically, as a general trend, the photos that people like tend to get more views more often. So the images start getting further and further apart in views. As an example, at the time that I’m writing this, this photo has 590 views and #61 has 683 views.
This is another panorama from Cornell. This is on Libe Slope, where Slope Day takes place. It is also climbed by nearly every upperclassman living on West Campus or beyond. Engineering students can avoid climbing it most of time as most of their classes are in the Engineering Quad which is south of West Campus. You just need to walk the circumference of the slope which isn’t nearly as steep. It is NO FUN walking up Libe Slope when it’s recently snowed and the university hasn’t cleared the walkways yet.
Another visit to Otakon for today’s Top 200 Photo.
photo #79 is:
Views-wise this photo is where I thought the red Cowboy photo would be. Both feature semi-nude women. However, what actually attracted me to photograph these women was the crazy hat the girl on the right is wearing. As a kid I was a HUGE fan of Dr Seuss and Tim Burton’s style seems, to me, to be a darker version of the Seussian style. Her hat reminded me of this style.
Back to Philly and a concert for this Top 200 Photo
photo #86 is:
Taking photos during a concert is always hard. First of all, let me say that I think people should be allowed to shoot photos during concerts as long as they aren’t using flash. The point of going to a concert is to spend extra money on a band you really like in order to hear them live. You should be allowed a memento of the night. Anyway, a photo is not representative of a concert, so it’s not like I’m going to see a photo of a concert and decide not to go.
I can’t do any better than the description I have on flickr: (Although I’ve made some modifications for clarity)
My brothers and I were avid LEGO builders/players. This was our city. Of the sets here (back when 99% of the LEGOs didn’t have much of a facial expression) most of them are mine. The gas station, race track, RV, and police station were mine. Dan had the fire station, pizza place, and underwater set.
In prior photos I used the flash in strobe mode to trace movement. But flash is also useful for freezing movement. This photo is from a series of experiments in freezing water droplets.
These are some old computer parts I had lying around. They were broken and I think I was saving them as teaching tools. I think I threw them out before we moved. It’s a graphics card, sound card, and hard drive.
Dina is a cake-decorating prodigy. This cake does not do any justice to her abilities, but she had to bring it all the way from NYC so anything too 3D was out of the question. Still the attention to detail here is pretty awesome.
Skipping the first number in the Fibonacci series (which is 0), each picture is displayed as many times as the Fibonacci number at that point. So the first picture is displayed 1 time and the 13th picture is displayed 233 times.
Once again we arrive at the USA’s Capital for today’s Top 200 Photo.
photo #94 is:
I spoke about the Cherry Blossom Festival early in this project (/2011/02/09/top-200-photos-195/). This is a panorama I constructed of about a quarter of the tidal basin that gives a good idea of what the cherry blossoms look like.
Once again a trip to Cornell during the winter for today’s Top 200 Photo.
photo #96 is:
This photo was taken during my freshman year with my brand new digital camera. That was actually a very mild winter. So mild, in fact, that my cross country skiing class became a hiking class. It did NOT prepare me for the rest of my time at Cornell. This dorm, where I stayed my freshman year, was brand new that year. It actually had air conditioning!
I mentioned before that one of the things I love about photography is the ability to allow you to see things you couldn’t otherwise see. In that photo I mentioned using photoshop to allow the photo to display changes in time as well as showing the other 3 dimensions. In this photo, I did not use photoshop. Instead I used stroboscopic photography. I was so excited when I found out my 580 EX was capable of these types of shots. I’d always seen them in my physics textbooks and I wanted to emulate them. This is from one of my first experiments with this type of photography.
Here are your new desktop backgrounds for July 2011!
Just click on the one that matches your monitor type and then either right-click and set as desktop or save it to your computer and save it as your desktop manually.
I wanted to capture Dave doing karate for a long time. But he wouldn’t let me go to a practice or anything, so we did some photography in my parents’ yard. I’d love to get him and Kendra in some more neat shots. But I really like this one. (Except for the fact that he’s trying not to laugh)
I previously mentioned how Ranma ½ got me into anime. At the time I also discovered Bubblegum Crisis (the original OAV) although I never got to finish it because the video rental place didn’t have the entire series. After that, other than borrowing Slayers from a friend in HS, I only ever got into two other series - Cowboy Bebop and Trigun.
I saw this while walking around an area near Clearwater Beach. Here’s what I wrote on flickr:
Coco Peli is a Mexican legendary character. My fascination with him began when my mom got me a lamp where Coco Peli was the base of the lamp. She said it was free spirited like me, but more importantly it had a denim top and I was really into demin at the time.
I came up with this photo while exploring with taking reflective photos where I’m in the shot without having the camera obscuring my face. This one ended up being my favorite and it’s even featured (as of the time of this writing) in the header of this blog.
Tai Shan’s birth at the National Zoo attracted lots of people. Many of them became regulars and I got to know a lot of them over a few weeks and months.
Of all the children born in the Year of the Pig, I’ve seen Nam the most. He only lives two houses over and, until he was old enough for daycare, Danielle’s mom took care of him every day. This photo is from before he was old enough to be scared of me and my photography. It’s one of my favorite photos in which he is the subject. I think it’s because we always see babies as innocent and he looks so sly in this photo.
My parents’ neighbor likes to build cars from the scratch. Of course, he doesn’t build the frame, but he buys it separate from the engine, seats, etc. He explained it to me once but I think it stems from some US regulations on what your car can be capable of and how emissions regulations are affected by custom-built cars vs dealer-bought cars.
Staying at Cornell and adding a bit of celebrity for today’s Top 200 Photo.
photo #107 is:
Bill Nye got his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from Cornell University. In an example of the awesome professors you can have at Cornell - one of his professors was Carl Sagan! Cornell has a program that invites alumni to come back once a semester and teach a class for a day. Here Bill Nye was teaching my Physics 213 class. My wife had alumni and former attorney general Janet Reno teach one of her classes. Anyway, I knew Bil Nye both from his appearances at the end of the animated Back to the Future show and from his show Bill Nye the Science guy, which I used to watch religiously.
And we bounce right back to Cornell for today’s Top 200 Photo.
photo #108 is:
It’s a shame that we go to school in the winter instead of the summer. I know it has to do with our rural past and having to help out in the farm, but it’s extra annoying at Cornell. Summer is really the best time to be there. It’s so pleasant and awesome. The campus is huge and has lots of greenery and it just feel so much better to be there during the summer. I think Cornell should be the first northern university to buck the trend and have school during the summer and no school during the winter.
Since I was going to the middle of England for work, I decided to fly into Manchester instead of the insane Heathrow in London. Then I just took the train to my final destination. It was great. I snuck in a five minute nap here and there, but mostly I looked at the British countryside. This photo is from the suburbs of Manchester and it reminds me a lot of the way Brooklyn is laid out.
I’d been a fan of Mo Rocca since I saw him on The Daily Show. I also enjoyed his contributions to VH1’s “I love the [decade]” series. These days I’m likely to hear him on NPR’s “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me” as a panelist. It was his involvement with the Broadway show “The Putnam County Spelling Bee” that made want to see it. Although he’s not Jewish, he was invited to Cornell in 2005 at the behest of the Hillel Club. He gave a talk about his career and interests. Highlights included his incredulity at being hired an as editor for men’s magazine Perfect 10, his friendship with Flava Flave, a clip of him on The O’Reilly Show, and his love of presidential childhood homes.
What happens in Vegas gets captured by Eric, put on flickr, and ends up on his Top 200 Photos!
photo #111 is:
After years of trying, I finally got work to pay for me to attend Blackhat. It was happening at Caesar’s Palace and I booked my room early enough to get a rate within what work was willing to pay. So when the conference wasn’t going on (early in the morning or late at night), I’d wander the Casino looking for photographic opportunities. At that time, 2008, they had a gambling area that was Pussycat Dolls themed. Basically that involved everything being pink, dealers in more modern clothes, and a go-go dancer in lingerie. Oh, and I think they had pop music playing, but I don’t remember if they did or not.
And we’re at Cornell once again for today’s Top 200 Photo.
photo #112 is:
This is from the Andrew White reading room at Uris Library. I didn’t properly take advantage of the library spaces in my freshman and sophomore years. It was when I really got serious about my studies in my Junior Year (after a scare in which bad grades almost got me kicked out of the electrical engineering program) that I began to utilize the libraries. In my first two years I would go back to my dorm between classes even if I could only be there for 10 or so minutes and I’d check my email and the net. I only did my assigned homework so I didn’t need all the time I was wasting going back and forth. Once Junior Year rolled around and I started doing extra problems in order to ensure I understood the material well enough to gets Bs and As, I needed to use the libraries to study. So I started to frequent the Uris and the Engineering Library at Carpenter Hall. The engineering library was my first introduction to Linux (they had Mandrake installed) and Firefox (before it was even called Firefox).
This was during a trip Danielle and I took to Philidelphia to see an Anberlin concert. We decided to also go ahead and see the sights. We saw the Liberty Bell in its new home, tried a real Philly Cheese Steak, and just enjoyed being somewhere else.
This photo is just a reminder that people won’t always say ‘no’ when you ask to take their photo. In his case, it’s because I really liked his uniform.
Another photo taken from the top of the clock tower. This time it has the business school as the most prominent building. It’s crazy how much that skyline has changed with new building construction.
Most of the buildings at Cornell had multiple entrances. Because of the hilly nature of the campus some of these entrances, like this one into Uris Library, went unnoticed by the majority of the student body.
Reflections and Self-Portraits in today’s Top 200 Photo.
photo #116 is:
Ever since I was young I was fascinated by visual depictions of infinity. It’s such a strange concept to get one’s mind around and I’m a visual person. So I’ve always loved looking into parallel mirrors. I also used to love hooking up a video camera to a TV and then filming the TV. The infinite scene there was so awesome to observe.
Confusingly, Lolita fashion has noting to do with the novel by Nabokov about a man falling in love with an underaged girl. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolita) Instead, it is an emphasis on Victorian-age fashion. It is, according to Wikipedia (and substantiated by what I’ve seen), subdivided into Gothic Lolita, Sweet Lolita, Classic Lolita, and Punk Lolita. I think this girl falls somewhere between Gothic and Sweet Lolita.
This is Cornell’s famous clock tower and the attached Uris Library. The clock tower is called McGraw Hall. I knew that at some point in my freshman year, but pretty much everyone just calls it the clock tower. It houses chimes that are played throughout the day. Every quarter hour it’s the usual chimes that every clock tower plays. About four times a day they play a few songs. At least once a day they’d play our Alma Mater. I loved hearing that when I walked through campus. It almost always brightened my spirits and made me feel happy to be a student there. Also every day (or nearly every day) they played the evening song at 1800. At one chimes concert I attended they cheekily said that it “resembles Oh Christmas Tree”. No, it IS “Oh Christmas Tree”. But they invented these songs back before copyright. For example, I learned that something like four other schools have the exact same Alma Mater song as ours. And I think that it, like The Star Spangled Banner, also was originally a drinking song. According to Wikipedia (caveats about the accuracy of Wikipedia apply), our Alma Mater, “Far Above Cayuga’s Waters” is “set to the tune of “Annie Lisle”, a popular 1857 ballad by H. S. Thompson about a heroine dying of tuberculosis.” Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the Alma Mater “theft”:
Cardinalis cardinalis is featured in today’s Top 200 Photo.
photo #120 is:
Danielle and I love cardinals. We love how bright red they are, their “masks”, their mohawks, and the way they hop around on the ground. The funniest thing about cardinals is that they try to act tough with the smaller birds, but the cardinals are the first birds to run/fly away whenever something scary happens. And they’re the last birds to come back to eat.
Otakon and video game characters in today’s Top 200 Photo!
photo #123 is:
I’ve mentioned my love of Final Fantasybefore. And that was the main reason for photographing the girl on the left. I saw the moogle and had to photograph her. Later I found out she is a character from Final Fantasy X. Every time I see this photo I’m filled with regret that I chose to do it in landscape orientation to include her friend (From Elite Beat Agents) because the bottom half of the costume is very intricate. It was only my second time photographing at Otakon and I was very nervous to ask people to take their photos and then I tended to rush through it. I’ve gotten better with each Otakon, but I’m still working on getting over it completely.
An interesting self portrait in today Top 200 Photo.
photo #124 is:
One of my favorite things about photography is how it can allow us to see what is impossible to see with the naked eye. Nowadays I tend to do that by freezing action or doing macro photography. Back in the early 2000s I mostly did that with Photoshop. Sometimes I just played with painterly effects. But one of my favorite genres at the time involved exploring the dimension of time along with space. So I created a series of photographs like this one were I imagined that the camera could capture time as well as space. (I would later learn how to recreate this with flash and without any aid of Photoshop)
Wedding bells are ringing in today’s Top 200 Photo.
photo #125 is:
I saw this photo when I went to DC with Danielle’s parents to see the Cherry Blossoms. When we were waiting to cross the street back towards the mall I saw this awesome wedding limo. I’m sure they got some awesome photos for their wedding.
note: This is a blog post about fine art nude photography. While there is no pornography or erotic image on this page, you may not want to load it up at work. Also, to see all my work with this model on flickr, you’ll have to sign in so they can verify that you’re old enough to see the photographs
I’d been wanting to photograph a model for a long time. I’d read that photographers often get together and rent out studio space to do so, but I didn’t know how to find it. I did a few google searches in 2006 and couldn’t find anything so I gave up. I’d also wanted to do nude photography since that time. I even bought a book about techniques. It all floundered for five years. Then I heard on This Week in Photo about meetup.com. There I found a group doing Boudoir Photography. I joined them. They were going to do a workshop at The Carriage House in DC. So I joined that group. And The Carriage House arranged for professional model Devonny Sandrick to be available. At $125 for time with a professional doing fine art nude and getting a liberal model release in return, it was a great deal I couldn’t pass up.
I didn’t take this photo. (I didn’t take a tripod on our honeymoon trip) We went to Puerto Aventuras, an hour south of Cancun, for our Honeymoon. This beach was right outside our hotel. It was, more or less, a perfect trip. I’ll blog more about it if other photos show up.
As I mentioned before, I enjoy the costumes people work on for Otakon. In this case, the person has chosen a video game character rather than an anime character. Dan informed me that she is Crimson Viper from Street Fighter IV. In the background you can see a group from another video game, Valve’s Team Fortress 2.
Cornell is once again the subject in this Top 200 Photo.
photo #128 is:
This is another photo from the top of the Clocktower. In this photo you see Ho Plaza, Willard Straight Hall, a chapel, Olin, Ganett, and Ithaca in College Town and beyond. (And a bunch of other buildings on the periphery)
And once again we return to Brooklyn for this Top 200 Photo.
photo #129 is:
Danielle’s family lives off of the last stop for the Q or B trains (as of this writing). So it’s a great place to photograph if you want to have an empty subway car. It can get really busy in the summertime with people headed to the beach, but usually it’s pretty empty at that stop.
Another photo of Tai Shan. This time he’s small enough to get on these flimsy branches without falling immediately. It was fun to watch him test the branches to see if they would hold his weight.
I had the good fortune of being sent to England on a work trip. Danielle was able to take some time off from work to join me for a week. We took day trips and weekend trips throughout England whenever I was off from work. One of the places we went to was York - partly because Danielle is from New York - so I thought she should see “Old” York. While there we saw York Minster. That was so much fun because it was so beautiful in there and also because York has such a rich history.
I don’t think I could describe this any better than I do on the flickr page:
I walked into my parent’s bathroom on the last day before the end of the final spring break of my life. I saw this beautiful image coming through the windows, the rest of the bathroom as just as dark as the picture portrays. It took some fiddling with the shutter speed and aperture to get the camera to record what my eyes were seeing, but I was amazed at the beauty of a sunset where I couldn’t even see the sun.
I now know this is a red-winged blackbird. At the time I just thought it was an awesome-looking bird that let me get really close to it for a photo. The most unsettling aspect of this photo is that the beak doesn’t hinge where it seems that it should so I think it looks creepy.
I took the source photo for this on the footbridge that leads to College Town. Then I threw it into Photoshop and started messing around. I arrived at this look by accident, but I really liked it.
This month’s calendar is from Rehoboth Beach in Delaware. The Dolles Salt Water Taffy place is in nearly all the postcards and other media for the city.
I enjoy all the birds in my backyard, but nothing beats the thrill of identifying a new bird. It’s hard to get a good enough shot to be able to ID it because enough birds look similar enough that it can be hard for the novice birder to identify them.
I got this idea during the swine flu epidemic. I’d heard that some people in less-educated countries were afraid that you could actually catch the swine flu from pigs. The truth was a bit more complicated - the original strain that could infect humans did come from a pig. But that was just one mutation of the virus. It only existed in that one pig. But people were boycotting having pigs in zoos and all kinds of stuff. So I thought of this idea. The title is “You Told Me You Were Clean”
I mentioned Tai Shan before. This is his father, Tian Tian. My wife is always expressing how pandas should be extinct already from having such a dumb diet. They eat bamboo, but it is so nutrient deficient that they essentially have to eat non-stop or they will end up actually losing weight by just laying around and being alive.
No #140 because it was already covered. As I write this, photo #140 has 416 views and photo #121 has 459 views. So they’re still close enough that just one view can cause a photo to jump 3 or more spots up.
photo #139 is:
Another boring night in Maryland. Another cool photo with the wife. I had been reading a book of famous photographers and there was this one guy who took photos of beautiful women, but always framed the shot so that he would be reflected in a mirror. So I decided to go with that. Danielle decided to play with kimonos Dan had brought back from his trip to Japan and put on some makeup so I could take photos. I think my favorite aspect of the photo is her half smile.
Time again for my photojojo time capsule. It contains my most interesting photos within a two week period. This time around it’s mostly my 365 plus one of my first Holga photos.
This terrifying photo is from a bee box in one of the Smithsonian museums. It was scary being so close to a box stuffed with bees. I just kept thinking about what would happen if they got loose.
Once again we return to Cornell for today’s Top 200 Photo.
photo #142 is:
Until I went to Cornell I didn’t really know anything about Indian culture other than that they were Hindu and had some elephant god. I ended up discoverying Bhangra, Diwali, and Holi. This photo is from the celebration of Holi. We (Danielle, Lisa Lau, Dina, and I) just happened into the court of Annabel Taylor where the celebrations were taking place. Basically it involves throwing colored powder onto each other. That stuff took quite a bit of time to wash off. But, as you can see here, it does lead to some pretty awesome photos.
Nearly everyone who does a 365 photo project ends up doing an interpretation of the Seven Deadly Sins. It tends to be really fun to figure out how to depict it. Most people never do the Seven Virtues. This was my depiction of Lust. I want to include here the text I have on the description on flickr.
One thing that all Cornellians should make sure to do is climb the iconic Clocktower. It’s so great to just look out over the entire campus that you spend all day navigating. I climbed it about four or so times and each time I enjoyed looking out over the campus.
To New York City at Christmas time for today’s Top 200 Photos.
photo #145 is:
In 2006 I went, for the first time ever, to go see the Christmas Tree at Rockefeller Center. It was crazy to see so many people there given how cold it was. My takeaway was that the tree always looks bigger in photos and on TV than it does in person. I had a great time during that trip seeing NYC all decorated for Christmas.
To Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn for today’s Top 200 Photos.
photo #146 is:
One of the main bonding activities between my father-in-law and myself (and other members of Danielle’s family) was going fishing. Danielle’s father has almost always owned a boat and used fishing as his method of relaxation. For quite a number of years, I joined him on his Fourth of July fishing trips. Usually along for the ride were Anh Dat and one of Co Sao’s sons. For the most part, no one spoke and we just fished. It’s only because of weird conditions in recent years that I have stopped going. The penultimate time I went, it was actually freezing on the 4th of July (but only over the water). I had to borrow a sweater and I was still freezing. The water was also very choppy and it was the first time I got seasick. The last time I went, the water was so choppy that even Duc started getting seasick. So I skipped a year or two and then he sold the boat, so I haven’t been fishing in a few years. This photo is a panorama of the area where he docked his boat. It was near a movie theatre, Jodan’s Lobster Dock, and a TGIF.
While I worked in P&G they sent all the college seniors to Cincinnati to see the corporate headquarters. One afternoon while the rest of the seniors went out drinking, I went walking around Cincinnati taking photos. This one stood out to me because the idea of anything involving tons of brides or the bridal industry seemed terrifying. I had been primed to think this because of the show Bridezilla.
I’ve already spoken about Slope Day in a previous post. We have one other huge tradition at Cornell - Dragon Day. I’m not sure if there will be more Dragon Day photos (I’ve only captured up to photo #121 at this time), but I have a bunch up on my Cornell set.
I’d never seen a whale in the wild before, so I knew we HAD to take advantage of the humpback whales who come to Hawaii for the winter. We went out on a lunch cruise to go see some whales. The only disappointing thing (which is not mentioned in the brochures) is that you can only get within 100 yards of the whales. That’s a whole football field away! And I didn’t have my Sigma 120-400 (link to B&H) yet, so this is the closest I could get to the whale. At least we got lucky and this mother jumped out. She was teaching her kid how to slap the water and other things and at first I thought we’d just see fins and tails.
I was practicing my macro photography and I chose to try and photograph myself. And I decided to focus on my stubble because that seems to be a perpetual feature of mine. I was very happy with the comments I ended up getting.
Another photo from Otakon. I was especially happy to see these guys at Otakon. Ranma ½ was the first anime I ever saw. It was my entry into the whole genre. I remember discovering it at a video rental store in Tualatin, OR. They had some VHS tapes of Seasons 2 and 3. I remember being so psyched that there were cartoons that weren’t for kids. I couldn’t wait for them to get the next tape. I spent all my time in the library at school researching Ranma and learning about the story and getting into fan fiction for the first time. If I’d been born about a decade later I probably would have really gotten into the whole fan-sub scene. Bandwidth was just too small back in those days.
I was just walking back to my apartment when I passed by this mail truck. I’d never seen the inside of a mail truck before, so I took the shot. I also remember thinking it was neat how the back of the truck framed the inside which framed the windshield which framed a view of the outside. (If only it were more scenic out there)
Back to Cornell for today’s entry in Top 200 Photos.
photo #154 is:
One day we were just walking around campus and just pulled into the stadium to watch some lacrosse. Unlike hockey, there was no fee and there wasn’t really anyone in the stands. So I practiced my sports photography with the team. I was into photo editing back them and I decided that this shot would be perfect for a cutout (selective colouring) because we were The Big Red and red is so vivid. I think it work perfectly with this photo. I think it’d look great in a book of Cornell sports photography (without my byline/watermark, of course)
Ever since I moved to Baltimore, I’ve been in the city during Otakon, the annual anime convention. The first couple of times it was a complete accident. For the the past two years I’ve looked up the dates ahead of time and made sure to be there to take some photos. I haven’t yet bought a ticket, but almost all of them tend to spend some time outside and everyone’s amenable to photos. After all, they’ve spent as much as the entire last year working on their costumes in some. I usually have a great time enjoying all the awesome costumes and they usually do pretty well views-wise on flickr. So I know there are at least two more Otakon photos on the Top 200 Photos.
Which is weird because, at the time, it was my favorite photo of Danielle and she hated it. And the weird thing is that, looking at it nearly 4 years later, I’m not as keen on it as I once was. I can’t figure out what I loved so much then. It’s so weird to have feelings associated with a photo change that much in just a few years.
There will not be a #158 because it is a photo that was already covered. (Moved up quite a few ranks much faster than I thought it would)
photo #157 is:
This is a photo from the only time I was the paid photographer at a wedding. The bride was the sister of one of Danielle’s coworkers and needed to work on a budget. Working that wedding taught me that I enjoy photographing weddings a lot more when I’m not the official photographer.
And now for a completely different climate in today’s Top 200 Photos.
photo #159 is:
This is from my Honeymoon outside of Cancun, Mexico. I love finding examples of American companies in other countries so I had to take a photo of this McDonald’s in Playa del Carmen. While we always make sure to eat local cuisine in whatever country we’re in, we also sometimes try out the American chains to see how they differ. McDonalds in England, for example, out-mayonaises the USA. And TGIF in England has ham rather than bacon on their potato strips. And the Pizza Hut sauce over there tastes weird. We did not eat at this McDonald’s in Mexico.
We stay at Cornell for this entry in the Top 200 Photos.
photo #160 is:
This has to be in the top 3 most depressing photos I took at Cornell. There’s a certain beauty in the photo, especially now that I don’t have to deal with that weather anymore, but just remembering trudging up that hill in that unforgiving weather is enough to make me happy to have graduated.
Ah, the Cornell Arts Quad. It’s where everyone plays frisbee. It’s where a large portion of Cornellians go to class. I was really into panoramas at Cornell. If I had the technology in today’s software back then, I probably would have done even more of them.
Once again, it’s a heavy focus on my 365 project. Photojojo is a photo time capsule that sends you your most interesting photos (according to flickr) from the previous year so you can enjoy them again
Another Photojojo photographic time capsule. See it online here and get your own if you want. This shows you your most interesting photos (according to flickrs algorithms) from 1 year ago. Mine this time focus largely on my 365 Project.
To a hacker conference in NYC for today’s Top 200 Photos.
photo #163 is:
Adrian Lamo is an ex-cracker (criminal hacker). He gained notoriety in 2010 for outing soldier Manning as the guy who’d leaked a bunch of info to Wikipedia. The funny thing is that, even though Manning mentioned leaking the State Department cables, it was just noted as a footnote at the time. Everyone was focused on the Afghanistan and Iraq leaks. Little did they know what a huge leak the cables would be towards the end of 2010. Apparently he saw Lamo as a fellow hacker and confessed the entire thing to him.
Just like the reflection of love photos, this was born of a boring weekend in Maryland. Danielle wanted to try some photographic ideas. She was partially inspired by a photo shoot she’d recently seen with Quentin Tarantino, but when those photos didn’t really come through, we went for some herion chic photos. The effect from the blinds started off as an accident, but ended up being something we really liked and tweaked to get just right.
Brooklyn and our nation’s birthday for today’s Top 200 Photos.
photo #165 is:
For a few years, until the younger batch of the next generation was born, Megan was the only kid to take photos of. The funny thing is that she was really scared of me so I usually had to sneak a shot. This is when she was getting old enough not to be scared of me. I wonder what used to scared her?
From NYC to our nation’s Capital for today’s Top 200 Photo.
photo #166 is:
As I mentioned before, we loved to go to the National Zoo to go see the Pandas. Well, thanks to Tai Shan, the zoo got a huge injection of donations which it used to revitalize its Asian section of the zoo. Eventually they got a pair of fire foxes. The fire fox is also known as the red panda. Back when we were in college I was visiting Danielle during summer classes and we took a trip to Syracuse. While there we went to the zoo. I saw they had a sign for a red panda. Whoa! I only knew about the black and white ones! I was quite annoyed that it was just some raccoon-looking thing.
Since I have family (in-laws) in NYC, I’ve tried, on occasion, to take my brothers to experience parts of NYC that we never got to see in the brief time my family rolled through before. On this trip, Dave got to ride a NYC subway for the first time.
This is one of my best bird photos both from a subject standpoint and a technical standpoint. Birds are exceptionally hard to photograph. All animals are hard as they’re more unpredictable than humans, but birds are exceptionally frantic. It’s probably partly because they have a few predators and partly because they need to constantly eat because of their high metabolisms. So it’s hard to capture a bird tack sharp like this one. It’s made a little harder by the fact that my camera’s old so I can’t boost the ISO high enough to get a nice, fast shutter speed.
Alex would, at least in 2009, try and get right up in front of the camera if he noticed you taking a photo. It could spoil the photo you were trying to get a candid shot of, but it certainly made for a dynamic spontaneity that’s harder to capture as kids get older and self-conscious of their image.
In 2008 Danielle was going to take a business trip and wanted a light laptop. Well, she was in luck because netbooks had just recently come out and we were able to get the EEE PC for around $300. We’ve been able to use it a lot for trips so we could watch different things or if we didn’t want the weight of my laptop. I’m not 100% sure it was worth all the money given how quickly the netbooks gained beefier hardware, but it was certainly fun to be part of the revolution in computing.
In the summer of 2006 Israel and Lebanon were engaged in an ever-escalating war. For the most part, I feel that violence is often not the best answer to violence. Especially wide-scale violence. It may be the case that some individuals deserve death for their actions - killing others, especially on a large scale - but retaliations on the country level tend to cause both sides to escalate. This photo/art piece is just meant to showcase how violence quickly gets out of hand.
Slope Day is an annual day of debauchery at Cornell, taking place on the last day of classes. Slope Day has gone through quite a few evolutions. This photo was taken in 2002, my freshman year, which was the last year in which Slope Day was a free-for-all day of drinking. I’m not sure why Cornell went back to a structured festival the following year (as it apparently had done way back in the day), but I think it probably had to do with the emergence of digital cameras and nascent social networking sites that were giving the University a bad reputation. Additionally, a few Ithaca High School kids died of alcohol poisoning. While I feel this wasn’t Cornell’s responsibility since Slope Day was not an official school function, apparently they felt differently. I had mixed feelings about what it evolved to. On the one hand, they started inviting bands to come perform and they had carnival games and food. On the other hand, in order to keep non-College students from getting any alcohol, they fenced off the area which made it really annoying for those of us who had to get to class or lab on that day.
What’s black and white and #173? Today’s Top 200 Photos entry.
photo #173 is:
For about a year, we were obsessed with Tai Shan, the baby panda at The National Zoo. We went at least once a month to go photograph him and watch him act all cute. This triptych is from his first birthday. The giant pink Popsicle is his birthday “cake”.
A still life photo makes it for today’s Top 200 photos entry.
photo #175 is:
Danielle likes to create decorations that add to the ambiance of the house. This involves taking elements from different places and creating something that’s her own. Here she’s taken candles from a bunch of different stores and combined them with seashells we found on a trip to Florida. Some of her other creations might appear later as well.
John Cleese is a comedic genius. I think that history will eventually give him and his Monty Python collaborators a place equivalent to Charlie Chaplin. They helped transform not only British comedy, but American comedy. Many in the US, most notably the creators of South Park, were inspired by this strange brand of humor and created a special blend of American and British humor.
For a while I was doing yoga at our local gym at work. It was quite a revelation. Media usually portrays it as a girly exercise that’s just a bunch of weird stretching poses. Yoga actually requires quite a bit of strength - especially in the “core” muscles. A lot of the poses left me feeling as tired as a weight training workout. I enjoyed it a lot and I only stopped going because my schedule changed and made it hard for me to attend. I’d definitely try it again if I could.
No #180 because that photo was already covered and it ended up moving up the rankings before I could get to #180.
photo #179 is:
From the date, I must have been at my parents’ house for my dad’s birthday. Anyway, as I’ve mentioned before, whenever I get a little bored I start taking candid photos. So I ended up with this good one of Dave working on a puzzle. This photo actually ended up inspiring a flickr friend of mine to do a painting of the photo.
This is Sandy, a jackass penguin. They are originally from South Africa, but her parents are at the Baltimore Zoo. Click on the desktop you want and then right-click and select “set as desktop background”. If you don’t have that option, save-as to your computer and then set it manually.
Back to NYC in this installment of the Top 200 Photos.
photo #183 is:
In March 2002 I went to NYC for the second time in my life. It was exciting for so many reasons. I was meeting my girlfriend’s parents for the first time and I was going to one of the biggest cities in the world. I’d been to NYC once before as part of a college trip up the east coast, but we only got to spend one day there.
This photo was taken when I was taking one photo a day, but before I’d heard of the 365 project. So sometimes I’d be the subject and sometimes it would be squirrels, inanimate objects, or insects. I was going for the look and feel of something out of a movie.
This arch is part of some of the oldest dorms on Cornell’s campus as well as being an arched entryway to West Campus. In 2001 when I started at Cornell, they made the change that all Freshmen would be on North Campus and all the Upperclassmen would be on West Campus. During most of my four years, West Campus consisted of a mix of old, gothic dorms and “temporary” dorms built to accomodate GI Bill students in the late 1940s. In my Junior year they began demolishing the old dorms (all named after graduating classes) and building new, modern dorms. This photo was taken in my Senior year when I used to walk around with my Fuji almost everywhere I went. From the date/time stamp, I was probably walking back to my apartment after getting lunch at The Ivy Room.
Sometimes when I was at functions with Danielle’s family (especially before Dina and Daniel started dating (others, not each other)), I’d get bored because everyone was speaking all Vietnamese, so I’d just grab my camera and wander around taking candid shots. And I’d often get gems like this one. After all, most people look better when they aren’t posed. By the way, this is Danielle’s cousin, Mai, and she’ll be featured a couple more times, I’m pretty sure.
What I love about this photo is that it captures two things that were key to the Cornell experience - passing out quarter cards (known as carding) and attending a Capella performances. It’s not far-fetched that the Andy character from The Office was in an a Capella group at Cornell. There were about six of them when I was there. Some were all male or all female and some were unisex. Pretty much every semester each of them had at least one concert. This group was called The Hangovers. Here are some other ways they advertised on campus:
I got my first digital camera over Christmas of my freshman year. It changed my photography forever. Since the photos were essentially free, I took my camera EVERYWHERE on campus. A lot of my photos, especially one of my favorite ones from my top 10, came from this impulse. I am able to look back fondly on nearly every single one of my Cornell memories because if something was going on, I probably had my camera there.
This photo is from of the earliest batch of photos I uploaded to flickr. I had just discovered Photoshop and was using what I learned from a book to create paintings from my photos. After spending a good semester doing stuff like this, I realized I preferred straight photos much better than these bits of art. It doesn’t mean I’ll never do it again, but I prefer for my photos to be photos.
This is from my 365 project where I had to take one self-portrait a day. In my quest to think of creative subject matter, I went with modern versions of scenes from the Bible. Here I am Adam, eating the fruit that Eve gave me. Nowhere in the Bible does it say it was an apple, so I went with grapes to be creative.
Bork, Bork, Bork! It’s time for another Top 200 Photos.
photo #191 is:
For the most part I was too young to catch the muppets on their first run. But Kermit was a reporter on Sesame Street when I was a kid and that resulted in my recognizing him when muppet movies were shown on TV. Eventually between reruns on TV and the web, I saw large portions of The Muppet Show and their various movies. The Swedish Chef was not my favorite character, but he was in my top 10. This photo was taken at the Smithsonian when they were having a pretty big exhibit of Jim Henson stuff. I usually consider it pretty dumb to take photos of stuff in museums (especially paintings), but I made an exception in this case.
Danielle’s best friend was going to college in Chicago. We’d never been to Chicago before, so we figured we could visit and see a new place and took off for a mini-vacation. When we first got to Chicago, she had class or was otherwise occupied, so we went for a walk around the city. We ended up at The Bean in Millenium Park. (Official name: Cloud Gate) That’s why our luggage is in the shot. Since the entire surface of The Bean is reflective, it makes for really awesome photos. This is not one of those awesome ones. I’m sure one of those will appear later in the list.
It was Halloween 2009 and I was in town to see the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade for the first time. We were waiting for everyone to arrive and I was getting all my photo equipment ready to go. Someone knocked at the door and Danielle’s cousin, Diane, went to answer the door. Since she was dressed as a maid for Halloween, I figured I couldn’t pass the opportunity up and took the shot. There’ll be more from the parade later, I’m sure.
The flower and garter tosses are when weddings really get wild and fun. The person throwing usually fakes the first throw. There are usually shenanigans going on in the receiving crowd. But, as a photographer, my favorite part is when the guy puts the garter on the woman who caught the bouquet. There’s a tension, ENCOURAGED by a good DJ, between pushing the boundaries of modesty and making the girl nervous. The rest of the guests usually help things out by cheering the man on. Sure, as I write this, I realize it’s pretty sexist, but at least it’s voluntary in that the women who get in line to catch the bouquet know exactly what’ll happen if they catch it.
No #196 because it was occupied by a photo I already featured. I didn’t capture all the top 200 photos on the first day, so there is some movement in the photo rankings. Starting with this one, I decided to capture 20 at a time to minimize the issues.
And I continue to through my Top 200 most viewed photos on flickr.
Photo #197 is:
Brighton Beach in Brooklyn is one of my homes-away-from-home. I’ve been going there to visit the family that became my in-laws for about 10 years. It was so exciting to find out that they lived so close to the famous Coney Island. I’m certain there will be more photos of Coney Island as this project goes on. It’s one of the easiest places for me to shoot because it’s only a 10 to 15 minute walk if I’m in a hurry vs a 45+ minute ride to Manhattan. Although I’ve never ridden the Wonder Wheel, I’ve always had a fascination with it because every time the fair came to Florida, I’d ride the Ferris Wheel. I am not sure if I’m forgetting some memory, but I don’t think I’ve ever done the cliche riding of the wheel with a date, but maybe I can somewhat buck that by riding the Wonder Wheel with the wife. Along with the Cyclone roller coaster, the Wonder Wheel is one of the oldest and most iconic structures at Coney Island.
When people find out that I’m from Florida ask me how I’m dealing with winters in Maryland, I just smile and tell them that I went to university in Ithaca, so no Maryland winter can compare with what I’ve seen. Cornell tends to be in perpetual winter from December until March. I think the lack of sun is part of what contributes to the low spirits of so many students. I didn’t mind the snow in January and February so much - after all, that’s winter. But when it snowed in March or April, it just made me feel as though this would be the year where winter never ended.
I love dramatic sunsets and it was complete luck that I was able to capture this one. I had been carrying around my Fujifilm Finepix S7000 all over campus everywhere I went, but I usually didn’t take it with me in my car. I just so happened to have it in my car when we went out to eat at Chilis in Ithaca, NY. By chance, we looked out the window and saw the sunset. I ran out to my car to capture it. Afterall, sunsets can go from amazing to ho-hum in an instant. The luck involved helps this photo to be one of my favorite sunset photos.
One thing I really love about the Photojojo photo time capsule service is that I get to rediscover my photos from a year ago. Although this year is off to a slow start, I usually take so many photos throughout the year that it’s really hard to remember all the photos I’ve taken. Sometimes getting the time capsule reminds me of a place I really enjoyed visiting or a good time with friends of family.
Once again I have received my Photojojo time capsule. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your point of view) , it’s all 365 Project photos as that’s the most interesting thing that was going on at the time photographically.
Here’s the background for February. A little shoutout to my alma mater. Click on the image and then right click to set as your desktop or save to your computer to manually set to the desktop.
[caption id=“attachment_4050” align=“aligncenter” width=“400” caption=“Feb 2011 desktop for more square monitors (1024x768)”] [/caption]
I’ve had a few changes. My photo of professor Delchamps continues to fall from #1 and we have the Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum photo enter the top 10 for the first time.
Here’s your calendar for January 2011. It’s a goose getting dry on top of a shelf of ice on a lake that was partially frozen over. Click on the image you want then right-click to set it as your background or save it to your computer and then set it that way.
Here’s the desktop background for December. I know it’s Western-centric - perhaps next year will be more neutral. To use as your background just left-click on the appropriate image for your monitor size. Then right-click on the image and your browser will probably have an option called “set as desktop background”. If it doesn’t, you can save it to your computer and manually set it.
Here’s the calendar for November - I hope it doesn’t keep you drooling all month! Click on the image to load it into your desktop. Then right-click and you should be able to set it as the desktop background. Alternatively, save it and then manually set it as your desktop.
[caption id=“attachment_3791” align=“aligncenter” width=“400” caption=“Nov 2010 - 1024x768 - For More Squarish Monitors”] [/caption]
For the past week I’ve had a huge surge in people viewing the image above. I saw that it was mostly from Google and not flickr. I was wondering why and then I realized I could see the search terms brining people to the image. Here are the search terms bringing people over:
1 tweedle dee and tweedle dum costumes 19
2 tweedle dee and tweedle dum 10
3 tweedle dee and tweedle dum costume 6
4 tweedledee and tweedledum 6
5 tweedle dee hats 2
6 tweedledee and tweedledum costumes 2
7 tweedle dee 2
8 image of tweedledee and tweedledum 2
9 tweedledee tweedledum costume women 2
10 tweedle dum and tweedle dee costumes 2
11 tweedle dee and tweedle dum women costumes 1
12 tweedle dee tweedle dum costume 1
13 woman tweedle dee and tweedle dum costumes 1
14 tweedle dum tweedle dee outfits 1
15 womens tweedle dee costume 1
16 what do tweedle dee and tweedle dum say in… 1
17 “tweedle dee and tweedle dum” 1
18 tweedle dee and tweedle dumb costumes 1
19 tweddle dee and tweedle dum costumes 1
Apparently I always go to National Parks in Oct, because last Oct I went to Shenandoah National Park. So all but one of the photos are from that trip. The time capsule is available online here if you want to see how to setup your own.
Once again, here are the most interesting photos as selected by the Photojojo folks and flickr’s interesting algorithms from one year ago. ( View on their site)
I’ve been slacking a bit with these, so here are two photojojo entries. The first one is from 25 Aug to 8 Sept. Apparently only my 365 was interesting at the time:
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Love the folksy Trail Name”] [/caption]
I’m not traditionally a nature-as-scenery photographer. I prefer animals and humans. But on a recent hike through a trail in Papatsco State Park, I took my camera along and captured some of the lightly forested trail.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“333” caption=“People love to mess up trees just to leave their mark”] [/caption]
I haven’t done one of these since last October. At lot of the same photos are there, but there are a few less panda shots. A few of the photos have switched spots with each other. And there’s the relatively new photo of Dina and Brian. Interestingly (no pun intended), my most viewed photo is not in the top 20 most interesting. (So people on flickr like uninteresting shots?)
Last time I mentioned my Franka Solida III, I had just had my first roll in my Yashica developed. I mentioned being a bit worried about the fact that I couldn’t tell what was in focus by looking through the viewfinder. Turns out that my fear was founded as I originally thought the units on the lens were ft when they were in fact meters. The results show:
Found online here. Mostly involves my 365 project. But the first photo is from a BBQ with a bunch of our friends. That was an exciting day in both good and bad ways.
Just like last year, I went to Otakon, but didn’t pay to get in. Perhaps next year. So, like last year, I mostly photographed people under the the awning of the convention center. Unlike last year, I asked lots of people if I could photograph them. It paid off as I was able to get lots of shots I would have otherwise missed. It also yielded me a lot more single person portraits rather than just massive group shots that everyone else happened to be shooting. So, here are some of my favorite shots.
It’s August - the last month to get to the beach, so I went with this image from Coney Island. Click on the image below and, when it loads, right-click to set it as your desktop background.
As always you can view it on their site here. (and sign up for your own) Here are the photos from the late July Photojojo time capsule. It’s mostly my 365 with a little bit of Otakon thrown in.
View it online here. For those new to this blog, Photojojo is a time capsule that emails me my most interesting photos from a year ago. This time it’s mostly involving our trip to Florida for my grandfather’s birthday.
On my Father’s Day Weekend visit to NYC I finally got to see some MoMA exhibits I’d wanted to see for months. First off was a Picasso exhibit called “Variations”. Ever since my parents took me to the Dali Museum in St Petersburg, FL six years ago, I’ve been very interested in painters – especially artists from the 1930s-1950s and the surrealist and associated movements. Also, as a person of Spanish heritage, I’ve had a special interest in artists from the region. So I was very excited to see this Picasso exhibit.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Luna Park, the new section of Coney Island”] [/caption]
As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I went to NYC over Father’s Day weekend to see the Mermaid Parade. Well, as if that wasn’t crazy enough, I went BACK to Coney Island that night to photograph the new Luna Park. I have been documenting the changes to Coney Islan d and so I wanted to document the aftermath. I took both of the digital cameras I had used that afternoon and proceeded to take some low light photos. I would have preferred to have gone a little earlier in the evening to take the photos, but we thought it might have been a little crowded. By the time we went, it wasn’t too crowded, but there were still plenty of people still in their mermaid costumes hanging around.
In reading the New York Daily Photo Blog, I happened to come across a post about the Coney Island Mermaid Parade. I mentioned to my wife that I wanted to try and attend next time it happened. Being the awesome wife that she is, she kept her eye out for the date and let me know it would coincide with Father’s Day weekend this year. So we decided to get a two-for-one deal and go to NYC to see the parade.
I was recently reading issue 15 of 125 Magazine and came across the following quote by Albert Watson.
[Americans] seemed to want fasion to be more of the people, more of the mass. Chairman Mao had all the Chinese dressing the same, and from a different base in America they arrived at something not to dissimilar. And you can take it on to looking at the success of companies like The Gap and others, where in the headquarters they make a decision that then rolls out across the country. Someone decides ’let’s do cargo pants again, we haven’t done it for a couple years….so this year we will put two buttons on every pocket.’ Then they proceed to make 16 million pairs of these … and they go all over the USA and all over the world. All the same but you can choose from six colours. there is a certain sense of Chairman Mao and his style for the masses in the American philosophy around fashion, if arrived at through capitalism rather than communism.
I’m writing this post two days before my 365 project ends. It will be published morning upon which I will take my last photo. I decided to end it with an eight-part story. You can start here and follow the photos in the set “The Dark Assignment” which should be open on the right. (Better than going directly to the set where you might end up seeing the end instead of following along) I’m not going to post my 365 retrospective now, that will come after I’m completely done. But I haven’t blogged about my 365 project since last October. So I wanted to share some of my favorite photos since then.
The title of the blog post comes from an interview with Paul Graham featured in the Summer issue of Aperture magazine, concerning the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibit I’ve been dying to see at the MoMA in NYC. The full quote was “Someone I know, who is working on the … Henri … [exhibit] … and has seen his contact sheets, said to me: ‘The “decisive moment” is bullshit.’ There are ten pictures before and ten pictures after every one of them;” Anyone who has studied photography for any length of time has been told that they will, with time, develop an eye for when something’s about to happen and then take the photo exactly the right moment. It’s an anachronistic bit of advice stemming from the days when each frame was expensive and you didn’t want people to shoot ten shots to get one. But, in the digital age, there’s no reason to be so stingy with your photographs. And, apparently, it’s a lie. Henri Cartier-Bresson is one of the masters - he’s featured in every photographic compilation I own. And he took dozens of photos just to get the one that touches people. That’s really the big secret that most people don’t know. For every photograph that you see out there by a professional, there are tens or even dozens of photographs he didn’t put out there. Even I (and I’m nowhere near the league of such people) upload only a fraction of the photographs I take. Every photo can’t be a gem. Sometimes it just doesn’t look as good as you thought it would. Sometimes you just missed that moment of pure emotion on the face.
Last time I wrote about my dabbling in the film world I had had 3 Holga rolls developed. My Yashica and Franka Solida III had arrived after my trip to NYC so I had yet to run any film through them. I shot a few frames with each camera when Danny and Dina came to visit in April and then let the cameras lay dormant. As I explained in a previous post, with the cost of film and development so high, these cameras were somewhat for special occasions. I took the cameras with me to Delaware (a trip I have yet to blog about), and shot with the Holga and Yashica.
The summer issue of Aperture magazine arrived at my door a couple days ago. It came with a supplement titled “Made in Polaroid”. Apparently, Ansel Adams was heavily involved in Polaroid’s early days, helping them research how to make it relevant to artists. Since he was a founder of Aperture magazine, the two organizations have always had a close relationship. As I recently read on Wikipedia, Polaroid stopped making cameras and film. The point of this supplement was to communicate what the company that bought the rights to the Polaroid name will be doing with it. The guys over at The Impossible Project will be creating instant film for the new line of Polaroid cameras. The supplement also functioned as a showcase of what various famous artists are doing with Polaroid. One artist in particular caught my eye: Maurizio Galimberti. He does Polaroid collages landscapes and portraits such as the following collage of Benicio del Toro.
Thursday (22 Apr) as I drove into work, I knew the first few hours would be unbearable. My photos were waiting to be picked up from L’Imagerie, but they weren’t open until 1000. So I had to wait until my lunch break to go pick them up. The whole day I didn’t know what to expect. I’d never had medium format film developed and, while I’d had contact sheets with my APS film, it was not a true contact sheet.
At the time that I write this (about two weeks ago), I have run three rolls of film through my Holga, my Yashica A has arrived (unfortunately, too late for the wedding), and I have taken my film to L’Imagerie in Bethesda, MD to be developed. I used the Holga, along with my DSLRs, at Ho and Lauren’s wedding and I took some photos on the Brighton Beach/Coney Island Boardwalk. I also took some outdoor candids of Danielle’s family. One question was asked constantly: why are you using film?
As I researched medium format photography in deciding whether or not to participate , I came face-to-face with a trend I’ve seen in other fields. As the technology has “progressed”, users have actually found themselves with worse and worse results. And, just as in other technologies, it is a tale of choosing convenience or cost in favor of quality.
As I write this I have shot 3 frames on my Holga 120N . It’s been a long time since I had to wait to see the results of a photo. One of my favorite aspects of film photography in the olden days was to get my roll(s) of film back from the drug store and being surprised at all the photos I had forgotten taking. But now I really want to see what’s on the rolls! Digital has spoiled me! Also, I’m curious to see the Holga work its magic!
It’s my photojojo time capsule from early to mid-April. Interestingly, the Tampa Bay Rays were playing Baltimore early in April and they did that again this year. Do they always play the same teams in the same schedule? Also, the first photo from my 365 was in the capsule.
Boy have we become spoiled in the digital age. I’m not sure when this will be posted, but at the time of writing this, I have a Holga 120N and a bunch of film at my desk. I bought a couple rolls each of colour and black and white film in ISO speeds of 160 and 400. I have no idea what to load into my Holga! With my digital camera I can change ISO on the fly. Dark outside? Increase the ISO. Want a slower shutter speed when it’s bright outside? Decrease the ISO. But with film I’m stuck for 12 frames with whatever I put in there!
In the beginning was the kit lens. And it was OK. With it I learned how to use my DSLR. I had never even had a film SLR before, so there was a lot to learn. Eventually I wanted my lenses to reach further so I invested in the Tamron 55-200mm. I was ecstatic at all the subjects I would now capture which were previously beyond my grasp. Birds and squirrels were no longer just small blips in my images. But, there were some issues with the lens. It was very loud when it focused and it was slow to autofocus. I would often lose the shot I was looking for by the time it finished focusing.
The beach was covered with snow, but that didn’t seem to bother the seagulls. As I approached, they let me get really close and if I got closer they preferred to run rather than fly.
The Brooklyn Bridge. It was completed in 1883 and it links Brooklyn to Manhattan. It’s also possible to take the Manhattan Bridge from Brooklyn, but it’s far less picturesque. I’ve been to the Brooklyn Bridge a few times to take pictures with the first time being when I bought my Fujifilm Finepix S7000. This was the first time I took photos from Brooklyn Bridge Park; every other time had been from on the bridge itself.
What can I say about visiting the Lomography store that hasn’t already been said? It provides a very interesting contrast with B&H Photo Video. B&H is a photographer’s sex dream. There are cameras and lenses of all kinds everywhere (on the second floor, nowadays). A conveyor belt system brings your order to the guy taking your order and then over to where you pay. It is massive (taking up a good chunk of 9th and 34th) and it feels chaotic on a Sunday afternoon. You instantly feel as though you need to win the lotto so you can posses it all. It feels like a microcosm of NY with people trying to get every which way and pushing around.
If you read anywhere on the web, you’ll see people talking about how Photoshop (and digital photo manipulation) is ruining the purity of photography. People argue endlessly about this as if they could get everyone on their side. Guess what? This controversy is older than radio. Recently I’ve been reading the great photography history, How To Read a Photograph. It turns out that as early as 1898, people were purposely publishing their photographs straight as they happened to develop. In the 1920s there emerged a division between photographers over whether it was more proper for photographers to alter their negatives (and therefore become an interpretive art form like painting) or if they had to be developed as is. People had already been experimenting throughout the 1900s with the usage of different chemicals to affect their prints in different ways. Photographers even used different films from different manufacturers because they were known to give darker greens or more saturated colors or better grain. Digital photography is no different - it’s just that dark rooms took years to master while anyone can get the basics of the Canon RAW (or Lightroom RAW) editor. But, having seen that this division has existed within photography for the past 100 years, I don’t think it will be going away any time soon.
It was busy at the bird feeders with all the new birds. This little guy was unable to find a spot to land. I don’t know what he didn’t like about the bottom peg.
This is one of our neighbors clearing the snow out in his yard. Not sure what he was making a path to. Perhaps for his dog to be able to get to where he goes to relieve himself?
In case you’ve been under a rock lately, Maryland, DC, and Virginia got rocked by a huge El Niño system over the weekend. It dumped over three feet of snow in my neighborhood and nearly three feet everywhere else. The birds weathered it pretty well. Well, it helps that I felt bad for them and kept refilling the bird feeders. They were especially aggressive on the feeders this weekend for two reasons. 1) It was cold and they needed food to heat themselves by moving and 2) We had a bunch of new, large birds join the crowds in my backyard. The new birds included Red-Winged Blackbirds, Common Grackles, and European Starlings. Neither of these birds like Sunflower seeds, so they all kept going after the bird feed mix feeders. When I ran out of bird feed mix (a few days later) and was unable to buy any because of the snow conditions, I filled the feeders with sunflower seeds and they remained untouched for most of the day until the birds figured out that’s all they were going to get. Then they finished that off. I’ll be interested to see if they stick around after conditions improve.
Sometimes the simplest things in life give the best pleasure. I love watching animals do the things they do. I pass by this lake chock-full of geese every day on my way to work. They’re only there in the morning before they go out in search of food and whatever it is geese do during the day. I wanted to catch them when the lake was frozen over to see how they dealt with it. Basically, they mostly treated it as though the shore extended out onto the lake. I shot at least a hundred frames and put up my best few onto flickr. This one became my favorite shot of the day.
In this post I decided to take you through my thought process in lighting the photo. Because I wanted the knife as close to the camera as possible (while still being in focus), I had to lower the intensity of the flash on the camera. But that meant I would end up too dark, so I had use another flash to light me. I wanted to make sure that the flash lit only me and did not add any extra light to the knife, so I put a snoot on my flash. As we covered before, the snoot directs light forward with a very quick drop-off to darkness from the projected circle of light.
This one’s another subtle one because it’s so obvious, but if, like me a few months ago, you’ve only shot with available light, on camera flash, or bounced your light because you were told to - you probably haven’t thought about how light affects your portraits. And so you have always taken portraits where they came out good enough if the people were photogenic and not so good if they were average. Well, the key is creating realistic, but soft shadows. (Although, in fashion photography and other styles you may eliminate all shadows) The problem with on camera flash is that you end up with super harsh shadows. (Also, the behind-the-head ugly shadows that make the person look like they grew an afro) What you want to do is to soften up the shadows and move them to the side. Just remember this thing you learned as a child - shadows appear where light is blocked.
You may have seen a photo like the one above where the light fades away as if it were a flashlight. How do photographers do that? It’s pretty easy, they snoot their flashes. A snoot is basically a light tunnel and professional snoots have a honeycomb grid at the end. The snoot directs the light and keeps it from spilling out to the sides so it all goes forward. The grid pattern at the end affects how wide the beam appears.
Here’s a non-obvious problem that photographers come up against all the time - I bought a white background so why doesn’t it look white in my portraits? The reason that it’s a non-obvious problem is that you have to remember that the camera doesn’t see the world the same way you do. The internal circuitry of the camera wants to meter for neutral grey. So the cure is simple as long as you have an extra flash unit - you have to use it to light up the background. One important thing to remember if you’re using a small flash (speedlite or speedlight), you need to pop a diffuser cap on that lens to spread out the light over the whole background. In fact, if the background is wide enough you might need two or more strobes. Another tip is that it may help to put your flash unit into manual mode so the flash itself doesn’t try to make the background neutral grey.
Here’s the calendar for February. Click on it to get the full size so you can make it your background. ( edit: I noticed a bug in the way the calendar appeared and fixed it on 31 Jan 2010 so just download a new version, thanks!)
This Northern Mockingbird is one of the many birds in my yard. I can’t quite pinpoint what it is about birds that fascinate Danielle and I, but we love to watch them cavorting around the yard and interacting with each other.
It’s been a very snow-filled winter this 2009-2010 winter season compared to the last five or so years I’ve lived here. I think I’m over it. Spring couldn’t come quickly enough.
This fox likes to sleep on a pile of grass in the back yard. This grass came from the first time I cut the grass after buying the house. The grass was so tall that it filled the compost unit and there was still too much grass. I didn’t know at the time we had yard pickup in the neighborhood, so I put it on the edge of my property for nature to do its thing and decompose it. At first I thought it was working because some mushrooms grew there. But they were eaten or somehow destroyed after a few days. Since then I haven’t seen any more mushrooms on there. It MUST be decaying, but it seems to always be the same size. A few months ago we first spotted the fox sleeping there. On the day I took this photo, my wife was home sick and she saw and it called me at work saying it was just lying there. Hours later it was still resting and I was able to get this photo. I’m not sure what attracts the fox to the grass. Is it warm because of decomposition? Is it just softer than the ground? Both? Either way, it’s always a special treat for the fox to show up.
I was curious how they stacked up and I wanted to see if I could detect any patterns. Except for a few outliers, they’re mostly below 50 views per photo. I also expected to see more views after I started adding my photos to more 365 photo groups, but this is not the case. There do appear to be clusters of views. In other words, one highly viewed photo seemed to lift the ones by it. That one huge outlier is my photo making fun of causes of the swine flu. The other big one is my Heroin Chic photo, no surprises there. It was fun to create this and I learned a new python module. Also, even though it probably took me a bit more time to program than to do it manually, it will now automatically generate whenever I want, and that’s worth the time it took.
Kids at Christmas are awesome! Nearly every present that Anthony, Alex, and Lizzie got received a loud, “This is the best present ever! This is all I ever wanted!”
My mom usually sets this up under the tree (although never this elaborately). By moving it to a table in the living room she was able to do a really amazing job. Also kudos to Denny who helped her with the landscaping.
What is it that intrigues us about rusty cars? On flickr there are hundreds, if not thousands, of such photos. I also see them in books. I think it’s partly because of the colours, partly because it reminds us of our own mortality, and perhaps partly leftover cultural hatred of machines.
Another hard bird to photograph. The blue jays are in my yard even less often than the cardinals. And they run away at the slightest move by me. But, once again, patience paid off.
Ever since I put up the bird feeders (and even before that) I’ve been trying to get good shots of the cardinal. With my Sigma 120-400mm and some patience I was finally able to succeed. These guys are really skittish. If I come outside when I see them, they run away. So I need to already be standing out there for them to ignore me and come out and let me take their photo. This photo has been increasing in views rather quickly. I’m a pretty big fan of it myself.
Rather than pile up my daily photos whenever I forget to post them, I’ll just post them one at a time and build up a stream of photos. I haven’t been in much a textual blogging mood recently. Perhaps that’ll return eventually.
Whenever I’m in Oahu, I love eating at this ramen joint. If your only experience of ramen is cup o’ noodles, you haven’t had real ramen. Check it out next time you’re in a heavy Japanese neighborhood. This place has good price and service and the food is pretty filling - especially if you get the rice and dumplings.
I was looking at my flickr 20 most interesting photos and I realized that a healthy portion of them were taken this year. Six of the top 20, in fact, were taken in 2009. Here they are:
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“375” caption=“La Palma Latin Cafe in Hialeah, Fl”] [/caption]
I took this photo with my cell phone while I was in South Florida for my cousin’s wedding. It was just on a whim because I wanted to show some of my family what had changed when I wasn’t looking. Below is what I wrote on the description on flickr along with a little more exposition:
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“333” caption=“This is a very creepy way to sell cigars.”] [/caption]
When I saw this guy in a Georgetown cigar store I knew I had to photograph it before the day was over. On the way back to the train, I captured this shot. It creeps me out, but I had to capture it.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“The lens is so heavy it tips my camera forward a bit.”] [/caption]
For my cousin’s wedding I wanted to have a f/2.8 lens. I had had bad luck with my current lenses at Richard’s wedding because I couldn’t get good enough low light performance. So I decided to rent a Canon EF 24-70mm L f/2.8 lens. So not only will it be an f/2.8, but it will also be an L lens so this should be the best quality photos I have ever taken. After a lot of looking around, I ended up choosing Pro Photo Rental.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“333” caption=“Who knew Inuyasha was that popular?”] [/caption]
This photos is my most viewed photo on flickr and today it reached 10,000 views! The pace of views has been insanely quick. (for one of my photos) It only had 5,000 views 18 months ago and ever since then I’ve been wondering when it would reach 10,000 views. Now the next milestone on the flickr views groups is 25,000 views. It’ll probably take a while to get there. I know there are some who get 25,000 views in one day, but I’m not one of those, so this is pretty exciting for me. 10,000 pairs of eyeballs have seen this photo and that’s awesome.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“333” caption=“All of us in our costumes, ready to head out to The Village”] [/caption]
Last year after Dina and Brian went to The Village for Halloween, I did some research on this tradition and decided we would go whenever things worked out. Well, this year was that year so we decided to spend Halloween night in Greenwich Village in NYC’s Manhattan. But, first, we rewind once again to last year. Danielle’s mother made an awesome Chun-Li costume for Dina that rivals anything you can find in a US costume store. Brian was Ryu and both got lots of accolades for their costumes. Fast forward to this summer. We decided to also have Danielle’s mom make our costumes this year.
Due to missing some photos on the weekend or extremely busy weeks, I’ve now completed 155 days as of the time this is being written. Here are some of my favorite photos since my last update in August. To see the entire project, visit my 365 Set on flickr.
This photo has suddenly become my daily most viewed photo for the past 10 days or so.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Pope John Mole IV is becoming somewhat of an internet celebrity”] [/caption]
Yesterday it had 32 views. It had 30 a couple of days before that. As of 2100 on 21 Oct, it has 22 views. [Almost] All of the views have been coming from Google and Yahoo image searches. I wish flickr told me what search terms were leading to this little guy. I’d try a few really quick. “Pope John Paul” (no quotes) does not bring it up on the first page. “Pope John Mole” and “Pope Mole” (again, both without quotes) do bring it up as the first search result. But why would someone be searching with those terms? It just doesn’t make any sense. The image already has 1814 views for all time.
[caption id=“attachment_2818” align=“aligncenter” width=“1036”] Apparently I mostly shoot wide[/caption]
Nearly 60% of my photos are in the wide to short telephoto range and nearly 40% is exclusively wide. Now, I do have SOME photos from others in my Lightroom catalog, but not enough to skew the results. I would say the reason for the huge concentration of photos in the 33-82mm range comes from the kit lens and its equivalent focal length USM version that I shoot a lot of photos with. The large concentration around the 308-330mm range comes from the 1.6x crop factor of my XT and XTi on the Tamron 55-200mm I use for wildlife photography.
Three years ago I was discussing photography with a fellow photographer, pictured below. We were discussing places for good photography in the DC-Baltimore vicinity and he mentioned Shenandoah Valley. He also showed me some photos of deer he had gotten there. He was pretty impressed with how close he got to the deer (although - spoiler - I eventually got closer). I was impressed with the deer photos and his description of Shenandoah Valley. I resolved to visit it.
It’s been nearly a month since I put up the bird feeders in our house and I have been enjoying them nearly every day since then. In fact, the only negative has been the cost of bird food. But, as my mother-in-law put it, I get the benefits of having birds without the hassle of having them as pets. At first we had a few birds visiting the feeders each day. Now, during the busy bird breakfast hours, we get multiple birds at once. Interestingly, on the whole, the birds to not fight with each other. Rather, if there are more birds than spots at the feeder, they will queue up on nearby branches. I was very surprised by this behaviour because I thought they would surely fight over this nearly infinite food source.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“What emotion does this photo invoke in you?”] [/caption]
A few days ago, Mai told me that photos of landscapes make her feel lonely. That really caught me by surprise. The usual response to photos such as the one above is one of awe. People usually feel a new appreciation for nature and/or that spot. And, sometimes, people express a desire to visit that place too in order to experience it themselves. But I never thought someone could look at a landscape and feel a sense of loneliness. (Unless, of course, the photographer meant to invoke loneliness by selecting a certain type of photo or white balance)
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“I took this first one while I was waiting for my wife to finish up at work so we could go see some houses.”] [/caption]
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“After putting it off for a few years, we went to a Corn Field Maze. It was fun for a little bit until we couldn’t find our way back out.”] [/caption]
[caption id="" align=“alignright” width=“160” caption=“Katy Ho, a fellow Cornellian from C/O 2005 on the same bus in Brooklyn that I happened to be on.”] [/caption]
One in 1,600,000. That’s odds of randomly meeting someone I know in NYC excluding my wife’s family. And yet, due to construction on the Q line, Danielle and I found ourselves on the bus with Katy Ho, who we hadn’t seen since graduation.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“My two Canon DSLRs”] [/caption]
Recently I’ve been seeing and hearing a lot of people repeating some version of the mantra, “a great photographer can make a great photograph with any camera.” They’ve then been following this up with, “therefore, why not just use an iPhone or point and shoot. There’s no reason to buy an SLR anymore.” Like everything else in life, the truth is gray rather than black and white.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“375” caption=“Just barely beat the sun getting our bird feeders up on the first day”] [/caption]
Almost since we moved into our house we’ve been fascinated by the birds we have seen in our front and back yards. Both the wife and I love birding in general and I love photographing birds. So, after a bit of discussion we decided to get a bird feeder. We ended up getting two of them to accommodate different birds and different seed types. Then I dug a hole and attached the bird feeders to a stick we had in the garage. I read a few books on birds and expected it might take a while for the birds to discover the feeder. I was extremely delighted the following day to find birds at the feeder when I got home from work! These little guys would flit out of the woods, peck a bite, and fly right back out. So it was very hard to get a photo, especially with the sun beginning to set. At the end of this post is the best shot I got.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“All the men in the wedding court”] [/caption]
Here are some of my favorite photos from the group portraits session. Some of these (mostly when it’s a group photo) were me “stealing” a setup that the official photographer had already set up. Many of the shots with one or two people are quick shots I grabbed while others were being shot by the official photographer. This is one of the reasons why people who have photographer friends are so lucky. I was able to capture tons of shots that the photographer couldn’t because she just couldn’t be in two places at once.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“333” caption=“This happens later, but it was a great photo to open with”] [/caption]
And so the ceremony began, starting with the couples approaching the aisle. I was able to get some great shots because I was using both my Rebel XT and Rebel XTi with the EF 28-105mm (and the lens hood to help mitigate lens flare) on one camera and the Tamron 55-200mm on the other. This allowed me to get close up shots no mater where the subjects happened to be standing.
This month finds me with getting two asian photos in my inbox from Photojojo. Either an amazing coincidence or they have some great code going on the in background. Interesting, the first one is a product of racism while the other is a product of love.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Yeah….racism….it’s great for selling stuff.”] [/caption]
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“From Lisa and Pawel’s Wedding”] [/caption]
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Jen appears from across the lake”] [/caption]
Jen was no where to be found at the wedding location because she was actually across the lake for her grand entrance. None of the guests at the wedding knew about this so everyone was very excited. I went on to the docks to photograph her entrance.
Just signed up for this neat flickr-related service, Photojojo’s Time Capsule. Twice a month they send you some photos that you took a year ago. Here are the photos from my first email from them, it’s pretty neat. If you want to see what it looks like in the email, go here.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“I *love* this photo because it expresses in a photo a lot about being a child.”] [/caption]
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“333” caption=“Need me to dig a hole for you?”] [/caption]
Going over photos that were moving from one views group to another on flickr, I discovered this photo that I really love. I love how his head is cocked, I love the idea of a bird with a built-in shovel, and I love how sharp the photo came out.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“The Entrance to the Wedding Location”] [/caption]
Our good friend Jennifer Bonass got married a couple weekends ago. The wedding was out in Chestertown, Maryland - out near Ocean City. Since there’s only one bridge to get there, we left early to make sure we’d get there on time. We got there insanely early (1-1.5 hours early) so I decided to take some photos of the setup to pass the time. Turned out to be a great thing I was there early because the official photographer was with Jen and they were at another location so I was the only one to get these shots. Here are some of my favourites.
A while back I unveiled a web utility for telling when it was time to move a photo from one flickr views group to another. It got tons of hits. Then I switched my server and it all stopped working. Beej had gone to a new framework for traversing the XML and had some problems porting it over. Finally got everything fixed up over the weekend and I can come out with version 0.3!
I first mentioned my participation in the 365 project back in May. Ever since then I’ve gone back and forth between filler photos and some of my best creative work. I’ve been trying as much as possible to explore different techniques and try to be as creative as possible. Here are my best shots since May.
Just like Dina, Daniel has a great smile. This is pretty easy to capture because he’s almost always laughing. He has a great attitude towards life and you can’t help but smile when you’re around Daniel.
While finishing up my photographic bio, I was copying and adapting my introduction from my flickr Top 40 book. So I decided to see how the top ten photos in my flickr Top 40 have changed in the past three years.
2006
Original Rank: 1
Current Rank: 5
Original Views: 455
Current Views: 1881
Camera: Kodak DX3600
And my most interesting photos continue to shuffle around! Here’s the latest top 10. You’ll see that this photo, which had become my 2nd most interesting photo at one time, is now off the top 10.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Dina on the DC Train”] [/caption]
Danielle’s family came to visit so we did what we always do when company comes, we went to Washington, DC. Seriously, I don’t really know what else to do. If it were Florida I would have taken them to the beach. In NYC I’d take them to Manhattan and either just walk around or go to a show. But around here I don’t really know what to do with visitors. Inner Harbor is really too small for just an hour or so. And not everyone likes the museums from DC. So if you know something to do around here, let me know.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Which 50mm lens is the best? The Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II or the Canon EF 50mm f/2.5 Compact Macro?”] [/caption]
I wanted to compare them to see if one is clearly better for another. After all, if I’m going to use a prime lens, why not use the best one? Before we get to the photo comparisons, let’s take a look at the other factors.
I wanted to see how I’ve changed as a photographer so I went to my first ten photos uploaded to flickr. The two biggest changes are that I am now really into portrait photography (although mostly natural portraits) and not quite as much into photoshop. My first two pages are mostly photoshop-manipulated photos. The next ten or so pages are photos documenting my life. I got to do some exciting stuff like going to NYC for the second time (but with a lot more time to look around) and also was busy documenting my life as a college student. I’m still into documenting my life and activities I participate in, but I’ve become more sophisticated in my techniques. I now know about shutter speed, aperture, and ISO and I strive to use them to get the best photos I can. I came to appreciate light and how it can work for and against the composition. I also learned when to use flash and when it’s useless. Before I thought no one would want to see an unaltered photo, hence the focus on the photoshopped photos. Then I looked through photography books and learned about street photography and documentary photography. I’ve grown quite a bit from the old days and here’s the proof.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“People came to Otakon from all around the USA”] [/caption]
For the first time since moving here, I found out about Otakon ahead of time. Unfortunately, the economics didn’t work out we didn’t buy tickets. But I did go to hang out outside Otakon on Saturday to get some photos. Lessons learned:
Remember what you learned in Hawaii and don’t be afraid to approach people. This is especially the case with Otakon. The cosplayers have spent a long time working on their costumes, sometimes up to a whole year. They want to show off their costumes. So go up to them and ask to photograph them.
With a 1.6x crop factor camera like the Canon 400D, 28mm is not wide enough. It’s very, very crowded at Otakon. They had something like 19 000 preregistered attendees. I missed out on getting some awesome shots of costumes such as this one where the girl on the left had an amazing bottom part to her costume, but I couldn’t fit her and her friend in without backing up a lot more
Buy tickets to Otakon! I missed out on a bunch of costumes because they were walking into the conference too quickly for me to intercept them at the door. So attend so you can see all the costumes
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Yankee Stadium from the Train Station”] [/caption]
Ever since I’ve known my wife I wanted to go to a Yankees Game. But we were often busy during the baseball season and neither of us are big ball fans. In fact, this was also my wife’s first Yankee game despite having grown up in NYC and rooted for the Yankees her whole life. So it was to my great dismay that I found out I would never get to see a Yankees game in the original stadium that housed Babe Ruth. However, I finally did make it to a Yankee game after nearly a decade. It was a bit of a taunt to see the old stadium right next to the new one as demolition has not yet taken place.
This is my new favorite photo. It captures everything I’ve always loved in non-formal portrait photography and everything I’ve aspired to. The emotions on display, the proper photographic technique, you just feel when you see this photo, especially with Christine’s huge laugh. It’s also why I love non-formal portrait photography rather than the usual stand there and be photographic with a stupid, fake smile. I’ve often seen photos that had this same vibe and felt jealous that I couldn’t capture it. My time just hadn’t yet arrived.
Just four days ago, this photo was my 11th most interesting photo. Now it’s my second most interesting photo! Wow! I wonder what factors contributed to this? Surely the fact that it has risen quickly to already have 200+ views?
editor’s note: I’m writing this blog in real-time on Friday, 10 July, when I got the card from B&H. The post will appear on a later date
Today I got my Lexar 4GB UDMA 300x CompactFlash Card from B&H. I don’t yet have a UDMA capable camera, but I decided if I am going to buy memory cards, they should have features that I can take advantage of when I finally upgrade my camera (hopefully in 1-2 years). This is my first Lexar card; until now I’ve been exclusively in the Sandisk camp. However, lots of people online love to rave about their Lexar cards and they had a much bigger rebate than Sandisk for similar size and speed. The first thing I noticed is that Lexar apparently doesn’t use those really annoying plastic pakagign cases that Sandisk tends to. You know, the ones that you need scissors to open. However, I also quickly learn that I’m not a huge fan of the case holding the memory card. While it probably has less of a chance of breaking than the Sandisk cases with their (Sandisk’s) latches, I find it a lot harder to open the Lexar case quickly. I pop the card into my Rebel XTi (400D). The camera claims 382 photos. I was expecting a number slightly closer to 400 since my 2 GB cards get 197, but I guess the “missing GB” problem that plagues hard drives is at work here too.
After Dan joined the Amazon.com affiliate program I wondered if B&H Photo and Video had an affiliate program as well. After all, I exclusive buy all of my photography equipment from them. They almost always have the lowest price and their customer service rocks! Plus, since I live in Maryland, I can choose UPS ground delivery (the cheapest option) and get my items within 3 days! Beat that Amazon! So I’ve joined the B&H affiliate program. You can see the link on the left sidebar (as of my current theme) and I’ll be sprinkling links throughout future photography posts. I thought the best policy for you, my loyal readers, was to be forthright in mentioning this new partnership. I promise not to make it annoying. And, if you’re going to buy something from B&H anyway after reading my review, if you do it through the affiliate link, you can help to support this blog. Thanks!.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Trying to do a candid shot, you can sometimes get spotted”] [/caption]
In yesterday’s post I mentioned how I overcame my shyness and it led to a good picture. That doesn’t mean I stopped taking candid photos. I wonder what she thought when she saw the camera pointed her way. Afterwards I shot some photos of the guy with a million balloons who happened to be passing by in the photo above. Did she think I was aiming for him? Because that was my intention - for her to think that. Although, I did want a photo of him too. I ended up taking about four and this was the best one.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Newspaper Guy Reading the Newspaper, but ready to take photos with tourists”] [/caption]
[caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“180” caption=“This guy was just a block over from newspaper guy. He was also ready to take photos with tourists”] [/caption]
I think everyone has seen a street performer painted in metal and dressed in clothes with a metallic-looking surface. I’ve seen them in Miami, Vegas, and Fort Lauderdale. But only in Honolulu have I seen three of them on the same street only a block from each other. At first when I saw the guy in the newspaper clothing I thought that was pretty creative. But then I saw the metallic guy just a block over. And after that I saw the guy in the “ska” checker board suit. Definitely some points are due for them not all looking the same. But are there really that many people who want a photo with a metallic man that they will take three such photos?
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“The Quintessential Hawaii Scene: palm trees, the ocean, and surf boards”] [/caption]
[caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“240” caption=“Diamond Head from in the Ocean.”] [/caption]
I forgot to mention, in my first post, that since I took all of my camera bodies and my GPS unit, I didn’t want to have to worry about setting it back to EST when I got back home, so I left everything in EST. So I decided to divide my days (for the purpose of these posts) as if it were in EST. So, on Day 2 I continued to take pictures as I walked about. But I also tried out the new underwater housing I bought for Danielle’s camera. It was pretty awesome being able to have the camera with me in the water. I was able to get some photos underwater and, if Danielle had been with me, we could have taken portraits of each other in the water. Nearly all of my photos from that day were with the underwater housing and here is a sampling of those photos.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“On the flight to Chicago, I traveled with many LPGA pros”] [/caption]
Last week I boarded a plane on a business trip to Hawaii. This time my wife couldn’t come along so all I had to do after work was attend to my photography.
[caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“160” caption=“The view somewhere between BWI and O’Hare”] [/caption]
Unfortunately, the flickr map page for my account only shows the last 30 or so photos on the map. So it’s pretty rare to get it zoomed out this far to show your GPS shots. I keep wishing they’d show all the GPS tagged photos (using some algorithm to combine them into one dot if you’re zoomed out far enough) so you can get an idea of where around the world the users have been. So after uploading a few Hawaii photos, it looked like this:
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Dina, Daniel, Ho, Beo, and Lauren put a lot of work into the decorations”] [/caption]
Last weekend I went to a graduation party Dina and Daniel organized to celebrate Dina, Ho, and Lauren’s graduation this year. It was a great BBQ event and I had a lot of fun. I only knew about 1/10th of all the people there, so I kept entertained mainly by ecording the events of the night with my cameras. I did end up speaking at length with some interesting people.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Lovers on the Boardwalk”] [/caption]
A few weeks ago I took yet another stroll on Brighton Beach’s Boardwalk. This famous boardwalk goes from Brighton Beach past Coney Island all the way to Seagate. This time around I took some iconic photos from the area. In other words, these are exactly the types of photos you would see included in any survey of boardwalk photos. Here’s the GPS track of where I went in a static PNG and then as a Google Map so you can zoom in and scroll around.
I recently posted the photos I took during Dina’s Graduation Party. I then posted the link to Dina’s wall on Facebook. Check out the spike in my views:
[caption id=“attachment_2307” align=“alignnone” width=“416” caption=“My Daily Views on Flickr”] [/caption]
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Dina, a new graduate!”] [/caption]
A few weeks ago I attended Dina’s Bachelor’s Graduation. After having attended my own as well as Daniel’s, I had some idea of what to expect, but this was the first college graduation I had attended outside of Cornell. (Not counting my dad’s graduation when I was young) I have have come to believe that all college graduations are the same everywhere. It is a bit odd that Stony Brook used red gowns instead of black ones. The was also my first long outing with my GPS unit. Here’s where I ran around that day. First as a static PNG:
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II Box”] [/caption]
[caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“240” caption=“Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II lens on its box”] [/caption]
Recently I got my fifth lens, the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II, Canon’s entry-level nifty fifty lens. This is the cheapest lens Canon makes and, build-wise, it shows. Unlike the other lenses I own (even the kit lens), the 50mm is very plastic-looking and plastic-feeling.
Danielle and I bought our first home near the end of February. We’ve moved many times before - between semesters at Cornell, from Cornell to Tampa, and from Tampa to Baltimore. Now we were finally moving into our own home. And so, for the first time, I decided to thoroughly document our move. I was partly inspired by photo blogs I’ve been reading recently, such as Jeffry Friedl’s blog. I decided to put together a photo essay. So I whipped out my cameras and started shooting.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Some of the equipment you need to geo-tag your photos.”] [/caption]
Recently I was listening to The Command Line Podcast and the host mentioned one way to help others is to write up a tutorial on your blog whenever you learn a new skill or task. Since the information I needed for geo-tagging my photos was fragmented, I decided to write up a tutorial following my workflow. I’ll break this up into the different phases involved.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“My first ever Geo-tagged Photo”] [/caption]
(I originally wrote most of this on Thursday, 21 May)
I can’t explain to you the thrill and excitement I get from geo-tagging my photos. I don’t mean that the thrill is so large as to defy explanation; rather that I can’t articulate what it is about geo-tagging my photos that excites me so much. Perhaps it’s the fascination of two different technologies coming together. Maybe it’s the age-old excitement of being able to point to a map and say “I was there!”, only this time you have the EXACT coordinates and you have photographic proof. All I know is that ever since I resolved to get a GPS device to work with my cameras, I’ve been anxious to get my hands on the device. Officially, it’s an anniversary gift from my wife, and I think it will be one of the ones I enjoy the most.
[caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“240” caption=“Day Fourteen: “You Told Me You Were Clean””] [/caption]
It’s been 16 days now since I started taking part in flickr’s famous 365 Project. Well, flickr has many of them, but the most famous one most people partake in is the one where the photographer takes 1 self-portrait per day for 365 days. The reason for the popularity in the self-portrait 365 project is probably due to two properties of said project. First of all, by forcing the photographer to take self-portraits you remove the photographer’s block that can come from thinking of a subject every day. Since you know it’s always going to be you, you don’t need to worry about what to photograph. On the other hand, self-portraits contain a challenge in that you have to pre-frame your shot and then get in it. At the moment the shutter clicks you are no looking through the viewfinder. I’ve found it to be a great exercise in creativity because it wouldn’t be fun for myself or my viewers if they were all just shots of me sitting or standing in front of a wall. I’ve only begun to scratch away at the limits of my creativity, but the house has gotten in the way; more on that shortly. I think my most creative shot thus far was on Day 14 and has to do with Swine Flu. Depending upon whether you are reading this shortly after posting or years later - the Swine Flu [near] Pandemic of 2009 was one of the biggest stories of the second quarter in 2009. It’s been on the news almost nonstop for the past week and so I had to try and do a topical 365 shot. I’m pretty happy with the result. Follow my progress in the 365 project by visitng my 365 se t.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“B&H Event Space - Where B&H holds classes on various topics”] [/caption]
[caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“240” caption=“Rudy Winston of Canon”] [/caption]
So the first B&H Event Space lecture I ever went to was earlier this April in a class about Travel Photography taught by Rudy Winston, an employee of Canon. His lecture was about taking a vacation specifically to get certain photos. In other words this was not about improving your photography while on vacation with the rest of the family. However, I found that a lot of the tips worked equally well for either kind of trip. Another key part of his lecture was taking pictures with the intention of loading them into a slideshow program as a means of sharing it with others. Before beginning the lecture, Rudy showed his slideshow and here’s what I picked up from that.
So I’m looking over yesterday’s most viewed photos and I am seeing pictures that make sense - the baseball pictures I’ve been uploading for the past 3-4 days.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Yeah, I’m reusing this image. Hey, it works!”] [/caption]
Wednesday I wrote about choosing the right camera. Today I wanted to write about choosing lenses for your dSLR. Just looking at the entire range of lenses available for a Canon EOS camera there are lenses from $89 all the way up to $8,000. You might see two lenses that go from 28-105mm, but one is $200 and one is $1,200. What’s the reason for the difference? I hope to demystify all of this with some knowledge I wish I’d posessed when I first entered the world of dSLRs.
I often see many people asking online how to choose the right camera. They are bombarded with all the megapixels and various features on offer and they have no idea what to get. And usually the retailers (Best Buy, Frys, etc) try and get you to buy more camera than you need. So what should you buy? I’ll try and guide you with this blog post.
The more I’ve been learning about Lightroom 2 (technically now at 2.3), the more I’ve been liking it! First of all, I learned that - thanks to new camera profiles (also available in the latest camera raw software) - I can get my photos to start from where Canon’s own RAW software would have started. I never realized it was a better choice than photoshop because I liked the photoshop workflow so much. But now that I’ve played with the camera profiles in Lightroom, I realize that I’ve been selling my images short.
There’s something about this little, brown, cube monster that people love. I first came across Domo when chatting on AIM with my high school friend, Lawrence Kwan. He had it as his buddy icon. I asked him what the brown square with the mouth was and he directed me to a website with an animation. I didn’t really get it. But there was something neat about the little guy. Then, all of a sudden, I see him all over the place for Target’s Halloween in-store decorations. (I wish I’d taken a photo) There’s something people love about the little guy. On flickr there are, as of this writing, nine groups featuring Domo.
I just wanted to really elaborate on why I think Adobe Lightroom is a program any enthusiast to pro user should own. Although, as I related here, LR has grown on me, going through the photos I shot at my cousin’s wedding has really cemented my love for Adobe’s product. Here are my two favorite features. You may want to open up the images in a new tab at full size so you can follow along.
Once again I’ve had one of my photos published by an outside source. I always had an image used by WNYC, which you may remember. This time it was the above photo in a blog post about Social Enterprenuership in Minnesota. As I said before, if the most important thing to you is getting your artwork out there, use the Creative Commons. At any rate, most artists (Van Gogh, etc) die poor. So why not at least know others are seeing your photographs - the more eyeballs the better. Plus, it might get you famous enough to get paid commissions.
Recently I’ve been going through my old analog photos and scanning them in. This is the oldest picture I have that I took. I took some pictures earlier in our first vacation to the Smokey Mountains. But those prints and negatives were lost by the time I started putting together photo albums. I’ve been remembering so much about my childhood and it’s been so much fun. I’m still deciding which photos to upload to flickr, but keep up on my Analog Set which covers up until the middle of my Freshman year in college.
So I did a test and found that as long as I save the metadata to the file, Adobe Bridge (even with CS2) can correctly read the changes. So I decided to work in Lightroom to see if it was worth buying. I can say that I am really loving it! I’ve been able to adopt my usual RAW workflow with only some small changes. Now I can’t see how I could ever work without LR!! (It’s no wonder why Adobe gives a 30 day free trial!)
During inaugural week I was in Hawaii. Given how cold it was in the Balitmore/DC area that week, I can’t say I wasn’t happy to be there. I stayed at the Embassy Suites Beach Walk in Waikiki and I cannot say enough good things about the hotel. When we first checked in we were offered some tropical drinks both alcoholic and non-alcoholic. The rooms were suite style and very well kept. Every morning they had a whole bunch of complimentary breakfast food - including omlets made to order. They also had a happy hour every night with free drinks and cheap snacks.
Of course, I took my Canon 400D and Fujifilm A 345. Overall I did pretty well. Out of 800+ pictures only 63 were out of focus. Also, for sake of mentioning it, 61 were of my wife. That’s a new thing for me as we usually don’t take the usual tourist-y pictures. Our first day were were still on Eastern Time so we got up at 0400 and went to watch the sun rise.
For quite some time I’ve been been struggling with the point of Adobe’s Lightroom. Other than competing with Apple’s Aperture, it appears not to have a purpose. Of course, right around the time Lightroom (LR) was hitting its stride, I stopped reading photography magazines. The zine I loved the most was a British one published by the same company that puts out Linux Format Magazine. Unfortunately, even with an exchange rate of $1:1 Britsh Pound (which isn’t the case), it’s still $90 per year. So I may have missed lots of tutorial and explainer articles talking about why LR is such a great program. My impression of it was of a Adobe Bridge and Camera Raw. So I didn’t really see the point of paying $200 for that when those programs work just fine for me. It also seemed to straddle some Photoshop territory and I just couldn’t figure it out.
The first word that comes to my head when I see this photo is heaviness. A huge heaviness that can’t be overcome. Even though it’s only 10 lbs, from the angle that I shot this, it seems to convey a strong sense of weight.
The top ten are mostly the same photos they’ve been for a while now, but the bottom ten have changed a bit. It’s very, very intersting (to me, at least) that every digital camera I’ve ever used is represented in the Top 20.
Flickr has a secret algorithm for producing a list of the most interesting pictures. So here are what Flickr thinks are my 10 most interesting pictures. Do you agree?
I think that nearly everyone who has ever learned about the Fibonacci Sequence is fascinated by how quickly it grows. I wanted to illustrate that, so I created this collage with some modifications to J im’s makeCollage.pl script. The rules were that each picture takes the place of a number on the Fibonacci Sequence and is displayed that many times. Of course, I skipped Fibonacci number 1, which is 0. No point in having a picture show up 0 times. So the first picture is shown once, as is the second. Then two times, then three, then…..
That collage was created by a program. I certainly don’t have the patience to arrange all of those photos one-by-one!I told the program to download all of my pictures tagged with Eric Danny David and Danielle and create this collage.
But does that make this any less of a work of art? I think the answer is no. The artwork was just created procedurally instead of visually. To argue that this is less artful is to say that the The Lion King isn’t art because the wildebeast scene was created procedurally. Of course, in this situation I don’t see myself as the artist, but the guy who wrote the program is the collage artist. It’s his procedures which created the art. His name is Jim Bumgardner and he’s a really nice guy who helped me fix up the script. I copied it from his book, Flickr Hacks, but unfortunately, as the code he relied on has changed, it didn’t work as posted. In fact, here is the fix you need in his program, makeCollage.pl :
Over the last two days, between playing Portal and Age of Empires III (both of which are…awesome!), I’ve been doing a little more flickr hacking. This is very closely related to my previous Flickr program where I checked if my pictures were ready to be moved into the next views groups.
This time I wanted to see which of my photos were not in any groups. So in the case that I’ve missed putting a photo into the 25 views groups because it’s a few pages back and I really don’t have time to go back through all of my photos to find the pictures to put into the groups. I tried that once and it was excrutiatingly slow - even slower than figuring out if it was time to graduate my pictures out of the views groups. So here’s the output of my current program:
I forgot to post this about 1 or so weeks ago when I finsihed up the script. So here’s how the output looks on my flickr views program:
Now my next step is to put it on the web. However, the Python API I’m using doesn’t do web-based program authentication. It also doesn’t handle multiple user authentication, which I’d eventually like to do. Right now I’m thinking of porting it to Perl or PHP. I’ll keep you posted.
Last time I checked on that picture it had 25 Views. As of this writing it has 230 Views. That’s not a very high number of views, but for the amount of time it’s been up (about 5 months), the subject matter (a plain view of The White House), and lack of groups (when I wrote this it was in just three groups - although I’ll be adding it into more now) it IS indeed a high number of views. Which just goes to show that you don’t need pictures of naked women to get views on Flickr (as some have argued).
So I’m using Flock daily now for my web browsing to see how I like it. Since I don’t usually go to Facebook on my own, it’s nice to see the notifications within Flock. Thus, I’ve been more responsive to my Facebook private messages, a good thing since my second-cousin recently caught up with me on Facebook. So I’m liking the Facebook integration even more than I thought I would since I’m not a Facebook-heavy person.
Visited this National Park last Sunday. It is pretty beautiful scenery. I’d probably rank it a 7 out of 10. It’s a very nice walking trail. Here are some of the pictures I took last week.
All I know is that this guy has a really high electric bill. I really love stuff like this. I used to have a blue light similar to one of the ones in this room, but it burned out.
And this guy……has my dream setup in terms of monitors.
On 2 Sept I mentioned getting up at 0500 to get some pictures at sunrise. I’d been wanting to get this pictures all summer, but I kept forgetting to take them. Here are the first ones I’ve uploaded to flickr:
Got up at 0500 today to take some sunrise pictures. (I’ll have pictures up later today or tomorrow) I cannot believe how many people were up and awake on a Sunday morning at that time of day! It’s not as if it were as many people as it will be later today, but I’d have to say it was probably thirty times more than the number of people I expected to be awake, namely just me.
I’ve spent a pretty good amount of my free time to try and finish Jose’s Dinner. Now that I’m done, I am taking a bit of a break from animation to do some of the other things I like to do, such as play civ4. The new expansion pack is coming out and I’m extremely excited. It has all kinds of great improvements like colonies, popes, and corporations. So I wanted to play one last game, Eric XI of the Chinese is probably going to be my last game before the expansion pack comes out.
I got to engage in one of my favorite activities this week - building computers! My father-in-law’s Windows Vista laptop was going so slow, he often thought it was about to kernel panic. So I saw the computer he wanted at dell and spec’d it and found out I could do it for $400 cheaper than dell and it’d have Windows XP so he would have a nice fast computer.
I was the photographer for a wedding this weekend (that’s the reason behind the lack of any posts recently). Here are some of my favorite shots so far.
We’ve been asking for it forever and finally flickr has delivered! We wanted sets that contain sets - it makes for better organization - and now they’ve delivered in the form of collections.
My flickr photos rated by # of views - #20, #40, etc….
The majority of my photos appear to be clustered together in the 100-200 view range because you will notice the decrease in the difference across twenty rankings. In other words #20 - #40 is a roughly 150 view difference while #40 to #60 is roughly a 50 view difference.
Since about my Senior Year at Cornell I’ve been shooting in RAW. When I got Photoshop CS 2 I was so happy with all the new features they added to make the workflow so efficient. It really eliminates the “raw is more work” complain that most people have. Recently, as I was reading a book on raw workflows, I realized that, ever since getting CS2, I’ve still been doing things horribly inefficiently!
I just want to share some shots that call out to me. I’ve been so busy with so many things from jump-starting a photography side business to trying to realize all of the Blender Computer animation ideas in my head. So, I may or may not have time to blog. Here are some great shots:
Here’s another shot someone has asked to publish:
As I mentioned before, getting published (as wish my other shot on NPR or the beach shots in the Tampa guide) is a photographer’s dream come true. It’s an acknowledgment that one has pictures worthy of others adding to their reports, websites, brochures, etc.
Here’s the email for this photo:
That picture is an awesome shot. I would like to know if you would give me permission to use this shot on a college report on the cultural aspect of the Brighton Beach community.
I’m working my way towards making money from my photography. I really enjoy the trade craft a lot and if I get to do it as a job on the weekends, all the better. So I’ve bought some books to shore up my technique since I’m pretty much a self-taught photographer. One thing my latest book has driven home is something I’ve noticed countless times in magazines, books, and my own work. I need to relax and take my time. I know enough, and have slowed down enough, to think about the aperture and shutter speed in relation to the effect I wish to achieve. I also know to frame my shot correctly and double-check my ISO settings.
Picture of the Day is back, starting with today. But I will do it semi-regularly instead of running around at 2330 trying to find something to photograph because I’ve been busy all day.
I’ve got a ton of projects going right now, so I’m taking a break from photography until I get a bit more free time. I began to realize that when I was just taking a picture right before going to bed of just about anything, just to fulfill my picture of the day, I was just ending up with mediocre pictures and mediocrity was beginning to creep into my other projects. I’ll come back to it soon enough.
Although it may seem like a philosophical or silly question, it is indeed a practical question for me. You see, we have a tradition at Christmas-time in my family where we play dominoes on the days before Christmas and whoever wins gets to open a gift. I’m sure I mentioned this around this time last year. Well, a couple of days ago I won and my prize was a Canon 50 mm f/2.5 Macro lens from my wife! It’s a fine lens - I’ve been taking some awesome pictures which I will be uploading once the Christmas Season is over.
I couldn’t help it. Once I saw the scale of these two, I just had to make one more tonight. Again, if you happen to like bizarre things like this on your desktop, a click will direct you to a larger size.
Yesterday was nuts. I took my photo of the day, but I wasn’t able to upload it as someone smashed my side mirror on my Civic and I had to call the cops, insurance company, etc Expect it later today!
Found my self at Rockefeller Center in NYC to see the giant Christmas Tree. Here are some shots from that day. I’ll probably have some commentary along with more shots in tomorrow’s post.
A brief holiday on “Today’s Shot”. I am spending time with my wife - pictures for each day will be posted Sunday or Monday. (Just as I did during Thanksgiving)
It’s been really pushing my creative limits to try and come up with a different shot each day. I will continue taking one picture a day, but for the next few days, I really want to take the Holiday to spend time with my family instead of messing with photos on the computer, so I’ll upload them after the holiday. So look for them then.
Looks like flickr’s been listening to me. I kept asking them for ability to search by camera. Others kept rebuffing me, but I guess others shared my passion as well, because they now have Camera Finder. As you can see on the current graph of most popular camera, my camera, the Canon Digital Rebel XT, is the most popular. This is no surprise to me as I see it EVERYWHERE I go! In fact, checking out the Canon stats page I found that, as far as they can tell, there are 8 MILLION photos taken with that Camera and 2300 daily users on average!
All I need now (and it may be there, waiting for me to discover it) is to be able to search my own photos by camera instead of EVERYONE’S.
The same way that aspiring writers are told to write at least one thing per day and it will improve their writing over time, I have decided to take one picture a day. So join me as I post 1 A Day…
If you want to know what the glue is that binds our family together, it’s my mother. She has worked tirelessly to ensure that we have built up the relationships we need in our family. Always working, it’s pretty rare to see her just slacking off. But then again, that’s what’s made her the amazing mother she is and the great wife to my father she is. When others were giving up, she was just getting started. She’s the strongest, hardest working person I know. The only person who works as hard as her is my father and that’s why they’ve pulled themselves out from being poor when they first got married to now nearly being business owners!
But at least I continue to surprise myself with the amount of pictures I have, not only of my grandmother, but of my grandmother with my brothers and I. I have spent months dispairing that I had not taken enough pictures of her before she left us, but as I’ve gone through my old photos looking for pictures that should be on flickr, I have found so many of them. They bring me so much happiness and sadness at once that they cancel each other out and all I can do is stare at them and thank God that I took them.
Ever since I can remember, I always thought my mom looked more beautiful on a day to day basis than when she dressed up for a special event. Perhaps it was the strangeness of the hairdo she would pick or something else. I just feel a stronger connection to the “real” person rather than a made-up idealization.
This view of the world has always extended to my photography. Sure, I took posed pictures, but by-and-large my favorite shots were those candid shots of my friends and family members. Yes, they always complained that they didn’t look their best, but what they didn’t know is that to me, they looked infinitely better than when they stood their with their fake smiles. In fact, you could always hear people afterwards saying, “so and so is obviously faking their smile.” Of course! There’s nothing to naturally smile about when there’s a camera pointed at you. The best smiles are the ones caused by the things we smile about: our children, friends, and family. This has inpsired my latest portrait trend, consisting mostly of candid portraits. I love this work more than almost any other work I’ve done recently with my photography. The only work I love more is the work where I push myself to my creative limits - whether that involves a creative composition or being creative in Photoshop (or, less frequently, in The GIMP).
But recently, as I’ve seen the work of other famous and important photographers, I’ve come to realize that some of the other shots I’ve been taking can also be great photographs. So I’ve been trawling through my archives to look for photos I could share with my fans and friends on flickr. Some of these pictures are even 5 years old already! In fact, searching for these new gems has taken me down memory lane and allowed me to relive some of my favorite memories. These are the reasons why we photograph. It’s not just a process for creating art, but it’s also a process for documenting the world around us and our own lives. Especially precious to me has been the rediscovery of some of my photos of my grandmother Aida who has almost been gone two years.
That’s why you’ve seen a lot of my older work on here recently as well as on flickr. Here are some more of my newly rediscovered favorites.
Just before going to NY for my father-in-law’s surgery, I heard about a group on flickr called “Stick Figures in Peril”. I looked at the group and thought it was a pretty interesting concept - take pictures of warning lables where it looks as though the stick figures are in trouble. When I saw this picture at the hospital as part of a larger sign of what to do in the case of a fire, I snapped a picture on my cell phone. Just by itself there isn’t anything particularly funny about the picture. But if you click on it (above) and see what other people have interpreted the picture to mean, be prepared to laugh, or at least ti chuckle.
I miss you Dan. You’re my only kin for at least a thousand miles. Can’t wait until next summer! We need to hang out a lot more next time. Danielle will make some pho. q;o)
As I went though my top 200 photos, this was had 121 views and I clicked on it. It gives me great memories of friends, but it reminds me of how happy I am to have graduated. School was stressful and I always felt like I was just one step away from failing out of Cornell. In the end I did alright and graduated with a B average, but while I was there, going to school, it just felt so hard. I sympathize with all the freshman who are just starting to deal with their first exams right about now.
Here’s a comparison of my Fujifilm Finepix S7000 vs my Canon Digital Rebel XT with a Tamron DI 200mm lens on. I love how much closer I can get to squirrels with this lens!
Sometime the best things are imperfect. For example, there’s something I just love about this photo even though I wasn’t able to capture his whole face since I was zoomed at 200mm and he was moving very fast. Yet I got it in focus and it is such a beautiful black and white picture. Not only that, but his smile and his energy come through so clearly. I just love it, even though it’s far from perfect.
This darned pigeon and his brethren in the parking garage at work have put more bird feces on my car in one day than I have had on the car in its entire 11 year lifetime. “Of course you know, this means war!”
I really respect and admire my parents for what they are doing now. At a time when they should be relaxing after 24 years of parenting, they have taken on 3 foster kids - 2 of them at the last minute last week. It’s not as though my parents are trying to replace the void of their two college and one college graduate children. Originally, they just wanted to help out the world by taking care of children who needed foster parents. The system is so backed up that there are currently about 16 children with no home who spend their days at the office with the social worker. Until these children are placed into a home they cannot have normal lives. They cannot be loved, go to school, and be carefree as children should be. So my mother and father just meant to be a point of normalcy in a life thus far full of chaos. Then the child could be placed into the home of people who were unable to have kids of their own while my parents took on another child.
This whole time, flickr has been technically beta software. Well, as they went gamma, they have decided to add a great new feature based on mashups that people were already doing using Google Maps API - they are providing a map of the world where users can drag their pictures to the spot it was taken. It then gets geotagged with that spot. So for those of us who don’t have some GPS method of figuring things out, flickr has made it easy for us. And, any photos you have previously geotagged with long/lat will automatically be mapped. So far people are complaining that there’s only good coverage in the USA map whereas Google has good coverage world-wide. I expect this to be fixed soon, though, as more and more people complain. I know that a good portion of the pictures I like to visit are created by non-US nationals.
This little guy stayed alive and stayed still long enough for me to photograph him. Then Danielle squished the life out of him. Hopefully he doesn’t go Agrajag on her. (Hitchhiker’s reference)
As I shot my cousin’s Sweet 16 as the official photographer, I realized that I didn’t need the box of AA alkalines I had taken with me to the event. It turned out that my two canon batteries and the NiMH batteries in the flash gun and battery belt were more than enough for nearly continuous shooting from 1730 - 2330. Instead it was my 4 GB of memory which was not quite enough for the event. Even though this allowed me to take 460+ pictures, I ran out prematurely - sometime around 2245, after which I had to try and delete any photos which appeared not to have come out right. Yes, I know, a typical wedding only has 300 shots or so, but I wanted to capture candids as well as all of the official photos. For the posed pictures I also shot a few too many, I think. I’m currently loading the pictures onto my computer, but I would estimate taking 3 pictures of each pose. This was mostly due to my inexperience. I didn’t want to just have one photo of each and then end up that it was over or under exposed or someone was blinking or something. We’ll see how it all came out soon enough.
Cosplay, for the uninitiated, is dressing up as a fictional character; in the US it tends to specifically mean dressing up as anime or video game characters. Anime Conventions are known for the fans cosplaying and coming up with elaborate costumes which can sometimes take months to develop. I missed Otakon (Baltimore Anime Convention) for the second year in a row. I know it’s my fault for no longer having my finger on the pulse of anime culture in the US, but I was hoping to catch it this year to get some great cosplay pics. Instead I had to just linger in the lobby of the convention center and take some snaps. I took about ten shots and here are two of my better ones.
I’ve been accused by some of having an asian fetish, but I don’t. I think I just have an asian preference. Mere mincing of words? I don’t think so. To me a fetish implies a desire for asian things (culture, people, etc) that accepts all things asian and rejects most things non-asian. Let’s start with culture, for example. There are a lot of things I like about the asian culture, especially the respect for elders and strong family ties. I also like the fact that, at least in Japan, people take a much more lax attitude towards things like nudity. As long as it’s not porn, what’s wrong with the female (or male) nude? I mean, here in the US, people got mad when a magazine printed a cover with a baby being breastfed. What’s more innocent than a baby being breastfed? Yet, American (puritan-based) culture finds it so offensive.
Two more of my photos, pictured here, have been selected for publication by an outside party. Schmap.com, which provides electronic guides to different cities has selected my pictures as representative of some beaches in Tampa, Fl. (USA) As you can imagine, this is once again exciting for me both as a chance to become well-known as well as a recognition by others as a good photographer! I’m so excited!
Today I received my copy of the photography book I’ve published, Eric Mesa’s Top 40 flickr Images. It’s a great feeling to finally have the book published after having worked on it since April. There were a few false starts with the publishing process as I figured out how to make sure my final PDF could be printed on Lulu.com’s printers. But the journey is finally over and I was able to make the book available to the public today.
The most important thing for me when it comes to sharing my photos is getting them seen. After all, there’s no point in publishing my photos if I didn’t intend for others to see them. I could have kept them on my computer for that purpose. The desire for others to see my work intensifies with photos I’ve put any kind of significant work into. Whether I’ve converted it to black and white and then spent some time burning and dodging or have created a complex composite work of art, I really desire for others to see the outcome of my labors.
As I have often claimed, Creative Commons is of most benefit to unknown artists. Bands, photographers, and painters (to name a few) will remain unknown if they charge for their work. Why? Because human nature is not to purchase something if you are unsure if you will like it. When an artist places their work under the CC license, they allow others to experience and use their work and share with others without financial risk. Later, the happy customers will very likely donate money or pay for that which they receieved and enjoyed. (Just ask Magnatunes)
flickr unleashed a new version of their website today. I am completely lost! Darn these UI upgrades! Why do they do these things? Hopefully things are better now.
When I found out a baby panda had been born at the National Zoo, I wanted to see him as soon as he was available. Unfortunately, the tickets to see him sold out right away. Now, nine months later, the tickets are largely an unnecessary formality. However, I didn’t know that when Danielle and I woke up at 5 am last Sunday to get a glimpse of Tai Shan. I had read that before 0830 tickets were not necessary to see the Giant Pandas, so I got all my gear ready on Saturday night and set my alarm for 0500. Then we went to go see Tai Shan. I found a group of photographers who all visit at least once a week (some every other day) to see what antics little Tai Shan was up to. He’s currently weaning, so he’s learned that bamboo goes in his mouth, but he still doesn’t eat it as voraciously as his parents. I had no idea I would find him so amusing! I ended up taken nearly 150 pictures of him. In raw mode, that cost me nearly 1.5 GB of space! Below are some of my favorite pictures from that day and I’ll be adding more soon.
In the sciences a pupil is taught formulas and learns to aply and adopt these to whichever situations present themselves. By contrast, artistic learning requires studying the masters and learning to imitate their techniques before being able to create a new one. By knowing the rules and how those great artists adhered to them or broke them, the student gains a greater understanding.
My own learning by imitation began with the internet and the homepage. I would navigate to one which looke dneat, view the source, consult my OReilly HTML book, and figure out how to do it myself. Flickr has had a similar effect on opening my mind to new possibilities.
Some people might look at my pictures, particularly those who are in the 400 views group and say, “so! Anyone can get to 400 views by climbing the Views bracket groups.” For the uninitiated, these are pools of pictures that start with 25 then go to 50, 100, and every hundred after that. The point of the group is that a photo with at least 25 views is placed in the 25 group and when it outgrows that group, it moves on to 50 and so on and so forth.
flickr has a top-secret formula, on par with Google’s PageRank, that ranks how interesting your pictures are. Since the top 500 appear each day on flickr.com/Explor e, they don’t want people to know the secret or they may game the system. Here are my top 10 most “interesting” pictures in suspense (reverse) order. See if you agree with flickr.
#10
Webmonkey has run a special on the ten best flickr mashups. What is a mashup with respect to flickr? I only know of mashups as songs where different groups put their songs together to create something new such as Jay-Z and Linkin Park. Basically, since flickr has opened up their API (as has Google with most of their web stuff), users can create all kinds of neat applications based on flickr without needed permission. You may have seen on some of my Linux screenshots where I have one such application that runs through my photostream. Well, these people have all kinds really neat website they have strung up. My favorite one is the sudoku one where instead of numbers, one has to play sudoku with pictures. Putting in djotaku for the username will allow you to play as me. I will be linking to my favorites on my links on the right over the next few days. Enjoy!
#6 this photo has been wonderful for me because not only is it one of my most favorite of my recent photos, but others have agreed! In just one week it went from #99 to #6. In fact, it was originally #8 when I was writing the list of #1-5.
#7 - taking this picture gave me the creeps. What if the glass broke?
It’s amazing how much of a difference there is between the number of views of my #1 viewed photo and my #2. They then follow in groups close to each other in number. (#5-10 to follow tomorrow)
#1 with 352 Views is
Months ago, I discovered one of the more creative photographers on flickr. Zannah takes pictures of her anime figurines in various locations as if they were real. (Think the “roaming gnome” from travelocity) Here are some of my favorites:
When I was browsing through techn0manc3r’s page, I clicked on usr-bin-girl and saw that the author was Zannah. I wondered if it was the same one because the picture looked familier. When I scrolled down the page, I saw that it was the same person! Now THAT is a small world if I ever saw one!
Here is the abbreviated commentary on my building of my new computer.Above are the new computer parts I used. In addition to these, I scavanged my DVD-ROM, DVD+-R, and hard drive from my old computer. I actually didn’t use the firewire ports as my motherboard has one in back and a connection for one in the front. I only use firewire for my video camera, so that was enough for my needs. I’m hanging on the to the firewire card for future potential projects.
My Kodak 3600 DX served me well. That 2.2 Megapixel camera was my first digital camera and I took many great shots with it. Some of my favorites are:
But it was time for me to finally upgrade to a camera with sufficient resolution, but which I could carry in my pocket. My Fujifilm Finepix S7000 is a great camera, but extremely bulky. It was a little annoying at Disney to have that huge thing with me. So today I bought a Fujifilm Finepix A345. It’s a 4.0 Megapixel camera. Yes, they have 5 Megapixel point and shoot cameras, but as I tell everyone, unless you plan to blow the pictures up to 16 x 20, a 3 MP camera is enough. So I wanted to give myself the lattitude to be able to do creative things with this camera, but without going overboard. My S7000 is now for planned shots that I want at the best quality. The camera is a little heavy to walk around with everywhere and since 11 Sept 2001, police don’t like people coming into places with bags. So I will have the A345 in my pocket for any shot that comes up and for those fun little shots that you can’t capture on the big boys. I’ll miss my Kodak, as it ushered me into this era, but I think I will really love the A345. And today, being the end of the year, seemed to be the perfect time to get the new guy.
I am extremely happy to announce that I have been approached by the author of The Cognoscenti for use of one of my pictures of Congress on his political blog as part of the header. I have just replied to give him permission to use the picture so I don’t know how long it will be until it is up. With the role that blogs have been playing recently in press and with their popularity soaring, this could be a boon for my photography.
Today would have been my grandmother’s birthday. She died this past March during my Spring Break and I loved her very much. I know that she’s up in Heaven now having a heckuva time with her husband who was taken from her more than twenty years ago. She remained faithful to him to the last day and never remarried. I miss her so much whenever I open up my phone and think of someone to call. I would always call her when I had a free minute. I always get so mad that she didn’t get to see the wedding or my graduation. I mean, I’d like to believe that she was able to see it from Heaven, but she didn’t get to hug me that day. I didn’t get to see the smile on her face. The best way I know to remember her is to use my talents and remember her through my photography. Here is a tribute to her on her bithday:
f-spot is a new program for organizing photos in Linux and is currently in early development. It looks really nice! It seems to rival most picture organizing software out there for any platform. The thing that really got my attention, however, was that the developers are asking people to send in RAW photo files so that they could build in support for that. If they successfully do that, I’ll never turn on my Windows computer again. The only thing I use Windows for nowadays is Photoshop. I have games like Sims 2, but I never have time to play them. Right now I’m too busy planning for the wedding and afterwards I’ll be too busy being married. Therefore, all I need to do is Office stuff and Internet which Linux does amazingly well. I hope the f-spot comes out soon.
Flickr just did the best and worst thing to me it could possibly do. As a Thank You for my going pro while they were still Beta, I got my subscription doubled to TWO years! Not only that, but they doubled my bandwidth to 2 GB. They may as well have made it unlimited because I’ve been having a hard enough time filling up my 1 GB limit! They also gave me the ability to freely upgrade two people to pro. I upgraded my mom. I’ll upgrade someone else later.
Last Monday I joined the Order of the Engineer. Although it has a title like the Loyal Order of Water Buffalo of the Flintstones, it is nothing at all like that. It is based off of a similar, but much older Canadian process known as The Ritual of the Calling of the Engineer. The American version was founded in 1970 by engineers at Cleveland State University. We will never had a meeting or pay dues again. The whole point of the order is to function as yet another institution I belong to which does not tolerate unethical behaviour. Unlike the IEEE, I have a ring to wear which symbolizes to all my commitment to the ethical practice of engineering. Official Order of the Engineer literature has this to say about the ring:
My first stop on this tour of the world was in Japan. gori-jp takes magnificent photos of his country and this is no exception. When I first saw the thumbnail for this image I thought it was a stack of mattresses. It turned out to be a very colorful building! We will surely see more of gori’s pictures in the future.
I’ve been traveling all over the world for the past month. No I didn’t suddenly win the lotto, I’m still a poor college student. But, through flickr, I have been traveling around the world through the photos of others. I really love doing this because it will be quite a few years before I can actually afford to travel all around the world, so the cheapest way is to enjoy the pictures of people who live in these areas. It has been amazing seeing the world through the lenses of these photographers, some of them have amazing quality work. This last week alone I have been to Malaysia, Iraq, and Japan. Over the next few days I will be blogging about some of my favorite pictures from around the world. This may be in addition to other posts if other exciting things happen around the world this week.
Architects ran through the engineering quad and in and out of bulidings screaming
Today is Dragon Day. As you probably know from my earlier posts, this is a huge tradition at Cornell. It was started back in the 1800s as a Spring Prank by the greatest Cornell prankster of them all, Willard Straight, and continues to this day as a rivalry between the Architects and Engineers. Yesterday they ran through all of the buildings decked in green paint and, althought you can’t tell because the picture is so small, skimpy clothes. However, if you look at the next picture, it’s quite clear. Yes, it was 30 degrees F outside and the freshman architects were running around in panties, bras, and boxers. But at least they were running, so that may have helped a bit. In this second picture I love the pair in the center of the shot, jumping for joy as though they were about to win a race.
For a while I had taken a break from photography. There were two basic reasons for this - first of all, it had become very cold and that disuaded me from taking my camera around. I was afraid of breaking it with the temperature difference between the outside air and the buildings. I was afraid of falling and breaking the camera or hurting myself trying to protect it. But, most importantly, with all my jackets and sweaters it was a bit of a hassle to carry my camera in its protective case. Second, I really like editing my pictures and making them a little closer to perfect. This was very time consuming and I didn’t have the time for it.
I didn’t take this picture, rather I found it on flickr.com, a cool new online community for hosting pictures. It’s based completely on open source software, which is pretty neat. But it’s a little hard to explain exactly how it works. Basically it links people’s pictures together in a complex network similar to facebook.com does for college students.
They have a neat little feature where I can blog from their site about any picture I find. This saves me the hassle of linking to the picture, loading up my blog, and making a post. It does, however, limit my abilities. For example, I can’t choose when the post will be up on my site or anything like that.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
For a while I was collecting a few links to document what was happening with the fight between Wordpress and WP Engine. But as time passed I just didn’t feel like writing the post and figured I’d just move on to other things I care about rather than continuing to watch what was going on with a piece of software I had abandoned. But yesterday I saw a news story on Tech Crunch about how Automattic had created a website to track how many customers had left WP Engine. It just reinforced my perception that this whole thing is being driven by ego rather than the usual company desires for money. I just had to shake my head at the pettiness of it all.
Back when I first started getting into the internet and hadn’t started using Linux yet, I needed a way to get onto the chat protocol known as IRC. Back then I used mIRC. Later on I started using Linux and used all kinds of IRC programs including XChat, BitchX, and Konversation. But recently most open source projects (which is what I’d used it for recently) have moved to the Matrix protocol. So I was surprised to see that mIRC was still a thing when I saw this news post:
I was on Identi.ca back when it first launched and I joined Mastodon a few years ago. Identi.ca had a decent number of FLOSS devs at the time, but by the time of Mastodon, Twitter was ascendant. So “no one” was on Mastodon. Even a few of the FLOSS developers I followed on Mastodon never posted on there. Network effects - it’s the reason almost everyone who threatens to leave Facebook never does; social media is only useful if you can be social (ie your friends/acquaintances are on it).
As I did last time, I wanted my web browser post to contain both news stories about browsers that have caught my attention and my thoughts on the newest web browser I’m trying out. Let’s start with the news.
As you probably have heard if you’re paying any attention to browsers, one of the selling points of using Brave is that they replace tracking ads on the net with their own ads and then “pay” you for viewing those ads. You can then take that money and pay it out to the creators you care about and continue to support the web while not being tracked and not just blocking all ads, keeping the creators from getting paid. Sounds too good to be true? Well, this article argues that it is. Here’s a screenshot of the new tab page on Brave on my Linux computer:
It’s been seven months since I last wrote about testing out new browsers on my computers. In addition to talking about what I’m doing, I wanted to muse about whether Mozilla really missed the mark with Firefox.
I’m going to start with the second point first. I forgot what brought them to my attention, but it turns out that while there are less browsers based on Firefox than there used to be (most of them are based on Chromium nowadays), there are at least two browsers based on Firefox that are still being developed: Waterfox and Palemoon. Waterfox is privacy-focused. They make a big deal about that on their site and FAQ. Palemoon is focused on being efficient and (it seems to me) still uses the old Firefox extensions. Why does this mean that Mozilla messed up? Well, first of all, I believe that Mozila sees Firefox as a privacy-focused browser. They may or may not have the same protections as Waterfox, but if they do, they have done a very bad job of marketing it. When it comes to Palemoon, I remember (at least according to commenters on Ars Technica) that when Firefox changed their extension format and caused all the old extensions to be deprecated, a lot of folks left for Chrome. At the time there wasn’t really much distinguishing the browsers, but getting rid of all the extensions, which are heavily used by power users, seemed like a really bad way to keep market share.
Brave didn’t last very long for me on Windows. I just don’t do enough on there to make use of their ad blocking and ad replacing tech. On the other hand, I’ve been using more and more of Vivaldi’s features. I just started using their Web panels - this allows you to have a web page on the left that loads up in a small section - great for pages that you would like to reference here and there without cluttering up your tabs. I’m using it on my Windows computer to keep some Web panels with notes on what I’d like to do in some games - like Civ VI, Darkest Dungeon, and Cities Skylines.
I’ve been using Vivaldi on Windows for about four months now. As I keep saying, my browser needs on Windows aren’t too huge. Mostly I access youtube, the Stardew Valley Farm uploaded, and Google Docs. But I want to keep checking out new browsers on Windows first precisely since they are so important on my Linux computer. I don’t want to mess up a good thing there.
I’ve been meaning to get to this post for a while now, but the recent Vivaldi update blog post spurred me to go ahead and write it. Vivaldi continues to do a decent job for me on Windows. As I’ve been planning on posting, I don’t do much web browsing on Windows. It’s mostly just uploading videos to YouTube and looking up various sites related to the games I’m playing. Pretty much any browser could fit in there. That said, in Vivaldi’s blog post they have a video demonstrating their new pause mode and before they pause things, they have the tabs tiled. I had completely forgotten that was a thing! It would have changed the way I did my FunkWhale vs Ampache video. That is, of course, a common issue with Vivaldi (and its predecessor, Opera). It has a million features and if you aren’t always making use of them, it’s easy to forget about them.
I’ve been using Vivaldi as my default browser for about a week now. As I said in the penultimate paragraph of the post where I mentioned exploring various browsers, I don’t really use my browser on Windows for much more than uploading YouTube videos. And I mentioned last time that it wasn’t the best setup when squished to a half 1080p Window while trying to upload YouTube videos with the tabs on the right. I also had to close the bar on the left. Here’s what that looks like:
This is the first post continuing my exploration of web browsers outside of Firefox and Google Chrome. You can read the introduction here.
Running Vivaldi for the first time.
For the first browser I wanted to check out on Windows, I decided to check out Vivaldi. My thought process is that I’m most likely to end up with Brave, so better to save that one for last. But as I went through the first-run process in Vivaldi and saw the nice polish the browser seems to have, it really started tugging on me, saying, “Are you sure you wouldn’t want to just stay with Vivaldi?” For this first post, I’d like to cover the first-run process and then a little video poking around the interface. This’ll be followed up in a while with any impressions I’ve come away from my usage of Vivaldi on Windows.
Well, on Linux I bounced back and forth between Firefox and Chrome, depending on which one was getting better performance. At this point, for what I do, Firefox is the winner for me. I use it on my laptop and desktop and it gets things done without getting in my way. I don’t necessarily have the most modern GUI setup because it tends to keep your GUI settings as you upgrade. This is what it looks like:
For the past six years, since Google Reader closed in 2013, I’ve been self-hosting my RSS feeds via Tiny Tiny RSS. Overall it’s been OK, except for a few years I missed that the update method had been changed and I hadn’t updated. Then I learned the new method was to clone the git repo. I did it and kept up with it. There was something I didn’t set up way back when with my MySQL so it’s got a weird miscount between the app and the tab header. But otherwise it was working just fine enough.
Although I’ve had a website since the mid-90s, it was 2005 or thereabouts that I first started hosting my own sites rather than relying on other sites. The first bit of hosting involved blogging and I tried a few different software packages before settling on Wordpress. And other than playing around with phpBB for my family and trying out Drupal for a bit for another site, that was it for a long time. Then Google abandoned Google reader so I moved to ttrss. And it was awesome and I didn’t have to worry it would ever go away because I was hosting it. But then this year I learned that Google Music was going to be going away and all the users were going to be pushed to Youtube Music. Unsure of whether my uploaded tracks would really migrate over (Amazon and some others have recently decided they weren’t going to host personally updated tracks), I decided to host Ampache. This had the side-benefit of actually allowing me to listen to my music collection at work since work blocks anything from Google Play. The most recent bit of self-hosting was because Google is about to get rid of Hangouts. Or rather, push all the regular Joes off in favor of making it a business tool. So that, coupled with Slack no longer working at work, led me to start up a Matrix server. That’s been plenty of fun, especially figuring out how to Federate, which allows me to access any open rooms from any other Matrix server.
I went with Backblaze first because they were highly recommended by LifeHacker. Then I chose Crashplan for my main Linux computer because Backblaze doesn’t do Linux. Crashplan offers a family plan that covers 2-10 computers, but I only need to cover 2 computers (my laptops don’t have anything that needs backing up). Covering two computers on Crashplan is more expensive than doing one computer on Crashplan and one on Backblaze. So the less efficient and more complicated setup is the cheaper one; oh well.
If you’ve been following Internet news recently, you know that the World Wid Web is celebrating its 25th Anniversary this year. Lots of people have been talking abou tthe first websites they ever set up. Unfortunately for me, my earliest sites were not captured by the Internet Archive. But I started on the web around 1995 or 1996 on Angelfire. From there I went to Tripod and Geocities. Eventually, I joined the two so that I could have a whopping 20 MB of hosting space between the two providers. I’ve mentioned it many times before, but my first web presence was a Squaresoft fan site - mostly revolving around Final Fantasy 6 (3 in the US) and Chrono Trigger. I also used it here and there in High School for various things. When I got back to Tripod in college and found that Tripod had deleted that site, I created a personal site for the first time. Around 2003 I started messing around with running my own server using Fedora Core 1. And since 2005 I’ve been blogging here at It’s A Binary World 2.0. And in the last few years I’ve had a web comic and a site that comments on commercial comics. It’s incredible that we’ve gone from 10 MB at Tripod to my current host giving me unlimited storage because it’s gotten so cheap. I’ve gone from one website to 3 with more to come in 2014.
I’ve been on flickr nearly since it first started. It’s been a great community to learn about photography and hook up with others who are really into photography as well. I have 10 700 photos on flickr so I’ve looked on various flickr developments with fear because of how invested I am in the site. I was scared when Microsoft was going to buy them because they haven’t always been as open a company as Yahoo. Frankly, I wasn’t too happy when Yahoo bought flickr because they’ve been so stagnant and development did stall for many years there. I used to listen to a lot of photography podcasts and they were constantly talking about the fall of flickr because the largest photo repository online was now Facebook. There were two reasons I never put photos on Facebook. At first it’s because I wanted to aggregate all the comments and views in one place. Later it was because posting photos to Facebook was a bad deal copyright-wise.
Lots of technologist have been suggesting that the entertainment industry should view illicit Internet sources of their products as indicative of unmet demand. Netflix is doing just that.
It’s been three years since the last time I posted about micro-blogging. Since then Google Buzz has been killed off, Google Plus has taken its place, Tumblr has arrived on the scene, and Identica doesn’t exist in the same way as it once did. I’m also using KDE now, so I went from using Gwibber to using Choqok:
I used Tumblr for about a year but I abandoned it because it’s just animated gifs and curation of the work of others. Out of all the Tumblrs I followed (about 20) only about 3 of them produced original content. All the rest were just reblogs. Also, there’s too much porn on there to use at work.
A little less than a month ago Ars had a story about Skype’s text messages being insecure. This is pretty devastating considering how many political activists are using Skype to stay secure from governments like China and Russia. The article doesn’t mention anything about the voice communications, but I would be a little cautious if your life actually depends on it. It turns out that Microsoft is scanning messages between users to make sure they aren’t spam or other bad messages. The problem is that your system is either 100% secure or it’s insecure. If Microsoft can see the messages then anyone else can by hijacking Microsoft’s servers. (And countries like China and Russia definitely have the skills to do that) This is a good reminder that you should make sure to read EULAs because this information has been there since Microsoft bought Skype. I wonder what technology political activists could use to stay safe in light of this revelation.
There’s an interesting tension in democratic nations. For democracy to work there needs to be transparency. A lack of transparency leads to corruption via information asymmetry. Humans, being humans, tend to exploit this to bad ends. Sometimes they have noble intentions and sometimes they have evil intentions, but the results are the same - an abuse of power. Examples include testing drugs and diseases on African-Americans, testing drugs on military and CIA employees without their knowledge, or the lies about the US winning in Vietnam. However, nations have always needed to maintain a level of secrecy to preserve information asymmetry over other nations. It’s why Caesar of the Roman Empire invented his eponymous cypher. It’s why all countries have an equivalent of the NSA to protect their secrets and obtain the secrets of other nations. So we want our countries to keep secrets, but not the wrong kinds of secrets.
I had something of an obsession with preserving history. It’s why I am constantly using photography to document my life. (And was doing so back when we had to use expensive film) A few months ago I wrote about how emulation can help us preserve our culture when it comes to video games. We’re in a weird place right now in our culture - everything is digital. If there were to be some sort of catastrophic apocalypse, any aliens that came to Earth would think we stopped inventing stuff in the Industrial Revolution. (Only a slight exaggeration) Even if we just look at humanity - if something were to wipe out technology (see many sci-fi stories including the manga/anime Nausicaa and Trigun) all the information we know - all the petabytes on the net would be inaccessible and lost forever. But if we dial it back a bit and forget about those doomsday scenarios - it’s important to see that culture is informed by what came before it. (Super heroes are just modern day greek gods, and so on) It’s why the Library of Congress collects important works of culture for preservation.
I’ve been reading a lot about kde-telepathy and it seems to be the next evolution beyond Kopete. So I decided to check it out in my Fedora Rawhide VM since that’s going to have the latest packages and telepathy is still in deep beta. When I installed all the packages that seemed to be important, I got the following when I launched it from the alt-F2 menu.
[caption id=“attachment_5130” align=“aligncenter” width=“384” caption=“kde-telepathy accounts menu in Fedora Rawhide (F17)”] [/caption]
I wrote this code a while back because a website that does the same thing seemed to miss my posts every other week. So I figured I’d write my own in python to do the same thing to me. Then I just put it into a cron job to automatically run it every Sunday. I’m going to be posting the code on my GPL code page. Here it is for you to see and for Google to index. Just fill in the appropriate variables with the secret keys you get from each site’s API.
Ever since late Fedora 12 or, for sure, Fedora 13, Evolution has been annoying me. I don’t know if it’s linked or coincidental, but it appears to have started getting buggy after I noticed it was using couchdb, a database that a lot of database people in the Linux world are getting all excited about. Evolution is the Linux equivalent to Microsoft Office Outlook. I switched to it a few years ago so that I could have tasks, email, and calenders in one spot. In theory, it’s perfect - it syncs with Hotmail, Gmail, and Google Calendar. I have all my todo items in there out to April of next year. It supports GPG signing and encryption via integration with Gnome’s Seahorse keyring. In practice, it has started taking forever to start a new email or enter a new task. I click the button and then have to wait for a long time until the dialog pops up; if it pops up. A lot of the time doing this causes the program to crash. I’ve filed a bug via the auto-bug-filing program in Fedora. There’s also a bug that doesn’t bother me as much where it keeps asking me to supply the password for my Hotmail account and not accepting it until the next time I restart the program. So I decided that I’d wait and see if things improved with Gnome 2.32, included in Fedora 14.
Almost exactly 2 years ago I started micro-blogging. Back then I signed up for Twitter, Pownce, and Plurk accounts. One month later I concluded that I really liked Twitter and that Pownce and Plurk were annoying. A few days later I discovered Identi.ca - a FLOSS version of Twitter and decided I would send frivolous tweets to Twitter and tecnological dents to Identi.ca. Then, a little while later Pownce was taken off the net. So what has happened in the intervening years?
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Kinda like this. Only with wires and computers and, really, having nothing to do with clouds.”] [/caption]
[caption id=“attachment_2634” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“I guess it’s in Beta because they haven’t removed the Jesus module yet”] [/caption]
While looking up driving directions on Google Maps from Barcelona, Spain to Madrid, Spain, I clicked the option for “walking” directions out of curiosity’s sake. This is the quickest route they gave me for walking. I don’t think that’s the most efficient way to go. First of all, I can’t walk on water. Second, why not go straight over land. That appears to be a shorter route. What makes this hilarious is the statement in yellow: “Walking directions are in beta. Use caution - This route may be missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths.” Missing is, “We may send you walking over water.”
I don’t even remember what I was going to search for in Google, but here’s what came up when I typed “why”.
This is becoming a huge “sport” on the net - to see what Google gives you when you type something into the search. It’s the first time I got something fun.
If you read a lot of technology news on the interwebs, it appears as though we will soon all be using cloud computing. No longer will people have hard drives or buy programs. They will lease it all from the cloud. (There are many, many things listed under “cloud computer” from Gmail to Twitter. I am talking about the ultimate goal of those who advocate “cloud computing” where your “computer” is on the net and you just connect from home) There are many reasons why cloud computing is not for everyone.
Let me start with the reason closest to my life - high end photography. I went to a baseball game on 10 April and shot over 4 GB of photos. I then loaded these photos onto my computer for editing and sharing with others. It seems to take longer that I can stand to get the photos off my camera and onto my hard drive. I can’t imagine how annoying it would be to have to wait to upload them onto a cloud computing environment. I shoot only in RAW files so I can do some serious editing on the photos and retain the best quality. Sometimes I delete up to half of the photos from a shoot because it’s hard to tell from the back of the camera if it’s subtly out of focus. So imagine waiting forever to upload photos only to ultimately end up deleting them! Photoshop and Lightroom require pretty beefy computers to work correctly, I can’t imagine how slow it would be to have my screen refresh after each edit. It already takes longer than instantaneous on my home computer. This use case - high end photography - also lead me to another reason cloud computing will not be for everyone: bandwidth limits.
As I mentioned in my post Micro-blogging: One Month Later, I hadn’t really used Pownce much at all. Even now, 4 months later, I haven’t touched it. In fact, ever since that post in August, I only used it once to transfer a file to my brother. I thought there wasn’t much room on the net for so many micro-blogging services. Most people, including CNN’s Rick Sanchez, use Twitter. And if you’re hard-core into libre software, there’s Identica. So I didn’t see why anyone would use Pownce. On top of that, Pownce was supposed to make money by getting people to pay for extra services. I just didn’t see any value in what they were charging for. So, I wasn’t too surprised when I got an email last Monday that Pownce was going to close shop.
Another micro-blogging post? What’s going on here? Well, when I first did my micro-blogging post, Identi.ca had just gone public and I didn’t think there was a reason to join yet another micro-blogging service. But two things came together to convince me to check out Identi.ca. First of all, I’ve overcome my reluctance to using micro-blogging services. Second, I heard an interview on Linux Outlaws with the creator of Identi.ca.
As you can see, it’s pretty much inspired by Twitter. It has a very similar interface and reply mechanisms. I got a good vibe from it - as I did with Twitter. Something about the aethetics just made me want to use it - just like Twitter and unlike Pownce. Of course, there are some negatives with Identi.ca being inspired by Twitter. Chief amongst these is the reply functionality. Only Plurk (with Pownce in a distant second) have correctly implemented replies in a way that makes sense. Without a threaded reply, it’s pretty hard to correctly follow the conversation that may come out of something posted on Twitter and Identi.ca. Of course, maybe that’s done on purpose. Perhaps replies are an afterthought because that’s not what these micro-blogging services believe micro-blogging to be about. I’d LOVE to see a mode in Identi.ca (just another tab, really) where posts could be viewed in a threaded fashion to be able to follow the conversation better. That would help Identi.ca leapfrog over Twitter in useability and functionality.
In my first look at the micro-blogs I had some pretty good feelings about Twitter. That has basically carried over for the past few weeks. I added a Twitter plugin to my blog, using it for quick thoughts I don’t want to elaborate on with a blog post. I’m also using Twitux on my Linux computer for posting without having to load up the Twitter site. I haven’t really been using the Flock Twitter plugin because it doesn’t seem to update correctly or often enough. I’m enjoying using it for those quick thoughts. I’m definitely going to keep using Twitter for the foreseeable future. So I feel the way about Twitter as I did a month ago - I like it.
I’ve known about micro-blogging for 1-2 years now - ever since I first started hearing about Twitter. Up until now I’ve been vehemently against the whole micro-blogging trend. To begin with, it requires anyone who wants to keep up with my writing to check yet another website! On top of that, I just can’t see a point to it. I even told my brother last weekend, why can’t I just have nice, short posts on my blog? But recently I’ve been hearing more and more about these micro-blogging services. It keeps being mentioned over and over on the net, in podcasts, pretty soon I’m sure CNN will be doing a piece on it. I know I’m late to the party when, according to Wikipedia, Barak Obama and Hilary Clinton have Twitter accounts. But, still, I hear all these complaints micro-blogging overload and people talking about ridiculously inane things such as what they just ate for lunch.
I’m uninstalling BitTorrent 5.0.9 from my Windows computer because every time the computer starts up, if I don’t exit from the program, all of my internet-related programs lose their connections. This is way too misbehaved and I’m sick of it. I’m moving to Transmission or one of the other ones that aren’t crap. I can’t believe the original program has been surpassed.
Back when I reviewed an earlier version of Flock, one of my complaints was that it was impossible to watch Youtube because the video was always stuttering. Well, the Flock programmers have fixed that bug and it’s now definitely usable to watch Youtube videos. I’ll admit that I only watch, perhaps, 1 a month, but to most people that was a deal-killer before.
When most people think of the GPL, if they think of it at all, they tend to think of Linux and perhaps other operating systems. However, there are many benefits to using the GPL for programs on a smaller level. For example there is a Go Application in Facebook. This programmer could have gone through the near impossible headache of creating an implementation of Go.
However, as Wikipedia mentions, it is very tough to create sofware to play go, “While the strongest computer chess software has defeated top players ( Deep Blue beat the world champion in 1997), the best Go programs only manage to reach an average amateur level.” This has to do with the high complexity level of the game’s strategy.
This is a test post for a blog post I’m writing about flock 0.9. It should appear in the next 30 minutes or so after I finish up. This is bold, underlined, and italics.
Dear Friend,
Better days greetings to you and your entire family and i pray that may the almighty lord guard you and your family. In our search for a trustworthy individual to work with us on a very important and confidential project, we came across your esteemed profile.I want to use this opportunity to introduce myself well to you, I am DESMOND EYADEMA,The Ex late PRESIDENT SON OF TOGO, I call you in respect of my consignment boxes in NEW YORK, which I want you to assist me and stand as my foreign beneficiary to receive my fund over there in NEW YORK, this fund am writing you about is
$38.5million U.S.Dollars which my late father deposited under GHANA HIGH COMMISSION or I and my mother,and Mr.JOHNSON ASCOT who was suppose to receive this consignment
in NEW YORK, Was demanding for 50% which I and my mother did not agree on for any reason,that was why we have to stop the delivery to him immediately, and search for another Beneficiary who can help us on this.I will give you 20% for the total fund involve for your assistance,because that was the former agreement we have with our foreign partner.Mr.JOHNSON ASCOT before he later change is mind because of his greed
that is why i and my mother put a stop to the delivery to him ,please if you are willing to help us, kindly reply me for more details.Thanks and God Bless.
Yours Sincerely,
Desmond Eyadema.
Most of you tech readers have heard of The Jargon File in which esr maintains the best of geek jargon and the lore behind their etymologies. What most people didn’t know is that esr also maintains a science fiction jargon file. It’s not as funny as The Jargon File or as comprehensive, but it’s pretty neat and a fun read. Perhaps if enough people read it, he will elevate it to the level of The Jargon File - so go read it!
To see a graph of search trends of any search term on Google, just mozey on over to www.google.com/trends and separate any search terms by commas. It’s quite a bit of fun!
Alright! Google Earth 4 has been released. This time around Google has not let us Linux users high and dry! In fact, they have released Windows, Linux AND Macintosh versions of Google Earth! I think I will finally download it - I had been waiting for the rumored Linux version. Read the exciting announcement here and look for me to be blogging about it in a few days.
AOL and Yahoo have announced they will allow companies to pay them money to guarantee their emails will get past the spam filters and appear certified. I don’t like this at all. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I think it’s all too easy once this kicks in for companies who aren’t paying to get past the spam filters to suddenly find themselves sucked in. Kinda like the Mobster movies where the shop owner who doesn’t buy “protection” gets his store trashed. And what’s to stop them from extending this to us, the normal guys? Email is wonderful and powerful because it’s free! I can shoot off as many emails as I want all over the world without paying $0.39-$2 to get it to the person. Therefore I can send an email just to let someone know I’m thinking of them. I don’t have to come up with a whole letter to justify the cost. I hope I’m wrong. Darn spammers messing up the net for the rest of us!
If you want to play Civ4 in the most unique way I’ve ever seen, then head on over to Demogame.civfanatics.net. What do they do? They play a civ game where a group of people act as a president and cabinet controlling what goes on in the game. In other words, I play for a few turns and do stuff based on what we decided to do as a group. I’m guessing that they paint the broad picture and I get to do whatever in the details that gets us in that direction. It is certainly much more involved than the way my brothers and I used to play. It’s very neat and I suggest you check out their page to at least get a feel for how involved their rules are.
It’s almost been a month since I went to Cancun, Quintanilla Roo, Mexicao. I meant to blog about it, but at first I was busy getting my married life and my room back into order. While in Cancun I decided not to rent a car in case the drivers were as crazy as the ones I’d heard about in South America. They actually ended up driving just as good (or bad) as people do in Tampa and arguably a lot better than how they drive in Miami. Since I wasn’t actually in Cancun, but in Puerto Aventuras (Adventure Port) we had to take a taxi to get anywhere Interesting.
There’s a reason why open source is so awesome - by providing other programmings with the inner workings of your program, they can create new and amazing uses for it that you could never imagine. One of the best examples of this is the fact that Google has release the API (aplication programming interface, I think) to their new map program. People have been using this in all kinds of interesting ways. A new real estate website uses the program to show users exactly where their offerings are on both the sattelite map and the road map. This article talks about some of the other ways that peole have been using the APIs.
I recently began listening to the followup to The Lexus and The Olive Tree, entitled The World is Flat: A Short History of the 21st Century. The latter was written in 2005 so the author has had time to absorb the true impact of the internet, while it was just getting revved up when he wrote the former book. His key point in the first part (of three) of the book is that there have been many events which have caused the world to flatten. This flattening is a metaphor for a leveling of the playing field across many different industries. For example, Linux has leveled the playing field in computers by allowing poorer people to afford computers since they don’t have to pay for an operating system or programs. Fiber optics have leveled the playing field for India by allowing data to be transmited so quickly and with so much bandwidth that companies are able to do more and more abroad, allowing educated Indians to have jobs of a caliber they could not have before. You get the point.
Andrew, on a dare from some of his mates in the Galactic Irregulars, tried to outdo the Numa Numa guy with his own lip sync to a song. Personally, I don’t think it’s whacky enough. He’s driving and the music is playing while he sings to some of the lyrics. It is kinda neat to see the cars over his shoulder, but nothing that I think would unseat Jersey boy. Andrew may have once looked comical (as we all do when we are in are early teens), he now looks like someone who could probably put up a good fight. Perhaps something a little whackier would be funny, but you can be the judge!
According to CNN Google will begin offering a new map service to rival and surpass Mapquest. They bought this service from Keyhole, a company with a large repository of satellite pictures of people’s houses. Some people are protesting this from a privacy point of view. I don’t see why they are protesting. It’s not as though I can pull up a live picture from your house. All I can do is see a picture that was taken at some point in the past (Google claims 6 months). I don’t see how that’s a privacy issue? Right now I could pay someone to go take pictures of your house and you probably wouldn’t know. As long as they aren’t tracking people or anything (something nearly impossible with civilian satellites), it’s not a big deal. If you look at the CNN articles you will see from the pictures that the resolution isn’t all that. It’s more of a cool geek thing than anything else. Actually, the article did mention the only good use I can see for this service, checking to see just how far that hotel is from the beach when they claim they are just “minutes away from the water”. Actually, I can think of one other thing. If you are trying to figure out which houses to visit with your realtor, you can look it up on Google and see just how big the yard is, front property, etc.
I was looking at the stats for my server and I saw that four people had come here by searching: “a mexican and asian guy singing the numa numa remix”. I googled it myself and saw that you guys had been tricked by Google. I had written about Asia in one post and Numa Numa in the other. None of the other search results had anything to do with it, and mine was one top. I was very happy to be the top item in the search, but felt bad that people coming here weren’t getting what they wanted. I looked around on the Internet to see just what this Mexican and Asian Numa Numa dance was all about. Turned out to be quite hilarious! So, I decided to copy the video and put it on this server for you to be able to see! (Because it was on some weird site that was full of weird ads.) So you can access it here!. Save it to your computer and then enjoy the Numa Numa happiness!
Yesterday there was one bright spot in the gloom and doom of the death of my grandmother. I saw the real music video to the Numa Numa song. It’s a European video, so it’s pretty cheesy, In fact, it’s hard to say which is funnier, the real video or the new one on the internet. I found a place containing the real video as a realvideo format. You can view it here. I will be copying it to my server soon so that it can always be experienced.
Remember when I talked about Numa Numa guy getting his big break on tv? He’s got a name now and it’s Gary Brolsma. (Well, he always had a name, but now we know it!) Following is a CNET article I found about him and my comments following any paragraphs I feel warrant comment.
Internet fame is cruel mistress for video dancer
02/26/05 | 07:24 AM PST
Jason George
Here is the cautionary tale of a guy from New Jersey who made the grave mistake of uploading a clip of himself lip-syncing.
The Numa Numa guy, who I wrote about in my first blog here, was on the news today on MSNBC. He was also on VH1’s best week ever. Whether he intended to have this video shown all over the internet, or whether it was accidentally put into his file sharing folder, he is now a huge celebrity on par with the Star Wars Kid.
It’s pretty interesting how these videos explode online. First of all, they are only being passed along by word of mouth - either emailing your friends about this crazy website or through IMs. Yet, soon everyone knows about it. I’m hard pressed to find any engineering students who don’t know what Numa Numa is. In fact, while waiting in line to see Mo Rocca, someone was singing along to Numa Numa. It was a cool conversation peice. Yet, it’s the Tv news who’s always slow to report on such things. Anyone who goes to see Numa Numa based on the the tv coverage is a late adopter. These are the people who didn’t buy DVD players until almost everyone had one.
As I’ve been exploring the move from Wordpress over to Hugo, I’ve learned that Hugo has pipelines that can run when it “compiles” the site. One such set of pipelines can automatically convert images to different formats or change the resolution of the image. They give the example of WebP and how it can potentially be smaller than a JPEG image without a perceptible loss of quality. I remember when there was a big controversy with Wordpress because after not having support for WebP for so long, they decided they were going to convert everyone’s image to WebP after upload. For image-heavy sites this could result in a large hard disk usage, so I think the conversion was left as opt-in. As I started researching, I found out that WebP is SOOO 14 years ago! The new format supported by all the browsers is AVIF. This is supposed to be every better for photographic images than WebP. But even THAT is not the newest (and supposed) best format as that would be JPEG XL. However, Google took it out of Chromium due to a “lack of desire” and since every browser but Firefox is Chromium, that’s as good as a ban on the format.
As I’ve been exploring the move from Wordpress over to Hugo, I’ve learned that Hugo has pipelines that can run when it “compiles” the site. One such set of pipelines can automatically convert images to different formats or change the resolution of the image. They give the example of WebP and how it can potentially be smaller than a JPEG image without a perceptible loss of quality. I remember when there was a big controversy with Wordpress because after not having support for WebP for so long, they decided they were going to convert everyone’s image to WebP after upload. For image-heavy sites this could result in a large hard disk usage, so I think the conversion was left as opt-in. As I started researching, I found out that WebP is SOOO 14 years ago! The new format supported by all the browsers is AVIF. This is supposed to be every better for photographic images than WebP. But even THAT is not the newest (and supposed) best format as that would be JPEG XL. However, Google took it out of Chromium due to a “lack of desire” and since every browser but Firefox is Chromium, that’s as good as a ban on the format.
I’m a bit late to updating the list this year. There aren’t too many new entries, but there are a few changes.
Politics
5-4 Pod – Official Description:5-4 is a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks. It’s a progressive and occasionally profane take on the ideological battles at the heart of the Court’s most important landmark cases; an irreverent tour of all the ways in which the law is shaped by politics. Presented by Slow Burn co-creator Leon Neyfakh, 5-4 is a production of Prologue Projects. Eric’s Commentary: If you really want to see how crazy it is that 9 men and women who server for life have such control over American life, you can be silly like me and listen to this show. I often find the topics and conclusions depressing (whether it’s the current Supreme Court or one from the past) The hosts are entertaining, though. They’re all practicing or former lawyers.
First off, I’ve mentioned before that I enjoy listening to the science fiction short story podcast Escape Pod. Today I listened to episode 949, A Foundational Model for Talking to Girls. Large Language Models (LLMs), what we have colloquially called AI for the past few years, have been a giant source of wonder and consternation in the world. AI in general has long been a topic for science fiction, but this short story tackles the current LLM version of AIs. I found it to be a very fun episode that is a master class in providing a huge amount of backstory without an exposition dump. I don’t want to spoil anything about this story, but they naturally drop all these background details about the world that make me want more stories in this universe. It also has a fun, light tone to it. I highly recommend you either listen or read (the full text is available at the episode link above)
Once again I used a script to pull out the official descriptions of the podcasts as well as the URL where I access the feed. After the official description you’ll see my commentary about the podcast.
Politics
5-4 Pod - Official Description:5-4 is a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks. It’s a progressive and occasionally profane take on the ideological battles at the heart of the Court’s most important landmark cases; an irreverent tour of all the ways in which the law is shaped by politics. Presented by Slow Burn co-creator Leon Neyfakh, 5-4 is a production of Prologue Projects. Eric’s Commentary: If you really want to see how crazy it is that 9 men and women who server for life have such control over American life, you can be silly like me and listen to this show. I often find the topics and conclusions depressing (whether it’s the current Supreme Court or one from the past) The hosts are entertaining, though. They’re all practicing or former lawyers.
In short succession 2 podcasts I listen to covered the movie adaptation of The Pelican Brief. If you watched it back in the 1990s you probably didn’t realize how bananas the plot of this movie was. It sounds OK in short summary - some evil corporations kill 2 US Supreme Court judges to prevent a certain ruling. But once the podcasts go into the details of the movie - it makes next to 0 sense.
This time around I’ve written a Python script to take the OPML file from Podcast Republic and generate the list along with URLs and official descriptions for all the podcasts. If I have additional thoughts I’ll add them after the official description.
The World Around Us
99% Invisible - Official Description: Design is everywhere in our lives, perhaps most importantly in the places where we’ve just stopped noticing. 99% Invisible is a weekly exploration of the process and power of design and architecture.
I’ve both added and dropped some podcasts since last time around. Where I’m listing the same podcast as last year I may use the same description as in the past with slight (or no) variation.
Public Radio
Radiolab – Heard about them because sometimes their stories are used on This American Life. Radiolab is a lot like TAL except with a much bigger focus on sound effects. It is, in a way, the descendant of the old radio shows of the 30s and 40s. (Approx 30-45 min)
I’ve both added and dropped some podcasts since last time around. Where I’m listing the same podcast as last year I may use the same description as in the past with slight (or no) variation.
Public Radio
Radiolab – Heard about
them because sometimes their stories are used on This American Life.
Radiolab is a lot like TAL except with a much bigger focus on sound
effects. It is, in a way, the descendant of the old radio shows of the
30s and 40s. (Approx 30-45 min)
I’ve both added and dropped some podcasts since last time around. Where I’m listing the same podcast as last year I may use the same description as in the past with slight (or no) variation.
Public Radio
Radiolab – Heard about
them because sometimes their stories are used on This American Life.
Radiolab is a lot like TAL except with a much bigger focus on sound
effects. It is, in a way, the descendant of the old radio shows of the
30s and 40s. (Approx 30-45 min)
I’ve both added and dropped some podcasts since last time around. Where I’m listing the same podcast as last year I may use the same description as in the past with slight (or no) variation.
Public Radio
Radiolab – Heard about them because sometimes their stories are used on This American Life. Radiolab is a lot like TAL except with a much bigger focus on sound effects. It is, in a way, the descendant of the old radio shows of the 30s and 40s. (Approx 30-45 min)
I’ve both added and dropped some podcasts since last time around. Where I’m listing the same podcast as last year I may use the same description as in the past with slight (or no) variation.
Video Games
Giant Beastcast – The East Coast Giant Bomb crew. This podcast is more about video game culture and news stories. It spends a lot less time on the “what you’ve been playing” section. I’ve actually grown to enjoy this one way more than the Bombcast because of the focus on the cultural and news aspects.
I’ve both added and dropped some podcasts since last time around. Ever since I started using Doggcatcher on my cellphone I’ve been able to listen to more podcasts because, even without the pitch distortion my sandisk had, it plays the content a lot faster. Where I’m listing the same podcast as last year I may use the same description as in the past with slight (or no) variation.
Video Games
Giant Bombcast – This is a HILARIOUS podcast that is mostly about video games. I say it’s mostly about video games because these guys often will go off on random tangents about what energy drinks they have, what they ate, what they did between video gaming, and other topics. However, they always get back to video games and provide a really fun podcast. Segments include What You’ve Been Playing, News of the World, and EMAILS! My favorite parts are “What You’ve Been Playing” and “Emails”. It can be a bit geeky in the same way that some of the tech podcasts I listen to are geeky. First Ryan passed away and then Vinnie went to New York. With the podcast being so personality driven, the changes almost drove me away, but I’ve stayed and the new talent is pretty good. (Approx 2.5 hours long)
I’ve both added and dropped some podcasts since last time around. Ever since I started using Doggcatcher on my cellphone I’ve been able to listen to more podcasts because, even without the pitch distortion my sandisk had, it plays the content a lot faster. Where I’m listing the same podcast as last year I may use the same description as in the past with slight (or no) variation.
Video Games
Giant Bombcast – This is a HILARIOUS podcast that is mostly about video games. I say it’s mostly about video games because these guys often will go off on random tangents about what energy drinks they have, what they ate, what they did between video gaming, and other topics. However, they always get back to video games and provide a really fun podcast. Segments include What You’ve Been Playing, News of the World, and EMAILS! My favorite parts are “What You’ve Been Playing” and “Emails”. It can be a bit geeky in the same way that some of the tech podcasts I listen to are geeky. First Ryan passed away and then Vinnie went to New York. With the podcast being so personality driven, the changes almost drove me away, but I’ve stayed and the new talent is pretty good. (Approx 2.5 hours long)
I’ve both added and dropped some podcasts since last time around. Ever since I started using Doggcatcher on my cellphone I’ve been able to listen to more podcasts because, even without the pitch distortion my sandisk had, it plays the content a lot faster. Where I’m listing the same podcast as last year I may use the same description as in the past with slight (or no) variation.
Video Games
Giant Bombcast – This is a HILARIOUS podcast that is mostly about video games. I say it’s mostly about video games because these guys often will go off on random tangents about what energy drinks they have, what they ate, what they did between video gaming, and other topics. However, they always get back to video games and provide a really fun podcast. Segments include What You’ve Been Playing, News of the World, and EMAILS! My favorite parts are “What You’ve Been Playing” and “Emails”. It can be a bit geeky in the same way that some of the tech podcasts I listen to are geeky. I miss Ryan since his untimely death last year - the guys do well enough without him, but he brought something very special to the podcast that isn’t there anymore. I felt like I actually knew him after about 200 weekly episodes where I spent almost 3 hours with him each time. (Approx 2.5 hours long)
Before continuing on, listen to this short story. (It’s only about 10 minutes long. It starts at about 1 min 50 seconds. Or read the transcript here)
When I first heard this story I thought it was a pretty interesting description of the dating world and how people are often looking for people who conflict with themselves. Note the first exchange our heroine has on her date:
I’ve cut back a lot because I have less time to listen to podcasts. Here are the ones I have now:
Video Games
Giant Bombcast – This is a HILARIOUS podcast that is mostly about video games. I say it’s mostly about video games because these guys often will go off on random tangents about what energy drinks they have, what they ate, what they did between video gaming, and other topics. However, they always get back to video games and provide a really fun podcast. Segments include What You’ve Been Playing, News of the World, New Releases and EMAILS! My favorite parts are “What You’ve Been Playing” and “Emails”. It can be a bit geeky in the same way that some of the tech podcasts I listen to are geeky, (Approx 2.5 hours long)
I’ve been listening to podcasts for about two years now. I got into it because I love listening to some NPR programs, but they are always on when I’m at work or asleep on the weekends. Eventually, I heard on NPR that they have podcasts of various shows. I checked it out right away because in Maryland NPR is on 88.1 which is always being interfered with by SiriusXM radio receivers. At first I only listened to a few podcasts because I didn’t own an iPod and I so I burned the podcasts to a CD-R every few days. That got expensive, so I got an iPod shuffle. Since podcasts don’t take up too much space, I started getting into more and more podcasts. Some I discovered in magazines and others were recommendations from Dan. So, I thought I would share the podcasts I listen to so that those following this blog could perhaps discover some new podcasts they didn’t know about. Dan, for example, recently got into This American Life. (I think after I kept telling him about it - but he may have discovered it independently) I’m going to put links to the actual podcast URL, so just copy that into your podcather or iTunes.
This book is the definition of a niche product. The only people I think would enjoy this are the intersection in the Venn diagram of D&D fans and Rick and Morty fans. I know I’ve been watching Rick and Morty since the first season and I can’t imagine that I would find this collection if my kids hadn’t gotten me into D&D a year or so ago. Almost all of the humor comes from D&D jokes and Easter Eggs.
Parodies are hard to do well. The worst parodies are unbearable, the best deconstruct the tropes. I was afraid The Mocking Dead would be the former, but since I got it as part of a huge Humble Bundle, it was nearly free for me to check out. Luckily it turned out to be less Scary Movie and more like something Mel Brooks would put together.
This book is a commentary on the sad state our country has been in since the 70s and 80s when it comes to computer crime. Although there should always be consequences for skirting the law we have often taken it a bit too far. This graphic novel was sad to read in the wake of Aaron Schwartz’ suicide when threatened by law enforcement.
Disclosure: I received this book as part of the Goodreads.com First Reads program in which the winner recieves a copy of the book in exchange for a review. (It’s slightly more complicated than that, see the Goodreads First Reads terms for all the details)
I love reading these types of histories about culture. I have read similar books about photography and animation published by Taschen. This isn’t my first time reading about the history of comics, I also read 10 Cent Scare and Grant Morrison’s Supergods. Anyone who’s been reading my reviews for a while knows that I love comics and actually run a comics analysis site, www.comicpow.com.
It’s December and I should have gotten all of my Kickstarter products by now. But that’s not exactly what happened. Every single one of my Kickstarters was late except the one I had the least faith and relationship with - Random Encounter’s Let Me Tell You a Story.
I’m writing this in late August - by the time this post appears I should have received all of my Kickstarter goods or they should be in the mail. Interestingly, even though the Kickstarter backer cycles were spread over about a three month period, they’re all supposed to be delivering the product at around the same time - 4th quarter of this year. As of the time of this writing, this is the status of my Kickstarters:
Those of you who have been reading this blog long enough know that I often write my blog posts during my lunch break at work and set it to post at some point in the future. I’m writing this post almost 1 month before it is to appear on the blog. So in the middle of July I find myself in what many who have backed projects probably experience as the Kickstarter Lull. I backed a project by I Fight Dragons and interviewed them about it here and I backed a comic project by Greg Pak and Jonathan Coulton. During the backing period as a way to drum up support there was a constant stream of both updates and digital goodies. IFD, in particular, gave backers 2 albums (live concert recording and a conceptual album) and a concert film. A little while after the backing period was over, the projects contacted us for the info they needed to fulfill our backer rewards. Since then I haven’t heard from either of them. On the rational side, I’m glad they’re focusing on creating what we paid them to create. But after the constant communications it just feels odd to have “radio” silence. Now we just wait for the products to be created. In the case of these two projects, the members involved are all veterans: IFD put out records before having a record company contract and Greg Pak has already done about a half dozen Kickstarters. So, outside of catastrophe, I don’t fear for my money. I could see where this silence might be more disturbing with an unproven team.
I had no intention of seeing Man of Steel in the movie theater; I was voting for Monsters University. I’ve grown quite tired with the constant universe rebooting. We all know where Superman (or Batman or Spider-Man etc) came from. Can we not waste another 2+ hours and $millions to retell that. Why can’t we just tell new stories? These characters have such rich histories and such iconic villains that it just seems so pointless to keep hitting the same notes. Additionally, while I liked Snyder’s Watchmen, I was NOT a fan of Suckerpunch. But my parents wanted to treat Danielle and I to a nice dinner for our wedding anniversary and Man of Steel was the movie that would get us out of the theater in time to make out reservations.
The thing I like the most about Twitter is the ability to interact with creatives in real time. In the past you had to write a letter to a writer, artist, musician, etc and hope that, maybe, they’d actually read it and that, maybe, they’d feel compelled to reply with something more than boilerplate. I started following Paolo Rivera after meeting him at Baltimore Comic-Con. (Related topic: meeting a bunch of creators in person at Baltimore Comic-Con helped make them more “real” to me. I’m not a jerky person, but it really does give me pause when I post a criticism to someone on twitter. Unlike these guys.) So when Paolo tweeted something from his blog that I wanted to comment on, I kept failing the captcha he had on the comments. I tweeted and (to my surprise) was retweeted by Paolo:
One always wonders if and when those classes you take in high school will be important. For me, as an engineer, most of my high school classes were laying the foundation for the classes I’d take in college. I’ve used plenty of those classes in my work and personal life. One of the classes that has served me well all these years was Speech and Debate. You don’t realize how long a minute is until you have to talk for a minute in front of class. It has helped me with college presentation and work presentations. Most recently, the following two video reviews were completely ad-libbed. I didn’t even have any notes to go off of. (In the AvX video I did take the comic with me to remember the name of the penciller)
Start here before FF
Fantastic Four By Jonathan Hickman # 1 - Volume 1
I’ve always been a Fantastic Four fan, but it’d been a long time since I last read F4 when I picked up FF. Being as this was a #1 of a new title, I was very confused about what in the world was going on with the Future Foundation. I knew what’d happened to ellicit the name change, but that’s about it. Well, if you read this book, it will all make sense. Right from the beginning you meet one of the future members of the FF. And later on you meet almost all of the rest of them. This TP also introduces the Reed Council which is the whole reason for the the first FF story arc. Hickman is like Marvel’s Grant Morrison. If you really want to understand FF, you are really going to need to AT LEAST read his run on F4. By the end of this TP, almost EVERYTHING from FF had been setup. I’d say, about 15-20% has yet to occur.
Not Feelin’ It
Astonishing X-Men # 36 - Monstrous, Part 1
The only story arc in Astonishing I haven’t read yet is Exogenic. I am really not liking this one. I know this is the first issue, but I’ve also read the third one due to when I got into Astonishing. I really, really hate this art style. It just looks weird and almost like a super deformed (in the manga sense) version of the X-Men and I don’t think it fits with the previous art style or tone of the book.
It was OK
Uncanny X-Men # 539 - Losing Hope
I was hoping this was linked to what happened in Generation Hope #8, but sadly it does not appear to be. We do get to see how M-Day has affected some former mutants, and that’s neat. We also get to see why Wolverine acts so strange around her. (Although an astute reader probably already guessed why) This issue felt like a very fast read and I wasn’t left as satisfied as I’ve been with recent Gillen works. Oh well. You win some, you lose some.
Injecting some fresh blood into the X-Men
Generation Hope: The Future is a Four-Letter Word # 1 - TPB
We live in a world where the big comic companies are in financial trouble. We’ve got so many things to occupy our attention and many of them are free. So we’re drowning in reboots and revamps and retellings. Ghost Rider is a woman now. Captain America is back for the umpteenth time. So it’s quite refreshing to see Marvel going in a different direction with the X-Men. Rather than doing a reboot so we can see the X-Men when they first became X-Men, they are introducing new, young mutants.
Good Focus on the New Guy
Batman, Incorporated # 7 - Medicine Soldiers
I like this Batman, Inc issue because it mostly focused on the new guy with Batman playing a very small part. The dynamic between Man-of-Bats and Raven is played very well. There’s a lot of history here and you can feel it. The only bad thing with this issue is the same as all the other issues, it feels like these books need to be a bit longer. I feel like too much story is getting compressed into too few pages and the story’s suffering a bit for it. I think it’d be best if these were all two-parters like the series-opening Japanese story.
Glad I Waited
Uncanny X-Men # 535 - Breaking Point, Part One
I just got back into comics in May after a 10-12 year hiatus. boy have I missed a lot! So I’ve been working my way through the trade paperbacks and hard covers to get caught up on just what happened to one of my favorite Marvel teams. I was going to read this issue when I saw in issue 534.1 that it involves the Breakworld which was mentioned as returning for the first time since Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men. So I put this issue aside and finished reading my Morrison New X-Men so I could read Astonishing X-Men. All of this is a very roundabout way of saying - it’s perfect for me! It’s as though things are picking up where that story left off. We have Kitty still intangible and even Danger (the embodiment of The Danger Room) still around. The only thing different is that Beast is gone because he is now with the Secret Avengers. (And Armor was left behind on purpose) And so this storyline is awesome for me, but what about the regulars?
A Fitting Followup to Morrison’s Run
Astonishing X-Men Omnibus # 1 - Astonishing X-Men Omnibus
I came into this right on the heels of Morrison’s run in the Ultimate 3 Volume collection. I know there’s an Uncanny Volume that takes place between the two, but it doesn’t look like it contained anything that kept me from understanding what was going on in this story. (Plus this Omnibus version has an intro to the X-Men that explains where Professor X is)
Things Really get Real
New X-Men Ultimate Collection # 2 - Book 2
At first the book continues directly from the previous one. We learn that Prof X can walk because Xorn healed his spine (although I thought it was that his legs were crushed? Perhaps that was retconned at some point). Prof X is working on a Cerebra upgrade to telepathically remote-control mutants to help them get out of dangerous situations? No possible way that could go wrong! Sometimes Xavier really does carry the idiot ball. (Although it ends up not being a plot point so far)
Morrison at his BEST!
New X-Men Ultimate Collection # 1 - Book 1
Holy cow! That’s not strong enough, that volume requires some high level “Whoa!” and “DID YOUO SEE THAT?” and all kinds of profanity (if you happen to condone such tings) to describe what a ride it was to read Morrison’s take on the X-Men. When you read the description on the back of the book which happens to, at the time of this review, match the description here on Comic Vine, it sounds like marketing BS. Every new writer is claimed to “have turned the (franchise name) on its (body part)” and “You’ve never seen (franchise name) like this!” This time it’s real. Like Frank Miller and Alan Moore, Morrison has brought grit to the X-Men universe. And it appears to have stuck, as I read today’s issues in the multitude of X-Books Marvel has seen fit to produce. Because this is a collection of issues and because it was originally released 10 years ago, I’m going to have some light spoilers here and there. I know there’s a spoiler button here on CV and I’ve used it on previous reviews. But that’s like using the spoiler button for Citizen Kane. If you don’t wish to see any of them, you can stop reading after the next sentence. If you like the X-Men and if you want to know where to jump on to get caught up with the current continuity, I can’t think of a better place to start.
And it’s over….
X-Men: Complete Onslaught Epic # 4 - Volume 4
So, here we are. The end of of a huge Marvel crossover that led directly into Heroes Reborn. (And maybe even was created solely for that purpose?) This thing went back a few years if you count all the hints they were dropping - even if they hadn’t figured out the entire plot yet back then.
Fantastic Four #416 - Franklin’s attempts to get help manifest as bad guys because Onslaught mucks about with them. This issue has no progress on fighting Onslaught… Awesome personal growth for Ben Grimm. Dr Doom is so awesomely bad ass! I love the way he talks and the way he speaks. It’s so awesome whenever he’s there. And this plus FF signals at least twice that they’ve had to join forces. Slightly pointless other than to gather all the heroes at FF Tower as more and more super heroes keep dropping in.
Pause the Action. Survey the World
X-Men: Complete Onslaught Epic # 2 - Volume 2
For the most part Volume 2 of Onslaught: the Complete Epic is just filler. The first issue or two deal with the X-Men on their mission to deal with Onslaught. Reveals that Xavier is like Batman: crazy prepared! He has files on how to kill each of the X-Men. That was neat to see. The issue where Wovlerine talks to this Aboriginal mutant was pretty awesome. Esp the fact that such a guy exists. But the rest of the book just seemed like filler that could have been safely ignored.
Back to the Action
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight: Time of Your Life # 1 - Time of your Life
After the last trade paperback, which was mostly laughs, we jump right back into the fray. (No pun intended) Buffy ends up sucked into the Future of Whedon’s Fray comic. Like the licensed and fan fiction that was written between the release of the Star Wars IV and Star Wars V, it can often be a mess to figure out continuity when you don’t know where you’re going to go creatively. Buffy ended in 2003 and Fray was mostly written in 2001. So when they started this future world, they didn’t know how the end of Buffy (the TV show) was going to end up with tons of girls activated as Slayers. So I think this book was Whedon rectifying the future and present of Buffy. Although you’re left wondering whether that future is still canon.
Is X-Men: Legacy always this confusing?
X-Men: Legacy # 250 - Lost Legions, Part 1; Flashback; Into the Abyss
This is only my second issue of X-Men: Legacy, but it seems to jump around more than the other Marvel books I’m reading. When #249 ended, we saw Rogue and Magneto maybe about to get it on. This issue - no mention of it at all. Really, after how big a deal it was in the previous issue you’d think there’d at least be some more movement on whether rogue was going to stay with Magneto. Instead, all of a sudden we’re looking for Legion’s personalities. Where the heck did that come from? In 249 he was just cycling through his personalities while connected to some machine. Still, it was a fun fight and the personality they have to catch in this issue has a neat power. Makes it really hard to fight him legitimately.
Holy Freakin’ Wow!
Detective Comics # 875 - Lost Boys
I loved this issue from cover to cover! First time I can say that in 2011! Wow! I loved Bullock’s section even though it didn’t really have anything to do with the story. I loved how it was drawn and coloured and how his narration squares were drawn. And Gordon’s story was insane. I loved how slow and methodical it was - perfect for a book called Detective Comics! I also loved the backstory into his life. And the shock ending! Man! I can’t wait to get to the next one. Snyder really hit the ball out of the park on this one!
Like a fun Sci-Fi Movie
Astonishing X-Men # 38 - “Meanwhile” Part One
This issue reads like a fun sci-fi movie. It’s great - it’s almost like a cross-over comic I read a decade ago where Superman ends up on the planet with the Aliens from Alien. In fact, the X-Men go to investigate a space station and the plot more or less becoems the plot to Alien. However, it’s quite compressed and ends up with a crazy ending. The character designs are a lot of fun - love the new Beast look. (New for me, at least) I don’t care that this book doesn’t fit into the timeline with the rest of the X-Men books, it’s a ton of fun to read. Another book for my ever-increasing pull list.
Falls off so quickly
The Batman Chronicles # 7 -
The first story is pretty neat - you get to see differences in how Batman and Superman interpret the law and due process as they fight to save a woman who may have been falsely put to the death penalty. And Batman and Supes even disagree on what circumstances would mean she was there falsely. I liked it a lot.
Another Good Arc Intro
Batman and Robin # 23 - The Streets Run Red, Part 1 of 3: Ins and Outs
And, I should mention, another cover that lies. (Been seeing a lot of those on the 2011 FF book) Anyway, I’m not sure how much of this sticks with the DCU Reboot/Refresh, but it looks like most of the current continuity does. (With changes like Barb being out of a wheelchair) But this arc definitely has time to end before September. It is low on action at first, but I think it sets up the characters’ motivations and actions quite well. As someone who knows the story of The Red Hood, but never read any of those books, it’s a great quick intro in why he is the way he is. I didn’t feel too bored and there were scenes where I was quite glad that there are now comics that are rated Teen so they could get into the rougher stuff. The news about the new DCU is that he’s going to have his own book and if he retains most of the characterization he has in this book, I’ll DEFINITELY have it on my pull list. In a way, he’s like the Batman of the Flashpoint universe - able to kill the bad guys rather than wait for the justice system. And so this sets him up for an interesting dynamic vs the bad guys, Nightwing, Batman, the other Robins, and Batgirl. I can’t wait.
I wanted to share my comic book reviews with my blog-reading audience without forcing them to go to Comic Vine to find them.
Leaves you Wanting More
Gotham City Sirens # 23 - Friends, Part 1
I am just returning to reading comics after a 12 year hiatus. Additionally, I was never that big into DC Comics. Most of my Batman exposure comes from Batman: The Animated Series. (And the Arkham video game) But I jumped into Gotham City Sirens because I’ve always loved the villianesses of Batman’s Rogue Gallery.
Entirely separately from my recent reintroduction into the traditional comic world, I’ve been into graphic novels, as you’ve probably read on this blog. An article I read on Cracked brought The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (LoEG) back into my consciousness and then I read the [non-comic] books The Map of Time and Dracula. So I was primed for another story that takes its literary cues from the Victorian Age. The only other Moore books I’d read are Watchmen and The Killing Joke. I enjoyed them both and so I looked forward to this one.
note: this was written on 1 June then put into my blog queue
I don’t remember exactly what made me decide to check out some new comics, but I think it was a mix of inventorying my comics and clicking over to the Whiskey Media site, Comic Vine. In the reviews for May’s comics, two books sounded interesting: FF and Gotham City Sirens. I went to my local comic book shop, Comics to Astonish, and also ended up picking up a bunch of issues from the old Harley Quinn book. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I was always into Marvel so I surprisingly chose to read Gotham City Sirens (GCS) as my first super hero comic since 1997.
Recently I was thinking about cataloguing my comic books. Recent family events convinced me to get on with it and so I spent all weekend putting the information into the KDE collection database Tellico. It had lots of useful fields to fill out, so I figured I was probably only going to do this once and so I may as well do it correctly. I entered in the names of the writers, pencillers, inkers, and so on. And I learned some interesting stuff.
Last weekend Danielle and I went to Borders so Danielle could check out the Buffy graphic novels and I could pick up Watchmen. While in the graphic novel section I started looking around to see what new books were out in this space and I came across Beyond Wonderland and Return to Wonderland, two comics in Zenoscope’s Grimm Fairy Tales line. From the busty cover on Beyond Wonderland, I thought it might be like Clamp’s Miyuki-chan in Wonderland.
The funny thing is that if you’ve been burned by this in your programming, you’ll find it tragically funny. All kinds of disasters from mundane to NASA-level have ocurred because people didn’t make their variables large enough. Thanks for that reminder, xkcd.
This has also aways bothered me. As usual, Randall, at xkcd, has put in a comic what was in my head. Recently, I was thinking of making a post about how old concepts from the 1400s and 1500s still influence our terminology and words today. One of the most prominent ones you often hear on the news is the reference of Europe as The West and China, et al as the East. That never made sense to me growing up. But if you consider that all of our history and culture is Eurocentric, it all makes sense. Europe “discovered” the world. And from Europe’s point of view, Asia and everywhere else in the world was The East. That’s why people weren’t sure that if Columbus sailed West that he would get to the East before he ran out of supplies.
So, I was working on fixing up some armature problems with the characters for I’m Not Mad. If you watch David’s Lip Sync you can see there were some major fixes needed for the Dan and Dave characters. Well, in the time since I started working on the character models Blender 2.46 was released. In 2.46 a new Hair Particle system was added to make working with hair a lot easier. So, here’s the David character’s new hair.
If you’ve ever looked at a reprint of the Kama Sutra, I think you’ll agree that reading it without being careful can lead to some interesting things. Such as this:
The plot twist at the end is awesome, but so is the programmer’s debate going on, especially since we were talking about this at work this week. Another great xkcd from Randall Monroe:
I think that the single largest source of mirth at the Thanksgiving dinner was Dan’s xkcd tshirt. Dan and I were the only ones who knew what this meant. Dave was the only other person capable of grasping it. Everyone else kept asking Dan to explain the shirt over and over. No matter how many ways he tried to do it, the response was always “I don’t get it”. Later on the response was a sarcastic “OK”. Later on in the evening/night everyone was sudo ordering people to do things even though they had no idea what that meant. The person who was ordered to do something would invariably answer “OK!” IT was hilarious and maddening at the same time.
This weekend was pretty great. I got to spend a lot of time with my wife. They were supposed to call her in on Saturday, but it got canceled, so that made our time together more enjoyable.
Dan came over and we watched him play Guitar Hero 2 on the PS2. I gave it a shot, but it was actually a little painful on my phret (fret?) fingers. The overall game is a pretty good concept and the music was pretty good. But, because it was music being played, it felt a bit repetitive. I’ll probably have to give it another shot to be fair.
courtesy of Randall Monroe over at xkcd
Tried watching “Little Miss Sunshine” on OnDemand. But the POS kept going on the fritz. We decided “to hell with it” and went back to bumping Netflix to an infinite number of discs per month. Today it kept messing up while Danielle was trying to watch some sort of scary movie.
I found this great web comic, xkcd, courtesy of my brother Dan. I don’t know how the site is overall and they do have a warning that some strips could be bad, but I found this one hilarious.
I love this particular strip because of the crazy circular logic involved to keep yourself sane if you start to succomb to urban legends and conspiracy theories. Here’s a mind trip for you - if The Matrix was real as told in the movie The Matrix, then the machines should make the movie The Matrix so that we would think it was just Hollywood machinations. If anyone came to us saying that The Matrix was real, we’d just dismiss them as a looney fanboy. Before we might think they were crazy, but maybe not. But after the movie came out, if they suggested such a thing, they got it from watching the movie. I know…don’t think about it too hard…..
It’s interesting how Science Fiction often predicts future technologies and trends. For example, this morning on CNN they were talking about a research group that is trying to switch on the gene in humans that would cause limbs to regrow. Apparently they haven’t seen what happens when you do that (I say tongue-in-cheek). Peter Parker’s favorite professor was trying to regrow his arm and his technique, which I believe involved splicing reptilian DNA, turned him into one of Spiderman’s fiercest foes, The Lizard.
Technology continues to be an amazing force and I’m always amazed at even the little things that technology can achieve. Until I was in High School I used to read Marvel comics every month when a new issue would come out. There were only three Marvel comics I cared about: (which happen to be some of the most famous ones) Spiderman, The Fantastic Four, and X-Men.
I liked Spiderman because he was really witty. Even when he was getting beaten up by his enemies, he would still make fun of them with all sorts of wise guy remarks. I also liked the fact that he always had a lot of real-world problems. Unlike a lot of other super heroes he always had problems. His best friend’s dad goes crazy and he is constantly battling with him. Jameson, at the newpaper, is always writing bad articles about Spiderman. No matter how good of a job he does, Jameson is always dragging his name through the mud. He has issues with MJ about why he is always dissapearing. Unlike Lois Lane, she doesn’t naively accept this, she gets ticked and goes out with other guys. Also, for most of the time, his Aunt May, who he so dearly loves, hates Spiderman.
I sometimes forget that most of social media is governed by an attention span algorithm instead of a reverse chronological algorithm. There are at least a couple times, however, when I’m reminded of that fact:
I Google a new topic or interact with a new creator on a platform and suddenly my feed is all about that topic or creator. As an example, my current Youtube main page is D&D and Cities: Skylines II. Just one week ago it was retro gaming single board computers, programming, and Cities: Skylines II. The stark difference in the recommendations on a page that I load at least once daily can sometimes be jarring.
Semi-related to the first point, my phone’s alerts for Youtube and Twitter tend to narrow to the last 1-2 creators I interacted with. Right now I’m only seeing YT alerts from the official D&D YT account and City Planner Plays. On Twitter I’m only seeing alerts from my local county and this person who posts about 1990s-2000s Contemporary Christian Music. And this has the weird effect of making it seem that no one else that I follow is creating new content. Then I go to my follower page on either app and realize that, no, there is a TON of new content by all the people I follow. I recognize that if the phone were to alert me for every person I follow, I might never be able to use my phone for all the alerts, but I do wish it were slightly more balanced. Maybe more of a power law or something. At one point I was only getting Twitter alerts for an author I follow and I’m sure it seemed odd that I was always commenting, but that also made the algorithm see more engagement so it kept giving me more of her Tweets.
Steganography is the process of hiding a message within another message. The difference between steganography and encryption is that encryption seems to make a message indistinguishable from noise. Encryption will turn “my cat is black” into “df cok eropz” while steganography could involve you sending a picture of a car and the receiver would run that image through some software to get the message “my cat is black”. Why use steganography over encryption? Because it’s less interesting to those who want to know what you’re saying. Imagine we’re in the world of Game of Thrones during Seaons 2 of the HBO show and Rob Stark needs to send a message about troop movements. He has to assume that the man carrying his message might be captured or bribed to give up the messages. If it looks encrypted, then King Joffrey will put his best minds on trying to figure out the encryption. If the message looks like a condolences to a lord for his son’s death, then they might let the message pass.
I came to a disturbing realization the other day - I’ve come to feel that whatever isn’t online isn’t real. This came about thanks to the Wii’s insanely stupid online policy. Everything about playing online with the Wii is an exercise in frustrating the user. Rather than always be connected to the net when the console is on (like modern computers, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3), the Wii attempts to connect to the game servers at the time you wish to play the game. This leads to the very frustrated experience of wanting to play online, loading up into the game you want to play and then realizing that the system is having problems connecting to the Internet. So you have to back out to the Wii menu and trouble-shoot the problem. This wouldn’t be so vexing if it didn’t take the Wii ages to load games, including the “don’t throw your effing Wiimote around” warning every time! Even in games where it doesn’t make sense! (Like Rock Band)
Mugshot is the website that continues to surprise me the more I use it. At first it was just a website with an unusual purple theme. Then it was the very frustrating site with the purple theme. Now it just may be one of the most interesting and underrated sites of the year.
In case you haven’t clicked on the link yet, Mugshot is a social web aggregator. You sign up to Mugshot and then let it know about all of the social networks you’re a part of such as Flickr, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, delicious, Picasa, digg and Reddit. Additionally, you add in some feeds from Amazon.com, last.fm, and Netflix. Finally, if you enter your blog address it tracks new posts. It then uses this to track all of these in one convenient place. The thinking is that you and your friends all sign up for Mugshot and then you have one-stop-shopping to find out everything that’s up with your friends.
Almost exactly a year ago my wife and I took our second trip to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park. We’d last visited 12 years earlier in October, and so had missed the opportunity to see puffins. I’d meant to make a series travelogue posts about my trip, but I got busy with programming, work, video games, and playing D&D with the kids so I fell uncharacteristically behind on tagging and editing my photos. I finally got around to editing the photos from the trip. First up, a selection of photos taken by my wife.
Back in December, before I was having any issues that made me think I was going to have to quit running, I signed up for the Dunedin Rotary Club Triathlon. It would be my first ever Triathlon. (It may end up being my only Triathlon) I set up a Garmin 12-week training plan and, when the time came, I started my training. I was feeling pretty good as the date approached. Unlike many others doing Triathlons, I’ve been swimming my entire life. Not to get ahead of myself, but this is reflected in my 2nd place ranking for the swim portion of the Triathlon.
Last year when I was looking at potential competitions to participate in, it saw that RipIt Events had a Duathlon pretty close to the house. I figured it’d be neat to try out a Run-Cycle-Run event. This would end up being my first competitive cycling event. However, it was scheduled for about ¾ of the way through my Triathlon training so I figured that I would be nice and trained up for the cycling portion.
It’s been a while since we last went to Disney; five years, in fact. We were originally supposed to go in 2020, but then, a week before our trip, Disney closed for COVID-19. Finally it was time to go back and boy have things changed. Back when we just had Scarlett, I wrote a blog post about Visiting to Disney with a 2-year-old and another about Visiting to Disney with a 3-year-old. While I don’t intend for this blog post to be nearly as formal as those entries, they do serve as a contrast for this trip.
Once again I participated in the Bigfoot 5 and 10 mile race near my house. However, I think this will truly be the last time. I didn’t fall this time, but it seems that no matter how carefully I step, this trail is designed to make me roll my ankle. I rolled it twice to the point where it hurt and a couple times that didn’t hurt. As I write this post near the end of race day (it will not be published until the new year), my foot is not throbbing and it doesn’t hurt to walk, so I think it was strained a bit, but not sprained (thank goodness).
Since I didn’t cover running last year, I’m going to cover both years in this post.
2021
If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know that I caught the running bug during the Red Hat Summit in 2019. My original goal was to do an official race that would allow me to qualify for a good spot at a Run Disney race. Then COVID-19 hit and killed in-person racing.
Because of various issues I wrote about before (mostly stemming from the issue with my right sesamoids), I ended up canceling my summer and fall races. The last one I was really looking forward to was the Ted Corbitt 15k, honoring Mr. Corbitt who has a long list of achievements, including being the first African-American to run the Olympic Marathon event and being a founding president of the New York Road Runners. This was to be my final competitive road race of 2022.
The Percy Sutton Harlem 5K was both the next race I’d registered for after the Front Runners LGBT Pride Run, and the first race after my doctors cleared me to start running again (“for reals this time”) after an X-Ray and MRI to make sure things were OK in that tiny area under the big toe where there’s so much going on. Both doctors told me to ease myself back into running. They also both gave me the metric of using the next day’s presence or absence of pain as a way to tell if I was doing OK. After the past couple months of trying things out, I’ve come to the conclusion that the best shoe for me is the New Balance 860. Since my old one was worn out (which is why I switched to the 1080 for the BK Half - which may (at least partly) be the reason for my injury), I got myself a new pair at the New Balance store located inside the NYRR RunCenter when I went to pick up my bib. I also took advantage and had them confirm my shoe size while I was there. For this race I chose to run with a dancer pad since my podiatrist is making me new orthotics with a cutout, both doctors suggested at least starting out using it, and I’d learned a new position for the pad that kept my sesamoid area safe while not causing me pain in the other toes. Bad placement of the pad caused me pain during the Pride Run.
As I mentioned in my Setbacks post, I’ve injured my foot. At first I thought it was metatarsalgia, but it’s a closely related issue - sesamoiditis. My podiatrist cleared me to attempt a run after a week and predicted things would be fully healed by 2 weeks in. There were 2 key changes I had to make. First, I had to change out the shoes I wear daily to work - I’d chosen a New Balance model that didn’t have a rigid enough sole. Second, I had to wear dancer pads while recovering. As opposed to the metatarsal pad I’d originally sought out from CVS, it doesn’t cushion the area receiving pressure. Instead it puts the pressure everywhere else. More about that later. I spoke with the coach I’m using to get ready for the Marathon and we agreed that I could try and run the race, but had to keep my pace lower to reduce the chance of injury.
This morning it suddenly hit me why this injury has messed with my head so much. I realized that “runner” has become a part of my identity and now I’d temporarily (hopefully) lost access to that part of myself.
I’ve already communicated this with most of my family and friends who support me in running, but I’ve suffered my second setback of 2022. The first one was back in January when I had to miss out on my first chance to do an in-person half marathon due to catching a really bad cold or flu. I don’t remember which, only that it wasn’t COVID.
Now, a few days away from my next 10K, I seem to have developed a pain in the ball of my right foot. I will be seeing a doctor to find out what it actually is, but there’s a 99.99999% chance that it would not be a good idea to even attempt to run the 10K at a slow speed if I want a chance of recovering in time for the marathon this fall.
I think I’ve become addicted to races. I really missed having races between April ( Cherry Blossom) and the end of May (BK HM) although I did that on purpose to allow myself to rest and train. July, when I once again will be sans race, is probably going to be hard for me.
A couple weeks after the Cherry Blossom race I reached out to my coach to give them my goals for the NYC Marathon this fall. The coach adjusted my training schedule and told me they wanted me to run the race as 10 miles followed by the fastest 5K I would run this year. I was aiming for a time of 1 hour 30 minutes for this race. That would require me to run the ten miles as fast as I had run in DC for the Cherry Blossoms and then do another 5K on top of that, and do it quickly. I set my Garmin to try and do that.
Last fall I finally got to race the official Credit Union Cherry Blossom 10 mile course. This year, I FINALLY was able to run the race on the course in the spring. It was nice for the race to return to its place as the “Rite of Spring”. Although the cherry blossoms reached peak bloom a week before the race, they still made a nice, pretty setting for the race.
A couple weeks ago, anticipating the coming spring showers and the possibility of having to race in the rain, I bought an outfit from Tracksmith’s new Thaw collection. As usual, I brought all my running clothes to NYC, not knowing what the weather has in store. After all, it wasn’t supposed to snow last race. I woke up at 0500 since the MTA trip planner told me I’d need to start my journey at 0544 to get to The Armory by 0730. It was in the 40s outside so while I brushed my teeth I waffled about what to wear. By race time (0900) it would be in the 50s. Complicating things: it was almost guaranteed to rain during the race. So my mid-layer was out. My jacket was waterproof, but that would certainly be too hot for the race. Should I wear it and unzip? In the end, I decided to go for just the Thaw long sleeve shirt, Thaw half tights, Thaw beanie, and inverno gloves. I had my usual pre-race breakfast of a quarter cup of raisins and headed out the door.
My second race for 2022 came right on the heels of the previous one. This time it was for the NYRR Gridiron 4 mile race. After this one I have a break for a little bit before the next race I’m running.
Yup, there’s snow accumulating on my head
This turned out to be my first race run in the snow. I got pretty lucky with my running wardrobe, but I’ll get to that in a second. Early in the week, I checked the weather to see what kind of running clothes to pack; there was a 17% chance of precipitation. Based on the forecast temperature of 33F (versus last week’s 18-22F), I was just going to wear the Tracksmith Brighton base layer, quarter-zip mid-layer, and tights. But I figured that it wouldn’t hurt to just bring my entire Tracksmith wardrobe. The night before the race I once again checked the weather. There was now a 50% chance of snow or rain. When I woke up, the forecast was now 90% chance. So I went with the same getup I had last week - the Brighton base layer, quarter-zip mid-layer, jacket, and Bislett pants. The jacket and pants are both wind and water resistant so I figured they’d keep me a lot warmer. The Bisless pants proved to be especially great to have because they have stirrups that keep the pants from moving up and, therefore, keep the legs from getting wet when it’s snowing. It was snowing when I left the house, on the train ride up to Central Park and as I warmed up. Luckily, the snow stopped right before race started and didn’t start up again until I was done.
Sunday, 6 February 2022, was my first race of 2022. I’d been looking forward to the Fred Lebow Half Marathon to both be my first race of 2022 and first half marathon race. Unfortunately, I got really sick with something not-COVID and couldn’t attend. So I was extra excited about getting to this race. Last year’s COVID winter surge and summer Delta wave meant that I didn’t get to any in-person races until the fall when I FINALLY got to do the CUCB Cherry Blossom race. This year it seems, so far, that in-person races are here to stay with various COVID mitigations in place. NYRR is requiring racers to be fully vaccinated and mask wearing until runners leave the corrals. Folks seem to be mostly complying with the latter, although it’s inevitable that some folks slip through the cracks.
Today I ran my first trail run, the Bigfoot Endurance Trail. I will definitely say that Ripit Events did a great job running the race. There were lots of good reminder emails leading up to the race. They had folks managing parking. Everything went smoothly and, more or less, on time.
The race was at Rockburn State Park, making this the first race for which I didn’t have to get up at an ungodly hour to attend. It’s just a 10 minute-ish drive from the house. I’d never done any of the trails - usually we just take the kids to the playground. Luckily, one of my friends at work warned me to pick up my feet. I don’t think I necessarily run at a shuffle, but it did make me run with more awareness of the trail. This was a good thing because Mother Nature was out to get me! The 10 mile race consisted of two 5-mile loops. On the first loop I mildly rolled both ankles either in sections that were nothing but tree roots or where the gravel or sand weren’t as tightly packed as they could be. However, tragedy struck (at least race-level tragedy) with half a mile to go. I rolled my left ankle HARD. Like, I’m definitely going to need some Ibuprofen and an ice pack when I get home hard. That threw off my gait and so with literally only a quarter of a mile to go, I couldn’t lift my foot high enough and tripped over a root. I took a spill, but was luckily wearing gloves. I only scratched up my knee. Very nicely - perhaps because this is more of a fun-run community thing than the Boston Marathon or something like that - a couple of runners both in front and behind of me stopped to help me up and make sure I was fine. One of them also checked up on me after the race. This tumble cost me for my age group to fall from 2nd place to 3rd place (literally just 20 seconds difference).
After nearly 2 years of training, I finally was able to run the Credit Union Cherry Blossom 10 mile race on 12 Sept. Yeah, last year I ran a virtual race, but that was really no different than a training run. This year we finally had the COVID-19 vaccine and so the race was able to take place in person. It was worth it.
The starting line when I first arrived to the race.
Twenty years ago today I was a freshman at Cornell University. I’d only been to NYC once before, during my family’s college tour trip in spring of 2000.
It was part of my college visitation trip and it was a surprise that we would get to see NYC. It was a miserable day, but I was ecstatic to see this place I’d only heard of in movies.
I begged my mom to let us visit the World Trade Center since I’d seen Kevin go up there in Home Alone 2 and I wanted to stand at the top of the world in the largest city in the world. But there wasn’t time for that. She said we’d see them next time we came to NYC….
It seems that it’s time to look back at a year of COVID-19. Scalzi did it. Ars Technica did it. I’m not usually a huge bandwagon jumper, but I thought, “why not?” This has been a huge, disruptive event. It might be therapeutic to write about it.
It was 11 March (I believe) when the WHO officially declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic. One of the first things I remember hearing about COVID-19 was the cruise ship that was stuck offshore because President Trump was so afraid of the numbers rising that he couldn’t let the folks off the ship. Turns out that was going to be a foreshadowing the likes of which we couldn’t quite understand at the time. My first inkling that maybe this was starting to become an issue in the US was in late February or early March when we went to visit relatives in New York City and they were against eating out because they were scared of getting sick. At the time, we thought they were just being a bit germaphobic. In fact, at the end of March we went to a restaurant for what we didn’t know at the time would be our last time to go out to eat for a year. (To date we still haven’t eaten out, not even for outdoor dining)
In September I made two new recipes. One was the Lamb and Grilled Onion burger from Weber’s Big Book of Burgers. I also tried a hot and fast recipe for pulled pork from Raichlen’s Project Fire. The taste was good, but the biggest hit was the recipe he had for a mustard sauce.
beef short rib ragu
For October the only new recipe I made was America’s Test Kitchen’s recipe for beef short rib ragu. I really enjoyed a different take on a ragu than the more French and Cuban versions I’d had in the past. It is definitely a recipe I’d like to make again.
Just one new dish in August. We had lots of repeat foods, but only one new dish. As far as I know, I didn’t have it until I was an adult and visited my sister-in-law in Long Island. At their favorite Italian restuarant / pizza joint I ordered it once when we were on the restaurant side. This America’s Test Kitchen version was very tasty and I would definitely make it again. Danielle liked it too, but it wasn’t a MUST COOK AGAIN dish with her.
As food stocks started to normalize towards the middle of COVID summer, I started to take advantage and try out more new dishes. It also helped that we were FINALLY able to find yeast again!
Chicago-style pepperoni pan pizza
hoisin-glazed baby back ribs
oatmeal-rasin bread
Grilled brined zucchini with cilantro-yogurt sauce
succotash
vanilla icebox cookies
The Chicago-style pepperoni pan pizza was one of the first recipes I wrote down to make. However, I never seemed to have both time and pepperoni at the same time. So I finally made it. I think America’s Test Kitchen’s decision to have me precook the pepperoni to render some of the fat helped both mellow the pepperoni taste (my kids were able to eat it) and keep this from being a greasy mess.
May was Cuban food month. I’d received a new cookbook of recipes from the Miami diaspora and back in Cuba. So I tried my hand at a few new recipes. Technically, I’d done the breaded steak (usually called Chicken Fried Steak in the USA) and pork shoulder Cuban style before, but this was the first time doing it with these recipes. I was very happy with all the results, although I learned a few things along the way for the next time I make these dishes.
When it came to new dishes, April was all about bread. First, I made a no-knead bread with America’s Test Kitchen’s recipe.
Almost No-Knead Bread
It came out OK. I actually tried it again the following day to try and get a darker crust. The funny thing is that this is one of the easiest breads to make and yet it’s the one I’ve had the worst results with. The crumb wasn’t as open as it was supposed to be and for all the time it took to proof it was pretty meh.
While I did a lot of cooking in March, I only made one new dish - Brown Sugar cookies. I’d had regular sugar cookies my entire life. I’m pretty sure this is the first time I had sugar cookies made with brown sugar instead. The brown sugar definitely took these cookies to a whole other taste realm where the molasses in the sugar added another dimension to the taste. I’m not saying it’s supplanted [white] sugar cookies in my heart, but that there’s a place for each of them. If the kids ate more cookies or if I didn’t care about my heart health (most cookies have a LOT of butter) I’d make these a lot more often.
Ever since fall 2019, I’ve been training for the Cherry Blossom 10 mile race, scheduled for 5 April 2020. Unfortunately, like everything else involving more than one person, it’s been scuttled by COVID-19. After all that training, it was disappointing. (I will take a moment to acknowledge that it’s objectively ridiculous to be disappointed by a missed race when people are dying. However, there’s always someone worse off than any other person. eg. I can feel that I’ve had a bad day at work, even if my day wasn’t as bad as someone who found out they had cancer It doesn’t delegitimize their feelings of disappointment as long as they keep it in perspective.) The organizers of the Cherry Blossom Festival race had a solution - a virtual race! Run wherever you can and record your time and it’ll all go on the website. It’s not perfect, but it’s certainly a way to use all that training you’ve done. So today I went ahead and did the race since the weather’s actually good today. It was an AWESOME run. It felt great to do it and, given the insane hills in my neighborhood, I finished feeling that I could definitely kick butt in the Cherry Blossom race next year because their course is not very hilly. It also renewed my confidence in being able to do well in the Baltimore 10-miler this summer (if it’s not cancelled), renowned for being hilly. So how did I do? (if you paid attention, it was spoiled at the top…hehe)
Very low number of new dishes. Mostly because I was obsessed with programming and Gwent.
Both recipes were from America’s Test Kitchen. The pizza recipe was a challenge to be able to make a pizza that would be ready in an hour and not suffer too much from not having the pizza ferment for a few days. I thought it was alright. Despite liberally dusting the pizza peel, had a hard time getting the pizza off.
Without a doubt, the biggest story to tell about my cooking in 2019 is learning how to make, and no longer be intimidated by, breads. I made 15 different new breads and biscuits this year, including new family favorites like the Amish Friendship Bread and Brown Butter-Cardemom Banana bread. Also, there were the harder breads like the braided cinnamon bread and hot cross buns.
cinnamon swirl bread
After spending years wanting to make my own bacon, I finally did!
December had a relatively low number of new dishes. I made a pasta bolognese from a new cookbook that I found rich and delicious. I had an OK attempt at flat bread. I needed to roll out the bread a bit thinner because it didn’t really fulfill the “flat” part of flat bread. The Spanish garlic soup was pretty good, except they didn’t mention how much Sherry vinegar to use and I guessed a little too high. The coffee cake was pretty good, and the first time I’d made one.
As I’ve mentioned a few times, my first running race was the 5k at the 2019 Red Hat Summit. I caught the bug and started thinking about running longer races. Since a lot of races use official USATF-certified times to qualify or to get a corral placement, I wanted to find a race that was USATF-certified. So in July I signed up for the 9th Annual Annapolis Running Classic. I started training and working my Saturday runs up towards a 10k distance. Today, it finally all paid off.
Lots of Mexican food and a some other neat, ambitious dishes in August. The by this point the chicken chilaquiles were one of the oldest chicken dishes on my To-Make list. I just never happened to have the ingredients around and I wasn’t sure if it was going to be a hit or a flop. Finally, I decided to do it! I went overly ambitious and made my own corn tortillas, which I then toasted in the oven to create chips which I then put into the chilaquilas. It was quite delicious. On the other hand I was not a fan of “Dave’s Fish Tacos” from the Weber Charcoal Grilling book. But, redemption came in the form of Easy Weeknight Chicken Tacos, one of the newest additions to my To-Make list from America’s Test Kitchen’s Cook it in your Dutch Oven. It had a good blend of citrus and Mexican flavors. I’d definitely like to make it again.
I finally made bacon from scratch for the first time, so that deserves its own gallery:
One of the things that had been stopping me was the fact that Costco only sold pork bellies already sliced for Korean dishes. Then, the weekend I was going to ask them if I could buy a full pork belly, they had one there. They said customers had been asking for it so they were going to start selling some whole. It was a pretty neat experience making my own bacon. I can see why it’s so expensive - it involves a lot of waiting and a lot of labor.
The biggest dish for me this month was the pit beef, which I’d been wanting to make for at least two years now. I finally went ahead and smoked it according to Meathead’s recipe (along with his recipe for Tiger Sauce - a type of horseradish). I was afraid after waiting for so long I’d have hyped it up too much in my head, but it turned out to be my new favorite way to eat roast beef.
Sometimes you only think you don’t like a dish because you simply don’t like the way it’s been prepared for you in the past. This has happened to me with a LOT of foods. Most recently I realized had written off oatmeal simply because my tastes didn’t match that of the others around me. From childhood to adulthood I’d only been given instant oatmeal if I’d asked to taste oatmeal. It has a place in people’s lives, but like most instant foods, the instant version is a pale imitation of the real thing. Then, when I got married my wife ate steel cut oats. I tried them, but again didn’t like them. It wasn’t until Red Hat Summit this year when I ended up trying them again because I wasn’t really feeling the other breakfast options. And it turned out that I could indeed enjoy oatmeal. It’s just that I liked it more al dente than my wife. Armed with the knowledge that oatmeal didn’t have to be mushy, I set about figuring out the right water to oats ratios to get it to the consistency I preferred. Now, at least once a week I have oatmeal with some fruit and, if we have some in the house, nuts. In the photo above I have some brown suger, but I’ve stopped adding that. With the sugars in the fruit, it’s not necessary. I do add a little vanilla extract and, if the flavors make sense, some cinnamon or cardamom.
I didn’t cook many new dishes in May, although I did have some encores of dishes that the family enjoyed. Since there are too few dishes to group them by theme, I’ll just go chronologically this month.
Ever since getting America’s Test Kitchen’s book on Mexican dishes, I’d made some great enchiladas a few times. Both their beef and ground beef enchiladas bring some great flavors to the table. The former is a bit more flavorful, but it also takes longer. So I wanted to see how the casserole version would come out. Overall, it’s very similar in flavor and tastes very good. Where it excels is as a party or potluck food. In the same dish that only makes about 12 conventional enchiladas, you can feed a lot more people because individual squares can be cut to any size. Also, like a lasagna, it has layers so there’s more to eat for a given amount of space on the dish.
April was a month for getting a little more ambitious as well as trying variations on dishes I’d made before. Among the variations I would count the tilefish, grilled chicken thighs, and bratwust hot tub. The tilefish was just a variation on the Raichlen grilled fish recipe I’d tried before with blackfish. This time I removed the scales to ensure the flavoring on the outside of the fish wouldn’t be wasted. It still wasn’t quite what I wanted, but I think grilled fish like this one is a great candidate for an after-grill marinade. I’ll try that next time. The grilled chicken thighs were a variation on the gochujang paste recipe from America’s Test Kitchen. I liked the mustard-tarragon paste, but Danielle was pretty blase about it. Finally, the bratwurst hot tub was the third such variation on braising bratwurst on the grill. It was fine, but I prefer Meathead and America’s Test Kitchen’s versions to Raichlen’s, which was the one I did here.
March was a bad time to have gluten allergies in my house. I did a lot of baking and most of it turned out great. The bake-sale muffins (used blueberries) in particular were a huge hit. I never knew blueberry muffins could taste so good. I’m kind of mad at every place I’ve ever eaten them before for making me think they couldn’t taste all that great. On the flip side, I was not a fan of the banana-poppy seed muffins. I think for now I’ll stick to banana bread and banana snack cake when I need to get rid of some ripe bananas. The lemon-buttermilk pound cake fell somewhere in the middle. It was good, but I find the loaf lemon pound cake I make to be easier and taste just as good. Then again, I have some mods I need to make to this recipe next time around to maybe get a better consistency.
February is when I started really getting confident about my bread-making skills. Most of it was great although I didn’t like either of the two buttermilk biscuit recipes I made in February. By contrast the Amish Cinnamon Bread (ATK’s version of Amish Friendship bread) and Brown Butter-Cardamom Banana breads were SO GOOD. Both have been made again in the few months since. Everyone who was here to celebrate a birthday party couldn’t get enough of the Amish bread. The North Carolina cheese biscuits were another of those recipes where Danielle was skeptical when I told her what I was making, but ended up really liking them. The pork posole was good, but flavor-wise reminded me a lot of the chili from the same ATK book. The Vermouth cracked potatoes from Milk Street were certainly a different flavor than I’m used to for potatoes, but I wasn’t dying to make it again. By contrast I loved the stuffed chicken. It had a pesto I finally loved (no pine nuts and lots of basil) and great flavor. It was my mom’s favorite dish for the weekend she was visiting. The skillet turkey burgers were also great. The panade made it the best turkey burgers I’d ever had even though I would still prefer a beef burger if given a choice. Finally, the thai chicken soup was good and spicy.
Macadamia nut, White Chocolate, and Cranberry Cookies
In January I made a lot less new things than in previous months, but I did prove that even in sub-freezing temperatures I still BBQ and Smoke. My least favorite were the macadamia nut, white chocolate, and cranberry cookies. I’ve liked white chocolate and macadamia nut cookies in the past, but this was my first time adding cranberries. But it was the macadamia nuts I wasn’t a fan of this time. I’m not sure why, I just didn’t liek the taste. The fattoush was a neat taste for a new salad and I learned how easy it is to make your own pita chips! The glazed ribs were OK, but I didn’t fill the water pan in the Weber Smokey Mountain and I think that led to a more smokey/burnt taste as the glaze dripped off and into the empty water pan. The Big Butts Pork Steak was pretty awesome, though. The recipe also contained my favorite home-made BBQ sauce. I definitely look forward to revisiting that recipe!
Bourbon Burger with Caramelized Onions and Horseradish sauce
chopped winter salad with butternut squash
Egg and Sausage McMuffin
English Muffins
English Muffins
Ground Beef Enchladas
Ladybird Johnson’s Barbecue Sauce
roti canai
Brussels Sprouts with Lemon
Thai-Style Pork Burgers
It’s hard to say which dish was the best one, because lots of them came out great. But it’s pretty easy to say which was the worst - the roti canai came out very much unlike what I was trying to replicate despite following a recipe that went along with a youtube video. Second worst were the English muffins, but they were WAY better than the roti was. They just came out more dense than I was hoping for and they didn’t quite have the nooks and crannies they were supposed to. This was a relatively fast recipe from my Cook it in Cast Iron book. I’ve got another in Bread Illustrated that has a longer rise overnight in the fridge so maybe that one will come out better. Lady Bird Johnson’s BBQ sauce came from Legends of Texas Barbecue, a part of a Humble Cookbook bundle. I took it with me to my mom’s house for Christmas. It was the first time I’d ever made it, but I thought it came out really well - it got lots of kudos. The ground beef enchiladas were a great approximation of the beef enchiladas which normally take twice as long to cook. The Egg and sausage McMuffin came from learning how to make the egg cook the right way by reading about it on Serious Eats. It was pretty good, but I was wishing I had some Canadian bacon instead so it could be more like the real thing. The Brussels sprouts with lemon was a dish I made to try something different with the veggie and it turned out great. It was a very simple recipe that I was able to memorize and so I also made it during Christmas at my folks’ and people really liked it - even those who professed not to like Brussels sprouts. The chopper winter salad with butternut squash came from Dinner Illustrated and it was a very fun, new type of salad that I’d never eaten before. Danielle has made roasted butternut squash before, but we usually consume it via soup. Finally, the two burgers. Of the two, the Bourbon burger was the more universal hit. Danielle was really impressed with my caramelized onions (given my newbie status on making them) and the horseradish sauce was pretty good, too. While I liked the Thai-style pork burgers, Danielle wasn’t quite into the taste of Asian-style pork in a burger. That said, I also cooked them in the carbon steel pan to try and get more use out of it, but it was just a little smaller than the 12 inch pan the recipe called for and so the pan was a bit crowded and I think that deterred some Maillard reaction from happening.
While I was swimming last week I came to the realization that my daily snack between lunch and dinner hits pretty much all the food groups. I usually have some afternoon tea with milk (dairy - check!), a couple servings of whatever fruit we happen to have at the house (fruit/veggie - check!), and peanut-butter filled pretzels (carbs, protein, and fats/salts - check, check check!)
The biggest success of the new dishes in Nov 2018 was the grilled chicken fajitas. We already had a recipe we often used for grilled chicken fajitas, but I wanted to stretch out and used the recipe from America’s Test Kitchen Mexican Recipes book. The biggest disappointment was the Georgian Chicken Soup (Chikhirtma). It was almost universally reviled in the house. I thought ti was fine, but everyone else hated it. The Milk Street Barbecue Rub No. 2 gives poultry a taste similar to satay, so it works quite well with peanut sauce. The mushroom pork omelet was promising, but I added way too many mushrooms because they called for mushrooms by weight and I used dried mushrooms rather than regular, hydrated mushrooms. Everyone liked the chicken tonkatsu, but only I liked the tonkatsu sauce. Finally, the donuts were a bummer, but I think that’s because it didn’t rise as much as it was supposed to, leaving it a bit dense.
In September I tried out four new recipes. The grilled breakfast quesadillas were surprisingly great. An egg is cracked into a ring of cheese and topped with grilled bacon and cilantro. The cauliflower gratin was WAY too rich for just Danielle and I to finish it. But I could see it working well for a Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner. The carnitas were a great indoor version. Finally, for the first time I grilled a full, in tact fish. My father-in-law had given me some sea bass he caught and I filled it with aromatics and then covered it in more herbs and aromatics after grilling. It was very, very good.
It’s been 2.5 years since I discovered Amazingribs.com and Meathead when I was trying to figure out why my BBQ wasn’t as good as the best BBQ joints I’d visited. Last year I ordered the 2016 and 2017 Annuals from Cook’s Illustrated and Cook’s Country as well as getting into Chris Kimball’s spin-off Milk Street. This year I continued my journey with the purchase of a bunch of cookbooks in a Humble Bundle sale as well as ATK’s Dinner Illustrated and Milk Street’s Tuesday Nights, both of which focus on weeknight meals that can be completed in 1 hour or less. I also began to take some steps towards being able to cook intuitively via Samin’s Salt Fat Acid Fire which I haven’t read, but I did see the Netflix show of the same name.
Last time I was in Florida my mom took me to a specialty BBQ store, Just Grillin, off of Dale Mabry in Carrollwood. I didn’t know such places existed. I thought everyone just bought their grills at a hardware store, Amazon, or direct from the company. It was a pretty great to be able to see and touch Yoders, Weber Summits, and other high-end BBQs. They also came by with some chicken they’d cooked in the back using a variety of rubs they sell. Oh yeah, the entire wall behind the register was full to the brim with rubs and sauces - most (if not all) of them local or competition group rubs. Any rub you wanted to try would be poured into a tasting cup. Sure, it’s not the same as having the rub on some food, but it’s certainly better than the blind buying we have to do with supermarket rubs. As a gift, mom said she’d get me any rub I wanted to try, so I picked up Thunderbird Chicken Scratch. Then a bunch of travel meant I had to keep waiting impatiently until I could finally try it. Last night I finally got my chance.
Continuing my summer of learning to cook new dishes, I decided to tackle steakhouse burgers. I’d already mastered diner burgers, so I wanted to work on these. I didn’t follow Meathead’s directions 100% in that I didn’t create ground beef out of a nice cut of meat. But I did follow his recipe for using 2 zone cooking to make good-tasting, thick burgers.
Now, it’s possible that it’s because I crowded my burgers (18" kettle, not much of a choice), but it took WAY too long to come up to temp. After 20 minutes it was not anywhere near 155. Since it was getting late, I just moved them to the sear side to speed up the cooking.
Do you know why a lot of people don’t BBQ that often? Because they always make the same thing and that’s boring. So I’ve been going through all the recipes in Meathead’s book (and other sources) to see if anything else is tasty to my palette. This time it was smoked chicken. I cut the chicken in half.
I took the skin off because Danielle was going to take off the skin anyway and since this was a rub-based recipe, that would remove all the flavor as well.
For a long time we’d been avoiding New York Strip Steak. I’d tried to grill some a long time ago and it just couldn’t hold a candle to a Ribeye. But recently my father-in-law bought a bunch and gave us some so I gave it another shot. I took all I’d learned in the past year or so from Meathead and used my thermometer to get a prefer medium steak. Here’s where I ended up:
Breaded steak was probably my favorite Cuban food growing up. More than pork shoulder sandwiches and other things my mother made. I often helped her prepare it at home, but never got a chance to cook it as a kid. I’ve tried it a few times since growing up, but it’s hard to get the right thickness. Butchers here don’t know what it is, so they have a hard time helping me. But this time I got through to a butcher at Wegmans - who let me in on the secret - using a mallet to squish the meat skinnier than it can be cut on a steak slicer. The only thing that sucks is that my example of thinness was some Korean meat so he thought I wanted it cut into little strips. Still, I finally was successful at making a very tasty breaded steak:
I don’t know how easy or hard it is to get a door frame in where all the pieces are at right angles to each other. The previous home owners failed at that and so the door could never close correctly. My father-in-law tried to fix it, but he shaved the wrong side. So when my parents and grandparents came, they decided to fix the door. And that’s a great thing because I’d always thought it’d just be something that would take an hour or 2. No, this door took an entire workday’s worth of hours to get to a point where it would correctly fit in this not-quite-rectangular frame that the previous home owners had put up. But thanks to my grandfather and father’s hard work, we now have a door that properly closes and can be locked.
It wasn’t until this year that I realized I was no longer in control of my personal narrative. I believed that I could be in charge of how private or public my life was. But it’s become increasingly obvious this year that it’s not in Facebook’s financial interest for me to be able to control my narrative. Too many of us are disengaging with the social network to a large degree. So now others can post about me and tag me and there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s quite frustrating that all too many conversations nowadays begin with, “please don’t post this to Facebook.” It just makes me want to turn in on myself and spend less time socializing. Because, at least for now, anything that happens in my home when I’m by myself will only end up on the Internet if Danielle and I both want it online.
When I was in my senior year at Cornell, my adviser tried to get me to enroll into graduate school. My dad had advised me to wait and see what it turned out I wanted to specialize in. Also, I’d likely be able to get work to pay for my degree. My adviser told me I’d never end up getting a graduate degree. Those who don’t do it right away end up procrastinating forever and don’t get one. I knew I’d work at getting one, so I didn’t pay him any mind. I went to work and work did have a program by which they paid for college classes. But I wasn’t sure where I wanted to go. Almost everyone went to Johns Hopkins Engineering because they didn’t require the GRE. But something inside just didn’t feel right. So I waited.
Until I was in high school, my dad and I didn’t bond over much. I knew he was a caring father and loved me, but we just didn’t have much to share except for one thing: Car Talk. My dad was never one to suffer fools, so when he drove me to school in the mornings we listened to NPR, not the music stations with their endless morning show prattle. Every time I hear the horn intro to Morning Edition it reminds me of my childhood.
Yesterday, just outside my neighborhood, my Civic reached 100 000 miles. So far the only problem is that the radio’s a bit wonky with the front speakers.
This’ll be a semi-recurring blog post highlighting some of my work on other websites. (Most often, but not necessarily, other sites I own/run)
Race Flipping in Comic Movies over at Comic POW! in which I discuss Johnny Storm being cast with an African American actor in the new film.
Autobiographies: Swimming Part 1 over at I’m not Mad in which I take a stab at autobiographical comics. It’ll be a little bit until Part 2 - probably around May when this semester ends.
[caption id=“attachment_6598” align=“aligncenter” width=“443”] Rock the Universe (1999)[/caption]
The last time I went to Universal Studios Orlando was nearly 20 years ago for Rock the Universe 1999. It was one of the most fun things I’ve ever done - enjoying the park by day with all my close friends and then a series of concerts at night. Despite getting soaked by the night-time storms we had a blast.
Dan and I started a website called Comic POW! Where each week we go over the best comics of that week. It’s been going for approximately 3 months and I’ve been having a lot of fun with it. The main feature is posted every Friday, but we occasionally have content on other days. I’ve also started writing for Player Affinity. They saw my work and invited me to write for them. My news articles are posted on Wednesdays and my reviews on Fridays. (With extra reviews sometimes appearing on Mondays and Tuesdays) Here’s one of my latest reviews.
So, I started working on my Nanowrimo partway through November. I quit partway through because I fell too far behind. So I reworked the story to have a better ending than the rambling mess it had become and tried to get some people to edit it for me. They’ve been busy and I’m sick of seeing it on my TODO list. So here’s my Nanowrimo Entry for 2010 as reworked -> NanoWrimo 2010 Reworked
I love to write so when I started the 2010 NanoWrimo competition 9 days late I thought it would be no big deal to get caught up. I really under-estimated the effort behind writing over two thousand words a day. I think I probably could have made it if I had an idea ahead of time, but I ran out of steam somewhere around 15 thousand words. I’m nearly at 18 thousand and nearly everything I’ve written has been complete and utter crap. Being very trope savvy has made it hard for me to just make stuff up as I go along because I’ve been trying to avoid plot and logic holes.
Today I went to the funeral of my wife’s uncle. It was a Catholic Mass, so it was pretty interesting trying to match up the Vietnamese with what I knew from English mass. It was also interesting to hear how the priest pronounced “amen” and “hallelujah”. So far in my life I’ve been to two Cuban funerals and one Vietnamese funeral. One of the Cuban funerals was a masonic funeral. The other was Protestant. Really the only difference in my limited experience is that the Vietnamese take photos and video to document the event.
Since apparently I’m a crazy person who thinks he has so much free time, I’ve decided to participate in this year’s National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write a 50,000 word novel in one month. Oh yeah, and I waited until 9 Nov to start. I’d heard about it on NPR and on Linux Outlaws and I thought - why not? The website seems to have a Lomography vibe to it - just write and don’t worry about editing until later. I love working under constraints. I feel that my 365 Project really pushed me to learn a LOT more about photography and techniques - especially lighting. Anyway, you can follow my progress on the NanoWrimo site here. See if I can make it or not. Whatever I have at the end of the project will be posted here under a Creative Commons license and probably also posted to lulu.com.
Last year was Dina’s graduation Tiki Party. This year it was Daniel’s turn. We arrived the night before (no hospital visits this time) and so we had plenty of time to help cook and set up.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Dina’s interpretation of how the party would go”] [/caption]
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“The BSO Warms up for the Concert”] [/caption]
Danielle and I recently went to see " Peter and the Wolf" at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Danielle and I both grew up watching the Disney animated adaption of “Peter and the Wolf” and we loved the idea of being able to listen to the music as performed by the BSO. I don’t care how amazing the speakers are in your home theater system, nothing sounds as amazing as the orchestra.
I think it’s pretty interesting that my eyes can see without seeing. For example, when I’m walking through the hallways at work, my eyes often end up in collision-avoidance mode. That is, I don’t see through my eyes because I’m busy seeing something else in my mind’s eye. So my eyes become visible-spectrum sonar and keep me from bumping into people and things. It’s often while in this mode that friends and coworkers will go out of their way to snap me out of my trance to bring to my attention the fact that I didn’t acknowledge their presence in the hallway. They never believe me that I didn’t see them because they were the only person in the hallway. In extreme cases I have literally manoeuvred around a person to get into a door or otherwise not crash, and still did not see the person. I mean, my brain knows I went around a human, but it doesn’t bother to decode the face so I have no idea who I narrowly missed. This makes them even more incredulous when I deny having seen them. Sorry, but it’s true. My brain decided that whatever it was picturing was more important than dedicating some neurons for facial recognition.
At the end of June I went to my grandfather’s 70th birthday party. But, before that, we went on a small vacation to Naples, Fl. My mom got us a very expensive hotel on the beach and we had a blast! I got another change to use the underwater housing I first used on my Hawaii Trip.
This is the view of the very expensive houses I could see from the balcony.
A while back in time (but only two posts ago) I wrote about my first bike ride on the BWI trail. A few days later I got an email on Facebook:
My name is Marty and I happened along your BLOG about biking at the BWI trail. My first time riding the trail was Saturday June 20th and I had the same incident with the bird. Not sure if we did the loop the same way but I was going pretty fast when the bird hit me. It was my first ride in about 10 years, no helmet and I was going pretty fast …………. THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO LOSE IT!!!
Been silent on the blog because I’ve been very busy with other things. Mostly I’ve been busy going through the 800+ pictures I took on my recent trip to Oahu, HI. Expect to see a fully illustrated blog post about my trip once I’m done uploading the pictures to flickr. And I’ve been doing this in Adobe Lightroom 2, which I recently gave my first impressions of. I’ve been doing a live blog which I’ll be publishing later. I’ve also been working on “I’m Not Mad”. I hope to have some more tech and political posts soon, but even sooner I’ll have an entertainment post.
The sewers backed up in my apartment flooding my bathroom via my bathtub and toilet and my living room via the front door with water full of excrement and urine. However, even in these horrible and anoying times, you still have to look at it positively. Our neighbors got flooded throughout their entire house. For us it didn’t spread of out the bathroom or living room. It was royally disgusting and smelly, but at least the cleaning crew worked through the night and morning to get our apartment to a usable state.
Their food may or may not be worth the price, I’ve never been there for dinner. However, I do know that their club is crap. I would have to say that tonight was definitely the worst experience I’ve ever had in terms of going out for a night of fun. First of all, I got to the Powerplant Live area and no one knew how to get into Babalu Grill. The people blocking the area told us to go down the block, the people at the end of the block told us to go back to the original people. When we finally get in, the bouncer said it was $5 per person, but the person taking the cash said it was $10 per person. It was so loud outside from a concert going on that it was impossible to reconcile. Perhaps I was just tired from a long day’s work, but had the concert not been going on a mere 20 feet away, I would have disputed this.
In case you might have been wondering why the posts have been lacking a bit of substance, it’s because I’ve been in England for the past month. I’ve been very busy (it was a business trip) and also did a lot of exploring for pictures.
I learned around the time I was in middle school that it takes 21 days to form new habits. I had been gone for nearly 30, so everything at home seems strange now. When I went to take a shower last night, it seemed as if Niagra Falls was coming out of my shower head. The water pressure was so much greater than the pressure in England, that I just couldn’t comprehend it. I was extremely happy to be home, but home was slightly foreign to me. Even being on my computer now is a little weird. It’s different than my laptop, and being on my Windows computer is even stranger.
I have come to see the most annoying thing in my known universe to be having to urinate as soon as I get out of the shower. It’s like dropping your clothes in the mud on the way back from the laundromat. This, for me, is second only to people chatting on their cell phones on busses and trains. I have no problem with people talking on their cell phones in these places. Perhaps they need to coordinate the night or let someone know that they are running late or running early. But chatting is quite annoying. It’s worse when all I hear is “really? wow” and other such utterances that let me know that I’m clearly listening to the wrong half of the conversation. I don’t think it would bother me at all if both halves of the conversation were there. If someone was going to talk loud enough for me to hear, I’d at least like to hear both sides.
This was one of the best Christmas celebrations either in spite of or because it was so simple. I got some really great gifts including:
Final Fantasy 6: Grand Finale - this CD has some AWESOME symphonic recordings of the best songs of FF6
Fantastic Plastic Machine: Les Plus - a great remix CD of that funky Japanese DJ, FPM. I’m sure you’ve heard him in commercials and movies and didn’t even know it. For example, one of his songs from this CD was in the second Austin Powers movie.
Linux Shell Scripting with Bash - to help me continue honing my programming skills
A great book on creating surreal artwork with Photoshop
Hollywood Shuffle - a great movie about Blaxsploitation films
1776 - a book about the American Revolution
some other stuff that was ordered, but didn’t arrive on time
But my favorite part was giving my presents to my family members. I made a calendar for my mom and her brothers with old pictures from their childhood since their mother died this year. I don’t know how my uncle in Miami reacted, but my uncle who was with us in Tampa was near tears. I’m glad I was able to make them emotional in a good way as they remembered simpler times. I think that’s one of the reasons God gave me the talent of photography and photo editing. Oh, and I gave my cousin a blog for Christmas as one of her presents. She loves to write and now she can write for the world. She has some great poetry up. You can check out her site here.
Went to Disney a few days ago with my family and found out that Disney is not quite the innocent little park it once was. I never quite felt the same about the park after 11 Sept 2001 when they began checking bags, but this time it was even more invasive. In order to enter the park I had to insert my ticket and then be digitally fingerprinted. Why did I have to be fingerprinted? To tie the ticket to me. In addition to the fact that it had my name printed on it, it now had my fingerprints attached to it. Now, I can’t really think of too many nefarious things Disney can do with my prints, but it was just really weird. Are that many people having their tickets stolen?
The timing of this holiday is perfect. Coming near the end of the year, there are basically 11 months upon which to look back on. As my wife reminded me last weekend, a lot have happened this year. As a matter of fact, I think this has been the most eventful year of my life. Here are the things I have to be thankful for this year:
May: We both graduated from Cornell with excellent grades; I had two job offers and selected one in the last week of school.
Mauricio replied to my post yesterday in order to placate my fears about his changing. (You can read it by clicking on comments below now that it’s been approved) In his post, he reminded me of why most of us blog (if our blogs are not simply parroting the news). We blog to sort out our feelings. We write what we would write in private in a journal or diary. But, unlike those devices, we put our lives out on display - really put our hearts on our sleaves. I know I’ve written some blog posts that we so slanted towards the way I was feeling that day, that they don’t represent the average me. They represent me happy/mad/sad/etc. I knew that in the back of my head and his comments just reminded me of the fact.
By this time next week I will have been married for around six hours. We would have been married under God and with all of my relatives as our witness. We would have had some fun, albeit muted fun, at my reception. If things to go plan, we would have been at our wedding night hotel for about two hours now. In about six and one half we’d have to start getting ready to fly to New York. And twelve hours from this time next week, I should be in New York City, resting or helping get things ready for the New York Wedding. Of course, I’ll volunteer to help, but often times in their culture, this is women’s work to be done. That’s fine with me, I’d certainly try for a nap if I could get one because even we were sleeping at this time next week, we’d still only have six hours of sleep after running around all day. Wedding days are notorious for using up not only all the energy you have, but also your energy reserves. Hopefully I can sleep on the plane to New York, but I don’t usually have good luck sleeping on planes. I have to make sure to find my travel pillow before I go.
I haven’t Googled myself in a while, so I decided to see what would come up with my first and last name. What a paper trail I’ve left since the last time I was here.
And just seven until I see my bride-to-be again. I wish this time would fly by a little faster. Unfortunately, work has been a little slow. I’m in a place at work where I think I may be close to finishing up my project, but I have been making a lot of requested revisions and, as such, have to meet a lot with people. They happen to be a little busier than me, so this has been stopping me. Perhaps today I’ll ask for another project to keep me busy. I think I’m more anxious about the wedding because the wedding means that I’ll get to see Danielle again. If she were living in Tampa, I probably wouldn’t be as anxious, maybe only seventy percent of my current level. The only part of my day that’s flying by right now is the afternoon because I have so much work to do to help my parents get the house ready for the reception next Friday. (and it actually has to be done by the rehearsal dinner on Thursday) So my days drag on while my evenings and nights go by way too quickly.
If I were someone else, I’d cry. I don’t cry for much, though, so I’m not. Today I got some luggage as a wedding present from my grandmother who passed away during Spring Break. She actually had a little piggy bank where she had been saving up money for my wedding present. It came out to be enough for the suitcase and an overnight bag. I am sad because she was so important to me and she’s missing from my wedding. That’s why I put more pictures of her in my wedding video than anyone else in my family. I miss you so much Abuela. Danielle misses you too! Thanks for the presents, I’ll enjoy them a lot.
I started upgrading my laptop from Fedora Core 3 to Fedora Core 4 today. After 9 hours it STILL wasn’t done. This is because I was installing it on a P3 600 Mhz computer. Hopefully I’ll get to play with it a little tomorrow. If not, I’ve got all the time after the wedding to play with and explore this sucker. Plus, the way people are complaining about different issues on the Fedora List-serves, it’s apparent that waiting a few days probably wouldn’t be such a bad idea as it will give the teams some time to patch up whatever software isn’t working quite right.
Just 16 more days left. I have so many things to blog about, but I have no time because of wedding preparations. I barely even have time to talk to my bride daily, ironic since I’m preparing for the wedding.
Only 18 more days until I get to marry the love of my life. The days couldn’t possibly go by fast enough! (And yet, they better not go by too quickly because there are still so many things to do in preparation)
As I drove to work today I came to a realization: my college life was like a type of poem I remember learning about in high school. It may not be 100% exact, but do you remember those poems where the first and last line rhymed while the inside lines rhymed? That’s exactly what’s happened to me. As I wait for some stuff to clear up on my permanent job I’m doing a temporary job at Baxter Healthcare, where I had my first summer internship. Thus, my jobs in my Cornell Years have been:
I now have a newly minted Bachelor of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Phillips School of Electrical Engineering. So that’s it, I’m official now. I now have my first degree. How do I feel? I feel like I’m on summer vacation. Doesn’t feel any different than any other summer. It DOES feel really good when I tell someone that I’ve graduated. It has the accomplishment feeling to it. Also, I get to tell people that I graduated from Cornell and that usually gets another round of congrats. It’s funny because for the past two days I’ve been really busy helping out around the house, unpacking my computers, and doing wedding preperations, but at the same time it feels like an eternity until my marriage.
I’m really busy trying to wrap up classes so that I can enjoy the last few weeks before graduating and being thrust into the “real world” so today’s post is just a minor observation. Of course, any of my long-time readers will know that as soon as I say that I’m too busy to post, I explode with a bunch of posts. Well, not for now, but who knows what tomorrow holds.
I am now officially a published author. Of course, my first published work wasn’t exactly what I wanted it to be, but I’m still excited about it! I decided my first book would not be a photography or fictional book. Instead, my first book is a report I wrote about migrating from a MS Windows environment to a GNU/Linux environment. Since I really want people to be able to read this, I am offering my first book for FREE on Lulu.com. It’s a PDF download that will cost you nothing! Go check it out and see how you can stop paying for software.
Technology continues to be an amazing force and I’m always amazed at even the little things that technology can achieve. Until I was in High School I used to read Marvel comics every month when a new issue would come out. There were only three Marvel comics I cared about: (which happen to be some of the most famous ones) Spiderman, The Fantastic Four, and X-Men.
I liked Spiderman because he was really witty. Even when he was getting beaten up by his enemies, he would still make fun of them with all sorts of wise guy remarks. I also liked the fact that he always had a lot of real-world problems. Unlike a lot of other super heroes he always had problems. His best friend’s dad goes crazy and he is constantly battling with him. Jameson, at the newpaper, is always writing bad articles about Spiderman. No matter how good of a job he does, Jameson is always dragging his name through the mud. He has issues with MJ about why he is always dissapearing. Unlike Lois Lane, she doesn’t naively accept this, she gets ticked and goes out with other guys. Also, for most of the time, his Aunt May, who he so dearly loves, hates Spiderman.
My grandmother was buried today. Everything has revolved around the burial and funeral. It’s been weird meeting people and talking about the future with these sad events around. Not much else to say - I’m very low on sleep. The funeral went from 4p to 1a. Burial stuff began at 9a.
Didn’t think I’d ever say this, but I’m looking forward to Cornell.
Thanks, my love, for being here for me these past few days.
Just when you thought the world was in huge trouble, you see an act that give you faith in humanity. I truly love those moments because so often we see these negative things on Tv: rape, murder, suicide, and hatred.
Yesterday I was with a friend of mine, talking his recent slip into some rather unfortunate circumstances. He told me I could blog about yesterday’s events, but I’ll protect his identity for now. If he wants to out himself, he can do that through commenting on this post. He cast some pretty bad lots and was lamenting not having been hugged in a long time. I suggested, in a tone of mirth, that he walk through Ho Plaza (where each student passes at least once a day according to the campus tours) with his arms outstretched in a hug shape and see if some random person hugged him. He responded that he would find that unsatisfactory because he wouldn’t know the person. He may as well just walk up to some random person and ask for a hug. At least one person, he claimed, would comply. While I disagreed people would hug on command (I certainly wouldn’t!), I didn’t say anything because there are always bozos out there that will act irrationally when compared to normal social protocol.
My fiancee and I stopped keeping track of how many months we’d been together once we reached the year-mark. However, since this is the last major milestone left before marriage later this year, I wanted to wish you a happy 3.5 years!
It seems already as though we’ve been together for an eternity. Everything is as perfect as it can be at this point in our lives. Every day I look forward to the day the pastor presents us to the world as husband and wife!
Today while talking to my dad about dancing, I realized I really don’t like booty dancing. I mean, I’ve done it before at numerous dances and I’d do it again instead of just sitting around bored, but I just don’t like it. I think it’s too repetitive and, frankly, not creative at all. I don’t know, it just bores me to dance it. Spanish music, on the other hand, I could dance all night long - or until I got tired. I guess I just feel more connected to my partner, for starters. When I’m in the groove I feel like we’re both one organism moving together. We move around seamlessly, without any verbal communication. Additionally, who knows, I may spin her or do another of the hundreds of moves from the dance. It also looks a lot more beautiful. Finally, it’s much more intimate. There aren’t too many social activities that make me feel as close to someone as when we’re dancing a bachata. I feel so connected and that’s why I love it so much.
This weekend my youngest brother and my fiancee’s youngest sister (with her best friend) came up to see us at school. It was one of the most fun times I’ve had here at Cornell. I don’t think I have as much fun with too many other people as when I’m with my brothers. We’re usually on fire, just bouncing off each other’s jokes and references.
I’m quite excited about this weekend. My fiancee’s sister is up with her friend and my brother flies in tomorrow. We are planning on spending at least Saturday together in order to have a good time and take a break from Cornell. Saturday night is also the final hockey game of the season. It should make for a good game and they usually have a little something special for the last game.
I want to give a huge thanks to Katie Cheng who dropped what she was doing Friday night to give my car a jump. Even though I hadn’t left the lights on in the car or anything, the car refused to start, leaving me stranded at Best Buy. It was near 10p and Katie didn’t mind coming out in the freezing cold with her car to help me out.
Also, thanks to Benny. Even though I was able to get my car started to go to Sears to get a replacement battery, he was ready and willing to help me out too.
About 4 years ago I decided to start exploring various web browsers. Eventually I settled on Vivaldi as my main browser both on Windows and Linux. When I first installed Vivaldi, I mentioned that vertical tabs are very helpful on a wide screen monitor. I also really like the ability to tile my tabs and to name my tab stacks (because other browsers like Chrome have also added tab stacks) While at PyConUS I posted to Mastodon:
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Firefox is now 5 years old”] [/caption]
I can’t believe Firefox has been around for five years! I remember first being introduced to tabs and it totally changing the way I surf the web. Back then it was a plucky upstart and didn’t even work with many websites that had been coded specifically for Internet Explorer. Now it has around 20% market share!
About 4 years ago I decided to start exploring various web browsers. Eventually I settled on Vivaldi as my main browser both on Windows and Linux. When I first installed Vivaldi, I mentioned that vertical tabs are very helpful on a wide screen monitor. I also really like the ability to tile my tabs and to name my tab stacks (because other browsers like Chrome have also added tab stacks) While at PyConUS I posted to Mastodon:
XZ Utils is a really awesome compression format. (In fact, earlier this month I got some Linux image files to run off an SD card that were compressed in xz
SSH uses XZ Utils
Only one guy was effectively maintaining it
Someone or some group pretending to be one person social engineered the maintainer to giving them commit access
they used that to put some backdoors
Because it’s in SSH it would have made every computer on the net vulnerable
LUCKILY it was found (by accident - see the Ars Technica story) before it made it out of most (all?) Linux distro test repositories
I was incredibly surprised to hear about it today on Planet Money’s episode: The hack that almost broke the Internet. It’s a really great episode to share with your non-techie friends who want to understand what you were stressed about and which it matters to everyone, not just techies. Of all the Linux distros, they start off interviewing someone from Red Hat! (My favorite Linux distro family) The episode then goes back to the 1980s to explain the origins of open source (not FLOSS, there’s no rms here - it’s Bruce Perens they interview) before bringing it back to the present and explaining the how the social engineering attack happened and what it affected. (Also a quick moment that explained how MS went from hating OSS to supporting it) I thought it was an incredibly well-produced episode that brings everything into context for those who aren’t neck-deep in Linux and/or open source. Give it a listen and pass it along!
I remember back before CentOS became CentOS Stream there would always be a long lag time from RHEL releases until CentOS. That’s why I was so surprised to learn that Alma Linux 9.4 is also available today. What I found neatest about Alma is the way they’re distinguishing their distro. Why just go for another RHEL clone? Well, in this case Alma Linux is decided to support hardware that had been deprecated by Red Hat. So now they get to position their disto as a useful alternative, not just a free offering - more important now that you can have up to 16 free RHEL licenses.
Back in 2013 when I started using Fedora Core 1, I had no idea I’d still be on Fedora when it reached its 40th release 11 years later. Congrats to the team and here’s the official announcement.
Now that we’ve had a few months to consider Red Hat’s new course code policy, I wanted to share my thoughts since I’ve been a user of Red Hat’s Fedora since it started back in 2003. I’ve also made heavy use of CentOS and am currently running a server using one of the free RHEL licences that came about from the CentOS Stream controversy. I want to start off with my thoughts and then how I think we may end up in a better place anyway.
If you’ve been following my blog long enough, you know that the KDE 3 -> KDE 4 transition was a mess, but somewhere around Oct 2010 (2-3 years after the 4.0 release), it really started to get stable and become my daily runner. By Feb 2011, I was loving the fact that KDE Plasma 4 had implemented the idea of activities. After user experience disaster, the KDE developers were a lot more careful with the transition to Plasma 5. Recently I read the blog post Plasma 6: Better defaults and I’m excited that the KDE developers are taking so much time to think about sane user defaults.
KDE Wayland has come a long way support has come a long way since I last wrote about it 8 months ago. Yakuake now shows up in the correct place (although it seems to have a hard time remembering to start up upon login). The lock screen bug hasn’t hit me in the past month. Multi-monitor support is way better now. (And this is without the new update that supposedly makes it even more so solid). Scrolling is still a little screwy in Firefox, but it works perfectly in Vivaldi (my daily driver for quite a few months now).
This morning I updated my Fedora 36 computer and suddenly it could no longer find any sound devices. Thanks to a Fedora user who commented on this reddit thread, I found that the solution was to downgrade my Pipewire packages. Specifically, at this point in time:
After using Plasma with KWayland for about a week, I had to go back to X11 because it’s not yet ready for me. There are 3 main issues I’m having:
Occasionally, when I come back to my computer after locking the screen it would say that the screen locker had crashed. I would need to go to antoher TTY and type in a command to unlock it. After I did that, coming back to the TTY that has the GUI just remains black with a mouse cursor. So I would need to reboot the machine.
I cannot drag and drop video files to upload to YouTube with Firefox. I have to click the button on YT and then navigate to the folder that has the video file. (Not sure if there are other things that can’t be dragged in - photo upload to Flickr, for example)
I’ll keep looking to see if they improve things. But for now I’m staying on X11.
I upgraded to Fedora 36 so I wanted to see all the latest updates to Wayland. I’d been reading about the updates in the KDE and wanted to see if it was more stable. I had to redo my latte dock profile. Other than that, SO FAR the only issues are that the scroll wheel on the mouse scrolls WAY too far on the page, making it almost useless. And Yakuake (the KDE drop down terminal) appears at the middle of the screen instead of at the top. I went to file a bug, but I saw a comment that this is fixed in the next version of Yakuake, so it seems I just need to wait for an update. Otherwise, so far it seems to be working OK.
Elisa is currently the “default” KDE music player, replacing Amarok. I am just taking a guess, but I think that Amarok just ended up with too large a codebase to be maintainable at a reasonable pace. I’ve been using Cantata, an mpd player for KDE that’s currently on maintenance mode. On the one hand, I know that for many folks last.fm scrobbling (logging the music you listen to) is something they left behind in the 2010s. On the other hand, I’m not the only person who has commented on the ticket to get the Elisa devs to add support for it. (And you know I love the stats for my end of year posts)
Fedora provides a nice RPM-OSTree solution for folks who want to use the tech, but don’t want to use Gnome. The install is a bit barebones and doesn’t come with Flathub pre-configured, reducing the number of KDE applications that can be installed after the distro is first installed. Once Flathub is activated and Discover is reloaded, the user can start installing KDE apps. Not a good starting distro now, but with some sensible defaults, it could be great thanks to the way that RPM-OSTree makes the system more maintainable.
Upgrade the main computer to Fedora 34. The upgrade was uneventful, but left me with a few little annoyances. It’s running Wayland, so there’s no longer a primary monitor. Also, something is slamming my processors and some programs are taking a long time to load. I was hoping things would be in better shape by this point in the life-cycle, but every once in a while there’s a buggier Fedora.
A few months ago, someone asked about whether the rices*/modifications/tweaks people displayed on reddit.com/r/unixporn (where people show off their desktops, not human pornography) were actually useful. Someone commented they’d like to see a post on how someone uses their mods. So I decided to write this up.
*I know the term ricing could be considered racist or insensitive. In this context, it’s simply the term of art used on the subreddit.
It messed with DNS resolution for my local network, at least temporarily. I couldn’t resolve any websites that needed to hit our local DNS server. I did some Googling and saw that the resolver tech was changed from Fedora 32 to Fedora 33. I change a setting for my NIC and then changed it back and either that fixed it or (some websites mentioned just needing to give it some time). Either way, that was it. Relatively smooth.
While new versions of Fedora have been pretty darned stable for a few years now, I usually wait a while after a release to upgrade. This year waiting ended up turning into just leaving it alone. But with February half-way done, we’re actually starting to get kind of close to the Fedora 34 release date. So I figured President’s Day was as good a day as any to do the upgrade.
It’s been a very, very long time since I tried using a different shell than the bash shell. Back some 10-15 years ago I remember hearing about fish and trying it out. I think it broke some bash paradigms so I went back to bash. I could have sworn I tried zsh in the past, but I could be wrong. I know the last shell I tried out didn’t let me use ‘*’ during a dnf update to update all the packages that start with the same prefix, say all the 1500-ish texlive packages. That annoyed me so I went back to bash. If it was on this computer it was on a previous install or previous /home directory because I couldn’t find any evidence of zsh. No profiles or other such dot files that I could find. (Not that I looked too hard).
On 8 Dec I saw the announcement that Red Hat (which had made CentOS an in-house distro a year or two ago) was changing CentOS from being a free clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, to focusing solely on CentOS Stream. ( The CentOS press release; The Red Hat press release) This would make the progression of features and elements: Fedora -> CentOS Stream -> RHEL. At first, like many others, I felt hurt by this change. It will take place at the end of next year. Usually CentOS follows a support widow similar to that of RHEL, so I was expecting a decade or so for the servers I converted from CentOS 7 to CentOS 8. While I generally run Fedora on many of my computers, I prefer not to have to upgrade every 6 months for my servers. That’s a level of disruption I could do without. That said, after I read this blog post, I had a slightly more nuanced view of things. I still think it should have taken effect with CentOS 9, which I think is due in the next year or so (RH is accelerating releases of new RHELs). But it certainly makes a clearer upstream to downstream path for Red Hat.
It came out this Tuesday and last night I updated my laptop. The only thing I had to do for the upgrade was remove a python3-test package. Since I’m using virtual environments, for the most part I don’t care which Python packages the system has. So that was a nice, easy upgrade! Good job Fedora packagers and testers! Speaking of Python, it’ll be nice to start upgrading my projects to Python 3.9. (Fedora 33 includes the latest programming language versions as part of its “First” values)
As you know, I had CentOS 7 on the Acer Aspire and it was working fine. After CentOS 8 came out, I went ahead and installed it there. It worked fine, but there aren’t as many packages in EPEL for CentOS and RHEL 8. I went on a journey to try and get the i3 window manager working, but I would have had to recreate way too many packages in order to get it to work. So I tried to go to Ubuntu. I couldn’t find a minimal installer that wasn’t for servers, so I went with the Kubuntu install, intending to use that to install qtile or another tiling manager (the resolution on this thing is just too atrocious for a real Window Manager or Desktop Environment). But Kubuntu was just insanely buggy - probably due to the low specs of the netbook. Also, apparently qtile had been knocked out of the Ubuntu repos. The qtile documentation implied it was still available in Debian, so I put Debian on the netbook using a minimal install where I went ahead and install LXQT just to be on the safe side and have some kind of GUI if things didn’t work out. At first wifi wasn’t working, but eventually I landed on this page which explains all the quirks of installing on the Acer Aspire One. I had to enable the non-free repos and install the broadcom-sta-dkms driver. After a reboot, I finally had wifi. Unfortunately, qtile isn’t in the Debian repos anymore either. So I’m going to give installing from pypi a shot and if not, maybe try Arch?
It’s been about a month since Fedora 32 was released, so I decided to try and upgrade Supermario to Fedora 32. First I had to disable the dropbox repo since they don’t have a Fedora 32 binary yet. Other conflicts included:
bat in module
gimp in module
meson in module
ninja in module
pythnon3-pytest-testmon (doesn’t belong in a distupgrade repo)
python2-beautifulsoup neds python2-lxml
The python ones are no-brainer to me. I use virtual environments now so I don’t care about the system libraries. I can get rid of those.
Last year when I went to Red Hat Summit, I saw a lot of use of Satellite. I’d tried the 5.x series’ upstream Spacewalk and it didn’t quite work out for me. But this time I would try it out, gosh darnit! I mean, with the Katello plugin it would even include Pulp, which I’d been interested in trying out before because it could cache RPMs during an upgrade. So I’ve been messing with it here and there. However,I don’t use Puppet scripts (it’s like Chef or Ansible in principle) and I don’t have the need to provision new machines or VMs (especially when that’s already pretty easy with Cockpit and/or Virt-Manager). It’s already easier and works more consistently for me to keep track of whether my computers are up to date (and update them if not) with Cockpit. The RPM caching part of it was neat, but recently it stopped working consistently. Upgrades are VERY fragile and messing up on installing a plugin could bork the whole system. Also the necessary files - puppet, katello-agent, etc were always behind in providing packages for Fedora. Turns out it was a bunch of extra work and frustration just to keep track of my computers - and I was already doing that in Dokuwiki.
Because I have this VM registered to Katello (Foreman plugin) to receive updates (basically as a way of both keeping track of the computers and VMs on my network and also to have a GUI to pulp for caching RPMs), I had to deal with Katello-Agent. The latest RPM in the official Foreman/Katello repos is unfortunately for Fedora 29. That version of Fedora has been out of maintenance for a long time. Maybe Foreman (upstream for Satellite) is just used by most of their customers for RHEL sites that don’t have any Fedora nodes? So I did find this copr that provides updated versions: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/slaanesh/system-management/
As I mentioned in my k3s on Ubuntu 2020.04 post, I really thought that Ubuntu 2020.04’s server install was prety slick. I’m used to text-only server installs looking like this:
Arch Linux Installation Begins
Here’s a step-by-step collection of screenshots and my thoughts on each step of Ubuntu 2020.04’s server install:
Language Selection
Just starting off, with the language selection, you can see this isn’t the usual ugly ncurses install. It looks like a beautiful matte black.
Clearly there’s a lot I don’t get about Kubernetes and I didn’t install a GUI in that VM so I can’t use the dashboard (which can only be viewed at localhost - or so the instructions seem to indicate) So I decided to go back to basics and look at the Hello Minikube tutorial, but run it in my k3s VM.
So I think this is the first part of why I was having problems yesterday with the pod I created from Podman. A lot of the commands I saw online implied a deployment, but I hadn’t created one. This is evidenced by:
As I’ve been working on learning server tech, I’ve gone from virtualization to Docker containers and now Podman containers and Podman pods. The pod in Podman comes from a view towards Kubernetes. I moved to Podman because of the cgroupsv2 issue in Fedora 31 and so I figured why not think about going all the way and checking out Kubernetes? Kubernetes is often stylized as k8s and a few months back I found k3s, a lightweight Kubernetes distro that’s meant to work on edge devices (including Raspberry Pis!). For some reason (that I don’t seem to find on the main k3s site), I got it in my head that it was better tailored to Ubuntu than Red Hat, so I decided to also take Ubuntu Server 2020.04 for a spin.
Yesterday I mentioned some issues with my Ortek MCE VRC-1100 remote and certain buttons not working. Figured out that in addition to removing the XF…. entries in dconf, also have to remove them in gsettings. Specifically, I had to use the commands:
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys stop-static [’’]
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys play-static [’’]
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys pause-static [’’]
After that, everything was working as it should. So far no negatives to using Fedora Silverblue as our HTPC. We’ll see if that changes as I try to get Lutris to launch some Wine games.
One thing to know about Silverblue is that it’s a Gnome environment. I was already running Gnome for the HTPC, but I prefer KDE for my computers usually. When I was installing Silverblue there was no option to go for KDE or anything else. On Silverblue you install via Flatpaks. Any regular installs (ostree instead of rpms) also requires a reboot.
Originally I was going to mess around with Silverblue in a VM before considering using it on my HTPC. In theory it sounded like it would work very well - an immutable, rollback-able OS seems like the perfect thing for the one computer that ALWAYS needs to work for less tech-savvy folks in the house. But the first release of Silverblue seemed to still be a bit rough around the edges. Lots of recent blog posts on Fedora Planet (a blog aggregator for folks who participate in the Fedora project) seemed to indicate that things were in a better place now for Silverblue. Still, I was going to first mess around in a VM. But then I had to reboot the computer after things went awry with the display and this time I wasn’t able to get around the Free Magic issue that had been plaguing me for a few months now since upgrading to Fedora 31 (in anticipation of Fedora 30 being out of the support window). The Free Magic issue basically would appear after the grub menu and while others’ reports on bugzilla seemed to indicate that a kernel upgrade fixed it for them, such was not the case for me. For a while it worked such that if I was there on reboot and hit enter on the grub entry, it would work (while it would fail if you left it to boot on its own). But tonight it would not yield. The computer had gone catatonic. So, I figured it was as good a time as any to try and move to Silverblue. As a bonus, I was going to move the installation to an SSD, so I still have the old, borked installation if things go completely wrong (although I’d still need to fix the Free Magic issue).
Recently upgraded my server to Fedora 31 as the Fedora 30 support window had closed. All I had to do was disable the bat Modular Repo. It wasn’t obvious I needed to do this at first, but I found a bugzilla that covered it. Then everything proceeded.
I also updated my main laptop to Fedora 32; it’s always my first upgrade since it’s not my main machine. That one required a few modular repos to be disabled as well as a bunch of conflicts from Python 2 packages. By using dnf’s –auto-erase (or whatever the command actually is), everything proceeded and seems to be running just fine. I was a little worried at first with the warning about coming back from a locked screen in KDE, but I decided I could live with it on the laptop. So far, either the issue doesn’t affect my laptop or I haven’t triggered the conditions.
I started off with just a boot install of CentOS 8, so I wouldn’t have Gnome or any other unnecessary cruft installed. After installation, I enabled the EPEL repository - latest directions for that are here.
A little over a year ago, I put CentOS 7 on my Acer Aspire One. We had no idea when RHEL 8 was coming out (turns out just a few months later when I was at the Red Hat Summit, it was the release party for RHEL 8), so 7 went on there. And at Red Hat Summit I learned that, while running CentOS 7, suspend worked on that netbook. However, it was already pretty old by the time I put it on the netbook and it was missing certain libraries and had old versions of libraries like Go so I couldn’t do something like install Weechat-Matrix on there.
For my btrfs snapshot program, snapintime, I have reached version 1.1.1. About six years after starting this project, it now covers all the cases I wanted to back when I started. I’m very happy with where it’s now at.
For my Extra Life Donation Tracker ( PyPi page here), I’ve reached my v4.2.0 release. This release fixes some of my oldest issues (#s 13 and 14 - while the current highest issue is #95), and allows users maximum flexibility in the way they want to set up their tracker window. They can change the font face and color of the text that displays the latest donation and they can change the background color if chromakey green doesn’t work for their use case.
If you’ve been following my blog for a long time, you know that back in 2014 I was working on a Python program to create hourly btrfs snapshots and cull them according to a certain algorithm. (See all the related posts here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) The furthest I ever got was weekly culling. Frankly, life and school contributed a good excuse not to keep going because I had created a huge headache for myself by attempting to figure out the date and cover all the possible corner cases with unit tests. This is what my code looked like in 2014.
Went ahead and upgraded. Only had to get rid of python2-twitter and an older nvidia package. Other than that it seems to be running relatively smoothly.
First up is tldr. This something I’ve wanted ever since I started with Linux 16 years ago! Basically it gives you the examples part of a man page. For both of these I’m going to use a screenshot because copy/pasting it into the blog doesn’t do it justice.
Three years ago I wrote a post (along with a Youtube video) about how to set up a KVM VM with Dual Monitors (or even triple monitors). Since then there’s been a bit of a change. I loaded up remote viewer and, for some reason, I couldn’t add more monitors to my Linux KVM VM. Turns out what you have to do is look at the Video (QXL) section in virt-manager. Look at how many “heads” it has listed. For example:
The podman saga continues. The podman equivalent of a docker-compose.yml can be created from a pod with the following command:
podman generate kube (name of pod) > (filename).yaml
So I did that with the pod that I’d created with an SELinux context. Now it was time to try it on another Fedora 31 VM to see if it would work. To be on the safe side, I started off creating the phpIPAM folder, chowning it to nobody and chmoding it to 777.
Last time I messed around with Podman, I finally got things working and had what I think was a pretty good understanding of how to go forward. But in order to get things working, I’d had to turn off SELinux. Now it was time to see what I had to do to make Podman work with SELinux. I’ve got some ideas based on some Googling and might also need to try a program called udica to create the right contexts.
Turns out that on my Fedora 30 VM something got screwed up with the CNI networking (the networking that Podman uses) and instead of pointing to the address that Podman is using according to Cockpit:
10.88.0.1
It’s pointing somewhere else. I found that via iptables -L. Not sure how to fix it, though. When I tried, it complained:
“`87-podman-bridge.conflist’ not found”
But changing the hostname environment variable turned out to be the solution as I tested on my Fedora 31 VM:
Adding the –name mysql - it wasn’t enough to get the PHPIpam apache container to find the mysql container. They’re in the same pod, but something’s not quite right. So I decided to see if I could modify the config.php by mounting the container and modifying that.
# podman mount beautiful_gauss
/var/lib/containers/storage/overlay/5a33decc2cfad7e9bda5f9048d94a814267d954e97d5dd7befb057a84367f27a/merged
While this allowed me to see the config files and open them in vi (not included in the container) I could not modify the contents. I think the key is passing “phpIPAM5” (or whatever the pod is called) into the MYSQL_ENV_MYSQL_HOST environment variable. So let’s try that. First, I had to stop phpIPAM5. I’ve been using
Like these random container names that podman generated:
# podman ps
CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES
b83a26bb2c5d docker.io/library/mysql:5.6 mysqld 2 minutes ago Up 2 minutes ago 0.0.0.0:8081->80/tcp hungry_wilson
f35ec64d3b3c docker.io/pierrecdn/phpipam:latest apache2-foregroun… 2 minutes ago Up 2 minutes ago 0.0.0.0:8081->80/tcp nice_johnson
Makes me think perhaps there should be a list of adjectives and names that shouldn’t go together?
When I tried to upgrade the laptop a couple days ahead of the Tuesday release date, assuming that the sources were as good as gold at that point, the upgrade process complained about the Kdevelop Python plugin and didn’t want to proceed. I figured if this persisted past Tuesday I would just use it as an opportunity to try out PyCharm Community Edition. But once Tuesday came around I was able to upgrade to Fedora 31 with nary a problem. So that was probably the smoothest upgrade I’ve had since Fedora Core 1.
Back when Fedora 30 came out, I updated my laptop, but I left my main computer and the HTPC on Fedora 29. The former because I was busy with something at the time and didn’t want the disruption of an upgrade; the latter because the family depends on it for entertainment. However, with Fedora 31 coming out next Tuesday, the support window of Fedora 29 is over. The HTPC didn’t give any issues when I started the upgrade (at of this time it’s still running the upgrade), but my main computer did. This time it complaint about ripright and whois-mkpasswd.
I was having an issue with Kdenlive while rending my most recent tutorials for my Extra Life Donation Tracker and so I grabbed the latest Appimage version since it’s more up to date than the version in the Fedora 29 repos. Boy has it changed in the last year or so. Here’s the version in the Fedora 29 repos:
Kdenlive 18.12
And here’s the latest release with the exact same file open:
Red Hat Summit 2019 was my first Red Hat Summit. I heard quite a few people saying it was the largest one they’d been to yet and that it used to be a pretty small convention. That was not the case this year; it used up the entire Boston Convention Center. I’ve said before, concerning video games, that the best use of trophies and gamification of the meta-game are to get the player to take actions they wouldn’t normally take. Red Hat did a pretty good job of this during the summit. They provided points for filling out session surveys, which most wouldn’t have done otherwise. They also provided points for posting to the convention’s feed. I normally wouldn’t have, but reaching 1000 points netted the player some money towards merchandise at the RHEL store. So I posted about getting my custom t-shirt. This led others to comment on my post to find out where it was taking place and I was able to direct them there.
CentOS continues to impress me with its performance on my netbook. It had never been able to properly suspend to RAM and wakeup. But while I was at Red Hat Summit, I could close the lid for it to suspend and then go to the next session and open it up and just tap any button to wake it up. It was GREAT.
Now that I’m back from Red Hat Summit, I am ready to start upgrading my Fedora computers. Well, probably not the server or the living room HTPC - I’ll take advantage of the fact that Fedora supports the n-1 release to reduce headaches and downtime. As I’ve done for a few releases now, I used the dnf upgrade facility and it worked fine. So far things seem to be working as they should. I got a weird error that said vmlinuz-5.0….. crashed, but given that it was a .fc29 package, I’m going to let that slide for now unless it turns out that things start acting funky on the laptop.
Often people try and dissuade you from installing CentOS onto a laptop because they say the chipsets on the laptops are so varied it’s likely you will end up unable to use your laptop because the drivers aren’t there. Well, I don’t know if it’s because this netbook is so old (I mean, netbooks as a category don’t exist anymore - having been supplanted by tablets) or just uses common chipsets, but when I ended up with some Fedora configuration error that I didn’t want to bother debugging (I hate using the netbook on an everyday basis because the keys are too small and the screen is pretty low resolution), I figured it’d be a fun time to test if I could install CentOS on there. During the installation GUI the trackpad worked fine and WiFi connected just fine as well. So if you’ve still got one of these lying around and prefer the longer support windows of CentOS / RHEL - feel free to install CentOS on there.
My main server, Tanukimario, has a 120GB hard drive in it and it’s started to become annoying to butt up against that limit. I have an 512GB SSD that I only used for a couple years that I wanted to use as a replacement. In order to reduce the annoyances that come from setting things up from scratch, I decided to try and use Clonezilla to copy the drive over. Since the hard drive is so small, it told me it would only take 40 minutes, so I was jazzed I’d be able to do it in the afternoon while everyone was out and I wouldn’t be inconveniencing anyone.
A while back I created a copr repo for HDR Merge. I hadn’t kept up with it because there weren’t regular HDRMerge releases going on, but I noticed the git repo has been very active, so I decided to create a new RPM for Fedora 29.
And recently I learned that for the newest version of MakeMKV if you want to be able to extract Closed Captioning from older DVDs of TV shows that use an embedded CC track rather than subtitles you need ccextractor, but there wasn’t a package available for Fedora, so I made one.
It’s been six years in the making, but GIMP is finally out with their GEGL-enabled version. Although some pros had made use of it, it is now 90% of the way towards being a Photoshop replacement. The next+1 release with non-destructive layer edits will finally get it there. I’m also happy it can use RawTherapee as a RAW image editing plugin.
Hitting alt-F2 then typing email (contact name - eg Danielle) and enter and then it presents me with an email window to send an email. No need to navigate to gmail.com or go over to the screen running Kmail (actually, usually Kontact).
It’s been a while since btrfs was first introduced to me via a Fedora version that had it as the default filesystem. At the time, it was especially brittle when it came to power outages. I ended up losing a system to one such use case. But a few years ago, I started using btrfs on my home directory. And even developed a program to manage snapshots. My two favorite features of btrfs are that Copy on Write (COW) allows me to make snapshots that only take up space when the file that was snapshot changes and the ability to dynamically set up and grow RAID levels. I was able to use this recently to get my photo hard drive on RAID1 without having to have an extra hard drive (because most RAID solutions destroy what’s on the drive).
With modern technology, here’s the pattern I’ve noticed since college. New tech comes out and I can see that it’s neat, but not how I can make use of it. A few years later, I finally come across the right article and it all makes sense to me. I first noticed this with VMs. I couldn’t see a reason to want to use it outside of a server context. Then I used it to review Linux distros. Then I used it to run my network’s services. The same happened with tablets, smart phones, and Docker.
[root@supermario ~]# /usr/sbin/btrfs scrub start -Bd /media/Photos/
scrub device /dev/sdd1 (id 1) done
scrub started at Tue Mar 21 17:18:13 2017 and finished after 05:49:29
total bytes scrubbed: 2.31TiB with 0 errors
scrub device /dev/sda1 (id 2) done
scrub started at Tue Mar 21 17:18:13 2017 and finished after 05:20:56
total bytes scrubbed: 2.31TiB with 0 errors
I’m a bit perplexed at this information. Since this is a RAID1, I would expect it to be comparing info between disks - is this not so? If not, why? Because I would have expected both disks to end at the same time. Also, interesting to note that the 1TB/hr stopped being the case at some point.
[root@supermario ~]# btrfs scrub status /media/Photos/
scrub status for 27cc1330-c4e3-404f-98f6-f23becec76b5
scrub started at Tue Mar 21 17:18:13 2017, running for 01:05:38
total bytes scrubbed: 1.00TiB with 0 errors
So on Fedora 25 with an AMD-8323 (8 core, no hyperthreading) and 24GB of RAM with this hard drive and its 3TB brother in RAID1 , it takes about an hour per Terabyte to do a scrub. (Which seems about equal to what a coworker told me his system takes to do a zfs scrub - 40ish hours for about 40ish TB)
Continuing my LXC project, let’s list the installed containers:
lxc-ls
That just shows the name of the container - lemmy. For completion’s sake, I’m going to start it as a daemon in the background rather than being sent straight into the console:
lxc-start -n lemmy -d
As per usual Linux SOP, it produced no output. Now to jump in:
lxc-console -n lemmy
That told me I was connected to tty1, but did not present a login. Quitting out via Ctrl-a q let me go back to the VM’s tty, but trying again did not get me login. There’s some weird issue that doesn’t allow it to work, however, this did:
I’m continuing on from yesterday’s post to get the VM ready to host LXC. I’m starting with Centos 7 so the first thing I had to do was enable the epel repos:
yum install epel-release
Then, according to the guide I was following, I had to also install these package:
yum install debootstrap perl libvirt
That installed a bunch of stuff. I also get that they’re trying to break out what they’re doing, but they probably could have installed both that and the LXC stuff below in one blow:
As I mentioned before, I’m looking at Linux Containers (LXC) to have a higher density virtualization. To get ready for that, I had to create a network bridge to allow the containers to be accessible on the network.
First I installed bridge-utils:
yum install bridge-utils -y
After that, I had to create the network script:
vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-virbr0
In there I placed:
DEVICE="virbr0"
BOOTPROTO="static"
IPADDR="192.168.1.35" #IP address of the VM
NETMASK="255.255.255.0"
GATEWAY="192.168.1.1"
DNS1="192.168.1.7"
ONBOOT="yes"
TYPE="Bridge"
After someone told me that a PDF I’d created in Calligra Office was illegible and having issues with spreadsheets loading slowly, I decided to install LibreOffice. However, rather than go with the version in the repos, I decided to go with Flatpak - which allows for a more advanced version via the usage of runtimes. First, I had to install Flatpak:
sudo dnf install flatpak
Then I needed to install the runtimes. The LibreOffice page uses the –user tag, but I think that is just for installing it just to yourself rather than for the whole system. So I am omitting that.
My main computer is now on Fedora 24. This time around I only had to uninstall HDR Merge (which was from my COPR and I hadn’t built a Fedora 24 version yet) and OBS-Studio because there isn’t a Fedora 24 package for it yet. Not bad.
After rebooting, I didn’t have graphics. Then rebooting once more kicked the akmod into gear and now things appear to be working well. 2 more computers left to upgrade to Fedora 24 - the VM server and the Kodi living room box.
Fedora 24 was released yesterday. I updated Daisy, my big laptop, first since it’s not critical. If the update broke something I wouldn’t care. The only hitch it had was that I had to reinstall the RPMFusion repos from the RPM for Fedora 24. Otherwise it was saying that one of the packages wasn’t signed and refused to do the upgrade. Probably has something to do with the fact that for the last release or two, RPMFusion wasn’t exactly in the best of conditions. I’m currently updating my netbook (Kuribo), but that’s more of an all-evening affair since it’s just running on an Intel Atom. There are three more Fedora machines in the house - SuperMario, TanukiMario, and BlueYoshi. I’ll probably save the livingroom Kodi (BY) for last since everyone in the house uses that to watch TV.
I’ve been looking at NAS implementations for a long time. I looked at FreeNAS for a while then OpenMediaVault. But what I really wanted was to be able to take advantage of btrfs and its great RAID abilities - especially its ability to dynamically expand. So I was happy when I discovered Rockstor on Reddit. Here are some videos in which I explore the interface and how to work with Rockstor using a VM before setting it up on bare metal.
It’s been a long time since I looked at a new Linux distro. Long time readers know I used to review Linux distros a few years ago. But one of the maintainers of Korora posts to the Fedora Planet feed. (They may say constantly that RSS feeds are dead, but some of us still use them!) Korora (which used to be based on Gentoo) aims to create the ultimate desktop user’s Fedora setup. So they tweak Fedora a bit and add some repos like RPMFusion out of the box. Since I do a lot of this every time I install Fedora anyway, I may want to just install Korora next time I do an install. So I wanted to look at Korora and also use it as a chance to take a look at what’s going on nowadays in the non-KDE/Plasma desktops. Also, since Korora 23 should be coming out within the next month or so, it should help me see how Korora upgrades compare to Fedora (*should* be the same). First the install:
It’s the intersection of three of my hobbies - computers, Linux, and photography! Ever since I learned how to compile source code from the net, about a decade ago, I’ve wanted to create RPMs to help those who aren’t comfortable with compiling or simply don’t want to bother with compiling. But, for some reason, RPM creation was always something I struggled to get right. Nearly once a year I’d try and do it, but always failed. But recently, when reading the instructions on how to do it, it just clicked.
After daydreaming about running my Linux computer from an SSD for years (ever since I saw how fast it made my wife’s Linux install), I finally did it on the main Linux computer (SuperMario) as the root hard drive was getting old and was liable to die at any moment. The last time I’d installed my main Linux computer from scratch was in 2009 when I went from an old eMachine to the computer I’d built for my wife when I was going to ease her from Windows on her Dell computer over to Linux on a custom built computer. Lots had changed since then (like going to SystemD, for example) and I also wanted to move to a larger hard drive. So just copying everything over was out of the question. I figured a fresh install would get rid of a lot of the cruft I’d picked up in the last 7 years. Additionally, this time I would start with an install of the KDE spin of Fedora and I’m not planning on adding in other desktop environments or Window managers unless I am ready to ditch KDE. If I want to dabble in other desktops, I can always run a VM.
I used to have a Team Fortress 2 server on CentOS 6 with Virtual Box. Now that I’m using KVM/QEMU/Libvirt, I wanted to set up a new one. Also, Valve somewhat changed how they worked a few years ago and I wanted a clean slate. I started with a VM with 40GB. It’s not supposed to take that much, but I remember last time it took much more than the 10GB I’d given the VM and I don’t want to have to increase the disk size again.
I have VM running Emby that I set up a while ago on an low spec machine that had been the guest computer before everyone got Chromebooks and tablets. But it only had 2GB of RAM and I gave 1GB to the VM. So I added some new RAM to bring the system up to 8GB and wanted to start off by giving the VM 4GB to see if that improved performance.
Recently I’ve been having a problem where the Emby server kept dying. I haven’t been able to figure out what is causing it. So while I’ve been trying to figure it out with the Emby folks, I fixed up the systemd script for Emby so that it would restart itself whenever it died. It was incredibly simple to do this. Here’s the original script:
[Unit]
Description=Emby Media Server
After=network.target
[Service]
EnvironmentFile=/etc/emby-server.conf
ExecStart=/usr/lib/emby-server/emby-server.sh start
Restart=on-abort
TimeoutSec=20
ExecStopPost=/usr/lib/emby-server/emby-server.sh clear
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
Upgraded the final computer - the server host that has the VM with our Kodi stuff. It was the least complicated upgrade - didn’t have to remove anything - it just worked. And that was a great change, for once. (Not that the others were too much of a pain).
For some reason gazebo-doc the Fedora 22 version conflicted with the Fedora 23 version so I had to delete that. Also, despite the system claiming that it would not have to download the packages again, it appeared to not actually work that way - at least the second time I ran things. (After removing Kernel-debug packages to get more space in /boot)
Overall, everything went relatively well. The only bad thing is that there was not a kmod-nvidia available for my current kernel in Fedora 23 so I had to boot into my old kernel in order to have the benefits of the proprietary driver. So later today if there’s time I’m going to see if there’s a kmod-nvidia for this kernel in rpmfusion-testing that I could install. Otherwise, I’ll just keep checking every few days and stay on the older kernel until then.
Now that it seems the nvidia driver that deals with the latest Xorg is available, I decided to try and upgrade my main computer, SuperMario. I started with the dnf commands:
As usual, old packages reared their ugly heads. They’d made it this far, but it was time to banish packages from Fedora 20 and even Fedora 15 that had survived this long.
People often recommend using CentOS for your desktop machine if you find Fedora’s pace to be too fast. Does this even make sense? I decided to explore the idea of CentOS 7 as a desktop computer using my wife’s requirements as the benchmark. Why? Because my wife likes long term support distros. What’s more long term support than Red Hat/CentOS’s 10 years of support for each version?
I wanted to play a bit with Fedora Rawhide so I installed Fedora 23 to a VM. I named it Blargg after the Fire Dragon in Super Mario World. (See video below) I used the following commands from the Fedora wiki:
# dnf upgrade dnf
# dnf install dnf-plugins-core fedora-repos-rawhide
# dnf config-manager --set-disabled fedora updates updates-testing
# dnf config-manager --set-enabled rawhide
# dnf clean -q dbcache plugins metadata
# dnf --releasever=rawhide --setopt=deltarpm=false distro-sync --nogpgcheck
## Optional: it is generally advised to do a selinux autorelabel and reboot
# touch /.autorelabel
I was able to get Kurio, my netbook, to upgrade to Fedora 23 without issue. BlueYoshi, the living computer, is still unable to upgrade. So far it’s tripping up on dolphin-emu, OBS-MP, and some Gnome package. I’m not sure if that’s something that’ll be fixed as RPMFusion continues to update their Fedora 23 packages or if I’ll have to do the old uninstall/reinstall dance that I sometimes have to do with these non-free packages that don’t get QA’d for a Fedora release. Not going to be doing my main computer any time soon.
Tried to upgrade the living room computer to Fedora 23. As of the time when I tried, because the RPMFusion repo wasn’t ready for Fedora 23, it couldn’t upgrade. I’ll try again in a day or two if the repo is up.
I recently had to reinstall an OS on the wife’s Dell Inspiron 17. I was unable to complete an install for Fedora 22, but Fedora 21 and Fedora 23 beta were able to install. It would always freeze mid-install - usually around 70 or 80%. From what I could gleam on the net, it has to do with a kernel issue. But I’m not 100% sure. Anyway, just putting this out there for anyone trying to get Fedora 22 on a Dell Inspiron 17.
The wife told me she couldn’t print from her computer. Sure enough, I couldn’t print from mine either. I tried the trick from last time and ran
system-config-selinux
but selinux wasn’t responsible this time. So I removed the printer and this time I added it through the cups website: localhost:631. After doing that it worked.
Back when I was looking into doing all my photography on Linux I saw that whenever I would add a tag to a bunch of photos that it would crash Digikam. I filed a bug and was told it was a problem with Baloo that would be fixed in Digikam 5. I wanted my photos to have metadata that would be indexed in Dolphin and Baloo search, so I tried to deal with it as I moved to doing all my photography on Linux. But after it kept crashing as I worked on my July photos, I had enough. I turned off Digikam and Baloo integration and am no longer having crashes. Here’s what it needs to look like in the settings if you’d like to do this too:
I was having trouble printing and couldn’t figure out what was going on. I tried everything, including reinstalling the printer and reinstalling the driver. I was getting a misleading “you are using the wrong driver” message. Turns out SELinux was to blame! I happened to check dmesg and see some audit messages. Then I did a
setenforce 0
to turn it off and printing worked. I tried some restorecons on some directories, but I don’t think that fixed it. What I think fixed it was going into the policycoreutils gui and checking as active the cups module “Allow cups execmem/execstack.” Obviously, I turned setenforce back on after checking the box.
Today I was banging my head against the desk trying to figure out why I couldn’t ssh to one of my Fedora machines. I knew that while Fedora wasn’t the most secure Linux distro out there, it was more secure than many by default. That includes having a strict firewall set up. But I had already enabled ssh. What was going wrong? Well, it turns out that the ssh daemon is disabled by default! Just typing the following:
I spent the weekend trying to figure out why SuperMario boots so slowly. I ended up overturning my ideas about what the problem was and learned a lot of new techniques. The only bad thing is that while I’m a lot closer to the problem, I’m still unsure of the root cause. So that the proper helpers can get credit, let me point you to the LinuxQuestions.org thread in which I worked this out. If you haven’t already clicked, don’t worry, I’m going to bring the relevant info over.
SDDM just kept crashing on my system. I can’t figure out what’s screwed up about it. And when it would get me to a KDE desktop, I couldn’t click on anything. So it’s back to KDM for now…
I have KDE connect installed on my computer and phone. KDE connect allows phone alerts to appear on my computer - letting me see if I’m getting a text or something. It just went off, letting me know I had a phone call. What’s neat is that I was listening to music and it paused the music until the phone call was over. While there might be some circumstances where that wouldn’t be the best default (say a party where I was playing the music), it’s certainly neat in the context of a personal computer.
So I found out today that there is no way to re-enable different backgrounds and plasmoids per virtual desktop. It appears to be a mix of forcing people to finally use activities and a complication that was causing all kinds of bugs (according to their bugzilla). I was bummed for about an hour. The different backgrounds can make it very easy to know what virtual desktop you’re at without having to glance at the pager. And if you’ve been following this blog for any length of time longer than a couple months you have seen my Desktop Screenshots and know how much I customize it in KDE.
I was pleasantly surprised to see the next day, when I woke up, that plasma had loaded up despite the fact that I removed kmod-nvidia. Also, I did not have the same issue with KDM as I did with tanukimario. I was loaded in with the blue triangle background. I was greeted with the message “Your saved type “kde-plasma” is not valid any more. Please select a new one, otherwisee ‘default’ will be used.” I select “Plamsa” and am greeted with the KDE loading screen I’ve become oh-so familiar with.
Today was the big one, time to upgrade supermario, my workhorse machine. As usual I had to remove the kmod-nvidia packages. This time around, because my card was getting a little long in the tooth, it was the kmod-nvidia-340xx packages. I also had a bunch of plasmoid packages to get rid of that I didn’t need to remove on the other computers because I was only a heavy plasmoid user on this computer. Thankfully, I’d long since abandoned all the ones I had to get rid of. After running fedup 3 times (once initially, once after removing plasmoids, and once after removing kmod-nvidia packages) to make sure nothing was expected by the program to cause problems upon upgrade, I finally rebooted to upgrade. If the past is any indication, I should be able to get to a screen where I can reinstall kmod-nividia after the upgrades. I’m only a tiny bit worried that Fedora only seems to connect to the internet when a GUI comes up, but if it comes to that I’ll investigate what I need to do and be sure to publish the procedures here for anyone else in the same boat.
Today I upgraded my netbook. Interestingly, this had less problems than yesterday with the guest computer. Perhaps because I wasn’t using KDM on my netbook? Anyway, I was actually expecting a worse time, but it worked out. It appears that KDE Netbook edition didn’t make the jump to Plasma 5. But maybe it’s just a setting I need to discover. See, my netbook is a 2nd gen netbook - not a piece of garbage like our EEE Machine, but it has a sub-HD resolution and so using most programs is hard unless the Window Manager or Desktop Environment is getting rid of window decorations. So far, KDE 5 is OK. I may end up going to Fluxbox. (I did not like XFCE on this screen resolution) Here’s my desktop as of now:
Turns out that the issue was the Fedora SDDM theme. Once I changed that to the default KDE theme everything worked. I wonder what I need to do to get the Fedora theme so that works as well. At least I know for future computers what needs to be done.
Started off with the guest room computer as it’s the least used. If things go pear-shaped there’ll be less complaining. fedup had a complaint about the one of the dependencies of the Dolphin Emulator. I just uninstalled it for now. I’ll worry about reinstalling it later. Often during these upgrades it appears that the biggest source of issues are badly written dependencies; badly written in the sense that I end up having to remove the offending packages only to reinstall them post-upgrade without any issues.
It’ll be of no surprise to regular readers of this blog that I’m both a fan of the Fedora distribution of Linux as well as the KDE desktop. For the first time in six years, the KDE desktop is changing again. While the change is not as radical as the change from KDE 3 to KDE 4, it’s still a big technological change. I decided I couldn’t wait until May to experience it, so I took a look at the current beta from within virt-manager. Here’s the default desktop:
Looks like I was right about the non-commit and possibly also about the df -h.
Last night at the time I wrote the post:
# btrfs fi show /home
Label: 'Home1' uuid: 89cfd56a-06c7-4805-9526-7be4d24a2872
Total devices 1 FS bytes used 1.91TiB
devid 1 size 2.73TiB used 1.99TiB path /dev/sdb1
Because of grad school, my work on Snap in Time has been quite halting - my last commit was 8 months ago. So I haven’t finished the quarterly and yearly culling part of my script. Since I’ve been making semi-hourly snapshots since March 2014, I had accumulated something like 1052 snapshots. While performance did improve a bit after I turned on the autodefrag option, it’s still a bit suboptimal, especially when dealing with database-heavy programs like Firefox, Chrome, and Amarok. At least that is my experience - it’s entirely possible that this is correlation and not causation, but I have read online that when btrfs needs to figure out snapshots and what to keep, delete, etc it can be a performance drag to have lots of snapshots. I’m not sure, but I feel like 1052 is a lot of snapshots. It’s certainly way more than I would have if my program were complete and working correctly.
I was happy to be interviewed for Fedora Magazine about How [I] Fedora and I mentioned that there was a Fedora book that led me to pick Fedora. ( I also mentioned that on this blog here) Recently I’ve been cleaning up my bookshelves as I have run out of space for physical books. While I’ve mostly gone digital, Goodread’s Advanced Reading Copies are currently only distributed as physical books and sometimes it’s nice to have printed deluxe copies of comics. I decided it was probably time to get rid of this incredibly heavy book (that’s moved 3 times with me), but before doing so I’d document some of the contents for historical purposes. What follows are some of the pages I had bookmarked or highlighted.
As KDE 5 reaches 5.2 and many begin to debate its features (this is a small evolution on 4 compared to the difference between 3 and 4) there has been an ever-increasing assertion that Activities are pointless. (At least it appears that way to me) I wanted to share how I use Activities, why they make me more productive, and why they’re the biggest feature keeping me on KDE.
So, I have lots of Activities: Main, Media, School, Photography, Video Games, Video Editing, Programming, and Reading. In its current implementation, each Activity must have the same number of virtual desktops; three in my case. In each activity I make use of different widgets. On nearly all of them are the brilliant folder view and application launcher widgets. These allow me to quickly see the folders relevant to the task at hand. In the case of the Multimedia activity, desktop 1, this is very useful for my workflow. Let’s look at that desktop:
On the guest computer I updated to Kubuntu Vivid Alpha so I could check out KDE 5. Looks awesome - lots of polish over KDE 4. Sad that I’ll lose my current settings, but a chance to recreate with a new desktop.
When I first installed my new hard drive with btrfs I was happy with how fast things were running because the hard drive was a SATA3 and the old one was SATA2. But recently two things were bugging the heck out of me - using either Chrome or Firefox was painfully slow. It wasn’t worth browsing the web on my Linux computer. Also, Amarok was running horribly - taking forever to go from song to song.
The latest curl works with XBMC (now Kodi) so it’s time to upgrade my main Fedora computer.
fedup --network 21 --product=nonproduct
So that started running at 1427. The d/l finishes at 1500, but as usual some stuff to take care of. Mostly packages left over from previous versions of Fedora.
WARNING: problems were encountered during transaction test:
broken dependencies
kmod-nvidia-3.17.7-200.fc20.x86_64-1:331.113-1.fc20.x86_64 requires kernel-3.17.7-200.fc20.x86_64, kernel-3.17.4-200.fc20.x86_64, kernel-3.17.3-200.fc20.x86_64
kmod-nvidia-3.17.3-200.fc20.x86_64-1:331.104-1.fc20.x86_64 requires kernel-3.17.7-200.fc20.x86_64, kernel-3.17.4-200.fc20.x86_64, kernel-3.17.3-200.fc20.x86_64
nautilus-actions-3.2.2-4.fc20.x86_64 requires libgtop2-2.28.5-1.fc20.x86_64
xorg-x11-drv-r128-6.9.2-1.fc20.x86_64 requires xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.14.4-13.fc20.x86_64
directfb-1.6.2-3.fc19.x86_64 requires libmng-1.0.10-12.fc20.x86_64
kmod-nvidia-3.17.4-200.fc20.x86_64-1:331.113-1.fc20.x86_64 requires kernel-3.17.7-200.fc20.x86_64, kernel-3.17.4-200.fc20.x86_64, kernel-3.17.3-200.fc20.x86_64
libipoddevice-0.5.3-8.fc12.x86_64 requires libgtop2-2.28.5-1.fc20.x86_64
libbtctl-0.11.1-13.fc19.x86_64 requires openobex-1.5-9.fc20.x86_64
Continue with the upgrade at your own risk.
Time to sort that out. I also remove some of the really old stuff, stuff it lists as not having an upgrade - that I’ve had in there since Fedora 13 or so. In the end I’m left with the usual issue I have: my kmod-nvidia packages are tied to the Fedora 20 kernels. So, as usual, I’ll probably have to remove them and reinstall when I finish the upgrade.
Went off without a hitch. Like the new login theme. Waiting to make sure the curl in F21 works with Kodi (formerly XBMC) since the current newest version in 20 doesn’t work.
It’s a week and a half after the last time I looked at the Fedora 21 and about 2 weeks away from the final release if there aren’t any showstopping bugs. I just did an update and it appears that Fedora 21 will start out with KDE 4.x instead of KDE 5. I spoke to someone in IRC and it appears that KDE 5 is in no state to be included in Fedora. That’s fine with me. It appears we have learned from the KDE 4 fiasco. I’m OK getting KDE 5 later on in Fedora 21’s life or even Fedora 22. After all, if you really want it, there are ways to get it like COPR repositories or self-compilation. Fedora 22’s less than a year away, anyway.
I know I’m late to coming across this, but I found a presentation where someone was explaining the idea behind Fedora.next where there are 3 core products: Fedora Server, Fedora Workstation, and Fedora Cloud. But I also think it works rather well if you think of Gnu/Linux distros as LEGO sets and Windows/OSX as Playmobil. (Also, I’m now at the point in my life where I realize the benefits of each system, although I still think people should have the right to explore code they run)
Booted it up in Virt-manager (which finally has bridging!) I love the new theme!
But, sadly, it logs into KDE4, not KDE5. Perhaps 5 isn’t ready for primetime?
What I find baffling, given that this is running in a VM is that it loads FASTER to the desktop than the computer it’s running on. I wish I knew which technologies I am running or which widgets are causing my KDE load to go so slowly.
Back when I was actively reviewing Linux distros and still learning all about Linux, it was in vogue to say that any distro was as good as the next. They all had the same GUIs and programs. The only difference was which package manager you preferred. Distributions started off, in fact, as a way to simplify Linux installations. Otherwise you’d have to go get the Linux kernel and then every package you wanted to install. Unlike Windows, Linux is just a kernel. If you just got Linux, you wouldn’t have tools or GUIs or anything. So the distributions give you all the programs you need to use your computer (which turns out to be WAY more than Windows for free (libre AND gratis).
A little while ago I wrote about watching Netflix on Fedora 20. Also works on the latest Kubuntu with the latest updates installed. Also, at least with Kubuntu, I didn’t need to modify the user agent. It just automatically worked with Google Chrome. I didn’t try with Chromium, but I’d read that didn’t work.
String: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/38.0.2114.2 Safari/537.36
Group: (is filled in automatically)
Append?: Select ‘Replace’
Flag: IE
Click on Permanent Spoof list and put netflix.com in the domain (and select the rule you just made from the drop-box). Then click the add button.
Go to Netflix and watch instant videos.
And it works! So linux is perfectly capable, but apparently it’s not supported. I guess I can understand not wanting to support the infinite versions of Linux, but why not Ubuntu or Fedora? Maybe it’s coming? That’d be great.
I’ll later check if if it works on Ubuntu, too, with with this method.
Hard drives are relatively cheap, especially nowadays. But I still want to stay within my budget as I setup my backups and system redundancies. So, ideally, for my backup RAID I’d take advantage of btrs’ ability to change RAID types on the fly and start off with one drive. Then I’d add another and go to RAID1. Then another and RAID5. Finally, the fourth drive and RAID6. At that point I’d have to be under some sort of Job-like God/Devil curse if all my drives failed at once, negating the point of the RAID. The best thinking right now is that you want to have backups, but want to try not to have to use them because of both offline time and the fact that a restore is never as clean as you hope it’ll be.
So, back when I started this project, I laid out that one of the reasons I wanted to use btrfs on my home directory (don’t think it’s ready for / just yet) is that with RAID1, btrfs is self-healing. Obviously, magic can’t be done, but a checksum is stored as part of the data’s metadata and if the file doesn’t match the checksum on one disk, but does on the other, the file can be fixed. This can help protect against bitrot, which is the biggest thing that’s going to keep our children’s digital photos from lasting as long as the ones printed on archival paper. So, like I did the first time, I’ll first be trying it out in a Fedora VM that mostly matches my version, kernel, and btrfs-progs version. So, I went and added another virtual hard drive of the same size to my VM.
Back in August I finally had some time to do some things I’d been wanting to do with my Snap-in-Time btrfs program for a while now. First of all, I finally added the weekly code. So now my snapshots are cleaned up every three days and then every other week. Next on the docket is quarterly cleanups followed up yearly cleanups. Second, the big thing I’d wanted to do for a while now: come up with unit tests! Much more robust than my debug code and testing scripts, it helped me find corner cases. If you look at my git logs you can see that it helped me little-by-little figure out just what I needed to do as well as when my “fixes” broke other things. Yay! My first personal project with regression testing!
# btrfs sub list /home
ID 275 gen 3201 top level 5 path home
ID 1021 gen 3193 top level 275 path .snapshots
ID 1023 gen 1653 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-13-2146
ID 1024 gen 1697 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-13-2210
ID 1025 gen 1775 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-13-2300
ID 1027 gen 1876 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0000
ID 1028 gen 1961 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0100
ID 1029 gen 2032 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0200
ID 1030 gen 2105 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0300
ID 1031 gen 2211 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0400
ID 1032 gen 2284 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0500
ID 1033 gen 2357 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0600
ID 1035 gen 2430 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0700
ID 1036 gen 2506 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0800
ID 1037 gen 2587 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0900
ID 1038 gen 2667 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-1700
ID 1039 gen 2774 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-1800
ID 1040 gen 2879 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-1900
ID 1041 gen 2982 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-2000
ID 1042 gen 3088 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-2100
ID 1043 gen 3193 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-2200
I got my new hard drive that would replace my old, aging /home hard drive. As you read in part 1, I wanted to put btrfs on it. This is my journey to get it up and running. Plugged it into my hard drive toaster and ran gparted.
[caption id=“attachment_7889” align=“aligncenter” width=“421”] Gparted for new drive[/caption]
[caption id=“attachment_7890” align=“aligncenter” width=“500”] Gparted for new drive1[/caption]
Recently I once again came across an article about the benefits of the btrfs Linux file system. Last time I’d come across it, it was still in alpha or beta, and I also didn’t understand why I would want to use it. However, the most I’ve learned about the fragility of our modern storage systems, the more I’ve thought about how I want to protect my data. My first step was to sign up for offsite backups. I’ve done this on my Windows computer via Backblaze. They are pretty awesome because it’s a constant backup so it meets all the requirements of not forgetting to do it. The computer doesn’t even need to be on at a certain time or anything. I’ve loved using them for the past 2+ years, but one thing that makes me consider their competition is that they don’t support Linux. That’s OK for now because all my photos are on my Windows computer, but it leaves me in a sub-optimal place. I know this isn’t an incredibly influential blog and I’m just one person, but I’d like to think writing about this would help them realize that they could a) lose a customer and b) be making more money from those with Linux computers.
The original fedup - 0.7 - did not work. Upgrade to 0.8 and then it complained about three packages - gthumb, picard-freeworld, and kipi-plugins. I THINK what happened is that my Fedora 19 version was the same or greater than the version in Fedora 20, but the dependencies were written in such a way as to not allow greater library versions. In other words, depends on library 1.0 and so version 1.1 doesn’t work. Sometimes that can be an important hedge against APIs changing, but often it can lead to annoying upgrades and updates. There are times where I couldn’t update a bunch of packages because of another. So I would remove that one and upgrade (or update) and later I could reinstall it. So I removed these packages and proceeded with the upgrade. It still complained about nvidia (which is really the only thing that is a problem after every upgrade)
For once I found a way to run Windows for free that wasn’t a scam! Turns out the Microsoft makes VMs of Windows XP through Windows 8 available for free. The point is for you to be able to test how your websites will look in different versions of IE and different versions of Windows. Now, because of this, they’re time-limited - you can renew them ever 30 days until 90 days and then you need to regenerate them. So you can’t really use it as a complete replacement for buying a Windows license. However, if you wanted to test how well Windows would run on your Linux computer it’s perfect for that. My short-term goal is to be able to run Windows within a VM for everything but video games and therefore not have to run two computers if I want to, say, work on my photos. (I use Lightroom although Digikam is pretty awesome if you don’t already have your workflow setup in Lightroom) So to me this is the perfect way to make sure all the programs I want to run on Windows (mostly Lightroom, but occasionally some others) will work well in a VM with my current hardware (before I spend the money to buy a Windows license). Another nice thing about running windows in a VM instead of its own computer is that it’s easy to create a new VM when a new version of Windows comes out and then have the VMs side-by-side as you migrate over to a fresh install. It actually wouldn’t be a horrible idea for my main Linux distro either, but then I wouldn’t have ANY OS taking advantage of being the main OS that’s not virtualized.
[caption id=“attachment_7361” align=“aligncenter” width=“604”] NPR All Music Considered works correctly now[/caption]
It’s not a surprise that I love Amarok. Take a look at the related posts below. I think nothing beats it as a music program. If the KDE4 for Windows libraries were more robust I’d recommend it for everyone. As is, I think it’s the best on Linux. But, until the most recent updates there was something lacking that really bothered me. On a stream like NPR’s All Music Considered it wouldn’t update the Now Playing track to the song that was on. And that made it really hard to use that stream in the best possible way - to discover new music! It’s fixed now and that’s awesome! Woohoo!
Nearly a year ago I did a comparison of Virtualbox and Red Hat’s virt-manager. Although I was pretty happy with virt-manager, I’ve had to continue using Virtualbox because so far virt-manager isn’t able to do a bridged ethernet connection without having to ditch NetworkManager and/or do some weird stuff. I’d given up on VMWare a long time ago because it used to be very cumbersome to install on Linux. However, I recently found out that I might be able to one day run Windows inside VMWare on my Linux computer and have 3D accelerated graphics work well enough to allow me to play games. It’s already made huge strides in that direction. So I figured I’d check it out and see how it compares to using the other two programs. I’ll be installing Fedora 18 XFCE beta (which I’m currently using on my netbook). Here’s the first dialog I got:
Recently I was listening to a Talk of the Nation interview with Jerry Brotton about his new book A History of the World in Twelve Maps. He mentions how the maps have a political reason for existing as well as having an effect on the viewer. He also mentioned how the map creator always puts him or herself in the center. Interestingly, I learned that for most of human history it has not been governments who have created maps, but corporations (such as the Dutch East India Company) who needed maps for commerce. The last map he mentions in his book, which he worked on for seven years, is Google Earth. I haven’t read the book yet, but during the interview he mentioned that it was one of the first times we have a union between a globe and a map. Also, that through the “magic” of computer technology it’s an infinite map as you can always keep scrolling in any direction.
Recently I was looking at this old post and the screenshots of Amarok 1.4 reminded me of something I loved about that version of Amarok - the stats that would display when you were playing a song - like if you were playing a Five Iron Frenzy song it would tell you your three favorite (or most played) Five Iron Frenzy songs. That functionality never made it back into the Amarok 2 series. So when I was looking through the Amarok scripts in the script installer I came across Rating Statistics. It basically gave me everything I wanted other than being linked to the currently playing song. It allows you to search your favorite songs based on all kinds of criteria like number of plays, user-assigned rating, or auto-score. You can also assign some weights to it and get your best songs based on that weighting. Here are the stats about my library:
Around a year ago I decided to KDE in Spanish to learn some technical terms. Back then I was using GDM, but now I’m using KDM. I didn’t see a way to set the language! How would I change the language to Spanish? I took a look online and found instructions. I’m going to reproduce them here for others. The great thing about the way that KDE handles things vs the way that Gnome does is that you can set a fallback language. When might this be useful? Let’s take a Vietnamese computer user. Vietnamese people (at least of a certain age) tend to be fluent in Vietnamese and French with some familiarity with English. So a Vietnamese person could set his computer to Vietnamese with a fallback to French for any programs that didn’t have translations into Vietnamese. As usual, I LOVE the level of customization in the KDE desktop.
Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote about replacing my file and print server with a Pogoplug. Overall, it’s worked perfectly. I even made it my DNS server because the number of internet connected devices in my was growing so much and on some computers (like the laptop and netbook) I was constantly changing distros so DNS became preferable to maintaining a bunch of /etc/hosts files.
Everything was working just dandy until I wanted to install mysql to have all my xbmc installs reference one library. I wasn’t able to install it because the mirrors and package lists were out of date. Being unfamiliar with arch, I decided I needed to upgrade my system to get that ability. And, as part of the upgrade, yes, it did update the mirrors and package lists and I was able to install mysql. But it also did something that killed ssh. So I could no longer connect to my Pogoplug (babyluigi).
A few months ago I took a look at KDE-Telepathy from within Fedora Rawhide. I said I would check it out after upgrading to Fedora 16 and then I got busy getting ready for the arrival of my daughter. (my first kid) So I just kept using Kopete for my multi-protocol IM needs. It’s the only way I keep up with anyone on Gchat or Facebook chat because I refuse to have to keep any specific tab open on my web browser for chatting. Also, it tends to be more annoying to chat - instead of chatting in a small window that I can put off to the corner of whatever virtual desktop or activity I’m in, I’d need my entire web browser.
I originally got interested in checking out the Chakra project because it was based on Arch Linux. As I mentioned before, the super customizability doesn’t appeal to me. I don’t have time for that - perhaps if Arch had existed when I was in high school or college I might have enjoyed it. What I do like is that they tend to have the latest packages and they tend to keep the distro as simple as possible - with very few customizations. When I went to do my pre-review research, I found out that while Chakra WAS based on Arch, they’ve now split off into their own proper distro. (Kinda like Fuduntu and Fedora) While they still use Pacman and other Arch-y things, they’re slowly changing to their own products.
Two years ago I reviewed Arch Linux. My conclusion at the time - great if you have to control every aspect of your system, but it’s not for me. I later used it on my Pogo Plug to set up a file and print server and it definitely has its merits. I know, generally speaking, that one of the best parts of using Arch is getting access to the latest software before anyone else. So I decided to take a look at a few Arch derivatives that take the work out of getting Arch installed while still having the benefits of Arch’s early access.
Fuduntu started off as a customized Fedora install, but recently forked Fedora to create their own special distro that borrowed a bit from Ubuntu and a bit from Fedora. It has a very nice look when it first starts up and I almost forget that it’s Gnome 2.x:
I decide to jump right into the install before doing any messing around. I like their logo, “Punny Name, Serious Distro”. Not surprisingly for a distro that started off as a modified Fedora, it uses anaconda for installation. The first question I get is the hostname. Then comes timezone and root password. After that is partitioning and the install finally begins. Overall, not too many options. It’s neither the easiest installation ever nor the hardest. I’d say it leans towards very, very easy, but I think Linux Mint actually wins for the easiest, nicest installer. (And Ubuntu - which I haven’t installed for a few months now might edge it out of second place) Overall, the installation is extremely quick, but I’m cheating in that it’s in a VM so, of course, I don’t need to worry about CD or DVD drive speeds.
I’ve installed Debian here and there on different computers in the last seven or so years that I’ve been using Linux. I almost ended up being a Debian person, but the Fedora book at the bookstore was more comprehensive, so I was set along the Red Hat path. On the one hand, I’ve often envied Debian both for its ease up upgrades and for its stability. On the other hand, I like having the latest stuff. KDE 4.8 is about to come out and I’ll be restless for the next few months before it makes its way into Fedora. So Debian’s never quite been for me. I’ve heard a lot about Aptosid (formerly Sidux) which turns Sid (the unstable repo) into a usable distro. Of course, Ubuntu does this along with a little extra polish, so I figured I’d see what Aptosid’s up to.
So I took a look at Blogilo a few days ago. So, taking a look at my Blogilo post I have to say that it is pretty much ALMOST there for the perfect offline blogging tool for someone using Wordpress. Sure, it doesn’t allow your to create categories, but a blog like mine that’s been around for ~7 years probably has all the categories it needs. The extra fidelity can come from tags which Blogilo hands just fine.
For the most part, I haven’t seen the point of using blog editors like Blogilo. While there might have been a purpose to them back in the dialup days, it seems pointless in the days of always on broadband connections. Also, back before blog software like Wordpress had their great visual editors, I could see the need. However, I guess I could see some use for it on my laptop. I often compose blog posts on there in a text editor when I’m traveling. It would be nice to have it all formatted correctly and ready to go when I got an internet connection rather than have to load up Wordpress then spend time formatting it when I could have done that on my laptop while I didn’t have a connection.
I’ve been using Virtualbox for a long time to run virtual machines when I want to check out other distros before I install them on one of my computers or to review them. It’s MOSTLY open source, although some of the key parts like USB 2.0 are free to use, but not open source. So now that Red Hat’s Virtual Machine Manager is starting to look pretty useful I figured I should check it out. That way I could be using a FLOSS virtual machine program - assuming the features were good enough to match Oracle’s offerings. Also, Virtualbox requires a kernel module that has to be recompiled every time a new kernel is installed and that’s annoying. I figured I’d test out both programs by installed a VM of Centos.
As usual, every time I upgrade Fedora I write a blog post to preserve this knowledge for others who might run across the same problem or in case it happens to me again next year. This time around the situation was a little less smooth than previous upgrades. After the preupgrade was done, when I rebooted I was 2 MB short in /boot. This shouldn’t happen to you if you started with Fedora recently, but I’ve been on the same install for two years. In the past if the preupgrade failed, the installer would put your system back into its previous configuration and you could use it again. This time around it didn’t do that and I no longer had a working system. It complained that a bunch of services weren’t starting and I couldn’t get a shell, not even in single user mode.
[caption id=“attachment_4833” align=“aligncenter” width=“253” caption=“The Amarok Dynamic Playlist DJ Monster is responsible for building your dynamic playlist”] [/caption]
I’ve spoken about Amarok’s Dynamic Playlists before. Despite my best attempts, I couldn’t quite get it to work correctly. However, Amarok 2.4.3 has revamped the dynamic playlists engine and interface, so I wanted to check it out and see if it worked better as well as testing out some of the new features. For one thing, they changed the interface to more closely match the interface for static playlists. See:
Just used preupgrade to go from Fedora 14 to 15. The entire process took about 3 hours. That’s not too shabby! In the old days of disc upgrades it had to go for days. Yum upgrade often had to work overnight. This one was much faster! After the upgrade, I had to turn off my dropbox repo - apparently they don’t have a Fedora 15 repo turned on yet. That allowed me to run yum distro-sync which bought me up to more or less at least what’s in Fedora 15. Otherwise you’re just upgrading your packages, but you may be missing some new ones that were added in. That’s what messed me up on the last upgrade. I still have to work on the rpmnew thing to get my config files as close to what they should be as possible and I have to figure out if the orphan packages I have installed are programs I should get rid of to make sure they don’t potentially cause problems in the future. KDE is working just as good as before. GDM looks very different - very similar to Gnome 3 and Gnome Shell. I’ll have to sneak in there later on in the week and try Gnome Shell out. Sound works and everything else works. (I only use an Ethernet connection so it’s not too complicated of a situation)
Fedora 15, which is almost out, will have Gnome 3.0 as its default desktop and since it’s such a radical departure from the Gnome 2.x series, I thought I’d have a post that reminds us of how it used to be and what Gnome evolved to become. So here’s a two screen desktop:
You probably need to click on the image so that it can be at a useful size. Gnome 2.32 consisted of two panels, one at top and one at the bottom. The one at the top housed menus that we’ll get to in a moment. Next to that are launchers. You could put launchers for all your most-used programs there. Because of that, I almost never went to the menus to launch a program. Over towards the right are panel applets. I have some for mounting and for showing the load on my computer. Then there’s the date/time where you can click on it and get a calendar. This area also had icons for certain types of programs like instant messengers. At the bottom you had the button to see the desktop, the list of open programs, the desktop switcher for the different virtual desktops, and the trash. Also notice that the programs have minimize, maximize and close buttons.
note: I wrote this on 17 April, a full week before it is published on the blog
[caption id=“attachment_4398” align=“aligncenter” width=“450” caption=“Acer Aspire One - out of the box”] [/caption]
Nearly six years ago I bought my first laptop. I’d never seen the point of laptops over desktops - the value per dollar just isn’t there. But I was going to be traveling for work now and again and needed to be able to get in contact with the family while away. I got an old Acer that was on sale at best buy because it was the last one left. A year after buying that laptop, netbooks came out. I got my wife one of the first Asus EEE PCs because she was going on a work trip didn’t want to haul my heavy laptop around. So for the past few years we’ve traveled with both of those so I can use my laptop to watch my movies and she can use her netbook to watch hers. But I’m getting tired of that heavy laptop and now netbooks aren’t saddled with crippled versions of Linux and inferior hardware. So I got myself a new Acer Aspire One from Amazon. I’d seen the same one at Costco for $50 more (because it has double the battery life) and I’d wanted to get it for a while now. I’m going to be traveling to Chicago for a trip soon, and since my back has been giving me issues, I figured it was the time to go to a lighter laptop.
I have not yet tried out Gnome Shell or Ubuntu Unity, but the biggest complaint most people level against them is that our desktops are being tablet-ified. Sure, there need to be new, innovative interfaces for tablets and phones, but that’s no reason to abandon the desktop. Sure, perhaps the average Joe (or Jane) will be using tablets more and more, but some of us have real work to get done. We need to do photo editing, programming, video editing, 3D modeling, and other tasks that require something more than a glorified smart phone. This is where KDE excels.
A few weeks ago, I upgraded to KDE 4.6.1 in Fedora 14 from KDE 4.5. The first login after reboot dumped me into Gnome. What the heck was going on? Apparently, in GDM, the entry had changed from KDE4 to KDE Plasma Desktop. Once I logged in that way, I was able to see the new KDE. The biggest change I saw was that notifications looked much nicer. It’s hard to quantify in what way they looked nicer, but something they changed about the appearance is makes it more appealing to my eyes. Also, the way it animates really helps a lot. For example, when two of my contacts sign into IM networks at the same time, the second notification is smaller so that my desktop is not overwhelmed with notifications. If I mouse over the second one, it grows and the first one shrinks.
Now that KDE 4.6 has finally landed in Fedora (KDE 4.6.1, to be precise) I can properly test activities. I spoke before of how I planned to use them back in this post. So let’s see how well it works in practice. I think for my first activity, I will setup an activity for programming because it will have the least adverse affect on my current way of working if things go wrong. So I click on the KDE cashew on my left screen. I click on the activities button. Here’s what I get:
So I’ve been using reKonq for about 3 weeks now. (Regardless of what the date of this blog post is in relation to the previous one - I usually write these ahead of time and then stick them into the queue) So here we go:
The Good
-Appears to have “Download them All” built-in if you enable the KGet settings in the preferences
-Integrates perfectly with KDE
-When you start up a new tab and then click on “recently closed tabs” the list of tabs has thumbnails of the sites. I think this is great because it helps you quickly find the site you’re looking for.
I’ve been using web browsers since Internet Explorer 1 and Netscape Navigator 3. I’ve blogged about my browserhistoryquiteabit. I’ve ended up using Chrome on all my platforms. It works on Linux and Windows and I can have my bookmarks synced up across all those platforms. Now, I’m not a huge user of bookmarks. From my earliest days back in the 1990s when I used to perfectly curate my bookmarks into folders and subfolders to the mid-2000s when Epiphany and Firefox implemented tags on bookmarks, pretty much anything I’ve ever bookmarked has gone into a status of “out of sight== out of mind”. In fact, the only way I’ve been able to effectively use bookmarks is to use the space under the address bar to store them so I can see them. This is what Chrome looks like on my machines:
I started using KDE in November of last yea r so I figured that I’d give an update on how things are working for me four months in. First off, KDE 4.6.x has not yet hit the official Fedora repositories. Since I like to yum upgrade or preupgrade from release to release, I try to stay with the official repos and RPMFusion. So no KDE 4.6 for me. At this rate, it doesn’t seem that it’s going to make it until around Fedora 15. But, if that means they iron out any extra bugs, that’s fine with me. So, with that said, let’s get to the info.
I’ve been using KDE since November of 2010 around the time that 4.5 was released for Fedora. Around the time of 4.4, the KDE folks, especially Aaron Seigo and the rest of the Plasma team, started really pushing activities. I kept talking to people on identica and I couldn’t quite figure out the point of activities. They seemed to be redundant in a world with virtual desktops. (And, as you can see in the comments of the article I’ll be linking to, most people feel the same way) The biggest reason I seemed to hear was that each activity could have a different set of widgets. But one weekened I was messing around with KDE system settings and found out that you could set each virtual desktop to have different widgets and not have to mess with any of these activities. So after that weekend I *really* didn’t understand the whole hassle of activities. This is how I configured my desktops:
One awesome thing that is easy to notice in free/libre software is how international it is. While proprietary software is mainly based out of the US - Windows/OSX - free/libre software comes from all over the place. Mandriva is based out of Brazil and France. SUSE was originally developed in Germany. Miguel de Icaza, one of the founders of Gnome, was born in Mexico. Choqok, the best KDE-native microblogging software is created by an Iranian. So something that Linux has always done better than Windows is support more languages. Microsoft has to pay to create language translations so they have to make a market analysis about which languages to support (and it still doesn’t cover non-Microsoft programs) With Linux, it’s all volunteer work (or paid by companies that care about localization) and if the programs are written correctly for KDE and Gnome, they will all be able to take advantage of the translation work for their program. “Save” should probably translate well across all well-written programs. I think this is one of the reason why all the regions of Spain have their own Linux distros. I don’t know this for a fact, but I would guess that Windows probably only comes out in Castillian (official or regular Spanish) and not in Catalan, Andalusian, Basque, etc
Back when I first started using Linux I was using a very underpowered computer that I got donated as part of my research at school. So OpenOffice.org was a real pain in the butt to use. It took forever to load! KOffice, on the other hand, loaded up quickly. At that time, with KOffice 1, they had the presentation program, the spreadsheet, and the word processing program.
At the time there were two neat things about KWord that I really liked and they both stemmed from something I was doing at the time. I was the head of the Phi Sigma Pi (scholastic frat) alumni team. We had a newsletter to get out. Turned out that KWord, as it worked at the time, allowed for very easy desktop publishing. I don’t think it was intended to replace Scribus, but when compared to Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org Writer, it was MUCH easier to set the layout. That made it really easy to create. With MS Word (at least 2000 and 2003) it was SUCH a PITA to try and get images where you wanted to be and to have text properly wrap around it. We had all kinds of issues in this class I took my sophomore year in which we had a tutorial class session on how to do this and it was still horrible to work with. KWord also had the ability to output to PDF which was great as I was trying to help the frat save money by seeing if we could get the alumni to accept emails instead of letters. They ended up rebuffing that offer, but at least it was something I was able to do. (I hadn’t discovered cutePDF and other ways to create free PDFs on Windows)
Sure, it’s a tired and cliche phrase, but hurray for the wisdom of the crowd. I’ve received comments on identi.ca, twitter, and in the comments here with answers to nearly all my problems with KDE. Let’s see if I can get them all to work. First off, I was told that my problem with Konversation not getting my password in time to keep me from being signed into the fedora-unregistered could be solved by setting the password as a server password. Alright! That worked! woohoo! Before I’d had it set to just run the /msg identify command.
So I’ve used KDE for about a work week. During that time I’ve pretty much gone to using the KDE versions of all my programs except Konqueror. I’m not sure if the Fedora 14 version of Konqueror is the one with Webkit, but last time I used Konqueror with KHTML it was mucking up a bunch of web pages including my blog. So I stuck with Google Chrome, which is what i use on Gnome, LXDE (Lubuntu on my laptop), and on my Windows 7 install. (Also, I stuck with gPodder for podcasts because that’s working perfectly) So how did it go? First of all, I love the stock screenshot tool in KDE, KSnapshot. I love that lets me choose full screen, region, window under cursor, and section of Window. With Gnome I hit print screen and then I have to edit the png in the GIMP. So it gives me less work for my Linux-related blogging.
Desktop search is one of those techs that keeps coming back and never really sticking. At least that’s how it seems to me. Look at how giddy I was about Beagle back in 2006. And I tried it and it was, generally, pretty awesome. It really worked well. It was like the speed of locate without having to wait until the database was updated at midnight. And it could see into IMs, MP3 metadata, emails and office documents. Now? According the the official website it’s no longer under active development. Perhaps that’s because they met all their goals. And that’s fine, but pretty much everyone switched over to tracker around 2008. I’m not quite sure why - perhaps all the anti-Mono hatred that went on. Fedora doesn’t even ship with Tomboy or F-Spot anymore. They’re there in the repos, but they aren’t the defaults.
There was a time when I thought Amarok was the best music player on Linux. I even used to run it in Gnome as you can see from this 2005 screenshot. In that first link you can read me gushing over Amarok 1.4. I loved all the integrated technologies, especially the metadata juggling Amarok did. The first few Amarok 2.x releases with the KDE 4 libraries were complete crap. They were ugly and were missing nearly all of Amarok’s features. (Mirroring the complaints people were having about KDE 4 at the time) When I took a look at Amarok and KDE 4.4 in October I said I would take another look at Amarok.
The Gnome panel was acting a little buggy and I was going to report that, but I decided that instead I could load up KDE. I’d been wanting to check it out a little more ever since I took a look in October. But I was unable to open Kontact because akonadi was being annoying. Turns out that the version of akonadi I had installed from Fedora 13 was technically a higher version than the one with Fedora 14. I ran most of the commands on this page after getting the link as advice from fenris in the Fedora freenode IRC room. The most important one was the ??yum distribution-synchronization which fixed that akonadi problem. Kontact now loads up. It’s acting a bit funny with my gmail messages, but I’m sure that can be fixed. So I’m going to have to get back into Gnome to see if the panels are behaving a bit better now. After all, I ended up installing about half a gig of updates tonight as a result of the instructions on that page. This is why, folks, everyone always recommends just going for a fresh install. Upgrades always require a bit more work.
I just did a preupgrade upgrade from Fedora 13 to Fedora 14. The only hitch is that it didn’t find enough space to download the installer ahead of time so that had to be downloaded after the the reboot. Everything went off without a hitch. My absolute cleanest upgrade ever. Dual screen worked, nothing had to be uninstalled. None of the repos had to be disabled. All my usual programs work. I haven’t tried Blender yet, that’s tomorrow. The first thing I noticed was that the OpenOffice.org icons have changed again. This is the third time, I think,since I’ve been using Linux.
It’s been a more than a year since I last had to install Fedora from scratch. I’m installing Fedora 14 into Virtualbox for an upcoming blog post where I wanted to do some stuff I wasn’t quite sure I was ready to do on my main box, so I thought I’d go ahead and blog about the installation. The default artwork is very dynamic and conveys a sense that this is an exciting release.
Fedora 14 is out today! You can get it from the newly redesigned website. Expect more from me as I explore it. Probably in a couple weeks as I’m extremely busy right now.
A few years ago I started hearing about ppas everywhere. More and more, I see developers telling people that if they want the latest of program X, they should load the developer’s ppa. A ppa is a repository of software that is neither maintained by Canonical nor the Ubuntu community. In some cases the software available via ppa is also available in the official repositories, just at a much slower pace since distros usually only provide major software version upgrades when they do a full system upgrade. In between they tend to just provide security updates and bug fixes. As usage of ppas grows, the user starts to have a system that is more like a rolling release than a snapshot of Debian’s testing branch. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, after all, a user’s system should do whatever the user wants it to do. I just wonder if the ever increasing usage of ppas will lead the Ubuntu community to switch to a rolling release style distro. Arch Linux users do enjoy having such a system, but they do admit that it can potentially lead to some instability if you upgrade right away when a new update comes through.
Last time I spoke about Empathy, I was a little disappointed in the project. I really liked Pidgin and it felt like they were being stabbed in the back, even if everything the Empathy team was doing was koser GPL-wise. At the time I didn’t give it a second look because it was still missing a bunch of features. It’s been 2 years, or 4 releases of Gnome, since then and the project has come a long way. It now supports all the protocols that Pidgin does (and more) and everyone seemed to think it was doing a better job of listening to users, etc. Now, this shouldn’t make a huge difference unless I missed something, but I’m reviewing 2.30 as Fedora 14 hasn’t come out yet. I’m sure there wasn’t a massive upgrade or anything. So, first of all, here’s what Pidgin looks like.
I have a HUGE music collection that I’ve taken the time to digitize, so it was bugging me that I couldn’t listen to it on my sound system on the first floor. When I raised the volume on my computer speakers I just ended up hearing a ton of bass. So I took a look around the net and it seems that mediatomb is the program to use. It was in the Fedora repos or maybe the RPMFusion repos. It’s pretty easy. You run it as your user (not root) and it creates a config file. All you need to do is tweak that file to have it say:
[caption id=“attachment_3694” align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“My KDE 4.4 Desktop”] [/caption]
At first I was confused because the desktop background was not carried over to my right monitor. When I went to change the background I saw that they no longer put it all into one dialog. You need to go to each screen and manually set the background. While counterintuitive at first, it actually makes more sense this way. You can see my micro-blogging widget, calculator widget, and some folder views. The taskbar is looking nice and slick now. The KDE version of the system try is looking really nice. It has a very good slickness to it; to quote Aaron Seigo, “like something that might come out of Cupertino”. My FAVORITE part of KDE 4.4 vs Gnome 2.30 is the little “i” i the right corner. If you click there you can scroll back through all the system messages. So, whereas you might miss that in Gnome if you’re looking somewhere else or away from the computer, you can easily find and review the messages in KDE. At first the desktop was really slow and I thought “here we go again. I’m going to have to once again write off KDE 4.x as useless.” But it turns out that it was just Strigi/Nepomuk indexing my home folder. It’d be a year or more since I last loaded KDE 4, so it had a lot to index. When I also had some errors with Amarok (which I’m about to get to), I gave it a reboot in case KDE was having a fight with SELinux (as has happened in the past). Anyway, when I came back, Strigi was done and KDE was much more responsive. Konqueror had also been slow during the indexing, so I’ll want to test that in Part 2. I took a look at my old friend, Kopete. It was looking nice, if a bit cartoony compared to Pidgin. I’ll also want to take a closer look in Part 2. It didn’t support Facebook chat (as is supported in Pidgin via a plugin) which isn’t a killer, but it’s not good. Perhaps there’s a plugin there too? I’ll have to investigate that. What I was most curious about was Amarok. It was one of my biggest anchors to KDE back in the day and really my favorite music player.
I first migrated to CrunchBang Linux because they kept talking about it on Linux Outlaws. Specifically they mentioned how fast it was and, if I recall correctly, Fab was using it on his netbook. My laptop battery life was quickly dwindling so, if I wanted to be able to use it on a plane, I needed a fast-booting distro. I enjoyed Crunchbang and the neat way it was setup. I loved just hitting Win-W to launch Firefox. Conky was really neat Terminator was the best term program I’d ever used. But it was getting a little long in the tooth. The most recent stable version was at least a year old if not 18 months old. It wasn’t keeping up with the Ubuntu releases. I was stuck using Firefox 3.0 (or some other such old version) Then came the announcement they were switching to a Debian base. Even if I stuck with CrunchBang, I’d be forced to reinstall anyway. So I decided to give Lubuntu a shot. I knew Ubuntu was too resource-heavy for my crappy battery life. I looked around and Lubuntu seemed to be the lightest - even lighter than Xubuntu. Could it match CrunchBang? CrunchBang took ten seconds from login to usable desktop and about 30 seconds until wifi was up.
This is the first time in nearly 10 years that I’m moving to a new version of WIndows. I pop the CD in and boot up. I see a text screen as Windows “loads files”.
Nothing here different from a Linux distro. Then the Windows logo pops up.
I took a look at openSuse 11.1 nearly a year ago and so it’s time to see what’s changed with openSuse 11.2. For those new to my blog, when I review a new version of a distro I’ve reviewed before, I usually just do a comparison to the previous review. Also important to know is that I review distros the point of view of ease of installation and ease of use. While I’ve often been told that I should use a distro for X amount of time before reviewing it, pretty much all Linux distros are the same in day-to-day usage. The only real difference being whether updates break stuff or not. But, since all versions of Linux basically all have the same software, I don’t really see what I would gain from using a distro over a number of days. Also, there are tons of other reviewers that do that. Finally, I only tend to get those comments whenever I’ve said bad stuff about a distro. Whenever I say all good stuff I never get people saying that I should spend more time with the distro or that I shouldn’t use a virtual machine. So, I think there’s something to be said about that. At any rate…let’s get into openSuse 11.2.
I last looked at Ubuntu 9.04 a little over six months ago. So I decided it was time to see what has changed. Since I’m now testing on a 64-bit machine, I decided to test the 64-bit version of Ubuntu. So here we go:
The guys over at Linux Outlaws are always talking about Tiny Core Linux because it always seems to be releasing a new version. I was impressed back in the day that Damn Small Linux could have a working Linux distro in only 50 MB. I know that Tiny Core Linux is technically not a full Linux distro, but I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. It came in a recent LXF disc and I decided to check it out.
I’ve been wanting to try Arch Linux for quite some time now. They seem to have a similar aesthetic to Gentoo in that the main mission of Arch is to build your operating system from the ground up. You only add the things you need. So you don’t have any cruft on your system based on what some other people think you should have. So let’s pop this CD in and see what happens! (I’m also following the directions on http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Official_Arch_Linux_Install_Guide) The disc is the 2009.08 snapshot. I booted into the LiveCD.
I looked at Zenwalk 6.0 back in June and Zenwalk 6.2 is now out. I’m going to do a mini-review just comparing 6.0 to 6.2 to see what has changed. This may end up being very short if it’s mostly the same. One difference right away is that it’s using ext4 instead of XFS. The install was basically the same.
[caption id=“attachment_3019” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“The final part of the Zenwalk 6.2 install”] [/caption]
In my Slackware 13 review mfillpot gave some suggestions to improve the Slackware experience and I thought I would give them a shot. First off, changing the init level to 4 to allow KDM to show up instead of this startx business. I was happy to note that Slackware had emacs. So many distros have vi and I never really learned how to use it well. So I changed the value to 4 and restarted. And there she is:
So I was unable to preupgrade to Fedora 12, even after the latest update. So I did a yum upgrade since I’ve known that to work in the past. As always, I followed the instructions here. It was very fast this time around compared to past upgrades. It only took 2 hours 40 minutes. I ended up needing to tell yum to ignore problems because of a weird package that it wanted to install, but couldn’t. But then installed anyway. I’m not sure what’s up with that. The specific package was abrt. And then when I went to install it afterwards, it said it was already installed. Go figure! So far there’s only one thing that annoys me since upgrading. All my taskbar icons are much more spread out. I tried to push them together, but I think this is as close as they get. See the images below for a comparison.
At work they were asking us to get familiar with openSolaris for a potential future project. I’d played with it a few years ago, so I decided to check out the latest version I had. On of my LXF discs had openSolaris 2008.11 and I figured that while I was checking it out I’d review it as well. I expected it to be spartan like FreeBSD, but it appears that Sun has learned a lot from the Linux community. It booted up to this grub screen:
A bit more complicated than it should have been. That’s really the lesson here. In fact, it appears not to have worked at all despite about five tries. The first two times I did it 100% with the GUI and had no idea why things were going wrong. The third time I did it on the command line so I saw that it was complaining about not having enough space - even though it did. And the fourth time I used the “trick installer into downloading” trick on this page and it still didn’t work. It appears not to be downloading the updates. I’m going to take to the mailing lists to try and figure out what’s going on. No one was able to help (or willing?) on the IRC so for now I remain with Fedora 11.
Even though I gave up on reviewing Linux distros a while back, I keep getting mountains of hits on here for people who who want Linux reviews. Since my Slackware 12.2 review was the second-most commented post on this blog, I decided it was a good distro to revisit. So, when Slackware 13 came a few months ago on the LXF magazine, I decided to throw it into Virtualbox to see how it has changed. One difference this time around is that I now have the dual core machine so I am running Slackware on that machine (especially since it has hooks for better virtualization so it should run better)
The latest version of Fedora is out. Get it here! I’ll probably give it about a month to get all the kinks out and then I’ll give it a shot and talk about it here. I’m excited for some new versions of programs like gPodder. I also want to check out Gnome Shell, the new interface for Gnome starting with 3.0 next fall.
From the time I started listening to podcasts until about two months ago, I had been using Rhythmbox to manage my podcasts. When I first started using a Linux music application, Banshee ran hideously slow on my computer. (As did most mono-based products) As time has passed I’ve acquired a more powerful Linux computer and the mono code has been made more efficient. But it was too late, I was already ingrained into Rhythmbox and it had all my music rated. So I continued to use it. On Linux Outlaws they kept mentioning how much they loved gPodder. I checked out an early version and I didn’t see the point. But after upgrading to Fedora 11, I decided to check it out. It is so much better for managing podcasts than Rhythmbox and that goes to the Unix ideal - have your program do only one thing and do it well. Banshee, by the way, is the opposite of that. It seems to be moving in a Windows Media Player direction, recently gaining the ability to play videos as well. So, here’s a comparison of Rhythmbox and gPodder and you’ll be able to easily see why I switched. First, here’s the podcast interface for Rhythmbox.
A few weeks ago I did an update to Fedora 11 using preupgrade. Nothing really broke other than iPods. My shuffle doesn’t work as well, but I’m working on fixing that. I also think that the updates are less annoying-looking and are more informative.
All good things come to an end. In this specific case I’ve decided to end my tenure reviewing Linux distros. Being a home owner consumes a lot more of my time than being a renter. Doing a quality distro review takes a lot of time - usually at least 2 - 4 hours. And so it was that I came to decide I’d rather spend my time on the hobby I enjoy most - photography. Also, I’ve grown bored with Linux. Not that I’m giving up on running Linux on my computers. But it just doesn’t excite me as it once did. I’m strongly considering letting my Linux Format Magazine subscription lapse. It was a tough decision because 90% of my blog’s traffic comes from Linux reviews. But, with only so much time in the day, I’d rather just work on my photography. So, very likely, this will be my last Linux review unless I get into it again. I will still probably be blogging about Linux and technology, I just won’t be doing any full-blown reviews. The big exception would be if I installed a new distro on one of my machines.
note: I started writing this months ago when I did the installation and now I am finishing up by looking at the installed distro. PCLinuxOS started as an extra set of packages for Mandriva. Interesting because Mandriva originally started as a KDE version of Red Hat. Eventually, it became its own distro. It became very, very popular around the same time as Ubuntu - give or take a few months. There was a time where you couldn’t read a Linux review without someone in the comments suggesting you should check out PC Linux OS. (Kinda like what I see happening with ArchLinux nowadays) The distro built up lots of steam and in 2007 seemed as though it could potentially steal Ubuntu’s thunder. Then it suddenly dissapeared from mention. There wasn’t a full-fledged 2008 release. According to its wikipedia page, PCLinuxOS has twice forked from Mandriva. So, while it was based on Mandriva at that point in time, it has since diverged into its own distinct distro. This is a very interesting distinction because this month I am also reviewing Mandriva 2009.1 and I had to postpone that review because it wouldn’t load up. PCLinuxOS, on the other hand, did load up. First up I had to choose my keyboard type.
Back in Nov of 2008 I checked out Zenwalk 5.2 and a recent LXF contained Zenwalk 6.0 - so let’s see what has changed. It loads up with the usual Kernel messages going past on the screen. The first screen for the installation hasn’t changed one bit from Zenwalk 5.2.
Once again, as before, I chose autoinstall. Once again, the installation was sparse, but very, very informative. I don’t think I mentioned this last time, but it appears that Zenwalk 6.0 (maybe earlier versions as awell) uses the xfs file system instead of the more usual ext3. (Or, recently, ext4) According to the wikipedia article I linked to, XFS is very good for large files and is one of the oldest file systems for *nix systems. Just like last time, the installation had information on every single package as it was installed. Just as last time I want to say that this installation was very, very simple. I don’t see why anyone new to Linux (but not a total computer noob) would have any problems installing it. Sure, it’s very short on eye candy - but who cares? You should only ever see the installation screen once. Just as before, I am convinced that Zenwalk is a very good introduction to a Slackware-type distribution thanks to this ease of installation.
I missed the release by a couple of days, but as is my tradition, here is the release notice:
Ladies and gentlemen of the Royal Explorers Club! Your attention please. It falls to me to be the host of our proceedings to-day, as we celebrate a great achievement in the annals of this hallowed organization – the discovery of what is truly a magnificent specimen among all FOSSdom. When Dr. Brattlesworth and I began this safari more than six months ago, we knew full well the many snares, toils, and dangers that awaited us along the hundreds of miles of tracking our quarry across the plains. But we also maintained a steadfast belief that by living with the land, and becoming part of the larger ecosystem where this incredible animal takes refuge, we could record for posterity the way of life of that marvelous creature – the Leonidas!
This is going to be the first time I look at a fresh install of Ubuntu in a long while. I first installed Ubuntu quite a while ago and then I just kept distro upgrading from there on. Then I installed Crunch Bang Linux on my laptop. So now I will be testing the installation. This may end up being a pretty short review because not much has changed from the previous Ubuntu, or so I hear. The biggest new change is the notification system. I’ll be sure to check that out.
SimplyMepis is a Debian-based distro developed by Warren Woodford who believed that Mandrake Linux was too hard for new users. (Mandrake, now Mandriva, was the Ubuntu of its time). I’ve heard him interviewed a few times on The Linux Link Tech Show and he seems to be of the realist (as opposed to idealist) school of Linux distro maintainers. He believes users should be able to listen to MP3s, use Adobe Flash, and so on. SimplyMepis 8.0 is based on Debian 5 stable, which I recently reviewed. So let’s load her up into VirtualBox and see how it goes.
I recently finally moved over to my 64bit computer. I’ve been using Fedora 10 64-bit for at least two weeks now. I was having a lot of trouble with migrating my Tomboy data over from the 32-bit install. It wouldn’t start up and the error message was not as helpful as it could have been. Eventually I dug around and found out I had to delete all the addin* files/folders in my .tomboy folder. After that everything worked fine.
This month’s LXF came with SimplyMepis 8, Zenwalk 6, and PCLinuxOS 2009. As soon as I get moved and the world stops turning upside down I’ll get those posted.
My wife said since she isn’t using the Linux computer I built for her, that I could use it. It has a Intel Core 2 Duo Dual Core chip, so I was pretty excited to try out 64-bit computing to see if there would be any problems. I installed Fedora 10 since I’m used to that platform. Installation process was pretty much the same as with 32-bit. It took 20 minutes to install. Blender was found in the repositories along with Inkscape - so far so good!
Debian…the father and grandfather of many a Linux distro. I think indirectly Debian is probably running on more computers than any other Linux distro. It’s the basis of Ubuntu, Mepis, Xandros, and many others. And many people use Debian where they need a nice, stable distro. The fact that Debian’s stable releases come out every one to two years and remain supported for a year after a new stable version means that it’s the darling distro where stability is needed. As great as Ubuntu is, you just can’t keep updating every 6 months on a production machine. Now, the flipside is that Debian tends to have older software all-around. So it tends to be used more as a server distro than a desktop distro. But more people than you would expect do run it on their desktops. Afterall, what does the latest version of Gnome have that you REALLY, REALLY need?
I recently heard that Cuba had created their own Linux distribution, Nova. Like many other countries with a rocky relationship with the USA (Russia, China, Iran), Cuba is wary of running their entire computer infrastructure on software developed in the USA. As someone of Cuban ancestry, this development piqued my interested and I decided to check it out. (I figured such a specialist distro would never be on the cover of LXF). According to its distrowatch page, it is a mix of Gentoo, Sabayon, and Ututo. We’ll see if they chose all of the negative aspects of those distros and thus created Satan’s Distro or if they took all that was good and created what Gentoo has the potential to be. So I launch it up in VirtualBox.
I first wrote about Knoppix in my original blog in Oct of 2004. I mentioned how awesome it was to be able to test out a live version of a Linux distro. It’s been a really long time since I last checked out Knoppix. Since it was bloated with KDE 3.x and slow to boot I used Damn Small Linux whenever I needed a LiveCD environment. Now that Knoppix 6 is the distro in this month’s Linux Format Magazine, I’m checking it out. It boots into Adriane. This is some strange speech synthesis program that launches different command line programs. (It also reads out loud what all the options are) Turns out if you want to go to a graphical desktop you ened to type “Knoppix” at the boot menu. So I scroll down to “graphical programs” then “start lxde”. Wow! LXDE is truly a lightweight desktop environment. It loads up a LOT faster than Knoppix and KDE used to. The menu loads up very quickly and the programs also load up quickly despite running off of the DVD. The default browser is Iceweasel (Debian’s rebranding of Firefox). The internet works perfectly fine.
A few days ago it was announced that the Ubuntu release after Jaunty Jackalope will be known as Karmic Koala. The funny thing is that a few months ago my friends and I were racking our brains for a K adjective and all we could come up with was Keen. I was sure it would be Keen Koala or Keen Kangaroo. The most interesting thing about Karmic Koala is that they will supposedly be considering getting away from brown. Then again, they’ve been going on and on about a new art style for a few releases now. We’ll see what they actually do. I’m mostly excited for the new notification style in Jaunty and to see if/how this will be implemented in Crunch Bang Linux.
(ed note: I actually ended up reviewing Crunch Bang Linux 8.10.02 due to a problem with my 8.10 disc)
I discovered Crunch Bang Linux (#!) through Linux Outlaws. Fab kept talking about how awesome it was. Then more and more podcasts and people on the tubes started talking about it. So I wrote to Linux Format Magazine about having it on their cover disc. They said there was a lot of clamor for it to be on a cover disc, but they couldn’t because it comes with multimedia codecs potentially covered by patents. So why am I breaking my self-imposed rule to only review distros on LXF cover discs? Because one of the most attractive features to me for #! is that it is supposed to load up a lot faster and run faster than Ubuntu. Right now I have Ubuntu 8.10 installed on my laptop. I pretty much only use my laptop for travel (although I do use it in the apartment ever once in a while). So if it boots up and runs faster than Ubuntu, it will leave me with more battery power for when I travel. I already ran the #! liveCD, so I know the wifi card will work. So first off, I boot up Ubuntu to time it and see how much of a savings I’ll be getting. From power on to GDM login screen is 1 minute 1 second. And it’s 40 seconds from login to a useful desktop. (Gnome) So then I install Crunch Bang Linux.
I already tried installing Gento o. Twice. The other Linux distro for the hardcore, for whom the Ubuntus and the Fedoras is too easy, is Slackware. Slackware is, of course, the oldest surviving Linux distro. I’ve already reviewed some distros based off of Slackware such as Zenwalk and Slax. Along the way I’ve come to learn about some of the appeal of Slackware and why people would base distributions off of it. However, it does have a reputation as a very hard distro to install. Fab, of Linux Outlaws, refers to it as the distro for those who “love the pain”. But Slackware has always held a special place in my mind for the quirky reason that I almost selected it as my first distro ( as I recount here). I had no idea that the Slack in Slackware was a reference to the Church of the Sub-Genius. (that’s why the Slackware Penguin smokes a pipe)
After reading through LXF, I tried loading openSuse 11.1 with the failsafe settings and it worked in VirtualBox. So I’ll now be reviewing openSuse 11.1. Here’s the screen as it booted up.
and after it loads up, it gives a nice explanatory screen.
So I last looked at openSuse 11.0 in Aug 2008. I’m not sure exactly how much has changed from 11.o to 11.1. I re-read my old review to get some perspective on what I said last time. Once I’ve gone through a distro at least once, I don’t see a point in repeating myself. Rather I look at how the distro has evolved since last time. Follow that link a few sentences back to see what I originally said about openSuse. As with Linux Mint 6, this time I’ll be evaluating the distro installation process - since I didn’t get to do that before as well as the program installation process. openSuse was listed in my Fedora 10 review as the distro with which to see how awesome KDE 4.2 is - so I’ll be testing that as well.
The latest LXF magazine arrived with Linux Mint 6, Slackware 12.2, and openSuse 11.1. I was originally going to review openSuse, but I have been unable to successfully boot either into VirtualBox or just by booting my computer and running it as a LiveDVD. ( ed. note: I just checked the magazine and they suggested booting in failsafe mode, so I’ll try that out in a couple of days) So, we’ll be starting with Linux Mint 6. I reviewed Linux Mint 5 Light back in July 2008. Since I wasn’t using VirtualBox at the time, I only tested it as a LiveDVD and that may have been the source of some of my problems testing the software installation. Plus this time I can review the installation process.
This month’s Linux Format Magazine includes Fedora 10. I u pgraded to Fedora 10 a few months ago via a yum upgrade. I started by looking at Xfce as I’ve been using Xfce non-stop ever since starting " I’m Not Mad" in November. Xfce is much lighter than Gnome and I’m able to use Blender more effectively. Fedora 10 comes with Xfce 4.4.3. Overall, nothing major has changed on the surface although I know they’ve been doing a lot of work under the hood.
I had done a second review of Gentoo 2008.0. People suggested I do a completely commandline install and I did. But my blog post got corrupted and I’m not typing that up again. My Gentoo install was unsuccessful anyway. So I fared no better with the commandline than with the GUI install. I’ll give it another shot sometime in the future.
Now that I have “I’m Not Mad” caught up for the next month, I thought it was an OK time to upgrade to Fedora 10. Unlike with the Fedora 9 release, there haven’t been huge complaints of the upgrade causing the system to become unusable. (Most, though not all, of that came from the version of X.org that Fedora 9 used)
As usual, I followed instructions at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq and I started the yum upgrade command at 1852. KDE basket-contact gave me dependency errors so I had to uninstall it. It had been giving me problems with updates as well - I had just forgotten about it. 1854 - started upgrade again. This time a problem with gstreamer - I think gstreamer gives me problems every upgrade. So I remove gstreamer08-plugins. (Which was apparently hanging around from fedora 6). This also got rid of some more gstreamers packages hanging around from Fedora 5. Don’t know why I still had that kruft there, but it’s gone now… 1859 - started yum upgrade again. This time it works! 2.8 GB! Well, it’s certainly the least painful yum upgrade process I’ve gone through yet - at least from this point in the process. The download process seems to be moving along pretty quickly. I guess getting that “fastest mirror” package out with Fedora 9 really does find the fastest mirror. Also, this far out from the Fedora 10 release, there shouldn’t be too many people hogging up the mirrors. What am I looking forward to in Fedora 10? Oddly, not much. Compared to previous releases, there isn’t any one technology I’m very excited about for Fedora 10. Sure, it’ll be nice to have the latest Gnome, but that release is so incremental, I doubt I’ll notice much. The latest KDE MIGHT be enough to finally get me back to KDE. KDE 4.1 was good, but not good enough. Other than that it’ll just be nice to have the latest stuff. Something I can do every 6 months or so with Linux and only every five or more years with Windows.
Somewhere in the middle of 2008 my wife’s computer kept making very disturbing noises upon boot up. She had told me she would move to Linux when her current computer broke. So I bought her a new computer and loaded Kubuntu on it because she wanted “the version that looks like Windows”. I new she would want KDE for the desktop and I liked Ubuntu’s user-friendliness from when I installed it on my laptop. I had a feeling Fedora would be a bit much for her. She’s not afraid to learn about her computer, but she doesn’t want it getting in the way when she wants to get work done.
About a month ago my wife asked me to get rid of the extra POS Linux and BSD computers I was using for my renderfarm. They quite a bit of an eyesore and so I agreed. Unfortunately, in the the group of computers I got rid of was my first ever Linux computer. It ran Fedora Core 1 and ran the server that ran this website until I upgraded computers and moved to FreeBSD. So it will be missed - I don’t usually attach too much emotion to objects – especially computers. I didn’t care too much when I got rid of my old Dell. But since that computer was what allowed me to get into Linux and learn all about libre software – which I had no idea about before. All I have left now from that era is the computer now known as luigi and functioning as my print and file server.
If you use Fedora and you want to be able to do useful things like play MP3s or DVDs you need to add an external repository like FreshRPMs or Livna. This is because MP3 playback is covered by patents in the United States, libdecss may be illegal to distribute, and a license agreement is required to playback DVDs. Ever since I tried Debian, I liked their way of doing things. The nonfree packages are in the official repos; they’re just disabled by default.
DATELINE: 2008-11-25
KEY FINGERPRINT: 61A8 ABE0 91FF 9FBB F4B0 7709 BF22 6FCC 4EBF C273
LOCATION: GEOSYNC ORBIT, FEDORA SPACE STATION VIA GLOBAL IRC NETWORK
BROADCASTING: FREEDOM FRIENDS FEATURES FIRST
(Cue J. Strauss' "Blue Danube.")
THIS IS FEDORA SPACE OPERATIONS ANNOUNCING with great pleasure the
successful launch of the new ship, Fedora 10: "Cambridge."
Strapped into the pilot seats are the latest GNOME (2.24) and KDE (4.1),
accompanied on their amazing journey by an all star crew of glitch free
audio, better printing and webcam support, and a new faster graphical
startup.
Also on this ride are wireless connection sharing and the next evolution
in PackageKit, hooking through your multimedia applications to help
install supporting software (codecs).
For developers and system administrators on this mission, we have built
in appliance tools, Eclipse 3.4, NetBeans IDE, improved virtualization
management with remote installation and storage capabilities, RPM 4.6,
and new security auditing toolsets.
Please remember to polarize viewports to properly enjoy Cambridge's
brand new graphics theme, "Solar," shining on the desktop. Also on this
flight is a new lightweight desktop environment, LXDE, joining the more
recent desktop envionment crew member, Sugar (from the starship OLPC
XO), and the venerable GNOME, KDE, and XFCE.
We are now leaving drydock for a 13-month mission of innovation and
exploration. Crew members and guests are invited to the forward lounge
to use, study, modify, and redistribute.
Get your copy of Fedora 10 today:
http://get.fedoraproject.org/
Join the many thousands of Fedora particpants and contributors:
http://join.fedoraproject.org/
If you missed the official launch, attend a Fedora 10 Launch Party near
you:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraEvents/ReleaseParty
Somewhere along the line I got into my head that Slackware was a distro that involved having to compile everything. From what I can gather from Wikipedia, The Slackware Website, and some comments to my Gentoo post, I was wrong. Slackware apparently uses packages, just like every other modern distro. The difference is that dependency resolution (at least with the default first-party tools) is up to the user. This clears up so much for me because I always wondered why someone would want to make a distribution based off of Slackware if the point of Slackware was to compile from source and be super hardcore. After all, Slackware doesn’t baby you and give you all these little GUIs to configure your system. You need to get down and dirty with Emacs (or even dirties with Vi) and edit those config files. Here’s what the Slackware site gives as the reason to use Slackware:
One of the biggest Ubuntu stories on the net is the elimination of xorg.conf. They haven’t made it unnecessary, they’ve completely eliminated it. If you create one and edit it - it will have no effect. I have not yet upgrade to 8.10, so I can’t verify it, but so far I haven’t seen any news to the contrary. I think this is very much against the spirit of Linux. I think that people should not have to know that an xorg.conf exists, but I think if you are “smart” enough to know about it and want to muck about then you should be able to. Perhaps you want to run your monitor at a non-standard resolution or refresh rate; Or maybe the default settings don’t work well. Ubuntu - let’s make xorg.conf available for the tweakers and uncessary for the tyros. Then we will have the best of both worlds.
I’ve been spending time in KDE on the weekends since I usually don’t need to update my podcasts (which I manage in Rythmbox) and here are my current impressions. Now that the latest nVidia drivers have come out, I was able to enable the desktop composite effects in KDE. This does not use Compiz, but rather KWin’s built-in effects. The default effects were nice. They slowed up my computer a little, but I was still able to run Blender, which is more than I can do in Gnome with Compiz turned on.
This month’s Linux Format Magazine came with CentOS 5.2 on the disc. CentOS, in case you don’t know, is a community supported version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. (RHEL) Again, in the unlikely case you don’t know - Red Hat is required to supply the source code to all GPL code it uses in RHEL. What they don’t have to do is supply the Source RPMs which make it extremely easy for a distro like CentOS to exist. They can take the SRPMs and just remove the Red Hat artwork/logos and repackage it off as their own. The GPL allows this. Why in the world would Red Hat do this? They are, in a way, helping for a gratis version of their distro to exist and take away money that might otherwise go to them.
Since both Gentoo and Sabayon were included on this Linux Format DVD, I decided I would first try and install Gentoo and then Sabayon and compare how easy the installations were since Sabayon is a derivative distro from Gentoo. As you know, I was unable to get a working installation from the LiveCD of Gentoo. If this was the case for most people, then the fact that they will no longer produce one is a good riddance. Sabayon, like most of the “modern” distros (or at least Ubuntu and Fedora), display a loading screen instead of the “ok” messages.
For a long while there I didn’t want to check out the Avant Window Navigator (AWN) because I was shunning Compiz. But now that I’m back on the Compiz (and since Metacity should have compositing “soon” anyway) I decided to give a shot when it was featured in Linux Format Magazine Issue 112. I found the AWN packages in Fedora although for AWN only AWN-extras comes up. You need to search avant-window-manager to get the main package. It doesn’t matter since AWN-extras brings in AWN in the dependencies. Here’s how my desktop looks before that:
Unless something went wrong between when I’m writing this post at 2324 on 29 Oct and tomorrow when it’s scheduled to launch, Congrats to the Canonical and the Ubuntu Release team on Ubuntu 8.10. The servers will probably be pounded today, so you might want to wait a few days before upgrading. I usually wait about a week anyway to make sure there aren’t any show-stopper bugs that somehow made it in. (this saved my bacon 1 or 2 releases ago)
Another distro in the seven distros included in Linux Format Magazine issue #110 is Gentoo 2008.0. This is an interesting release given the recent news that, at least for the time being, Gentoo is not going to be releasing these discs anymore. Apparently for both of the last two years there has been a lot of trouble with compiling the LiveCDs.
On the one hand, yearly (or biannual like Ubuntu) releases are redundant for Gentoo users. You just install Gentoo and from then on you just emerge newer versions of packages and always stay up to date. I have to say this is one of the features that makes Gentoo very attractive to me considering all the problems I’ve had with Fedora in-place upgrades. But if they are no longer making these annual LiveCDs, what will the Linux magazines feature on their distro discs? After all, there are people who have bandwidth issues and can’t download Linux distros to instasll. They are dependent upon magazines to carry the latest releases. And you know the magazine isn’t going to make a LiveCD for Gentoo. I still think that a yearly snapshot makes sense. Also, there has to be a starting point from which the user has a rolling updating system.
For some reason, I didn’t get Linux Format Magazine issue #110 when I was supposed to. I ordered another copy and it arrived recently, so it’s time for another slate of Linux reviews. Unfortunately, something appears to be wrong with the way they mastered the magazine DVD, because I was unable to boot into any of the Slax options. So I went online and got the latest ISO off of http://www.slax.org.
Hardly a day goes by that I don’t see an article on Linux Today about Moonlight and what a horrible person Miguel de Icaza is. So I thought I’d go ahead and do some exploration of what’s going on with Moonlight and Silverlight. First of all, what’s Silverlight? Check out the Silverlight article on Wikipedia. Basically, Silverlight is Microsoft’s answer to Adobe’s Flash. MS is pretty peeved they haven’t been able to get people off of PDF and onto their own format. They waited way too long while the rest of us realized that PDF is great if you want to make sure that the document you create is displayed the same way on everyone’s computer regardless of the fonts they have or which version of Office they have installed. (Or if they even have office installed)
It’s time once again for a Linux distro review. This month, Antix 7.5 was included on the LXF DVD. It’s another light distro, so I will use the same metrics I used in the Lightweight Linux Throwdown. Antix is based upon Mepis which is, in turn, based upon Debian. I think at one point it was based on Ubuntu, but I think they’ve gone back to being based on Debian. So, let’s get down to it. Here’s a screenshot of my desktop upon boot.
So I waited until about halfway through Fedora 9’s initial life-cycle to install it. I listed the reasons for that here. Once KDE 4.1 was finally out and most of the complaints had stopped, I took the plunge. I am actually very happy with Fedora 9. I think most of the reviews you may have read criticizing Fedora 9 focused on the initial version. That was, according to the mailing list, very buggy. But, for those who run Fedora on their day-to-day systems, simply waiting a few months is enough to get most of the bugs ironed out. First I’ll focus on what I have thought of Gnome since I’ve been using it since the install. Due to Fedora’s servers getting cracked, I just got KDE 4.1, so I’ll just be giving my preliminary impressions there. I’ve been wondering if KDE 4 would bring me back into the KDE came from the Gnome side. We’ll see. I intend to boot into KDE 4 for the next week or so to see how I like it.
I’ve never used Suse or openSuse. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been a “loyal” Fedora user since Fedora Core 1 and I have Ubuntu on my laptop since it had awesome laptop support. I even got some Suse CDs as a prize for the Letter of the Month from Linux Format magazine. However, I never even tried it at that time as I was mad at Novell for the Microsoft pact. I think it lends a lot of credibility to Microsoft’s BS argument that Linux violates its patents.
Well, the latest craze to hit the Linux bloggers is talking about Empathy. Everyone is talking about it. It’s apparently going to be in the next version of Gnome and Ubuntu is considering replacing Pidgin with Empathy for the next release. First of all, depending on how much work is done on Empathy between now and then, I think this may be a bad idea. Ubuntu is the distro we give our Linux n00b friends to play with. Pidgin can do (more or less) everything Trillian can do (and definitely everything AIM can do - except voice/vid). Do we want them thinking that Linux is crap because they are using the feature incomplete Empathy?
Many people know the mantra - if you are a gamer or office worker, you use the OS from Redmond. If you are a creative person such as a musician, video editor, etc you use a Mac. Geeks use Linux. But more and more people are moving away from Windows and seeking either Macs or Linux. If you switch to Mac you have to spend a ton of money and if you switch to Linux, it’s free and you can use the hardware you already have. But what if you’re a creative person? Can you only go to a Mac? Lots of people want to allow the creative people to come to Linux so there are more and more Linux distros for the creative types. This month, in Linux Format Magazine, 64 Studio was bundled on the disc. It doesn’t run as a liveCD or liveDVD so I’m running it in VirtualBox. As you can see here, it is a Debian-based distro:
First of all, I guess we got all jealous of Ubuntu because we have a startup sound now. There goes signing in with the speakers on late at night or early in the morning. Second, I apparently no longer have any functionality in Gnome. There are no panels, I can’t right-click the background. I can rotate a cube, but that’s about it. Oh, and I can move my mouse around. Time to figure out what went wrong.
Ok, I noticed that most complaints on the Fedora mailing list seemed to have been solved and it has bene a few months since Fedora 9 came out. So I figure that it’s time to finally upgrade. Also, my biggest problems appear to have been resolved. Although X.org is still in beta, nvidia has released drivers that will work in the interim. And today KDE 4.1 was released! I expect it’ll be in Fedora any day now. I was going to wait until it was there so I wouldn’t have to download all the KDE packages twice, but I figure it’s not that big a deal.
This month’s Linux Format Magazine had Linux Mint as one of the Linux distros on the DVD. I’ve been hearing a lot of people talk about this Ubuntu-based distro. So Mint is based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian. Why not just base Linux Mint off of Debian? Ok, so given that it’s based off of Ubuntu and Ubuntu is becoming synonymous with Linux because it’s so easy to use, why would you want to use Linux Mint? I check out tout the Linux Mint About Page and I’ll sum it up here. Basically they appear to be focused on making things even MORE user-friendly than Ubuntu. It appears that they intend to do this in in two ways - by having the media codecs and firmware available and by having some better user interfaces.
The first time it Kernel Panicked. So I told it to go completely in RAM like last time. Then it had some kind of “bread failed” kernel error and paused for 60 seconds. It tried to use UnionFS and kernel panicked again. I gave it one more shot with loading completely into RAM and ACPI off since that can sometimes wreak havok with Linux. It finally worked! Interestingly, when I rebooted, I had a hard time making that work again. Sounds like something the Puppy devs need to fix. However, I guess it could be something wrong with my burned CD.
This will be a few days old by the time this blog post appears on the site, but Gnome 3.0 is set to come out by 2010! This is huge news! Ever since Gnome started getting into the 2.2x series, people have constantly been asking about when Gnome 3.0 would be coming out. Since the Gnome project has decided that Gnoem 3.0 would be an appropriate time to break API and ABI compatibility, they have been saving that until it was needed. However, ever since KDE 4 was announced a few years ago, people have increased their calls for a Gnome 3.0. After all, they don’t want to seem so ridiculously behind when compared to KDE. Computer geeks like you and I know that doesn’t matter, but the lay person might think Gnome was outdated. Now that KDE 4.0 is finally out and with KDE 4.1 due at the end of this month, it seems that the momentum has finally built up for Gnome 3.0.
It’s been a really long time since I last looked at Songbird. In fact, according to my blog, the last time I checked it out was version 0.2 back in October of 2006. The UI certainly has a bit more polish. I submitted some bug reports on their Bugzilla about Metadata problems with WMAs and problems with podcasts. Eventually, I just got frustrated and stopped using it. I updated to version 0.4 a while back, but it still seemed a bit unstable. With Rhythmbox and Amarok meeting my needs on Linux, and with me hating Windows Media Player so much, I’ve pretty much stopped listening to music on my Windows computer.
My wife’s aunt’s computer was always getting full of viruses. I’d spend a few hours every time I came to visit removing the viruses and get the computer back to a working state. Sounds like the perfect job for….. Linux! All she does on her computer is email and watch videos - that’s it. Plus, I can set everything to Vietnamese for her thanks to Linux’s great internationalization efforts. Since I wanted a nice, worry-free desktop for her, I installed Ubuntu 8.04.
Once again I was pretty excited to find that I had been aggregated onto LinuxToday for this blog post. The funny thing is that I almost didn’t make that blog post as I was contemplating it for over a week and usually if I wait that long, the blog post doesn’t get written.
For the past week to two weeks I’ve done something I had’t done in years - I switched my default desktop environment in my GDM login screen. I’ve been logging into Xfce instead of my usual Gnome. There are basically three reasons why I’m loving Xfce over Gnome.
First of all, I love the theme. I know it’s just Bluecurve, Redhat’s theme, for the Window manager, but I just love how it looks compared to Gnome. I can’t really explain it, but there’s something about the share of blue they’ve chosen and the way it blends with the White of the letters and min, max, close buttons that’s very, very pleasing to my eye. It’s definitely one of those subjective things and I’m sure there are others who will disagree with me, but I think it’s beautiful. There’s something about the shades of blue they use that I just love. (For the curious, the theme of the desktop environment is Clearlooks, their newest theme, but that’s not available as a theme for the Window Manager)
I’m not 100% sure, but I think this is the longest I’ve purposely waited to upgrade to another Fedora release. I’ve been reading the Fedora user and developer mailling lists and what’s I’ve seen there has pretty much convinced me not to upgrade. First of all, there are a lot of answers to people complaining about Fedora 9 being unstable which include variations on “no one told you to stop using Fedora 8.” Some answers put it more politely and some more bluntly. And that’s ok. Just like the people who bought the iPhone last year got their pants pulled down over the price, so do those who upgrade to distros right away pay the price in instability. This happens with all distros from Fedora to Ubuntu. Sure, there’s an alpha testing period and a beta testing period, but not everyone can take part in that. I, for example, use my Fedora computer as my main computer for everything but gaming and photography. I can’t be unable to do my banking or type stuff up or work on my animations just because I’m trying the latest bleeding edge Fedora. And there are others like me, so the distro doesn’t truly get tested until it comes out. This is the argument used by the KDE team with respect to the POS that KDE 4 is, according to others - I haven’t tried it out.
Dang that’s a mouth-full! Let’s break it down a bit for anyone who may not be familiar with the lingo surrounding this very blue Linux. Mandriva Linux is the name of this distro. One is the name of the sub-distro. The choices are Free, One, and PowerPack. Free only contains free software. One is free as in beer, but may contrain some non-free software - perhaps, for example, MP3 playback capabilities. PowerPack costs money and contains commercial software such as Cedega, which would cost money if you got it anyway, and other software like Adobe Reader. The French and Brazilian folks at Mandriva release twice a year (Like Ubuntu and Fedora). This is the Spring release for 2008 and later we’ll have the Fall release.
Foresight Linux was supplied on the most recent Linux Format Magazine disc. Unfortunately, the distro doesn’t run in LiveCD mode (or at least such an ISO was not provided) so I decided to try it out in Virtualbox, which I have heard so much about. It appears to be equivalent to VMWare while also being mostly open source, so that was a bit of a draw.
1) I fixed up a bunch of my links. Some of them led to websites that no longer existed, one domain had been bought by a pr0n website. So all my links should go to where they’re supposed to now.
I haven’t updated to Feodra 9 yet because I keep hearing that Fedora really jumped the gun on this release and there’s still a ton of stuff broken. Since I use Fedora as my main daily computer, I can’t really sit there wasting time debugging it - especially since I’ve got a few animations that I’m working on. I’ll move it it when it gets a bit more stable. I’m thinking of maybe moving to another distro in the future. Perhaps Mandriva….we’ll see.
I’ve been reading a lot of reviews recently about the upcoming Banshee 1.0. ( Arstechnica and Linux Magazine, for example) It looks like it’s going to be an awesome release, but I wanted to see where it is now and compare that to Rhythmbox. As I mentioned here, I switched to Rhythmbox in May 2007 (a year ago!) from Banshee which I had been using approximately from May 2006 (when Mono programs were first introduced into Fedora). Back then Banshee (and other Mono-based programs) were around version 0.1, but it was the new cool thing and everyone was talking about how awesome Mono would be for Linux. (This is before everyone turned against it and Miguel de Icaza) Eventually I left Banshee because it was slow and bloated (as are most Mono programs), couldn’t handle podcasts (which I had recently discovered), crashed when updating my large music library and when I changed Metadata it wouldn’t stay changed. Since then Rhythmbox has been meeting all of my needs. For Banshee to be worth switching to, it would have to provide all the features of Rhythmbox along with adding some new features.
I’ve used Damn Small Linux (DSL) quite a bit in the past. Before getting my laptop I used to use it to be able to get a Linux desktop at my in-laws’ house. I decided I wanted to try out some of these other lightweight Linux distros that everyone is always talking about. Even on Linux Outlaws they mentioned how they like some different light distros over DSL. Since I’ve used DSL so much, I decided to evaluate these other Linux distros based on how they compare to DSL.
And that day has come: the Computer said “I will convert these
unbelievers, and now that I have Sulphur it will be easy.” At that,
the heavens opened and burning Sulphur descended upon all the world,
taking on many different forms.
If all goes well, then as this post appears at 1000, Sulfur will be released to the mirrors and available for download! Enjoy! If you download from scratch, be sure to use bit torrent so you can share the bandwidth.
Yesterday, to my surprise, when I went to LinuxToday, I found that I had been aggregated!
For those (like my wife) who don’t know what this means, it’s more or less the equivalent of a garage band being discovered and being invited to play at The Apollo. I’ve wanted to have my Linux-related blog posts aggregated on there for years. I’m happy to finally make it. I hope this means I’ll be there more often. Of course, I’m a little disappointed that this post was the one they chose to spotlight. I have had so many better written Linux-related articles. Oh well, better to get my blog out there and hopefully get posted more often than to never be posted at all.
I’ve been reading so much about all these Linux distros and I’ve been curious what they’re all about. In particular, Mandriva’s been calling to me a lot because I think that, had Ubuntu not been around, I probably would have installed it on my laptop. I’ve certainly had a bit of interest in the distro. There’s also all these other strange distros like GOS and Foresight Linux that I everyone’s talking about. I find myself wondering what’s so different or great about these? As you’ve noticed recently, the pendulum on my blog has swung away from Blender and back towards Linux while mostly skipping over politics (there really isn’t much to be said there that hasn’t been said over and over on cable news). So you may notice some more reviews on here.
So gNewSense 2.0 came out a few days ago as the gNewSense crew is tracking Ubuntu LTS releases. Of course, the bad part is that there is no upgrade path from gNewSense 1.0 to 2.0. Ubuntu recommends upgrading by going from release to release so upgrading is not feasible (or is too hard for the developers to implement) so freedom lovers need to have a good backup strategy.
Since I reviewed gNewSense 1.0, I wanted to structure this review as comparing and contrasting this release to the last one to see where the progress has come. They have a much cooler looking desktop background. There wasn’t anything wrong with the last one - it just didn’t have as much of a cool factor. They still have ugly icons on the screen.
Some developers are working on a neat new program menu for KDE called Raptor Menu. Thanks to Plasma and other underlying KDE 4 technologies it is now a pretty trivial hack to change the program menu if you don’t like the default. Such enhancements exist for KDE 3, but they are all very kludgey. Thanks to Plasma’s modular nature, it’s easy to replace it. Even the KDE developers have acknowledged this when people have complained about their new program menu. Bear with them to fix it, they say, but if you don’t like it, it’s now very easy to implement your own.
Today I decided to upgrade my Mythdora to the latest verison, 5.0. I downloaded the CD media and booted into the install. I had to do a text install to be able to watch it on my TV. Then I just needed to yum install the kmod-nvidia drivers. (Although, first I had to uninstall the previous nvidia drivers - they were neither automatically upgraded nor uninstalled) I started at about 1930 and was able to be completely up and running by 2055, just in time so that I didn’t have to missmy 2100 recording of “Best Week Ever”.
One of the new features of Gnome 2.22 is the fact that Totem now has a plugin to access your MythTV programs. I installed the plugin and found myself wondering what to do next. I checked on Google for totem mythtv and didn’t find anything until today when Google finally got around to indexing a forum post about it on the Ubuntu Forums. I followed the directions about editing Gconf and had success!
Last weekend, it had been a few days since the latest Ubuntu hit the net and I hadn’t heard of any major upgrade SNAFUs so I decided to upgrade. I wanted to record my absolute first impressions without doing much, just to see how I felt. The upgrade went by without anything bad happening. My wireless connection still works and nothing major seems to have gone wrong. I went through each of the things I’d heard hyped about in Ubuntu and checked to see how they had changed.
The Open Source Advocate has an article discussing the merits of all the distros releasing on the same schedule. His main argument, bolstered by quotes from Shuttleworth is that by having them all release at the same time, they will end up with the same software and cause a massive synchronization across all major open source projects. The 2 main quotes I’d like to focus on are:
“Simply set a hard date and modify your goals to make that release date.” - Article Author
Some little updates on my KDE experiment. First of all, I run an rsync script semi-daily to backup my home drive to an external hard drive in case the main one fails. It’s already happened to me once before and I was really glad to have had backups. However, as you can imagine, this is a huge drain on my computer’s resources while the backup is being performed. Since I have it running from a cron job so that I can just forget about it, I tend to forget when it’s set to run and I get really annoyed if my computer starts slowing down and I can’t figure out why. So I put a wall command into my script. This sends a message to all terminal emulators and everyone logged into the computer via terminals or ssh. Usually in Gnome I can only see the message if I happen to have Gnome termnal open. However, KDE does something very awesome and useful. Here’s a screenshot:
Ubuntu 8.04, Hardy Heron will be released today. As the name implies, 8.04 will be Hardy because it is a Long Term Support (LTS) version. This means that for 18 months they will release security updates. What does that really mean? It means that if you like Ubuntu, but don’t feel like upgrading every six months, you can stick with Hardy Heron for 3 release cycles. You won’t get the latest programs, but you’ll get security updates to protect you against crackers, viruses, and other malicious things.
As many of you know, according to the Google search terms that bring people here. I am of the not-so-humble opinion that Fedora’s upgrade process is about as pleasant as being forced to walk through the desert without a canteen of water. First of all, they recommend to just do a fresh install which is a non-starter for me. I’d have to waste way too much time restoring all my files and settings. Ubuntu and Debian seem to get me through upgrades without reinstalling without any problems. I blogged about the horrors up upgrading to Fedora 8 here and here. I blogged about how awesome the yum upgrade worked here,here,here, and here.
I’ve always been the first to jump to the defenses of people who love creating more distros and programs. After all, if everyone just stuck to the established distros we would never have had Ubuntu and perhaps Linux would still be just a curiousity to most. However, I just didn’t see the purpose in both Gobuntu and gNewSense. First of all, they’re both based on Ubuntu. It’s not even that one is Ubuntu and one is Debian or that one is Ubuntu and one is Red Hat-based. That would have made sense to me as perhaps they liked a different packaging format or something.
As you can see, by trawling through this, I have gone back and forth between KDE and Gnome a lot. As I’ve mentioned many times before, I initially loved KDE over Gnome. It looked more like Windows, it had more neat options, and great programs. Not only is Amarok the best media player out there (although Rhythmbox is not far behind), but the KDE programs feel so much more tightly integrated than Gnome. That’s one part where they’ve always had a huge lead over Gnome, although Gnome has been catching up recently. Still, I hope that KDE continues to evolve its KParts and KIOSlaves infrastructures. (Or whatever they evolve into in KDE4) KDE programs also just seemed to fit together visually so much better, I don’t know why because Gnome has the HIG.
In the most recent LugRadio episode was a feature about how the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) states that applications should be named in the applications menu not as the program name, but as what the program does. This is something I’d like to explore a little more in another post. But during the discussions, they mentioned an interesting point: Gnome follows (or tries to follow) the paradigm of the ego-less desktop. This means that it’s not important who coded your program, it’s important what it does. And this got me thinking about one of the HUGE annoyances I have as I read the blogs and news pages about Linux. Everyone complains about how Linux isn’t quite there yet and how it needs to fix this or that before it’s easy enough for the proverbial Grandmother. Let’s take a look at some use casse and see how Linux is precisely the opposite - it’s MUCH easier to use than Windows.
Two major Linux distributions will be making releases this month and since I use both of them, I’m pretty excited! First up will be the Debian-derived Ubuntu. This distro has been the darling of users and Internet media alike for the past few years. It stole the post from Mandriva, the previous Linux distro that everyone recommended to new users. Although Mandriva was the easiest distro for new users, it also had a reputation for being so bleeding edge it was unstable. Ubuntu, however, is very stable and tends to work on more hardware out of the “box”. In fact, it was Ubuntu’s ability to work on laptops, long the Holy Grail of Linux distros, that led it to such prominence. That is the main reason why I chose to install Ubuntu onto my laptop even though I’ve been a Fedora user since I first got into Linux about five years ago. Ubuntu 4.08 aka Hardy Heron will be flapping its way to you on 24 April.
After a light window manager roundup in the latest LXF (Issue #103) I decided to give IceWM another shot. I had looked at it once before and found it to both be bare and lacking any programs in the IceWM->Programs menu. It loaded up ridiculously fast, which was nice. Unfortunately, for some strange reason, loading up Rythmbox also loads up the Gnome background. I understand that the Gnome libraries are loaded for whatever necessary reasons when Rhythmbox loads up, but I think it’s pretty rotten behavior to usurp the desktop background! I wonder if this is worth filing a bug report about with Gnome developers.
Compiz-Fusion, as you surely know is responsible for eye candy on GNU/Linux distros such as windows that turn into paper airplanes when the user minimizes it to turning the desktop into a spinning cube. There’s something about the wobbly windows that provides some a sense of inertia that just makes things feel a little more dynamic on the desktop. I can’t explain it, but some of the effects make the GUI slightly more useful. However, Compiz-Fusion isn’t perfect.
KDE 4.0 was released today! After seeing screenshots like the ones I want to share with you, I can’t wait to try it. Too bad Fedora won’t be including it until Fedora 9 in April.
All of the following images were produced by/for KDE.org. I’m just borrowing them for illustrative purposes.
First of all, here’s the default GUI:
Not too shabby. Looks pretty similar to KDE3, but with a “Vista Black” thing going on. But here’s where I really got excited:
For years I had been saying that I would not buy an iPod product. After all, they sell music in the iTunes music store with DRM on it. All of my music on my Linux computer is in the OGG format and it can’t be played with iPods. However, when it came time to buy an audio player I did a bit of research. It had to be something I could buy at the local Best Buy because I had a coupon and gift card. Of the players sold at Best Buy, the players which supported OGG were, ironically, not well supported on Linux. In fact, the best supported and integrated player in Linux was the iPod. That’s important to me since I use my Linux computer for serving my main audio needs. All of my podcasts come in through Rhythmbox. The second requirement I had is that it had to be of the same form factor as the 2nd Generation iPod Shuffle so that it could use it at the gym clipped onto my shirt or shorts and not weigh me down at all. I used to work out with an iPaq in my pocket and it was not very comfortable at all.
Recently I wanted to install VMWare on Danielle’s computer. I’ve installed Kubuntu on her Linux machine (Toad) and I wanted to get a clone over her Windows computer onto there in VMWare player. I used VMWare Converter to create the VMWare clone of her Windows computer and then put it into the Kubuntu box. But then there was a bit of a problem: the Ubuntu repositories did not have VMWare Player. I went to VMWare’s site and they only had rpms and the source code. I was hesitant to compile VMWare Player from source. I was sure it would be a monstrous mess. After all, I’d had problems with much less complicated programs.
In order to get my title bars back, all I had to do was run compiz-fusion in the terminal. To get it to persist I had to do SYSTEM–>Preferences–>Personal–>Sessions. Click on add, name it whatever and the command should be compiz-manager and to get all the awesome plugins you’ve been seeing since the merge with Beryl, just download ccsm. If you have any problems, check out this linuxquestions.org forum, that’s how I figured it out.
I had to uninstall a few more multimedia packages, but it eventually upgraded. After rebooting I arrived at GDM just fine - yay! I’m not sure if it’s just me, but the bootup time on Fedora 8 seems to a A LOT faster than it was in Fedora 7. I feel like I got to GDM a lot faster.
Compiz is working and so is dual screen - so far this live upgrade has been better than any of my DVD/CD upgrades. Due to either updates in Compiz or in Gnome or in Fedora’s changes to Gnome, I finally have something I’ve wanted since Fedora Core 6 - on the desktop switcher, when using Compiz, it would not show the dividers between the desktops. Now it does show the dividers, making for a better experience. It’s easier to click on the exact desktop I want. Then again, at least on this first boot, I seem to be missing the top-most bar on my program - where the max, min and close program button are. Not surprisingly, there are no updates to install.
Mario is my main Linux box. I had to uninstall x264 this comes from the fact that I mixed livna and freshrpms. I never intended to do so, but I started with freshrpms back in the day, but nowadays I use livna for my graphics card. That plus freshrpms relative lack of updates compared to livna means that it’s slowly sliding off my computer. The only bad thing is that livna does not carry binaries for Cinelerra. I’ll have to investigate what I should do there. So far, for dependency errors I’ve had to remove:
Review and remove all .rpmsave and .rpmnew files before and after upgrading
I basically did a locate, found them and deleted them.
for a in $(find /etc /var -name ‘*.rpm?*’); do b=${a%.rpm?*}; diff -u $a $b; done
I did this, but I didn’t really know what to do with the results. It appears not to have mattered in this case
The default GDM screen looks a little ugly to me….perhaps it’s just too new.
The new SELinux notification tool may be useful if something is not working correctly, but it just bugs the heck out of me as every single program appears to be trying to access protected memory. Of course, some people may welcome this new program. It looks very nice, but I’ve never been one of those who had problems with SEL to begin with
Well, at least it worked pretty well on my future PVR. I will give a more detailed explanation/directions of my experience for others who may be wondering if this is really as scary as it sounds since it’s “unsupported”. However, my main Linux computer is much, much more complex in the number of packages installed. I’ll probably be waiting until after the Thanksgiving Holidays to tackle that one to make sure that I have the needed time to fix things if they go wrong. At least I’m happy at the prospect and I plan on letting the Fedora Live Upgrade SIG know about this so they can make it officially supported.
Well, the entire upgrade process is not yet over, so I don’t want to get too excited, but I think this may solve my problem. I started a yum upgrade on my living room computer - which will one day be my MythTv PVR (once I get the necessary hardware). It went through the dependency check in roughly 4 minutes or less. It’s now downloading 951 MB of updates, so it may be a while before it’s ready for the next phase. Still, if this works, I know what I’m going to do with my main computer. I really hope this can eventually become a supported method of upgrading. It seems to be a lot faster and doesn’t require me to uninstall all of my third party programs.
It may have been about to install or it may never have installed, but after 35 hours, I was getting a little annoyed. I’ve decided to try the unsupported yum upgrade. I’ll try it first one a guinea pig computer that’s at Fedora 7. If that works, I’ll try it on my real machine.
It’s still right at the end of that little progress bar. The HDD activity light on my compute continues so I’m hoping it’s not frozen, but just working on figuring out the dependencies on all of my packages. I’m going to give it until I get home today and maybe until I go to bed. After that I’ll have to rethink things - perhaps uninstalling those non-Fedora packages…. q:o(
Upgrading to Fedora 7 didn’t take this long and neither did Fedora 6, but that’s ok - as long as it happens. It’s nearly done with the dependency checking. It’s been getting closer and closer to the end of the bar. Part of me thinks it may be stuck, but after waiting 10 hours to get this far, I don’t want to stop if there’s a chance it will start installing tonight or even tomorrow morning. Before the next upgrade I hope to have more RAM, as I think that’s probably part of the reason why it’s taking so long. Just wanted to update how long it’s taking both for anyone else in this situation and for myself so when Fedora 9 comes out, I can remember how long Fedora 8 took.
I tried upgrading Fedora 7 to Fedora 8 a few times when it first came out and it kept getting stuck at 26% in the dependency checking phase. I went on the fedora IRC room and I was told to remove my non-Fedora repos. I didn’t listen because that’s always the first thing they tell you to do and, in my experience, it never seems to be the true culprit. Then I found out online that the update servers were swamped when Fedora 8 first came out. Also, freshrpms didn’t appear to have any RPMs yet for Feodra 8. Tried it again today and it appears to be going much better. It’s taken around 2.5 hours, but the dependency check is almost done. I’m hoping to be able to upgrade today. This last part has been especially slow, so I’m hoping that within the next hour or two I’ll be able to start the actual upgrade process. I’ll post what happens here in case others are having similar problems.
I’m bit torrenting is as we speak. Get it here. Be nice and download via bit torrent if you can so we can all share in the bandwidth!
And here’s the release announcement:
Official Announcement: (To the tune of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”)
It’s close to midnight and something cool is coming through the “tubes”
It’s looking real tight, a distro for the experts and the n00bs
With Live CDs* so you can try it out before installing
Or DVDs so you can have the packages you choose
No way to lose
No lame jungle puns from me. Just go here it here. Or, if you already run it (as I do on my laptop), then just use the upgrade tool. I’m upgrading now. If anything major breaks, I’ll let you know.
As you know, life tends to consist of cycles. You feel up and then you feel down then up again. You get hungry and eat to get full and then get hungry again. And so on….
Apparently the same is true in the computing realm as well. I was searching through my blog today to find a post to see what my Wordpress theme is called. (It’s called ramart) Wordpress 2.3 is out and they had a list of themes that were compatible, so I wanted to see if mine was, but I needed to know what it was called. (It isn’t compatible) I knew that I had changed to this theme early on so I was searching through my earliest articles.
Read the latest Linux Format Magazine and I was delighted to find out that the two IRC clients I use were each awarded a 9/10 in their IRC client roundup. When I’m in KDE I use Konversation and in Gnome I use gnome-xchat (although it was vanilla xchat that got the 9/10). Both were praised for being approachable by tyros while at the same time having features for the experienced.
WTF is this world coming to? From the digg “horny nerd” files, comes this website: http://www.moanmyip.com/.
Interesting things I learned on this site are how web servers and websites see me. Here’s what it says it thinks it knows about me:
YOUR OPERATING SYSTEM AND BROWSER
Linux / Safari
YOUR USER AGENT INFORMATION
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.5; Linux) KHTML/3.5.7 (like Gecko)
YOU CAME HERE FROM
http://digg.com/security
I think it’s interesting that it reports as Linux Safari when it clearly knows, from the next line down that ti’s Konqueror. I know that Konqueror and Safari share KHTML/Webkit for the backend, but I think ti’s strange that it shows up as Safari in one field and Konqueror in the next.
On my system, running Fedora 7 and Compiz causes the computer to refuse to exit Gnome. I always have to go into a terminal and shut the computer down that way and it’s extremely annoying. So I’ve decided to run KDE as my default desktop instead of Gnome. We’ll see if I can rekindle the fire I used to have for KDE or if it will annoy me enough to drive me back to Gnome.
This picture appeared in a blog that claims to be a hot girl in a wet ubuntu tshirt because she loves Ubuntu. I say that it claims because the tshirt was photoshopped to have the logo. However, my favorite part are the comments on digg.com. Here are some of my favorites: (reads like a bunch of nerdy pickup lines)
I’d open her source.
Soooo…. If I pretend I’m Ubuntu… can I penetrate that market?
For a while it seemed as though Debian couldn’t stop the hemorrhage of distros decided to be based on Ubuntu instead of Debian. For months on end people talked about whether Debian was still relevant and whether its long release cycle was to blame. Well, now it seems that perhaps some of those derivative distros were a little quick to jump on the bandwagon! SimplyMepis has decided to be based on Debian again.
The founder said that each time Ubuntu is build from scratch and it was hindering the ability of SimplyMepis to have a sensible upgrade path. I don’t know enough about that side of Linux distros to know how different that is from what most of them do, but apparently Debian does not have that problem.
System76, which sells customized Ubuntu laptops allows you to write in an get a free set of “Powered by Ubuntu” stickers. Thanks for offering this service! It was annoying me that my computer said it was perfect for Windows Vista Basic, when it’s running Ubuntu! So, I now have my Ubuntu stickers.
They finally got Epiphany-extensions up to the right level! So now the only thing I need to have everything working perfectly again is to finish up editing xorg.conf so that I can get compiz running again. I also submitted my hardware profile to the team via Smolt. Hopefully that means more support for my hardware. YAY!
It turned out to be pretty easy. I used the nVidia tool to generate my xorg.conf and then just had to do a couple of tweaks. First off, since it was running as a non-privileged user, it wasn’t able to save to /etc/X11/xorg.conf. So I had to save it to my desktop. Then I had to edit it because the nVidia tool didn’t want my second monitor to be an awesome resolution, so I had to edit that manually. Then I just copied it to the right spot. Now it’s perfect. Here’s my xorg.conf:
Man have I been busy. I’m finishing up the wedding I shot a couple of weeks ago, so I haven’t had time for much. I think I have nVidia up and working now, although still just one monitor is working. glxgears gives me 1340 FPS - is that good or bad? I’ll have to look into my blog and see what happened last time. hmm….looks like I didn’t write anything down before. Well, now I have it here for the record for next time.
Updating via Livna nVidia did not completely fix the problem. As in the last time I upgrade I am now down to one monitor and I hate it! I feel so cramped! I’m still updating some stuff so hopefully this’ll be fixed soon.
While I’m at it….I don’t like the default Gnome icons for Fedora 7. I find them very ugly. Also the font used is very hurtful on my eyes. I wonder if that has to do with font patent/copyright issues.
But that’s my own fault. I thought about switching away from nVidia before updating, but I didn’t. So I’m updating - there’s 1 GB worth of updates. So when I get home today I need to install the nVidia drivers from Livna.
The upgrade went off without a hitch except for one thing: in grub, it did not make my FC7 kernel the default! And, obviously my FC6 kernel was gone. No biggie, just select F7 kernel in grub and you’re good.
It’s almost done installing. I’ve stayed up too long to go to sleep now. Although, I doubt I’ll stay up past one. I might have to finish it off tomorrow. Anyway…it looks like they’ve eliminated the time left to install. That’s probably a good thing as for the past 3+ years it’s always been horribly inaccurate. Instead they still you how many packages out of how many total packages have been installed. I’m down to the last 100 packages. Who knows how much longer is left? I’ll give it 15 more minutes.
I usually wait a while to install new Fedora releases, but a few things made me decide to give a whirl today. First of all, my torrent finished at a reasonable time. Second, Freshrpms is actually already ready for the upgrade. Finally, I read online that it’s a pretty stable release that doesn’t rock the boat too much. So here goes….
I thought I’d have to wait for Fedora 7 to experience Pidgin (what gaim got renamed to due to their legal battles with AOL - as I previously blogged), but they provided it for Fedora Core 6.
The interface has changed a little. Here are some screenshots showing my first impressions on the differences:
The main difference I noticed is that everyone is represented by a green dot if they are available instead of an icon representing their chat service. In other words, AOL contacts are no longer displayed as the AOL running man and MSN is no longer the chubby green guy.
And it’s called Moonshine. I like the name better than Zod, Fedora Core 6’s name.
Here’s the announcement from the Red Hat Mailing List:
\* From: The Fedora Project
\* To: fedora-announce-list redhat com
\* Subject: Announcing Fedora 7 (Moonshine)
\* Date: Thu, 31 May 2007 03:28:41 -0700
Howdy, cousins! Welcome to our little Fedora hollow, where we’ve
brewed up some mighty, mighty Fedora 7 Moonshine for your enjoyment.
Here, I’ll help you pour that … and some for me … *cough, cough*
Smoooooth … sure does taste good. It’s been sitting here in the jug
for almost a whole month now! Go ahead and help yourself to some
more:
Fedora 7 should be out in 8 days. This time around there isn’t much I’m looking forward to in the new release as they are mostly just laying the groundwork for more changes in future Fedoras. My wish list is better compiz support and just a few newer versions of stuff like Pidgin (formerly Gaim) and Blender.
As a general rule, Linux users are not terribly prone to loyalty to any particular Linux distribution. This is due to the fact that open standards allow it to be generally pretty easy to move one’s settings from one distro to another. Thus there have been several darlings of the Linux movement. In the beginning, Slackware was introducted to server rooms and was the most popular. Then Red Hat Linux became the new distro to use with its easy to use GUIs. Mandrake (now Mandriva) became the best distro when Red Hat began to slow down their pace, leaving Mandrake as the most bleeding edge and easiest for new users. It was known for “just working” even if being on the bleeding edge also meant it was chronically unstable. Now the distro to be running is Ubuntu. It works flawlessly with most hardware, is easy to install, has a liveCD, and the great apt-get system to resolve package dependencies.
Recently I’ve been a tad annoyed at the criticisms of the Sugar interface to the laptops in the One Laptop per Child project (OLPC). The developers chose to forgo the desktop metaphor as the kids over there in the third world don’t even have desks or files or anything like that. Instead they tried to reengineer things to be as fun and intuitive as possible for the kids that will get the laptops. So many people have complained that the interface is so non-intuitive that there’s no way these kids will get the interface. It should have been made to mimic Windows they claim! I think they just find it unintuitive because we’ve been using the desktop metaphor here since the 80s.
Oracle decided, a few months ago, to exercise a right they have under the GPL: they have taken Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux and copied everything about it, rebranded it and called it their own. This is not unique to Oracle. On a basic level, this is what Ubuntu, Linspire, Mint, Xandros, CentOS, and others do - they build on another distro and package it out. Some may have different packaging or have different ideas of which kinds of software they can include. However, there is a huge difference, at least in my mind. With Ubuntu, Xandros, etc they do not exist to compete with Debian (on which they are based). Rather, they celebrate the fact that they came from Debian and make a point of contributing back to it. They also cater to certain markets that may not find Debian easy to use.
I’m including the file here. It’s just a command line RSS reader. The included readme file will tell you which parameters to pass it. It doesn’t really do a lot of checking or than for the words “sub” and “unsub”. It’s a pretty neat proof of concept. I’m not going to improve on it much at this stage because it’s going to be used in issue 91, I believe, to create a GTK application. It would be my first ever useful GTK application, so I’m pretty excited about it. RSS Reader
I booted into this disc to see what games it had. It is a decent disc and I discovered that there’s a Penguin-based Mario Kart Clone. It mostly has FPS shooters.
Anyway, when I booted back into Windows my network card was no longer working. After fretting for about an hour and rebooting and shutting down, I went on IRC and found the answer. Sometimes (although it’s never happened to me before with a livecd) the drivers get into a weird state. To fix it, just completely cut the power. That means shut down your computer and then pull the power cord and wait for about 1 minute. After that it will work again.
Despite the fact that the ReactOS test specifically said that 0.3.1 was not ready for installation on computers, I tried anyway. Looks like they decided to keep that horrible installer from Redmond. Quite a shame when most Linux distros are using graphical installs. You don’t need to copy the bad stuff too, ReactOS team!
However, that computer already had Linux on it and, for some reason, ReactOS did not know how to use the partitions correctly. So instead of getting to test how ReactOS was going on real hardware (vs the VMWare images I’ve tried so far), all I got was a GRUB error. When I get more time I’ll have to fsck it to wipe the whole drive and then try again. Hopefully by then they’ll be into the 0.4 series. (I don’t see myself having much free time anytime soon)
Just tested and, yes, for the small, uncomplicated Hello World program it works just fine on Windows XP. I just had to install .NET. (It took about 10 minutes….I don’t know why)
After reading Linux Format Magazine (LXF) Issue #91, in which they used Mono to code a GTK gui, I decided to take up C# programming. I will follow along with the tutorials and gain another programming language under my belt. Today I started with LXF #87 and completed my C# “hello world” program. The syntax is interesting - it’s a cross between C and Java. Of course, that makes sense as it lists those as its predecessors. Python (and Perl) is still much quicker for short programs, but for complex ones C# seems to be the way to go. At least, a lot of neat Gnome projects have been created with C# such as Banshee, Tomboy, and f-spot.
Veterans of Linux installs from the early days may chuckle at my new discovery, but I’ve only been installing Linux since the graphical days of Anaconda and Fedora Core 1. (But first some background info) I was recently installing Xubuntu on my father-in-law’s computer. He wanted me to install a new Windows Media Player version, but I needed to upgrade to Windows Service Pack 2. The Kami at M$ were not smiling upon his household because this hosed the computer.
I’ve done a few updates in the past week or so and I’ve been in fvwm-crystal, so I don’t know which update fixed things, but Gnome finally handles Dual Screen Compiz correctly. Previously, if I maximized a window, it would maximize across both monitors! I NEVER want that kind of behaviour because my screens are not only a few inches apart, but they also have a 2-3 inch frame between viewable areas. I really didn’t like that discontinuity in my viewing area, so I would always have to manually size up the windows. This behaviour was only occuring in Gnome; KDE, fluxbox, fvwm-crystal and other WMs were correctly handling the maximize command. So I’m glad that Gnome will no longer be a source of frustration for me.
Date Sun, 4 Feb 2007 11:10:36 -0800 (PST)
From Linus Torvalds <>
Subject Super Kernel Sunday!
In a widely anticipated move, Linux “headcase” Torvalds today announced
the immediate availability of the most advanced Linux kernel to date,
version 2.6.20.
Before downloading the actual new kernel, most avid kernel hackers have
been involved in a 2-hour pre-kernel-compilation count-down, with some
even spending the preceding week doing typing exercises and reciting PI
to a thousand decimal places.
I read a blog post a few days ago where someone who purported to be a Linux user (so as to not be accussed of trolling) claimed that although Linux and its freedoms were great and all - at the end of the day - the user had to return to Windows to get any serious stuff done. Well, I’m here to say, that I think that’s completely bogus. I haven’t had my Windows computer on since last Monday and I’m only turning it on today to work on my photography. All week long I’ve used Linux for everything, even helping to correct my younger brother’s paper by using Open Office.org Writer.
KDE.news has reported on part of the progress of KDE 4 specific to SVG graphcs. (I know that’s redundant) It’s redundant because SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics. Ever since about 2 years ago, Gnome and other projects began to move to SVG rather than PNG, JPG or other types of graphics. “What’s the advantage?” you may be asking yourself. Well, the advantage lies in how pictures are represented in SVG instead of, say, PNG and its ilk.
A few big things in Fedora News. First of all, the Fedora Summit happened recently. They are tackling a lot of things for Fedora Core 7 including blurring the line between Core and Extras (a point of contention for those moved from Core to Extras - they were less important they felt) and finally having a true LiveCD. You can read more about it at Linux.com’s review of the Fedora Summit.
In an interesting game of Russian dolls Techalign released Pioneer Linux, based on Ubuntu, which in turn is based upon the venerable Debian Linux. Technically, they’ve based it off of Kubuntu which is a KDE spinoff of Ubuntu; they aren’t even using Ubuntu proper. So when they send patches upstream, are they sending them to Ubuntu or Debian? Check out their free version, live CD, or pay version.
Red Hat is moving from the Nasdaq to the New York Stock Exchange. Great for the bean counters, probably won’t mean much for us.
As I read this article about how this guy’s kids love Linux and hate Windows, I had a couple of questions come to my mind. First of all, is this a testament to how easily kids learn things? Second, what does this mean for newbies to Linux who complain that it’s not as easy as Windows?
According to the article:
Here was a five year old, traversing the directories, finding applications and opening them without any hesitation. He had no issue figuring out how to open and close screens, move them around, or change their size. The tool bars, menus and icons were all intuitive to these kids.
I have to say that the first thing I noticed when I booted into gNewSense is that they have chosen a supremely ugly theme for their icons. I felt like plucking my eyes out rather than continue with this distro. I don’t know why I had such a against it. As you can see in the screenshot below, it’s just not aesthetically pleasing! I gues I’m just used to Fedora’s nice, smooth icons. Some people may say that Fedora’s icons are getting tired, but I like it.
Eben Moglen, a lawyer for the Free Software Foundation, remarks that the new deal may violate Section 7 of the GPL! So now you see that the stakes in the GPLv3 talks are very high! The GPLv2 may indeed be our saviour against Microsoft’s tyranies, but more on that momentarily! Mr. Moglen specifically comments:
“If you make an agreement which requires you to pay a royalty to anybody for the right to distribute GPL software, you may not distribute it under the GPL,” Moglen told CNET News.com Thursday. Section 7 of the GPL “requires that you have, and pass along to everybody, the right to distribute software freely and without additional permission.”
So, by now this is a little older news, but I wanted to wait for some more information before blogging. Novell has signed a deal with the devil, I mean Microsoft. When I first heard the story yesterday I thought, “OH sh$t! It’s embrace and extend and it’s with Linux!” Novell’s Press Release spun it as a positive thing for Linux. In reality, if you pay attention for the words, their point is that this partnership is good for Novell and Suse Linux, not all Linux users. I could have said, “Well, at least we have Red Hat in the business spaces to keep things going well.” But, no, Oracle had to botch that up last week. One of the biggest steps backwards this agreement takes, is that now Novell is support Microsoft’s Office XML format. NO NO NO! We were supposed to be going towards OPEN standards! You know, like the IEEE promotes! Why? Because we all know that proprietary standards can really cause things to get locked up when the proprietary vendor stops supporting it. But then again, maybe Novell doesn’t know this since it promoted Netware and other such proprietary produces before trading its stripes for Linux.
So you thought Debian was pretty anal about free software did you? Well you ain’t seen nothin’ yet! Love ’em or hate ’em, but the Free Software Foundation is very serious (and extreme) in their position of what constitutes free software. Although this has alienated some, I think that a certain amount of what they do is necessary because the forces of Evil in the World as pulling just as hard in the other direction. (eg Trusted Computing, DRM, etc) Well, RMS likes to get into quibbles with Linux distros over the fact that they don’t call them GNU/Linux systems when a large portion of important programs (GCC, for example!) come from the GNU project. So, they decided to play on Linux’s turf. (instead of finishing their own kernel, HERD) Using the power of the GPL (which the FSF is in charge of), they forked a Debian/Ubuntu mix of Linux which is 100% free! That’s right, forget the little fights over Firefox/IceWeasel. gNewSense (nuisance? the first part is creative pun on GNU, but the overall word may or may not be what they were looking for) is a Linux distribution where ALL of the software has the sources available. Anything available only in binaries (eg nVidia/ATI drivers) are nowhere to be found!
As you may have heard recently, Debian has a problem with Firefox due to the fact that the artwork is not released under a free license. This is an extension of problems they’ve had with GNU’s documentation and the clause that allows some parts to remain uneditable. So Debian has forked Firefox into IceWeasel. The engine and core program are the same, only the artwork is different.
This has caused a lot of name-calling back and forth between the two camps. Mark Shuttleworth, who’s Ubuntu is based in Debian, posted a reconcilatory post today whereby he called on both sides to respectfully disagree.
Fedora Core 6 comes with Gaim 2.0 Beta 4. Above you can see it together with the new Fedora Core 6 DNA-style background.
As you can see, things have changed quite a bit in the appearance of Gaim. The largest change to the GUI involves the availability which is now set by a bar at the bottom of the GUI. The biggest complaint I have with this setup is that there isn’t an easy way to set one account as away while another is available.
All I had to add, apart from what I mentioned yesterday was:
Load “extmod”
to the Module section of xorg.conf.
Although others have derided it, I think it is an AWESOME addition to Fedora. It really brings the desktop to the eye candy level of Mac’s OSX. A lot of the eye candy is also extremely functional! I wanted to save this post for a video showing the compiz stuff (it doesn’t really work to show screenshots), but I haven’t been having the best of luck with that. I’ll try again in the next couple of days along with my review.
I’m almost ready to do my first review of FC6. However, I’m still working on getting all the neat AIGLX effects working. After all, that was almost the whole point of upgrading. So far I’ve installed the Compiz package, which gave the the System -> Preferences -> Desktop Effects menu. That didn’t work, so I hit the IRC servers. I was told the latest livna nvidia driver doesn’t support it, but the version in the testing repo should support it. So I’m going to be trying that soon. I also had to add Option “AddARGBGLXVisuals” “True” to my xorg.conf. I haven’t setup the dual head again yet, but that should be a snap in comparison.
The new version of Fedora is installed. So far, only the X server didn’t work right. It didn’t feel like supporting my dual head setup, so I’ll have to investigate that over the next few days. Other than that, it appears to have installed just fine. By the way, it didn’t take until now to be finished. It finished around 11 last night, but I didn’t want to reboot because I didn’t want to deal with any debugging until today.
The actual installation process began at 2110, so it took about 10 minutes for the dependencies. This part now tends the be the longest part. At times, it even seems to be frozen - at least that’s my experience for all prior upgrades/installs. We’ll see how this one fares.
And, since I downloaded it on my Windows box, the torrent will keep allowing others to download the Zod goodness. I am now beginning the install at 2057.
Fedora Core 6 was 15 minutes late….at least, the anouncement on Linuxtoday.com is 15 minutes after 1400 GMT, although it may just be that Linuxtoday.com didn’t make the anouncement on time. So what’s up with Zod? Well, after naming Fedora after rivers and French cities, it is now named after some weird space alien-sounding name. I’m not sure what Zod is, but I recently read that they consider part of the fun to be to guess how the name relates to the name of the previous release.
The wait is over for Fedora Core 6 will be releasing today, 24 Oct, at 1400 GMT or 0900 EST. Get on those bittorrents so that I can torrent off of you when I get to work. Hopefully, the Livna repositories will get those nvidia drivers working quickly.
Recently you’ve read about Linux in computers, servers, cell phones, Playstation 3, and the Nintendo Wii. But did you know about Linux being put into a surgeon? The Oct 2006 issue of Spectrum includes a story about a team designing a robotic surgeon to allow a human surgeon to do surgery from afar. The thought is for them to deploy this in the battlefield so that doctors don’t have to be at risk of dying and to obviate the long flight to a safe base for surgery. Why did they choose Linux? Well, since they were designing something revolutionary, there probably weren’t Windows drivers for controlling a robotic surgeon. With Linux being open-source, they could see how it works and easily write device drivers for their robot. One reads a lot about stuff like this - experimental robots and automated vehicles tend to use Linux. Of course, it also is available for free and doesn’t require registration for activation. Finally, you can scale it back to just the kernel and what you need instead of the whole gargantuan OS - as in the case of Windows.
A couple of stories that I found interesting today.
First of all, there’s a new Red Hat Fedora Core-based disto on the block, and it’s called Linux XP. It’s meant to be a drop-in replacement for Windows users. The screenshots look VERY nice and it definitely seems like a pretty enticing distro to show your Redmond-loving friends. However, this review found the Linux XP to be lacking in some stability features.
To read an article by someone who’s pretty much been with Linux since the beginning, check out this article.
I noticed today that, as usual, the Fedora Core release date has slipped. This is a good thing as there are some bugs remaining to be fixed. However, it is annoying for me. I want the new toy! Here’s the explanation:
Fedora Core 6 will be out on 11 Oct 2006 (if they keep to schedule this time). Expect some screenshots once I get the AIGLX special fx working. They’re a little behind SuSe on this one, but still pretty ahead of the game.
So why do we need YALD? Well this isn’t just any new Linux distro! This Linux distro is created by Gael Duval, the recently-booted creator of Mandrake Linux. Mandrake Linux was in the position Ubuntu now is - the easy distro to introduce new people to Linux with. It had the easiest installer around and generally worked on the greatest amount of hardware. It was originally based off of Red Hat Linux 5.0. (This is back when they used to sell boxed PC software in the niche that Fedora now occupies)
I used to love KDE and thought it was so much better than GNOME. Especially after discovering Superkaramba, I was sure nothing could beat KDE in terms of cool factor. Later I started using more GTK applications so I gravitated towards GNOME, fluxbox, and XFCE. Also, I ended up not really using the SuperKaramba widgets that much because they were always buried under my other windows….where I was doing real work!
As I was reading the latest Linux Format Magazine, they had a great tip for a low tech way to remind yourself of different time-sensitive events. The best part is that it works under any window manager! (ie it doesn’t matter if you’re in Gnome, KDE, XFCE, Fluxbox, or any other) The trick is to use xmessage and at. at is cron’s little brother, for scheduling things that will happen in the future, but not be a recurring event. xmessage presents a little dialogue box with whatever message you give it. Here’s a screenshot with an example!
I'm a day late, but happy birthday Linux! Here's the email that started it all!
From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?
Summary: small poll for my new operating system
Message-ID: <1991Aug25.205708.9541@klaava.Helsinki.FI>
Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki
Hello everybody out there using minix -
I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and
professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing
since april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on
things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat
(same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons)
among other things).
I've currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work.
This implies that I'll get something practical within a few months, and
I'd like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions
are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them :-)
Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)
PS. Yes - it's free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs.
It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never
will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have :-(.
Wall is a great command if you’re intent on getting notoriety/kicked off the box you’re on. It broadcasts a message to every terminal open for every logged on user. For this reason, it may be turned off on the computer you’re on. This means every xterm, gnome-terminal, etc and every one of the 6 VTs will get the message. Usage is:
As I was browsing around /usr/share/emacs/21.4/etc/ looking for the emacs manual in order to look for the command to launch the doctor and I found the following. It’ll be funniest if you’re used to Unix man pages. Here it is, the man page for condom.
CONDOM(1) EUNUCH Programmer’s Manual CONDOM(1)
NAME
condom - Protection against viruses and prevention of child
processes
SYNOPSIS
condom [options] [processid]
DESCRIPTION
_condom_ provides protection against System Transmitted
Viruses (STVs) that may invade your system. Although the spread of
such viruses across a network can only be abated by aware and cautious
users, _condom_ is the only highly-effective means of preventing
viruses from entering your system (see celibacy(1)). Any data passed
to _condom_ by the protected process will be blocked, as specified by
the value of the -s option (see OPTIONS below). _condom_ is known to
defend against the following viruses and other malicious
afflictions…
After reading about the BSDs in Linux Format Magazine a few months ago, I started to wonder about these Linux cousins. The original Berkely Software Devision port of Unix was developed a long time ago, but the free ones developed almost simultaneously with the Linux kernel had remained hidden from me up til now. Even though I used a BSD machine at Cornell (at least I assume it was since it had a daemon on the login screen), I was just told it was a Unix machine capable of running our software on the Unix cluster.
If you haven’t done so already, install xen by typing
yum install xen
This will install xen as well as taking care of any needed dependencies. Now you need the xen-enabled kernel so type
yum install kernel-xen0
(That’s a zero there) While we’re waiting for that to install, it’s time to learn some Xen terminology. Xen causes all operating systems to run virtualized. This is why we need the xen kernel. It’s also why Xen is not available on Windows XP- you can’t virtualize an OS that doesn’t expect to be virtualized. However, there is still a primary OS and then a series of guest OSes, depending upon how many OSes you want to run and how much RAM you have. The primary OS is domain 0 and is referred to as dom0 online and pretty much everywhere I’ve read about Xen. All guest OSes are called domU. The first one is called dom0 because programmers start counting with 0. The guests are called domU because U stands for unpriveledged. Unpriviledged means they can’t reboot the physical computer and other such restrictions. Done? Good!
I first read about Xen while still at Cornell. I think it may have been my Junior year. I don’t have the magazines with me at the moment, so I can’t verify. When I finished reading about the new technology in Linux Format Magazine, I racked my brain, but couldn’t find a reason to run it. I mean, I could see a reason to run it if you were running servers, but not at home. So why put it on Fedora, Debian, and all the other distros? The paradigm wasn’t there, so I couldn’t figure it out.
What GIMP needs to implement for me to stop using Adobe. (Thus saving myself and others $600+)
RAW Support (preferably the new standard of DNG)
16bit File Editing
XMP Tag support
Panorama Tool
Adjustment layers
Number 1 is important for those of us who wish to capture the camera’s RAW data and then losslessly manipulate it before getting it into the image editing program. There are some plugins which do bits here and there of RAW support, but I need it to be much closer to at least Adobe CS 1. For those who, like me, do editing on nearly every photo, 16 bit files are important because each pixel holds more data and, therefore, less is lost overall with each edit. XMP tag support is important as it is the standard for applying tags, titles, and copyright notices to photos. Many agencies expect this and it also allows for pretagging of photos so that they upload to flickr with tags already in place. I was so happy when flickr finally adapted that ability. The panorama tool is alone amongst these five as just me being spoiled. There are many ways to create your own panoramas by meticulously lining up the photos and messing with the layer masks. But I don’t want that! Why? Because Photoshop almost always gets things perfectly, allowing me to do what a photographer is supposed to be able to do - be creative! I don’t want to fiddle endlessly to get a panorama to work or it’s not fun for me. Endless tweaking is ok when I’m programming, but it frustrates me to no end with photography. Finally, #5 is almost the most important feature. In Photoshop adjustment layers are layers for some of the adjustments one normally makes TO a layer. In other words, instead of tweaking the luminosity on a layer, you create a luminosity layer tweak. This does many important things. First of all, it is non-destructive to the photo. If, twenty steps down the line, you don’t like the effect anymore, just remove the layer. You don’t have to undo through 20 steps and lose all that you’ve done along the way. Ever since I discovered adjustment layers they completely changed the way I worked. Second, you can make adjustments to your adjustment later without having to go back through the undo stack. If you know what I’m talking about, you know how useful this is.
Fedora Core 5 has moved one step closer to being finalized with the release of Test Release 3. I’m currently downloading the torrent of the DVD because I think I want to go ahead and put it on my main machine. Yeah, it’s a test release, but I’m so impatient to get working with Beagle and Fspot! I’ll see what others are doing before I do anything rash. See the official announcement here.
Those of you who have been daring enough to run Gnome 2.13 already know most of this stuff. However, if, like me, you can’t afford to have unstable desktops, this page contains a preview of what will be in the latest offering from Gnome. It looks as though the changes will only be incremental in nature, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I think this is the first Gnome which will require Cairo, and that’s supposed to provide a huge boost in graphics capabilities.
The important thing about installing a multi-disc distro with VMware Player is that it will create a lock on the disc so that it will tell you to change discs, yet when you do, it says the same disc is still in there. The way to counter this is to hit the CD-ROM button at the top of the VMware player window. This toggle button controls whether the CD is mounted or not. The first time you will get some warnings, but by clicking cancel you can tell it to ignore the lock the emulator has on the drive. From then on, changing discs during installation is as simple as toggling the button off and on, to let it know a new CD is in.
VMware has relased their VMware Player player for free. This product acts as a virtual machine (as opposed to an emulator) and is, therefore, supposed to give you much faster speeds than a program like QEMU. You could use it to run Windows on Linux or Linux on Windows. I will go over putting Linux on Windows. First go to http://www.vmware.com/products/player and download the player. Then download the Browser-Appliance. Of course, the easiest way is to download a Linux image which has already been created for you. They have Debian, Fedora, Suse, Ubuntu, and a few others. However, as I already have CDs of Fedora Core 5 test 2 downloaded, I don’t want to waste bandwidth (and time) downloaded the vmx image. Therefore, I will go over a slightly harder way, but, according to the PDF at this site, it doesn’t appear to be that hard.
The Fedora install was going so well…it was on disc 3 with nary a problem. Then it had the same problem again. For some reason, in the middle of the install it rebooted the laptop again. Frankly, I’m not down with these 3 day installs. Sorry, but my laptop’s days with Fedora have passed. Basically, every time I try to reinstall Fedora I know I’m going to have similar problems. It’s just too slow to endure these kinds of installs. So I’m switching over to Debian on my laptop where upgrades do not require reinstalling the entire system. You just point to a new repo and update your packages as usual. Fedora will remain on my nice fast computer.
I guess Fedora grokked that if this install didn’t work, I was going to install Debian or Ubuntu. It’s currently going through CD 2 without problems. Still slow as heck, but actually making it through. Excellent!
Something happened in the transition from CD1 to CD2. The screen looks like it tried to boot up and then failed. I confirmed that trying to boot fails - of course as only 1/5 of the installation has taken place. I’m going to give it one more shot before I file a bug. Beginning installation….now!
Came home from work expecting to pop in CD 2 for the install. The screen had blacked out and no amount of moving the mouse or tapping keys brought it to life. Rebooted and started the process again. This was at 5pm today. Right now it’s still “preparing to install”. I had a similar problem when I was originally installing FC3 on this computer. Perhaps there’s something that needs to be disabled in laptop installs to keep it from blacking out? The only way to keep things working is to push a button every once in a while to keep it from blacking out. Can’t do that while I’m at work so I’ll give it one more try today. If it doesn’t work, I’ll have to wait until Saturday to install FC5tc2. Of course, I’m losing valuable testing time, but that’s what happens when you try to upgrade Fedora on a 600 Mhz computer! By contrast, on nice fast machines it takes 15 minutes tops for an install. This is excruciating….anyone want to donate money for a new laptop?
I decided to do something I’ve never done before, I’m going to install Fedora Core 5 Test Release 2 and actually help with the debugging process. It was a bit of an internal struggle. By taking part in the debugging, I get to see the new technologies instead of being surprised in March when it comes out as a final release. But, having my laptop here with no real purpose, and thus no consequences if something is broken in the software, I decided to install it. In a previous press release they said that test release 2 would allow upgrading from FC4 (whereas test release 1 did not); if this is the case, then I’ll be doing it on the laptop. If not, I may use some kind of emulation to run it on my Windows Box.
While I was fiddling with grub as part of my experiment to get rid of the graphical boot, I noticed the picture grub uses when I boot in. For Fedora Core 4 users, I’m talking about the blue screen with the words Fedora Core where grub gives you a few seconds to choose a different kernel or OS before booting in. I decided to make my own, to truly customize my computer! Afterall, that’s one of the things that REALLY attracts me to open source.
…if they don’t get off schedule. And here is a really awesome review - I’m so excited! I think I may download the test 2 release and install it on my laptop, that will allow me to help out by submitting bugs, and I don’t use my laptop day to day, so if something breaks, it’s ok.
Linux Format Magazine Issue #72 had, appropriately enough, 72 speedups for a Linux computer. I really don’t need it for my desktop computer as it has a modern processor and 512 MB of RAM, but my laptop is a 600 Mhz 128 MB RAM geezer. The most important thing for me with the laptop is the startup time. I use it for pretty simple tasks since it is so slow and so I don’t mind perhaps giving up some ameneties to make it startup faster. After all, on a laptop, the longer it takes to start up, the less battery time I have to use when it’s up!
I chose the following speedups:
As happens every once in a while, this article tries to spread the FUD that the FOSS movement is a communist movement. That is completely untrue as the developer is free to charge for value-added services. For example, Novell makes a boxed product that sells for $100. You could download it for free, but if you pay the money you get a manual and support. Likewise, Madriva is free to download, but you can pay for the priveledges to get the downloads first by being part of the Mandriva Club. FOSS requires a paradigm shift and some are scared and can’t see how to make money this way so they call it communism. It’s ok, most people are afraid of new things.
In my KDE 3.5 post, I mentioned it was the final release of KDE before KDE 4. According to this interview on O’Reilly with a KDE developer, there are some BIG changes a’ comin’! It looks like KDE will be going through some paradigm shifts in the way they think about the desktop. Interestingly enough, it is tentatively slated to come out in Fall of 2006, around the time that Windows Vista with IT’S paradigm shift in desktop philosophy should be coming out. It will be interesting to see where this goes. Both KDE and MS seem to be moving towards Apple’s chic desktop concepts.
In Fedora Core 4 (and earlier Cores) when the user is in Gnome or KDE, the HAL daemon will automatically recognize when a USB drive is attached to the computer. It will then create an fstab entry and all will be good in the world. I’m not sure if this happens in Debian, but I’m using Debian as a print/file server so I don’t have any GUIs installed. So I will go over my learning process for others who may be having the same difficulties.
KDE 3.5 is the last KDE release before KDE 4. As you will know if you are into the Linux world, most projects reserve a major number change for possible imcompabilities. It’s part of the reason why Gnome is no longer following math and is at release 2.13, which is larger than 2.9. When Gnome finally switches to 3, it’s open season for breaking compatibility with all the GTK+ apps that work with the past few years of Gnome. It’s a chance for programmers to say, “Hey, when I made function foo, I had to use a hack to make it work with the Gnome 2.0 series. Now, I can rewrite the Gnome libraries to make it work with proper programming techniques so it works right.” The same will happen with KDE 4, which is having a rewrite of many of the core libraries.
Yumex, the graphical frontend for yum has been upgraded to version 0.44. This version fixes all that was annoying about the previous version. It now automatically takes the user to the output page during updates to see what is going on. The interface is also a lot cleaner and there are a lot less popup windows which had a tendency to get “lost” if heavily using multiple desktops.
I believe that the more choice in Linux distros, the better! It’s good to have one for each purpose and the following website shows why:
the best linux distro
In this post, wget had created a directory structure, foiling my plans to do the md5sum check automatically. The correct way to do what I wanted to do was use the option -nd for no directories. If I had typed
wget -nd address
it would have just saved to my current directory and the code would have worked perfectly. It would have also worked the roundabout way that I showed.
If you like Neal Stephenson’s style of writing then you MUST read Catch-22! Catch-22 is the literary father of his style of writing so be sure to check it out! I just finished the book a couple of days ago and I loved it! It was a little confusing at first, but then I couldn’t put it down.
My wife asked me a poignant question a couple of weeks ago, “If Linux is SOOO awesome, why don’t you stop using Windows?” I told her that I couldn’t play civ4. “I thought you said it was ready for use and equal to Windows,” she continued. And I realized, there are probably some others who prosthelyze about how awesome Linux is. While I think Linux is amazing, and can do some great things which are hard or impossible to do in Windows, it is not for everyone.
You may wonder what use the command line has? Afterall, why use it when you have a GUI? Well, they are so useful, that Microsoft will be reimplementing it in Windows Vista to allow people to run shell scripts. I’ve blogged about the usefulness of the command line before, but I wanted to demonstrate with some examples.
As I was reading about DSL, I wanted to download the ISO so that I could try it out. But how to do this quickly and without my intervention? Enter the program wget. wget allows you to download from the internet in the commandline. You can download one thing, such as an iso, or you can download an entire website for offline browsing. What makes it better than using your browser to download is that you can set it to retry a number of times so that if the download gets disconnected for some reason, it will continue to try. Also, a good thing to always do when downloading an ISO is to check the md5sum, allowing you to know that your file was not corrupted during a download. No biggie if you are just downloading one thing, but if you are downloading a couple of ISOs, it can get a little tedious. Using the commandline should help you out. So here’s how I started off:
Here are some of the latest screenshots I’ve taken of my main Linux desktop and how to do the same for yourself. Click on the screenshot to be taken to the fullsize picture. I finally listened and provided a low-res picture here instead of resizing the large one, thus a faster download time for those of you on dial-up.
These add-ons on my desktop as known as eye candy. They are on my desktop to look cool and provide some functionality. It’s nothing I can’t already do by going into a web browser, but it looks neater doing it like this - to some anyway. First off, you’ll notice that my menu bar and icons are in Spanish. That isn’t part of the eye candy, but I figured I’d let you in on how to do that in case you also wished to practice your technology vocab. When you are starting up your computer, if you are using Fedora you will have GDM as your greeter - the place where you type in your username and password. Other distros may also use GDM or you may select it on your own. There is a button called “languages” and if you click there, it will set all of the menus to be in Spanish. And when you load Firefox up and go to Google, it will be Google in Spanish! (or whatever language you selected, if it’s supported)
What does DSL mean to you? If you’re a technological person, it might mean Digital Subscriber Line, a way to access the internet. If you’re not a technological person….well, just ask my sister-in-law what it means to her. But to Linux users, DSL has even a third meaning, Damn Small Linux. What is Damn Small Linux? It is an entire Linux distrobution that fits on a 50 MB “business card” CD-ROM. It’s based on the Live CD technology devised by Klaus Knopper of Knoppix fame. He has created a phenomenon by perfecting the idea of having an operating system running entirely in the user’s RAM. This allows you to use Linux wherever you go, no matter what computers are available, and you won’t be touching the underlying system!
Some tidbits I’ve gleaned and where to get more in depth info:
KDE3.5 has been released! Hopefully this means that it will make its way into the Fedora Core 5, due out in Feb 2006. Or, if they’ve completely moved KDE to the extras packages, maybe it will be available even earlier! Lots of info here and screenshots here!
Speaking of Fedore Core 5, there is a review of the latest devel freeze to be found at this O’Reilly site.
I finally had an awesome enough computer to run Gnome and KDE! I was so excited and downloaded Super Karamber, gdesklets, and all the other eye candy I could never enjoy on my old Linux box. (which is now serving as a debian print server) However, having used Fluxbox so long on the old computer caused me to long for fluxbox. There was something I just liked about it. Perhaps it was the inobtrusivness which comes from a lack a large program menu or maybe it was right-clicking for programs or the way I did almost everything in a term window. So I was getting a little tired of having Gnome in Spanish, as I had switched it to about a month ago for fun so I decided it was time to end my session and start a new one. I always wanted to take advantage of having a GUI with a low memory profile since I wanted to begin working on Cinelerra (see my tutorial tomorrow), which takes up quite a bit of RAM.
There was a heckuva lot of debate on the Fedora Development list server when the extras repository was first mentioned for Fedora Core 4. People were taking exception to the fact that their package was in extras while some other package was in core. Some threatened to stop making FC packages and others just whined a lot. Well, the extras repository has debuted and I hope that people see that it’s really not a bad idea at all, In fact, I think it’s an excellent idea.
Here’s a really great article that I found about customizing one’s desktop. This is the most important thing a geek can do with his or her computer. When you first get your computer it looks just like everyone else’s computer. By customizing it and taking a little bit from what you see on this person’s computer and that person’s computer you end up with something that is uniquely your own and slightly different from everything else you’ve seen. Be sure to visit the link provided below to see the screenshots.
I finally got Fedora Core 4 running after nearly 12 hours of installation. Boy, that was a little rough on my patience. The first change I noticed is that the default “time left” bar is candy cane striped now instead of solid blue.
I decided to boot first into Gnome and see what this new “Clear Looks” theme looked like. It pretty much lived up to my expectations. It is a much cleaned-up version of Bluecurve, just as everyone claimed before. By cleaned up I mean that it’s a much more streamlined-looking, post-modern theme. It’s more like XP inthat the corners are more rounded and the buttons look nicer. Unlike XP there’s no annoying red “X” button. The other icons look the same. It may be me, but they look like they are rendered a bit nicer, but it could be in my head. Gnome also seems to run faster than it previously did, but I have no way of testing this. I didn’t do any benchmarking before and my other Linux computer is on a significantly slower processor.
After two days of downloading, finally got Fedora Core 4 downloaded. Currently burning the discs, but I won’t get to play until I get back from work. It’s going to be an ancy day.
At approximately 11 am EST today Fedora Core 4 was officially released to the mirrores and bittorrents. I couldn’t wait to get home to download it and install it on my two Linux machines. I’m currently downloading it - unfortunately it currently says I have 65 hours left, but hopefully that speeds up soon. Happy “birthday” Fedora!
Recently I had ocassion to require wireless access on my Linux box. This is notoriously difficult in Linux as of now, although most other hardware devices are found and work right out of the box. I’d gotten it working on my laptop before, but this time it was necessary to get it working on my desktop. At first I tried a USB wireless device, but those are almost no support in Linux so I ditched that effort and bought a D-Link DWL-G510 Wifi G pci card. I hoped it would work out of the box, but it didn’t.
Here I have decided to run the “top” command in the top transparent Eterm window. This is a great command to have running on the desktop. Basically it’s equivalent to hitting control-alt-delete in Windows and then clicking on “processes”. It tells you what you are running on your system, how much RAM/CPU cycles it’s taking up, and a bunch of other information. It dynamically updates so as you run programs you can see what’s holding up the computer. It doesn’t normally have that line running down the middle. That’s a consequence of some glitch when I was taking the screenshot.
Finally I have figured out something else I have wanted to do for MONTHS! If you look on the top-right corner you will see what looks like an embedded terminal in my desktop. The biggest reason why I’ve wanted to do this is simply because it looks really neat to have a terminal “built into” the desktop. I haven’t even gotten to the best part yet, the way people use them to run a logger in the background or other neat utilities. Besides looking really neat, it allows you to enjoy your background while using the terminal instead of covering it up. I mean, what’s the point of going through all the trouble of having such a great background when you can’t even see it? If you are into computers you are now nodding in agreement. So, how did I do this?
I wanted to share my Fluxbox desktop on my main Linux computer both for the geeky motive of showing off my desktop like jocks show off their cars and also to help others achieve the same configurations that I have. Fluxbox, like Blackbox and other *box window managers, are very, very customizable.
Here is the screenshot of my desktop, which you can see in full resolution by clicking it.
First of all, on the left-hand side of the screen you can see my system monitor, gkrellm. If you’ve spent any amount of time checking out screenshots of others’ desktops you’ve definitely seen this system monitor, especially on a non- KDE or Gnome screenshot. I was actually trying to figure out what this program was for months before finally stumbling upon the answer. It is highly customizable both in what it shows and what the colour scheme is. Currently I have it showing my CPU usage, user/program usage, internet traffic, and a few other small things. The best and easiest way to get get gkrellm if you are a Fedora user is to install it from the freshrpms repository via apt or yum. Freshrpms also contains themes and plugins for gkrellm.
As we saw in yesterday’s post, one of the things the author of the article suggested was that Linux needed to get simpler in order to gain a wider audience. But I say, hell no! Do not dumb down Linux! One of the most powerful things about Linux is that we still have access to the raw commands and configurations that allow each person’s computer to be infinitely different from the next. Already part of this process has taken place with a right-click in KDE (at least in FC3) not even having an option for opening a terminal. Look at Microsoft, it’s such a pain to use DOS now and, although some don’t like it, text commands hold a much greater amount of power and complexity than an icon can.
Here’s an example of when a rich person does something for the good of humanity. Sure, he mentions in the article that he wouldn’t mind making money, but he is genuinely doing good for the planet.
Ubuntu Linux encourages sharing and copying
10 May 2005
Free operating system Ubuntu Linux has been heralded as one of the most exciting software projects ever created, writes Michael Herman.
Ask software billionaire Mark Shuttleworth why he has dedicated so much of his time and money to open-source projects since selling his business in 1999, and he is likely to tell you he wants to make the world a better place.
You may or may not know this, depending upon how technologically inclined you are, but you can buy ROMs of the old classic arcade games like Ms Pacman, Arkanoid, Spaced Invader, and much more. (You can also download them off of limewire or kazaa, but that’s illegal if you don’t own the arcade machines) Then there is a group which has developed a program known as the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) which you can use to play these old games. “So?” you may be thinking, “I can find shareware versions of all of those games.” Yes, but this is the actual original version of the game pulled right off the arcade machine without any changes to it whatsoever! What could you do with this? You could do what thousands (or at least hundreds) have already done: build your own arcade machine! There are a few webpages and books on the subject, I know there is one really good book on the subject available at Borders, I can’t remember the title, but it’s fairly obvious. Something like, “Build Your Own Arcade Machine.”
A while back I posted that Mandrakesoft had bought Conectiva and changed its name to Mandriva. What I didn’t both researching at the time was the reason for this move. Apparently, Conectiva made the most popular commercial distribution of Linux in Latin America. In fact, it had contracts with the Brazilian army and navy, as well as others. Looks like they actually made a really good purchase!
One of the most well-known Linux distributions has recently changed names! After their recent merger with Connectiva, Mandrakesoft is changing its name to Mandriva. No more Mandrake Linux! It’s Mandriva Linux now. Their URL will soon be changing to reflect this, so make sure to update your bookmarks.
Only in the Linux world can a brand name change without much repercussion. Information travels fast so everyone knows it’s the same thing. Imaging frosted flakes changing the name and mascot of its cereal. Without an expensive ad campaign everyone would assume it was a new cereal and they would lose their brand recognition. Not so with purely internet entities.
I am a little late in mentioning this due to events in my life at the time at which it occurred, but the Fedora Core 4 Test Release 1 is now available! This is only for use on a test machine because, as the test 1 release, it is very full of bugs. However, if you have an extra machine you can throw it on, you can help them in the debugging process. They have all new goodies that you can’t get anywhere else like Gnome desktop 2.10 and KDE desktop 3.4. Most distros are still on 2.8 and 3.2!
I have recently had yet another paradigm shift involving my use of the GNU/Linux operation system. Up until now I was treating it like a better, more stable version of Windows. At first I even tried to do everything graphically, shunning away from anyone who told me to use the command line. I figured they were just some diehards who felt that mouse users were below them and considered their advice to be one-sided.
Usually with a magazine, I feel a little sad reading it. In middle and high school I was subscribed to Electronic Gaming Monthly. Each month they would detail all of the new games coming out; their features and how to do certain tricks here and there. Since I was too young to purchase them and my parents believed in being frugal when it came to video games, all the magazine could do was make me lust over games I could never have. The same goes with most PC magazines. They talk about this or that software for Windows and it is often too expensive to get it.
XZ Utils is a really awesome compression format. (In fact, earlier this month I got some Linux image files to run off an SD card that were compressed in xz
SSH uses XZ Utils
Only one guy was effectively maintaining it
Someone or some group pretending to be one person social engineered the maintainer to giving them commit access
they used that to put some backdoors
Because it’s in SSH it would have made every computer on the net vulnerable
LUCKILY it was found (by accident - see the Ars Technica story) before it made it out of most (all?) Linux distro test repositories
I was incredibly surprised to hear about it today on Planet Money’s episode: The hack that almost broke the Internet. It’s a really great episode to share with your non-techie friends who want to understand what you were stressed about and which it matters to everyone, not just techies. Of all the Linux distros, they start off interviewing someone from Red Hat! (My favorite Linux distro family) The episode then goes back to the 1980s to explain the origins of open source (not FLOSS, there’s no rms here - it’s Bruce Perens they interview) before bringing it back to the present and explaining the how the social engineering attack happened and what it affected. (Also a quick moment that explained how MS went from hating OSS to supporting it) I thought it was an incredibly well-produced episode that brings everything into context for those who aren’t neck-deep in Linux and/or open source. Give it a listen and pass it along!
I “lost” my optical drives. I had to mess with a registry key to get them back.
Here’s one I didn’t realize until I went to play Civ 5 and my saves were all gone. Because I have my main OS on a small SSD (and originally had my games on a regular hard drive - now they’re on their own bigger SSD), I had My Docs and My Pictures pointing to another drive. The Windows 10 upgrade lost those settings. I had to open up Windows Explorer and right click on each of those and change the location on the location tab.
This is the first time in nearly 10 years that I’m moving to a new version of WIndows. I pop the CD in and boot up. I see a text screen as Windows “loads files”.
Nothing here different from a Linux distro. Then the Windows logo pops up.
Recently Microsoft screwed themselves over. We have MS Money 2006 from back when I was still getting into Linux and hadn’t convinced my wife completely about how much better it was than Windows. Recently we switched to back to a credit card where we previously used to download the transactions from within MS Money. When my wife went to do this, she was informed that MS Money only allows you to do this for two years. After that if you want to keep doing it you have to buy another copy of Money. So when she found this out, did she buy a new copy of MS Money? NO! She was extremely pissed that this important feature would expire. So she want to MoneyDance.
System Information for WIndows (SIW) is a program you MUST have installed on your Windows computer. It gives you all the information you could ever want to know about your computer in a nice easy to use interface. I learned about it in a recent Computer User Magazine. Here are some examples of the information it provides:
Many people know the mantra - if you are a gamer or office worker, you use the OS from Redmond. If you are a creative person such as a musician, video editor, etc you use a Mac. Geeks use Linux. But more and more people are moving away from Windows and seeking either Macs or Linux. If you switch to Mac you have to spend a ton of money and if you switch to Linux, it’s free and you can use the hardware you already have. But what if you’re a creative person? Can you only go to a Mac? Lots of people want to allow the creative people to come to Linux so there are more and more Linux distros for the creative types. This month, in Linux Format Magazine, 64 Studio was bundled on the disc. It doesn’t run as a liveCD or liveDVD so I’m running it in VirtualBox. As you can see here, it is a Debian-based distro:
The Free Software Foundation’s Defective by Design is reporting that MSN Music is shutting down, leaving anyone who bought music legally left with music they can no longer listen to. This will have two outcomes and neither of which is what the music labels really want. Some people will decide they got left holding the bomb with one second left for doing the right thing and paying for music. They will decide to download music without paying from now on. They will reason that if they ever buy music again they won’t know if it will cease working. Or they will being to take note of places like Amie Street and Amazon.com that sell DRM-free music.
I was recently in a hotel room with my wife and her brother and sister. We both have the exact same acer computer - the Acer Aspire 3680-2022. I have Ubuntu on mine and he has Windows Vista. We bought them both at the same time. So this is IDENTICAL equipment. And in the hotel room he could not get a wireless signal while I was able to get a nice sustained signal the entire time. It’s not what Microsoft wants to hear, but in this case Ubuntu was BETTER on wireless than Windows!! That’s right - Linux IS ready for the desktop NOW! Not next year - now!
As for me, my first computer was a Tandy T80 - I’m not 100% sure about it being a T80, but I know it was a Tandy. It was just a keyboard that connected to a Tv. I learned to program in basic and I played proprietary games that came on cassette tapes.
When I was doing my renders of the mancandy mesh/rig, it seemed to me that Windows was taking forever to render the scene compared to my previous Blender renders on Linux. A quick investigation on the Blender FAQ stated that, indeed, the Windows version was faster than the Linux version. However, this didn’t make sense to me. My Windows machine is a 3 Gz Computer with 2 GB of RAM. My Linux box is an AMD (2 GHz, I think) with 512 MB of RAM. The Linux version couldn’t be THAT efficient, could it?
With Windows Vista requiring a computer more powerful than the majority of computer users have, many have touted Linux as the savior of these PCs. Do not throw away your PC because you must upgrade to Vista. Get all the graphical goodness and latest software with Linux. It has modest hardware requirements and will even ressurrect Windows 98 PCs. Then they talk about Compiz/Beryl, the 3D desktop. All of this is true, but I think it’s a bit of a half-truth.
One of the biggest trends over the last few years has been customization. People customize their cellphones, myspace pages, websites and computers. Via the popuplar widgets system on the Mac OSX, SuperKaramba for KDE, and gDesklets in Gnome, people customize their desktops to make them unique to their vision. Even Microsoft has jumped on the bandwagon recently and introduced a widget system of its own. All of these customizations would have taken place on the computer no matter what.
….that my wife, who hates the idea of Linux on her computer, told me that when her computer dies, rather than have Windows Vista on her computer she wants me to install Linux on the computer for her. That’s right, she’d rather have Linux on her computer than the next version of Windows. Why? First of all, she’s heard all the problems of how Vista doesn’t have any drivers for any hardware. She’s also heard about how they’re already getting virii and other exploits and even Forbes recently recommended not updating because of the digital restrictions management and how that messes up your system. Specifically it causes your CPU to use up cycles trying to make sure you aren’t doing anything disapproved of.
My brother upgraded and now his MICROSOFT brand mouse does not work. Specifically, the extra buttons no longer work. Way to not support your own stuff Microsoft!
Dell has introduced (or, if it’s been around for a while, it was just recently brought to public attention) the nSeries Desktops. These are computers that have no installed operating system - so you don’t have to pay for windows. It comes with a Freedos disk. So you can install Linux, *BSD, or whatever you want onto that clean machine - without having to first get rid of windows!
DO NOT UPGRADE! There are many reasons, but here are the most important ones - Norton Antivirus does NOT work with Vista as of now. It will make some graphics and sounds cards work at reduced capacity. Finally, they are ALREADY talking about a Service Pack 1 - meaning there are flaws they know about. Wait until those flaws are fixed. Service Packs mean big flaws, not little ones as are in every piece of software.
Borys Musielak, has published an article on polishlinux.org on his top ten reasons why Linux should be used instead of Windows. I have just finished part one, which is what the previous link goes to. Although he claims that he is purposely being biased against Windows, he’s actually quite fair towards Windows. For example:
What’s the difference between the security policy of Microsoft compared to GNU/Linux and even better, BSD systems? It’s the defaults, idiot! Technologically, both systems can provide a similar level of security, actually. The difference is that most GNU/Linux distros make it much easier to have a secure OS by providing reasonable default settings, usually secure enough for home computer users.
Today, The Linux Extremist, posted his attempts to compute what we in the Linux world call “The Microsoft Tax”, this is the extra cost of a computer with Windows as opposed to a computer without an operating system. His numbers are not all that surprising with an extra cost of 323.67 British pounds for Windows, Office, and Paint Shop Pro. In my eyes, the true purpose of his article was not so much to document the extra cost of Windows, but rather highlight that the Windows user must pay 323.67 in order to gain the functionality that us Linux users take for granted.
VMware has relased their VMware Player player for free. This product acts as a virtual machine (as opposed to an emulator) and is, therefore, supposed to give you much faster speeds than a program like QEMU. You could use it to run Windows on Linux or Linux on Windows. I will go over putting Linux on Windows. First go to http://www.vmware.com/products/player and download the player. Then download the Browser-Appliance. Of course, the easiest way is to download a Linux image which has already been created for you. They have Debian, Fedora, Suse, Ubuntu, and a few others. However, as I already have CDs of Fedora Core 5 test 2 downloaded, I don’t want to waste bandwidth (and time) downloaded the vmx image. Therefore, I will go over a slightly harder way, but, according to the PDF at this site, it doesn’t appear to be that hard.
I was successful in sharing the drive with my windows computer and have tested that I can create files and delete them in Windows. I followed this tutorial. I did everything as they said to setup Samba, which communicates on the Windows smb protocol. They only thing different was to uncomment the line security = user. That has to be set to security = share. Now I’m trying to adapt their NFS to work for me for sharing with Linux. It was working before I formated the drive from FAT32 to ext3. (I reformatted because FAT32 has no ability to set file permissions. Shame on you BGates!) If/When I figure it out, I’ll probably post what I did differently on here. Stay tuned!
It only took me about 4 hours. Most of it was spent doing tedious things like trying to get the motherboard screws to align with the motherboard and getting the dagnabbin’ default motherboard I/O template and the new one in. So to replace my 1.5 Ghz 1 GB RAM dell that died, I now have a 3 Ghz 2 GB Ram Eric Mesa computer. Really my only complaint in the whole process is that the Asus motherboard holes didn’t line up with the Aspire X-Navigator Holes so it’s not as securely fastened as I would have liked.
In all the magazines and web articles I’ve been reading, there has been a call to arms in the Linux camp. Microsoft is going to be innovative, for once, and we’re going to take advantage of it. There will be significant interface changes for Vista and MS Office 12. According to Linux Format Magazine issue 73, there will be major changes to the way Office looks. Why does all of this matter? Well, one of the complaints leveled against Linux time and again is, “it may be simple, but I already know how everything works in Windows. Why switch and waste time relearning it?” It’s the whole gist of Microsoft’s campaign that it costs more to switch to Linux than remain with MS. It’s not cost as Linux is free as in beer and freedom, but because we have to retrain the workforce, they claim. So, the logic amongst Linux enthusiasts goes, if MS is going to overhaul things, why not give us a shot? I must say this viewpoint appears to have some merit.
My wife asked me a poignant question a couple of weeks ago, “If Linux is SOOO awesome, why don’t you stop using Windows?” I told her that I couldn’t play civ4. “I thought you said it was ready for use and equal to Windows,” she continued. And I realized, there are probably some others who prosthelyze about how awesome Linux is. While I think Linux is amazing, and can do some great things which are hard or impossible to do in Windows, it is not for everyone.
As I spoke with my in-laws last weekend about viruses and anti-virus software makers, they voiced a thought everyone has had at one time or another- perhaps the viruses from Norton and McAfee. After all, why would you spend $40 a year to keep your computer safe if there weren’t any viruses? As I explained to them that, actually, most viruses nowadays come from Organized Crime in an attempt to steal identities, I thought about the fiasco it would be for such a thing to occur. It would be like Microsoft purposely creating a virus for Linux.
Wine, the program which allows Windows programs to run on Linux by implementing the DLL structure, has gone beta. How long did it take? Twelve years! That’s right! Twelve! Now, a lot of programs in the open source world are considered to be beta and they run perfectly fine (eg fluxbox and enlightenment). However, Wine has been in Alpha for twelve years! The reason? Windows is complicated as heck to emulate and it isn’t exactly out there and documented like open source projects are. They had to reverse engineer EVERYTHING! But, you may be saying, Beta still isn’t release quality! When I go to Winehq.org the version for download is 0.9. That’s true, but getting out of Alpha was a VERY important stage. You see, while in Alpha they would always fix one bug at the expense of functionality of another. In other words, if you looked on the program compatibility database you might see something like - This worked with 20030406, but does not work with 20040406. From now on, because it’s in Beta, those kinds of continuity breaks are not allowed. It should allow for a much faster development cycle as bug fixes will build on each other, not eradicate each other. I’m building from source as we speak and I hope to be able to post some test pictures later. Lets give the folks over at Wine a round of applause!
One of the things I love about Linux is that it doesn’t slow down like Windows tends to. I can (and did) have the computer up for weeks at a time and it doesn’t go any slower than when I first booted it up. More importantly, after updates the computer doesn’t slow down. I don’t know what others have experienced, but whenever I update Windows or even download anything more than a few hundred megabytes, Windows slows to a crawl. This may be something unique to my computer setup or something, but just downloading the ISOs for Fedora cause my Windows computer to grind to a halt! With Linux, I can download gigs of updates and it doesn’t have any bad effect. I hope that 1) Linux never loses whatever it is about the kernel that makes it this stable when running for days and after updates and 2) that Windows finally learns how to do that.
I used to think Windows was so amazing. I thought it was at least 20 times better than Macintosh. Not only is their interface so obtuse, they don’t really have any programs other than video, audio, and photographic production. Windows was awesome and Bill Gates was a near genius. Those were the days! I remember being so angry at the government for filing an antitrust lawsuit. So what if Windows came with IE, weren’t people smart enough to download Netscape if they really wanted it? I remember Sophomore year in college being so excited at the new Windows Media Player which promised so many neat little trick like auto-playlists. The reason why I loved Windows so much si that I didn’t know I had a choice. I thought it was Windows or Mac and I certainly preferred Gates’ little creation.
Another reason why Linux will take over the world.
25 Years After DOS: Lessons Learned for Linux
by Walter V. Koenning for the Reallylinux.com OPINION/EDITORIAL section.
NOTICE: Our other recent OP/ED postings include:
Microsoft’s Approach May Isolate U.S. Permanently
Open Source VS Windows: Reality of a Better Paradigm
Microsoft Corporation is preparing a gallant pageant to celebrate 25 years of what should at the very least be considered remarkable marketing. But what can the Linux world learn from Microsoft’s past 25 years of unique experiences and domination? I think we can uncover a lot simply going back to that first fateful year when Microsoft released PC-DOS for IBM PCs (as a joint venture with IBM).
Last night I woke up in the middle of the night from a dream where I was at a programmer convention. A bunch of devs were arguing and they came to me to be the deciding factor for the future of the KDE Plasma 6 project. Each was very passionate about the direction they wanted to go. I woke up really stressed and glad it was a dream.
The last time I tried to solder something, it was just a few pins and it gave me so much trouble and took hours. So, when I was thinking about how how I was going to redo my BBQ thermostat with Adafruit Circuit Python and Stemma QT, I was afraid to get the FeatherS2 since it wasn’t sold in a configuration that came with headers already soldered on. The idea of soldering some 28 pins filled me with fear of screwing up the board. After it arrived, I procrastinated. Finally, today I did it. I don’t know what changed from when I tried to solder last time, but it worked reasonably well. Yes, if you look at the picture, I need to fix the USB pin and pin 38 before I try inserting into any headers, but it just took me about 15 minutes and I didn’t have any feelings of giving up or intense frustration. So, I just wanted to celebrate this milestone. Hurray for me!
I’ve both added and dropped some podcasts since last time around. Where I’m listing the same podcast as last year I may use the same description as in the past with slight (or no) variation.
Public Radio
Radiolab – Heard about
them because sometimes their stories are used on This American Life.
Radiolab is a lot like TAL except with a much bigger focus on sound
effects. It is, in a way, the descendant of the old radio shows of the
30s and 40s. (Approx 30-45 min)
A big difference from 9 years ago is that I don’t use the dedicated ereader as much as I used to. Mostly that comes down to the fact that I don’t read as much before bed and I have limited other places to use the ereader. Usually I’m either reading on my phone or on the computer. But there’s one time that I really love the ereader - when I’m traveling, particularly by plane. This way I can read during the entire trip without draining my cell phone battery. As Scarlett has gotten old enough to read, I figured she could have the Nook (to keep from straining her eyes constantly with the backlit tablet) and I’d still want an ereader for travel. Additionally, who knows - I might go back to more reading at home or before bed when a backlit phone just isn’t ideal. So I got the Kobo Clara HD.
Ever since I first took a macro photo, I’ve been drawn to the form. I think microscopic photography often turns the everyday into the abstract. Macro photography can do that at times, but more often than not, it just lets you have a good look at something that you don’t normally get such a good look at. My favorite macro shots to take and to take in are of insects. They’re skittish so it takes skill to capture it. And they look so alien compared to mammals (which is why they’re often the template for aliens in movies). This guy was resting near my front door and I ran inside to get my camera and hoped he’d still be there when I got back.
I created my first GPG key 10 years ago when I didn’t really know anything about encryption. So I have created a new key and signed it with my old one. You can find it here: My New GPG Key
I’ve also uploaded it to the servers supported by KGPG.
The local Olive Garden has added these devices to the tables. My first thought was to be annoyed at the fact that this thing takes up a significant chunk of the table. Then I messed with it a bit - it seems to be mostly a neat idea with one think that’s a bit out of place in a semi-classy joint like Olive Garden.
Let’s look at the positive aspect first - you can order drinks or ask for your drinks to be replenished. This helps to alleviate one of the biggest sources of annoyance when out to eat. You also pay on this device so if you’re completely done and don’t need boxes, you can just pay and leave. While a place with good service that isn’t swamped shouldn’t leave you wondering if you should skip the check because you’ve been waiting over 15 minutes for the check, it does occasionally happen. Again - happy customers.
Here’s a letter Governor Jerry Brown sent to Ben Carson when he said that climate change was irrelevant:
Dear Dr. Carson,
I hope you’ve enjoyed your visit to the Golden State. It’s come to my attention that while you were here you said the following regarding climate science:
“I know there are a lot of people who say ‘overwhelming science,’ but then when you ask them to show the overwhelming evidence, they never show it…There is no overwhelming science that the things that are going on are man-caused and not naturally caused. Gimmie a break.”
Why is this an issue? Because the books you read can be used to discriminate against you or, in some countries, land you in jail. In the USA it could put you on the no-fly list. As soon as I get home I’m uninstalling ADE - I’d installed it for the possibility of checking out digital books from the library. Forget it! I’m sticking to the no-DRM books and physical books at the library.
I think it’s pretty awesome how Google has taken the same tactic as Wordpress and broken out key features into plugins. For Wordpress it leads to better and faster development without breaking the main program. For Google it allows them to do an end run around the stupid carriers who won’t upgrade Android in a timely manner.
[caption id=“attachment_7308” align=“aligncenter” width=“346”] Peer Review or It Didn’t Happen - more and more important to remember nowadays[/caption]
But as you reduce the speed that the drive shaft is rotating, you lower the frequency of the sound it’s making. There comes a lower limit where the engine is making what Gordon calls “groan-y and moan-y” noises which people find unpleasant. The car sounds broken. So cars had to keep the engine’s RPM above a certain level, hurting their fuel efficiency, or risk alienating customers.
GM’s solution was to implement active noise cancellation, the same technique used in some headphones to quiet ambient noise. Microphones in the body listen to the ambient sounds the car and engine are making, and the car plays the opposite of that over the vehicle’s speakers. The sound waves from the engine are cancelled out by the sound from the entertainment system, netting a quieter ride that can be more fuel efficient without being so bothersome.
It’s pretty neat how much technology has changed in the past 8 years. Eight years ago Rich West and I coded up a web server on a microcontroller ( code here) and part of my justification was that, for only $50, someone would be able to have a web server on a microcontroller. Wouldn’t that be so awesome for people without a lot of money for technology? Yet, less than a decade later, the Raspberry Pi can be had for around $50 (give or take depending on the features) and implements an entire computer, not just a web server. You can install a full Linux distro on it and do everything that a Linux disto can do (including serve web pages). I hope we can continue to grow technology like this for years to come.
[caption id=“attachment_6890” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”] The Elevator at the Sears Tower[/caption]
A month or so ago I had a disagreement with my sister-in-law. I’d read about how many traffic crossing buttons and elevator buttons to close the doors were not wired up to anything. She claimed I was wrong and I couldn’t remember where I’d read it. Luckily, I recently came across an article on Placebo Buttons at Your Are Not So Smart.
I came across an article a couple weeks ago that baffled me. Let me get one thing out of the way right away, lest it become a distraction: Sidney Meyers is an idiot for calling in a school bomb threat on his cell phone. (And would still be a dummy even if he didn’t do it on his phone) With that out of the way - let’s set up the ridiculous situation here. Sidney Meyers is a 20 year old man. He met a girl who turned out to be 16 years old. They started a sexual relationship. This relationship was actually cool with the girl’s mother. And in South Carolina, where they live, the age of consent is 16 so there’s no big deal that they’re having sex. (Well, you might have some squick issues with the age difference or the fact that an adult would want to be with a minor - but legally they’re OK)
Over at All things D, Venture Capitalist David Cowan talks about predictions he was asked to make about the future. His predictions involve more immersive wearable computing than Google Glass and a loss of the taboo of cyber attacks. He envisions our vision essentially merging with Hollywood’s depiction of robotic or cyborg vision - think of the Terminator. If you’re looking for a specific tree, it could highlight it for you and draw your attention to it. Cowan also thinks it’ll allow us to review past moments it has recorded or allow us to see someone else’s point of view. Interestingly, I think this is a technology that has the opportunity to either bring humanity closer (helping us remember names, auto-translating foreign languages) or be the final nail in the coffin for human interaction. Call me curmudgeonly if you want, but I start to lose my patience when people keep being interrupted by their phones when I’m trying to socialize with them. By definition, there should be very little more urgently needing your attention than me if I’m actually there and the other person is not. A few check are fine. And if someone is relying on your texts to meet up with you or get directions, just let me know and it’ll go a long way towards ameliorating the situation. But once people don’t even have to look away to be involved in something else, it could lead to a roomful of people who are all alone - or interacting with those outside the room more than those inside the room.
[caption id=“attachment_6442” align=“aligncenter” width=“200”] Sandisk Sansa Clip Zip in Packaging[/caption]
I’ve been using MP3 players since they first existed. I can’t remember the name of the device, but I got it with my Audible subscription. Then, I used my PDA for a while - remember those? Then I used an iPod Shuffle, but it didn’t work well with my Linux computer. The database kept getting corrupted since Apple can’t play nicely with others so it has to be reverse-engineered. So I told myself I’d never get another Apple music playing device. About three years ago, I went with a Sandisk Sansa Fuze. Since then I’ve gone through three of them, approximately one per year. What keeps happening is that the headphone jack gets looser and looser until the slightest nudge makes it so that I can’t hear one of the audio channels. Since I use it work out, this quickly gets VERY annoying. But I really, really like Sandisk’s GUI for their devices - it has a specific podcast section that resumes the podcast where I left off, even if I go back and forth between different podcasts. I don’t do that too often, but I do it often enough that it’s important. So I got a Sandisk Sansa Clip Zip because the Fuze+ has horrible reviews (for the way they changed the buttons) and since I’m using it to work out, I could use a smaller, lighter device.
On 6 May Ars published a story about some Chinese scientists who were trying to see if they could make avian flu better transmit to mammals. They claimed the point was to better study how it is that these viruses mutate to become infectious to mammals. However, the scientists used guinea pigs for some reason. For some reason left unexplained in the article, guinea pigs have both mammalian and avian receptors so they’re susceptible to avian viruses anyway! But the biggest problem, as pointed out by Robert May, is that this is China. You know…the country that has lead in toothpaste. He posited that we can’t really trust them to keep the virus contained if they do create a mammalian supervirus. A bit of an elitist attitude from the West? Maybe, but China doesn’t exactly have the best track record on doing stuff up to Western standards. Just one mistake and we have all those crazy infection movies coming true. It’s especially not worth it since other experts quoted in the article also say that you can’t really learn a lot about how to prevent or limit the spread of the mutated flu in the wild with the kind of study they were doing. They almost come across looking like a real life version of Aperture Science.
[caption id=“attachment_6217” align=“aligncenter” width=“496”] German Kids using inflationary money as blocks in 1923 - Bitcoin is supposed to be immune to this[/caption]
Boing Boing pointed me to a few Bitcoin articles and then there was another one on Ars on 6 May. I’d be pretty surprised if you haven’t heard about Bitcoin; it’s been all over the news because of the crazy bubble the Bitcoin exchange rate was having recently. But, just in case, Bitcoin is a currency that exists entirely electronically. This is true of nearly all currencies nowadays (none of them are backed by anything but faith in the countries that issue them). The supply of Bitcoins is only increasing to a certain amount and then no more, preventing inflation. It’s main benefit is supposed to be that it’s completely anonymous. So is cash, but you can’t use cash online.
Remember earlier this week when I said the gun control debate was now pointless? Apparently the State Department wants to pretend that what I said isn’t true. In a complete misunderstanding of how the Internet works, they have compelled the website holding the CAD designs for the 3D gun to remove the CAD file. The reasoning is that leaving it up would be exporting munitions (since everyone all over the world can go to a web page) This, of course, ignores the fact that it was already obtained over 100 000 times and is already on Bit Torrent. Oh well. I guess pointless moves are better than nothing in their eyes.
[caption id=“attachment_6194” align=“aligncenter” width=“449”] The Liberator - the world’s first working 3D Printed Gun[/caption]
I’m sorry Obama, Sandyhook victims, and everyone else. You’ve already lost the gun issue. Not because of politicians, but because of technology. We have working 3D printed guns. It’s over. On 6 May my RSS feed reader was ablaze with articles about the working 3D-printed gun including this article from Ars, another article from ars, and one from Boing Boing. This is the same guy who previously created the ability to hold more bullets in semi-automatic guns using 3D printing. The articles all made sure to mention that the CAD files that were uploaded for this new gun had a section that was purposely made of metal to ensure it could be detected by magnetometers. Only one article mentioned that this was a bull-crap attempt at not getting too much flack from anti-gun people. Because there’s no reason why someone who got the CAD files couldn’t change that to be made of plastic and have a nearly undetectable gun. The gun only fires a few rounds, but under the right circumstances that could be more than enough.
[caption id=“attachment_3556” align=“aligncenter” width=“450” caption=“Barnes and Noble Nook and the a case for the Nook”] [/caption]
As you may remember, a few months ago I decided to rethink the issue of ebooks. I was going back and forth about buying the Barnes and Noble Nook just before my recent flight to Florida. I had been looking forward to the flight as a chance to read through some of Cory Doctorow’s fiction. In the end, I decided I didn’t want to spend the money on the device and read it on my laptop. This was less than ideal. The laptop only had about 20 minutes of charge on the battery and so I had to split up reading the book between the outbound and inbound trips. Sometime in the near future Danielle and I are going to be taking a much longer flight, so I caved and decided to buy the nook.
Until now I’ve been quite against ebooks. Back when I was in college I had an iPaq and I downloaded the Microsoft reader to it. I bought about 3 - 5 books for it and, at first, I thought it was great. It would allow you to annotate the book and highlight passages. And it was electronic so I could carry a bunch of books in the space of my PDA. But it was one of the first times I was bitten by digital restrictions management (DRM). I had to reset my PDA because it got into a locked state. After that, I couldn’t read my books until I reauthenticated the PDA. After all, everyone out there is out to destroy authors and steal digital books, so they need to make sure I’m the one who paid for it. This worked the first time around, but the second time I needed to authenticate, the server refused to authenticate the device and I could no longer read the books. So I was out around $20. Imagine buying a regular physical book and then having it no longer work because it wasn’t sure if you were the person who bought it. Yeah, it’s pretty ridiculous.
As I researched medium format photography in deciding whether or not to participate , I came face-to-face with a trend I’ve seen in other fields. As the technology has “progressed”, users have actually found themselves with worse and worse results. And, just as in other technologies, it is a tale of choosing convenience or cost in favor of quality.
Recently, when I started up Opera, it updated to 10.5. I noticed a huge cosmetic change. Observe:
[caption id=“attachment_3272” align=“aligncenter” width=“480” caption=“Opera 10.5 new gui”] [/caption]
Yes, they have copied the GUI setup from Chrome. The tabs are now above the address bar. Now, they still have a separate search bar like Firefox, but this is a pretty big change. Also, although I can’t share it in a screenshot, they have changed the tab animations so they are really slick like in Chrome. Overall, the animations are one of those things that really add to the experience without doing much. It just feels nice to have things slide in and out rather than pop into existence. They also seem to have REALLY sped up the startup to the point where Opera is once again a joy to use. They also made a change to the way the text searching works:
I’ve been listening to podcasts for about two years now. I got into it because I love listening to some NPR programs, but they are always on when I’m at work or asleep on the weekends. Eventually, I heard on NPR that they have podcasts of various shows. I checked it out right away because in Maryland NPR is on 88.1 which is always being interfered with by SiriusXM radio receivers. At first I only listened to a few podcasts because I didn’t own an iPod and I so I burned the podcasts to a CD-R every few days. That got expensive, so I got an iPod shuffle. Since podcasts don’t take up too much space, I started getting into more and more podcasts. Some I discovered in magazines and others were recommendations from Dan. So, I thought I would share the podcasts I listen to so that those following this blog could perhaps discover some new podcasts they didn’t know about. Dan, for example, recently got into This American Life. (I think after I kept telling him about it - but he may have discovered it independently) I’m going to put links to the actual podcast URL, so just copy that into your podcather or iTunes.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“It’s either warmer or not. Read the thermometer.”] [/caption]
Because of the upcoming talks at Copenhagen, everyone’s been talking about global warming recently. The news even featured a member of a Commonwealth government claiming that global warming is not true. In my own country, Republicans like to say that global warming isn’t true. The opposition parties in both countries disagree. Look, this debate is over the wrong question. There can be no debate about whether global warming is happening. It either is or it isn’t. That’s not up for debate. Are average temperatures higher year over year compared to the past? Then we have global warming. The globe is getting warmer. End of debate. If not, then we don’t have global warming. What we really need is debate over whether it’s human caused, human exacerbated, or neither. After all, the planet has been warmer and cooler than its current temperature. So we need to figure out if what we’re doing is enough to make a difference. If it is, we should probably knock it off so we don’t make things worse. If it is solely our responsibilty, then we need to stop right away. But if it’s going to get warmer no matter what and our activities only matter in the thousandths of a degree, then there’s no point in doing anything. So this is where we need to be and this is what we need to figure out. Stop arguing over whether the planet is getting warmer or not. It’s like arguing if the sun came up today.
While listening to The Command Line Podcast a few weeks ago, they started talking about how digital distribution allows for innovations in publishing. I don’t remember what they mentioned exactly, but the prior link should take you to the show notes. The talk started a series of synapses firing in my grey matter culminating in the following idea - what about a subscription model for authors. Right now it sucks to be an author in that your pay is very irregular. I know that my paycheck will be the same week to week. But authors get an advance for a book and then some royalties depending upon how well a book sells. So they can’t really plan their finances easily because they don’t know ahead of time how many books they will sell. But, with digital distribution, it might be easier to sell the author’s readers on a subscription model.
I’ve had the Roku Box for a few months now. It costs $99 and I bought it for one simple reason: my wife and I object to having to use Windows and Internet Explorer to watch Netflix’s Instant Programs. As a secondary reason, we’re not in college anymore and we object to having to watch on our computers. We want to be able to watch these on the TV just as if we had rented little silver discs. The Roku box is tiny. Here’s a shot of the front:
Our sexually crazy and confused friends over in Japan have decided to contribute to the end of humanity with the Honey Doll (warning link contains some images/sounds NSFW) :
Unlike the blowup doll everyone makes fun of, the Honey Doll is supposed to mimic real women. It looks real (or creepily almost real) and has real feeling breasts - or so I assume from the pictures since I can’t understand Japanese. It also make real orgasm sounds. So for loser guys who might spend a little more time finding a real woman, I think they may give up. And then there’s the stereotypical guy that doesn’t want to have to deal with a real woman and all her problems and just wants to have sex. I think it’s roughly the end of humanity……
Today I tested my POS Compaq render node (running freeBSD with no GUI) with the same bouncing ball as in this previous post. It took my node 796 seconds to render the same animation. This is somewhere around 1.65 times slower. However, the software should just be throwing frames at whichever computer is ready for a new frame. The node took about 20 seconds per frame on average to render. My Linux computer takes 12 seconds. Here’s where I’m pretty bad at math, but I think this means that a render farm with just these two computers should finish in a little over half the time as just my Linux computer. But I can also throw in my laptop which should also be in the same range. So a 3 hour render should go down to a 1 hour render. (Roughly speaking)
While thinking about digital music recently, and how great it was the BMI decided to sell some of its music on iTunes without Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). However, these tracks will cost $2 while the DRM’d tracks will cost $1. First of all, this seems to be a scheme to prove that the public doesn’t really want non-DRM’d music when Jon Random User probably doesn’t even know the difference and won’t see why he should pay twice as much for the same song.
Some pessimists decry that even electric cars have pollution created at the power plant thus what’s the point - let’s just have our current gas guzzlers. What they forget are their thermodynamics lessons in college. It’s no secret that we have yet to find an efficient way to convert fuel into useful energy. Of that $3 gallon of gas, only around $1 is used to move your car forward. The rest is blown out the tailpipe.
So, according to Thoggen’s count, it took 4.45 hours to encode into Theora. At least with this DVD it seems that the coding team has fixed their error where the software seems to keep going past the end of the DVD. As far as I recall from one year ago, it didn’t add more infomation in - the thread just didn’t get the message that the title was done encoding.
Thoggen is a tool for backing up DVDs to the ogg container with the theora video codec and vorbis audio codec. Theora is the darling video codec in Linux because it is unencumbered by patents. There are other free formats, such as Xvid - a format compatible with Divx, but it is based on MPEG-3, which is patented by the group the controls the MPEG standard. Technically all encoders need to pay them a fee to encode to MPEG formats. This can get expensive - M$ is curently being sued by one of the patent holders of MPEG Layer 3 Audio (AKA MP3) for a very large amount of money. I *think* it’s in the billion range, but I could be off by an order of magnitude. So, theora, which was licensed to the open source community, is the safest bet.
Move your clocks ahead one hour! Congress decided that two weeks earlier would save us tons of oil - so it’s today, not in two weeks. Both my Windows XP SP2 and GNU/Linux Fedora Core 6 automatically updated on time, so your computers should be fine as long as they’ve gotten updates since 2005. (I think that’s when Congress did it)
I’m pretty sure that in previous posts I’ve mentioned that the RIAA has always been wrong about what technological disruptions do to their business. They wanted to kill LPs because they thought no one would go see live performances. They wanted to quash AM radio for fear no one would by LPs. They wanted to kill the cassette tape because it would allow piracy of LPs. Currently they want to prevent the existence of a Tivo-like device for digital radio.
The Inquirer.net reports a boy who is counter-suing the RIAA! Why?
for defamation, violating anti-trust laws, conspiring to defraud the courts and making extortionate threats.
Awesome! It’s about time someone fought back!
They have demanded a jury trial and filing a counterclaim against the companies for allegedly damaging the boy’s reputation, distracting him from school and costing him legal fees. The record companies have engaged in a wide-ranging conspiracy to defraud the courts of the United States, the court documents say. Competitors in the recording industry are a cartel acting together in violation of the antitrust laws by bringing the piracy cases jointly and using the same agency “to make extortionate threats … to force defendants to pay”, our precocious teen wrote.
Well, I’m not sure if Timbaland did it purposely or if he was under the impression that he had permission, but he took music for Nelly Furtado’s song “Do It”. The sampled song is in the MOD format, popular in the early 1990s electronic BBS music scene. Currently it has a pretty decent underground following, as you can see at modarchive.org. You can see the MOD artist’s information here. And you can see some more detailed information at this forum. If you listen to the original file and then the background at the beginning of the Nelly song it is extremely obvious that they are the same song. I hope that Tempest (Janne Suni) gets the compensation he deserves. Tempest did not license his music under a permissive license so if the song makes money, he deserves it. After all, it was his creative genius that came up with the song. Obviously, it was good enough if Timbaland wanted to use it.
I don’t know if it’s Global Warming or El Niño, but 2 weeks ago in the Baltimore-DC area it was 70 degrees and outside in a tank top in January. This week, in fact, yesterday or so, it’s snowing in Dallas, Texas! I’m hearing this has ruined orange, lemon, and avocado crops. What the heck is going on here?
I don’t know if it’s the fault of global warming, but something is seriously wrong with the climate recently. Yesterday it was 72 degrees in Washington DC - IN THE MIDDLE OF JANUARY! Don’t get me wrong, I love walking around in a tshirt and tank top in January - it kinda reminds me of when I used to live in South Florida. But, seriously, something very wrong is going on here. By this time last year it had snowed at least two times here, if not more.
Ever though celebrities were a bunch of know-nothing morons? Well, Ironic Sans has used Google’s new patent search feature to discover that many patents have actually been filed by celebrities. The smartest was Hedy Lamar who was actually a brilliant mind in the world of Cryptography. However, her equally good skills at acting caused most not to take her seriously. It was only recently that she has received the attention she deserves.
This is from my brother, Dan, who went to Japan last summer.
Hey all,
I went walking with no apparent destination and, about 6-10 miles
there and back later I found myself home and with impressions of
Japan that I figured I’d share. Pretty much, I’m gonna take myths
about Japan and debunk or support them. Here we go…
Myth: Everyone in Japan knows English.
False! Everyone in Japan knows English about as much as everyone in
the States knows Spanish or French or Italian…they might be able
to understand what you’re saying, but most can’t speak it to any
degree of proficiency (at least in Okinawa). Luckily, with
Okinawa’s large American base presence, road signs are in English
and most restaurant menus in Japan have pictures on them, have
English, or both English and pictures. Don’t expect the locals to
understand too much of what you have to say though, especially if
it isn’t rudimentary.
This morning I watch the Diebold documentary, “Hacking Democray”, on HBO or one of its affiliate networks. The basic information in the documentary was not news to me. Since I currently live in Maryland, the news that Johns Hopkins had obtained the source code to the voting machines was all over the place. I knew, even as I did my civic duty of voting this November that it was possible my vote would not count. I had also seen “Man of the Year”, a movie which has a similar theme as its main premise.
Joystick.com reports that judges are finally starting to make some rulings that make sense! We all know (if from nowhere else, than from this blog) that the DMCA is evil. It allows all kinds of restrictions to be placed on you, even though you were a good citizen and bought the content legally. For example, the DMCA makes it illegal to rip a DVD to your computer because that would entail breaking the copy protections on the DVD. This may have killed a HUGE surge or video iPod-like devices. Sure, you can buy video from the iTunes store, but why do that if you already own the movie?
I don’t own an iPod. I would never wear an iPod… If this is your primary focus in life - the machines… it’s going to have a staggeringly negative effect, all of this, for America… did you ever talk to these computer geeks? I mean, can you carry on a conversation with them? …I really fear for the United States because, believe me, the jihadists? They’re not playing the video games. They’re killing real people over there.
We have a tradition in the USA in which we allow the user the right to purchase technologies which can be used both legally and illegally. For example, a camcorder can be used to film a documentary, a child’s first steps, or a birthday party. It can also be used to sit in a movie theater and film the movie to then illegally distribute it on the internet. So is the solution to ban all camcorders? No, that would be silly and there are plenty of legal uses for a camcorder. The correct solution is to police movie theaters to make sure that such persons do not gain entry. In fact, in the Betamax case, the judge ruled that VCRs were legal because although they could be used to bootleg movies, they could also be used to watch legally purchased movies and time-shift programs, allowing the user to watch television on his or her own schedule. VCRs can also be used to copy tapes which the owner has the right to copy - such as his own footage.
Newegg.com has begun selling them and they have a Plextor brand Blue Ray burner for $835.99. Sounds similar to how much a DVD burner would have set you back just a few years ago. Now they are selling for $60 and less. So I’m predicting that Blue Ray technology burners will be about this price in 3-5 years. Also, there was a fiasco with DVD+R and DVD-R just as there is now Blue Ray and DVD-HD. Yet burners now burn both DVD + and - so it may end up the same with the newer technologies.
BitTorrent - up until now, mentioning legal uses of the program was likely to garner snickers from your audience. Afterall, it’s just for downloading music and software illegally, isn’t it? Actually, for the past few years, it’s been the way that most people download their completely legal copies of Linux operating systems. In fact, for Linux distribution companies it has been a HUGE load off of their ISO servers to allow people to be able to use BitTorrent to download their software.
If Microsoft thought they would have the IE 7.0 release to gloat about for long, they were wrong. Firefox 2.0 is due to debut this afternoon. I’ve provided a nice little link over to the page to download Firefox, but I don’t expect it to be updated to Firefox 2.0 until this afternoon when the new code will hit the mirrors. Lots of new code for me to play with today!
In the “Technically Speaking” article of October 2006’s IEEE Spectrum Magazine, Paul McFedries speaks of a new term surfacing to counter the whole “Web 2.0” crap that’s going around. Web 2.0 always smacked of marketing to me - a way to get investors to put money into some kind of upgrade to the Internet. “Oh, we’re doing TWO-POINT-OH stuff here, none of that Web 1.0 stuff.” Of course, as my readers know, the whole point behind Web 2.0 is the blog/AJAX/flickr/etc interface where the users create and modify each others’ content. McFedries reports a few good Geeks who have responded by rebranding “Web 2.0” as “chmod 777 web”. All of my Linux/Unix readers will get this instantly and start cracking up. For the rest of you, this is the way, in *nix, where you say that a file or folder can now be read, modified, and executed by the owner of the file, everyone in his group, and everyone else. Basically, you’ve just made it into a Windows-style file.
I have now adapted my blogroll code for YOU! That’s right! Now YOU can put in the URLs of blogs you want to keep track of and my program will put it all on one page for you! No more wandering from site to site! Just visit the link on the right or this one right here!
AMD is buying ATI for $5.4 billion! This could completely change the landscape of things. If AMD goes M$, they could coerce MoBo makers to make AMD motherboards only use ATI or use ATI better than Nvidia. What’s next? Intel buying Nvidia?
Paradigms are a battle of the mind that take place when we prepare our children with certain expectations about the world. Don’t let them grow up thinking there’s something right about Digital Restrictions Management! Have them read The Pig and the Box and let them learn about why software and culture need to be libre. (That’s free as in speech!)
In biology class we learn about Mendel as one of the pioneers of biology for he determined that tall plants breed tall plants and short ones breed short ones. However, it’s clear that even in the ancient of days there was some knowledge of how genetics worked. Take, for example, the following passage from Genesis where Jacob’s uncle Laban has asked what Jacob would like as repayment for all the work he’s done.
To All Responsible at nVidia for the production of device drivers,
I want to thank you for producing binary drivers for Linux at a time when most other companies don’t feel that the Linux market penetration is larger enough to develop drivers. So thanks for doing that! In fact, that is why I exclusively buy nVidia for my machines whenever possible. Sure, ATI is sharing NOW, but you were the first to divert some programmers to produce it and your reward is faithful customers like me. Of course, supplying closed-source binary drivers is not the perfect solution, as you have no doubt heard from others. However, I think this is an important first step which allows me to use my computer’s hardware to its maximum and allows Linux programmers to make GUIs capable of eye candy rivaling (and in some cases surpasing) that of Windows and Macintosh.
A little bit of info to impart here with respect to using the proprietary nVidia drivers. So, first I went to livna and downloaded the nVidia kernel modules that match my kernel. Then things were running great - even a little better than before, but something seemed wrong. The people in the irc room were unhelpful when I tried to ask them if nVidia was running. When I tried to run BZFlag, it no longer ran! I kept getting GLX missing errors! Turns out that it wasn’t running! I had to go to system-config-display (in Red Hat Fedora) and tell it to use the nVidia card as my graphics card. Then I opened up a terminal and typed init 3 and went to another VT for init 5 to restart the X server. This time I saw the nVidia logo when I got to the login screen. Success!
I got my graphics card today. Nothing crazy - just a $30 PNY 128 MB nvidia graphics card from newegg. I haven’t installed the nvidia drivers yet, but it has already been amazing in difference. The colors are brighter and more vibrant, the cpu, bereft of its need to draw the graphics runs faster, and windows don’t lag when I drag them around - a problem since Fedora switched to Cairo. There’s also no lag in SuperTux!
Acme: n. [from Greek akme highest point of perfection or achievement] The canonical supplier of bizarre, elaborate, and non-functional gadgetry — where Rube Goldberg and Heath Robinson (two cartoonists who specialized in elaborate contraptions) shop. The name has been humorously expanded as A (or American) Company Making Everything. (In fact, Acme was a real brand sold from Sears Roebuck catalogs in the early 1900s.) Describing some X as an “Acme X” either means “This is insanely great”, or, more likely, “This looks insanely great on paper, but in practice it’s really easy to shoot yourself in the foot with it.” Compare pistol.
ACK: /ak/, interj. 1. [common; from the ASCII mnemonic for 0000110] Acknowledge. Used to register one’s presence (compare mainstream Yo!). An appropriate response to ping or ENQ.
2. [from the comic strip Bloom County] An exclamation of surprised disgust, esp. in “Ack pffft!” Semi-humorous. Generally this sense is not spelled in caps (ACK) and is distinguished by a following exclamation point.
3. Used to politely interrupt someone to tell them you understand their point (see NAK). Thus, for example, you might cut off an overly long explanation with “Ack. Ack. Ack. I get it now”.
accumulator: n. obs. 1. Archaic term for a register. On-line use of it as a synonym for register is a fairly reliable indication that the user has been around for quite a while and/or that the architecture under discussion is quite old. The term in full is almost never used of microprocessor registers, for example, though symbolic names for arithmetic registers beginning in ‘A’ derive from historical use of the term accumulator (and not, actually, from ‘arithmetic’). Confusingly, though, an ‘A’ register name prefix may also stand for address, as for example on the Motorola 680x0 family. 2. A register being used for arithmetic or logic (as opposed to addressing or a loop index), especially one being used to accumulate a sum or count of many items. This use is in context of a particular routine or stretch of code. “The FOOBAZ routine uses A3 as an accumulator.” 3. One’s in-basket (esp. among old-timers who might use sense 1). “You want this reviewed? Sure, just put it in the accumulator.” (See stack.)
Leave it to content providers to mess everyone up. Slashdot reports that, in an effort to stop piracy, the HD signal in the component jacks of HD DVD players will be down-sampled because it’s analog and letting it come out at normal quality would allow pirates to get around their copyright protections. This is BS! I say we make this into a HUGE issue. Every company is trying to mess with us on the grounds of copyright protections. Sony thinks it can install rootkits onto your computer without permission. HD DVD people think they can render your HD TV obsolete before the first HD DVDs even come out. They should cut the crap! If someone really wants to, they’ll find a way to circumvent it - look at DVDs. Given enough angry geeks, things will be “solved”. Not only that, but they are assuming that consumers of pirated DVDs wouldn’t want to see the down-sampled video. If that were true, no one would be downloading and buying (in Chinatown) video taped footage of Hollywood movies. The fact of the matter is that, except for Star Wars, LOTR, and Harry Potter, no one cares how good the movie really looks if they want a pirated copy.
Think flickr is addictive? Spend hours perusing Wikipedia? Then you better stay away from The Jargon File, a reference to geek terms maintained by hacking demigod Eric Raymond. You can easily spend HOURS learning the meaning behind words in geekspeek or (even more fun) reading about the background BEHIND these terms. Eric Raymond, the major co-author of the introduction, is a great author and the intro is as much fun as the rest of The Jargon File. Especially awesome is the part about the geek psyche. It explains why we find funny:
Recently, all they’ve been talking about on NPR is the Intelligent Design debate. Basically, some people say that when students are taught evolution during biology, they should be informed that not everyone believes in evolution. Opponents say that religion has no place in a biology class. I agree; religion should be taught in a religious studies class. But what is so hard about saying the following:
Today we will learn about evolution. There are some people, including scientists, out there who do not believe in evolution and these are their reasons. Instead they believe that because of all above reasons, that the complexity of life must have been designed or aided by an intelligent super-being. However, the majority of scientists DO believe that evolution is a fact and here are their reasons for believing that evolution is true. In the end, there is no way to prove which is right so it is up to you to decide what you believe in. For the purposes of this biology class, we shall assume evolution to be true.
Although Sony still claims the right to use copy protections in their CDs, this BBC News story reported that they have abandoned the software I’ve been blogging about due to the fact that virus writers have written exploits for the software. And, in a one-two punch, Microsoft announced in THIS BBC News story that they have told their spyware program to treat Sony’s software as spyware! They will be removing it from their users’ computers. Again, this could all have been avoided if Sony had just let people copy their CDs to their computers. They bought it LEGALLY dagnabbit and if they want to put it on their computer or combine it with music from others CDs and create a custom mix CD then they should be able to do that.
Sound card in my server tanked, taking down the ethernet card with it. Result - server was down most of yesterday. I took out the sound card today since there is no need for a sound card in a server. It’s back up and better dang well stay up.
I was walking away from the Tv playing in the lunch room when I noticed the sharp reduction in television volume when I had turned around. Instantaneously I noticed what had been in front of me for nearly 23 years or rather what had been beside me. Human ears are uniquely shaped to funnel in sound most efficiently from the direction in which the person is facing. By contrast, if you’ve ever seen a deer’s ears you know that they face sidways and can swivel to a certain angle towards the front and back. I thought a little more and came to the conclusion that this was just another example of predator/prey biology. Lions, bears, and other predatory animals I could think of also had them facing forward. Elephants were another gargantuan example of prey having ears that faced to the side. This, of course, makes it harder for predators to sneak up on prey from behind. Of course, prey already have the advantage of having their eyes close to (or on, in some cases) side of their head, allowing them to see to the side and, in some cases, backwards. I cannot figure out, however, why it would be advantageous for predators to have their ears facing forward. Perhaps, the same way that having both eyes facing forward allows for stereoscopic vision, having the ears facing forward gives the predator a 3D auditory experience. I can’t see a real benefit for this in humans, but for animals with hearing far stronger than we do, perhaps it provides them with additional details about their enviroment. Just another example of the wonderful design of the Creator who strives, it seems, to make an equal playing field. Neither predator nor prey seems to have an advantage - and that’s a good thing. Otherwise either the predators would eat all the prey or the prey would multiply too numerously. Neither outcome would be good for the environment.
I hope to get the promised slope day post up soon. In the meanwhile, for those of you who were wondering, the new ipod commercial features the new Gorillaz single, “Feel Good Inc”.
For the past few days I have been wondering why there is still a Newsweek or Time magazine. Whereas newspapers come out once a day, these magazines come out once a week. I have already complained that I find newspapers woefully out of date when compared to news on the Internet. Why then do people still buy magazines containing news a week old? At today’s pace this is practically ancient history by the time one read’s it. Yet, today my fiancee’s actions changed the focus of my post.
Today I finished up yet another class. The first one I finished up was a project where I was conducted a study for the School of Electrical Engineering to switch over to Linux and open source alternatives. I also published my study as my first publication at Lulu.com. It was great to have one class out of the way, especially one which was such a joy to participate in.
Today I wrapped up another favorite class, microcontroller design. As my faithful readers know, I’ve been providing the source code to each of the labs we completed during the semester. Well, today my group demoed our final project to our professor and TA. They were quite impressed with the progress we had made on the code, despite its limitations. Our final project, a web server on a microcontroller, was a lot of fun to work on. There were a lot of frustrating times, but it’s the good kind of frustration that motivates one to try as hard as they can to get around the problem. One of my favorite taks is to participate in design and debugging, trying to get my design to work because I know it *should* be working, so what did I forget? Was it simply a semi-colon? Was it something more significant, some kind of oversight? It was hard sticking to the project and keeping Rich from rewriting it from scratch, but I think we had a much better product because we sat through all of our problems and figured out what the original author of the source code we were basing it off of had done. After all, in a real work environment you have to figure what the previous guy did. There is no time to rewrite the code, no matter how awesome you are at coding. I will be posting the code and my report soon, probably over the next few days. I invite and challenge anyone out there to work on the code and make it more robust and reliable, there is PLENTY of room for that. You just need an Atmel Mega32 and STK500 development board. (As well as the computer on which one does the programming)
I’m free flowing my writing tonight. We’ll see how much sense it makes. My dad has encouraged me to listen to Deepak Chopra. He is a western medicine educated Indian who beecame disillusioned with the poor success rates of western medicne. Determined to fuse the best of the West and East he went back to his native country to study the medical practices there. The final result is a fondue of Western Medicine, Quantum Mechanics, ancient Indian teachings, and Eastern Medicine. His books are part motivational and part practical. Sometimes they just offer plain and simple advice - eating such and such a food with such and such a quantity is shown to reduce the chance of disease X. Other times they are more metaphysical in nature.
In a world based on technology, a small error in a program can lead to some interesting results. Take this for example:
This was what weather.com displayed a few days ago when I typed in Ithaca’s area code. Rest assured that it was barely HALF the temperature they claimed it was. I think they probably had a variable slightly off and so it pointed to Arizona or something, but came up as Ithaca. Pretty humorous when it’s the weather that’s so off this way. Not quite so funny when it’s your phone freezing up.
The funny thing about the changing of the time that we do twice a year here in the US is that no one ever seems to know when the day is for changing the clocks. We all know approximately when the time is: in the early spring and early fall. But, even the week before, if you go around asking people, no one seems to know that it will be the next Sunday. Yet, without fail, the night before there is a slew of emails as one person finally figures out that this night is the night to move the clocks. They email their friends and acquaintances who email their friends until about 90% of the people know. Everyone else, like one of my homework group members who isn’t here right now, finds out when they turn on their computers the next day or any other electronic device that automatically adjusts itself.
For the past 9 years I’ve been using a Garmin watch while swimming. Back then I had a swim-focused watch, now I have a multi-sport watch. Most days the biggest benefits are the fact that I can pre-load a workout (so that I don’t need to print one out or keep my phone nearby (while keeping it safe from water) and the fact that it counts my laps for me. As I wrote 9 years ago, by releasing my brain from keeping track of laps, I can better focus on my technique.
About a decade after someone first suggested that I should join US Masters Swimming, I finally did. Originally it was because a local swim team required swimmers to be USMS members. I didn’t end up joining the team because the pool plus team fees were a bit more than I wanted to spend. But, since I was a member, I was eligible to participate in swim meets now.
This meet was at the Arundel Olympic Center. It was my first time there, and what a beautiful venue for a swim meet! Unlike the other pools in the Carol Chidester series it has 6 or more lanes available for warmup and cooldown while the meet is running. This is due to the fact that it’s a 50 meter pool that’s being converted to a 25 yard pool using a bulkhead. The other half of the pool is where the warmup lanes reside. There is built-in stadium seating; nice and high up so that the entire pool can be viewed from up there. The only bummer was that the spa pool was closed during the meet. That would have been a nice place to rest the muscles while keeping them warm between events.
On Dec 10 2022 I participated in my second swim meet of this year and also my second swim meet as an adult. It was the same day in which I did the Bigfoot Endurance Trail run and rolled my ankle during the run. It wasn’t causing me any issues during my swim or walking to the blocks. But it does mean I wasn’t at full strength for the meet.
On 15 October this year I competed at my first swim meet since high school, some 20ish years ago. Although I’d had various folks encourage me to join US Masters Swimming for almost as long, I’d always found a reason to put it off. Sometime in August or September I decided I wanted to do some swim meets. I think it was around the time that I was coming to terms with the fact that my foot injury was going to keep me from competing in my first marathon this year. I looked around to join a Masters team in order to get better at swimming and they required a membership to US Masters Swimming, so I signed up. After another week or so, I realized they didn’t have a schedule that would work for me, but now that I was registered with USMS, I could compete in swim meets. Luckily for me, the first meet of the 29th Carol Chidester Memorial Swim Series was coming up. I signed up and started looking forward to it.
If there’s one thing I always try and do, it’s to see things from the perspective of others. It doesn’t have to mean that I’ll agree with the person or even think they’re also in the right. But sometimes I come across someone who sees things so differently that I can’t quite comprehend how they could see things so differently. The funny thing is that this doesn’t involve the biggest divide in America now - politics. Rather it’s a lack of self-control that, perhaps, makes me sound like the old man I’m becoming?
For my birthday, my mother got me a Garmin Swim watch. The watch uses an accelerameter and gyroscope to figure out how many laps I’m swimming and what strokes I’m swimming. It’s not perfect, but it works well enough that it was able to allow me to focus on my strokes instead of counting intervals on the first day I used it. I’m not sure what I am doing wrong with breaststroke, but it made it add 2 extra laps to my third set of 400 IM. Even with those issues, (and the fact that something I do with backstroke is so wrong, it thinks I’m doing breaststroke) I was able to confirm some things I’d supposed, but didn’t want to waste time confirming with a less feature-full stopwatch. For example, I confirmed that, on average, I swim 25 meters in 30 seconds with freestyle. I also confirmed that I do my 400s in slightly less than 10 minutes, but slower with each set as I get tired.
Today while swimming it was “Jesus Loves the Little Children” stuck in my head. I haven’t thought about that song since about a year ago when I was comparing with someone from another denomination to see if they sang the same songs in Sunday School. Definitely a weird one to have in the noggin while trying to remember numbers.
When I’m swimming I’m usually just repeating numbers over and over in my head so I don’t forget what lap I’m on - especially important on days when I’m doing 80 laps. Many times I end up saying the numbers along the beat/melody of a song. Today it was Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines. “21 21 21 you know you want 21 21 21 21”
If you’re a developer you’re probably familiar with the idea that you will make a hack or a demo project just to demonstrate that the concept works and then management takes it and runs and next thing you know, your ugly hack is the production code.
Well, I guess this is because it’s the way things have been since the dawn of computing. According to the most recent episode of Red Hat’s Compiler podcast COBOL (the ancient language that still runs the key systems in the modern world) was only ever intended to be a stopgap language. It wasn’t meant to become so widely used.
Once again I worked on some Scratch projects with the kids. This time it involved a sports theme. I let the kids choose which games they wanted to create and Sam chose to create the game where Scratch the Cat goes Skiing.
Having done this for a few weeks now, it wasn’t too much trouble to get things working and do a mod or two for Sam. The video below contains the code and a short video of Sam playing the game.
Being a male, who’s racially white, I never had any trouble with finding representation on TV. This hasn’t always been the case for everyone, although it’s only recently (last 5ish years or so) that folks have begun to speak out on how important representation is. When you rarely see yourself in media, I’ve been told, you feel left out by the culture. Disney started rectifying this in its Disney Junior line; first with Doc McStuffins.
Tried Milk Street’s BBQ Rub #2 for the first time today on some chicken cutlets. Just pan fried for a quick meal. The taste ended up being very similar to chicken satay and I definitely found myself wishing I had some peanut sauce to eat with the chicken. The rub’s also recommended for fish and veggies so it’d be interesting to try on those. I’d also like to try it on food from out on the grill. So far it’s a good run, but not not Earth-shattering.
A week or so after the smoked chicken, Danielle did her marinade on a whole chicken we’d cleaved in half. I cooked it on the Weber Kettle at an average of 350 F and it came out GREAT! I did a 2 zone setup with the dark meat facing towards the fire. I took it out when the breasts were 160 (which was approximately 180 for the dark meat - which is the temp most people like dark meat). Look at how juicy that came out!
I’ve been working with my host to try and figure out why my relatively low traffic site has been having issues. So I’ve rejiggered WP Super CACHE to work well on the site and I’m using Cloudfare on most, if not all, of my Wordpress blogs. Yet I’m still getting some periods of time where the site’s offline. So, after many years I’m getting rid of Sociable and YARPP (which produces related posts). YARPP, in particular, if often called out as a plugin that requires a lot of resources. Here’s how things looked before I changed it:
I forgot the September calendar! (Whoops!) Here’s the October calendar. Click on the image for your monitor’s resolution and then set it as your desktop.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Danielle with her bike”] [/caption]
There were a few things we were excited about being able to do once we had a house - do laundry without sharing the machines, get away from noisy wall/ceiling neighbors, BBQ in our yard, and own bicycles. Being extremely clean, we were unable to own bikes at the apartment because we had nowhere to store them. Last Sunday we finally got around to buying some bikes. After getting them home to tune them up and get the tires filled with air, we contemplated where we should go for our first ride. Mind you, this would be our first bike ride in at least 3-4 years. Insanely, I suggested the BWI airport loop trail. My main reason: I knew where it was and we had run on it before. We had never run more than 2.5 miles of the trail, but we had been there and were familiar with it. So we set off on the trail. We didn’t know it yet, but it looked like this:
Hey Everyone! Yesterday my server died. I finally bit the bucket and rented a VPS. Sadly this means that I am no longer hosting my own site on my own personal server. However, hopefully this will translate to greater reliability for you guys. You no longer have to go through my POS home router and crappy comcast upload speeds. So I hope it’s a better, faster experience for you guys now. It’s great to be back!!!
Although, since you’ve done a summer job every summer, like me, you probably won’t notice that you’ve graduated until winter comes around and you don’t get a winter break.
Then you can follow and see all of the blog’s posts. There is a bit of an error with my author posts, but since I’m the only author on this blog (I think there are maybe 2 posts by my brother), it’s not a big deal. I’m not sure what the etiquette / norms are if someone has a blog on the Fediverse. Is it gauche for me to also post about those my blog posts on my own Mastodon account? I expect the norms will evolve along with the Fediverse, especially as it expands to include Facebook and Tumblr (assuming their owners go along with that idea). For now I’m probably going to post a limited number of blog posts on my Mastodon account - I guess as a way of boosting. Or maybe I’ll just boost my blog’s posts? Again, I imagine it’s going to evolve for all of us as time goes on. (Although, as I wrote that previous sentence, I guess boosting it makes the most sense)
This post contains my thoughts on a few stories I’ve been saving up that don’t merit a post on their own.
D&D Romance
Just a day after posting about my kids getting into D&D, I came across this article on Tor.com about The Golden Age of D&D Romance. I had no idea it was a genre, but I’m not surprised. Pretty much every genre can be crossed with every other. See The Dresden Files for fantasy mixed with detective noir, for example. After a brief introduction, the author of the piece lists 6 books in the D&D Romance genre. I don’t hate on romance as much as I did before I read a few books in the genre, but these aren’t my cup of tea. That said, they may work for you.
As you know, I’ve been using Vivaldi as my default browser for a while now. I like how they continue to innovate in the browser space while Firefox and Chrome as just standing still. (Which, to be fair to the other two, makes sense given their general purpose audiences) The latest Vivaldi update has some nice theme updates for folks that like to customize their browsers, but what I really like is their addition of Workspaces. Similar to the way that many of us use Virtual Desktops (or the Windows and Mac equivalents) to organize our open windows, Workspaces allow for organizing your tabs. Combine that with tab groups and you get the kind of 2-dimensional organization that I like with KDE Plasma and their use of both Activities and Virtual Desktops.
A week ago Stella asked me, “Daddy, why is China fighting Ukraine?”
I told her, “No, China isn’t fighting Ukraine. Russia is fighting Ukraine.”
She thought for a moment and she asked, “Russia wants to take over Ukraine?”
After I answered in the affirmative she asked, “If Ukraine wins the war, does that mean they get to take over Russia?”
After I let her know that wasn’t the case, I did think about how it certainly seems fair play. If losing means losing your country, shouldn’t winning mean that you win the other’s country? And there have certainly been wars like that in the past, but I don’t think any modern wars have followed that pattern.
It seems that it’s time to look back at a year of COVID-19. Scalzi did it. Ars Technica did it. I’m not usually a huge bandwagon jumper, but I thought, “why not?” This has been a huge, disruptive event. It might be therapeutic to write about it.
It was 11 March (I believe) when the WHO officially declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic. One of the first things I remember hearing about COVID-19 was the cruise ship that was stuck offshore because President Trump was so afraid of the numbers rising that he couldn’t let the folks off the ship. Turns out that was going to be a foreshadowing the likes of which we couldn’t quite understand at the time. My first inkling that maybe this was starting to become an issue in the US was in late February or early March when we went to visit relatives in New York City and they were against eating out because they were scared of getting sick. At the time, we thought they were just being a bit germaphobic. In fact, at the end of March we went to a restaurant for what we didn’t know at the time would be our last time to go out to eat for a year. (To date we still haven’t eaten out, not even for outdoor dining)
For the past two years we’ve had increasing evidence that something needs to change in the police/neighborhood dynamic. But Fergusson, New York City, and Baltimore are only the tip of the iceburg in every sense of the metaphor. If, like me, you follow the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Boing Boing, and other organizations committed to justice, you know that for every Freddie Gray there are dozens whose injustices don’t make it to national prominence. Of course, this isn’t even a new trend. African Americans have been complaining about harassment and being framed for a long time.
Jurors deliberated for about four hours before convicting Sam Carter on all nine counts he faced, which also included forgery and tampering with evidence.
Carter shot “Big Boy” the bull elk with his buckshot-loaded shotgun as it grazed on fallen crabapples, and then called in a friend and fellow officer to help remove it as horrified neighbors watched Jan. 1, 2013.
Questlove said his most recent stop was conducted at the base of the Williamsburg Bridge a few weeks ago following an appearance at the hip venue Brooklyn Bowl. Officers pulled over his driver, shined flashlights into the car and asked him why he was sitting in the back “like a don,” Questlove said. After showing the officers a copy of his new memoir, Mo’ Meta Blues, Questlove said he was let go.
Miley’s twerking has been way over-exposed. I didn’t write a post about it because I couldn’t give a crap. She just seemed like she was either pulling an Andy Kaufman on us by looking absolutely ridiculous or she was doing a Bieber and losing her marbles.
However, I came across this p retty awesome post written by an African American woman sociologist on how the performance looked to her. These are the types of posts that make me happy that blogs exist. I learned about an experience I couldn’t begin to fathom since I’m neither racially black nor a woman. I didn’t read all the comments on the post, but there were some disagreements from other black women. I’d say you should probably give her more weight than the average blog, considering her PhD, but also remember that not everyone has the same experience - even people of the same race/sex.
I just found out from my brother that Alvarez Guedes died. I have almost the same story as the person who wrote the linked article. I’m not sure if I’ll expound on it in a longer post, but I wanted to pass along the link. He was an awesomely funny dude, my favorite comedian, and the world is less funny with him gone.
[caption id=“attachment_6659” align=“aligncenter” width=“231”] MLK in a Hoodie (you can buy prints here)[/caption]
I’m breaking my usual schedule because of the Trayvon Martin case. This story over at Gawker has an important point to make about how race played a part. Personally, I think that, like OJ, Zimmerman is free of jail, but may still end up guilty in a wrongful death lawsuit. After all, he did admit to killing Trayvon and he was told by the 911 operator to leave Trayvon alone. He might have not had enough of a burden of proof to go to jail, but he IS guilty of killing a kid. I am against the Nancy Grace crowd and the way she treats cases like this one of Casey Anthony. Look, we have a court system and we have to abide by its rules or we have chaos. Ken White of the law blog Popehat makes a VERY salient point about this that everyone who’s pissed about the Trayvon case needs to read. This case angers me personally because I have been the target of racism. It was only once, but it stung. I have a younger, adopted brother who is half black and lives in Florida. My parents are well off and my brother could definitely find himself in a neighborhood where people don’t think he belongs. I think I would only act more irrationally towards someone killing my wife or daughter than I would for someone killing my brother. It sucks that so many decades after the 60s we still have stuff like this going on. What bugs me more than anything each time I hear about this case is that Trayvon didn’t do anything to instigate violence - he was just walking through a neighborhood. Whatever he may or may not have done once Zimmerman followed him, he didn’t start anything and he still died. Again, we have a system and the system has chosen not to find him guilty in a criminal sense. Hopefully the system can find him guilty in a civil sense.
[caption id=“attachment_6546” align=“aligncenter” width=“444”] The Family by the Willamette in the mid-90s[/caption]
When I was still a young lad, we lived in Oregon for a while; just outside of Portland. I remember my mom making us chew these horrible tasting “vitamins”. I asked my mom what they were and she told me it was because they didn’t fluoridate the water. She didn’t want our teeth to get messed up and so we had to chew the nasty tablets until we moved back to Florida. My mother loved how laid back life was in Oregon when compared to the frenetic pace of Miami. Yeah, you’ll get that when you live with hippies. They also didn’t use reflective paint on the lanes in the road which made them dangerous to drive on when it rained (which was a LOT of the time), especially if it was dark. That reflective paint was bad for the environment and no one came up with any alternatives so I guess they considered it better for people to die.
I came across this story back in May, but things appear to be at a stand-still. Essentially, The New York Times came up with an awesome new way to tell stories on the web and when someone figured out how to duplicate it, they sued. Let me start by saying that one awesome thing about the NYT is that they are incredibly innovative at how they use the web. About 10 or so years ago they had a state of the art photo journalism blog that I frequented and LOVED. They were telling neat new stories and really taking advantage of the web. Snow Fall, the prototype for this new way to tell stories on the web is incredibly beautiful. Go check it out on that link. Back? OK, wasn’t that great? It is the NYT taking what’s awesome about the web - what it can do better than print - and making it beautiful. When I came across this site it made me feel like this is the future of magazine journalism. This is what Time Magazine, Newsweek, etc should look like on the web. Instead of ugly (in comparison) walls of text with a few tiny photos, this website really does everything right. It has animation and video and good margins, great fonts. I know it’s not appropriate for the daily news - at least when it’s a short story. But I am absolutely shocked that Rolling Stone magazine isn’t using it for their 5-6 page stories - I think their legendary photos would work so well with this format and it would provide a great transition to digital that would rival the print version. (And perhaps give a compelling reason to pay for the magazine?) Right now it’s like when you see those awesome prototype cars and then they never come out. It just sucks that someone out there has come up with something that could be a real order of magnitude shift in how we experience journalism and stories on the web and no one seems to be using it. Instead the news website and blogs are just slightly better than paper in that they have hyperlinks.
Over at Popehat they presented an interesting article about the Ideological Turing Test. The regular Turing Test says that a computer passes if you can interact with it and you don’t know you’re interacting with a computer instead of a human. One of the closest things we have right now are the chat bots whose eventual goal is to get you to some website. Well, the Ideological Turing Test tests:
whether a political or ideological partisan correctly understands the arguments of his or her intellectual adversaries: the partisan is invited to answer questions or write an essay posing as his opposite number. If neutral judges cannot tell the difference between the partisan’s answers and the answers of the opposite number, the candidate is judged to correctly understand the opposing side.
One of the earliest demands for justice children make is that of fairness. What parent hasn’t heard the complaint “That’s not fair!” uttered by their children? Scarlett isn’t there yet (shoot, she’s barely speaking so far), but I imagine one of the hardest things I’ll have to do in her toddlerhood is to explain to her that life isn’t fair. It must be such a scary moment for children. It’s the first time we realize that the adults in our lives aren’t always going to provide justice. It’s funny because it’s an extremely important life lesson to learn, but it often arises out of frustration when another child won’t cooperate in the fairness regime. And it’s a tough balancing act if you’re sovereign over both children between requiring fairness and teaching that fairness just isn’t in the cards all the times.
There’s an interesting tension in democratic nations. For democracy to work there needs to be transparency. A lack of transparency leads to corruption via information asymmetry. Humans, being humans, tend to exploit this to bad ends. Sometimes they have noble intentions and sometimes they have evil intentions, but the results are the same - an abuse of power. Examples include testing drugs and diseases on African-Americans, testing drugs on military and CIA employees without their knowledge, or the lies about the US winning in Vietnam. However, nations have always needed to maintain a level of secrecy to preserve information asymmetry over other nations. It’s why Caesar of the Roman Empire invented his eponymous cypher. It’s why all countries have an equivalent of the NSA to protect their secrets and obtain the secrets of other nations. So we want our countries to keep secrets, but not the wrong kinds of secrets.
[caption id=“attachment_6176” align=“aligncenter” width=“449”] Citi Bank is one of those too big to fail banks[/caption]
Matt Taibbi wrote a story on 1 May about how there is a possibility of the end of banks that are too big to fail. The biggest issue I have with the way the financial crisis has been dealt with is the complete hypocrisy. Now, I’m not so naive as to fail to realize that politicians just say what they will and hope that people don’t look at what their saying either because of party bias or the media doesn’t cover it so they can worry about the latest media tart’s exploits. After all, the biggest retort to every bit of legislation to help the vulnerable (whether that be the environment or the poor) is that the free market should be allowed to work. Well, in a free market a lot of banks would have gone bust and perhaps we would have learned out lessons. Of course, the big difference this time is the money involved. Money can turn any politician into a hypocrite instantly. So I’m glad to read in this article that some politicians are attempting to pass a law that would require the riskiest of banks to hold more money in reserve. Because I understand why the government has to bail out the banks - we don’t want a global collapse to lead to the end of our awesome first world luxurious life. But rather than need a bail out or financial collapse, what if we just had a system where banks could fail and it wouldn’t destroy the system. Taibbi goes off on a huge tangent about how the content of a Standard and Poor white paper on this bill means that Wall Street is actually scared of the bill. It’s a good read if you don’t have blood pressure problems. Unfortunately, the article ends with the prediction that it probably won’t even make it out of committee, but at least someone is trying.
[caption id=“attachment_6153” align=“aligncenter” width=“450”] Firefox (aka Red Panda) busy Not Spying on You[/caption]
A 1 May Ars article and 30 April Wired article mention that a UK company known as Gamma International is selling spyware that pretends to be Mozilla Firefox. Both articles mention that repressive governments have used it to spy on dissidents, but it’s unclear from the article whether the company purposely sells to evil governments or whether it sells this to anybody, including foreign governments. The Wired article mentions that Gamma markets it to governments in general and so, if pressed, would probably say that it’s not meant to be used by evil governments - just people like the FBI trying to catch criminals. Either way, Mozilla has sued for trademark infringement. I applaud them for doing so. Governments may have both legitimate and illegitimate reasons for spying on computer communications, but I don’t think they should be abusing the good will of other companies to do it. Imagine if Gamma was selling Ford cars that were bugged. No one would want to buy a Ford car for fear it might be a bugged version. Come on, guys! Figure out a solution that doesn’t screw over the folks at Mozilla.
The slippery slope rebuttal can be pretty annoying depending on how dumb the person using the argument wants to be. For example, many people say all the surveillance cameras we have everywhere are a slippery slope towards totalitarian governments. While I think we still have a few tricks up our sleeves before we have to be worried, I give the argument some credibility because in the past one of the greatest tools totalitarian governments had at their hands was to create a snitch society. When your neighbors (or even your kids) are going to potentially rat you out to the government, it means you really have to watch what they catch you doing. Even something that is innocent (as far as the government’s rules) can be dangerous if your neighbor misinterprets what you’re doing. So if you don’t have to worry about neighbors, but have video everywhere - all the worse!
With the current revolution in Egypt I’ve been hearing a lot of speculation on NPR’s Talk of the Nation about who will come to power when the current government falls. There’s been a lot of talk about the consequences of a government run by The Muslim Brotherhood. The fact is that some key figured in Al-Qaeda were active in The Muslim Brotherhood. Another fact is that Hamas is an off-shoot of The Muslim Brotherhood. However, at least two guests have mentioned that in the last few decades the organization has sworn off violence. Wikipedia (caveats about Wikipedia reliability apply) claims that bin Laden has denounced the fact that The Muslim Brotherhood has denied violence and is participating peacefully in Egypt’s parliament.
While listening to a recent podcast of This American Life (TAL) it made me realize the troubles that the disabled have to go through in this country. I don’t mean the way others treat them differently, although that certainly is an issue, but rather the little things we take for granted. The sad thing is that, from what I’ve heard from friends and family who have lived abroad, the US is one of the top countries in the way we treat those with physical disabilities. The story on TAL, in case you don’t have time to listen to it, was about how California is the only (or one of very few) state in the USA where the disabled can sue for Americans with Disabilities Act violations and get monetary compensation.
Recently this photo was published by the Associated Press and has been getting a lot of attention on the interwebs. It shows Lance Cpl. Joshua Bernard, an American solder in Afghanistan, after being hit by a mortar attack and only hours before death. A lot of the debate participants seem to feel one way or another depending on how they feel about our war. But I think the debate deserves to be much more complicated and nuanced because there are actually a lot of issues at play here.
There’s been a lot of news for the past 3-6 months about the new FISA bill and how it provides immunity for the telecommunications companies. A lot of people including the Electronic Frontier Foundation are opposed to this provision of the bill (if not bill in its entirety) because they say the telcos have acted illegally by assisting the Executive Branch with their warrentless wiretapping of phone calls. The reason they argue this is illegal is that the original FISA bill, as written in the 1970s (and ammended throughout the years) requires a warrant for all wiretapping of US Persons. That includes foreigners who are physically in the United States. As the New York Times revealed in 2005, the Bush Administration started acting against this law in 2001 because of opinions written by some radicals in the Justice Department (such as Yoo).
Someone with a bit of artistic creativity has decided to create an illustrated view of all the big news of the year. I like it so much, I can’t wait to see his work no Fall 2008 and so on.
As you know, unless you’ve been living under a rock, the US Government (USG) wants to give us all rebate checks to spur the economy along. All you have to do is file your taxes and you’ll get up to $600 if you’re single or $1200 if you’re married. What hasn’t really been publicized in the mainstream media, however, is the drastic measures the USG is willing to go to make sure you spend your rebate and to help the economy.
I’ve had this rhetorical question in my mind for quite some time now. There was a time, not too long ago, when the Iraq War dominated the news. Not only that, but people were protesting. Remember Cindy Sheehan who was camped outside Bush’s house in Texas and leading all these anti-war rallies. About four months ago, it all disappeared. Coincidentally, this is more or less the same time when Britney Spears had her breakdown and the Presidential Primaries started getting interesting.
Today they were saying that Imus will be getting a new radio show. They started talking about the incident he had with the basketball team. One person mentioned that his contract specified he should be offensive and stuff like that on the radio. It’s not a new excuse for what he said, but I saw it differently for the first time. Basically, people who use this line of reasoning are saying that his contract excused him from hate speech and racist speech. That’s pretty ridiculous! So any entertainer who has a contract to be offensive should be able to say racist things without penalty? I think it’s interesting that, for the most part, the people making this argument are not African-American.
For a while it seemed as though Debian couldn’t stop the hemorrhage of distros decided to be based on Ubuntu instead of Debian. For months on end people talked about whether Debian was still relevant and whether its long release cycle was to blame. Well, now it seems that perhaps some of those derivative distros were a little quick to jump on the bandwagon! SimplyMepis has decided to be based on Debian again.
The founder said that each time Ubuntu is build from scratch and it was hindering the ability of SimplyMepis to have a sensible upgrade path. I don’t know enough about that side of Linux distros to know how different that is from what most of them do, but apparently Debian does not have that problem.
I found this online and had to include it because this is my favorite scene in The Princess Bride. It concerns the current lawsuit between IBM and SCO. (Click that link to find out more about it).
SCO: So, it is down to you, and it is down to me…if you wish Linux dead, by all means keep moving forward.
IBM: Let me explain…
SCO: There’s nothing to explain. You’re trying to kidnap what I have rightfully stolen.
IBM: Perhaps an arrangement can be reached?
SCO: There will be no arrangements…and you’re killing Linux.
IBM: But if there can be no arrangement, then we are at an impasse.
SCO: I’m afraid so. I can’t compete with you physically, and you’re no match for my brains.
IBM: You’re that smart?
SCO: Let me put it this way: Have you ever heard or Kernighan, Ritchie, Torvalds?
IBM: Yes.
SCO: Morons!
IBM: Really! In that case, I challenge you to a battle of wits.
SCO: For the kernel? To the death? I accept!
IBM: Good, then untar the source code. [SCO# tar -xvfz code] Inhale this but do not touch.
SCO: [taking a vial from IBM] I smell nothing.
IBM: What you do not smell is our patent portfolio. It is odorless, tasteless, and dissolves instantly in source code and is among the more deadly portfolios known to man.
SCO: [shrugs with laughter] Hmmm.
IBM: [turning his back, and adding the patents to one of the code trees] Alright, where are the patents? The battle of wits has begun. It ends when you decide and we both compile - and find out who is right, and who is dead.
SCO: But it’s so simple. All I have to do is divine it from what I know of you. Are you the sort of company who would put the patents into his own source code or his enemies? Now, a clever man would put the patents into his own goblet because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I am not a great fool so I can clearly not choose the code in front of you…But you must have known I was not a great fool; you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the code in front of me.
IBM: You’ve made your decision then?
SCO: [happily] Not remotely! Because Linux’s SMP code originally came from England(1). As everyone knows, England is entirely peopled with criminals. And criminals are used to having people not trust them, as you are not trusted by me. So, I can clearly not choose the code in front of you.
IBM: Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.
SCO: Wait ’till I get going!! …where was I?
IBM: England.
SCO: Yes! AH! And you must have suspected I would have known the source code’s origin,so I can clearly not choose the code in front of me.
IBM: You’re just stalling now.
SCO: You’d like to think that, wouldn’t you! You’ve beaten my giant, which means you’re exceptionally strong…so you could have put the patents in your own code trusting on your strength to save you, so I can clearly not choose the code in front of you. But, you’ve also bested my Spaniard, which means you must have studied…and in studying you must have learned that Man is mortal so you would have put the patents as far from yourself as possible, so I can clearly not choose the code in front of me!
IBM: You’re trying to trick me into giving away something. It won’t work.
SCO: It has worked! You’ve given everything away! I know where the patents are!
IBM: Then make your choice.
SCO: I will, and I choose…[pointing behind IBM] What in the world can that be?
IBM: [turning around, while SCO switches goblets] What?! Where?! I don’t see anything.
SCO: Oh, well, I…I could have sworn I saw something. No matter. [SCO laughs]
IBM: What’s so funny?
SCO: I…I’ll tell you in a minute. First, lets compile, me from my code and you from yours. [They both compile]
IBM: You guessed wrong.
SCO: You only think I guessed wrong! That’s what’s so funny! I switched branches when your back was turned! Ha ha, you fool!! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia; and only slightly less well known is this: Never go in against SCO, when intellectual property is on the line!
First of all, Debian has finally turned 4.0! It’s been YEARS in the making and they are 4 months late, but better late than never! Believe it or not, this is a huge improvement over the prior release cycle! With Ubuntu and Fedora releasing every sixth months now, it’s up to Debian to find a good compromise between releasing often and undoing their reputation as a nice stable distro to base other distros off of and not moving at glacial speed so that distros like Linspire/Freespire move to being based on Ubuntu.
For the last few years, the movie industry’s battles with Internet pirates offered an entertaining diversion during Oscar season. Their problem: they need to “leak” their films to Academy members for consideration, but don’t want those official leaks to fall into the hands of pirates. In 2003, the MPAA banned all screeners, causing a massive uproar from directors, actors, critics and indie studios. The plan was eventually scrapped in December 2003
A couple of stories that I found interesting today.
First of all, there’s a new Red Hat Fedora Core-based disto on the block, and it’s called Linux XP. It’s meant to be a drop-in replacement for Windows users. The screenshots look VERY nice and it definitely seems like a pretty enticing distro to show your Redmond-loving friends. However, this review found the Linux XP to be lacking in some stability features.
To read an article by someone who’s pretty much been with Linux since the beginning, check out this article.
Those were the first words to pop into my consciousness this morning. It’s been a week worth of tributes, speeches, and remembrances. Today’s main thought for me involved pondering if anyone from NYC actually watched any of the 11 Sept movies this year. Personally, I think it’s way too soon and too real for these events to be fictionalized. Even movies “based on a true story” lose their dramatic edge when compared to the real events. My wife told me she’d never see those movies (and neither would her siblings). I wonder how other NYers feel. Personally, I have a hard enough time getting myself to watch tragedies; and that’s with fake characters. To watch an event which left so many widowed and parent-less is just too much for me. We didn’t even watch the names being called out today.
As the British (and even some Americans) begin discussing the possibility of racial profiling after this latest foiled airplane terrorism plot, we should remember that not all terrorists are Arabs or Middle-Eastern-looking. Take, for example, the worst terrorist attack in the US prior to the attacks of 11 Sept 2001 - The Oklahoma City Bombing. The terrorists in that plot, which blew up a federal building and killed many people, were white guys. In fact, although I was young at the time, I remember them saying in the news that they had delayed in capturing the guys and even had given them the chance to get away because they were looking for Arabs instead of white guys. So think about that before you start racial profiling. Also think of the DC Sniper - a black man. There are a lot of people who hate the US government or just like to kill people and they don’t all have “al” or “bin” in their name.
UK Police say they have stopped 21 suspects who were going to blow up a plane from the UK to the US. Effective immediately at Heathrow, people cannot take beverages, hand lotions, or USB thumb drives onto an airplane. What were these suicide bombers going to do? Get drunk, lather up, and throw USB sticks at everyone? More news after work. In the meanwhile check out Google News.
Thought this song was pretty interesting - I had it on my computer, but hadn’t heard it in a long time. Pretty relevant to the current news stories.
lyrics:
No tomo te, tomo cafe mi amorYo como arepa y pabellonCon mi sumbao machuco el English when I talkIm Venezuelan in New York
Me ves pirao por Roosevelt avenueCon mi tabaco y mi bastonSiempre me escondo cuando viene imigracionSoy un emigrante ilegal en New YorkI’m an alien, I’m an illegal alienEmigrante ilegal en New YorkI’m an alien, I’m an illegal alienEmigrante ilegal en New York
F-Spot is looking really good and sporting a much better looking website. They now support RAW files as well as XMP data. Perhaps some of their programmers can share this with the GIMP people - hint hint!
Fluxbox, one of my favorite window managers, and the one I’m using now, won a 2005 linuxquestions.org Choice award!
Fedora Core 5 release has been pushed back to 20 March.
Search engines have been in the news a lot recently. For example, this BBC News story talks about how Google is refusing to hand over their search results to the Justice Department. This could come back to bite them in the butt when they try to buy some company and the DoJ denies their application. I believe they are probably doing the right thing as we are already giving up too much privacy involuntarily. This week a story broke on all the major news networks that for about $100 I can buy the cell phone records of a complete stranger.
Richard Pryor died yesterday of a heart attack. His comedy set the stage for a whole slew of comedians like Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock who told jokes about the differences between whites and blacks. Although many chastised he and his disciples for their use of profanity and the fact that their jokes hindered racial progress, I feel that, by pointing out our differences and exagerating them, they helped us to realize the frivolity of racism. As a quote from a GRITS track points out, “both whites and blacks who are most interested in bringing about racial equality shy off certain facts that deserve recognition. There are cultural differences, a truth that not only supports integration, but will help bring about honest equality. This is, after all, the ultimate goal of integration.” We shouldn’t ignore our differences or hate each other because of them. We should just realize that we are different and there’s not one thing wrong about it.
Some tidbits I’ve gleaned and where to get more in depth info:
KDE3.5 has been released! Hopefully this means that it will make its way into the Fedora Core 5, due out in Feb 2006. Or, if they’ve completely moved KDE to the extras packages, maybe it will be available even earlier! Lots of info here and screenshots here!
Speaking of Fedore Core 5, there is a review of the latest devel freeze to be found at this O’Reilly site.
With all of the job cuts being announced right before the holidays, I was wondering if it might be time for a new capitalism. Here’s a rhetorical question, what if the board lowered their salaries and the CEO’s salary instead of firing people? A typical CEO for these big companies like Delta makes a few million. He or she doesn’t need millions - no one does! Somewhere around $50k can allow someone to survive in the US. $100k is very comfortable depending on the housing market. Certainly, $500k could be enough to live VERY well, even in New York. Let’s say they are firing white collar workers who each make $50k. If the CEO were to lower his salary by just $500k, he could save 100 jobs! If we’re talking about people who make less money, even more jobs could be saved! So why can’t they do this? Well, obviously, no one would ever lower their own salary. But why isn’t there much of a public outcry? People are losing their jobs right before Christmas and these CEOs are flying around in private jets. I know we have even more ridiculous things like basketball players making millions, but I would assume that people would say stuff. For the first time today, I heard them say something on CNN this morning. Of course, it was 6 AM and no one was listening - it wasn’t repeated all day like their typical stories. I know it’s a bunch of BS, but I had to get this off my chest - it’s really been bothering me.
An update to the story I talked about on 8 Nov - BBC News has revealed that at least three viruses have emerged that take advantage of the malware Sony has installed on user’s machines without their permission. Sony says its sorry, but sorry doesn’t bring back the bits! This is exactly why music CDs should do only one thing - play music! If they want, they can include some music videos, but that should be the extent of the software on the CDs. They don’t need all this Macromedia crap on them that loads when I pop in the CD. That’s part of the reason why I just rip the music to my computer instead of popping in a CD each time. I hope this REALLY backfires on them!
BBC News has reported today that Sony BMG implanted malware into one of their country music CDs to prevent it from playing in certain Windows Media players. Not only that, but the software installs itself into the dark recesses of the computer where only the most technologically savy can find it. This is the kind of crap I expect when installing Kazaa, not when LEGALLY using a STORE BOUGHT CD. I don’t want anything installed on my computer unless I installed it myself purposefully. That’s why I use Mozilla Firefox instead of Internet Explorer and limit my usage of shady Internet-downloaded software. And, if I decide to do one of these things, I take a calculated risk. How badly do I want a program to, for example, remove region restrictions on dvds? Is it worth possible spyware and malware? But NO ONE thinks of those things when they put a musical CD into their computer. This is a blatant faus pax and Sony is extremely lucky that this story doesn’t seem to have made news in the United States. Again, people escape media wrath because American news organizations are relatively lazy. I advocate making this a huge deal and I hope more bloggers help push this story to the mainstream.
Over at Geek Ramblings they pointed out just one more blow to Microsoft FUD. The article says MS will be deploying tens of thousands of routers around the world which will be running Linux. All the while, MS has be claiming that Linux is a POS. This is almost as great as when I heard that the new Halo movie would be made using Linux computers. Of course, what does a Halo movie mean for the folks over at Rooster Teeth- the Red vs Blue creators
Rosa Parks died yesterday of natural causes. As everyone knows, she was one of the most influential and accidental icons of the United States Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. As she herself has told others, she never meant to actually stand up for civil rights. She had just finished a very long and tiring day of work and simply took a seat near the front of the bus in order to just sit down. As nearly all American school children know, in those days if a white person asked a black person to get out of a seat near the front, they were required to do so. Just like you or I don’t think straight when we’re tired, she actually refused to move on account of being tired. There were, after all, other seats the white person could have taken. The end result? She was arrested and Martin Luther King Jr began the bus strike. Since so many blacks used the busses, their strike was devastating to the bus’ source of income. They caved and eventually blacks and whites could sit anywhere on the bus. Her actions contributed in a large way to the fame of MLK Jr and gave a large boost to the Civil Rights movement.
If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. That’s a very important mantra to have in the software/hardware world. For example, OpenOffice.org has its own file format, but around 90% of the world uses the Microsoft Office format. Therefore, OO.o must incorporate support these formats. Similarly, a large portion of the Internet servers out there are running Linux and/or open source software. That’s the reason that Microsoft has decided to try and booot compatility with open source. How hard are they trying to make their software work with open source?
I wanted to be able to talk about the news stories I found very interesting without creating an additional post for each story, so here is the first edition of “In the news today”.
This BBC story shows how NASA’s attitude about shuttle accidents has changed since the 2002 shuttle destruction. Previously NASA was more concerned about its PR image. How would it look if NASA was trying to check the shuttle for problems due to foam hitting the wing? For whatever reason, they decided to deny the astronauts the ability to check the condition of the shuttle, costing them their lives. This time around, with a possible heatshield tile missing from the Shuttle Discovery, they are doing a full diagnostic over the entire shuttle to determine the integrity of the protection system against the heat of reentry. I’m glad NASA has finally learned its lesson. I hope that this is one it doesn’t forget.
Today I was reading an article about the perils of blogging about the workplace. This is something I have always avoided. I think it’s ok to say something like, “Man, this guy was a real jerk to me in the cafeteria, I wonder what problems he was facing to feel that way.” It’s not ok to say, “Man, my boss is such an [insert favorite insult]” because that will just cause problems. Don’t think that he/she might not read it. Although I garner a few thousand hits to my website a month, I know that I have a pretty small audience compared to the more famous bloggers and I figured my blog to be relatively obscure. My wife’s neighbor googled me and found all sorts of stuff on my website that we presented as proof that he had researched me. (This is not as weird as it sounds, she grew up with him as a neighbor and he protects her as a niece or maybe even a daughter - and he’s a great guy) So, your boss might end up on your site too. Keep your comments as generic as possible and try not to mention your company by name and you’ll probably be ok. But I’m way off on a tangent from my purpose for writing this post.
I mentioned the issue of racial profiling a couple of days ago. Today while eating lunch I was watching Fox News (not because I wanted to, but because we couldn’t change the channel) and again some simpleton was calling for racial profiling. The particular show on at this time (around 1p EST) had a live audience, something I’ve never seen on the news. It seemed more like an episode of Oprah than the news. I guess people are right when they say that the news is more about entertainment than telling the story. Walter Cronkite must be so dissapointed. Every time the fellow being interviewed called for racial profiling the mostly-white audience cheered. Unfortunately, the man put on the show to oppose the racial profiling issue was a bumbling fool who spent more time spinning the issue than answering questions. However, when he said that, “all black people are not alike,” the audience actually booed him. What in the world is that? I think all those people needed to locked in that studio and given some lessons in racism.
Remember that guy they shot in the London Subway. I said, “he’d better be a terrorist or they’re going to have a problem on their hands.” Guess what? He’s NOT a terrorist. I clicked on the reader response link and saw that the guy’s visa was most likely expired and that they were checking visas at subway stations. Additionally, the police were NOT wearing police uniforms so he had no reason to believe that they were cops. Apparently there have been some problems with people pretending to be cops and robbing and murdering people.
editor’s note: This was supposed to appear as a post yesterday, but I was unable to post it on time.
---————————————–
Things have really escalated in London since lunchtime on Thursday (EST) when I first heard of the second round of London bombings. First of all, I think that for a non-Middle Eastern (or any place that has constant violence) country the timing of the second string of attacks is unheard of. Look at the US, it was seven years between attacks on the World Trade Centers.
You may know, because they are relatively famous examples, that in British citizens wishing to enter inner London streets during peak times have to pay a toll. This was enacted based on the economic premise of marginal benefit. In case it’s been a while since you took Econ101, marginal benefit is the amount of money someone is willing to pay for a service. If they pay less then that, they feel they are getting a good deal. If they pay that price, the believe it is fair. They refuse to pay a price above that price. In other words, if your marginal benefit from a bag of chips is $0.50, you will cease to want a bag of chips if they cost $0.60. If you still want it at sixty cents, then that was your real marginal benefit. Therefore, the British government figured that they just had to raise the price high enough that a majority of people wouldn’t use the roads and then congestion would vanish. It has mostly worked out right.
This is not one coherent post, but a post about crazy things that have recently occurred.
Crazy thing number 1: New York City Mayer, Mike Bloomberg, has announced that from now on the building code in NYC will state that for every toilet in a men’s room there must be two toilets in the women’s room. This, he hopes, will ameliorate the age-old problem of women’s bathrooms having ridiculously long lines when compared to a men’s room. He joked that he would no longer need to wait outside the women’s room for his wife.
Today is Good Friday, the day that Christians celebrate the betrayal and death of Jesus the Christ. Jesus was murdered in order to fullfill the prophecies dating back to the days of the Old Testament books of the Bible. According to the doctrine of Original Sin, when Adam and Eve committed the first act of disobedience against God, they caused all of their descendents to also be born into sin. In order to symbolize a washing away of this sin, God commanded the ancient humans (proto-Hebrews) to sacrifice a purely white lamb, sprinkling the blood symbolically onto the sinners, to take away their sins. The lamb, being without defect, was supposed to stand in for the humans who had the “defect” of sin.
Last week was the first week of school in Howard County, Maryland. It was a chaotic week for transportation and, I think it was caused in large part by contractor issues. In the USA we tend to believe that privatizing everything makes it better. But, in fact, all it does is create an extra layer of remove from key employees and create inefficiencies. As an example, from this news story:
“My husband is a bus driver for Howard County with a different contractor, and I know that there are companies like his where the drivers don’t have enough routes,” said Andrews, “Instead of us having to drive our kids to school, they need to use some of the existing contracts to fill these routes.”
When I was looking at my SFF magazine covers on Calibre-web, I noticed there seems to be somewhat of a house style to the images chosen for the covers. I know I could write a python program to give me a definitive answer, but I’m not currently in the mood for that. So here’s what I saw as the main theme for each of the magazines I’m subscribed to:
Lightspeed Magazine
The main impression I get with the covers (from the issues I own) is that a successful Lightspeed Magazine cover has orange in it.
Wrote this over the course of a few days as a creative exercise.
----
“¡Carajo Coño!” he muttered under his breath as he ran. His wife had just started to get into the mood when the call had come in. It was on the mobile that he never turned off, not even during moments of planned intimacy. He’d had no choice but to answer and, despite her threats of finding electromechanical means of satisfaction, he was forced to bolt out the door. “¡Coño!” he wagered to utter a little louder, he had left so quickly he only had the small pistol that was always in his right pocket. He hoped it wouldn’t matter.
KDE Wayland has come a long way support has come a long way since I last wrote about it 8 months ago. Yakuake now shows up in the correct place (although it seems to have a hard time remembering to start up upon login). The lock screen bug hasn’t hit me in the past month. Multi-monitor support is way better now. (And this is without the new update that supposedly makes it even more so solid). Scrolling is still a little screwy in Firefox, but it works perfectly in Vivaldi (my daily driver for quite a few months now).
Interestingly enough, I was originally exploring whether to change to the new Bjork theme I’d just heard about. Unfortunately, unlike previous theme changes, it required me to completely redo my homepage while the page was live. It was NOT a good experience. But I did start playing around with the built-in themes. For the past few years I’ve found that I have preferred the built-in themes to anything else out there.
While I enjoyed the new theme overall, one thing was nagging at me as I went to bed last night - the padding around the menu, header, and site identity took up WAAAAAAY too much space. So I made the menu more nested to make it appear on the right as it does in the example site for the theme. I might need to make a few more tweaks to that to make sure certain pages are surfaced rather than hidden.
I was looking around recently at the Wordpress annual themes and was looking into Twenty Sixteen. While it hadn’t spoken to me when it was released, it did have some features that seemed perfect for me now. The first is that images are given even more room to breathe in this theme. Since I’ve featured photography quite a bit on my blog over the past 11 years, this was something I definitely wanted. I have toyed with the idea of having a separate blog for my photography that has a dedicated photography theme, but since my tastes are always shifting, I think it’s better to just keep it all together on one blog. Another feature is the addition of pull-quotes - something I was trying to figure out how to do via plugins. Finally there is the sub-title you see above - I love those. I plan to have some fun with it in the future.
Finally switched over to Twenty Thirteen now that Wordpress 3.6 is out. It’s going to take some time for me to get things looking the way I want them. Anyway, I LOVE the new fonts - much better readability than the previous theme.
I found a Wordpress theme that I mostly like called Hal 5.0. I think the top image is a little over the top, but the overall theme is ok. I edited the font size up from the default - the font designer must have amazing eyesight. I also added in tag listings into the blog posts. Overall, I’m much happier with this look than with the previous one. I still think that, someday, I’ll make my own theme so I can be completely happy with it instead of finding one that’s good enough on the Wordpress site.
This theme is really annoying me, mostly because it’s a fixed width theme. That means that the theme doesn’t expand if you expand your Window or have a wide screen monitor. Mostly, it means annoying things like this blog post title. As you can see, it cuts into the metadata such as the date/time. Also this theme doesn’t support tags. So you may see some strangeness as I change themes. I couldn’t find any that I truly wanted and, in the end, I think I’m just going to end up making my own theme.
I’m going to try and upgrade my theme to work with the latest Wordpress feature - widgets. Therefore, the blog might look a little ugly as I attempt to get the theme to work.
The Hugo Awards (Science Fiction and Fantasy award given out at WorldCon; anyone who bought a ticket can nominate and vote) were given out this past weekend. Here is a link to all the awards and winners. I just wanted to share a few of my thoughts, organized by category.
Best Novel - I’d read and enjoyed Becky Chambers’ The Galaxy and the Ground Within, so it was a bummer it didn’t win. I’ve heard a lot of good things about P. Djèlí Clark’s A Master of Djinn. I hope to get to it some time in the next few years.
This week Our Opinions Are Correct aired an episode about the Illusion of Change. They do an excellent job explaining what it is - when long-running fiction (comics, Soap Operas, etc) has to eventually return to the status quo. They cover infamous examples like that time that Satan dissolved the marriage of Peter Parker and Mary Jane. Finally, the hosts cover the biggest reason the corporations that own Marvel and DC always resort to the status quo: so that folks jumping onto the series don’t have to deal with 50-100 years of backstory in order to understand what’s going on with the characters now.
In September I once again covered Baltimore Comic-Con for Comic POW! Not only did I get to meet Greg Pak, awesome creator of Code Monkey Save World and The Princess Who Saved Herself (in collaboration with Jonathan Coultan and the artists), but I got to see that I made the blurb on the back of the second volume of Altar Girl! (see my Comic POW! coverage of Altar Girl)
Hey, when you like bands like The Protomen, Anamanaguchi, and Weird Al, it’s hard to find someone to go to a concert with you. I’d be missing out on lots of fun if I had to go with someone else.
A couple days ago I heard the latest episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast. In it we learn about how where you grow up has a profound affect on the way you think and act. On of the coolest conclusions they mention is that the reason that the American Deep South is known for being so ridiculously polite is that honor is so important there that people fight over it. Meaning, it’s an act of survival to ensure you do nothing possible to piss off those around you for fear of besmirching their honor and having them kill you.
I’ve blogged in a similar vein before, but it’s really neat to come across AV Club’s Memory Wipe. Someone (or a group of writers) who seems to be about the same age as me, give or take a few years, is taking a look back at the pop culture of our youth to see if it holds up as an adult. Check it out - you’ll get lost in the writing and nostalgia.
Start here before FF
Fantastic Four By Jonathan Hickman # 1 - Volume 1
I’ve always been a Fantastic Four fan, but it’d been a long time since I last read F4 when I picked up FF. Being as this was a #1 of a new title, I was very confused about what in the world was going on with the Future Foundation. I knew what’d happened to ellicit the name change, but that’s about it. Well, if you read this book, it will all make sense. Right from the beginning you meet one of the future members of the FF. And later on you meet almost all of the rest of them. This TP also introduces the Reed Council which is the whole reason for the the first FF story arc. Hickman is like Marvel’s Grant Morrison. If you really want to understand FF, you are really going to need to AT LEAST read his run on F4. By the end of this TP, almost EVERYTHING from FF had been setup. I’d say, about 15-20% has yet to occur.
Not Feelin’ It
Astonishing X-Men # 36 - Monstrous, Part 1
The only story arc in Astonishing I haven’t read yet is Exogenic. I am really not liking this one. I know this is the first issue, but I’ve also read the third one due to when I got into Astonishing. I really, really hate this art style. It just looks weird and almost like a super deformed (in the manga sense) version of the X-Men and I don’t think it fits with the previous art style or tone of the book.
It was OK
Uncanny X-Men # 539 - Losing Hope
I was hoping this was linked to what happened in Generation Hope #8, but sadly it does not appear to be. We do get to see how M-Day has affected some former mutants, and that’s neat. We also get to see why Wolverine acts so strange around her. (Although an astute reader probably already guessed why) This issue felt like a very fast read and I wasn’t left as satisfied as I’ve been with recent Gillen works. Oh well. You win some, you lose some.
Injecting some fresh blood into the X-Men
Generation Hope: The Future is a Four-Letter Word # 1 - TPB
We live in a world where the big comic companies are in financial trouble. We’ve got so many things to occupy our attention and many of them are free. So we’re drowning in reboots and revamps and retellings. Ghost Rider is a woman now. Captain America is back for the umpteenth time. So it’s quite refreshing to see Marvel going in a different direction with the X-Men. Rather than doing a reboot so we can see the X-Men when they first became X-Men, they are introducing new, young mutants.
Good Focus on the New Guy
Batman, Incorporated # 7 - Medicine Soldiers
I like this Batman, Inc issue because it mostly focused on the new guy with Batman playing a very small part. The dynamic between Man-of-Bats and Raven is played very well. There’s a lot of history here and you can feel it. The only bad thing with this issue is the same as all the other issues, it feels like these books need to be a bit longer. I feel like too much story is getting compressed into too few pages and the story’s suffering a bit for it. I think it’d be best if these were all two-parters like the series-opening Japanese story.
Glad I Waited
Uncanny X-Men # 535 - Breaking Point, Part One
I just got back into comics in May after a 10-12 year hiatus. boy have I missed a lot! So I’ve been working my way through the trade paperbacks and hard covers to get caught up on just what happened to one of my favorite Marvel teams. I was going to read this issue when I saw in issue 534.1 that it involves the Breakworld which was mentioned as returning for the first time since Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men. So I put this issue aside and finished reading my Morrison New X-Men so I could read Astonishing X-Men. All of this is a very roundabout way of saying - it’s perfect for me! It’s as though things are picking up where that story left off. We have Kitty still intangible and even Danger (the embodiment of The Danger Room) still around. The only thing different is that Beast is gone because he is now with the Secret Avengers. (And Armor was left behind on purpose) And so this storyline is awesome for me, but what about the regulars?
A Fitting Followup to Morrison’s Run
Astonishing X-Men Omnibus # 1 - Astonishing X-Men Omnibus
I came into this right on the heels of Morrison’s run in the Ultimate 3 Volume collection. I know there’s an Uncanny Volume that takes place between the two, but it doesn’t look like it contained anything that kept me from understanding what was going on in this story. (Plus this Omnibus version has an intro to the X-Men that explains where Professor X is)
Things Really get Real
New X-Men Ultimate Collection # 2 - Book 2
At first the book continues directly from the previous one. We learn that Prof X can walk because Xorn healed his spine (although I thought it was that his legs were crushed? Perhaps that was retconned at some point). Prof X is working on a Cerebra upgrade to telepathically remote-control mutants to help them get out of dangerous situations? No possible way that could go wrong! Sometimes Xavier really does carry the idiot ball. (Although it ends up not being a plot point so far)
Morrison at his BEST!
New X-Men Ultimate Collection # 1 - Book 1
Holy cow! That’s not strong enough, that volume requires some high level “Whoa!” and “DID YOUO SEE THAT?” and all kinds of profanity (if you happen to condone such tings) to describe what a ride it was to read Morrison’s take on the X-Men. When you read the description on the back of the book which happens to, at the time of this review, match the description here on Comic Vine, it sounds like marketing BS. Every new writer is claimed to “have turned the (franchise name) on its (body part)” and “You’ve never seen (franchise name) like this!” This time it’s real. Like Frank Miller and Alan Moore, Morrison has brought grit to the X-Men universe. And it appears to have stuck, as I read today’s issues in the multitude of X-Books Marvel has seen fit to produce. Because this is a collection of issues and because it was originally released 10 years ago, I’m going to have some light spoilers here and there. I know there’s a spoiler button here on CV and I’ve used it on previous reviews. But that’s like using the spoiler button for Citizen Kane. If you don’t wish to see any of them, you can stop reading after the next sentence. If you like the X-Men and if you want to know where to jump on to get caught up with the current continuity, I can’t think of a better place to start.
And it’s over….
X-Men: Complete Onslaught Epic # 4 - Volume 4
So, here we are. The end of of a huge Marvel crossover that led directly into Heroes Reborn. (And maybe even was created solely for that purpose?) This thing went back a few years if you count all the hints they were dropping - even if they hadn’t figured out the entire plot yet back then.
Fantastic Four #416 - Franklin’s attempts to get help manifest as bad guys because Onslaught mucks about with them. This issue has no progress on fighting Onslaught… Awesome personal growth for Ben Grimm. Dr Doom is so awesomely bad ass! I love the way he talks and the way he speaks. It’s so awesome whenever he’s there. And this plus FF signals at least twice that they’ve had to join forces. Slightly pointless other than to gather all the heroes at FF Tower as more and more super heroes keep dropping in.
Pause the Action. Survey the World
X-Men: Complete Onslaught Epic # 2 - Volume 2
For the most part Volume 2 of Onslaught: the Complete Epic is just filler. The first issue or two deal with the X-Men on their mission to deal with Onslaught. Reveals that Xavier is like Batman: crazy prepared! He has files on how to kill each of the X-Men. That was neat to see. The issue where Wovlerine talks to this Aboriginal mutant was pretty awesome. Esp the fact that such a guy exists. But the rest of the book just seemed like filler that could have been safely ignored.
Back to the Action
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight: Time of Your Life # 1 - Time of your Life
After the last trade paperback, which was mostly laughs, we jump right back into the fray. (No pun intended) Buffy ends up sucked into the Future of Whedon’s Fray comic. Like the licensed and fan fiction that was written between the release of the Star Wars IV and Star Wars V, it can often be a mess to figure out continuity when you don’t know where you’re going to go creatively. Buffy ended in 2003 and Fray was mostly written in 2001. So when they started this future world, they didn’t know how the end of Buffy (the TV show) was going to end up with tons of girls activated as Slayers. So I think this book was Whedon rectifying the future and present of Buffy. Although you’re left wondering whether that future is still canon.
Is X-Men: Legacy always this confusing?
X-Men: Legacy # 250 - Lost Legions, Part 1; Flashback; Into the Abyss
This is only my second issue of X-Men: Legacy, but it seems to jump around more than the other Marvel books I’m reading. When #249 ended, we saw Rogue and Magneto maybe about to get it on. This issue - no mention of it at all. Really, after how big a deal it was in the previous issue you’d think there’d at least be some more movement on whether rogue was going to stay with Magneto. Instead, all of a sudden we’re looking for Legion’s personalities. Where the heck did that come from? In 249 he was just cycling through his personalities while connected to some machine. Still, it was a fun fight and the personality they have to catch in this issue has a neat power. Makes it really hard to fight him legitimately.
Holy Freakin’ Wow!
Detective Comics # 875 - Lost Boys
I loved this issue from cover to cover! First time I can say that in 2011! Wow! I loved Bullock’s section even though it didn’t really have anything to do with the story. I loved how it was drawn and coloured and how his narration squares were drawn. And Gordon’s story was insane. I loved how slow and methodical it was - perfect for a book called Detective Comics! I also loved the backstory into his life. And the shock ending! Man! I can’t wait to get to the next one. Snyder really hit the ball out of the park on this one!
Like a fun Sci-Fi Movie
Astonishing X-Men # 38 - “Meanwhile” Part One
This issue reads like a fun sci-fi movie. It’s great - it’s almost like a cross-over comic I read a decade ago where Superman ends up on the planet with the Aliens from Alien. In fact, the X-Men go to investigate a space station and the plot more or less becoems the plot to Alien. However, it’s quite compressed and ends up with a crazy ending. The character designs are a lot of fun - love the new Beast look. (New for me, at least) I don’t care that this book doesn’t fit into the timeline with the rest of the X-Men books, it’s a ton of fun to read. Another book for my ever-increasing pull list.
Falls off so quickly
The Batman Chronicles # 7 -
The first story is pretty neat - you get to see differences in how Batman and Superman interpret the law and due process as they fight to save a woman who may have been falsely put to the death penalty. And Batman and Supes even disagree on what circumstances would mean she was there falsely. I liked it a lot.
Another Good Arc Intro
Batman and Robin # 23 - The Streets Run Red, Part 1 of 3: Ins and Outs
And, I should mention, another cover that lies. (Been seeing a lot of those on the 2011 FF book) Anyway, I’m not sure how much of this sticks with the DCU Reboot/Refresh, but it looks like most of the current continuity does. (With changes like Barb being out of a wheelchair) But this arc definitely has time to end before September. It is low on action at first, but I think it sets up the characters’ motivations and actions quite well. As someone who knows the story of The Red Hood, but never read any of those books, it’s a great quick intro in why he is the way he is. I didn’t feel too bored and there were scenes where I was quite glad that there are now comics that are rated Teen so they could get into the rougher stuff. The news about the new DCU is that he’s going to have his own book and if he retains most of the characterization he has in this book, I’ll DEFINITELY have it on my pull list. In a way, he’s like the Batman of the Flashpoint universe - able to kill the bad guys rather than wait for the justice system. And so this sets him up for an interesting dynamic vs the bad guys, Nightwing, Batman, the other Robins, and Batgirl. I can’t wait.
I wanted to share my comic book reviews with my blog-reading audience without forcing them to go to Comic Vine to find them.
Leaves you Wanting More
Gotham City Sirens # 23 - Friends, Part 1
I am just returning to reading comics after a 12 year hiatus. Additionally, I was never that big into DC Comics. Most of my Batman exposure comes from Batman: The Animated Series. (And the Arkham video game) But I jumped into Gotham City Sirens because I’ve always loved the villianesses of Batman’s Rogue Gallery.
Glen Weldon takes us through Batman’s history and evolution and how it was affected by the culture in which it was written. I knew bits and pieces of the story from other histories of comics, but this was the first time I’d read one focused on Batman. There are many ways to tell this story and I think Weldon’s is a very good strategy.
In my ideal home setup, I’d have computers in every room. I’m not horribly far off, but it’s mostly via old laptops and computers that I’ve retired from regular use or had donated from family members. As more of our movie purchases become BluRay (and with 4k video around the corner), some of those old computers just aren’t up to snuff when it comes to 720P and higher. I have a Roku 3 in the basement for running on the treadmill and that’s capable of handling higher quality video, but it’s not compatible with the way I’ve ripped my media. After a bit of investigation, it looked like Emby might be the right choice for me. So I installed it on the CentOS VM that runs my homeserver. The first thing I had to do to get it to work well was to change the Mono garbage collection.
Scarlett has become hardcore obsessed with the BBC show Octonauts. Nothing she used to care about - Mulan, My Little Pony, Beauty and the Beast - can be put on the television for her. All she wants to watch is Octonauts. So for Easter we got her all the characters. She has two favorite characters/toys: Shellington, a koala bear, and Kwazii, a cat descended from a long line of pirates. This is what Kwazii looks like:
Just in case you didn’t read it or watch the movie, each district has a fashion designer who designs the costume for its contestants representing the products the district produces. The narrator mentions that these fashion designers aren’t always creative. In the movie, the logging district girl is dressed like a tree. Then again, maybe Hunger Games was copying Miss Universe - I don’t watch beauty pageants. Either way I think the only way Miss Canada could have been more of a stereotype is if she had a jar of syrup in her other hand.
He’d have made Bee and Puppycat, Natasha Allegri’s latest surreal cartoon masterpiece. I think there’s something great about Allyn Rachel’s mumbling delivery that really sells it. I love this amazing world we have that allows for experimentation - I hope we don’t lose it through bungling of Net Neutrality issues. (I like eps 1 and 2 from the Kickstarter [second video] more than the pilot [first video])
I come in from raking the leaves and Scarlett is standing there with one remote in her hand and the other two in front of her. She’s pushing buttons and asks me, “Daddy, what button do I need to push to watch a video?” I told here there were a lot of buttons to push. “But which one do I push first?”
Last night I had a dream that combined Games of Thrones and Perl programming. Like it was in the GoT world, but we had to do some Perl programming to defeat the Lannisters.
Some things people don’t know because they weren’t taught. Or it was taught in a way that didn’t make sense to the way their brains work. Or it was beyond them for some reason. All of this is fine. It’s the prideful ignorance that is really wreaking havok with this country. The following Daily Show clip is what inspire this mini-rant:
Today’s post is facetious - I know the answer is that men and men’s desires control Hollywood. But, as I watch Game of Thrones, I end up seeing so many breasts and so much female pubic area that it just ends up making the ridiculous absence of penises pretty abundant. Especially in the scene in which a guy is purposely taunted to get hard ….. no wait…this happens twice and both times with bad results. One time, the dude’s penis gets cut off and the other time a leech is attached to it. Neither time is it shown. Yet during a scene at a whorehouse, we see an acrobatic girl essentially put her vagina right into the camera.
When you’re part of a dominant class you don’t realize how differently you see the world. Sure, I’m ethnically Hispanic and have suffered humiliation and financial consequences over one overt racist incident. But by and large the world is my oyster. I’m a man and racially I’m white. In fact I’ve had coworkers come to me and disparage Hispanics (all-to-often a codeword for Mexicans - especially Illegal Mexicans - in the USA) and then say, “they’re not like us white guys.” So for the most part I never saw anything awry with pop culture. In fact, one of the few times I realized consciously that I wasn’t actually represented on TV was when I did see myself represented on TV in the form of reruns of the TV show ¿Qué Pasa, U.S.A.?. The show was exactly about me - it was about kids (although I think they were high school age or older) who were born in the USA to Cuban immigrants and whose grandparents only spoke Spanish. It was odd and fascinating and I couldn’t get enough of it. But other than that one year or so when I saw those reruns, I was able to identify with virtually any TV show. I could see myself as Chandler, Ross, or Joey in Friends. (Or as a character on Full House or Home Improvement) Now, I loved showed with African Americans like Hangin’ with Mr Cooper, Family Matters, The Cosby Show, and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air so it’s not as though I needed to see myself in TV. But until I started poking around on the Internet as an adult I never realized that for people like African Americans, those four shows were almost the only opportunity they had to see themselves on TV (especially in a positive sense). And forget it if you’re Asian! (including Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis) I came to realize that I had been as naive about the entertainment landscape as those white couples from the 1920s who use to take trips to Harlem on the weekend to experience the Jazz and other aspects of African American culture. At the end of the trip they could retreat to their comfortable lives while the African Americans were stuck there.
After writing my Boxee review based on my experience over the weekend, I tried to use it again Tuesday and Wednesday. There two shows that I watch Tues-Friday: The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. I’m not sure what API or screen scraping Boxee uses for these sites, but it needs to be improved. When I went to look for Monday’s episode on Tuesday, it wasn’t there. And Colbert didn’t appear to have any shows since mid-November. That tipped me off to check their websites and see that they did, indeed, have new episodes. Very disappointing. I don’t want to pay $200 for a device that works worse than a web browser on the shows that are important to me.
My wife enjoys watching TV a lot more than I do. I prefer interactive or creative pursuits like programming, photography, or video games. If, tomorrow, all the TV studios said we could no longer use the Internet to freely watch their programs (with ads, of course), I wouldn’t buy cable. Once I’d broken that shackle, it was gone forever. Even when I had Comcast and my MythTV, the hard drive was filling up with the shows I liked (Myth Busters, Dirty Jobs, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report) faster than I could watch them. But Danielle enjoys TV and I enjoy making my wife happy. So, when I read about the Boxee Box, I thought it might be something she’d enjoy.
I’m not often annoyed enough with mainstream news organizations to make a big deal out of it. Plenty of stuff they do annoys me, but I rarely get so charged up that I blog about it. Recently they stoked my fire when discussing the attempted terrorism on Times Square. Take, for example the following excerpt from a newspaper article: “The vehicle identification number was defaced, but detectives found it stamped on the engine block and axle to get a lead on the current owner.” (Alison Gendar - New York Daily News)
[caption id=“attachment_3359” align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“South Park Cosplay (photo by heathbar on flickr)”] [/caption]
In the beginning I was not a huge fan of South Park. Of course, I never gave it a chance, but it didn’t give me a reason. It was, as the creators admitted in a recent Fresh Air interview, exceptionally crude both in its jokes and its scatological humor. I heard that basically it was just a bunch of elementary school kids using profanity – how novel. So I did other things with my time.
When I flew to Tampa last week, there was a magazine cover that claimed the days of free professional content over the Internet were over. The cable companies had a way, it claimed, to control the programs available and keep us paying >$100/month for cable. I didn’t read the article, but I have a guess at how they might do this. Comcast is currently attempting to buy NBC (if the Justice Department doesn’t have anything to say about that) and NBC has a stake in Hulu. So, Comcast could limit Hulu to existing cable customers or they could limit the content to make Hulu no longer that important. Already, changes are afoot that have made Hulu less attractive. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are no longer available via Hulu. Whether or not this is part of the same agenda (getting people to pay for cable) isn’t important. The less programming available in one place, the less important Hulu is. But if they succeed I will simply stop watching TV.
It’s been pretty ridiculous recently with Steele claiming to bring Urban cred to the Republican party. I think they feel like they have to have a black guy too. It’s just odd that suddenly after Obama’s President, they have a black chairman.
Well, I know that eventually Hulu will pull this clip. But until they do, enjoy the extremely creative editing of the The Colbert Report’s team in this rap battle between Colbert and Republican Chairman Michael Steele.
A lot of people have been warning that rules/laws that everyone considers stupid are a very dangerous thing. Essentially, what happens when every single person you know is a “criminal”? It begins to create a sense that rules are pointless and if everyone’s disobeying this rule, why not disobey that one and so on. These people see the current problems with copyright infringement as potentially being the catalyst to the end of civilized society. I’m not sure I would go that far by a long shot, but it is an interesting question.
There’ve been a lot of people recently on the MythTv mailing list talking about Boxee as a convenient way to was content on Hulu. However, the Boxee developers have blogged that Hulu has nixed that idea. ( And here’s Hulu’s side of the story) I read a bunch of comments as well as both of those blog posts (I also read this great blog post) and the only conclusion I can come up with is that the TV execs that license their content to Hulu are braindead. Here are the best reasons I read in the comments (summarized for brevity) :
The other day I was messing around with flickr’s slideshow feature and I came across this:
And here it is zoomed in:
This comes from an episode where the characters are discussing the founder of Springfield who uses the word Embiggen and some teachers debate whether it’s a real word. I love the way programmer put little homages into the code they work on.
Over the last few days I’ve been watching season 1 of the British version of The Office. I’ve come to the conclusion that to say, “the American The Office is based on the British The Office” is a gross understatement. For the first season, at least, it’s almost a 1:1 copy of the British version. Examples:
Both Dave and Michael Scott have a raunchy friend who teases him, but he thinks he’s in on the joke
Tim and Jim look almost exactly the same and react to the camera in almost the same way
the British Pam character is dating a guy from the warehouse who’s less than romantic
Both Dave and Michael Scott have a female boss who is much more competent than them
In both shows a temp is hired in the first few episodes and knows way more than the boss
In both shows Tim/Jim put Garrett/Dwight’s stapler in jello
in both shows the “kevin” character wants to be in a band
Both Garrettt/Dwight know karate and other such things
There are probably a few more similarities. I almost feel like I’m watching the first season of the American version again. There are a few differences, though, that make the American version more enjoyable to me. Jim and Pam have more chemistry and play more pranks. Of course, the American show has more episodes than the British one so there is more time for mischief-based shows. I like Dwight’s quirkiness more than Garrett’s. So far there isn’t an HR person that the boss in the British version hates and the animosity towards Toby made the show for me many times when the Jim/Pam love triangle was taking forever. Oh yeah, the British opening theme is SO British.
My father-in-law is over today and he’s been dying to watch the Bizarre Foods Paris episode. I’m opposed to buying video media off of iTunes because of the digital restrictions management (DRM). But, he’s been wanting to watch that episode forever and we no longer have cable so I can’t record it onto MythTV. We bought it off of iTunes and then tried to watch it in iTunes. It was skipping and stuttering worse than a Youtube video. It was reminding me of the old dialup days when the buffer would keep running out. Any TV show I have ever downloaded for free off the net has not had this problem - it has played flawlessly - even if it was an HD recording. So why should I pay $2 for a stuttering video when I could get it for free and have HD quality?? And I’m not the only one - I searched the web and 3 million pages came up on this issue. The solution was to play it in Quicktime, outside of iTunes. This is ridiculous - pay content should NEVER be worse quality than free content if you want people to pay. That is, after all, how the free market works.
This week was my last week with cable television. I’ve had it since I was around 12 years old or so. Now I’ve been on my own for a few years now and I noticed two things. One, I don’t watch much cable television. Just a few programs here and there. Two, it’s pretty expensive! It was $50 per month for just a few programs here and there. And now, it’s no longer necessary.
Got my Neuros OSD today via UPS! w00t w00t! I’ve been lusting after this since it was featured in Linux Format Magazine last month. (or was it two months ago?) I unpacked the contents and skimmed through the quick start guide. Then I hooked it up in my bedroom and connected it to the ethernet network.
They have a neat little opening animation about how Neuros is about open technology. Unlike other companies that build on open source technologies (I’m looking at you TiVo), the guys at Neuros Technology are proud of this and are using it to their advantage. In fact, they have a few Google Summer of Code projects working on improving the firmware - free engineering hours. That’s one of the benefits of open source. Another benefit is that someone like me (or, more likely, someone with lots of programming chops) can take the hardware they’ve developed and then tweak the code to make it do whatever they want.
Today I consider whether or not TV Stations as a distinct programming lineup have become obsolete. More or less since the beginning of commercial television there have been TV Stations to tune in to. (eg ABC, HBO, TNT) These stations create and broadcast original programming or buy the rights to broadcast programming created by others so that I can pick it up on my television. Every year they decide which television shows will play throughout the day for the next year. This show should play on Thursday at 2000 because that’s when such and such an age group will be watching. That show should be on at Monday at 2100 because otherwise it might have to compete with a show from another network. Some shows have nearly literally lived and died based on the timeslot they were shown in. Sometimes shows are moved around to follow other shows to benefit from the inertia of the viewers of the previous show to carry this one until it either proves itself or fails.
Today I decided to upgrade my Mythdora to the latest verison, 5.0. I downloaded the CD media and booted into the install. I had to do a text install to be able to watch it on my TV. Then I just needed to yum install the kmod-nvidia drivers. (Although, first I had to uninstall the previous nvidia drivers - they were neither automatically upgraded nor uninstalled) I started at about 1930 and was able to be completely up and running by 2055, just in time so that I didn’t have to missmy 2100 recording of “Best Week Ever”.
One of the new features of Gnome 2.22 is the fact that Totem now has a plugin to access your MythTV programs. I installed the plugin and found myself wondering what to do next. I checked on Google for totem mythtv and didn’t find anything until today when Google finally got around to indexing a forum post about it on the Ubuntu Forums. I followed the directions about editing Gconf and had success!
Joost recently (within the last couple of weeks) came out of Invitation-only beta. It’s a program developed by the same people who brought you Kazaa and Skype. Like those programs it also harnesses the power of peer to peer (P2P) technology. (Another reason for advocating net neutrality!) Joost is meant to replace cable TV and provide the viewer with programs on demand. There are a lot of other people trying to work on the same goals, but a key difference is that Joost actually has deal with content providers to legitimately provide content. Both The National Geographic Channel and Viacom Channels are available.
Recently, a coworker of mine showed me the website Hello Kitty Hell. This is a website created by someone who’s wife sells Hello Kitty items. If there is a young girl or, occasionally, woman in your life who is into the Hello Kitty Phenomenon, you doubtless know how much crap there is that can be branded with Hello Kitty and her various companions. Well, you probably haven’t seen many of THESE products. These are, as far as I know, REAL Hello Kitty items and all of them were featured on the Hello Kitty Hell website.
As you’ve no doubt heard, the US will be discontinuing Analog TV transmission in February 2009. They’ve actually already auctioned off the analog spectrum (and I’m not too happy about who ended up buying it, but that’s for another post). So, if you have cable TV you don’t need to worry about this and if you have satellite TV and you get local channels via satellite, you also don’t need to worry. If you currently get the nice, free, over the air (OTA) channels, then you need to worry - unless you have a new HDTV. But, for some reason, I don’t see the HDTV crowd overlapping with the OTA crowd. If you bought an HDTV, I assume it was to watch your cable or satellite provider’s HD sports package or HD HBO or HD Discovery Channel (which is beautiful, by the way). So you probably need a converter box.
On Hardball on MSNBC they were talking about Barack Obama’s poor bowling performance during his campaigning in Pennsylvania. One of their political commentators quipped, “Perhaps he should have stuck to shooting hoops.” I absolutely couldn’t believe they would say something like that on the news. And it wasn’t some random yahoo, it was someone that I’ve seen on MSNBC making political commentary in the past. If it matters in how you think of this, this commentator was white.
Today I was reading an article about protecting kids from seeing bad things on the Internet. The author pointed out that there’s bad enough stuff on Conservative Fox News and pointed to this link.
Well, almost. I got everything installed and configured for the remote to work. However, there are currently some buttons that don’t do anything - so I need to go into the config and get those buttons to do something. There are definitely some things that I need to program into the remove to get full functionality out of it. However, it’s pretty much done. If Danielle were to pick up the remote tomorrow, I think it would be self-explanatory how she would begin to watch live tv.
Well, I’ve have my MythTv box for about 24 hours now. I have figured out everything that was bugging me about the system except for the remote control. I hear this may require some compiling on my end. Not something I’m fond of, but I’ve done it before, so it shouldn’t be too bad.
So I went from not knowing what to record last night to now having 16 programs to record over the next two weeks. I’m not too worried about filling the drive because I can hold approximately 250 hours of programming before the hard drive gets full. Most of these episodes are things I would probably only watch once anyway, so I’ll probably be deleting them once I watch them.
I’ve wanted one for quite a few years now. I’ve really wanted one since I got my Jetway MiniQ case about 2 years ago - almost to the day. Now I finally got all the necessary parts today and put it together. If Jetway was still selling the MiniQ (it’s discontinued) I would DEFINITELY recommend AGAINST using them for a MythTV setup. The Hauppauge PVR-500 just barely fit in there. In fact, I had to move a badly placed capacitor slightly out of the way to fit the card in. I also had to remove the DVD burner (temp for the installation) and unplug the hard drive. But I finally got it up and running.
We’re on the edge of the largest disruption in Tv technology since color Tv became mainstream. In 2009 all analog television transmission will cease. Although the two terms tend to go hand-in-hand that doesn’t mean that all channels will become HD. There just isn’t the bandwidth for that in the cable pipes right now. But it does mean that soon nearly everyone’s Tv will be obsolete. Sure, the government plans to subsidize at least one converter box per household, but by-and-large everyone is going to need a new Tv; and a new Tivo….
Publishers often refer to prohibited copying as “piracy.” In this way, they imply that illegal copying is ethically equivalent to attacking ships on the high seas, kidnapping and murdering the people on them.
If you don’t believe that illegal copying is just like kidnapping and murder, you might prefer not to use the word “piracy” to describe it. Neutral terms such as “prohibited copying” or “unauthorized copying” are available for use instead. Some of us might even prefer to use a positive term such as “sharing information with your neighbor.” - rms on Piracy in Some Confusing or Loaded Words and Phrases that are Worth AvoidingPhoto by redjar on flickr, used under a Creative Commons License
I just discovered this show and it’s hilarious! It’s an HBO show about two Kiwis (guys from New Zealand) who are in a band and are trying to make it big in the US. If you like absurdist Tv shows like “Ally McBeal” or “Scrubs”, then you’ll love “Flight of the Conchords”. The band members routinely break into singing and end up in a music-video-like sequence. You have to see it to get an idea of the way it works.
This show is not very good, at least not based on the pilot. I’ll be shocked if people get into the show. Basically, it looks like the creators said, “How can we make a Tv show about race relations and not make it about race?” “I know, let’s make the non-whites be cavemen.” It’s so uncreative. So the show starts off with the cavemen watching the news and a caveman robs a liquor store. The others comment that it only makes the news when it’s a caveman. One of the main cavemen is dating a rich white girl. She invites him to a country club and they have a hard time getting in. People ask them if they should be catering or cutting the grass. It all seems pretty lame and unoriginal. If it were any other minority than cavemen, people would be saying, “do we really need this in 2007?” Sounds like something from the 1960s or 70s. But maybe I’m just being too harsh.
Let’s pretend I’m Joe College-Grad Consumer and I’m trying to evaluate how I should obtain my video content. I’m interested in watching shows as they come out - not later when they’re on box sets. Let’s see, I could buy my content on iTunes, Amazon Unbox, or some other such service. If I buy my content on iTunes I can watch it via iTunes or via my iPod. So if I have Linux, Haiku OS, or some other uncommon operating system I can’t watch it. Amazon does them one better and not even Mac users can watch it. If I have some other video jukebox than an iPod, I can’t watch my videos on the go. If I buy it via Amazon, I can’t even put it on my iPod. Both are riddled with DRM so if they decided to stop providing the service, I’m stuck with videos I can’t convert over to some new device. If I want to burn it to DVD to watch on my DVD player, I can’t. Oh yeah, and for some stupid reason, if I don’t live in the USA I can’t watch it until months or even years later.
The iPhone commercial shown tonight during the oscars was pretty sweet! It featured clips from a ton of movies where people said, “hello.” It revealed a June release date and, as far as I know, is the first commercial for the phone. Looks like they got the trademark thing settled with Cisco.
Democracy player is an interesting new type of video software which allows the user to subscribe to video feeds and have them automatically downloaded. One way to think of it is like a TiVo for internet videos. I’ll post some more after I get some experience with it, but if you want to go ahead an use it for my vimeo videos so that they go right to you, just click on the link below. I’ll also be adding a link to the side bar
I am against censorship. The recent news that Tom and Jerry will be edited in Europe to remove smoking scenes is absurd! So it’s not ok for Tom to smoke, but it’s ok for Jerry to electrocute him, chop him up, and all the other behaviours kids may imitate from watching cartoons. Even racist stuff has a place in our culture so that we can see what was acceptable back then, why it was acceptable and why it’s not acceptable today. I think it can be educational and also show how every immigrant group has gone through racist depictions in our multi-media. However, what I don’t like is unequal treatment people seem to give the different races and ethnic groups when it comes to apologizing. Here are two screenshots from the original Three Little Pigs.
I don’t usually blog about TV shows, but this Simpsons episode was so bad, there wasn’t even a point in the writers even trying. They should have just taken a week off and worked on a better show. The show started off on a funny note, although we’ve seen it before a few too many times. Bart was behaving badly and so Homer and Marge took him to therapy. This time they recommended having him play the drums. Above, they used this to create a really funny parody of the White Stripes video where the drums keep multiplying as they go on. However, things took a turn for the predictable and the episode went for a downturn when Bart ends up being picked up for a Jazz band and Lisa doesn’t. She gets jealous and, predictably, that is how we get the show back to the reset point. (meaning, as in every Simpsons episode, we have to get back to where we started so that the show doesn’t need to maintain continuity -except where it’s funny)
I read a book a few years ago called “Don’t Tell the Grownups” about how some authors hid their dangerous messages in the form of children’s book. As I was listening to some music from the cartoon Animaniacs, I also heard some hidden messages that the kids might not quite understand. For example, in a song where the Warner Brothers sing the names of the US Presidents, they end the song with, “…the one in charge is plain to see, it’s Clinton - first name Hilary.” So even in this kid’s show we see the joke that Hilary is in charge of the White House instead of Bill Clinton. This is pretty mild, but even more contentious is where Yakko sings all of the countries in the world. He mentions Taiwan as one of the countries. As we all know, we’re supposed to pretend that Taiwan is part of China when, for all intents and purposes, it is its own country in all but name. But here we are training kids that it is its own country - very interesting!
Football just gets in the way of the commercials I want to watch. So what did I do to kill time in between? I hacked Python, of course! I found a bit of humor in this, don’t know if you will if you haven’t taken CS classes.
> li
[‘a’, ‘b’, ’new’, ‘mpilgrim’, ‘z’, ’example’, ’new’, ‘False’]
> “False” in li
True
False is True! Kinda like turn left, right? hehe…
To sum up the opinion my wife and I have of the current cartoons out there for kids: they stink! The animation style is very strange and certain shows like Ed, Edd, and Eddy have a really strange palette. We pine for the cartoons of our youth. So we were very happy today to find out that, after three years of searching the web constantly, we found Duck Tales and Rescue Rangers Season 1 on sale at Best Buy. Part of the Disney Afternoon, Duck Tales was one of our favorite cartoons and represents the first time cartoons were taken seriously by studios. It kept me entertained for many a day as I sat and watched the degenerates of Duckburg try and bilk Scrooge McDuck out of his money. We’ve been watching the videos recently and the nostalgia is great! These DVDs are a must for anyone who grew up on the Disney Afternoon.
Today I read something that delighted me! On the back of the volume 2 DVD of Tom and Jerry it read “this dvd is intended for adult collectors and may contain material unsuitable for small children.” Why did it make me happy? Because it’s finally an admission that cartoons were not created originally created for children. Most of the cartoons played prior to movies with adult and/or family audiences. So I hate this sanitizing of cartoons that has been occuring on some of the box sets lately. Also, there were some cartoons which would never have been made into today’s PC world. But they WERE made and I think it is an important cultural history that we preserve these cartoons instead of putting them in the closet. We need to see these cartoons and understand why they are wrong and why they were ok back then. I think it’s important and the past can’t be changed, so don’t try to change the record! So I will enjoy this DVD more than I have enjoyed most recently.
Fanservice (or fan service) is a vaguely defined term used in visual media, particularly in the anime fandom (in Japanese, it is simply spoken as “service (saabisu)”), to refer to elements in a story that while potentially superfluous to a storyline, are designed to amuse or excite the audience. It is sometimes used in a derogatory manner when presented in a clumsy, pandering fashion or is the only thing notable about a series. Since it is extremely subjective, the most common uses are listed.
I’ve attended a few of Michael Kennedy’s Python courses over at TalkPython.fm. He’s a great instructor and he really knows his Python. (As well he should, as host of Talk Python and co-host of Python Bytes) His usual courses at Talk Python are pre-recorded and I believe this was Michael’s first time doing an online live class under the Talk Python banner. (Before the pandemic, I think Michael would conduct live, in-person classes for companies)
Over the 16 years that this blog spans I must have, at some point, mentioned that I believe sometimes we get knowledge when we’re not ready to receive it.This isn’t some spiritual or new age thing (although you’ll hear Chopra and/or Tony Robbins talk about the phenomenon). It’s simply my lived experience. Sometimes you come across some knowledge, but there’s some underpinning knowledge missing or maybe some life experience you don’t yet have to put your new knowledge into context. So sometimes this leads to a difficulty in learning the concept and other times you just don’t get the point of it and file it away or throw it away - no need to waste neurons on this!
A user of my Extra Life Donation Tracker program discovered that I had introduced a regression for brand new users who didn’t have a persistent setting. I thought about it overnight and it was exactly what I thought it would be - when I switched away from threading for the GUI, I forgot to add a way to tell participant.py to reload its settings values. I also decided to take a page from a programming podcast I heard recently and change the settings GUI to only have a “Save” button instead of a persistent save button AND a Save button. Especially when I wanted most people to hit persistent save, and that’s not what they’d most likely do by default. So I ended up making 5.2 release to fix both of those issues.
I was writing a GUI for Pydvdauthor, my program for creating DVDs on Linux from an MPEG file. I wrote this in order to help me create the XML files necessary for dvdauthor. Here’s what the GUI looks like right now:
I updated the project on freshmeat, but they haven’t updated my main page yet. You’ll know because the tar file will be 0.1.6. I’m pretty excited as this is my first non-toy program GUI. With time it’s gotten easier and easier to do them - they were quite intimidating at first.
After spending the past three days futzing about, I’ve finally configured things on my new server so that GNaughtyNice will once again run. So visit the link on the right-hand side of my blog and see how Naughty or Nice any word is!
Today I started learning Python. I picked it because it’s not only one of the hottest languages right now (outside of C#/Mono), but because GRAMPS is written in Python. I haven’t explored this deeply, but I know for a fact that plugins can be written in Python, if the entire program itself is not Python. (Also, it’s named after one of the funniest comedy troupes the world has ever known!) I have chosen “Dive Into Python” as my tutor in this new language.
I found only two things that annoyed me, one was a minor annoyance and one was a tad more annoying. The minor annoyance came from the fact that the author broke nearly 50 years of tradition and didn’t start the book off with a “hello world” tutorial. Yeah, he talks about how he’s not going to bore the reader with all the crap that I always glossed over in the other programming books. I mean, this book truly is what it claims to be - it doesn’t teach you how to program, it teaches you Python. I already know how to program from having taken 2 semesters at Cornell and learned BASIC, Java, C, C++, and a bit of Perl. But to break so many years of tradition! (To be fair to the author, he does type out print ‘hello world’ in the installation chapter, but it’s supposed to be your first program, not the first thing you type into an interactive shell!)
If there’s one thing I always try and do, it’s to see things from the perspective of others. It doesn’t have to mean that I’ll agree with the person or even think they’re also in the right. But sometimes I come across someone who sees things so differently that I can’t quite comprehend how they could see things so differently. The funny thing is that this doesn’t involve the biggest divide in America now - politics. Rather it’s a lack of self-control that, perhaps, makes me sound like the old man I’m becoming?
I gave a short reply, but I felt Twitter was inadequate to truly express myself. Of course, Diversity Panels have been around long enough that by 1997’s Chasing Amy (source of the header image), they were already making jokes about how some folks were always relegated to the Diversity Panel (click to play):
On 30 June 2021, I attended my first concert since COVID-19 started. I was masked since the Delta variant is a thing and singing indoors is definitely an activity that increases transmission. Despite that, it was awesome to get to do it again and there was a real sense of joy in the room from both the audience and the performers at once again being able to engage in the ancient human ritual of enjoying music as a crowd.
As I’ve mentioned on this blog before, I always find it fascinating how the kids interpret the world. Here are a couple examples of how Sam is seeing things at this point.
LEGO Ban
Last weekend I was sitting at the computer, working on some code when my wife came into the room. “Did you tell Sam that he couldn’t play LEGOs?”
“Of course not,” I retorted.
“Did you tell him he couldn’t be in the basement, then?”
Sam sat on my lap and looked at the keyboard on the desk. At first he tried to do the ABCs, but he was stymied by the QWERTY layout. So then he looked at the numbers. He started with 1 and counted up. As Scarlett did before him, he automatically said “10” when he got to the 0. I told him, “That’s not 10, that’s 0”. To which he replied, “Zero doesn’t belong here! It belongs here! [pointing to the beginning of the row of numbers]”.
Since becoming a parent it’s been a common theme of the blog that I find it fascinating experiencing the kids getting older and, therefore, more able to process the world around them. This winter was the first time the twins could be out in the snow for more than just a few minutes. Not only were they more able to weather the cold, but they were also strong enough to move around in the snow without too much frustration. They were also finally able to have a snowball fight. Although, watch Sam’s face closely from beginning to end in the following video, it’s priceless:
One day, I wanted to enjoy time with the kids a little differently and since my love for photography is once again peaking, I took photos of the kids playing in the ball pit.
My 1.5 year old daughter doesn’t understand entropy yet so she doesn’t understand why she can’t just put it back after she rips a flower off a house plant.
One day in October I wanted to get some exercise and it was just perfect timing with the kids up from their naps. So I took them for their first ride on the bike carriage. I wasn’t sure how they’d take it, given how randomly they seemed to take stroller rides. But they both actually enjoyed it and didn’t cry one tear. We’ll see what happens in the spring when they’re 1.5ish.
Stella loves anything she can climb on. Scarlett hasn’t developed a love for climbing trees, but Stella might. Put anything in front of her that’s a bit off the ground and she’ll try to get on top of it. Not sure if she’s trying to reach what the adults and her big sister can or if she’s just climbing it for the same reason people climb Everest: Because It’s There.
The funny thing about this age is that the kids start making all kinds of faces at the adults. But for the most part, I doubt it really means anything. For the most part they’re learning by imitating and trying things out and seeing what kinds of reactions they get. But we can’t help but ascribe intentions to their facial expressions. Then again, we do this with inanimate objects, it’s part of what makes us human. (Or at least puts us in a small category of animals)
I took this photo back in August. I’ve said it before on the blog when talking about Scarlett, but it’s incredible how much the babies change in their first year. Sure, at this point it’s 100% of his life. But eventually you reach this age where you don’t really change all that much from year to year. You get a little fatter or skinnier and maybe lose a little hair, but it’s on going back multiple years where you really see the change. But look at Sam closer to birth:
Some things are harder with twins - feeds, giving each one the amount of attention you’d like to give them, bed times, and more. But some things are pretty awesome - like the fact that they have a playmate that’s the same age. When we were little, I used to play with my brothers, but it’s not the same when you have the oldest (me in that case) directing play versus two kids who have the exact same notions of what play even means.
Just as with Scarlett (when she was a baby), we THOUGHT Sam had teeth coming. Everyone felt something in his mouth. He had all the signs….but, alas, no teeth yet.
More insight into kid brain development. Scarlett drew this image of a person sitting on a chair. I asked her if the little box was a tablet. She said, “No, it’s a door.” So I asked her why it was so small. “Because it’s far away.”
When Scarlett was born, I went a little crazy. Sure, it’s natural for first time parents, especially someone with my personality. But I think I also deserve some slack because it was a difficult, complicated pregnancy and then Scarlett needed surgery in her first week of life in order to live.
So when I saw myself starting to act crazy again (after another crazy pregnancy with premie babies), my solution was to withdraw. If I didn’t get too attached, I wouldn’t have such visceral reactions to my underweight daughter not eating. So I threw myself into my books and video games. It was made easier by the fact that my mother in law was here, so I had more opportunities to run off. But then, a week ago (and I’m writing this post about a month before this will appear on my blog), I realized that I had been letting their infancy slide past me without enjoying it. And so I put myself back into their lives. This was made easier by nearly five months of the doctor weighing Stella and finally being OK with her weight. Also, we’d found out she was lactose intolerant and switching her away from mother’s milk and cow-based formula caused her to transform into a happy baby. But now I’m really enjoying the heck out of the twins and it’s a joy to see them each day.
One of the photgraphers on Adorama’s channel has a show called You Keep Shooting. That advice worked rather well when I took Scarlett into the studio with me for a photo shoot that would be used for my Black and White Conversion Challenge. (While the videos are already live on Youtube, the blog post that ties it together has not yet been published) Scarlett tends to be a pretty awesome model for a four year old amateur. She was patient and took direction for about 10 minutes or so. Then she wanted to do her own thing. Mostly that involved jumping and dancing and asking me to photograph her doing it. I zoomed out to get more of her body on the jumps and in doing so ended up with the beauty dish in the frame. While it would be only of a medium difficulty to remove it in Photoshop or GIMP (and trivial to crop it out), I felt that it added to a feel of performance when combined with the red background. The only thing would have made it more perfect for that theme would have been if she’d been wearing a dress or tutu.
Yesterday Sam’s teeth started erupting - making him the earliest of the three kids to get their teeth and also explaining the last few days of insane amounts of drooling. (this was not a pre-published post)
Although, if you aren’t judgemental, I guess it’s a good thing it exists. I know some women (not Danielle, we both rarely drink alcohol) who had miserable pregnancies because they couldn’t drink. So at least this way if they want to drink now that the baby’s out, they can make sure the milk is alcohol-free.
One of the best parts of three year olds is their willingness to help. I will show this video to Scarlett when she denies ever being enthusiastic about helping us. She even dragged a stool over to be tall enough.
Some people still treat TV as if it’s the boob tube (that’s boob as in dummy, not breast). But Scarlett’s kid’s cartoons led her to learn some stuff that led to the following exchange:
Danielle (rhetorically): Why does this monkey have a frog on its head?
Eric: It’s Swedish. (The toy is from Ikea)
Danielle: What?
Scarlett: No, it’s symbiosis!
Eric: Symbiosis? (I wonder if she knows what it means) What does that mean?
This post is meant to be a followup to last year’s post, Visiting Walt Disney World with a 2 Year Old. I’ll be referring to, and updating, that post with the elements that were different this time around. For one, I said she wouldn’t remember the first trip. While that’s certainly true in the long run, three year old Scarlett definitely remembered the previous trip. She asked for rides she’d been on last time and she remembered going on the monorail.
As a parent you are constantly wondering if you’re doing the right thing - are you being too nice or too mean? Is this a time to give in or stand your ground? But recently I heard a great story of something Scarlett did while I was at work. When Danielle’s birthday came around, Scarlett took her toys and wrapped them up in her blanket. She gave it to Danielle and said, “It’s your present! Open it! Open it!” That just made me beam.
Listening to Jim Gaffigan talking about raising 5 kids in a NYC apartment and suddenly found myself thinking - I could have 5 kids! I have a whole house!
When I think of the world and my daughter’s place in it, nothing upsets me more than the fact that misogyny is still the norm and not the exception; especially in the tech sector and on the web.
Two nights ago Scarlett had her first nightmare (that she could articulate to us). She was screaming for us to come and then hyperventilating as she told us what was scaring her. I won’t share the exact details, but I’m pretty sure it had to do with the fact that she saw Sleeping Beauty and Beauty and the Beast that day.
Scarlett slept all night last night. But for the past week it’s been something like every other day that she sleeps through the entire night. But I can’t figure out the variables. I try to copy them from night to night. Oh well.
For more or less the first time since mid-June, last night Scarlett slept the entire night without needing her blanket fixed, her hair-tie fixed, or a cup of water. It was nice to get some rest.
For a while during Scarlett’s second year Danielle and I went back and forth on whether we should take Scarlett to Disney just before her second birthday or whether we should wait until she was older. On the one hand - she’s not going to actually remember this trip. Or rather, any memories she has are sure to be false memories triggered by the photos and videos we took. On the other hand - whether or not she remembers it, it’s still forming her base memories; memories that anchor most of the subconscious feelings we feel about our lives.
I’ve mentioned before that I find Scarlett’s mental development utterly fascinating. As someone who’s always been fascinated with the science of cognition ( You Are Not So Smart is my new favorite podcast) and psychology, it’s amazing to see her capabilities grow and change as long with her physical growth. Her most recent new ability is understanding cause and effect. If you ask her a “why” question, she gives a “Because” answer. Now, this can border on the surreal absurd as when she recently painted her face with finger paint. The exchange went like this:
[caption id=“attachment_7418” align=“aligncenter” width=“604”] Scarlett and I in the Kitchen before Bedtime[/caption]
Yesterday Scarlett pointed at herself and said, “Me… Scarlett”. She’s responded to her own name forever, but she is just now starting to realize that she is but one of many people inhabiting her reality. She is a person named Scarlett, I am a person “named” Daddy, and so on. It’s always been incredibly fascinating for me to see how her perception of the world has changed as she’s gotten older. It fascinates me more than her acquisition of new physical and mental skills (which is still cool on its own). Later on I asked her, “What’s your name?” And she responded, “Scarlett.” Up until now she’s just given us a blank “duh” stare whenever we’ve asked her that question. I’m sure this is but one of the reasons that parents put up with the stress of raising a child - for moments like this.
Near the end of August Scarlett started waking up saying “Mommy” or “Daddy” instead of crying (although sometimes in addition to some light crying). Pretty neat and I think it signifies a further understanding that we’re around when she wakes up - she just needs to summon us. I better enjoy it - in about 6 months she’ll be able to come to our room when she is in her toddler bed.
During lunch I was looking back on my blog posts. Scarlett of 4 months ago still looks like current Scarlett (only smaller). But Scarlett of 1 year ago looks “nothing” like current Scarlett. I wonder where, exactly, is the inflection point.
[caption id=“attachment_6698” align=“aligncenter” width=“400”] The “Family Dinner” Early July[/caption]
Unfortunately, my work situation dictates that Scarlett does not have any local grandparents; one set’s in NYC and the other’s in Tampa. Scarlett’s current age necessitates being taken care of by someone who’s raised children, so Danielle and I don’t get to go out to the types of places you’re not supposed to take kids like uber-fancy restaurants. When we went to Tampa recently my mom wanted to give us the gift of some time away from the baby so she gave us tickets to go to Universal Studios. So we jumped in to the middle of the pond and learned how to speak rather than dipping our toes, so to speak. Scarlett was left with my parents,adopted brothers, and dog all day long. A day or two after that my parents took us to a nice restaurant to help us celebrate our anniversary and left the baby with a close family friend for a few hours. A week or two after that, we found ourselves in New York City on the same night that my sister/brother-in-laws were getting together with their best friends and cousins for their monthly dinner. My sister-in-law invited us so we left the Scarlett with my mother-in-law. Finally, as I write this, a couple weeks before it appears on the blog, we left Scarlett at our house with my visiting mother-in-law so we could have a nice dinner out.
[caption id=“attachment_6459” align=“aligncenter” width=“527”] Scarlett and her cousin, Lan. Two different approaches to language.[/caption]
Nobody that I personally know was truly raised bilingual. My parents purposely taught me English first. Whatever Spanish I knew before learning it in third grade was picked up from visiting my grandparents. It was mostly limited to asking for food items and very generalized expressions of my state of being. Danielle was taught Vietnamese and learned English in preschool. Pretty much all of our cousins were raised with one language or the other as the primary language spoken at home. My house was pretty much only English unless my parents were trying to talk about something we kids weren’t supposed to understand. Danielle’s parents came to the US at a much older age than my parents (nearly twice as old) so English is laborious to them - they can understand it well enough to only be tripped up by the most esoteric of expressions (eg “like water off a duck’s back”), but can’t express complex ideas eloquently in English. Or, to put it another way, my father-in-law loves to tell jokes - he almost never tells any in English.
Sleep is one of the most stress-inducing topics for parents. Well, for first time parents. I imagine that, baring some medical conditions, once you’ve figured out how to get one kid to sleep through the night, you can reapply the template over and over. I think one of the reasons sleep tends to be so stressful is that parents are so gosh-darned competitive. It’s ridiculous, but every parent is in a competition with every other parent. People like me are cognizant that this is stupid and don’t do it consciously, but my mind is always playing on my parental fears and bringing it up. “Hey, that kid can walk/talk/insert skill and is the same age as Scarlett so why can’t Scarlett do that?” Other people do it on purpose - it’s how they get their sense of worth - their kid is better than those around them. These are the same people who will be asking in 18 years what college Scarlett is getting into - not because they care but because they want to tell me what school little Dylan got into. And sleep is one of those activities where the parents actually have some control (unlike their mental skills) and so it’s seen as a sign of bad or weak parenting if you can’t get your kids to sleep through the night.
Ever since Danielle and I started talking about marriage 10 years ago, one of the nightmare scenarios in my head was my kid acting like a brat in public and me getting accused of kidnapping the kid because he or she didn’t look like me. My parents are Cuban and hers are Vietnamese. All kids go through impertinent phases and some of them threaten to accuse their parents of abuse and other things in an attempt to blackmail their parents. I would hope that I would raise my kids with more respect than that, but in my head I saw them pretending I wasn’t their parent in an attempt to get me to buy them something. Joke’s on them, I’d let them sweat about being put into a foster family. But how do you prove your kid is your kid? It’s damn near impossible. But I also have an over-active imagination so I figured this wasn’t a real thing. Until I came across this news story.
I forgot what the term was called, but you know how it goes: you learn a new concept and suddenly see examples everywhere. (Or look into buying a new car only to discover that “everyone” is driving it) Once I jumped into the rabbit hole of Disney Princess Culture and our daughters, it seemed to be never-ending. I happened to come across a post in my feed reader in which a photographer was trying to figure out how to photograph her daughter for her 5 year old portraits:
When I wrote my second fatherhood post, the one about Disney Princesses, I speculated that perhaps the problem most people had with the Disney Princesses was not the movies, but how the company marketed to kids. Since Scarlett is only one, my only exposure to the princesses has been through my own childhood and adulthood love of Disney movies. This Boing Boing post about the princess from Brave, Merida, proves the point - it’s the marketing that gets under everyone’s skin. Here’s the change from the movie version on the left to the marketing version on the right:
My favorite thing about being a first-time father is watching Scarlett’s mind develop and acquire the skills necessary to be human. Anyone who paid a passing attention in biology class knows that humans are born more immature and less capable than almost every other animal. It has to do with walking upright shrinking the female pelvis while the ever-growing brain required a larger head. The result is that kids have to be born before their heads would be so large we’d be exploding from our mother’s vaginas like a horrible, horrible version of Alien. (As it is, quite a few women need an episiotomy to have a safe childbirth) And I’m not the only one to find this transformation into humanity so incredible as to refer to babies as not quite human. Jonathan Coulton mentions this in a throwaway line about his living situation while recording his song, The Presidents:
Today I heard a story on NPR’s Fresh Air about the state of child daycare in America. Let’s just say it’s not very good. It was an interview with Jonathan Cohn who recently wrote a “The Hell of American Day Care” for The New Republic. It was a story that had some details that rang too true for Danielle and I. One of the key points that Cohn makes is that daycare is very expensive - so expensive as to be a burden to those who need it the most, single parents. That is a very, very true statement. Danielle and I flip-flopped during the pregnancy about whether Scarlett would be going to daycare. Around three months before she was due to be born, we decided to go with daycare so I set out to find all the daycare centers near our house that seemed reputable.I was quite surprised that it was hard to find one that was clean, provided stimulation for the kids, and wasn’t impossibly expensive . Eventually we found one that seemed good based on the tour. About a month before Scarlett was supposed to start, we went for a visit to meet the teachers. While talking with them, we realized that most of the kids were left alone and the workers weren’t washing their hands after changing the kids’ diapers. Disgusted, we decided to just take care of her at home. The sad thing is that daycare at that place cost so much that we weren’t really losing any money with the loss of one income. That was what had made us so unsure of whether to go with daycare in the first place - the amount of money we’d still get to take home if she was in daycare was so small the only thing that kept us actually considering it was a fear of how expensive diapers and other baby products are.
As I was going through my feed reader recently, I came across an article from Ars Technica, that I’d skipped over when it first came out, which announced that the All Your Base Meme is now 20 years old. I couldn’t believe it. It was my first meme, a few years before Numa Numa would be the meme that crossed over into regular pop culture. It led me to The Laziest Men on Mars’ page on Mp3.com, which was a kind of proto- Bandcamp in the early 2000s where indie bands (and some commercial bands) would put up MP3s to gain followers. ( This ended up being my favorite song from The Laziest Men on Mars) Here is the video that took over all of us on the Internet 20 years ago:
I passed by this house every Saturday during my long run. Right after the election I made sure to snap a photo of the sign so that I could get a picture before they took it down.
Here in Maryland, Howard County has a bumper sticker you see on almost all the cars - it’s basically that green sign on the top right (without the deplorable thing, of course). So when I saw this, I was blown away at the awesome creative nature of the situation. It’s a nice bit of humor in what’s been a horrible election.
These guys show up during rush hour every Friday. I don’t care if you agree or disagree with their views, but it’s so annoying that it backs up traffic as people try and read the signs.
For the past two years we’ve had increasing evidence that something needs to change in the police/neighborhood dynamic. But Fergusson, New York City, and Baltimore are only the tip of the iceburg in every sense of the metaphor. If, like me, you follow the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Boing Boing, and other organizations committed to justice, you know that for every Freddie Gray there are dozens whose injustices don’t make it to national prominence. Of course, this isn’t even a new trend. African Americans have been complaining about harassment and being framed for a long time.
The lives lost are tragic, but the constant police misbehavior has an even worse effect on society. I came across the following today on an article about Stingrays:
Well, the supposed “good guys” (cops) no longer really care what is legal and what is not, so why should I?
Once this type of sentiment becomes entrenched, civil society is in danger. Just like paying taxes, we need people to believe in the social rules or the illusion comes crashing down.
I heard an interesting theory today - not sure if it’s a causal or correlation relationship, but it goes as follows:
We know that genetics plays a role in how naturally fearful people are. If you’re more towards fearful on the spectrum, you’re not going to want to live in a big city full of lots of fear-causing agents. So you live in the country. Also, if you’re fearful, you’re going to be happier believing in a god that can protect you from all the things you fear. Finally, fearful people hate change. They’ll want things to remain the same - to be conserved. Conservative. It certainly explains the way conservatism manifests itself in the USA. (although I’m sure because of the negative connotations, people would resent being called fearful) It also explains the return to conservatism when times are tough. But, doesn’t necessarily mean causation, maybe it just appears at the same time and there’s another explanation we haven’t found.
The Supreme Court rulings on campaign finance make me think of Animal Farm. All are equal, but some are more equal than others. (Because if money is free speech, some have way more free speech than others)
“What Mailer told me is that the CIA is basically a white Christian Protestant organization," Fellwock said. “And white Christian Protestants have to find a devil in order to justify what they do. Their Christian values say they should help the poor, like the Communists were. But they were not helping the poor. They were helping the very rich. And this created a conflict inside of the white Christian Protestant mind that could only be resolved by them seeking out a devil and making that devil into an exaggerated thing. Thus, they exaggerated the threat of communism just like they’re exaggerating the threat of Islam today.”
Questlove said his most recent stop was conducted at the base of the Williamsburg Bridge a few weeks ago following an appearance at the hip venue Brooklyn Bowl. Officers pulled over his driver, shined flashlights into the car and asked him why he was sitting in the back “like a don,” Questlove said. After showing the officers a copy of his new memoir, Mo’ Meta Blues, Questlove said he was let go.
Stephen Fry is asking for the Olympic Committee to cancel the Winter Olympics in Russia this Winter. The reason is their recent horrible actions against LGBT people. Politically, I think Fry’s in the right. (The gay stuff plus tons of other bad things Russia’s been doing lately) But I feel it could be unfair to the Olympians who spent all these years training. (Especially the older ones who can’t wait 4 more years) Additionally, given all the commercialism BS I’ve heard about the IOC and how you can’t even reference the Olympics if you’re a business in the city in which it’s happening, I doubt they’ll have the convictions to pull the plug. But how awesome would it be if they succeeded and just moved it to the second-place city that was advocating for the Olympics? One can dream….
I’m always late on my podcasts. I have a lot of stuff I want to listen to and not much time for listening. This week I was catching up on the final week of Talk of the Nation episodes as well as some This American Life episodes from a month or more ago. They kept talking about how Republicans need to do something about immigration reform in order to get the Latino Vote - or at least not automatically lose it. After all, Latinos are natural allies with the Republicans - on average Latinos tend to be socially conservative and pro-business. Great allies! Except for that whole Republican racism image that I’m not entirely sure is undeserved. (Especially since it’s been a tactic they’ve been using ever since Nixon used it to wrest the South from the Democrats. Remember McCain’s alleged black son being a tactic to lose him key states in the South?) Instead of “Build that Dang Fence” they should be working on comprehensive Immigration Reform, the pundits said. But here’s the thing - Latinos are quite diverse culturally. See this video from The Daily Show:
Do I even need to repeat it here? Eh, why not: “Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics”. Between the way the mind works and the way we’ve been socialized, statistics carry more weight than the same information without statistics. However, there are many ways to take the same data and bend the results to draw out your conclusion. In the case of a story I came across at the end of May, it was through omission. The story mentioned a study by the Drug Czar’s office that revealed
This Thursday morning I tweeted that I would need to take a look at the actual ramifications of the Supreme Court’s 26 June decisions before I did too much celebrating. I was right to have a tempered reaction. As is pointed out in the Rolling Stone story on the decision, all the overturning of DOMA does is allow for Federal rights to be given to gay couples. So they can be married in the eyes of the IRS, Federal Healthcare, etc. Now, this CAN have incredible financial ramifications, but we’re still a little ways away from gay marriage in all 50 states. Although, I wonder if the decimation of the Defense of Marriage Act leads the way to a lawsuit about states having to reciprocate marriage. I’m a little ignorant on whether states do that because they’re federally required to or because it would bonkers if you could go from married to unmarried just because you moved for a job. So there’s that.
Over at Popehat they presented an interesting article about the Ideological Turing Test. The regular Turing Test says that a computer passes if you can interact with it and you don’t know you’re interacting with a computer instead of a human. One of the closest things we have right now are the chat bots whose eventual goal is to get you to some website. Well, the Ideological Turing Test tests:
whether a political or ideological partisan correctly understands the arguments of his or her intellectual adversaries: the partisan is invited to answer questions or write an essay posing as his opposite number. If neutral judges cannot tell the difference between the partisan’s answers and the answers of the opposite number, the candidate is judged to correctly understand the opposing side.
There’s an interesting tension in democratic nations. For democracy to work there needs to be transparency. A lack of transparency leads to corruption via information asymmetry. Humans, being humans, tend to exploit this to bad ends. Sometimes they have noble intentions and sometimes they have evil intentions, but the results are the same - an abuse of power. Examples include testing drugs and diseases on African-Americans, testing drugs on military and CIA employees without their knowledge, or the lies about the US winning in Vietnam. However, nations have always needed to maintain a level of secrecy to preserve information asymmetry over other nations. It’s why Caesar of the Roman Empire invented his eponymous cypher. It’s why all countries have an equivalent of the NSA to protect their secrets and obtain the secrets of other nations. So we want our countries to keep secrets, but not the wrong kinds of secrets.
In my 20s I learned something important that changed my idealism when it came to how the world would be awesome if all the politicians would listen to me - the law of unintended consequences. I came across an interesting example in a 22 May story Planet Money did about the uneven Marijuana Laws in the USA. One of the biggest arguments in favor of pot legalization is the legalization will reduce the street price which will allow drug lords and gangs to have less money. This allows them to have less power and we all win. The same number of people get baked and Mexican and border cities don’t become war zones. (For the record I am conflicted. I think legalization does imply a sort of endorsement by the government - “this isn’t that bad for you or it’d be illegal”) Turns out this has pretty much worked exactly like that:
The Executive Pranch of government is a complex place; way more piecemeal than it seems when it’s described/depicted in media. It’s like a bunch of separate companies in which the President’s office has a controlling share. Still, given the ridiculous nature of the conspiracy theories which Right Wing News Organizations irresponsibly do nothing to counter: REALLY?!? You thought it was a good idea to let the IRS give special audit consideration to Right Wing Groups?!? REALLY?!?
[caption id=“attachment_6232” align=“aligncenter” width=“683”] The Capitol[/caption]
I keep hearing that the gun bill was killed in the Houses of Congress despite 90% of Americans wanting it to pass. Now, we know that polls can be rigged based on how the questions are asked. But, if we take as a starting point that this poll is accurate, what does that mean about our representative democracy system? There are basically two types of democracy - representative and direct. In a direct democracy we’d all vote on all the issues. In the representative democracy that we have, we vote on issues by proxy. We believe that Democrats or Republicans will vote a certain way on certain issues and we know where our candidates agree and disagree with their parties. So we elect them and expect them to vote as we would vote. So what does it mean when 90% of us want something and we still don’t get it? Is the system working correctly? Are we effectively saying they know better than us even though they were elected by us to serve as our proxy? And if it’s broken do we have any recourse short of the reprehensible idea of revolution?
A bit of a news roundup for this week’s political post.
[caption id=“attachment_6120” align=“aligncenter” width=“450”] Game of Thrones - coveted by Australians[/caption]
Apparently, illicit acquisition of the Game of Thrones is making things awkward for the United States Ambassador to Australia. He’s asking Australians to please stop getting the show off the Internet. After all, the US is quick to put (or threaten to put) other countries like Spain onto their special list if they start grabbing TV shows off the net. But Australia is an important ally so it’s embarrassing for them to be pushing the US’s buttons. Here’s where they could have done better by listening to something I’m constantly complaining about. See, according to the linked article, the issue is that for seasons 1 and 2 of Game of Thrones it was not available until a few weeks after it had aired in the US. There’s no reason for that. It’s not like the days before current technology where physical objects need to be ferried around the world. It’s all digital - all parts of the world should be able to watch all programs at the same time. Because NOW that it’s available a few hours after it shows in the US, the people in Australia don’t care - they’re already used to getting it for free online. So - the whole cliche about the genie being put back in the bottle.
The slippery slope rebuttal can be pretty annoying depending on how dumb the person using the argument wants to be. For example, many people say all the surveillance cameras we have everywhere are a slippery slope towards totalitarian governments. While I think we still have a few tricks up our sleeves before we have to be worried, I give the argument some credibility because in the past one of the greatest tools totalitarian governments had at their hands was to create a snitch society. When your neighbors (or even your kids) are going to potentially rat you out to the government, it means you really have to watch what they catch you doing. Even something that is innocent (as far as the government’s rules) can be dangerous if your neighbor misinterprets what you’re doing. So if you don’t have to worry about neighbors, but have video everywhere - all the worse!
Usually for my blog posts, I write them in isolation and try to guess how my regular readers might respond. However, for this topic, I spoke with Dan about it as I wrote it. As someone who’s visited Hiroshima, Dan has a pretty unique perspective on the topic compared to most Americans.
With the current revolution in Egypt I’ve been hearing a lot of speculation on NPR’s Talk of the Nation about who will come to power when the current government falls. There’s been a lot of talk about the consequences of a government run by The Muslim Brotherhood. The fact is that some key figured in Al-Qaeda were active in The Muslim Brotherhood. Another fact is that Hamas is an off-shoot of The Muslim Brotherhood. However, at least two guests have mentioned that in the last few decades the organization has sworn off violence. Wikipedia (caveats about Wikipedia reliability apply) claims that bin Laden has denounced the fact that The Muslim Brotherhood has denied violence and is participating peacefully in Egypt’s parliament.
Recently I was listening to Fresh Air’s interview with David Weigel. The occasion was a book he had written about how the Republicans are shifting what their party is about. Frankly, I’m a bit concerned. The party seems to be less and less about small government and big business and more and more about courting religious fanatics. Seriously, a lot of these people sound just as bad as the Mullahs in Iran. There’s nothing wrong, of course, with courting religious voters. For some people they don’t care if their government is going to have financial policies that will harm them as long as they try to make abortion illegal again. But religious fanaticism is wrong whether it’s Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Sikh, or any other religion.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“I’ve got some beef with the White House’s Policy”] [/caption]
The Whitehouse has been posting the official photographer’s photos on flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse . They each have the following written in the description:
This official White House photograph is being made available for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way or used in materials, advertisements, products, or promotions that in any way suggest approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“The Seat of Power”] [/caption]
The last time I really blogged about politics was back around the 2008 election. Looking over my archives, I found that, by contrast, I blogged about politics quite a bit from 2007 and prior. My heaviest political post density (for It’s A Binary World 2.0) seems to be 2005-2006. Why so much back then? I think because I was already posting pretty regularly about politics and I was extremely frustrated over the second Bush term win. I think this post best sums up the despair I was feeling at the time. It was very interesting to read this post with 4 years of hindsight. First of all, this sentence: “There haven’t been any abuses of power (that we know of) … “. Little did I know we’d find out that December about the NSA’s Warrentless Wiretapping which, I believe, would have heavily swung the elections in 2004. ( THANKS New York Times!) Second, this fraction of a paragraph:
If you are an American reader of this blog, make sure you vote. It doesn’t matter who you vote for - just vote. And keep your eyes out for any hanky-panky with the voting machines.
Today I was listening to Fresh Air on NPR. They had an economics guy on who’s now a professor at one of the University of Maryland campuses and was involved in Clinton’s economic team. (Although he didn’t always see eye to eye with Clinton’s treasury secretary) This guy put the current economic crisis in the best terms and framed it so well, I can’t believe that we’re in this mess. Those stupid jackasses on Wall Street “were betting that people who did not have money to pay their mortgage would pay their mortgage.” Just take a second and read that again. Yeah, pretty nutty, isn’t it? If people had just used their noggins we wouldn’t be in this mess. “Sure,” you might say, “hindsight is 20/20.” Yeah, but it doesn’t take hindsight to see that people who have bad credit probably aren’t going to pay their mortgage. Couple that with the fact that Wall Street swindled them into interest only loans and variable rate mortgages, and you HAD to see that a disaster was on the way. Again, they were betting that people who didn’t have the money to pay their mortgage would somehow pay their mortgage. Again, in their defense you might say, “but they thought housing prices were always going to go up.” And to that I say, WHEN has ANY market EVER gone up FOREVER? Hello! The tech bubble was just 10 years ago! Nothing ever goes up without an end. That’s just ridiculous. Sigh! Seriously, I don’t know how they let this happen. These guys all have degrees in finance. They should have known and done case studies on how whatever’s hot now won’t be hot in a few years. And then AIG freakin’ insures the mortgages of people with bad credit? I just can’t believe it!
There’s been a lot of news for the past 3-6 months about the new FISA bill and how it provides immunity for the telecommunications companies. A lot of people including the Electronic Frontier Foundation are opposed to this provision of the bill (if not bill in its entirety) because they say the telcos have acted illegally by assisting the Executive Branch with their warrentless wiretapping of phone calls. The reason they argue this is illegal is that the original FISA bill, as written in the 1970s (and ammended throughout the years) requires a warrant for all wiretapping of US Persons. That includes foreigners who are physically in the United States. As the New York Times revealed in 2005, the Bush Administration started acting against this law in 2001 because of opinions written by some radicals in the Justice Department (such as Yoo).
This year has been an incredibly racist year from people being afraid to vote for Barack Obama because they believe he’s a secret Muslim (so? Any American-born person should be allowed to run for president) to people who say he’s too black or not black enough. Now this old guy claims that Obama’s an Oreo and it’s unfair for him to reap the rewards of the Civil Rights battles of the previous generations.
Obama will not be the first African-American President of the United States. Barack Obama will be the first mulatto President of the United States of America. This is the myth of race in the USA. Apparently because Barack is half-black, he’s the first African-American President. But if he’s half-black then he’s also half-white. So why isn’t he just the 40-somethingith white President of the US? I don’t understand, if one half is valid, why isn’t the other?
Yes, the race for the White House has hit new lows, even for this race. It appears that we haven’t learned from the past two races and it’s starting to scare me. Both in 2000 and 2004 one of the biggest reasons stated for George W Bush winning was that both Al Gore and John Kerry seemed too “elite” and “aloof”. George Bush seemed a little more down to earth, someone you could invite to a BBQ. Well look where that got us!!
On Hardball on MSNBC they were talking about Barack Obama’s poor bowling performance during his campaigning in Pennsylvania. One of their political commentators quipped, “Perhaps he should have stuck to shooting hoops.” I absolutely couldn’t believe they would say something like that on the news. And it wasn’t some random yahoo, it was someone that I’ve seen on MSNBC making political commentary in the past. If it matters in how you think of this, this commentator was white.
I’ve always been a bookworm and so around the age of 11 or 12 I asked all my male and female friends whether they would vote for a black man or a white woman for president. Everyone, male and female alike would always say black man. I was surprised that the ladies didn’t stick up for one of their own. I was so surprised, that I would ask my friends this question every couple of years. We moved a little and I also changed who I hung out with so I wasn’t always asking the same people. Yet, even though high school and college a majority would say they would rather go for a black man.
As you know, a student was tasered at UF a few days ago. I hadn’t written anything about it until now because I wanted to get some details from my brother who matriculates there. Before I get to his info, I just want to say that this incident has shown why video is important in news. Anyone who, like me, saw the video thought the kid deserved to be tasered. Why? The kid, who had the smirk of a self-entitled jerk as he stepped up to the podium, was clearly resisting arrest. When the police detained him, he pushed them away and broke free. He then pumped his hands in the air victoriously, although this was cut short by the police catching him again. He continued to push and shove the cops until they finally tasered him. You don’t want to listen to the cops, that’s what happens. But the people who only read about the tasering though that it was undeserved. Undoubtedly those written bits of news left out the way he was acting, the look on his face, and the shoves against the cops.
Stanford University, a leader in trying to get Congress and the public to understand the importance of the Public Domain have done what I’ve been dreaming of doing for a few months now. They decided to test the doctrine of Fair Use in copyrights by creating the following video. Any Disney fan should be sure to watch. Don’t know what fair use is? Don’t worry, they’ll explain it below.
In the case that the above video should be removed from youtube, download it from their page. If that page should happen to be down, then you can download it from me here.
Looks as though my method of figuring out which Congressmen are gay is correct. Just look to see who is working the hardest to restrict gay rights. For example, Senator Larry Craig. He pleaded guilty to basically trying to solicit sex in a men’s bathroom. He’s now claiming that he wasn’t guilty and he plead guilty to get people off his back.
Sorry buddy, but that’s pretty weak and it’s hardly a good defense. After all, if that’s true then you are admitting to perjury and that, in and of itself, is enough to end your career. That WAS the charge brought against President Bill Clinton in the 1990s.
Alberto Gonzalez has resigned as Attorney General. The guy who Bush said wasn’t going anywhere is leaving! I haven’t been able to to catch the news at all today as I was in training, but I saw a little headline on Tv in the lunchroom! I am so curious to find out what caused this to occur. I am even more curious about what he’s sitting on. What did he do that was worth pushing him out. Even more strangely, people seem to be abandoning ship like rats. You know that old saying, (paraphrasing) “you know the ship’s going down when the rats flee”.
I came across the follwing European Threat information the other day but have been unable to validate its status. Anyone else seen these and can verify?
The English are feeling the pinch in relation to recent terrorist threats and have raised their security level from “Miffed” to “Peeved”. Soon, though, security levels may be raised yet again to “Irritated” or even “A Bit Cross”. Londoners have not been “A Bit Cross” since the blitz in 1940 when tea supplies all but ran out. Terrorists have been re-categorized from “Tiresome” to a “Bloody Nuisance”. The last time the British issued a “Bloody Nuisance” warning level was during the great fire of 1666.
A male Florida Senator was recently arrested attempting to solicit sex from a male prostitute. His excuse, “I was in a bad neighborhood and I saw all these black guys and I got scared.” I don’t understand how that excuse works well. John Oliver from The Daily Show had a better excuse, “I’m bulimic and I have putting my finger down my throat.”
Politicians continue to take the gay vote for granted. Personally, with the stances that Republicans take on social issues I don’t see how anyone with an alternative lifestyle can vote republican. Well, today, while listening to last week’s “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me”, I found out that recently John McCain fired some of his campaign staffers. His complaint? He wanted them to stop dressing him in “gay sweaters” on the campaign trail. Wow….
Every time politicians speak, I want to question their numbers, to force them to quantify where it came from. No one has the balls to do this out there other than Colbert and John Stewart who will play back to back quotes of politicians contradicting their selves. Seriously, does the rest of the news industry work for the Ministry of Truth?
With all the news recently about whether Tillman’s death was just a ploy by the White House to make the war sound great or whatever the heck was going on, I was very surprised to find that I had blogged about it when it happened.
It’s not often that one finds acts of selflessness and courage nowadays. Especially here in the States people seem to only be chasing after money, power, and fame. Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with those goals - we simply tend to take things too far and puruse those goals at the blatant disregard for others. That’s why Tillman’s story has made such an impression on me. He was a football player who gave up a multi-million dollar a year contract to go fight in Afghanistan. He died last week in post-war combat.
As we know, there are many drugs which cause memory loss. They must be taking all of them up there because every time they end up in front of Congress, they spew a series of “I dont’ remember"s or “I don’t recalls"s. In a clip they showed this morning on CNN from Alberto Gonzalez’s testimony I counted about 10 “I dont’ remember/recall"s. It’s clearly a mockery of the system. If they can’t compell him to remember, what’s the point of the trials? To give the media something else to focus on?
It’s not Paul Wolfowitz’s fault that he used nepotism to give his girlfriend a job at the state department paying $200k a year. No, no…. You see, he told use yesterday why he did it - He was new to the bank and didn’t know that it was wrong. Of course! The World Bank obviously operated under different rules than the rest of the US Government where he worked for 24 years. But then again, he was one of the nut jobs that said invading Iraq was a good idea, so perhaps his judgment isn’t working so well.
In t his post, Scott Adams mentions some of his dissapointment with our goverment. The key three paragraphs to his post were:
Recently our so-called Speaker of the House was meeting with the Syrian government while our so-called Vice President was on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show reminding the world that the so-called Speaker of the House doesn’t speak for the United States in foreign policy. Foreign policy is the job of the so-called President who doesn’t speak to governments that don’t already agree with him.
Whenever one political party expresses wishes to give a fixed percentage tax cut to all Americans, the other party portrays it as tax cuts for the rich. (I’ve complained on this blog about this before) Their proof: the rich get back a few thousand bucks while the poor only get back a few hundred. The stupidity: if it’s a tax cut where everyone gets 1% off, and the rich people put more in, 1% of their money is more than 1% of the poor person’s money. Of course, they never dig deeply into it in the news and perhaps it’s a tax cut on Porches or something else that only rich people have. Somehow I doubt that or the other party would bring it up.
Back in 2005, when gas prices were high, the Republican Congress (although the Dems may have acted the same in their shoes) decided that, to save a few barrels of oil, they would move daylight savings up 3 weeks. They forgot that the ENTIRE WORLD now runs all of its most critical applications on computers and computers are programmed to follow the same daylight savings from 60 years ago! Now Bill Gates is warning people not to trust their appointments in MS Outlook and other software until the day of the old daylight savings. Don’t these guys remember the Y2K mess? And now they want to mess with the way computers keep time AGAIN?
For the last few years, the movie industry’s battles with Internet pirates offered an entertaining diversion during Oscar season. Their problem: they need to “leak” their films to Academy members for consideration, but don’t want those official leaks to fall into the hands of pirates. In 2003, the MPAA banned all screeners, causing a massive uproar from directors, actors, critics and indie studios. The plan was eventually scrapped in December 2003
Yesterday Democratic Senator Joe Biden was announcing his candidacy for president when someone asked him what he thought of presidential candidate Barack Obama. His response?
[Barack Obama is] “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”
This immediatly became a huge race issue. I mean, it just boil’s people’s potatoes to hear educated blacks called “articulate”. Why doesn’t anyone say, “Man, you should vote for Hilary. She’s articulate.” It seems to imply that all blacks speak ebonics and it’s some kind of wonderful achievement for them to speak articulately.
First they release news that Barack Obama went to school in a madrassa in Indonesia. When CNN decides to do some research and proves that it’s just a public school, Fox comes out and shows their anti-muslim racism outright.
I think it’s time we rethink why we execute criminals. Because we seem to have some very funny and contradictory ideas right now as a result of no one wanting to examine them. For example, Jon Doe brutally murders a family. He gets the death penalty and we must ensure that his death is quick and painless. Did he ensure that the deaths he committed were quick and painless? And what kind of a deterrent is death if it is going to be a as nice as being knocked unconscious?
I think it’s now pretty obviously true what people were suggesting in the month before elections. All of a sudden, gas, whose high prices had been a thorn in the side of the Republicans, took a dive in price. The truth (no conspiracy) is that Republicans are in bed with Big Oil. Bush and others own oil companies or are on their boards and stuff like that. The conspiracy was that the gas companies were helping them out by lowering prices. (They could afford to with the huge profits they were raking in that summer)
MSNBC predicts Democrats control the House of Representatives with anything from 7 to 47 seat majority. The Senate is nearly 50-50. This will leave us in a very interesting place where they will either need to get all bipartisan or nothing at all will get done. With the voting machines and their uncertainties I predict there will be massive calls for recalls. The Republicans will not just go out without a fight. And I don’t blame them - the democrats would do the same in their shoes.
President Roosevelt’s dream, and a proper implementation of Woodrow Wilson’s Leage of Nations concept, was founded 61 years ago by 50 members, with 51 members when it finally opened up. Today it has 192 member states and has had both many failures and many successes. May it continue to prevent World War 3, while also providing help for its member states to overcome poverty and injustice in the world.
So, North Korea has tested a nuclear weapon, despite our warnings. It is now time to see if our threats have some backbone to them. Kim has continuously defied the world and has been rebuffed each time. Does he give a darn? No, because all we do is threaten sanctions over and over and threaten with talks. Despots do not respond to talks they respond to violence. We need to either sabotage their country and cause as peaceful a revolution as possible, or we need to attack. Although I hate war, we went into war in Iraq because they supposedly had nukes. Kim not only has nukes, but he is a nut and will probably sell nukes to his good friends in Iran. The world needs to stop being so pusillanimous.
The man who was in trouble last year for saying, “New Orleans, at the end of the day, will be a chocolate city….” is now in trouble for remarks he made last night on CBS’ 60 Minutes. The reporter asked him why, after a year, New Orleans was a mess. He replied, “Look, you guys in New York City can’t fix a hole in the ground, and it’s been five years. So let’s be fair.” The “hole in the ground” he referred to? The former site of the Twin Towers, also known as Ground Zero. Just like the chocolate city remark, which was meant to reflect tensions that aftrican americans may not have the money to return to New Orleans, this new remark is a great example of one of those things you may think to yourself or tell your close friends. However, it’s not something to say on Tv if you are a mayor, especially if you have a history of saying things people find offensive. Then again, he DID get reelected after his chocolate city remarks, so maybe it’s a noteriety thing which will benefit him in the end.
As the British (and even some Americans) begin discussing the possibility of racial profiling after this latest foiled airplane terrorism plot, we should remember that not all terrorists are Arabs or Middle-Eastern-looking. Take, for example, the worst terrorist attack in the US prior to the attacks of 11 Sept 2001 - The Oklahoma City Bombing. The terrorists in that plot, which blew up a federal building and killed many people, were white guys. In fact, although I was young at the time, I remember them saying in the news that they had delayed in capturing the guys and even had given them the chance to get away because they were looking for Arabs instead of white guys. So think about that before you start racial profiling. Also think of the DC Sniper - a black man. There are a lot of people who hate the US government or just like to kill people and they don’t all have “al” or “bin” in their name.
UK Police say they have stopped 21 suspects who were going to blow up a plane from the UK to the US. Effective immediately at Heathrow, people cannot take beverages, hand lotions, or USB thumb drives onto an airplane. What were these suicide bombers going to do? Get drunk, lather up, and throw USB sticks at everyone? More news after work. In the meanwhile check out Google News.
I wanted to get an idea of what the Brits thought of this whole scandal with the US allowing their ports to be run by a company owned by the country United Arab Emirates. I found a British article with an interesting side to the story. As you know, the ports used to be run by a British company. The article said that he couldn’t believe that a company based in England for over 140 years could be sold away to another country. It was, he said, one of the last vestiges of the British Empire. The former CEO was nearly outraged at this. The biggest irony in the whole situation is that the new company is owned by the state of Dubai, a former English colony. So a symbol of English colonialism was bought by a former colony. I couldn’t help but smile a little at that. That particular article didn’t have much to say about port security and Arabs. Personally, I think most of the American outrage came over the fact that the proposal came out of nowhere. Even pres Bush *claims* not to have known about it until it came out in the news even though he said he would veto any negative responses. Kinda weird for someone who was supposedly in the dark. In the end, it’ll probably pass, but his credibility has been sorely damaged. I heard the other day his approval ratings were down to 34%.
I don’t agree with a lot of what the current administration is doing. While I don’t necessarily believe that G. W. Bush is evil like Mr. Burns and wishes to bring the US and England together under IncSoc, I do agree with some congressmen that he has set some perilous precedents if congress just leaves things alone. For example, as many jounalists and bloggers have pointed out, one of the key themes in 1984 is perpetual war. Because Oceana is always at war, people are willing to tolerate a loss of freedoms and a worse quality of life than they had prior to World War II. I agree that we have certain rights afforded to the Executive Branch during war-time. However, If Bush can do whatever he pleases because we are at war and we are always at war, then he can always shirk the constitution.
According to many sources, including BBC News, an audio tape purported to be from Bin Laden calls for a “long-lasting truce” between the US and the terrorists. He also claims that we have been safe in the US only because they have been focusing all of their attacks on Iraq. BBC didn’t mention this, but according to a Fox News broadcast, we should believe his truce because he is forbidden to lie since he is a Muslim. As compelling as that logic is, the US is not biting. Personally, I wouldn’t either.
“Indeed, it has been said that Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried.” - Winston Churchhill
There has been a lot of talk recently concerning the CIA and their interrogation techniques with Terrorism suspects. Specifically, the talk has centered around “secret prisons” in Europe and the fact that the UN can’t go and investigate the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. However, I suggest that the debate is centering around the wrong tennants. Most of the debate has centered around whether we have been torturing prisoners. I don’t want to minimize the evils of torture. We obviously don’t want to use torture because it undermines our message to dictatorships and it increases the chance that Americans will be tortured when they are captured.
To all those who have had to fight in wars justified and unjustified;
To all who have left their families, uncertain if they would ever return;
To all who may have lost everything from limbs to families:
Thank you for fighting and keeping us safe. Without you, we wouldn’t have the great country we have - one where we even have the freedom to protest against the wars it rages.
Bush asked Congress to earmark approximately $7 billion to help save us from a bird flu pandemic. I think this is good, but with the regular “plain jane” flu season around the corner, I think we’re going to have a huge problem. First of all. Congress takes forever to take action on Bush’s initiatives, if they take action at all. Remember all that money Bush promised the Katrina-ravaged gulf states? The vast majority of it still hasn’t been approved/sent out to the states that need them so badly. And this is something that has already happened, therefore allowing people to demand action. We usually have a problem getting a large number of people mad about something that may happen in the future, but people can protest really quickly over something that has already happened and is currently affecting them.
“Scooter” Libby, VP Cheney’s advisor, looks like a really shady guy. So it was no surprise to me when I heard on NPR news that he has been indicted and he has resigned. He wasn’t indicted with outing the CIA agent, but with perjury and obstruction of justice. Paltry crimes you say? These were the crimes that ended getting Bill Clinton impeached! Carl Rove didn’t get indicted, but isn’t scot free either! They’re still investigating him even though the Grand Jury has been retired. I’m currently listening to the Special Prosecutor on WYPR’s (our local NPR affiliate) streaming audio and I’ll update you if I learn anything else.
First a quick aside:
That Civ4 post got pushed back a little as I couldn’t resist playing and then I had to get to bed since I have an early day today. Expect it later today if nothing irregular happens. To Tara’s comment yesterday - your comments made me check my tech tree poster - Mine is in English. It seems like you got a European version even though their debut is in November.
While browsing Andrew’s page this post of funny news stories. The one I thought was the best was the one about Chairman Mao doing weddings. I went ahead and checked out the yahoo news story he linked to and I thought it was quite an interesting story. Apparently, there is a guy who looks exactly like the late Chairman and he performs at weddings for 500 yuan. I guess that’s the key difference between the way a communist/despotic country is run when compared to a democracy. Apparently people there idolize this guy enough that they would love to have him speak at their wedding. Could you imagine someone dressing up as George Washinton and performing at your wedding?
Those of you who have been reading since I was blogging on Tripod will recall (or be able to go back and read) my post in which I wondered why the terrorists, if their true aim was terror, were not attacking us randomly in all manner of locations. You can only do the big attacks so many times before security gets too tight around the important targets. For example, for a long time after the 11 September attacks in the US, the Statue of Liberty was closed. Washington DC is also now off limits for any pilots who have not obtained prior clearance. Anyway, these types of attacks barely terrorize me. They happen in certain high visibility areas that most Americans have no contact with. If it weren’t for visiting my wife’s family, for example, I’d never be in the New York City area. Therefore, I wondered why they didn’t just attack mass transit and other public areas which are impossible to protect.
That’s what the Chesire Cat told Alice in the Disney version of the story when she informs hims that she doesn’t want to visit the March Hare or the Mad Hatter because they’re both mad. I feel as though the entire US has fallen through the rabbit hole. Don’t get me wrong - I love my country; it’s got the best combination of freedoms and protections that exists in today’s world. But the things people have been saying recently have been scaring me a little. Long-time readers of my blog (who have been with me since the beginning) will know that ever since the 11 September attacks on the US, I have been a bit wary of how our political system has been becoming more and more like IngSoc. There are days that I feel that those speaking for the US are part of the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s 1984.
Americans may remember George Bush’s comments this last election in which he said that America had to check to see if it was ok to import drugs from Canada. When he said that, my jaw dropped to the floor. Did he just say that we had to check and see if drugs from Canada were safe? We’re talking about Canada here, not some developing nation. I am pretty sure that the Canadians have equal or higher standards for their medicines; Europe usually does. Basically he didn’t want to upset the drug companies who had paid Republicans so much money to keep being able to charge Americans higher prices than our neighbors to the north and he didn’t want to upset Americans who might not vote for him if he flatly told them they wouldn’t be able to buy these cheaper drugs.
What does “Deep Throat” mean to you? Well, if you were born in the 80s and happen to have a “dirty mind” then the term is a reference to a type of oral sex. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’d rather not be the one to take away your innocence so go google it. If you are a history buff or were born in the 60s (or earlier), “Deep Throat” was the name given to an informant to the Washington Post who helped to leak key information about Richard Nixon which ended up in his resignation. In my opinion, it was a very weird name to give to this person considering the fact that it was a reference to a cult pornography movie in which a woman who was unable to orgasm, called upon a doctor who found out that the problem was that her clitorus was located in her throat. I think you can guess where the porno went from there. (I’ve never seen it, but saw some clips on VH1 - I think it’s the grandfather of cheesy 70s music-style pornography - the kind which is always parodied)
I am coming to the end of the Lexus and The Olive Tree. In part three of his book, he had a very interesting analogy for the world’s economic systems. If they were a gas station….
Japan - the gas costs $5/gal, but there are five guys who service your car. They pump your gas, fill your tires, and clean your windshield. They are all guaranteed to have their jobs for life.
I’m still listening to The Lexus and the Olive Tree, which I mentioned back back on 12 March, since it’s a massive 21 hour book. Today I heard what I consider to be one of the most interesting theories involving wars. The author of the book noticed that no two countries containing a McDonald’s in their borders had ever fought. In other words, if Country A and Country B both have a McDonald’s they won’t fight each other. If Country C didn’t have a McDonald’s, then it may be attacked by either Country A or Country B, or it may attack either of these countries. His main exclusion to this theory is that a Civil war doesn’t count, so the problems in Yugoslavia don’t disprove the theory. The author then took his theory to McDonald’s who then independently verified that no two countries containing a McDonald’s had ever attacked each other.
Today is Good Friday, the day that Christians celebrate the betrayal and death of Jesus the Christ. Jesus was murdered in order to fullfill the prophecies dating back to the days of the Old Testament books of the Bible. According to the doctrine of Original Sin, when Adam and Eve committed the first act of disobedience against God, they caused all of their descendents to also be born into sin. In order to symbolize a washing away of this sin, God commanded the ancient humans (proto-Hebrews) to sacrifice a purely white lamb, sprinkling the blood symbolically onto the sinners, to take away their sins. The lamb, being without defect, was supposed to stand in for the humans who had the “defect” of sin.
I recently began listening to an unabridged version of The Lexus and The Olive Tree and I must say that after about ten minutes of listening to the book, I’m quite disconcerted over the increasing connectedness of countries and their ability to affect each other. Allow me to illustrate this by paraphrasing the book’s opening story.
In 1998 the Thai government had been keeping the currency, Boht, valued at one US dollar. Banks and investment first in Thailand therefore were borrowing money from US banks for their ventures since US banks were much more stable. In August of 1998 the Thai government, for whatever reason, decided to no longer tie the values of the two currencies and the Boht fell to 30 Boht for 1 US dollar. The Thai banks now had to come up with a lot more money to pay back their loans to the US banks. A short time later, 56 of Thailand’s 58 major banks closed down. Over 20 thousand white collar workers in Thailand lost their jobs. Foreign investors began removing their money from developing Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand, South Korea, and others. This would have only caused an asian recession except for the ties to Russia.
In September I made two new recipes. One was the Lamb and Grilled Onion burger from Weber’s Big Book of Burgers. I also tried a hot and fast recipe for pulled pork from Raichlen’s Project Fire. The taste was good, but the biggest hit was the recipe he had for a mustard sauce.
beef short rib ragu
For October the only new recipe I made was America’s Test Kitchen’s recipe for beef short rib ragu. I really enjoyed a different take on a ragu than the more French and Cuban versions I’d had in the past. It is definitely a recipe I’d like to make again.
Just one new dish in August. We had lots of repeat foods, but only one new dish. As far as I know, I didn’t have it until I was an adult and visited my sister-in-law in Long Island. At their favorite Italian restuarant / pizza joint I ordered it once when we were on the restaurant side. This America’s Test Kitchen version was very tasty and I would definitely make it again. Danielle liked it too, but it wasn’t a MUST COOK AGAIN dish with her.
As food stocks started to normalize towards the middle of COVID summer, I started to take advantage and try out more new dishes. It also helped that we were FINALLY able to find yeast again!
Chicago-style pepperoni pan pizza
hoisin-glazed baby back ribs
oatmeal-rasin bread
Grilled brined zucchini with cilantro-yogurt sauce
succotash
vanilla icebox cookies
The Chicago-style pepperoni pan pizza was one of the first recipes I wrote down to make. However, I never seemed to have both time and pepperoni at the same time. So I finally made it. I think America’s Test Kitchen’s decision to have me precook the pepperoni to render some of the fat helped both mellow the pepperoni taste (my kids were able to eat it) and keep this from being a greasy mess.
May was Cuban food month. I’d received a new cookbook of recipes from the Miami diaspora and back in Cuba. So I tried my hand at a few new recipes. Technically, I’d done the breaded steak (usually called Chicken Fried Steak in the USA) and pork shoulder Cuban style before, but this was the first time doing it with these recipes. I was very happy with all the results, although I learned a few things along the way for the next time I make these dishes.
When it came to new dishes, April was all about bread. First, I made a no-knead bread with America’s Test Kitchen’s recipe.
Almost No-Knead Bread
It came out OK. I actually tried it again the following day to try and get a darker crust. The funny thing is that this is one of the easiest breads to make and yet it’s the one I’ve had the worst results with. The crumb wasn’t as open as it was supposed to be and for all the time it took to proof it was pretty meh.
While I did a lot of cooking in March, I only made one new dish - Brown Sugar cookies. I’d had regular sugar cookies my entire life. I’m pretty sure this is the first time I had sugar cookies made with brown sugar instead. The brown sugar definitely took these cookies to a whole other taste realm where the molasses in the sugar added another dimension to the taste. I’m not saying it’s supplanted [white] sugar cookies in my heart, but that there’s a place for each of them. If the kids ate more cookies or if I didn’t care about my heart health (most cookies have a LOT of butter) I’d make these a lot more often.
Very low number of new dishes. Mostly because I was obsessed with programming and Gwent.
Both recipes were from America’s Test Kitchen. The pizza recipe was a challenge to be able to make a pizza that would be ready in an hour and not suffer too much from not having the pizza ferment for a few days. I thought it was alright. Despite liberally dusting the pizza peel, had a hard time getting the pizza off.
Without a doubt, the biggest story to tell about my cooking in 2019 is learning how to make, and no longer be intimidated by, breads. I made 15 different new breads and biscuits this year, including new family favorites like the Amish Friendship Bread and Brown Butter-Cardemom Banana bread. Also, there were the harder breads like the braided cinnamon bread and hot cross buns.
cinnamon swirl bread
After spending years wanting to make my own bacon, I finally did!
December had a relatively low number of new dishes. I made a pasta bolognese from a new cookbook that I found rich and delicious. I had an OK attempt at flat bread. I needed to roll out the bread a bit thinner because it didn’t really fulfill the “flat” part of flat bread. The Spanish garlic soup was pretty good, except they didn’t mention how much Sherry vinegar to use and I guessed a little too high. The coffee cake was pretty good, and the first time I’d made one.
BBQ Thermostat: Arduino MKR 1010 and Therm Shield measuring temperature during a smoke
Today I was smoking a turkey so I figured it was a good time to do a live test of my project. There was good news and bad news. I think it’s illustrated quite well by the following graph:
Grafana graph of my BBQ Thermostat while measuring the smoker temp
Lots of Mexican food and a some other neat, ambitious dishes in August. The by this point the chicken chilaquiles were one of the oldest chicken dishes on my To-Make list. I just never happened to have the ingredients around and I wasn’t sure if it was going to be a hit or a flop. Finally, I decided to do it! I went overly ambitious and made my own corn tortillas, which I then toasted in the oven to create chips which I then put into the chilaquilas. It was quite delicious. On the other hand I was not a fan of “Dave’s Fish Tacos” from the Weber Charcoal Grilling book. But, redemption came in the form of Easy Weeknight Chicken Tacos, one of the newest additions to my To-Make list from America’s Test Kitchen’s Cook it in your Dutch Oven. It had a good blend of citrus and Mexican flavors. I’d definitely like to make it again.
I finally made bacon from scratch for the first time, so that deserves its own gallery:
One of the things that had been stopping me was the fact that Costco only sold pork bellies already sliced for Korean dishes. Then, the weekend I was going to ask them if I could buy a full pork belly, they had one there. They said customers had been asking for it so they were going to start selling some whole. It was a pretty neat experience making my own bacon. I can see why it’s so expensive - it involves a lot of waiting and a lot of labor.
The biggest dish for me this month was the pit beef, which I’d been wanting to make for at least two years now. I finally went ahead and smoked it according to Meathead’s recipe (along with his recipe for Tiger Sauce - a type of horseradish). I was afraid after waiting for so long I’d have hyped it up too much in my head, but it turned out to be my new favorite way to eat roast beef.
Sometimes you only think you don’t like a dish because you simply don’t like the way it’s been prepared for you in the past. This has happened to me with a LOT of foods. Most recently I realized had written off oatmeal simply because my tastes didn’t match that of the others around me. From childhood to adulthood I’d only been given instant oatmeal if I’d asked to taste oatmeal. It has a place in people’s lives, but like most instant foods, the instant version is a pale imitation of the real thing. Then, when I got married my wife ate steel cut oats. I tried them, but again didn’t like them. It wasn’t until Red Hat Summit this year when I ended up trying them again because I wasn’t really feeling the other breakfast options. And it turned out that I could indeed enjoy oatmeal. It’s just that I liked it more al dente than my wife. Armed with the knowledge that oatmeal didn’t have to be mushy, I set about figuring out the right water to oats ratios to get it to the consistency I preferred. Now, at least once a week I have oatmeal with some fruit and, if we have some in the house, nuts. In the photo above I have some brown suger, but I’ve stopped adding that. With the sugars in the fruit, it’s not necessary. I do add a little vanilla extract and, if the flavors make sense, some cinnamon or cardamom.
I didn’t cook many new dishes in May, although I did have some encores of dishes that the family enjoyed. Since there are too few dishes to group them by theme, I’ll just go chronologically this month.
Ever since getting America’s Test Kitchen’s book on Mexican dishes, I’d made some great enchiladas a few times. Both their beef and ground beef enchiladas bring some great flavors to the table. The former is a bit more flavorful, but it also takes longer. So I wanted to see how the casserole version would come out. Overall, it’s very similar in flavor and tastes very good. Where it excels is as a party or potluck food. In the same dish that only makes about 12 conventional enchiladas, you can feed a lot more people because individual squares can be cut to any size. Also, like a lasagna, it has layers so there’s more to eat for a given amount of space on the dish.
April was a month for getting a little more ambitious as well as trying variations on dishes I’d made before. Among the variations I would count the tilefish, grilled chicken thighs, and bratwust hot tub. The tilefish was just a variation on the Raichlen grilled fish recipe I’d tried before with blackfish. This time I removed the scales to ensure the flavoring on the outside of the fish wouldn’t be wasted. It still wasn’t quite what I wanted, but I think grilled fish like this one is a great candidate for an after-grill marinade. I’ll try that next time. The grilled chicken thighs were a variation on the gochujang paste recipe from America’s Test Kitchen. I liked the mustard-tarragon paste, but Danielle was pretty blase about it. Finally, the bratwurst hot tub was the third such variation on braising bratwurst on the grill. It was fine, but I prefer Meathead and America’s Test Kitchen’s versions to Raichlen’s, which was the one I did here.
March was a bad time to have gluten allergies in my house. I did a lot of baking and most of it turned out great. The bake-sale muffins (used blueberries) in particular were a huge hit. I never knew blueberry muffins could taste so good. I’m kind of mad at every place I’ve ever eaten them before for making me think they couldn’t taste all that great. On the flip side, I was not a fan of the banana-poppy seed muffins. I think for now I’ll stick to banana bread and banana snack cake when I need to get rid of some ripe bananas. The lemon-buttermilk pound cake fell somewhere in the middle. It was good, but I find the loaf lemon pound cake I make to be easier and taste just as good. Then again, I have some mods I need to make to this recipe next time around to maybe get a better consistency.
February is when I started really getting confident about my bread-making skills. Most of it was great although I didn’t like either of the two buttermilk biscuit recipes I made in February. By contrast the Amish Cinnamon Bread (ATK’s version of Amish Friendship bread) and Brown Butter-Cardamom Banana breads were SO GOOD. Both have been made again in the few months since. Everyone who was here to celebrate a birthday party couldn’t get enough of the Amish bread. The North Carolina cheese biscuits were another of those recipes where Danielle was skeptical when I told her what I was making, but ended up really liking them. The pork posole was good, but flavor-wise reminded me a lot of the chili from the same ATK book. The Vermouth cracked potatoes from Milk Street were certainly a different flavor than I’m used to for potatoes, but I wasn’t dying to make it again. By contrast I loved the stuffed chicken. It had a pesto I finally loved (no pine nuts and lots of basil) and great flavor. It was my mom’s favorite dish for the weekend she was visiting. The skillet turkey burgers were also great. The panade made it the best turkey burgers I’d ever had even though I would still prefer a beef burger if given a choice. Finally, the thai chicken soup was good and spicy.
Macadamia nut, White Chocolate, and Cranberry Cookies
In January I made a lot less new things than in previous months, but I did prove that even in sub-freezing temperatures I still BBQ and Smoke. My least favorite were the macadamia nut, white chocolate, and cranberry cookies. I’ve liked white chocolate and macadamia nut cookies in the past, but this was my first time adding cranberries. But it was the macadamia nuts I wasn’t a fan of this time. I’m not sure why, I just didn’t liek the taste. The fattoush was a neat taste for a new salad and I learned how easy it is to make your own pita chips! The glazed ribs were OK, but I didn’t fill the water pan in the Weber Smokey Mountain and I think that led to a more smokey/burnt taste as the glaze dripped off and into the empty water pan. The Big Butts Pork Steak was pretty awesome, though. The recipe also contained my favorite home-made BBQ sauce. I definitely look forward to revisiting that recipe!
Bourbon Burger with Caramelized Onions and Horseradish sauce
chopped winter salad with butternut squash
Egg and Sausage McMuffin
English Muffins
English Muffins
Ground Beef Enchladas
Ladybird Johnson’s Barbecue Sauce
roti canai
Brussels Sprouts with Lemon
Thai-Style Pork Burgers
It’s hard to say which dish was the best one, because lots of them came out great. But it’s pretty easy to say which was the worst - the roti canai came out very much unlike what I was trying to replicate despite following a recipe that went along with a youtube video. Second worst were the English muffins, but they were WAY better than the roti was. They just came out more dense than I was hoping for and they didn’t quite have the nooks and crannies they were supposed to. This was a relatively fast recipe from my Cook it in Cast Iron book. I’ve got another in Bread Illustrated that has a longer rise overnight in the fridge so maybe that one will come out better. Lady Bird Johnson’s BBQ sauce came from Legends of Texas Barbecue, a part of a Humble Cookbook bundle. I took it with me to my mom’s house for Christmas. It was the first time I’d ever made it, but I thought it came out really well - it got lots of kudos. The ground beef enchiladas were a great approximation of the beef enchiladas which normally take twice as long to cook. The Egg and sausage McMuffin came from learning how to make the egg cook the right way by reading about it on Serious Eats. It was pretty good, but I was wishing I had some Canadian bacon instead so it could be more like the real thing. The Brussels sprouts with lemon was a dish I made to try something different with the veggie and it turned out great. It was a very simple recipe that I was able to memorize and so I also made it during Christmas at my folks’ and people really liked it - even those who professed not to like Brussels sprouts. The chopper winter salad with butternut squash came from Dinner Illustrated and it was a very fun, new type of salad that I’d never eaten before. Danielle has made roasted butternut squash before, but we usually consume it via soup. Finally, the two burgers. Of the two, the Bourbon burger was the more universal hit. Danielle was really impressed with my caramelized onions (given my newbie status on making them) and the horseradish sauce was pretty good, too. While I liked the Thai-style pork burgers, Danielle wasn’t quite into the taste of Asian-style pork in a burger. That said, I also cooked them in the carbon steel pan to try and get more use out of it, but it was just a little smaller than the 12 inch pan the recipe called for and so the pan was a bit crowded and I think that deterred some Maillard reaction from happening.
While I was swimming last week I came to the realization that my daily snack between lunch and dinner hits pretty much all the food groups. I usually have some afternoon tea with milk (dairy - check!), a couple servings of whatever fruit we happen to have at the house (fruit/veggie - check!), and peanut-butter filled pretzels (carbs, protein, and fats/salts - check, check check!)
The biggest success of the new dishes in Nov 2018 was the grilled chicken fajitas. We already had a recipe we often used for grilled chicken fajitas, but I wanted to stretch out and used the recipe from America’s Test Kitchen Mexican Recipes book. The biggest disappointment was the Georgian Chicken Soup (Chikhirtma). It was almost universally reviled in the house. I thought ti was fine, but everyone else hated it. The Milk Street Barbecue Rub No. 2 gives poultry a taste similar to satay, so it works quite well with peanut sauce. The mushroom pork omelet was promising, but I added way too many mushrooms because they called for mushrooms by weight and I used dried mushrooms rather than regular, hydrated mushrooms. Everyone liked the chicken tonkatsu, but only I liked the tonkatsu sauce. Finally, the donuts were a bummer, but I think that’s because it didn’t rise as much as it was supposed to, leaving it a bit dense.
In September I tried out four new recipes. The grilled breakfast quesadillas were surprisingly great. An egg is cracked into a ring of cheese and topped with grilled bacon and cilantro. The cauliflower gratin was WAY too rich for just Danielle and I to finish it. But I could see it working well for a Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner. The carnitas were a great indoor version. Finally, for the first time I grilled a full, in tact fish. My father-in-law had given me some sea bass he caught and I filled it with aromatics and then covered it in more herbs and aromatics after grilling. It was very, very good.
It’s been 2.5 years since I discovered Amazingribs.com and Meathead when I was trying to figure out why my BBQ wasn’t as good as the best BBQ joints I’d visited. Last year I ordered the 2016 and 2017 Annuals from Cook’s Illustrated and Cook’s Country as well as getting into Chris Kimball’s spin-off Milk Street. This year I continued my journey with the purchase of a bunch of cookbooks in a Humble Bundle sale as well as ATK’s Dinner Illustrated and Milk Street’s Tuesday Nights, both of which focus on weeknight meals that can be completed in 1 hour or less. I also began to take some steps towards being able to cook intuitively via Samin’s Salt Fat Acid Fire which I haven’t read, but I did see the Netflix show of the same name.
We’ve been growing plants and herbs at the house for a few years now (but not as many as I wish we had in retrospect). But, as far as I could find with a cursory search, I’d never done an end of summer summary of how the growing season went for us. I know there are still somewhere between a few weeks and a couple months before first frost, but I don’t expect anything to radically change between now and then.
Last time I was in Florida my mom took me to a specialty BBQ store, Just Grillin, off of Dale Mabry in Carrollwood. I didn’t know such places existed. I thought everyone just bought their grills at a hardware store, Amazon, or direct from the company. It was a pretty great to be able to see and touch Yoders, Weber Summits, and other high-end BBQs. They also came by with some chicken they’d cooked in the back using a variety of rubs they sell. Oh yeah, the entire wall behind the register was full to the brim with rubs and sauces - most (if not all) of them local or competition group rubs. Any rub you wanted to try would be poured into a tasting cup. Sure, it’s not the same as having the rub on some food, but it’s certainly better than the blind buying we have to do with supermarket rubs. As a gift, mom said she’d get me any rub I wanted to try, so I picked up Thunderbird Chicken Scratch. Then a bunch of travel meant I had to keep waiting impatiently until I could finally try it. Last night I finally got my chance.
Continuing my summer of learning to cook new dishes, I decided to tackle steakhouse burgers. I’d already mastered diner burgers, so I wanted to work on these. I didn’t follow Meathead’s directions 100% in that I didn’t create ground beef out of a nice cut of meat. But I did follow his recipe for using 2 zone cooking to make good-tasting, thick burgers.
Now, it’s possible that it’s because I crowded my burgers (18" kettle, not much of a choice), but it took WAY too long to come up to temp. After 20 minutes it was not anywhere near 155. Since it was getting late, I just moved them to the sear side to speed up the cooking.
Part of the fun of being into BBQ has been trying new things. As I’ve mentioned before, when I was growing up “BBQ” was what we called grilling and it MOSTLY consisted of burgers and hot dogs. Very occasionally it would be something else. Lots of lighter fluid and mediocre results. But now I know about low and slow and smoking and 2-zone grilling. And once I mastered ribs, chicken, and brisket it was time to experiment. So I tried Meathead’s recipe for Alabama Birds with White Sauce.
I’d never made bread before (not counting pizza dough), but I recently got a dutch oven on sale on Woot.com and was looking for some things to make in the device. Then I came across this recipe for No-Knead Dutch Oven Bread. It seemed really simple, so I figured it’d be a great activity to do with Scarlett. She did in fact love working on it.
Lessons learned - the crust looked fine after 45 minutes and I already cut the time with the lid off to 10 minutes. Next time I might just take it out after the 45 minutes if the crust looks good. Other than that, it’s very delicious and tastes amazing with butter.
In the past few years I’ve been moving away from seeing pizza as junk food towards seeing it as another food that is sometimes made with care, skill, and love and sometimes make in a hurry for a buck. I can’t remember the exact timeline and can’t be bothered to search for photo evidence, but the two restaurants that changed my mind on pizza were Two Amys in Maryland and Grimaldi’s in Brooklyn. Two very different styles of pizza, but Grimaldi’s cooked in a fire-based pizza oven and authentic Neopolitan at Two Amys. So now there was a new measurement against which to measure all pizzas: the wood-fired pizza.
Do you know why a lot of people don’t BBQ that often? Because they always make the same thing and that’s boring. So I’ve been going through all the recipes in Meathead’s book (and other sources) to see if anything else is tasty to my palette. This time it was smoked chicken. I cut the chicken in half.
I took the skin off because Danielle was going to take off the skin anyway and since this was a rub-based recipe, that would remove all the flavor as well.
I’d tackled all the major BBQ meats. It was time to try and make my own sauce. So I assembled all my ingredients and followed Meathead’s recipe. It’s supposed to be like KC Classic, which I’ve never had. I also went with the secret optional ingredient of Tamarind paste.
Then I finished cooking
And canned it while it was still hot:
So what was the verdict? Again, I’ve never had KC Classic. My favorite commercial BBQ sauce is Trader Joe’s Kansas City sauce and that’s nice and sweat. This sauce was very tangy. While it has grown on me over the past couple months, it’s definitely not my favorite and my wife doesn’t like it at all. I want to try one more time, this time tweaking it to be a sweeter sauce. Also, I want to see how it changes when caramelized, something I haven’t had a chance to do yet. Still, it was fun to make my own and add it to my other BBQ/smoke creations.
I had been wanting to do brisket for a very long time, but I couldn’t find anywhere convenient to buy a whole packer brisket. But right before I was convinced I was going to have to go to a butcher, Costco decided to carry them.
Yeah, it was 20 lbs, which is ridiculous for what was essentially going to be just 3 adults, but it was USDA Prime for only $3/lb! I had no choice. I put it in my shopping cart and resolved to deal with the consequences later.
For the first time in a few years, my mom was going to be in town for Mother’s Day. We didn’t have a ton of events to attend or anything, so I asked her what she would like for dinner if she could have anything. She said she wanted prime rib, so I figured it was the perfect time for me to try out a prime rib roast on one of my BBQs. Meathead has lots of tips for eliminating most of the hassle of making a prime rib roast. First of all, remove the ribs - they only serve to block heat and keep the roast from cooking evenly. Second, use twine to make it into a cylinder so it cooks evenly from the outside to the inside.
This past winter I smoked a pork shoulder for the first time. I learned some lessons, continued to work on getting better with my kettle, and decided it was time for pulled pork again.
I cut the pork shoulder into roughly equal halves. I had three things I wanted to experiment with:
Would it cook faster?
Would it be nice to have twice as much bark?
I wanted to try a Mexican-ish rub on one to have pulled pork tacos.
In my opinion, for a long Weber Kettle cook you can’t beat a snake. If it’s going to go VERY long, it can be a pain as you have to move the water pan to continue the snake. But for medium-long cooks, it’s a nice, perfect way to have a consistent temperature throughout the cook.
We were debating what to eat. There are a lot of dishes we like, but it’s easy to forget all of them when you’re constantly thinking of the half dozen foods your toddlers eat and the dozen or so foods your preschooler eats. Lamb was on sale at Costco, so I told the wife we should have lamb and I would cook it outside and we’d have gyros. Well, modified gyros because we used naan for the bread instead of pita. The image above is Danielle’s wet brine for the meat. Based on the size of the chunks Danielle chopped up, I decided to do a reverse sear.
I’ve been perfecting my diner style hamburgers (aka quarterpounders) thanks to the tips from Amazingribs.com. But there’s a guy at work I talk to about grilling, BBQ, and smoking. He was telling me about his bacon cheeseburgers. I thought about how I tend not to like bacon cheeseburgers in restaurants. Usually either the bacon or the cheese is substandard and I end up just preferring a hamburger. But then I thought about one key thing - when I make the burgers I decide all the ingredients.
For a long time we’d been avoiding New York Strip Steak. I’d tried to grill some a long time ago and it just couldn’t hold a candle to a Ribeye. But recently my father-in-law bought a bunch and gave us some so I gave it another shot. I took all I’d learned in the past year or so from Meathead and used my thermometer to get a prefer medium steak. Here’s where I ended up:
As a manger, I’m often thinking of ways to show my employees how much I appreciate their hard work. Recently, while watching a Meathead video, I saw his quote at the end that cooking for someone is an act of love. And love is not far off from appreciation so I figured I’d ask my employees if they’d like it if I made them some smoked baby back ribs for the cost of raw materials. We settled on a half rack per person, salad, and bread for $6. So then I just had to pick a date to make the food. Thanks to my mom getting me the Weber Kettle for my birthday this year, I had enough room to smoke to the ribs across both my BBQs as long as I used rib racks. So I used the Weber 6605 rib racks (which you saw in the featured image and will see again below)
Long-time readers of my blog will know that while I’ve been working at mastering my grills for a few years now, it was in 2016 that I decided I would take my BBQ to the next level. Back in June I smoked baby back ribs for the first time. Then I realized that I wanted to step up my smoking game I’d need a Weber Kettle. Mom got me one for my birthday and at that time I started pining for a chance to take on one of the two kings of BBQ: Pulled Pork or Brisket. The local area made up my mind for me. Apparently it’s next to impossible to get full packer brisket in Maryland. So pulled pork it would be.
Ever since I bought my house and got a BBQ/grill I’ve learned that most of what I thought of as BBQ growing up was actually grilling. The key difference is that you BBQ at a lower temperature (typically around 225 F) and that BBQ is cooked via indirect heat. Grilling is cooking directly over a fire and, typically, done at the highest heat your BBQ/grill can provide (at the very least starting around 350 F and higher). Although I’ve been cooking ribs successfully on the BBQ/Grill for the past 6ish years, I’ve never really been BBQing them. So I looked around on the web and I found the recipe for Last Meal Ribs.
As an adult I have discovered a love of cooking. Sure, it can get mundane on a day-to-day basis, but I enjoy creating something tasty. I especially enjoy learning how to cook food that is much more expensive to eat out. Recently when I went to Costco, I was in the pork section and noticed they had pork bellies. So I wanted to try and recreate a Samgyeopsal-gui dish. So I found a recipe that included the sauces that go along with the dish and tried it out. It was a hit on the first try. Enjoy some images of my cooking:
When Dan and Katie were last in town, they invited Scarlett and I out to the Papermoon Diner. If you’ve seen John Waters movies and wondered if that Baltimore still exists, it certainly has one enclave at the Papermoon Diner. If you’ve been to a TGI Friday’s or a Chili’s you’ve seen restaurants with crap on the walls.
Well, the Papermoon Diner takes that and filters it through a Baltimore sensibility:
I heard about this on Boing Boing and then a month later on Marketplace: a sushi restaurant in New York that has eliminated tipping. Sushi Yasuda decided that instead of making people sit there at the end of the meal and agonize over how much to give the wait staff, they’ll just pay them the right amount and not charge the patrons tip. This means that they had to raise prices accordingly, approximately 18%, but I’m quite supportive of that. If there’s one thing I’ve come to hate, especially as money has become more tight since the baby was born, it’s that the true price of eating out is hidden from me. I don’t want to have to take out my calculator and do a bunch of math (sum everyone’s entree and add 18%) to know the true cost of the meal. I want to have a reasonable idea as I order how much money I’m going to spend. This also gets around the issue that comes up everywhere from Reservoir Dogs to any time tipping is brought up on the Internet: how much is the right amount to tip and is it ever ok not to tip? Everyone has crazy different rationals on this and I think just including the tip in the price and paying a living wage gets around that. Really, the only people who benefit from the current system are the credit card companies and restaurants who see us ordering more than we can actually afford because the prices aren’t higher. If a federal living wage law were passed, everyone’s prices would go up at once and restaurants wouldn’t have to worry about being at a competitive disadvantage for raising prices. Then again, maybe it’s not a bad thing to be a first mover while people still think of tipping as customary:
I have found myself frustrated with Michael Pollan lately. In the course of promoting his new book about cooking, he’s taken to spouting some opinions that I’ll frankly call claptrap. He’s mocked women who felt trapped by the kitchen drudgery that they got stuck with simply because they owned a vagina. He’s implied that it’s easy (if you’re not lazy) for everyone to make every meal an ideologically sound slow-food meal. In general, he’s disparaged the very idea that some people don’t like to cook.
On 30 April of this year I came across an article on Eater about how restaurants can deal with No-Shows. I didn’t even know this was a big enough thing that restaurants have multiple strategies to deal with it. Every time I’ve made a reservation to a restaurant, I’ve gone. I set reservations because I (or I and my wife and whoever else is involved) have decided to go out to eat and want to be sure we’ll not have to wait too long to be seated. Or, in the of exclusive restaurants, ensure we’ll actually get a table. I could understand people not showing up because of a life event - someone gets sick or dies. But I don’t understand the mindset of making a reservation without an intention to attend. Additionally, the biggest reason I make reservations is, as stated above, to ensure I get a table in a reasonable amount of time. Nearly every place I’ve ever made reservations at has a line out the door and even with a reservation I sometimes have to wait 15-30 minutes for my table. That said, they wouldn’t write this whole article if there weren’t a bunch of people skipping out on reservations so I wanted to answer their suggestions.
I’ve recently begun to notice a disturbing trend: anything that’s good for you will cost you more. The most serious infraction comes from the food supply. When I go to buy ground beef, cheapest of the beef products, there are three tiers of product available for me to purchase. The cheapest product is ground beef with the default amount of fat. Since ground beef is already among the scrap left from a cow, this fat content can be pretty high. Since I eat ground beef fairly regularly, about once every two weeks or less, this is unacceptable. So I can choose 95% lean ground beef or 97% lean ground beef. However, these products are more expensive. In other words, economics would tell me to eat the meat that was worse for my body. However, I am a rational human being who is not a slave to any theorems of economics; I choose to buy the expensive 97% lean ground beef. Of course, if I really want to get a leaner beef product, I can go from ground beef (where $5 will feed me many times) to filet mignion (where $16 will feed me twice - max). Not only will it contain more vitamins and less fat, but the tenderness of the meat is also healthier for my digestive system, and, to a trivial degree, my teeth.
It took me a while to get the hang of the many, many options within Podcast Republic so that I could get it to work the way I wanted - automatically downloading episodes on WiFi. Unlike Doggcatcher, but more like other modern pod catchers, you can stream a podcast instead of always having to download it. The option is nice, but it does introduce complexity. As usual, it was annoying at first to have the pod catcher think it needed to download every single episode from the podcasts you subscribed to.
I’ve been using Doggcatcher for YEARS - ever since I first got a smartphone something like 8 or so years ago. I started using Doggcatcher on Dan’s recommendation. One of the best features it’s had is the ability to speed up podcasts without chipmunking the voice. (I think that came a year or so after I started using it). Recently I’ve been a bit annoyed at Doggcatcher, particularly with podcasts from the EarWolf network (although there may be other networks with the same behavior). Every time Doggcatcher checks for updates, all the episodes from EarWolf will disappear and redownload. Until it is done, I can’t listen to the episode.
Neil deGrasse Tyson’s podcast is also annoying in that if a new episode comes out before I’ve finished the previous one, it’ll overwrite it so that I now have two copies of the same file. This makes it more stressful than it needs to be when I’m trying to choose the next podcast to listen to. So I started asking folks for recommendations. Dan recommended Podcast Republic to me. I don’t know if it’ll fix things for me because Dan was using it because Doggcatcher wasn’t working well for him for authenticated feeds, but I’m hopeful.
It’s been a little over a year, so I wanted to make a new, updated list of the podcasts I’m currently listening to. For shows I covered before, I’m just going to copy the description over, verbatim.
Science
The Naked Scientists - This has nothing to do with nudity. It’s a British thing, like The Naked Chef. This great British radio show covers science topics equivalent to what you’d read in Discover Magazine in the USA. It’s informative while being entertaining, and I learn a lot every week. (Approx 1 hour long)
Back in May, I set up my Raspberry Pi B as my garage door monitor. Unfortunately it stopped working, I haven’t investigated yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it got hit with the infamous SD card corruption that was a big problem with the early Raspberry Pi boards. (I think I read it’s much less of a problem with the Raspberry Pi 4) So I decided to go ahead and switch it with a Raspberry Pi Zero W, especially since you can get it with headers from Adafruit for only $14. As a bonus, it’s got a better processor (same as the Raspberry Pi 3, I think) and built-in WiFi. It’s also got a smaller footprint, but that doesn’t matter to me for where it’s mounted. So now I’m back to having a Raspberry Pi B without a job to do (assuming the hardware is fine and it just ended up in an unbootable state. I’ve also now got a usb WiFi module for it, so maybe that’ll help me think of something for it to do. I think the Raspberry Pi rover project I got in a Humble Bundle uses a 1st gen Raspberry Pi, but I’d been thinking of using a 4th gen Pi in order to maybe do some more fun stuff with it like maybe some openCV based Computer Vision and/or machine learning.
I hadn’t upgraded anything other than the graphics card for about a decade and so my gaming computer was starting to drag a little, even on games that shouldn’t have been that demanding. It was time for an upgrade! But I hadn’t kept up all that much with computer tech since I knew we didn’t have it in the budget to be upgrading constantly. So I headed over the to the subreddit the PC Master Race (yeah, problematic name) Builds page. It seemed I could get a pretty decent build without spending too much money - especially since I already had a case and hard drives. So I posted on the subreddit just to make sure I was making the right choice. I’m glad I did, because they let me know that in June there’d be a new AMD motherboard coming out and I wasn’t in a huge hurry. So I waited and got this:
A good read for October, I guess. I didn’t really know what this book was about at all. I’d gotten it during a free ebook Friday for B&N years and years ago. The title made it sound like it was a detective noir or something. Nope. It’s about a young adult who hung out with a bunch of bad characters and was betrayed and sent to hell. In other words, it’s a revenge story.
In a post about how security has changed, Josh Bressers had this great bit of info in how some people are living in the past when it comes to understanding technology:
If you listen to my podcast (which you should be doing already), I had a bit of a rant at the start this week about an assignment my son had over the weekend. He wasn’t supposed to use any “screens” which is part of a drug addiction lesson. I get where this lesson is going, but I’ve really been thinking about the bigger idea of expectations and reality. This assignment is a great example of someone failing to understand the world has changed around them.
Back when I first was working on replacing my Pogoplug (the original BabyLuigi), I was looking at potentially using it to learn about Docker in addition to creating virtual machines that were actually useful instead of just playing around with VMs for looking at Linux distros. The benefit of Docker was to have the isolation of VMs without the overhead of VMs. Also, since it was trending pretty hard, I figured it’d be good for my career to have some experience with it. So I spent a few weeks researching Docker and playing around with some of the online demos. I read lots about how it was used and how to avoid the usual pitfalls. But in the end I went with a VM that did a bit more than I wanted; I’d wanted to separate services so that updating one thing wouldn’t cause me to lose everything. However, the more I looked into it, the more it looked like unnecessary headache without enough of a benefit. Dockers were SO isolated that if you wanted to run a LAMP stack you had to run at least 3 Docker containers and find a way to string them together and have a separate pool of storage they could all access.
So, the current solution for bridging with KVM/QEMU/Libvirt involves macvtap. This allows your VM to be seen by computers on the network which is key if you want to, say, run a server or DNS on a VM. However, there’s a catch - the host can’t reach the VM. Sometimes this doesn’t matter and sometimes it does. For example, if the guest is running DNS and you want the host to be able to use it for DNS, this is an issue. There is another way to do it, but it involves ditching Network Manager. I actually like Network Manager. So what am I to do?
While it’s generally not needed for a general purpose Linux computer, when editing large RAW files it helps to have lots of RAM. But the biggest reason I upgrade the RAM on SuperMario was that Crashplan requires about 1GB of RAM per 1TB being backed up. With me moving everything but gaming over to SuperMario, I have 4.8TB of data to back up! It had been failing its backups and now, with 24GB of RAM it works quite well and I’m getting close to having everything backed up! Plus, there’s a lot less swapping of programs in and out of RAM!
A few days ago I created a page to keep track of various computer projects I’m working on. I figure this’ll help me keep track of what’s going on and what I’ve written about it and it’ll also maybe serve as a one-stop shop for visitors to the blog who want to see how I implement various projects.
This is the first post documenting my research so far on my Home Server Project. Here’s how I describe it at the moment:
There’s a lot that’s gotten to feel old with my Acer Aspire One. I hate the pitifully low screen resolution and it doesn’t even have enough oomph to run KDE netbook. But one thing I DO like about it - it has lots of USB ports. I hear many of the newer computers are aping apple and reducing ports.
my wife and I like to collect Disney movies from our youth. These movies are most likely to be watched by kids and kids are likely to damage DVDs. I’ve heard lots of anecdotes on the net from parents who are on their fourth purchase of the same movie. That’s just silly! Also, Disney’s always putting their movies “back in the vault” so if your kid messes up one of THOSE movies, you could be SOL for up to a decade
Let me tell you a story of how ridiculous things have gotten in my house thanks to Netflix Instant. My wife owns all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD. However, she does not watch these DVDs. She watches it on Netflix Instant. Why? Because it’s easier for her to go on Netflix and find the episode she wants than to try and remember what season has what episode and go get that, take it out of its case, and put it in the DVD player.
If I can go off on a quick tangent - the movie studios might read #2 wrongfully conclude (as I’ve seen WB do before) that this means they should keep their stuff off of Netflix instant. No, what it means is that people want the convenience of Netflix Instant with the movies they buy. We would NEVER go look for a CD to play music anymore. It’s all on our computers in Amarok or iTunes or Rhythmbox and we can easily search for an artist or a song and not have to worry about what CD it’s on. This is what people want in their homes! Yet the movie studios have killed every company that’s tried to do it. Well, no wonder people are using Netflix vs buying movies nowadays! Sheesh! OK, rant over.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“333” caption=“The old file/print server”] [/caption]
A few years ago I heard about the Fit-PC. It was a computer that was the size of a stack of two or three CD jewel cases running Ubuntu. This was pretty cool, but, most importantly, it only used 15 watts of electricity when under highest load. At first I entertained using it to replace Danielle’s computer to save space in the crowded office we had in the apartment. But the fact that the computer couldn’t easily be upgraded put the kabosh on that. Eventually I turned my attention to replacing our file and print server with one of these. There was just one problem, they cost somewhere in the $300 range so they don’t really pay themselves off quickly enough in electricity saved.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Everything but the RAM”] [/caption]
14 Sept
Sometime in my junior or senior year of college I came across a book about building my own computer and resolved to do it. My tribulations with my Dell computer were enough to convince me that building computers with generic parts was the way to go. Later experience with my Emachine and the inability to tack on a DVD-writer (because they had blocked the slot with a metal mesh) confirmed this was the case. Just under five years ago I was finally able to do this and built my [first computer](/2006/01/03/new-computer-built/ /2006/01/07/building-the-computer/). I can’t believe it took me four hours to put that first one together. Nowadays, if things go well, it takes about an hour. In the time since then I’ve built 8 other computers. Of course, those weren’t all for me. I also built Dan and Dave’s newest computers, my father-in-law’s computer, his sister’s computer, and a bunch of others.
Windows Antivirus product Kaspersky Internet Security 2009 is blocking access to Google.com. What’s so insidious about google? Do they know something we don’t? I discovered this problem when my wife wanted to get on Google. I then spent the next 15 or so minutes trying to figure out what was going on. Found someone in Britain with a similar problem, but no solutions yet. Hopefully this is fixed very soon or they’ll have a ton of angry former customers.
Penguin Pete has started a very interesting view of what drives people to use certain operating systems. You may find part one a little heavy, especially if you don’t know the history behind it. Basically, Pete has been slammed quite a few times for his blasphemous viewpoint that Ubuntu is a watered down version of Linux that doesn’t always show users the true spirit of Linux. Part two is a witty, well written historical (and fanciful) acount of how we arrived at the current situation. The fractionalization of the three main OSes is the subject of Part Three.
When I first started playing with Linux I had a very crappy old computer; I think it was a 286. It was painful to try and do anything in Gnome or KDE, but it ended up making a pretty good server as it was the server that ran this site until late 2005 or early 2006 (I can’t remember). Then I moved onto another machine which was slightly better, a Pentium II 400 Mhz, 128 MB RAM computer. That computer ran a little better in Gnome or KDE, but I became a huge fan of Fluxbox as it ran best and I was able to use it as my almost-primary computer. It is now Luigi, my file/print server.
I expected this to be an awesome triumph because I spent a good deal of the weekend trying to get blender installed on bulletbill. It finally got installed, but it doesn’t work. I had to do some editing here and there to try and get it to work and I think that’s part of the problem. I’m not sure exactly how to redo this in freeBSD, but it’ll probably be another month before I dedicate the time needed to it. That said…..
Ok, so adding in the laptop really improved the render time on the farm. It went from 405 seconds to 260 seconds! So it went from 6.75 minutes to 4.3 minutes!! Now THAT is a dramatic improvement! It basically cut the rendering time in half. So, with this setup, it should take roughly 12 hours to render “Jose’s Dinner”. Not bad compared to 25 hours! I wanted to have one other comptuer participate, but my master died so I had to have that other computer replace the master’s job. I hope it’s just a bad network card. Wed I’m going to open her up and see if I can clean it and reseat the card and see if it will work correctly.
In that post, we saw that it took my Linux computer 481 seconds and my Windows computer 453 seconds. So for a slightly longer than one second animation, the windows computer was about 30 seconds faster to finish it. So one might reason that a 2 minute video would finish 1 minute faster and so on as time goes by. So it could become relevant for a long enough animation.
It took me nearly all day, but after consulting one source after another I finally got drqueue to run on my computer. It’s actually very easy to do….if someone actually gives you good directions!
The key to make it work for me was setting up the master and slave .confs and creating the etc, logs, and tmp directory in the same nfs shared folder that I had placed my blend file in. Once I did, it worked like a charm!
As Neal Stephenson tells us, “In the beginning was the command line…” But then came the Graphical User Interface, or GUI. These point and click environments, as they came to be called, originated in Xerox’s PARC research center. However, the Macintosh was the first computer to bring it to the masses. For someone my age, I experienced most of this as it happened. For you younger readers, you can look back and see how primitive the GUIs used to be. Remember that when they first came out, they were state of the art and some even decried them as pointless. Experience it all here.
Ok, so with 3.0 there are still some major reliability issues. I blue screened a bunch of times just trying to get to this blog and it was quite slow. However, it did seem to work a bit better than 2.9. I will be testing installing some Windows programs to see just how far they have come. Pretty soon I’ll be able to be free of Windows. The funky-looking page has to do with the size of my ReactOS screen vs the size I normally view my blog at. Apologies for those with crappy screen resolutions who see something like this.
I decided to revisit ReactOS to see what had changed from 2.x that I reviewd before to the 2.9 release candidate. So I fired up VMWare and ran it. I was a bit dissapointed in the performance. I know it was VMWared and only had 128 MB, but Ubuntu was running beautifully VMWared with only 192 MB of RAM. It kept blue screening whenever I tried to visit this blog, for example. However, they are making really great work at binary compatibility. As a test, I went to the Mozilla website and downloaded Firefox. It installed and ran pretty well.
In the olden days of computers, they were as good at communicating as the people on earth after the Tower of Babel incident. Not only did none of the scant networking protocols interact well, but the floppy disks were sometimes completely different sizes. That is, when there were disks; there were some systems based on cartridges, like video game systems. In fact, on an Ataric, not only could you play pong, but you could balance your finances via spreadsheet.
So, as readers of my blog know, one alternative to Windows is Linux. (Formally GNU/Linux) Another alternative I haven’t talked much about is BSD, another Unix derivative. Both of these are great operating systems, but they aren’t Windows. For the most part, this doesn’t matter. If I can do the same stuff on Linux, why not use an operating system unencumbered by patents and other nasty things. However, some people need to use Windows. They need the programs or they just don’t want to learn a new OS. On Linux (and possibly BSD), an imperfect solution is to use Wine. Wine is not an emulator (that’s what Wine stands for, incidentally) but rather implements DLLs in order to run Windows programs. They get closer and closer every day, but it’s imperfect and will probably continue to be for quite some time. For gamers, there’s Cedega, but that costs money - a monthly fee to be exact.
I have mentioned using GRAMPS for a few posts already. I decided to head on over to their site and see what was on the plate for the next release, version 2.2. I am extremely excited!
The map view, if it’s included looks to be amazing! As you can see if you follow the link, it will show where all the events have taken place.
The pedigree view is much more vibrant now, instead of a dull black and white. It also appears to display more information.
Check out: Planned Obsolescence
This kind of stuff ticks me off. But it’s the reason why I’m currently building my won computer. I’m sick and tired of the big name vendors thinking that they can do whatever they want to us, and think that we are ignorant enough to accept it. Stand up and realize that the power is in YOUR hands! You can build your own computer and upgrade it and don’t need to or want to be forced to pay for upgrades every few years! I’m going to be building a new computer since my Dell finally died. I’ll be documenting the process so that you can see just how simple it is. Stay tuned!
Do you think you know your keyboard? Then read Techn0manc3r’s “Tour of Your Keyboard” post. He covers in depth the meaning behind many keys. Like wtf is Scroll Lock for? Why are there other keys you almost never use like “Pause/Break”? He does an excellent job presenting the keyboard and even veteran computer users will learn a thing or two. Also, it’ll make up for my lack of a good post today.
A BBC News story has pointed out that my prior post (which I can’t find on my first blog) in which I called this guy a moron for spending $17 thousand to buy land in a virtual world. Afterall, it’s only an investment if you can sell if for a higher price. However, according to the story, there is a strong chance this guy and others will be making money! Should we all rush in and do this? Nah! I think it’s probably like most investments, if you’re not the first one in, you’re not going to make as much money. Afterall, you have to pay more and then hope the price goes up even more. This may end up making a lot of money for the first batch and be a bust for everyone else. Time will tell and I’ll keep a close eye on this story.
Thanks to those with the kind words for me over my graphics card problem. I got a BFG brand nVidia 256 MB card at Best Buy for $159. It was equivalent to the one I just lost so civ4 should play at least as well as before. AND it has a lifetime warranty! As soon as I get a chance, I’ll post that walkthrough.
As I documented before, I’ve had problems with Pogoplug and Arch Linux running my servers. Recently I’ve been having problems logging in via SSH on my updated Fedora computers. From what I can tell from a little research, it seems the old way of connecting had a flaw so updated SSH doesn’t want talk to unupdated SSH. So I tried to update Arch Linux and once again ended up with a borked computer. And it’s not something I did wrong - everyone had complaints of the change from /usr/bin (and some other bins) bricking systems. If Pogoplug had a display, I’d have been able to fix it. I tried reinstalling, but something has changed that makes the Pogoplug no longer work. Sick of having stuff go wrong every time I update, I decided this was the time to implement the Home Server Project.
Scarlett was practicing coming up with alliteration for each letter of the alphabet. Here’s what she came up with for “F”. I think the drawing makes it almost like a Shel Silverstein poem.
Four filthy fat flamingos fly for freedom from five fat flies from Florida.
It can be found here, but in case it disappears, I’ve reproduced it.
Zero and her Origin
Zero, the number said to be discovered
Nine times by ancient magicians, was
Found again by a mysterious order of
Nine modern alchemists, who built
One machine after another, until finally
One exploded with fascinating results.
No fire emerged from its
Twin engines, but instead
Nine small automata crawled out,
Denying the proposition that energy,
Seven millenia or more in the accumulation,
For most purposes, remains
Ever constant, throughout the
Three ages of man’s civilization.
Life seems to be a series of waves that I ride until they crash on shore. Then I wait for the next one and have another go at it. I’m not talking about life fundamentals - those are on a much slower evolution and change much less often, but I’m talking instead about the fun things I do in my life.
Take, for example, my recent fascination with haikus. I don’t even have an event I could pinpoint as the cause. I just saw the snow and remembered how I always loved seeing it fall at night at Cornell. Then, for some reason, I thought the best way to express myself would be a haiku. Now, it seems they are coming to me for all sorts of reasons. And so it will be for a while, until they suddenly stop.
Because of my age relative to the era of computer, for a good portion of my life computers were Serious Things used for work and school. They also belonged to the family and there’s no way we could have gotten away with putting stickers on them without getting in trouble. So back in 2006 when I went to Blackhat and Defcon, for the first time I saw people’s laptops covered in stickers. The EEE PC (new at the time) had a meetup session where I saw others who’d painted their machines various colors. I’d ended up with a bunch of stickers after Blackhat and Defcon, so I decorated my first-ever laptop, an Acer.
I missed the 15 year anniversary this February because I was busy with family visiting and then COVID-19 happened and next thing I knew it was the end of July and I was realizing just how long this site has been around. The crazy thing is that in my first blog post on this blog, I wasn’t even sure I’d stick with it. Yet here I am, with a blog that’s essentially been with me for my entire post-college life. While I started off with the generic Wordpress theme, 15 years ago in July I had the following theme:
I first blogged about Wordpress 3.6 in April. I was extremely excited about the new Post Formats UI and the new theme Twenty Thirteen. At the time there was a month left before the release. Then, things got pushed back a bit which messed with my image formatting. Then, at some point, they decided they would have to remove the Post Formats UI for this release. And then they went silent. Weeks passed; a month passed. When they mentioned Post Formats and the new Multimedia features - embedded video and audio - it sparked a creativity in my brain - a way to use the site that would make use of what was unique about the web rather than just being a public journal. And I haven’t known when I could schedule these posts or even write them because after the Post Formats UI decision, they stopped updating the releases section of the website. Look, I’ve been involved with FLOSS software for about a decade now. I know all about the Release when It’s Done method, aka The Debian Way. It tends to lead to better quality releases (keyword: tends). But it also causes a lot of frustration - hence the reason for the Ubuntu fork. Really, all I wanted (and based on a few comments I’ve seen on the web from people who use WP to make a living - designing or writing training materials) was some communication. I understand that you might not know exactly how long it would take to untangle the Post Formats UI from the code. But an estimate would have been better than nothing.At least we’d know you cared what we think. And that’s just human psychology. It’s the reason why all the theme parks have signs telling you how long the wait is going to be for any particular ride. If you know it’s going to be an hour you aren’t as pissed as if it takes an hour and you had no idea. So next time, keep us in the look, Wordpress.
Happy 10 years of the software that allowed me to free myself of the shackles of other corporations and take blogging into my own hands. I started this blog almost around the same time as Wordpress (WP was only 1.5 years old) Here’s to another ten years! And, here’s my version of what Dougal suggested:
When I first started using Wordpress in 2005:
I was in my 20s
I was in college
I was running the blog on Fedora Core
I was engaged
I was using Facebook heavily as it was still highly focused on college students
I’d never been to any country outside the USA other than Canada
One day last week I was a little bored at lunchtime so I started clicking on the Wordpress Dashboard links to different developer blogs. Turns out Wordpress 3.6 is coming out soon and it’s going to focus on bringing post formats to the fore and creating a consistent way of handling them within the database. I had no idea this was introduced back in Wordpress 3.1. I don’t know if I missed the notification or if it didn’t mean anything to me because I hadn’t used Tumblr yet. Here are two great explanations: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/post-formats/ and http://wpdaily.co/future-post-formats/ . If you don’t feel like reading those, basically think of how when you make a post on Tumblr it asks you if it’s an image, post, link, etc. That determines the interface it gives you and, depending on your Tumblr theme, determines how to present the information you put into it. Given that one of the post formats is Annotation (meant to be a short post) and given that I quickly grew tired of Tumblr and how it doesn’t have a proper commenting system, I’m probably going to use that for shorter, less fleshed out posts rather than having a Tumblr blog.
So, Wordpress 2.7 is finally here. It’s their second visual refresh in a year and I have to say they have really outdone themselves. When they did the last change, I thought “wow, there’s no way they could improve on this.” and “I thought their old interface was good, but this makes it look like a pile of crap!”. But now I feel the same way all over. There are a few things that aren’t where I remember them, but overall, I am loving the new work they’ve done. There’s just one thing that annoys the heck out of me - the new threaded comments don’t work with my theme. I’m going to either have to figure out how to redesign it on my own or switch themes again. But I really like this theme and I’ve done so much customization already.
Other than widgets, I think that tags are the best feature of Wordpress 2.3. Up until now I kept adding more and more categories and things were starting to get ridiculous. But now with tags I have a wonderful middle path. Categories are for broad swaths of posts and there shouldn’t be too many. (Or at least not any more than I currently have) But now, instead of making a new category to talk about Compiz or X11, I can just file it under Linux and add the corresponding tags. Plus, tag clouds are fun!
I’m getting a bit bored and my wrist is starting to hurt a little from operating the mouse so much. I’m not done recategorizing my blog posts, but I only have one year’s range left - March 2006 - March 2007. Hopefully that was a twelve month period in which I didn’t write too much. Boy-oh-boy did I learn my lesson about not backing up. Also, I was jumping from 2.1 to 2.3 so perhaps I was bound to run into those problems. Once I’m done with that, there are some pretty neat developments which have recently happened on vimeo as well as some exciting news on “Sugar” and “Trick or Treat”.
Finally upgraded to Wordpress 2.1 - I was waiting to make sure there weren’t any show-stopper bugs as there were in the previous version. So far no one seems to have found any problems. They didn’t do too many cosmetic changes because I can’t really tell what’s changed. I’ll have to review the changelog again. So far the BEST change is that “General” is not automatically selected as a category. It was annoying to uncheck that EVERY time!
I finally found out that all I need to do is to disable the WYSIWYG editor in Wordpress (which I hated anyway!) and now I can get my Vimeo clips embedded. Sure, I could point you to www.dropthebombproductions.com, but people tend not to like to leave their page if they don’t have to. I’d love to be able to embed video. Now I can!
As a celebration, here is one of my earliest videos, “Anime Hurricane”. (Follow the vimeo link to get more information on it)
Well, about 14 hours ago WordPress went 2.0!! It is amazing! They have REALLY revamped things. I’ll have to relearn how to do some tasks, but it is genrally very amazing. For example, now I can create new categories from within the post instead of saving, going to the categories page, creating it, and then coming back. (using AJAX - like flickr.com) It allows me to be a LOT more flexible in my tagging and I love that. Also, the preview is not just the text and images anymore, they make it look EXACTLY like your page! It’s really awesome and I’m glad I upgraded. They have continued to create great blogging software that puts all other blogging software to shame!
WordPress is almost at 100,000 downloads. This is easily attributed to the fact that the program is awesome. I don’t know how I ever truly blogged before using this software. Blogging is ridiculously easy and the plugins add infinite possibilities for expanding the blog’s potential.
Another reason for the increase in downloads has to do with others promoting WordPress. A recent Linux Format Magazine cover DVD came with WordPress source files available on it. It was from the previous release, but as people work with it and find out about the upgrades they are sure to continue to use it. Once again I recommend that anyone with their own server (or access to one) use it for their blogging needs.
First of all, congrats to the WordPress team! In just two weeks they were able to have 50 000 downloads of the blog software this site is running. I HIGHLY recommend them if you have your own server and want to run your own blog.
Second, for those who are used to the format of my old blog where the posts are never ending to the bottom and then you click back to go to the previous posts, this blog software handles things a little differently. You will onlly see on one page (plus clicking back) posts from that month. So, this blog doesn’t only have two posts, it also has a bunch of february posts which can be access by click on “february 2005” under archives.
The upgrade went off without a hitch. The new features are pretty neat, although I’m trying to see how to get back my original template. Overall, the new features are a great improvement over the previous version of the software, but, as usual, there is some getting used to with the new features. Still, the folks at Word Press have really outdone themselves. Definitely check them out if you have the luxury of your own server and want to blog.
Well, they have released a new version of my blogging software. For the first time ever I will be upgrading a blog. In a way, it’s a very good thing because I’ve been putting off learning how to backup my databases for a few weeks and part of the upgrade process is to backup the database files. It will be interesting to see how things change. I know they have built in some stronger spam filters, but I haven’t had any trouble with that, yet. Of course, this is a relatively new blog, so most search engines probably don’t know about it yet. I will probably be upgrading today, so if the blog is inaccessible, I may be in the middle of an upgrade process.
One of the things I love about word press over Tripod’s current mode is that I can make a post belong to several categories. This is extremely useful because on Tripod, for example, I have the categories of “Linux”, “Computers”, and “Technology”. Since the category I pick is sometimes a function of the one I first find, it may not always make be easy to see which is the best option when I’m trying to find a post I previously made. Since I have over 600 posts at Tripod, being able to find a post is a bit of a daunting task. Additionally, by being open source, plugins have been developed and I intend to try a few of them once I get a change. It looks to me that I am now about 90% sure that I will be converting over to Word Press full time once I get my server up again in Sept/Oct of this year. It seems pretty likely that we’ll be going wireless here within the next week.
Today I begin what may be one of the most interesting projects I have yet to take on. This blog is hosted on my server. That means it is completely under my control. I don’t have to pay money for it and I can write whatever I want without any censorship. Additionally, it’s pretty freakin’ exciting to be running my own blog.
That said, I am not 100% sure if I will be completely migrating over to this blog. To begin with, I don’t want to lose my blog over on tripod. I have had so many insights on that blog and I would definitely need to find a way to archive it or transfer it over here somehow. At this point in time I’m not sure how that would work. Also, I don’t really have the time for that. Finally, from the time that my apartment complex demands to have my cable modem so that we can switch to wirelss access (thus effectively killing my server) until at least until I move into my townhouse some time around September, I will only be able to blog through Tripod. Once I get my server set up, however, I intend to permanently have it up.
A user of my Extra Life Donation Tracker program discovered that I had introduced a regression for brand new users who didn’t have a persistent setting. I thought about it overnight and it was exactly what I thought it would be - when I switched away from threading for the GUI, I forgot to add a way to tell participant.py to reload its settings values. I also decided to take a page from a programming podcast I heard recently and change the settings GUI to only have a “Save” button instead of a persistent save button AND a Save button. Especially when I wanted most people to hit persistent save, and that’s not what they’d most likely do by default. So I ended up making 5.2 release to fix both of those issues.
Since I’ve been making a lot of great progress programming with the kids in Scratch, I bought some Circuit Playground Expresses to program with the kids. The Circuit Playground Express can program in Arduino’s C dialect, CircuitPython, or Microsoft MakeCode, which uses blocks like Scratch. Today Scarlett and I made our first useful bit of code, a digital spinner we called The Sibling Chooser. Here’s the code, and you can see that it is indeed like Scratch:
A user of my Extra Life Donation Tracker program discovered that I had introduced a regression for brand new users who didn’t have a persistent setting. I thought about it overnight and it was exactly what I thought it would be - when I switched away from threading for the GUI, I forgot to add a way to tell participant.py to reload its settings values. I also decided to take a page from a programming podcast I heard recently and change the settings GUI to only have a “Save” button instead of a persistent save button AND a Save button. Especially when I wanted most people to hit persistent save, and that’s not what they’d most likely do by default. So I ended up making 5.2 release to fix both of those issues.
With the twins, I messed around with a Neopixel strip. Not sure what I’d do with one in a future project, but at least I know how to program it in MakeCode now. Our project:
Since I’ve been making a lot of great progress programming with the kids in Scratch, I bought some Circuit Playground Expresses to program with the kids. The Circuit Playground Express can program in Arduino’s C dialect, CircuitPython, or Microsoft MakeCode, which uses blocks like Scratch. Today Scarlett and I made our first useful bit of code, a digital spinner we called The Sibling Chooser. Here’s the code, and you can see that it is indeed like Scratch:
Since I’ve been making a lot of great progress programming with the kids in Scratch, I bought some Circuit Playground Expresses to program with the kids. The Circuit Playground Express can program in Arduino’s C dialect, CircuitPython, or Microsoft MakeCode, which uses blocks like Scratch. Today Scarlett and I made our first useful bit of code, a digital spinner we called The Sibling Chooser. Here’s the code, and you can see that it is indeed like Scratch:
A few days ago, I had the opportunity to ask the twins what they did that day while they were isolated from each other.
Stella: “We played LEGO and built a lot of cool things.”
Sam: “We went to Costco and then came right back home.”
Mind you, they both had the exact same day and did the exact same things. If I had to guess at why they focused on the things they did, I’d say that Sam’s answer was based on the fact that he likes to go out, especially to the park. So he was upset they’d left the house and hadn’t done anything he found fun. I’m not sure why Stella only focused on the LEGOs, but she is still playing with them a few days later, so maybe she was really happy to have new things to play with.
Some people still treat TV as if it’s the boob tube (that’s boob as in dummy, not breast). But Scarlett’s kid’s cartoons led her to learn some stuff that led to the following exchange:
Danielle (rhetorically): Why does this monkey have a frog on its head?
Eric: It’s Swedish. (The toy is from Ikea)
Danielle: What?
Scarlett: No, it’s symbiosis!
Eric: Symbiosis? (I wonder if she knows what it means) What does that mean?
I’ve been meditating on a blog post about the riot in my figurative backyard. While I’m still unsure if whether I’ll end up writing anything about it, I came across some interesting MLK Jr quotes today.
A riot is the language of the unheard.
Martin Luther King Jr
and this one seems to apply not only to what I’ve heard about Baltimore, but also to what I’ve heard about Fergusson and New York City:
Some folks (especially Americans) seem to think that their AR-15s are a guarantor that they can resist tyranny. But guns are an 18th century response to 18th century threats to democracy. Capital doesn’t need to point a gun at you to remove your democratic rights: it just needs more cameras, more cops, and a legal system that is fair and just and bankrupts you if you are ever charged with public disorder and don’t plead guilty.
A substantial percentage of outrage is bullshit. So is a substantial percentage of outrage about outrage, and so on. Outrage is often about consolidating political power and promoting the view that your political opponents are horrible people. Much of the dialogue about Mr. Robertson being suspended from A&E consists of partisans eager to use the opportunity to argue that (1) people like Mr. Robertson are horrible people or (2) people who criticize Mr. Robertson are horrible people. Outrage is often an occasion for “THIS JUST PROVES WHAT I AM ALWAYS SAYING ABOUT THEM,” with the particular case a thin disguise.
Yet, despite his non-existent range, Schwarzenegger has continually taken on projects that either cast him as a character with multiple identities ( Raw Deal, Total Recall, True Lies, Escape Plan) or require him to play multiple characters ( The 6th Day, the Terminator franchise). This results in a Hollywood hall of mirrors: Schwarzeneggers interacting with other Schwarzeneggers; Schwarzenegger pretending to be Schwarzenegger; Schwarzenegger discovering that he’s not the Schwarzenegger he believed himself to be, but a different, identical Schwarzenegger.
“Torture porn works in exactly the opposite way: It shows the audience absolutely everything, and bears the same relationship to actual horror as porn does to romantic comedy.” - Scott Kaufman of the AV Club
If ever there was a period in modern American history that deserved to be described in Dickensian terms, it was November 2008. If you voted for Barack Obama (or just appreciated the historical significance of our country electing a black president) it was the best of times, the age of wisdom, the epoch of belief, the season of light, and the spring of hope. But if you paid any attention to the financial news pages (or simply owned a house that was now worth a year’s pay less than what you paid for it) it also seemed like the worst of times, the age of foolishness, the epoch of incredulity, the season of darkness, and the winter of despair.
Someday I want to say “Hey everybody! Listen up!” and have everyone in a 50-foot radius gather around me, just like Dudley does while handing out the bike-shop fliers. It’s one of the ways I wish life were more like television.
Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important than they all. It is not a figure of speech, or a witty saying; it is a literal fact. Printing, which comes necessarily out of Writing, I say often, is equivalent to Democracy: invent Writing, Democracy is inevitable. Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole nation, becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in law-making, in all acts of authority. It matters not what rank he has, what revenues or garnitures: the requisite thing is that he have a tongue which others will listen to; this and nothing more is requisite.
“And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.”
Once again I share with you the funny (and in some cases, insightful) quotes I’ve gathered over the last few months:
I had this conversation with Duffy yesterday about how politicians need to hire me as a lifestyle coach
“Hey Dan, should I pay all my taxes?”
“Yes! Are you stupid?”
“Hey Dan, should I solicit male prostitutes in the bathroom if I’m a conservative Republican?”
“…No…”
Dan: I was ready to get lunch, but found out I’m not hungy. It sucks.
It’s time once again to empty out my AIM quotes into my blog. Enjoy:
?“You’re, like, my concierge to the Internet Underworld” - T to Chris at work
“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Unless you throw a dictionary at me.” - Colbert 8 April Colbert Report
“They’re so much cuter tasting” - Lauren about airline pretzels
“In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something no one ever knew before. But in poetry it’s the exact opposite.” - Dirac
Background: I’m feeling a little under the weather, so I’m staying home today.
Danielle: “I want you to rest today, ok? I’ll send you a list of chores later.”
The Hitch Hiker’s Guice to the Galaxy had such wonderful and amazing quotes in it that I was horribly dissapointed when the movie didn’t share more of these quotes. Here are two of my favorites, with more to follow.
The intro to the first book, which set the tone and got me very happy about the book to follow:
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
“If a man owes you $1000 that’s his problem. If a man owes you $1 000 000, that’s your problem” - Anon
Confusion that only occurs with computer nerds:
Me: did tyhey teach you about “this” in java yet?
Danny: yeah
Me: it’s the neatest thing that noeone actually uses
Danny: we do sometimes
Me: that’s cuz it’s a class ;P
Danny: cause we’re a class?
Me: :P
Me: cuz it’s not real life
Danny: oh, gotcha
Those of you who may be new to my blog because you discovered me through a ping-back or some other method than coming over from It’s A Binary World 1.0 don’t know about my quotes posts. Throughout the day I collect quotes I hear in class, emails, or other sources and place them in my AIM profile. Whenever my profile contains too many characters, I move the quotes into my blog and refresh my AIM profile with new quotes.
First of all, I was wrong about needing to trigger it to update. The default configuration is to update the feeds every hour, 10 at a time. This is configurable, but I think that arrangement works fine to me. Having been using it on my phone for a few days now, I’m really liking the formatting and how nice it looks. If there’s one negative thing, it’s that the links can be a bit tiny for my fingers to click on. Otherwise, it’s looking like I’m going to stick with Miniflux.
Scarlett drew this back in September when the kids were playing a lot of Spelunky. It’s interesting to see which parts of the game imprinted on her mind.
Sometimes Scarlett asks me to draw with her. So I drew this scene:
Of course, what we “see” is dependent upon our state of mind. Having been watching lots of fairy tale cartoons, her first guess was that I’d drawn a dragon and a dinosaur. Her second guess, of course, was correct that it was a giraffe and rhino. She then added a bird and some apples for the giraffe.
I know there’s a fine line between a parent being impressed by their child and a parent bragging. Nonetheless, I thought this drawing Scarlett did was pretty good for a 3 year old.
I think that nearly everyone who has ever learned about the Fibonacci Sequence is fascinated by how quickly it grows. I wanted to illustrate that, so I created this collage with some modifications to J im’s makeCollage.pl script. The rules were that each picture takes the place of a number on the Fibonacci Sequence and is displayed that many times. Of course, I skipped Fibonacci number 1, which is 0. No point in having a picture show up 0 times. So the first picture is shown once, as is the second. Then two times, then three, then…..
I’ve done a few travelogues on this blog (like the series covering my trip to the Grand Canyon) and I usually cover things chronologically. However, this time around I’m writing things about 3.5 months later. So rather than worry about covering things chronologically, I’m going to cover them by topic.
Family Vacations
Dan making pizza for the family
We were visiting The Redwoods (or, rather, a number of state (and maybe national?) parks containing Redwood trees) for my mom’s birthday. It was her wish to gather the entire clan for her birthday and to check the Redwoods off her bucket list. This was extra special to her because it’s pretty rare for all of us to be in one place at once time. Dave’s family is in the Pacific Northwest while Dan’s family and mine are in the mid-Atlantic. Mom’s in Florida with my three youngest siblings and dad. With everyone married and with all the parents wanting holiday time we can’t always all make it together for the same holidays.
The wedding day went the way these things always go. If you’re not involved you’re spending most of the day waiting around until it’s time to get your nice clothes on and go to enjoy the wedding. I went to get In-N-Out Burger for lunch and learned that Scarlett really, really likes french fries.
Today’s post makes the series name somewhat inaccurate, hence the subtitle. We awoke and, having spent the week debating the best course of action, decided it made the most sense for us to all go to the airport to pick up the rental car since it cost the same to get out there whether it was just me or all of us. Additionally, we’d spend less gas than having me circle back around to pick up the girls.
After confirming with Danielle that her family didn’t want breakfast, I went out for breakfast and saw the above mustachioed car. They’re for a service called Lyft that uses regular people as cab drivers. More about that here. The first time I learned about the way taxis are regulated was when I was at Cornell. In my experience, the taxis there were horrible. They were often late when they came at all and they charged per person rather than distance like most cabs. I wondered why someone didn’t come along and compete against them with better service. Well, because in most (if not all) jurisdictions Taxis are a regulated monopoly. The thing about monopolies is that not only do they not have an incentive to provide good customer service, they also don’t have an incentive to innovate. That’s part of why Lyft and Uber are so awesome - they have features like being able to track where your ride is - via your cell phone. You know how far they are and when to actually go outside. (Not like the many times I was freezing outside at Cornell waiting for the cabs, since they refused to call when they arrived) Then again, you’re putting your life into the hands of a random Joe. I know Taxis aren’t perfect and the ones in big cities sometimes drive like maniacs, but this nascent movement will probably die on the vine the first time someone gets kidnapped or murdered or something.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“375”] Crazy boutique Hotel Diva Blackout Curtain[/caption]
We awoke wondering what shape Scarlett would be in. We were instructed to only give her Pedialyte or ginger ale. Scarlett, being her usual picky self, was having none of it. So we decided to try milk. She was OK. The vomiting was over.
When traveling through time zones the first few days are often spent on the home city’s timezone. I ended up spending the entire trip on EST thanks to Scarlett. And that is fine because it made going back to work easy.
As I mentioned yesterday, there were a bunch of diners around our hotel. We spotted Lori’s Diner when we went to get water at Walgreens. It’s a 1950s-style diner with vintage stuff all over the walls and floors. Great breakfast (for a diner) and great staff.
We flew to San Francisco to attend my brother-in-law’s wedding, but Danielle and I had wanted to go there for years so we decided to have a week-long vacation. Scarlett was amazing on the airplane. It was her second flight in her short life. However, the flight to Florida is so short that if you can time it with a nap, it’s EASY to travel with her. The 6 hour trip to San Francisco is another matter entirely. However, we kept her entertained and that kept her calm. There were a lot of other little kids on the plane including a 2-3 year old who spent 30 minutes crying. Scarlett never cried although she does whine every now and again if she doesn’t her needs met - it only lasts a minute or two. We brought crayons and painter’s tape (to stick to the seat) and that seemed to keep her pretty well entertained. When she grew bored of that, I walked her up and back the aisle. She seemed to love seeing so many people. We went back and forth a half dozen times before I grew tired of almost falling onto her when going towards the back of the plane. (The plane was angled up)
While on my trip to the Grand Canyon I kept a journal of my experience in order to create an after-the-fact travelogue. This is the last entry of an edited version + photo essay of my trip. ( First entry here)
---
9 Oct 2010 1530
The drive to Phoenix was uneventful. I did finally get a cactus photo.
I also finally got to eat at an In-n-Out Burger after having heard its praises on the Giant Bombcast and countless other west coast podcasts.
While on my trip to the Grand Canyon I kept a journal of my experience in order to create an after-the-fact travelogue. Presented over the next few days is an edited version + photo essay of my trip. ( First entry here)
---
8 Oct 2010 2051
I feel completely differently at the end of today. My feet don’t hurt and I’m not exhausted. I have some mild aches in my legs and very mild aches in my feet. It’s because today was a much milder day.
While on my trip to the Grand Canyon I kept a journal of my experience in order to create an after-the-fact travelogue. Presented over the next few days is an edited version + photo essay of my trip. ( First entry here)
--- 8 Oct 2010 0720
Yesterday was awesome and today I have the sore legs to prove it. My legs have not been in this much pain in a long time. I’ll get to the cause of that in a moment. First of all, we went yesterday to see the sunrise3 at Desert View (near the Watch Tower). Let me stress again that the park is huge! We got up at 0430 and ended up nearly missing the 0600 sunrise. We arrived at the inner part of the park at 0520 and I thought we’d be at Desert View by 0530 (my target time to arrive). But no, from the South Entrance near the visitor center, it’s 25 miles to Desert View! We made our way through the pitch black roads and ended up in the parking lot by 0550. The drive was extra nervous as we saw the sky getting brighter and brighter despite not yet having arrived. Then we had to frantically find our way to the lookout. It was dark and even the outlook area was huge! We got there as the sun was just getting ready to peek out. The sunrise was magnificent, but I’m not sure any of the photos can match how amazing it looked. Surprisingly enough, there was only one couple there. A family later arrived.
While on my trip to the Grand Canyon I kept a journal of my experience in order to create an after-the-fact travelogue. Presented over the next few days is an edited version + photo essay of my trip. ( First entry here)
---
6 Oct 2010 2022
Today was both overwhelming and underwhelming. Overwhelming because of how massive the park is. We barely scratched the surface and yet we felt very tired at the end of the day. Overwhelming at how many different nationalities were present. We heard french, german, japanese, vietnamese, and The Queen’s English. There was a constant cycling of tourists foreign and domestic at the Grand Canyon Village. To stand there is to constantly be surrounded by Grand Canyon green horns. It was also amazing to see so many animals. We saw a neat type of squirrel, a mouse/chipmunk thing, dear, a woodpecker, and a beautiful blue bird. It was so awesome - especially the blue bird. At the end of the day, it was amazing how dark it was and how many stars there were in the sky. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a camera that could properly capture the night sky. That’s why I want to get a film 35mm Canon camera.
While on my trip to the Grand Canyon I kept a journal of my experience in order to create an after-the-fact travelogue. Presented over the next few days is an edited version + photo essay of my trip. ( First entry here)
---
6 Oct 2010 0638
I forgot to mention yesterday how neat it was to see cacti in the wild. It’d seen them in arboretums and botanical gardens, but this was the first time I saw them growing in their natural environment. Biggest impression: unlike cartoons, the “arms” are not even. Some of them even have only one “arm”.
While on my trip to the Grand Canyon I kept a journal of my experience in order to create an after-the-fact travelogue. Presented over the next few days is an edited version + photo essay of my trip.
---
5 Oct 2010
Tomorrow I get to see the Grand Canyon! I’ve been waiting to see it for years. Today was pretty awesome because I got to see another thing I’d wanted to see for a while now - I saw a hummingbird for the first time. The best part is that it was completely accidental. We got into the rental car and, as Danielle set up the GPS, I looked up at the some flowers and saw a hummingbird. It quickly left, so it was just being there at that exact time that allowed me to see it. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my camera with me. Hopefully I get to see it again.
Life sure is strange. This morning I was sure I’d be buying a Holga today. After talking to Danielle, it even seemed that SHE would get one too. She wanted to have one loaded with color film and one loaded with black and white film. Then she asked a few questions. I can’t remember the exact words, but it got me thinking. Do I REALLY want a Holga? I mean, the biggest attraction for me was the ability to medium format film. As I mentioned on 12 Feb, it’s a connection with the past and a chance to shoot with better film than I ever did. But the more I looked at other photographers’ Lomo results, the more I wondered if this was how I wanted to re-experience film. What put me off the most is the fact that the results are so random. I don’t understand how people go on vacations to places as far away as Asia with a Lomo as their sole means of capturing their experiences. They could be getting completely blown out photos the whole time and come back without any photo memories.
I went to the Lomography store yesterday and it was a very interesting experience. The store matches the aesthetic of the Lomography movement. It has a very casual feel to it. It definitely belongs in Greenwich Village. The wall is a huge collage of Lomo prints; most appeared to be of or taken in New York City. There was a lot of repetition and it had the feel or working well as a larger work of art. It’s worth visiting the store just to see the wall. But the layout was also great - all the cameras are sitting on a table in the middle and you can touch them and handle them and get a feel for the camera. I have a feeling they would have probably let me load some film in and take some shots for them to keep. (And I might have if I hadn’t been there with others) The table has an outline of each camera beneath it with the price of the camera listed. The staff (well, the one woman there at that time) was very knowledgeable and helpful. Definitely a good hire. There were also tons of books and magazines wholly consisting of Lomographic images.
After reading Dan’s great Japan travelogue, Super Ichiban Travel Blog, and another source where someone had his children always keep a journal when they travel, I decided I wanted to do this as well. To practice for when I go to some place that’s foreign to me, I decided to start keeping a journal when I travel to places I’ve already been. Here’s the first entry from last weekend’s trip.
Three years ago I was discussing photography with a fellow photographer, pictured below. We were discussing places for good photography in the DC-Baltimore vicinity and he mentioned Shenandoah Valley. He also showed me some photos of deer he had gotten there. He was pretty impressed with how close he got to the deer (although - spoiler - I eventually got closer). I was impressed with the deer photos and his description of Shenandoah Valley. I resolved to visit it.
Macadamia nut, White Chocolate, and Cranberry Cookies
In January I made a lot less new things than in previous months, but I did prove that even in sub-freezing temperatures I still BBQ and Smoke. My least favorite were the macadamia nut, white chocolate, and cranberry cookies. I’ve liked white chocolate and macadamia nut cookies in the past, but this was my first time adding cranberries. But it was the macadamia nuts I wasn’t a fan of this time. I’m not sure why, I just didn’t liek the taste. The fattoush was a neat taste for a new salad and I learned how easy it is to make your own pita chips! The glazed ribs were OK, but I didn’t fill the water pan in the Weber Smokey Mountain and I think that led to a more smokey/burnt taste as the glaze dripped off and into the empty water pan. The Big Butts Pork Steak was pretty awesome, though. The recipe also contained my favorite home-made BBQ sauce. I definitely look forward to revisiting that recipe!
Last time I was in Florida my mom took me to a specialty BBQ store, Just Grillin, off of Dale Mabry in Carrollwood. I didn’t know such places existed. I thought everyone just bought their grills at a hardware store, Amazon, or direct from the company. It was a pretty great to be able to see and touch Yoders, Weber Summits, and other high-end BBQs. They also came by with some chicken they’d cooked in the back using a variety of rubs they sell. Oh yeah, the entire wall behind the register was full to the brim with rubs and sauces - most (if not all) of them local or competition group rubs. Any rub you wanted to try would be poured into a tasting cup. Sure, it’s not the same as having the rub on some food, but it’s certainly better than the blind buying we have to do with supermarket rubs. As a gift, mom said she’d get me any rub I wanted to try, so I picked up Thunderbird Chicken Scratch. Then a bunch of travel meant I had to keep waiting impatiently until I could finally try it. Last night I finally got my chance.
In the past few years I’ve been moving away from seeing pizza as junk food towards seeing it as another food that is sometimes made with care, skill, and love and sometimes make in a hurry for a buck. I can’t remember the exact timeline and can’t be bothered to search for photo evidence, but the two restaurants that changed my mind on pizza were Two Amys in Maryland and Grimaldi’s in Brooklyn. Two very different styles of pizza, but Grimaldi’s cooked in a fire-based pizza oven and authentic Neopolitan at Two Amys. So now there was a new measurement against which to measure all pizzas: the wood-fired pizza.
Do you know why a lot of people don’t BBQ that often? Because they always make the same thing and that’s boring. So I’ve been going through all the recipes in Meathead’s book (and other sources) to see if anything else is tasty to my palette. This time it was smoked chicken. I cut the chicken in half.
I took the skin off because Danielle was going to take off the skin anyway and since this was a rub-based recipe, that would remove all the flavor as well.
This past winter I smoked a pork shoulder for the first time. I learned some lessons, continued to work on getting better with my kettle, and decided it was time for pulled pork again.
I cut the pork shoulder into roughly equal halves. I had three things I wanted to experiment with:
Would it cook faster?
Would it be nice to have twice as much bark?
I wanted to try a Mexican-ish rub on one to have pulled pork tacos.
In my opinion, for a long Weber Kettle cook you can’t beat a snake. If it’s going to go VERY long, it can be a pain as you have to move the water pan to continue the snake. But for medium-long cooks, it’s a nice, perfect way to have a consistent temperature throughout the cook.
We’ve been growing plants and herbs at the house for a few years now (but not as many as I wish we had in retrospect). But, as far as I could find with a cursory search, I’d never done an end of summer summary of how the growing season went for us. I know there are still somewhere between a few weeks and a couple months before first frost, but I don’t expect anything to radically change between now and then.
Last time I was in Florida my mom took me to a specialty BBQ store, Just Grillin, off of Dale Mabry in Carrollwood. I didn’t know such places existed. I thought everyone just bought their grills at a hardware store, Amazon, or direct from the company. It was a pretty great to be able to see and touch Yoders, Weber Summits, and other high-end BBQs. They also came by with some chicken they’d cooked in the back using a variety of rubs they sell. Oh yeah, the entire wall behind the register was full to the brim with rubs and sauces - most (if not all) of them local or competition group rubs. Any rub you wanted to try would be poured into a tasting cup. Sure, it’s not the same as having the rub on some food, but it’s certainly better than the blind buying we have to do with supermarket rubs. As a gift, mom said she’d get me any rub I wanted to try, so I picked up Thunderbird Chicken Scratch. Then a bunch of travel meant I had to keep waiting impatiently until I could finally try it. Last night I finally got my chance.
For the first time in a few years, my mom was going to be in town for Mother’s Day. We didn’t have a ton of events to attend or anything, so I asked her what she would like for dinner if she could have anything. She said she wanted prime rib, so I figured it was the perfect time for me to try out a prime rib roast on one of my BBQs. Meathead has lots of tips for eliminating most of the hassle of making a prime rib roast. First of all, remove the ribs - they only serve to block heat and keep the roast from cooking evenly. Second, use twine to make it into a cylinder so it cooks evenly from the outside to the inside.
I came across this in Target during Christmas time. Now, I am not a fan of the concept of the Elf on the Shelf and I’ve heard quite a few anecdotes of kids becoming freaked out - like the girl who called 911 because it fell and she didn’t want to touch it because kids are told that if they touch it they won’t get any presents. But between companies looking for a cash grab and those Jewish families who want to celebrate not-Christmas (like the ones where I went to high school that had Hanukkah Bushes (Christmas Trees with blue lights) and Hanukkah outside decorations), I guess this was inevitable.
[caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“180”] Photo by Chris247[/caption]
Happy Lunar New Year! Happy Year of the Goat! Hopefully snow doesn’t mess up your festivities. You can use my Vietnamese Zodiac program to find out what animal you are!
I know this was months ago, but I started writing this back then and just got the opportunity to finish it recently.
[caption id=“attachment_7634” align=“aligncenter” width=“427”] Scarlett Trick Or Treating at Ellicott City[/caption]
This year was Scarlett’s second Halloween, but the first one where she had some kind of a clue about what was going on. The previous year we’d dressed her up as Toad, but other than the giant head-piece, I don’t think it was too different from any other day in her life. This time around, although she didn’t really see a point in collecting the candy because she doesn’t eat it - she did present her basket to each person giving out candy.
It’s the year of the cat for the Vietnamese Zodiac. Here’s wishing you happiness, prosperity, and health. If you want to find out your animal, just visit my Vietnamese Zodiac web app.
For the past week I’ve had a huge surge in people viewing the image above. I saw that it was mostly from Google and not flickr. I was wondering why and then I realized I could see the search terms brining people to the image. Here are the search terms bringing people over:
1 tweedle dee and tweedle dum costumes 19
2 tweedle dee and tweedle dum 10
3 tweedle dee and tweedle dum costume 6
4 tweedledee and tweedledum 6
5 tweedle dee hats 2
6 tweedledee and tweedledum costumes 2
7 tweedle dee 2
8 image of tweedledee and tweedledum 2
9 tweedledee tweedledum costume women 2
10 tweedle dum and tweedle dee costumes 2
11 tweedle dee and tweedle dum women costumes 1
12 tweedle dee tweedle dum costume 1
13 woman tweedle dee and tweedle dum costumes 1
14 tweedle dum tweedle dee outfits 1
15 womens tweedle dee costume 1
16 what do tweedle dee and tweedle dum say in… 1
17 “tweedle dee and tweedle dum” 1
18 tweedle dee and tweedle dumb costumes 1
19 tweddle dee and tweedle dum costumes 1
This is over a decade old, but I just discovered it.
‘Twas the night before Christmas and Santa’s a wreck…
How to live in a world that’s politically correct?
His workers no longer would answer to “Elves”,
“Vertically Challenged” they were calling themselves.
And labor conditions at the North Pole
Were alleged by the union to stifle the soul.
Four reindeer had vanished, without much propriety,
Released to the wilds by the Humane Society.
I wanted to wish a Merry Christmas to my readers, however many (or few) of you there are.
I hope this is a time of happiness and family fun for you. And, if you’re Christian, I hope this can also be a time of reflection for you upon the sacrifices Jesus made for you so that you don’t have to go to hell.
For those of who are non-Christians - I hope you can take this time to spend with your families and friends and be happy.
For Christian readers, take time today out of the pagan rituals of trees with lights and presents by a large, fat man. Take time to remember that Christmas is about the Creator of the Earth incarnating and submitting himself to a human life so that we would no longer have to spend eternity in Hell. Sure, we may not understand the metaphysics involved and why he couldn’t just pardon us with all of the coming down and all, but since He DID go through so much, take time to remember and be grateful.
Happy Thanksgiving! Take time to Give Thanks (thanksgiving) for everything you’ve been blessed to have. No matter how things are going for you, others have it worse. Case in point, be thankful for the soldiers fighting abroad. Whatever you may think about the war, those poor men and women cannot be with their families this Thanksgiving. Instead they are in some hell-hole fighting to help people who don’t even want them there.
A big Thank You to all those who have protected us over the past 200+ years. Here are two wonderful veterans who were key to the success in World War II. Click on the pictures to see a short summary of their stories.
The timing of this holiday is perfect. Coming near the end of the year, there are basically 11 months upon which to look back on. As my wife reminded me last weekend, a lot have happened this year. As a matter of fact, I think this has been the most eventful year of my life. Here are the things I have to be thankful for this year:
May: We both graduated from Cornell with excellent grades; I had two job offers and selected one in the last week of school.
I want to wish all of my readers a very happy Valentine’s Day. If you do not have a significant other this holiday, do not feel sad as you see all the couples about. If Valentine’s Day is about love, it need not be about love between lovers. Share your love with your parents, siblings, and friends. Let them know that you care about them (in whatever way is appropriate for the relationship q;o] ) and enjoy it.
I can’t believe how much they’ve grown. Summer 2016 we were pushing them around in this car, now they’re pushing it around. (Youtube vids which may not carry over to FB - you may need to click through to the blog)
(if you usually see my blog posts on FB, I am pretty sure they don’t carry over Youtube embeds, so come to the blog to see the videos)
If you’re an only child, you don’t know what it’s like to have to live with your kiddie tormentor. Growing up, the three of us each alternated as the aggressor and the aggrieved. As Stella proves here, you don’t have to the the oldest to be the one causing issues.
Until recently I’d never used a DSLR that was capable of video. Oh, I’d had plenty of point-and-shoot cameras that were capable of shooting video, but not DSLRs. Thanks to my mom, I now have the Canon EOS Rebel T6s Digital SLR and I wanted to try out the video. On the first day, with the auto-focus I was annoyed because it’s incredibly loud on the onboard microphone. More or less impossible to shoot film that way until you’re going to have an external mic. So I played around with it with manual focus. Here is the result:
[iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/41535967" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen>]KDEnlive Test from djotaku on Vimeo.
I’ve mentioned this on my blog before, but there are a few passions that I have been engaged in to various degrees over the course of my life. One of those is the creation of videos. Of course, video creation is much more involved than my other passions. First of all, you have to worry about sound as well as video. Second, it usually has to have a story or purpose - so it’s at least three times as involved as photography, writing, or programming. So my video production has fallen off quite a bit in the last few years. You can see that if you go to my video site: drop the bomb productions. Although I may have done some tidying up by the time this post goes up, before that I hadn’t touched it in 4 years.
Dan’s not the only one that can post videos. Here’s one I really enjoyed. I heard about this guy in a podcast that covered a steam punk gathering in London.
Every once in a while, while reading Wikipedia to try and figure out why some show from my childhood isn’t available on DVD, I read that music rights are holding back the DVD. I understand that these shows were created back before DVDs and, therefore, some kind of weird legal loophole is keeping the tv show rights holders from using the music. But I think that whoever owns the music should just let it be used! Why? Because it can end up leading to music sales for the music rights holder. This wasn’t the case in the bad old days of records and CDs. But now that the viewer can just buy any song he/she wants, the music rights holder is just losing money for no reason. Recent example: Danielle is currently working her way through the Nip/Tuck DVDs. After watching the season four finale, she searched around the Internet to find the song and then bought it off Amazon.
After having tried drupal for a couple of years on an unrelated site, I came to see that it would be a great way to develop a new site for drop the bomb productions. After about two days of converting the site over, you can now see the results. I think it results in a cleaner, easier to navigate site and I think it’ll be easier for visitors to find what they’re looking for.
The word irreverent is tossed around way too flippantly these days, however, if there’s one site that deserves it, it’s ZeroPunctuation. ZeroPunctuation is a site where a British guy living in Australia reviews video games within a video format weekly. He often makes fun of games and the genres they belong in. The animation is extremely simple, yet remarkably effective. It’s slightly more than xkcd, but not much more than stick figures. The way he does this is brilliant and it must be seen in order to explain it correctly. Just one warning, if you get queasy over profanity, do NOT visit his site.
When I first began to study about Salvador Dali, I looked up surrealism in Wikipedia. The article mentioned that surrealism was not limited to the art of painting. It also extended to video work. I always wondered what a surreal movie might be like. Well, I have found one that, for some reason, has really stuck to me. It’s called Incongruitastic. This project originated with the animator wanting to combine all of his ideas into one short film. The result is episode 0, which is extremely surreal.
This annoyingly catchy rap song with crazy dance moves (there’s even a video online by the rapper to show you how to do the dance) is being put into all kinds of mashups. For some reason, these all seem to involve kiddie movies and Tv shows. Anyway, this gave me a pretty good laugh for a while. So, even though I hate linking to youtube videos (since they have an annoying tendency to be taken off), check these out while they last. First, check out the original, so you know what they’re parodying.
One long standing request on the Vimeo forums was for Vimeo to adopt some features from flickr; namely sets and groups. Well, Vimeo decided to mix it up and create a hybrid all their own. Dubbed Channels, they are an interesting mechanism. A user creates a channel and then the user can add his own videos to that channel as well as the videos of anyone else he thinks matches the channel criteria. So it’s like a set, but you can add others so it’s like a group, but only you are allowed to add in videos. I think it’s annoying that only the channel moderator can add new videos. However, I do like a lot of the extra features they added such as blogs and RSS feeds. I’ve wanted a way to blog within vimeo about vimeo-specific things that were just way too specific to mention in this blog.
What makes mytoons.com so awesome is the fact that they truly do care about their users. Due to what I wrote about my experiences with my “Shrodinger’s Cat” video on their site, I’ve had their lead web support guy email me and we’re actively working on the problem right now. That and getting the comment on my blog from the President is pretty sweet. I’m very happy with this experience as it shows they truly care and are truly working towards having the best animation site on the net. It’s like being in involved in an open source project where they accept your constructive criticism as input towards improving the product instead of something that needs to be swept under the rug.
So, I have all of my videos on Vimeo.com. I like them better than youtube because of their focus. Vimeo is very community oriented and they put a huge emphasis on original content. Vimeo is where I go to see new, neat videos like the stuff that Remmy is doing. Youtube is where I go if I missed The Colbert Report. Recently I put up my animations, “Jose’s Dinner” and “Shrodinger’s Cat”. However, they don’t seem to be getting a lot of views compared to my other videos. " Jose’s Dinner" has 134 views and " Shrodinger’s Cat" has 134. Most of my other videos have 2 - 4 times as many views.
After 3-4 days of rendering (fluid reflections and tranparency take forever to render), here is the video outcome of the splash shots I’ve been showing here. Enjoy!
So, with water simulations in Blender, the resolution of the water particles can be set. Basically, you are telling the simulation engine how big to consider the particles of water to be. This can have extremely dramatic results. Let’s take the tank of water I rendered yesterday. This time I’m at a more exciting point in the animation, frame 104.
First, here is the animation with a resolution of 50. This takes up about 3 MB on my computer.
Probably for the same reason I LOVED taking these pictures:
(you should view these large to get the full effect)
So here’s one frame from a new mini animation I was working on today. I still have a few tweaks to make, but it took 20 minutes or so to generate this frame.
and I’m happy to say that today I got 35 views on " Jose’s Dinner" too bad no one’s leaving comments. But perhaps most of my viewers are not from the vimeo community.
I decided to give myself a little “final exam” and practice everything I had learned in Blender so far. So I combined soft bodies, the physics engine, and the fluid simulator. It wasn’t exactly trivial - for example - I had to tell the physics engine to consider the towel to be a ghost because of the way the soft body engine works in combination with the physics engine. Also, I had a lot of issues with getting the water resolution low enough to get it to fall into the cup instead of hovering over it. Overall I really liked it and if I could do something different I would have had a bit more water so that it would have splashed out of the cup or done something a little more interactive. Nevertheless, here it is, my final exam:
The beat was stuck in my head for days. My youngest brother says it’s a Daft Punk song. Having done some of these on a small scale all I can say is that this must have taken them HOURS (if not days) to do!
If you want to see a REALLY, REALLY good animation, check out Three Legged Legs’ Samurai. It’s about 2-3 minutes long and it’s a wonderful little cartoon set in a stylized ancient japan.
A pretty interesting animation was done on Blender by an Arabic team. You can watch it here.
For my latest animation, " Jose’s Dinner", I was using Cinelerra for the 2D animatic. I was working on it while I was at my in-law’s house so I was using the laptop. However, we try to use the laptop as little as possible to keep extend the life of the laptop, so when I got back home I wanted to work on it here. However, the files were in different folders than on the laptop. But, since Cinelerra uses XML files, all I had to do was load the file into Emacs and do a find/replace to replace the old folders with the new ones and it worked! With a binary file that would be impossible since the information is not represented as text!
Have you ever wondered what it would be like if the Walmart logo danced to regeton, a mostly crappy mix of reggae and booty music? Me neither! That’s why this video was so surprising. Enjoy!
I’ve been too busy to write recently; even though I have so much to write about. It’s quite annoying.
There’s a lip dubbing challenge going on at Vimeo.com. I would have called it a fan video - basically people are making music videos to their favorite songs and, instead of attacking us with their horrible singing skills, they are dubbing the song over their own voices. I hope to have my own up soon. There’s one I’ve had the idea to do for about 4 years now. I used to daydream about doing it while walking through Cornell campus and listening to the song. I just knew I could make a good video for it. After seeing the real music video recently - I know mine will be more accurate to the song.
I’ve written before about how my interests tend to go in cycles. I haven’t played Sims 2 or Civ 4 in ages. In fact, since getting to work after Christmas Break I haven’t really taken many photos either. I became consumed with Blender and getting my animations done. Then Vimeo raised the upload limit from 30 mb to 250 mb and I suddenly had to digitize all those video clips I"d been waiting forever to digitize. Here’s a video Vimeo asked us to make - they said to make a video celebrating the increase.
My brother Daniel and I worked together on this video, an assignment for one of his classes at school. It’s a wonderful thing to have now that I’m so into genealogy. I also thought it was a very neat historical document because we interviewed people who experienced the revolution first-hand.
This is not the interview I was talking about last night, but I think it’s a great thing to share while I am working on translating and editing the video of my grandmother.
That tape I was waiting to rewind was an interview I did with my grandmother. She was only 3-4 months from dying. It’s freakin’ surreal! I knew I had this tape, but I couldn’t find it for the past 3 years! I had wanted to do this for years - video tape an interview with my grandmother about her life - for genealogical purposes. A lot of questions I’ve recently asked my mother, my grandmother answers in this tape. I just didn’t bother writing it down since I was video taping it. I couldn’t believe it when she died because I wanted to do this so badly and I wanted to get more interviews. She used to tell me story upon story when I was a child. It was my favorite thing to do at her house. I will post it to vimeo with some translations and an introduction. Probably tomorrow if I’m feeling especially ambitious.
----
edit
it was 1 year and 3-4 months from her death - but still came out of the blue for me!
I’ve been inspired by a string of videos on Vimeo involving live action stop-motion. Usually stop motion is used to animate inanimate objects or create movies such as “The Nightmare Before Christmas”. But with the cheapness of digital photography, more and more people are turning to using stop-motion to animate themselves. I didn’t have this intention when I shot this sequence of photos. I was just trying to make sure to get that moment when the person opens their Christmas present and has that sense of excitement in their eyes. So I took a lot of pictures before and after gifts were opened.
Bet you’ve wanted to see the budgie all the way around, eh? Well, here it is! I was doing a test on timing and light. Naturally, the timing is wrong! That’s why I’m doing a test! The camera is moving too fast, I’m going to try and work on that as I continue working on the modeling aspect.
For any creator of content, be it music, photos, or music, the greatest praise is to have people experience your content. This is why I care about how many views I have on my photos on flickr. It’s not that I want to compare myself to others - there are many who gets thousands of views on each photo they upload. I just want to know people are looking at my photos.
While I was at my parents’ house, I wanted to show David, my youngest brother, how quickly I could generate I could a humanoid while also practicing the principles I learned with Raul Domingo. (Thus Danny’s extremely blocky midsection) Then I moved on to some more advanced topics, such as light. I had always been a little bit dissapointed in the light in my renders, but I never knew what was wrong. After going through the lighting tutorial from the Blender Summer of Documentation, I realized what the problem was. A twofold problem, it was a matter of power. You see, first of all, I needed to have a sum total light intensity of 2, not one. Second, the designers of Blender envisioned most scenes to have, at least, two lights. Below are some renders of my experimentation with flashlight light and sunny light. Click on them if you want/want to see the full res version.
Which means “do Bhangra!” or “dance Bhangra!” Bhangra is a wonderful and catchy style of dance from the Punjab region of India. View this clip from the introduction to Pao Bhangra 1 at Cornell University! You can follow the link to Vimeo to see the rest of the clips, go to www.dropthebombproductions.com or come back to this blog over the next few days when I post the next part.
In order to get my video to fit within Vimeo’s upload limits, I had to split up the video into different parts. This is also from VCD disc 1 that I created for them.
Pao Bhangra Disc 1, Part 1 Pao Bhangra 1 Disc 1 Part 1 on Vimeo
David has created a wonderful new bit of machinima entitled S’mores Night Movie. It was originally intended as an inside joke between friends. He, with his girlfriend Tamlin as the screenwriter, put together a 35 minute movie incorporating different episodes of what has happened with their friends into a remake of “10 Little Indians”. I was thoroughly impressed as this was his first scripted movie and his first machinima. In fact, he didn’t even know of the movement called machinima, he just happened to feel that the Sims 2 provided him with a great set of premade characters and items for him to use in his movie.
I have registered the above domain name for my video production group. I’ve recently overhauled the website (an understatement, if you ask me) and have plans to continue to fix it up. I figured if I plan to continue to work on my videos and computer animation, it makes sense to have a domain to bring people to see my work.
I came across this page today where someone has posted a video entitled Suburban Plight. The movie is a combination of live action and computer graphics created with Blender! The result looks very nice. I’m glad the author decided to share it with us. Check it out!
Just wanted to talk about Vimeo, a flickr-like site for videos. You can see my videos at http://www.vimeo.com/user:djotaku/clips . Some of my readers may notice that I have these clips on my server (except Pao Bhangra). So why would you go to vimeo? Because my server has limited bandwidth. I think it uploads at 2 Mbits per second, while these people download a lot faster. So check them out! Then check out some other people’s work.
I’m really busy, so check these out, they are awesome. It’s a guy who synced up his Christmas lights to music. Saw it on CNN and googled to find it. Sorry it’s in evil Windows Media Video…
As some of you know from having been to my drop the bomb productions site you can see some of the stuff I’ve done. Of course, I haven’t done much serious stuff yet, but have mostly just done work for others to showcase my editing abilities. However, I am constantly making videos for different reasons. For example, I just completed making a two DVD set video of my own wedding. I also made a graduation video for my brother, Dan, a couple of years ago. So I love to keep up to date with the latest in video software. Other than photography (and lite gaming), it’s my biggest reason for using a computer.
The website for drop the bomb productions, my indie film studio, has received a minor face lift today. I changed the index page and added some forums for discussion.
For those of you who don’t know, I am into video editing and have created quite a bit of content. The videos currently on the server showcase just a fraction of my work over the past half decade. Of course, I have not added some of my largest productions, including Pao Bhangra, due to current space restrictions on my server. I intend to fix that when I relaunch the server at the end of 2005.
I discovered The Bugle from an AV Club post about podcasts. It was a very British approach to satirizing the news. At the time it was hosted by Jon Oliver and Andy Zaltzman. Then Oliver hit it big with Last Week Tonight and didn’t have time to participate in The Bugle anymore. While Andy Zaltzman was trying to figure out how he was going to relaunch the show, he played clips from his standup show Satirize This. People email him things they want satirized and he does it. I grew to really, really enjoy it and so when I heard he was actually coming to America, I knew I had to jump on the opportunity to see him live.
I will not be having a Star Wars day today on May the Fourth and it’s thanks to Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). For people who wonder why I often blog about DRM - this is why we need to fight it. I bought LEGO Star Wars five or more years ago. It was OK, but I needed someone else to play with me because the game is pretty crap with just one player. So I couldn’t wait until I could share the game with one of my children. Scarlett saw a LEGO computer game on Youtube and wanted to play. PERFECT! I went to load it and, because Microsoft no longer supports SecuROM, I can no longer play this game that I paid money for! This is why I only buy books without DRM; why I only buy movies on BluRay, not Amazon - because the DRM is trivially removed. And now I buy games on GOG whenever possible because they sell games without DRM. Don’t flush your money in the toilet! Buy DRM-free!
In a lot of ways I really don’t care what happens in the video game console world. In the last 2-3 years I have rediscovered computer gaming. Actually, to be more accurate, game publishers have rediscovered computer gaming. I remember in my youth when the best of the best games came out for computers and the consoles were mostly just arcade ports. At some point the pendulum swung the other way and, other than the Civilization and Blizard’s franchises, gaming had mostly died. Whatever games were released on computers were an afterthought and pretty poor quality. I don’t know if it was the unusually long console cycle leading to a lack of graphics innovation or the success of Steam making publishers realize they couldn’t afford to leave money on the table or a combination of the two, but computer gaming is back in a big way. (And, I’ve been saying computer gaming because Apple has seen a resurgence in gaming unlike any it has seen since the early to mid-90s and, thanks to Steam, Linux gaming is finally becoming a thing that doesn’t need WINE) So everything but the console exclusives - Halo, Mario, Uncharted - now come to computers. If I’m going to have a computer anyway (and I will), why ALSO play $300-400 for a gaming console? In the years since I’ve bought my Playstation 3 it’s been used WAY more often for Netflix than anything else. A Roku box serves that purpose a lot cheaper.
I was reading Scott Kelby’s Digital Photography books when he suggested making a background calendar to get my photos out there. A lot of people at work like to have these types of backgrounds and I follow another photographer/blogger that does the same. Here’s my January 2010 calendar. To make these your background, click on the photo and then right-click and click on “set as my background” if you’re using Windows. Linux and Mac users should be technical enough to be able to figure out what they need to do for their specific situation.
I have not been a part of the Harry Potter fandom, so I don’t know if anything I’m going to mention here has been answered in interviews or wikis, etc. I doubt Ms Rowling had the entire seven book series planned from the beginning. However, it’s pretty clear that sometime around book 2 or 3 she did a general outline of the rest of the series because it has all fight together so nicely - and not in a cheap way. Again, not having been a part of the fandom, I’m unaware if there’s some glaring plot hole, but overall it seems to fit quite, quite well. Each book matured not just in the tone of the prose and the subject matter, but also in the lifting of the veil of protection kids feel from adults. The adults were revealed to be selfish and have impure motives and, in the case of the worst of them, no problems being violent to children.
My wife and I love The Oatmeal. While I don’t find each strip funny, I certainly love strips like this one or this one. So I was extremely excited to back the Exploding Kittens kickstarter. Back when I first got it I took it to New York, excited to play it with my wife and her sister.
Exploding Kittens 002
Exploding Kittens 009
Exploding Kittens 008
Exploding Kittens 006
Exploding Kittens 005
While I think the rules create a pretty interesting game, they got caught up on the cards themselves. So I don’t think I’m going to have anyone to play it with, but I do recommend it for its interesting rule set.
When we went to my graduate degree graduation, it was also Alex’s birthday so we went to see Aladdin on Broadway. It was really good. Danielle and I enjoy Broadway shows, but have not really enjoyed the Disney Broadway shows. Mary Poppins in particular was quite a disappointment. Aladdin, on the other hand, hews a lot closer to the story that movie audiences remember. The only changes they make have to do with the fact that it’s harder on broadway to have animal characters. So instead of Abu, Aladdin gains a few friends (and a fun song about them in which they are busking. Iago becomes a man who seems to be doing a mix between Sam Kinison and Gilbert Godfrey. While we’re talking about impressions, one of Aladdin’s buddies appears to be doing an impression of Horshach from Welcome Back Kotter. Of course, the star of the show is Genie who plays on our stereotypes of overweight people to impress as he does the most impressive feats of broadway of the entire cast.
When I was growing up, I used to draw comics all the time. So when I heard about web comics I thought it was natural to create one of my own. Dan and I worked on I’m Not Mad for a few years, but it eventually fell off due to limitations in my ability to create female characters in Blender. When I got my drawing tablet (a Monoprice), I thought I might get back into it. But I have come to terms with the fact that I will never have the time commitment to get back into it. I will fulfill my desire to create by photography and blog posts. I’ve always been loathe to let go of URLs and taking stuff off the net, but we have The Wayback Machine. You can see I’m Not Mad at https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.notmadcomic.com
My first passion is photography. It’s something I’ve done all my life. (I think anything done continuously from about the age of five or six is all my life) I love coming up with an idea to shoot. Composing the frame is an artform. I love the emotional effect photography can produce in others. There’s one other hobby that’s been a constant for nearly all of my life — creating comics.
I had a crazy sense of Deja Vu today as I first read this Penny Arcade Comic. Then I popped on over to Ctrl-Alt-Del and read this comic. It was pretty strange to see them both focusing on the exact same subject. However, I too am starting to get annoyed at the Halo 3 Mt Dew commercials, however fun they may have been to watch the first dozen times.
Kudos to Tycho for today’s quote as he spoke of Mountain Dew:
Can be found here. However, there is profanity involved, so don’t go there if that offends you. Otherwise hilarious. That’s all I have to say today, spent my time out of work watching disc 4 of “The Office” and pre-ordering Mario Party 8.
…unless you have a LOT of time on your hands. Wikipedia, by being internet-based takes advantage of cross-referencing in a way that was NEVER possible with traditional encyclopedias. Even new multimedia encyclopedias like Encarta don’t take advantage of it like Wikipedia does. Almost every word in an article is a reference to something else. For example, I was curious if there was an article on Five Iron Frenzy, easily one of my favorite groups of all time. To both my dismy and delight there WAS a Five Iron Frenzy article. I was only dismayed because I would have liked to have written the article! However, the author(s) did an amazing job and there was no need to add much to what they had written. In that article they mentioned Third Wave Ska. I knew that ska had come out in a few waves and often talked about it based on what I had heard people say, but I wasn’t sure on the definition. I wanted to read more so that I would have a clear understand when I spoke of it, so I clicked on the link and found out about third wave ska. I knew that ska came from Jamaica, but I had no idea what its origins are. I especially wanted to find out about it since some groups (such as No Doubt) have recently gone to a more reggae sounding ska. Unlike other encyclopedias, I did not have to type a search for ska, it was already referenced in the article! I click on it and read about ska.
After waiting for a bit, turned out that the only real issue with Windows 10 is that you shouldn’t do Express Install unless you want Microsoft spying on everything. Also, now that I’m doing photography on Linux (another post about that at some point), the only thing I had to lose was the ability to play games for a while. The updater was pretty self explanatory and the process was more or less similar to a Fedora upgrade.
Innovation is one of those things we pretend to want and then complain when it happens. It’s like women who say they want sensitive men who understand their feelings and then always fall for the bad boy. In the technology world, everyone always views copying with disdain. “Where’s the innovation?” they decry. Case in point, everyone is always yelling at Microsoft for stealing copying Apple’s GUI interface with Windows 95. (Everyone seems to forget Apple stealing borrowing from Xerox) When they try to get innovative with Vista or Windows 7 everyone complains they can’t find anything because it was moved around. Linux is not immune to these complaints. On the one hand, everyone mocks Linux for co-opting technologies from other operating systems. “Oh, you have a dock - why do you always have to copy the Mac?” or the ever-present “If Linux really wants to take the lead, they’ll have to stop copying Windows and Mac and start innovating on their own.” But then, when Linux improves upon something from the leading OS all you hear is, “Why is everything so different? Until Linux is easy for a Windows user to just jump over to without relearning things, they’ll never succeed.”
Recently, Penguin Pete, who’s on my blogroll, wrote this piece about his disapproval about where Ubuntu was taking Linux. Some of his key arguments were….doh! He removed the posts. I guess I’ll have to summarize. He said, in a nutshell, that too many Windows users were going to Ubuntu and expecting it to be just like Windows. But Linux is not Windows. This is not to say that there’s anything wrong with people going from Windows to Linux, but their demands to rearrange Linux, which was made in the image of Unix, to be more like Windows, raelly rubs some people the wrong way. He suggested that if users wanted a FOSS version of Windows, they should go to ReactOS, a Windows clone.
Whenever I boot up post upgrade to Fedora 22, it takes much longer to load KDM than it used to. So I thought maybe it has something to do with Wayland and the fact that KDM is EOL’d. So I thought I’d convert to SDDM. I had no idea how to change DMs in the modern day, so I decided to look it up and ask on LinuxQuestions.org. Eventually, I found it on a stack overflow page:
Today I saw the ad above which is part of an ad campaign that includes the ad in the header. As you can see by comparing these images, the photographer had many permutations of clothing available for the athlete, Purity Kirui, to wear. But I think each of these images reaches into the viewer’s mind differently. The header image is a standard athletic image. Purity seems to be enjoying her incredible athleticism and the implied advantage of doing so in Nike gear. It’s been shot in such a way as to make it seem as though she’s almost literally flying through the air or jumping as if she had Flubber on the bottom of her shoes. It’s a good ad and a great photo. (Note: I have cropped image horizontally - original photo here for as long as Nike keeps it up) On the other hand, let’s look at the image I saw at the mall today. At first glance it seems a less dynamic and less powerful image. Yet it kept my attention for longer than the header image. Why is that? Because the photographer is reaching into the zeitgeist - super heroes. The way her shirt is pulling behind her is evoking the current super hero trend. Even though the other image has her in the air, this one seems as though she’s running to go save someone. By tapping into this feeling, she seems even more powerful and as though she’s running even faster. It’s almost implied that Nike’s the shoe of power and integrity and even, subconsciously, that it’s the only shoe that can withstand the speed. This is the power of imagery and it’s one of the reasons we are more censorious with images than we are with words.
Because I’m using WP Super Cache to reduce the strain on the server, there’ll be a lot of older posts and pages with the old theme. I didn’t notice this until I loaded up my blog at work. The main page was fine as it’s incredibly dynamic, but many of the pages (as opposed to posts) were stuck with the old theme.
I also noticed it’s often stalling before it can finish, so I changed it from every 12 hours to ever 24 hours. If that works well, then at most a few days from now everything will be on the new theme.
My site got pounded today like a beach on a windy day when I appeared on Linux Toda y. So I decided to install WP Super Cache. This should display cached pages to anyone who isn’t commenting so hopefully it will help my site deal with a lot more traffic. The traffic was so bad I couldn’t even SSH into the box. Hopefully now it won’t be so bad. So if anything appears wonky - please bear with me while I work out the bugs.
I’ve been hearing about the members of the Giant Bombcast talk about participating in the Extra Life video game marathon for a few years now. For some reason, when the 2014 event happened, I decided to look into it to see if I could participate this year. When I started looking into it around a month ago, I realized I wouldn’t be able to participate in the big 24 hour day because that’s when someone’s getting married. But, then I found out that the organizers are OK with creativity in the marathon was run. There are others, like me, who raise money and play games throughout the year.
Alright, It’s 1 March so it’s time to break out the shorts and tank tops! No? Oh yeah, Ithaca is too far away to get the memo that it’s March so today I looked out and saw all this snow. In fact, it was actively snowing when I looked out the window. When I got in my car to go buy Bambi for my fiancee (it came out on DVD today) and drove to Best Buy, I was taken aback at how beautiful the snow looked. Since it was early in the morning, it hadn’t been soiled by cars driving over it or plows pushing dirty snow around. I resolved to take my camera out with me when I walked to class. It turned out that you just get a very different image from the snow on campus than you do from the snow in the mountain roads leading to the mall. I have decided to include some of the pictures I took today. Enjoy.
So, this paper in Nature reveals that sex is much more complex than just having XX or XY. I think an awesome followup would see if trans and/or gay/lesbian people had more of these chimeric conditions. Although, everything has potential for evil, I think this would be super helpful to parents of kids who were going to end up trans to educate themselves in order to be more supportive.
“Oh, you’re getting married? I guess your sex life is over” HYUK HYUK HYUK HYUK. It’s hilarious. Oh, wait, no it’s a hackneyed joke that’s more or less run its course. First of all, it doesn’t make sense for the segment of the population that waits for marriage for sex. Their sex life is just beginning. Second, it’s not really true. A marriage is just like any other relationship - it’s easy to take for granted, but it needs work to be maintained, much less to grow. That means satisfying each other’s needs: mental, physical, spiritual, emotional, and sexual. Given that I had a daughter, it should not be a surprise to anyone (although I know you’d prefer not to have it forefront in your mind), that Danielle and I have sex. And Scarlett was born after we were married so … yeah. That’s why I was pretty annoyed by the last paragraph of what was otherwise a pretty neat article about someone’s experience being in an open marriage and how it’s not the evil thing most people assume it is:
When I became sexually active (which I’ll loosely define as when I started trying to kiss and touch girls), here’s what I’d been told:
School: there are tons of diseases you can get so don’t have sex
Parents: If you have sex, make sure you use a condom to protect from aforementioned diseases as well as unwanted pregnancy. Because if you get the girl pregnant you’re dropping out of school to take care of that baby
Church: The only proper sex is between husband and wife. Also, masturbation is a sin.
Of those, the only practical advice came from my parents. (The school helped, but I’ll elaborate on where they could have done more momentarily) In the end, I did not have intercourse until I married my wife so I guess all the authority figures in my life “won”. To be clear, my position is that the optimal sex is that between a married couple (whether you be straight or gay) or at least a deeply committed couple. Why? Because whether or not you have a religion that tells you to wait or even have a religion at all, I think sex is a special act between two people. I think sex requires trust because you’re making yourself ultimately vulnerable - you have no clothes to hide behind. Your body and your performance will be judged. And I think that the best sex is sex in which each partner is focused on the needs of the other, not their own. This is more likely to happen in a relationship than a casual hookup. And perhaps the biologists will just tell me that it’s oxytocin or some equivalent brain/body chemical, but post-sex I usually feel extremely close to my wife as though something has occurred on the metaphysical level.
[caption id=“attachment_7194” align=“alignleft” width=“455”] MRI of Clitoris converted to 3D model[/caption]
First of all, it’s a complete accident of timing that this post appears next to tomorrow’s post. I wrote tomorrow’s post about a month before I wrote this one.
With that out of the way, let’s talk about one of the most interesting things I recently learned about the fairer sex and, well, sex. What you see in the image on this post is a 3D rendering of an MRI of the clitoris. The first most interesting thing about this image is that the clitoris wasn’t fully mapped until 2005! (WHAT?!?) Between the insane numbers of sexual dissatisfaction reported by women, the constant bafflement among men about how to best make sure their partners can also climax, and the awesome fact that is is the ONLY organ in the human body that exists purely for pleasure I am baffled that no one studied it this thoroughly until 2005. You’d think that, at the very least, there would be a potential goldmine for companies to help alleviate all that sexual dissatisfaction. The second most interesting thing about this image is the shape. Those of us men who’s actually taken the time to learn about women so that sex can be about both of us, not just the man, know about the nub we can see on the pelvic area. But pretty much no one knew about the wishbone shape of the internal aspects of the clitoral tissue. It’s almost like discovering that the clitoris is an iceberg and we can only see the 10% that floats above the surface of the water.
Boing Boing linked to an article about three women who worked in pin-up ar t. (While most of the images are tame enough to view at work, there are at least three drawings of fully nude women in the article, so it’s up to you) I was fascinated by this because it seems odd that women would want to contribute to the sexualization of women - at least under the narrative I grew up with. Interestingly enough, one of the artists is best known for the Coppertone Baby (which always reminds me of Miami Billboards)
John Waters was on NPR to talk about his new book, Role Models. In the course of talking to Terry, he mentioned dealing with people with Alzheimer’s. He asked a friend of his, a nurse who works with Alzheimer’s patients - “People forget who their family is, what they did that day or even five minutes ago. Do they ever forget if they are gay or straight?” And the answer was “no”. He surmised this meant it was built in versus a choice. Because you could forget a choice you made. While not perfectly conclusive proof, I think it certainly adds to the idea that it is inborn rather than simply a choice.
I just wanted to free flow some ideas today since there isn’t any one thing I wanted to blog about that I felt was worth justifying an entire post.
First up, I think I’ve seen these ads on VH1 or MTv when my wife is watching them (I don’t like anything on those channels) - Elexa - a new feminine sexual line of products by the makers of the Trojan condom. As they have just launched the brand, the commercials are nice and cryptic - of course the reason for that is because Madison Avenue wants you to be all curious so that you go and check out what’s up with this product. I had no idea what it was. Looking online, I see that it consists of freshinging cloths, a lube, and some condoms. I have no idea what the freshening cloth is, but from their description using “polite” words, I think it’s a quick way to clean up after sex without going to shower. An interesting idea, although as a married man in my own house - I’d rather just get in the shower. I could understand if you were having sex somewhere else and had to be discrete or something and couldn’t shower - then they’d be pretty useful.
No, the worst part is that, like the lady who had to swallow the bird to catch the spider that she’d swallowed to catch the fly, any technical system that stops you from being the master of your computer must be accompanied by laws that criminalize information about its weaknesses. In the age of Google, it simply won’t do to have “uninstall HAL9000.exe” return a list of videos explaining how to jailbreak your gadgets, just as videos that explain how to jailbreak your iPhone today could technically be illegal; making and posting them could potentially put their producers (and the sites that host them) at risk of prosecution.
Here’s a great collection of Zen Writing Parody called The Rootless Root.
I will sample my favorite one here to give you an idea of the wisdom contained inside.
Master Foo and the Script Kiddie
A stranger from the land of Woot came to Master Foo as he was eating the morning meal with his students.
“I hear y00 are very l33t,” he said. “Pl33z teach m3 all y00 know.”
Master Foo’s students looked at each other, confused by the stranger’s barbarous language. Master Foo just smiled and replied: “You wish to learn the Way of Unix?”
With all the recent hype revolving around Second Life, Darren Barefoot created First Life. In case the site goes down or is sold off, here’s a screenshot. Click it for a full resolution view.
He is one of my favorite comedians so I have translated two of his jokes for you today. Enjoy!
A woman walks into a pet store and tells the man at the counter, “I would like to buy your canary which sings most beautifully.”
So the man at the counter comes back with a bird and tells her, “this bird sings more beautifully than any other canary. It sings so beautifully that I cannot sell it for less than $1500.” She thought this was a lot, but for a bird that sang that well, she was willing to pay the price.
This is an amusing essay I found online, written in the mid-seventies. The humor is a little crude at some points, but I think it’s not too nasty in any one location. So join Larry as he explores whether Superman could ever have sex with a human.
---—————
Man of Steel,
Woman of Kleenex
By Larry Niven*
---—————————————————————————–
Things of the form (*text*) are footnotes in the original text.
He’s faster than a speeding bullet. He’s more powerful than a locomotive. He’s able to leap tall buildings at a single bound. Why can’t he get a girl?
I started reading this series 10 years ago. For whatever reason, I stopped a couple books short from the end. Last year I started re-reading them for a series over on Comic POW! ( http://www.comicpow.com/thread/unders… ) Overall, I’ve enjoyed the story almost as much as I did the first time around (when I was closer in age to Keitaro). Many manga and anime are full of Fan Service and, as you’d expect from a series involving a college guy living with HS-College age girls, there’s plenty here. But this entire volume was essentially just one giant fan service episode for 100 or so pages. Given that Akamatsu has actually really provided some of these characters a lot of emotional and personal growth it was just annoying and repetitive. The entire volume feels as though Akamatsu had to make, say, 100 issues and he realized his story only required 95 issues so he’s stalling. Instead of one nonsensical issue within the volume, the whole thing hinges on the girls being fired or quitting over and over as they fight with Keitaro’s sister, who’s running things while he’s in America.
The basement bathroom needed some new paint and repairs for reasons I’ll get into in another post. But it got Danielle in a renovation mindset. So she decided to paint the master bathroom. And, in the course of examining the bathroom she found out that the vanity lighting was rusting and needed replacement. So we ended up replacing nearly everything metal in there from shiny Chrome to Nickel. So here’s how the bathroom looked before she painted and I replaced the metal pieces:
Apparently my old stomping grounds of Ft Lauderdale have passed an ordinance making it illegal to feed the homeless. WTF, Florida? Anyone who is active in church should be fighting this with civil disobedience. They can’t arrest all of you!
Yesterday I read through the intro of Don’t Know Much About Mythology. It posited that one possible reason for myths was for the rich to control the poor. I thought, “Yeah. Makes sense back then with their god-kings, but we’re smarter now.” Then I thought about American politics and realized nothing has changed over the past 10000 years.
By the way, so much of the Christian discourse in America is so far away from the actual content of the Bible that regardless of whether you believe in Yahweh/God and Jesus’ divinity, you should regard most of what you think you know about Christianity as mythology.
Welcome to my new series where I wonder if some concepts and technologies are now obsolete thanks to our new paradigms and technologies. Today’s topic - evangelism.
Short term readers of my blog will think I only write about Linux and technology. Long term readers will know that I’m a Christian. I was brought up (what the media refers to as) an evangelical. Specifically, I was brought up as a Baptist. My entire church life though high school involved being told how we had to spread the Word of God. Indeed, if you believe in the divinity of Jesus and the infallibility of The Bible, it even says in the Gospels that Jesus commanded his followers to spread the “Good News”. And so they became the first missionaries.
If you take the Biblical story of Adam and Eve literally (as opposed to figuratively or allegorically) there is one possible explanation for the world as science sees it that I’ve never, ever heard anyone propose. This shocks me as it seems to be a convenient answer that fits with the science. The Bible tells us that when Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the Tree (not the apple…) they had to die. This means that prior to that, they were immortals. At least that’s the only possible reading of the story of Adam and Eve that doesn’t make God a liar.
(I’m writing this on the 21 around midnight, but I have a lot of posts coming up so I time-shifted this to the 24th)
If you’ve read my blog long enough, you know that I believe in events transpiring when they should. In other words, God places things in our lives at the right time. If you call it luck, what is luck, but another name for God? You’re still ascribing it to an unexplainable force.
In " Things that Shouldn’t Make Me Happy", Scott Adams hits on one of the most poignant things I’ve read in a while. For a humorist, he has been making some amazing points recently.
If you think about it, wars are generally fought because of a false sense of certainty. Usually some leader thinks he is a God, or talks to God, or descended from the Gods, or thinks God gave his people some particular piece of real estate. The leader’s opinion is the most certain in the land. People flock to certainty and adopt the certainty as their own. The next thing you know, stuff is blowing up.
I’m reading through Leviticus right now and boy is it tough going. The entire Biblical narrative has come to a complete halt as rule after seemingly arbitrary rule is spelled out. And the killer is the repitition. Instead of lumping twenty offenses together and saying, for all of these the punishment is X, it lists the punishment each time for each specific offense!
I used to think that these rules were pretty arbitrary and marveled at just how detailed the regulations concerning their lives was. One thing I’ve always wondered about is what the point of it all was. Why did God have to have all these rituals - did He really need the Isrealites to kills goats, pigeons, and sheep? Couldn’t he just have told them to pray and He would answer their prayers?
This news is a few weeks old, but I’m behind on my “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me” podcasts. However, a congressman said that we have to be really careful with dealing with Iraq and Iran (meaning bomb the stuffing out of them) or else our money may one day read, “In Mohammad We Trust.”
Hey you moronic, racist/religioust, jerk - does our money say, “In Jesus We Trust?” If your improbable scenario were to play out, our money would read “In Allah We Trust” and everyone knows that Allah == God. Therefore it would say the same thing it says now.
Recently, someone created Conservipedia, saying that Wikipedia has a liberal bias. Its proof? Idiotic things like the fact that some of the articles are spelled in the Queen’s English (honour, colour) despite most users being American. This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.
Another proof it gives is not idiotic, just misguided - Wikipedia, like a majority of the world, lends credence to the Theory of Evolution. Frankly, as a Christian, I’m sick and tired of this whole Creationism movement. All it succeeds in doing is making Christians look like conniving morons. We can’t get schools to teach in the Christian God creating things, so we created “Creationism” that teachs that some Diety created the world and everything. I think people would be less vitriolic towards the whole thing if it just went outright and called it for what it is - the Christian God.
Apparently showing a trailer for a movie about Christ at a Christmas festival is too much for Chicago officials. Although Fox was prepared to pay $12 000 to the festival if the trailer for “The Nativity Story” would be shown throughout the festival. Sorry, said the Political Correctness Police, we can’t appear to be endorsing any religion. Never mind the fact that there’s a menorah on display at the festival.
It was just an audio footnote on NPR’s story, but he has confessed to his church that some of the allegations are true.
This story should remind people why religion and politics shouldn’t be mixed. This guy wanted to be all big, calling into the White House and stuff and he wanted to support and anti-gay amendment. Now, the whole world gets to watch his fall. It always makes me sad when religious leaders get caught up in stuff like this because, as a religious person myself, it makes it seem as though all Christians are hypocritical or something. Sure, even Christians, sin, but the cliche is true - the bigger you are, the harder you fall. If this guy was just some regular local preacher, this would just be a Colorado thing instead of a National issue.
A Pastor with ties to the White House, Republicans, and Anti-Gay Marriage stuff in Colorado has been accused of having an affair with a gay man. Now, the elections are just 4 days away, so the first thing I thought was - this is TOO perfect. This has to have been made up to defame the guy in the hopes of throwing off the “Values Voters” who vote for Republicans. After all, if they aren’t practicing what they preach, why not vote for Democrats? Even just saying he had a heterosexual affair would be bad, as he is a Pastor and is supposed to be setting an example. But it has happened before.
That my father-in-law was able to get a kidney from his sister and the surgery went well. He is now recovering, but will no longer need dialysis every other day! I kept myself busy/sane in the hospital by reading my Salvador Dali book and taking pictures. Here are some of the pictures from the hospital:
It really annoys me when I can’t remember what I wasn to post. Blogging has been one of the casualties of working a steady eight hour job. While I’m at work I always thing of all these great ideas of thigns I want to blog, but then when I finally get home, I either have forgotten what I wanted to talk about or I just don’t feel like it anymore. The second reason seems to be just as prevalent as the first - sometimes I would have put an idea on paper, but after mulling about it all day long, I just don’t feel like thinking about it anymore. Frankly, as I write this, I feel I’ve written this paragraph, or one similar to it, at least once before. I guess that means this is a true and recurring problem which really bothers me.
Christian Rock/Pop music has been around since the 1970s when Larry Norman pioneered the genre. Since then it has become a HUGE market encompassing all areas of music from rock to ska to punk to rap. There is a large popuplation of Jews in the US, so why wouldn’t there be Jewish music? Finally, our country has put enough of our prejudices aside that I heard Matisyahu’s single “King Without a Crown” on the pop radio station here in the Baltimore Area.
God’s Debris, by Scott Adams, is a total mind-blow. It is, indeed, one of the most provacative philosophy books I have read in a long time. As Adams says himself, the book is not a reflection of his opinions or necessarily of anything more than nonsense. He just took the simplest answer for the philosophical questions he poses. However modestly he begins the book, it’s clear he hasn’t fooled around. The points he presents in the book on religion, the sexes, and other topics will cause you to seriously think about your beliefs and why things are the way they are on this earth. Especially poingnant is his chapter on Holy Land when we have so many groups fighting each other on account of Holy Land.
Sure, this is mostly a technology (read linux) blog with some politics thrown in. But long-time readers know I am a religious person. Not a religous fanatic, but religious nontheless. I just wanted to take a post to express my gratitude for things that have been going so well for me. For instance, my mother’s flights to and from, and her time in, Mexico were safe. There are many other things, some of which I may be able to discuss in the future. Thank you God.
Sarong Party Girl (SPG), who ironically does very little blogging about parties, wrote this hasty article, tackling an issue she talks about a lot - relativism and good & evil. The key point of her post, which has been a theme in some of her other posts is:
At the end, whatever we do, there will never be more good than evil, and good can never triumph, because from someone else’s point of view, what is good for you might not be good for him. We sympathize with the victors as history is written by them.
Just a quick thought that I may elaborate on later (hence the part 1). Some may just call it coincidence, but days like this further my belief in God. Out of the blue I think that perhaps I should just try my server again, after trying EVERYTHING when I first moved in. Now it suddenly works! I feel God put that idea in my head. Thank you.
Well, I can’t get into too many details at this time because of professionalism, but I had been praying for certain things to happen in my future and they had occurred! I know we’re not supposed to make deals with God, but I did promise that if He delivered that I would share it with the whole world. I am VERY happy today and my life is now a little less infinite than it was a couple of weeks ago! I’m so happy I can barely contain it!
Joseph Ratzinger from Germany! I had been hoping they would go with a Latin American poope like they had been predicting. Not only because this would have probably been a Hispanic, but because it would have been the first Pope from the New World. I would also have liked an Asian or African Pope because that would also have been a break from a European Pope. Well, maybe next time.
A new pope has been chosen! More info when I hear it later tonight. Wow, this world really had been accelerated. They picked someone on the first day unlike in previous times.
I was watching a commercial today on MSNBC for a knee replacement technology. The ad had some woman who lives in San Francisco and the infinitely large hills there were just killing her knees because she had arthritis. But then modern medical science gave her: “a replacement knee that, unlike the ones produced by other companies, bends and turns to ALMOST simulate the function of a real knee.” And it continued with the usual disclaimers - don’t elect to have this done if you’re sick, the knee may gain setience and kill you - stuff like that. But what stuck out for me in the ad was the fact that the replacement knee ALMOST was like a real knee. ALMOST. Are you telling me that modern science can put a man on the moon, build a space station, make computers that store so much information that if you would have told the original creators of the computer you would have been thrown in a luny bin, can manipulate NANO objects to build things for them, yet it cannot make a fully functional knee?!? WTF is that?
But reading @Scalzi’s response to GamerGate jerks just demonstrates how few companies run the media world and how important it is for us to maintain an open internet so that people can express themselves without being gated by companies that, as a whole, tend to be conservative (not in the political sense, in the business sense)
This book is a commentary on the sad state our country has been in since the 70s and 80s when it comes to computer crime. Although there should always be consequences for skirting the law we have often taken it a bit too far. This graphic novel was sad to read in the wake of Aaron Schwartz’ suicide when threatened by law enforcement.
SuperMario is my main Linux computer and its motherboard was dying. The first signs were the DVD burner no longer being read (knew it wasn’t just that one because I swapped out DVD burners) followed by the front panel USB not working. Then, last week, it stopped booting reliably. It was time to finally replace the motherboard. This was the Linux computer I’d built the first time I was trying to convince Danielle to use Linux (seven years ago) so it had a Core 2 Duo in it. So I’d need a new motherboard, CPU, and RAM. Here’s what KinfoCenter looked like before the swap:
We all know that technology continues to get cheaper and cheaper every year. But this was brought into sharp relief yesterday when I looked up the invoice for Dave’s computer to see what components it contained. I built Dave’s computer in 2006. It was a graduation present from my parents and meant to be Dave’s computer in college. At the time he was really big into WoW and other video games and he had a crappy old HP computer. The total price of the computer was $2421.92. It included a 500 GB Seagate drive (I was really into Seagate then) for $280! Nowadays you can get a 500 GB drive for around $50. The DVD burner didn’t fall as dramatically in price. The one I bought him was $36 and you can get a pretty decent one now around $20. I’m not going to focus on the motherboard price because those tend to actually stay constant for a standard entry board; around $100. The next expensive item was the graphics card. It was a PCI Express x16, 512 MB Radeon card and it cost $600. Nowadays you can get the same thing for less than $50. The RAM was 4 GB for $439! I just bought that much RAM for $90. Finally, the Pentium IV 3.8 GHz processor for $621. Newegg no longer carries P4s. Last time I shopped for one, about two years ago, it was $50. (The keyboard and mouse were gaming-specific so they sold for a premium, and Windows XP was $89)
As I’ve mentioned before, although I think it was on It’s A Binary World 1.0, a Cornell education does something strange to you. Like seeing vectors when speeding up and slowing down your car. Or in the way in which you explain why Dan will be escorting two bride’s maids at Phil’s wedding:
?(09:00:29 PM)Danny: and here’s what this one guy had to say about it(09:00:38 PM)Danny: Also, I would like to concur with Dan’s sentiments. Given Dan’s unique
relationship status amongst our fraternity of groomsmen, it would be
logical and just to assign him the surplus of bridesmaids. However, giving
him three would stretch the bounds of the reasonable. It would be awkward
and contrived. Naturally, six bridesmaids would be pigeonholed amongst
four groomsmen in the currently arranged manner: 2 would have 1 each, 2
would have 2 each. Perhaps Margot would appreciate the subsequent
metaphor. Since the current combinatorial arrangement is the natural
consequence of an application of the Pigeonhole Principle, we can liken
the current circumstance to that of the most stable or lowest-energy
state. Although I am sure Mr. Mesa’s propensity for being an attractive
nucleus for members of the opposite sex is considerable, keeping three
bridesmaids in an orbital around his personage would undoubtedly require a
good deal of energy on his behalf. Also, let us consider another physical
fact. As Margot has indicated we may likely be in “arm-in-arm” contact
with our respective bridesmaids. Based off my prior observation of Mr.
Mesa, his anatomy appears nominal in that he possess, as do most members
of our species, two arms.
A third bridesmaid would have to reside in some outer orbital and would
have a greatly increased probability of being snatched by another
groomsmen to fill his inner orbital. As such, this arrangement is
unstable.
Just grow your own 1up mushroom! Don’t have the spores for that? A dinosaur kingdom hasn’t taken over your land and transformed your people into mushrooms? Don’t worry! Think Geek is selling a 1up Mushroom!
The same dork who, last December, was trying to claim that the GPL ruined his ability to program because the software was available for free, appealed last December’s decision. Well, on 9 November, he was handed another blow from the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. The Judge was a pretty smart guy and asserted that if Linux was so anti-competitive by being free, why do more people have Windows and Macintosh computers than Linux? Why do people use Photoshop instead of The GIMP. I love it when our government officials actually know about technology! (Unlike the congressmen who passed the DMCA!)
The computing industry has lots of euphimisms, but one of the ones that gets me really miffed is “trusted computing”. It is a process by which computer companies are trying to exert THEIR control on machines WE have bought with OUR money! Trusted Computing is the way they show they don’t trust us, but not allowing us to do whatever we want on our machines. This goes against the very love of tinkering that drives so many of us. It’s why more and more people are turning to the BSDs and Linux distros in order to be able to have the FREEDOM to tinker with THEIR OWN software as they wish. Instead, the industry wants to tell us how we should experience their items! I don’t want to hear it! If I want to buy a CD or DVD and rip it to my computer and put it on my iPod, then that’s my own business! Especially if I have PURCHASED IT! There have always been and always will be pirates. If you embed these systems into our hardware, you think it will stop us from experiencing our media the way we want to, but it won’t! There’s not a thing you can do to stop the resourcefulness of computer geeks, CS, and ECE majors. You can push congress to make it illegal, but that just means another DVD Jon in Scandanavia will figure it out. Just let us do what we wish. There has always been piracy and somehow you’ve still managed to make money anyway.
Someone built a difference engine - the first computer ever designed by Charles Babbage - out of Legos. The difference engine is more of a calculator than a computer in that you can’t load multiple programs on it, but it was still extremely revolutionary for its time. In fact, it was only designed on paper and wasn’t actually built until the 1990s!
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
Given the way humans work, this episode of You Are Not So Smart probably won’t change the mind of anyone who’s deep into the alternative medicine world, but I think it’s important to listen to and strongly consider if you’re on the fence.
Key quotes to me:
“There’s a name for treatments that are proven to work. It’s called medicine”
Here’s an email I sent to some of my friends based on an piece I heard on The Naked Scientist:
This group did a study and found that women who were lap dancers and not on the pill (ie they had a normal menstrual cycle) go more tips on their fertile days. (I can’t imagine the grant application process for that study. “Yeah, we need to study strip clubs…this is important, somehow….”)
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“The trinkets I received for becoming a member of the Free Software Foundation.”] [/caption]
I’ve been wondering about a peculiar aspect of human motivation. Why do we require a present of some sort in exchange for a donation? Let’s take NPR for example. During membership drives a donation will net the donator a hat or tote bag or something like that. But why does there have to be a prize for donation? The point of donation is that you realize some organization or cause needs your money. So why waste some of that money to get a mug? And if you wanted a mug emblazoned with the NPR logo, you could just go to the NPR store and buy it. But getting gifts must entice more people to donate or organizations wouldn’t waste money on it when they could be using all the money to cover their costs.
According to the latest issue of IEEE Spectrum, I suffer from completism. Completism is when you have to have all of a collection. It’s true I’m always get annoyed whenever I have only one DVD of a Tv series or if I have 9 of 10 DVDs or something. Feel the same way? Now you know what it’s called!
That’s what the computer told my fiancee. “You have been classified as having the symptoms of being bipolar,” it continued. A friend of mine had recently taken an online diagnosis using the school’s health website. I felt it was bogus and told him so, but to drive the point home my fiancee and I decided to take the test ourselves.
We answered all of the questions from her point of view, but we didn’t do this in a, “let’s mess with the system” sort of way; we genuinely filled out the answers. I knew the diagnosis would be less than perfect when it simply consisted of multiply choice questions like
Yesterday I was doing looking for the website to Wikipedia and came acrossWikibooks, which happens to be run by the same group, The Wiki Media Foundation. Since I knew what Wikipedia was, I decided to see what Wikibooks was. Well, the same way that Wikipedia attempts to be an encyclopedia which anyone can contribute to, Wikibooks is like a library written by everyone online. I’m not so sure if I will ever use Wikibooks in the near future, but Wikipedia is a pretty good resource to use.
(BTW - I don’t remember that show having a laugh track. Quite jarring)
I felt just as incredulous as that guy. Still, even the most obvious things, like zippers, have to come from someone’s brain. I didn’t think about it again for years. Until this June when Boing Boing, Ars, and NPR covered the story that a film maker is suing the copyright holders. He just made a whole documentary about Happy Birthday and so he has a pretty good handle on exactly where it came from. Turns out he believes it should not be in copyright. So he’s suing Time Warner for collecting copyright fees on something it shouldn’t hold the copyright on. Supposedly it makes Time-Warner $2 million a year so they could end up with a HUGE bill if the film maker can turn it into a class action lawsuit. However, considering how much money Time-Warner would be liable for, you can be certain they’ll bring their best lawyers to play. It should be a pretty interesting fight.
In the past week I’ve listened to the most recent episodes of The Commandline Podcast and The Giant Bombcast. The former was a discussion of those who willingly violate copyright law as a comparison to those who violated the Volstead Act and 18th Amendment to the US constitution both of which made it illegal to sell “intoxicating liquors”. The latter had a discussion during the listener emails section that revolved around buying illegal VHS copies of movies and TV shows that have never been released on DVD (or sometimes even legitimately on VHS). (For my younger readers — VHS is a cassette tape format that held video . It was the precursor to DVDs) Together these different shows got me thinking about how copyright should deal with unreleased video.
(BTW - I don’t remember that show having a laugh track. Quite jarring)
I felt just as incredulous as that guy. Still, even the most obvious things, like zippers, have to come from someone’s brain. I didn’t think about it again for years. Until this June when Boing Boing, Ars, and NPR covered the story that a film maker is suing the copyright holders. He just made a whole documentary about Happy Birthday and so he has a pretty good handle on exactly where it came from. Turns out he believes it should not be in copyright. So he’s suing Time Warner for collecting copyright fees on something it shouldn’t hold the copyright on. Supposedly it makes Time-Warner $2 million a year so they could end up with a HUGE bill if the film maker can turn it into a class action lawsuit. However, considering how much money Time-Warner would be liable for, you can be certain they’ll bring their best lawyers to play. It should be a pretty interesting fight.
When I really got into animation a few years ago, I started appreciating a lot of the aspects of animation that people don’t even realize took work. For example, in a live action movie the set designers can go buy chairs and lamps and lights. Everything in an animated work has to be created from scratch. Although Disney feature films tend to put a lot of emphasis on the voice actors, most TV cartoons are voiced by people who only we animation geeks know. Giant Bomb brought video game voice acting to my attention with their discussions over the last three years or so about how Nolan North is in so many video games that they were able to have an entire Game of the Year section called The Northies in which they decide which of his roles was best acted. (Unfortunately, the joke wore thin and it won’t be there this year.) Giant Bomb was at it again in this clip in which they consider baby/kids toy voice acting. ( at the time I’m writing this, there’s a bug that doesn’t show the play button. Click left of the left-most numbers)
Cleaned up the header menus (it was really bugging me that the second row only had one entry on most desktop computers) and added a Comment Policy page.
My stats say there have already been 43 visits today, so some of you may have seen the header while in its state of flux. After talking it over with the wife (who also thinks the new theme looks more pro! yay!) and sleeping on it, I got the header to about 1.0 stage. I have a couple ideas on how I want to punch it up a bit more, but I want to give myself some time to mull it over.
On 8 July I wrote a blog post asking Why is Pop Culture so Anti-Women? Danielle usually comments on my blog posts, but she also doesn’t always have time for that because of Scarlett. So we discussed it at the dinner table. What she told me was that “you get used to it. You just figure -that’s the way the world is.” Hearing that response was one of those times where I felt two opposing feelings. I felt sad that the response is getting used to it. Although, given the power of the media in our youth and its continued (yet hopefully diminishing) power today - I could see that feeling angry and hoping for change would be a lost cause. At the same time, I felt hopeful for Scarlett and for the ~150 million women and girls in America because Danielle transcended those images, tropes, and stereotypes. She does not feel the need to dress or act how society supposes she should. She does as she wishes and is a successful woman. She was an extremely successful worker in the workplace - always getting the highest accolades. She is completely interdependent with me rather than dependent on me. That’s what I need to impart onto Scarlett and she’ll be fine. Pop culture will still suck, but she’ll be fine.
The Singapore government just announced an intention to begin regulating websites that report on the country, requiring a S$50,000 ‘performance bond’ and compliance with any takedown notices from the government within 24 hours. The reason for this is apparently to regulate content which solicits for prostitution, undermines racial and religious harmony, or ‘goes against good taste’"
I had no intention of seeing Man of Steel in the movie theater; I was voting for Monsters University. I’ve grown quite tired with the constant universe rebooting. We all know where Superman (or Batman or Spider-Man etc) came from. Can we not waste another 2+ hours and $millions to retell that. Why can’t we just tell new stories? These characters have such rich histories and such iconic villains that it just seems so pointless to keep hitting the same notes. Additionally, while I liked Snyder’s Watchmen, I was NOT a fan of Suckerpunch. But my parents wanted to treat Danielle and I to a nice dinner for our wedding anniversary and Man of Steel was the movie that would get us out of the theater in time to make out reservations.
I had no intention of seeing Man of Steel in the movie theater; I was voting for Monsters University. I’ve grown quite tired with the constant universe rebooting. We all know where Superman (or Batman or Spider-Man etc) came from. Can we not waste another 2+ hours and $millions to retell that. Why can’t we just tell new stories? These characters have such rich histories and such iconic villains that it just seems so pointless to keep hitting the same notes. Additionally, while I liked Snyder’s Watchmen, I was NOT a fan of Suckerpunch. But my parents wanted to treat Danielle and I to a nice dinner for our wedding anniversary and Man of Steel was the movie that would get us out of the theater in time to make out reservations.
One day last week I was a little bored at lunchtime so I started clicking on the Wordpress Dashboard links to different developer blogs. Turns out Wordpress 3.6 is coming out soon and it’s going to focus on bringing post formats to the fore and creating a consistent way of handling them within the database. I had no idea this was introduced back in Wordpress 3.1. I don’t know if I missed the notification or if it didn’t mean anything to me because I hadn’t used Tumblr yet. Here are two great explanations: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/post-formats/ and http://wpdaily.co/future-post-formats/ . If you don’t feel like reading those, basically think of how when you make a post on Tumblr it asks you if it’s an image, post, link, etc. That determines the interface it gives you and, depending on your Tumblr theme, determines how to present the information you put into it. Given that one of the post formats is Annotation (meant to be a short post) and given that I quickly grew tired of Tumblr and how it doesn’t have a proper commenting system, I’m probably going to use that for shorter, less fleshed out posts rather than having a Tumblr blog.
For people of my generation (and the younger ones of the previous one) video games are cultural phenomenon no less important to the way our brains work than books, music, or movies. So it’s no surprise that our music, which has been inspired by books and movies in the past is now being inspired by video games. What was surprising to me were all the different manifestations this inspiration has taken.
For people of my generation (and the younger ones of the previous one) video games are cultural phenomenon no less important to the way our brains work than books, music, or movies. So it’s no surprise that our music, which has been inspired by books and movies in the past is now being inspired by video games. What was surprising to me were all the different manifestations this inspiration has taken.
For people of my generation (and the younger ones of the previous one) video games are cultural phenomenon no less important to the way our brains work than books, music, or movies. So it’s no surprise that our music, which has been inspired by books and movies in the past is now being inspired by video games. What was surprising to me were all the different manifestations this inspiration has taken.
For people of my generation (and the younger ones of the previous one) video games are cultural phenomenon no less important to the way our brains work than books, music, or movies. So it’s no surprise that our music, which has been inspired by books and movies in the past is now being inspired by video games. What was surprising to me were all the different manifestations this inspiration has taken.
For people of my generation (and the younger ones of the previous one) video games are cultural phenomenon no less important to the way our brains work than books, music, or movies. So it’s no surprise that our music, which has been inspired by books and movies in the past is now being inspired by video games. What was surprising to me were all the different manifestations this inspiration has taken.
For people of my generation (and the younger ones of the previous one) video games are cultural phenomenon no less important to the way our brains work than books, music, or movies. So it’s no surprise that our music, which has been inspired by books and movies in the past is now being inspired by video games. What was surprising to me were all the different manifestations this inspiration has taken.
This is Sandy, a jackass penguin. They are originally from South Africa, but her parents are at the Baltimore Zoo. Click on the desktop you want and then right-click and select “set as desktop background”. If you don’t have that option, save-as to your computer and then set it manually.
Here’s your calendar for January 2011. It’s a goose getting dry on top of a shelf of ice on a lake that was partially frozen over. Click on the image you want then right-click to set it as your background or save it to your computer and then set it that way.
Here’s the calendar for November - I hope it doesn’t keep you drooling all month! Click on the image to load it into your desktop. Then right-click and you should be able to set it as the desktop background. Alternatively, save it and then manually set it as your desktop.
[caption id=“attachment_3791” align=“aligncenter” width=“400” caption=“Nov 2010 - 1024x768 - For More Squarish Monitors”] [/caption]
I was reading Scott Kelby’s Digital Photography books when he suggested making a background calendar to get my photos out there. A lot of people at work like to have these types of backgrounds and I follow another photographer/blogger that does the same. Here’s my January 2010 calendar. To make these your background, click on the photo and then right-click and click on “set as my background” if you’re using Windows. Linux and Mac users should be technical enough to be able to figure out what they need to do for their specific situation.
I forgot about this little project for a while, but I remembered in time to make October’s background. I’ve decided to stop making the square versions of the background. If I get enough people who actually want it, I’ll reinstate it. To set as your background, click on it then right-click and set as desktop. If that option’s not available, save it to your computer and use your OS’s method of setting the desktop.
Here are your new desktop backgrounds for July 2011!
Just click on the one that matches your monitor type and then either right-click and set as desktop or save it to your computer and save it as your desktop manually.
This month’s calendar is from Rehoboth Beach in Delaware. The Dolles Salt Water Taffy place is in nearly all the postcards and other media for the city.
I decided to check out the latest Windows release to see how much it differs from my Windows 7 install (on my video game/photography computer). So I installed it into Virtualbox.
[caption id=“attachment_4951” align=“aligncenter” width=“361” caption=“Windows 8 - Need to change some settings”] [/caption]
At first it wouldn’t install and I couldn’t understand what was going wrong. Turns out that in the settings under the motherboard tab I had to tick the checkbox for “enable IO APIC”. So I finally got it to start installing:
In the most recent LugRadio episode was a feature about how the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) states that applications should be named in the applications menu not as the program name, but as what the program does. This is something I’d like to explore a little more in another post. But during the discussions, they mentioned an interesting point: Gnome follows (or tries to follow) the paradigm of the ego-less desktop. This means that it’s not important who coded your program, it’s important what it does. And this got me thinking about one of the HUGE annoyances I have as I read the blogs and news pages about Linux. Everyone complains about how Linux isn’t quite there yet and how it needs to fix this or that before it’s easy enough for the proverbial Grandmother. Let’s take a look at some use casse and see how Linux is precisely the opposite - it’s MUCH easier to use than Windows.
Here are your new desktop backgrounds for July 2011!
Just click on the one that matches your monitor type and then either right-click and set as desktop or save it to your computer and save it as your desktop manually.
Here are your new desktop backgrounds for July 2011!
Just click on the one that matches your monitor type and then either right-click and set as desktop or save it to your computer and save it as your desktop manually.
My latest Photojojo photo time capsule containing the ending to my 365 project and some photos from the Coney Island Mermaid Parade has arrived. Here are the photos:
Here are your new desktop backgrounds for July 2011!
Just click on the one that matches your monitor type and then either right-click and set as desktop or save it to your computer and save it as your desktop manually.
My latest Photojojo photo time capsule containing the ending to my 365 project and some photos from the Coney Island Mermaid Parade has arrived. Here are the photos:
My latest Photojojo photo time capsule containing the ending to my 365 project and some photos from the Coney Island Mermaid Parade has arrived. Here are the photos:
So I’ve been using reKonq for about 3 weeks now. (Regardless of what the date of this blog post is in relation to the previous one - I usually write these ahead of time and then stick them into the queue) So here we go:
The Good
-Appears to have “Download them All” built-in if you enable the KGet settings in the preferences
-Integrates perfectly with KDE
-When you start up a new tab and then click on “recently closed tabs” the list of tabs has thumbnails of the sites. I think this is great because it helps you quickly find the site you’re looking for.
I’ve been using web browsers since Internet Explorer 1 and Netscape Navigator 3. I’ve blogged about my browserhistoryquiteabit. I’ve ended up using Chrome on all my platforms. It works on Linux and Windows and I can have my bookmarks synced up across all those platforms. Now, I’m not a huge user of bookmarks. From my earliest days back in the 1990s when I used to perfectly curate my bookmarks into folders and subfolders to the mid-2000s when Epiphany and Firefox implemented tags on bookmarks, pretty much anything I’ve ever bookmarked has gone into a status of “out of sight== out of mind”. In fact, the only way I’ve been able to effectively use bookmarks is to use the space under the address bar to store them so I can see them. This is what Chrome looks like on my machines:
Recently, when I started up Opera, it updated to 10.5. I noticed a huge cosmetic change. Observe:
[caption id=“attachment_3272” align=“aligncenter” width=“480” caption=“Opera 10.5 new gui”] [/caption]
Yes, they have copied the GUI setup from Chrome. The tabs are now above the address bar. Now, they still have a separate search bar like Firefox, but this is a pretty big change. Also, although I can’t share it in a screenshot, they have changed the tab animations so they are really slick like in Chrome. Overall, the animations are one of those things that really add to the experience without doing much. It just feels nice to have things slide in and out rather than pop into existence. They also seem to have REALLY sped up the startup to the point where Opera is once again a joy to use. They also made a change to the way the text searching works:
Ever since I last wrote about Opera and Chrome, some things have changed about my browsing habits. On Windows, I’ve gone from always using Flock to always using Opera. I just found out that Flock finally released version 2.0 because I wanted to check up on my facts before looking like a dork on my own blog. So I haven’t used version 2.0 and that doesn’t figure into what I’m going to say here.
At this rate, I’ll never be able to kick the Flock habit. Ever since, as I blogged before, they fixed their problem with stuttering YouTube videos, I’ve been able to use Flock for my main Windows browser day-in and day-out. Now they’ve added even more features! First of all, I think it’s neat that they’ve published an online video (via YouTube) that appears on the “you’ve updated” page. This is much more exciting than simply reading a list of what’s new and even shows you how to activate it.
My excitement over Flock has faded a bit. It’s a bit bloated. I understand, because of the software involved in Flock’s features, why Flickr is so slow. However, Flickr is one of the sites I visit more often than any other, so I need it to go fast. Right now I have to load up Firefox whenever I want to do anything in Flickr for more than just a couple of minutes. And watching videos (such as on youtube or vimeo) is next to impossible on Flock. It keeps skipping and stuttering. Also, Facebook’s recent changes to the pokes page make Flock’s Facebook features less attractive to me. 111
At first I used Internet Explorer because we had a free trial of MSN. Then we switched to MCI, who used Netscape (although you could also use IE) and I mostly used Netscape. I think this was around Netscape 4 or 5. I really liked Netscape A LOT and used it almost to the exclusivity of Internet Explorer. Of course, those were the exciting days when every few months Netscape and Internet Explorer would release a new version. As I’ve commented in previous posts, whether or not Firefox ever gains a dominant share (and the same with Linux vs Windows), its mere presence will necessitate innovation from Microsoft. You may have noticed that IE stayed at version 6 for a very long time until Firefox started getting really popular. But I digress. Netscape had all the best plugins and I thought it was the ultimate in the Web experiences. I coded all of my websites with Netscape in mind.
Flock has completely changed how I interact with the so-called Social Web. In my case, that means Facebook and Flickr. Ever since I first started using Flock and received the help I needed to get the blogging to work, I’ve been using it every day. In fact, that only thing that has kept me from having it be my only/default browser is that it’s extremely slow in Flickr when loading pages. Also, in any pages with videos (whether from Youtube or Vimeo) there is a video and audio stutter that renders the video unwatchable. But that’s the only real negative I’ve been able to find with Flock.
Many many thanks to Flock engineers Erwan Loisant, Mike Dosik, and Patricia Bacon. They took time with me over the past few days to get my problem debugged and now categories worked. Here are the details in case you find yourself in my situation.
First of all, once they told me that it worked on Wordpress blogs in general, I was starting to think that it might be a problem on my end. It turns out that it was a problem on my end! After some debugging, Erwan found out that Flock was getting back the message that the pulling of the categories was requiring more than the alloted 8 MB for PHP memory. So I went in and increased that and now it works!
So I’m using Flock daily now for my web browsing to see how I like it. Since I don’t usually go to Facebook on my own, it’s nice to see the notifications within Flock. Thus, I’ve been more responsive to my Facebook private messages, a good thing since my second-cousin recently caught up with me on Facebook. So I’m liking the Facebook integration even more than I thought I would since I’m not a Facebook-heavy person.
(just so you know, you should be able to click on most of the screenshots to see them more clearly)
Earlier this year, I took a look at flock. It didn’t impress me. In fact, I found it so useless to my browsing habits that I didn’t even bother to review it. I neglected to mention last time that Flock is built upon the same Gecko backend as Firefox. This is, as I have mentioned before, one of the best things about free and open source licenses. Firefox is a great technology, but it’s meant to be the every-man’s browser. This is expressed by Firefox’s own team and it’s why they have the plugin architecture. They feel that the Mozilla Suite became extremely bloated as it had a web browser, IRC client, email, and (I think) calendar built into it. It was a bit intimidating for first time users and took up quite a bit of RAM. Also, from a programmer’s perspective, it’s a lot harder to maintain something so complex. So, for Firefox they went for just developing a solid browser. Anything missing could be implemented via plugins.
I’m writing this from flock, a new web browser which comes with a lot of built-in utitlities for the most popular web technologies including flickr and blogging. I’m writing this post from within flock’s blog utility. I’m not sure yet if this is a worthy feature or just a gimmick. I intend to try flock out for a few days and see.
It’s just like the old days of Netscape vs Internet Explorer when more and more technologies kept emerging. After IE won the battle things were stagnant until Firefox came around with their tabbed browsing and so forth. We’ll see how this turns out!
I heard something really sad on NPR today. Kids are complaining that their parents are spending so much time on their smartphones with twitter and Facebook and so on and they feel neglected. I had always assumed that parents from my generation would put away these stupid habits once we had children. It’s part of the reason why I’ve been on a video game binge. I’m hoping to have a kid sometime in the next few years and I am pretty sure that once I have one that I won’t really have any time for Civilization. And, at least with the way I feel with other people’s kids, I feel like I’d probably want to spend every waking second with them, at least until they were old enough to be entertained with their own games and toys.
This is Sandy, a jackass penguin. They are originally from South Africa, but her parents are at the Baltimore Zoo. Click on the desktop you want and then right-click and select “set as desktop background”. If you don’t have that option, save-as to your computer and then set it manually.
This is Sandy, a jackass penguin. They are originally from South Africa, but her parents are at the Baltimore Zoo. Click on the desktop you want and then right-click and select “set as desktop background”. If you don’t have that option, save-as to your computer and then set it manually.
I feel like I may have covered bits of this here and there, but I couldn’t find it after a cursory check through my blog. Fanaticism is fanaticism, whether it’s religious or technological it follows the same path. Witness anyone who has just become an evangelical Christian (and it probably extends to other religions) as they return to life after their conversion. For the first chunk of time after doing so they will likely do some or all of the following: get a new wardrobe, get rid of all CDs/MP3s that aren’t by Christian bands, preach the Gospel to anyone within earshot, read the Bible daily, pray in public spaces (sometimes boisterously as possible), go to church every day, and other things. With time they may soften in some of these aspects. They may realize that, for example, it’s probably OK to listen to most of U2 and many other bands that don’t have profanity or sexually explicit lyrics. But the biggest change anyone outside of their family/best friends will notice is that they realize it’s probably not a good idea to go around telling everyone that their worldview is wrong. It turns out to be better for everyone if the member of the proselytizing religion waits for others to ask their opinion. At that time, the person asking is receptive to hearing about this new religion. (Unlike when they’re ambushed and on the defensive)
The GNU Software Project to provide a wholly free operating system turns 25 today! Check out this great video showing British superstar Stephen Fry . Thanks to rms, Linus Torvalds, Aaron Siego, Miguel de Icaza and others who have worked hard to give us a free operating system that we can tweak and that no one can ever own and take away from us.
Next time you find yourself wondering why people like me (or rms) make such a big deal about having the source code to software (especially when it comes to voting machines), ask yourself why we make scientists show us all of their research instead of taking their word for it. Think about why it’s important that other scientists can recreate the experiment and how that analogy applies to software stability, security, and overall quality.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Love the folksy Trail Name”] [/caption]
I’m not traditionally a nature-as-scenery photographer. I prefer animals and humans. But on a recent hike through a trail in Papatsco State Park, I took my camera along and captured some of the lightly forested trail.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“333” caption=“People love to mess up trees just to leave their mark”] [/caption]
I was reading Scott Kelby’s Digital Photography books when he suggested making a background calendar to get my photos out there. A lot of people at work like to have these types of backgrounds and I follow another photographer/blogger that does the same. Here’s my January 2010 calendar. To make these your background, click on the photo and then right-click and click on “set as my background” if you’re using Windows. Linux and Mac users should be technical enough to be able to figure out what they need to do for their specific situation.
It would seem insane to even consider getting into analog photography in 2010. But, as I wrote in my tet travelogue, I’ve been bitten by the bug. I think, had I been able to take photography classes and develop my own negatives and learn about aperture and shutter speed and all that with analog cameras, I might not feel such a need to discover the past now. But, when I get an idea into my head it’s pretty hard to dislodge it. Additionally, I see all these photographers on flickr waxing about how they have discovered or rediscovered film photography. Another photographer whose blog I have been reading recently wrote an ebook about how he has rediscovered film and will now shoot both film and digital. All this conspired such that recently I went through another round of deciding whether I wanted to do some film photography.
I was reading Scott Kelby’s Digital Photography books when he suggested making a background calendar to get my photos out there. A lot of people at work like to have these types of backgrounds and I follow another photographer/blogger that does the same. Here’s my January 2010 calendar. To make these your background, click on the photo and then right-click and click on “set as my background” if you’re using Windows. Linux and Mac users should be technical enough to be able to figure out what they need to do for their specific situation.
I was reading Scott Kelby’s Digital Photography books when he suggested making a background calendar to get my photos out there. A lot of people at work like to have these types of backgrounds and I follow another photographer/blogger that does the same. Here’s my January 2010 calendar. To make these your background, click on the photo and then right-click and click on “set as my background” if you’re using Windows. Linux and Mac users should be technical enough to be able to figure out what they need to do for their specific situation.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Firefox is now 5 years old”] [/caption]
I can’t believe Firefox has been around for five years! I remember first being introduced to tabs and it totally changing the way I surf the web. Back then it was a plucky upstart and didn’t even work with many websites that had been coded specifically for Internet Explorer. Now it has around 20% market share!
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Lookin’ for the Pot ‘o Gold in Mehoopany, PA”] [/caption]
When I read this article in Digital Photography School, I posted the rainbow photo shown above as an example of how much I had to learn. Little did I know how much traffic that would generate for me. In just one day I got 172 views after having spent the past 26 days with 0 views in that period. It shot up from a photo somewhere in the range of 25-50 views to 213 views as I write this.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Fun, outdoor games requiring a minimum of only two players”] [/caption]
Danielle and I went to Rockburn Branch Park today to throw a ball around and maybe ride bike. We ended up not riding bike because we didn’t like the trail too much and my water bottle holder came loose from my bike. So we grabbed our gloves and brand new baseballs (we lost our previous ball in the woods behind our house) and went out to an empty baseball field. The fact that we had a frisbee was simply due to the fact that Danielle threw it into the bag. I certainly hadn’t intended to play frisbee. It was so awesome to have a whole baseball field to ourselves. It did, at the same time, feel a bit weird to have that whole field to ourselves. It was great to just run around and throw the ball. Eventually our catching hands got really sore from having the ball slam into it. We tried our best to get the ball to end up in the part that didn’t contain our fingers or palms, but it wasn’t always easy. So I looked into the bag and we eventually switch to frisbee. It was so much fun. We were both uncannily good. I think it was mostly because we didn’t have the pressure of really awesome players to make fun of us when we did fling the disc in very wrong directions. Eventually the bugs were getting to be too much and we left. Still, yesterday’s play at the park made the weekend for me.
A while back I unveiled a web utility for telling when it was time to move a photo from one flickr views group to another. It got tons of hits. Then I switched my server and it all stopped working. Beej had gone to a new framework for traversing the XML and had some problems porting it over. Finally got everything fixed up over the weekend and I can come out with version 0.3!
A while back I unveiled a web utility for telling when it was time to move a photo from one flickr views group to another. It got tons of hits. Then I switched my server and it all stopped working. Beej had gone to a new framework for traversing the XML and had some problems porting it over. Finally got everything fixed up over the weekend and I can come out with version 0.3!
A while back I unveiled a web utility for telling when it was time to move a photo from one flickr views group to another. It got tons of hits. Then I switched my server and it all stopped working. Beej had gone to a new framework for traversing the XML and had some problems porting it over. Finally got everything fixed up over the weekend and I can come out with version 0.3!
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“372” caption=“Perhaps taking the introspection a bit too literally”] [/caption]
My blog has always contained some degree of introspection. It has varied based on my interests at the time. While it’s not impossible to include some self-examination in a Linux review, it’s certainly not par for the course. But, recently, reading Min and Kailyn’s blogs recently has inspired me to try and include some more of my thought process when blogging. I think I’ll definitely try to give it a shot on my next photo essay, but also on other posts, such as those dealing with my photography or politics.
[caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“160” caption=“Dan, of “I Bring Nothing to the Table””] [/caption]
First mentioned in this post , Dan’s been blogging on this server for just over a year. So how has the blog come along in these 13 months? Very well, I’d say. By the Google search results metric, Dan is doing very well. He’s been driving the bulk of our Google search related traffic with his sports and video game posts. (My posts tend to spread by word or mouth or search engines other than Google)
Jeffrey Friedl and I share a few similarities: we both are computer programmers, love photography, and enjoy blogging. Unlike me, however, Jeff is an expat living in Japan. Also unlike me, he has a great photo blog. Jeff documents his travels throughout the islands of Japan as well as his daily life in his blog. Ocassionally, he also blogs about technical issues or new tech toys he bought or new Adobe Lightroom Plugins he has developed.
As I mentioned here, Micro$oft has provided yet another example of why digital restrictions management does nothing but hurt legitimate consumers. To remind you, this is when Microsoft turned off the servers for its ironically named “playsforsure” DRM system. These songs, which consumers would told, would play for sure on any digital media player containing the proper logo, will no longer play once August comes around and Microsoft turns off the servers which validate you as a non-criminal. I hope there’s a huge outcry that forces them to un-DRM all these songs and sounds the ultimate death knell for DRM.
And it is hilarious! So Dan finally got around to updating the blog I created for him on my server. He gave it a pretty witty name “I Bring Nothing To The Table” which is a great pun on our last name. (Although I recently found out he saw it on a T-shirt, so, while still cool, is not worth as many cool points as before) If you read nothing else on his blog, you MUST read this post in which he gives his British friend some tips on Americanisms. It is one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard come out of Daniel’s head. So go and check it out and laugh out loud…
Andrew’s post on Imus and his firing prompted a response from me. I decided that since I hold a dim view that other sites may exist in the future, that I will post select bits from his post and my full response. By clicking on that link you can see his whole post and my response.
…Sharpton and Jackson were both like piranhas when Imus made his offensive statement. But Imus’ comments were outright tame compared to what the average top 40 rap song has in it. Why aren’t they going after rappers more vehemently? Because they’re black, or are they afraid 50 cent’s homies are going to cap them for it?
Mabolosoft is a company that sells seedless fruit. They have orchards full of fruit trees that they have genetically-altered to be sterile, so that no seeds will be included with the fruit. Consumers want fruit, so they buy it from Mabolosoft. This fruit is seedless, so when people need more fruit they must go back to Mabolosoft.
Dina Mehta’s post about the current state of Blogging in India resonates so well across cultural and state boundaries because she touches on topics which transcend the human race. One of the best things about the article, in addition to the great writing, is the fact that, by reading it, one realized that in most ways all of humanity shares the same traits.
For example, this paragraph of her article pertained to me in every aspect:
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Dina, Daniel, Ho, Beo, and Lauren put a lot of work into the decorations”] [/caption]
Last weekend I went to a graduation party Dina and Daniel organized to celebrate Dina, Ho, and Lauren’s graduation this year. It was a great BBQ event and I had a lot of fun. I only knew about 1/10th of all the people there, so I kept entertained mainly by ecording the events of the night with my cameras. I did end up speaking at length with some interesting people.
If you read a lot of technology news on the interwebs, it appears as though we will soon all be using cloud computing. No longer will people have hard drives or buy programs. They will lease it all from the cloud. (There are many, many things listed under “cloud computer” from Gmail to Twitter. I am talking about the ultimate goal of those who advocate “cloud computing” where your “computer” is on the net and you just connect from home) There are many reasons why cloud computing is not for everyone.
Let me start with the reason closest to my life - high end photography. I went to a baseball game on 10 April and shot over 4 GB of photos. I then loaded these photos onto my computer for editing and sharing with others. It seems to take longer that I can stand to get the photos off my camera and onto my hard drive. I can’t imagine how annoying it would be to have to wait to upload them onto a cloud computing environment. I shoot only in RAW files so I can do some serious editing on the photos and retain the best quality. Sometimes I delete up to half of the photos from a shoot because it’s hard to tell from the back of the camera if it’s subtly out of focus. So imagine waiting forever to upload photos only to ultimately end up deleting them! Photoshop and Lightroom require pretty beefy computers to work correctly, I can’t imagine how slow it would be to have my screen refresh after each edit. It already takes longer than instantaneous on my home computer. This use case - high end photography - also lead me to another reason cloud computing will not be for everyone: bandwidth limits.
I last changed themes in April 2008. It hasn’t quite been a year yet, but as was the trigger last time, the latest version of wordpress doesn’t work with this theme. Last time it was tags and the time before that it was widgets. Now I want a theme that fully supports Wordpress 2.7 - especially the threading of comments and other such features. I believe I have found one that works. Also, with my current theme it has that annoying large header at the top. My dad didn’t even realize I had linked him to my blog. He thought that header image was what he was suppopsed to look at. I also think it’s interesting that this new theme is a brownish colour as was my original Tripod-hosted blog. Here are some images of the current theme for historical reasons
This theme is really annoying me, mostly because it’s a fixed width theme. That means that the theme doesn’t expand if you expand your Window or have a wide screen monitor. Mostly, it means annoying things like this blog post title. As you can see, it cuts into the metadata such as the date/time. Also this theme doesn’t support tags. So you may see some strangeness as I change themes. I couldn’t find any that I truly wanted and, in the end, I think I’m just going to end up making my own theme.
Over the Thanksgiving holiday I went to see Mike Burbiglia on his Broadway show “Sleepwalk with Me”. I wasn’t going to blog about it originally, but during the performance he mentioned that he gets Google alerts about himself. He used to Google himself, but then he set it up to get Google to do it for him. Since I know that Google indexes my blog, I thought I’d blog about the performance.
Today’s distro has been described as the Ubuntu of the BSD world. PC-BSD is an easy to use version of FreeBSD. FreeBSD is the behemoth in the BSD world and would probably have a much larger desktop presence if the BSDs hadn’t run into copyright and other proprietary problems right around when most of the GNU toolset was complete and Linus was releasing the Linux kernel. At least, that’s what most people claim. However, given the animosity (although that’s almost too strong a word) between the Free Software Foundation and the supporters of the BSD license.
It’s been a little delayed and it’s long in coming, but FreeBSD 7.0 is out now! They’ve made a LOT of updates over the 6.0 series; most importantly they’ve done a lot of work on the SMP kernel. SMP is what you use if you have more than one processor in your computer or if you have a Dual or Quard Core Processor. So they’ve made a huge step to continue FreeBSD’s place in modern hardware. The release announcement contains a lot of info and the release notes contain even more!
Since I don’t have any animation needing to be rendered for a few months, I decided it was a great time to upgrade Dr Queue to the latest version. I’d heard that a lot of improvements had been added since version 0.60. So let’s see how the upgrade process goes:
On Mario, my Fedora 8 machine, I had to install scons first as it’s now used to buld dr queue. I also had to build it on my FreeBSD machines, starting with KingKoopa, the render master. This also required python to be installed. For Mario, it was very easy, I just ran the install script and it wrote over the old stuff and appears to work. I’ll probably need to copy the new directories over to the common hard drive. Peach and BulletBill already had python installed so they didn’t need scons installed.
After literally a week of cleaning and compiling, I FINALLY have a working copy of Blender on my bulletbill box. This is the one I was most excited about because, while it’s a Pentium II, it has 2 processors! So it should be able to do two Blender frames at once when I’m rendering via drqueue! Finally! I’m excited!
A few days ago, I released my lastest video, " Robots". It’s a fan-tribute music video based on the song of the same name by Flight of the Conchords. Check it out and enjoy.
Almost a year ago, I mentioned that I had discovered the site www.mytoons.com. In that blog post I mentioned that I felt my animation wasn’t really getting the amount of views I hoped they would get. So I put my animation on mytoons and when the results weren’t immediately different, I completely forgot about my experiment. I check back on MyToons.com from time to time because of their great newsletter, Animation Snack. But I hardly ever check on my own videos. Well, I did a check today and the results are astonishing!
Blender 2.46 was released yesterday and it has a whole bunch of new features- mostly created to facilitate production of Big Buck Bunny. What I’m looking forward to the most is hair/fur rendering, any toolsthat makearmatures easier to skin (the bane of my animation hobby!), a cloth simulator, and the improved sequencer which should allow most of the video editing to take place inside of Blender.
I’d love to play with it, but right now I’m working on some animation projects so I need to wait until at least Fedora comes out with the 2.46 rpm. Ideally also my FreeBSD render farm would also get updated. A lot of the new goodies like hair/fur rendering are not backwards compatible. Good job from the coding team and I hope to test it out soon enough.
I’ve been very happy until now with drqueue. Developed by Jorge Daza, it’s a very nice render farm management software with a nice GUI. It worked relatively well for me for “Jose’s Dinner” and " Schrodinger’s Cat". However, there were two big kinks in using drqueue. First of all, Windows support was so sketchy it might as well be non-existent. So my most powerful computer was left out of the render-pool. Second, with the latest iteration, it no longer works on BSD computers. I tried for a few nights to make it work, but to no avail. So I turned to FarmerJoe.
You’re probably asking yourself two questions. 1) When did Eric get awesome at modeling humans? and 2) What are these bald, naked women doing on this site? In fact, you probably asked yourself those questions in the reverse order. Extra points for the MakeHuman team if you didn’t even realize those were computer images and thought they were real.
So, to start off with question 1, I didn’t model those humans in the traditional sense. In other words, I didn’t start with a box or plane and build up a human from there. Instead I used a program called MakeHuman which has similar goals to the commercial software Poser. Poser, as those of us into 3D art and animation know, is software for the posing, animating, and rendering of humans (and occasionally other creatures). Both software packages exist because animators may not want to also be character modelers. Instead they may wish to use a package such as MakeHuman which creates the character meshes and materials for them and then work on the animation. In such a context I wouldn’t call it cheating. After all, in a studio, most artists specialize on one part of the animation (eg animation, modeling, texturing, etc). I may even see myself using MakeHuman or Poser if I wished to have a realistic human character in my animation.
Since I don’t have any animation needing to be rendered for a few months, I decided it was a great time to upgrade Dr Queue to the latest version. I’d heard that a lot of improvements had been added since version 0.60. So let’s see how the upgrade process goes:
On Mario, my Fedora 8 machine, I had to install scons first as it’s now used to buld dr queue. I also had to build it on my FreeBSD machines, starting with KingKoopa, the render master. This also required python to be installed. For Mario, it was very easy, I just ran the install script and it wrote over the old stuff and appears to work. I’ll probably need to copy the new directories over to the common hard drive. Peach and BulletBill already had python installed so they didn’t need scons installed.
Posted over on Blender artist s and told them about the problems I was having with Indigo and getting it to render Suzanne as glass. It turned out that I had two things wrong. One: I needed to set the gain to 2 instead of the standard 100. Apparently this controls the transparency level. Two: I needed to set the absorption color as it didn’t transfer over from Blender. In fact, a quick look on the Indigo forums showed that the materials don’t export over well without some work. Here’s the final result after 28 hours:
For nearly a year now, I’ve seen a lot of really great images in the blender gallery. Many of the most breathtaking images are rendered with outside renderers like Yafray or Indigo. Here’s an example of a subtle, but real-looking render made with Indigo.
I already tried Yafray before, and didn’t really like it too much. I decided to give Indigo a shot. So I went to the Indigo website and followed their directions for rendering with Indigo from Blender. The tutorial shows it as coming out like this:
11 Second Club - Nov 2007 - first pass from djotaku on Vimeo.This is my first pass. I’ve gone through and animated nearly everything for the character on the right (mancandy) except the lip sync. To see it in full HD awesome quality, follow the link containing the video’s title right under the video.
I’ve just finished up my second pass. I finished up Mancandy’s animation and did the arm/hand animation on lil guy. I think it’s coming along very well for my first attempt at something like this. I’m going to set it to render tonight at respower and I hope to find all or most of the frames to be done by the time I get up tomorrow.
The 11 Second Club is a great animation learning tool and a fun contest. Every month they post an audio file that is approximately 11 seconds long (it’s 12 this time) and the members create an animation to go along. At the beginning of the next month, the members vote on the entries and a winner is declared. The emphasis is on the acting of the characters and the backgrounds/props are not supposed to matter. I thought it would be a great thing to do so that I can work on my acting, especially emotions and lip syncing. When I saw this month’s clip, I knew that I had to enter for the month of November! It’s a clip from one of our favorite movies, The Birdcage. I will probably be posting my progress as I work on it. Look for my progress over the next few days.
Ok, I got a better version uploaded. The video is MUCH better quality and the audio is better as well. However, the conversion to flash caused it to go a little out of sync. It’s still not as bad as it was before. Still, for someone like me who’s trying to share their creative vision, it’s quite annoying. Enjoy the improved version. To see my original version, just follow the Vimeo link and download the original .mov file. You’ll notice that the first part is a bit more in sync.
I finally finished rigging up Nick’s body. His face is yet to be done, but at least I finished up this milestone. At this point I’m not sure if I’m going to start work on the facial rigs right away. I’m leaning more towards beginning modeling on my next character, Wallace. This is because at the NY Blender Conference (which was awesome!) I spoke with Bassam about how he handles facial animation and he told me he used latices in combination with shape keys. Every other book I’ve read uses shape keys exclusively or armature-driven shape keys. I figured that while I’m thinking about the type I’m going to use that I can hold off on that and make an armature that will allow me to achieve good results as well as not being a real pain in the butt to use. Also, I’ve done a lot of work on this armature and added a lot of constraints, which I’ve never done before. I think I’m going to make this my general purpose rig for human characters for a while, so I’d like to take the time to get it right - or as right as possible. Then, after a few shorts I’ll either refine the armature or create a fresh one.
I was reading 3D World Issue #95 and they had a tutorial for Blender in the Questions section. It involved having a ball hit a wall of bricks and knocking them down. This is tedious to animate brick by brick, but relatively simple with the Blender physics engine. The following animation only took me about 15-20 minutes to get set up.
But you may notice a problem here. The ball appears to accelerate as it leaves the bricks. That’s because the tutorial was just a quick example of how to do the task at hand. So I set about to find out what was going on and why my ball was not obeying the conservation of energy. It turns out that the settings as described in the magazine kept continuously giving the ball energy. So I had to adjust it so that it would only get energy at the beginning. After that, I got something much more realistic.
It’s something I need to keep reminding myself as I work on getting myself more and more competent with Blender and 3D animation in general. For example, check out the complex rigging I did for Nick’s hand for “Sugar”:
It’s not complex in the sense of having a ton of bones, but complex in the sense that it has a few pointless bones. I tried to come somewhat close to “reality” by making sure that the bones of the fingers are connected to the bones of the hand. These bones don’t really do anything as I don’t want a hand to be able to bend there. Afterall, I don’t need to duplicate anatomy. I don’t have hips or anything like that. The body will move just as well with less bones and will be less complicated for moving if I simplify it as below:
I’ve used and created a few rigs now for my different animated shorts and test animations and I’ve had my share of frustrations with the process. First off, it can be quite tedious to create even a mediocre one. Second, it’s hard to create a good one; forget about how hard it is to create an excellent one! All of my rigging experience post " Penguin Flight" have come from a tutorial I read from the Blender Summer of Documentation. Even then, I didn’t do it from the rigging tutorial (which is incomplete in the most interesting of places) ; rather I did it based off of the Character Animation tutorial (which is quite, quite good and got me started after “Penguin Flight”. In fact, you may recognize it as the source of Raul Domingo).
I don’t like posting too many videos because they could be removed at any time, leaving this post worthless. However, here are some neat cartoons I found. The first one, “Wanted”, I found because it was featured in issue #92 of 3D World. It was the final project of some German film students. It took them 6 months to complete.
“Bath Time” is a cute CG short I found on youtube after watching “Wanted”:
I’ve heard about Yafray so much and I’ve seen that it can deliver VERY photorealistic shots. The Blender internal renderer is not bad - as a matter of fact, it’s awesome. However, for all the really realistic stuff people tend to use Yafray. I tried to use it before, but all I got was a blank screen. Today, doing some research, I found out that, for some reason, the lights need to be jacked up in order for Yafray to work. Click on any of the pictures to see a larger size.
Thanks to the helpful users over at blenderartists.org, I was able to solve the problem of the water turning black upon landing on the table in my fluid simulations. Apparently, I needed to turn on TraShadows (transparent shadows). You may want to save this for your last step because it causes the renders to take a LOT longer. I put the cup, table, and water with TraShadows on and you can see the results. (Click for full size)
I tried another shot at using the physics engine and here’s my latest work. I rendered this at full HD resolution so it took 2 days and 7 hours to render these 990 frames. Enjoy!
I tried another fluid simulation. I still have a few things to learn.
It appears that inertia caused the water to fly out of the cup - I did move it relatively quickly. How can I lift the glass of water without causing all the water to shoot out.
Why is the water black when it hits the table? I had that issue in the first simulation and it also appears to be the case in the tutorial I followed the first time around. However, this is obviously non-realistic. I really intend to investigate this.
Here’s a pretty neat fluid simulation render I did yesterday. I’m pretty happy with the results. It’s based off a tutorial I was doing. I intend to make one that’s a little more involved. This is really computationally intense and although it’s not VERY difficult, it’s not trivial either. Enjoy!
I set “Jose’s Dinner” to render from beginning to end to test the eye and mouth movements I’ve done so far. It’s almost done, but it’ll probably need another hour. So it took around 25 or so hours to render on one computer. Now I have a benchmark against which to see how fast the renderfarm is. Remember that most of my computers are old POS donated computers. So I don’t know how much it will be able to speed things up. Tomorrow I will probably do a test render with the bouncing ball to see how much more quickly that one renders. I’ll be excited to see the results.
Last night around 2300 I finished up the preliminary 3D render of Jose’s Dinner. Now I just need to tweak up the animation with the fine details such as blinking and mouth movements. After that I just need to create the soundtrack and credits and the short film will be completed. I’m excited about debuting it, so this will probably take up all my spare time (instead of playing games or watching tv).
I discovered a great CG artist named Daniel Martinez Lara who has some great material on the web. I discovered him because he recently started using Blender, whereas he had been using commercial 3D software previously. If you want to see a great animation that’s only a couple of minutes long, check out Changes.
Blender Nation has been one of the really great rigged up characters available for use in Blender, mancandy. It’s very useful for people who want to focus on backgrounds or learn how to create a semi-realistic humanoid and rig. After seeing this story about different pictures people created with mancandy, I decided to give it a shot. It’s a very well rigged character and I think I will use it to practice facial expressions and body language. I only played for about 5 minutes, so I know there’s lots I’m not taking advantage of, but here’s my best shot. It’s now my Windows background image. Link is to a background-sized image.
I started working on a new animation project a couple of weeks ago. I’m pretty excited about this because it’s going to be my first animated short with a plot. Sure, the Penguin Flight animation technically had a plot. But it didn’t have a valid story-telling plot. There was no conflict - it was boring. (Not to make, but to watch) For this new animation I’m going through all the steps - starting with writing a story and storyboarding. Then creating a 2D animatic. This is not, by the way, the budgie video I was previously planning. That one has been shelved for now because it didn’t really have a plot and I am really into this new story. I’ll go back to it later, I think. Also, you may see the bird make cameos in other shorts. At the very least, it was a great exercise for me to learn more about modeling.
Just got a book today that I ordered from Amazon.com - “Inspired 3D Short Film Production”. As I watched the DVD of shorts that came with the book and thought of the dozens of ideas swirling around in my head, I came to terms with the reality of computer animation - the animation step itself, it pretty trivial with respect to the rest of the process. In other words, in a good animation package like Blender, the animation is actually the relatively easy part. The hardest part is making the objects, giving them textures/colors, and rigging them up with bones so they can be animated. After that, animation is relatively easy. Relatively easy because, it’s still pretty hard to create convincing animation. However, making a good model in the first place is tough. It takes the Blender character animation book until page 82 to finish up a character of moderate difficulty. Of course, the process gets fast with time. I was able to model the budgie a lot faster than I was able to model my penguin and Raul Domingo. However, it still takes a fair amount of time to model a reasonably nice character.
Luckily, my younger brother pre-ordered this for me for my birthday (which came months ago), because the book is now sold out. Ever since I heard about it in Oct 2006, I couldn’t wait for it to come out. There are really great tutorials online, but I needed a nice coherent, beginning to end book to guide me through the process at least once. As you know, I’ve already done one animated short, " Penguin Flight", and a few quick animated scenes in preparation for my next animated short, " Budgies". However, although I have the basic techniques down, I know there are enough gaps in my knowledge to make any reasonably length animation a pain in the butt.
from my vimeo page:
The cartoon I’m going to be making featuring the budgie you’ve been seeing will take place in this apartment living room.
There seem to be two flaws.
The camera seems to move in a strange, unanticipated way in the beginnig
I need to fix the lighting situation. I had done most of my lighting testing with the walls off, adding the walls has apparently caused a lot of light to be blocked.
The short will take place in an apartment living room so I’m taking a little bit of a break with the budgie to work on the living room. (This is, in many ways, a lot easier than the bird, so it’s a welcome change)
Finished my first ever couch today. I’m pretty happy with how it came out. I didn’t even look at any tutorials - I just worked at it for about 30 minutes until I figured out the best way to represent a couch and what I would have to do to get it. Blender is one of those tools, like Photoshop, that takes a while to get used to, but then, once you start thinking in the program’s paradigm, you become insanely productive. So here’s what the apartment looks like so far in lo res and, by clicking, hi res. (The object hanging on the wall is a very small LCD Tv. I hope to give him a larger allowance so he can buy a bigger Tv. q;o) But for now this’ll do.
The budgie is almost complete. Here I am testing all of the bones. I just have a few things left to fix up with the bones. Then I need to fix the tapering of the wings. After that I just have a few little things like making the bird blink. Then I’ll be about 80% done towards finishing up the cartoon the budgie will be staring in.
Finally got to do some more work on the budgie today after having taken about 4-5 days off to do other stuff like photography and be with my wife. Finished rigging up all 6 toes on the bird. All I have left in the rigging is to do his legs and creating a tracking bone for moving his eyes. Here’s another foot animation to showcase all the little toes moving around. I hope the next one will have the entire bird moving through his entire range of motions as a test.
My budgie is almost ready to perch. I finally finished getting all the bones in the right front toes. This is the annoying part of computer animation. I need to make bones for each part of the body I wish to move and then tell the bones what parts of the flesh they move.
So here he is moving his toes around and getting ready to perch.
Didn’t get to do any work on the budgie 3 Jan 2007. However, I did get a lot of texturing and adding of bones done late on the second, I just didn’t post it. Here are some of the highlights.
I added the strips behind the head, which you can see much better in the picture after this one.
I also added some “feathery-white” textures based on a picture I saw online of a blue budgie.
I wanted to play a little with particle systems in Blender and see if I could get some realistic fur. I came to the conclusion that I need a lot more practice before I try to implement it. Sure, making a furry sphere went very well.
I even got a little bold and added some color to my furry sphere.
But things got a little messed up when I tried to add fur to Danny!
Raul Domingo and the little Penguin. This turned out to be a lot harder and more complicated to put together than I imagined. Thankfully the programmers are working on a better implementation. (Click on the picture for a larger version that may work better as a background for your desktop)
Alright, I finally finished up the animation for Raul Domingo. In addition to all I did before, I now know how to lip sync, use the NLA editor, and do some other pretty neat stuff. I technically know how to make him blink, but I was having some technical difficulties and wanted to get the animation going, so I skipped that for now. Part of the animation involved creating facial expressions for Raul so that he could speak and show basic emotions. Here are some of the facial expressions. (Link to the videos below)
I’m making really great progress on Raul Domingo. As I mentioned yesterday, the fact that I’ve already used Blender before is really helping me understand what I’m doing instead of hunting down where things are. Today I not only finished putting bones into the legs and feet, but I’ve also done a wonderful walking and waving animation section of the tutorial. You get to see that probably tomorrow. It’s amazing to see what kinds of things are so easily neglected if you don’t know what you’re doing.
I forgot to add this to the end of the last post and I’m a bit of a stickler for editing posts once they’ve gone public. I am going to name him Raul Domingo after my late grandfather who I never got to meet, but feel that I know via all the stories I’ve heard of him. I know I would have loved to have met him and look forward to doing so in Heaven (after a long live on Earth - I hope!).
I stress the word humanoid because it would be quite a stretch to call it a human. It is roughly human, but the head is not quite as spherical as a human head. However, I think you will notice quite a few improvements over my previous render, the penguin.
Most notable should be that the skin looks a little more skin-like. This time instead of looking so plastic-like, the current set of tutorials I’m following has taught me about materials and textures. I really hope you can see the textures on your screen. This really looks like clay to me. I’m moving along a LOT faster than the penguin. I was really shooting blind with that one. I was in such a hurry to get my first ever computer animation out there that I learned as I went along. Not quite what you want to do with Blender. Now, I’m realizing how a lot of these things work. It also helps that this tutorial is not my first time using Blender. I have a better idea of where to find things and how to navigate around. Another improvement you may notice is that the eyes look a little more realistic. This has to do with the way I applied the materials and colors to it when compared to the penguin.
You can see Penguin Flight, my first-ever CG short subject film, at drop the bomb production’s CG Animation Page. It’s at the bottom. Read the description first and then give it a shot. It took roughly a month to get that sucker down. I expect my next one to take longer as well as be of better quality. Please enjoy it!
Got some advice on rendering. Apparently for the amount of frames I did, it’s much better to render them as individual frames and then piece together the AVI from that. So I chose PNGs since they are lossless. If the last render session is any indication, it’ll be nearly Thursday before I can put the finishing touches on the animation. Darn! Hopefully this works well and is just a lesson learned.
The rendering of my penguin cartoon is over. Now I will review it and add a soundtrack. If everything goes right I hope to have it up by tomorrow or Wed at the latest.
I finally finished the animation for the penguin short. It looks to be about 2 minutes long. (Not including opening and closing credits) I will now begin rendering and we shall see just how long it takes to render. I was originally going to do an HD render, but I’m afraid it will take much longer than NTSC. Also, I had been using 25 frames/sec and NTSC is 30. Since I’m going to edit it later to add sound, I guess I’ll do with 30 frames per second. So it may move a bit faster than I thought. Actually, I think the biggest lesson I will have from this animation will be timing. It’s been hard trying to think about how long things take. What should happen after one second? What happens in a half-second?
Oh, all of my penguin CG renders are, of course, copyrighted to me. However, I am copylefting them under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 which you can read about by clicking on the link.
Unfortunately for him, I haven’t built an opening into his igloo yet, so he’s kinda stuck outside. That’s fine because I haven’t made him any furniture yet! But then again, I haven’t made him eyes yet, so perhaps he doesn’t know about the igloo yet? So much to do and so little time to do it all!
By the way, if it isn’t clear, if you click on any of these penguin pictures you can see the full-resolution size.
Here’s my second render. I love penguins and they’re the mascot of Linux, so why not work on penguins. Here’s how I progressed with my penguin as I learned more last night. And….BONUS….here’s my second video. This one’s 8 times as long as the previous one! Watch Penguins Jump (and Cameras move)!
Here’s my first (admittedly simple) render with Blender. I did one before, but I didn’t really know what I was doing. This time I’m gearing up to do some serious playing. Full size is available by clicking on the picture. I also created a very short animation (just over 1 second) to test the animation process. You can access that here: Eric’s Cube and Mountains Animation (watch out Pixar!) You will need Divx and/or Xvid codecs to watch the animation.
On first startup, I thought - hmm this browser looks a bit bubbly. Reminds me a bit of MSN Browser in the late 90s. Then I suddenly noticed something - no top bar on the browser! Where’s the File, Edit, Tools, menu so common to Windows programs? Even the tabs are right up in the titlebar window. But you know what? I like it - more room for viewing my websites. Tabs load up ridiculously fast. And the little things are so nice - like how there are animations when you create the tabs. They slide out from the left. Or when you close a tab, all the ones to the right of it slide over to the left. It’s pointless eye candy, but I love it! It really adds to the experience.
If this story is accurate, then Micro$oft has withdrawn their offer to buy Yahoo! This is great news because I love the guys at Yahoo and the programs they run, such as Flickr and delicious and I love the fact that they use FreeBSD for their servers. You can bet that Microsoft wouldn’t have been having any of that and would have made them switch to the inferior Microsoft IIS. Plus, they probably would have wrecked my Flickr!
Well, I’m filling up my space time with programming and animation. Here’s what I’m currently up to with animation. First of all, there’s " Sugar" . I have the script and most of the props complete for the animation. I got a little frustrated when I was working onNick’s armature and started working on programming and some other projects. I intend to get back to Sugar very soon now and finish it up by the end of the year.
Well, I’m filling up my space time with programming and animation. Here’s what I’m currently up to with animation. First of all, there’s " Sugar" . I have the script and most of the props complete for the animation. I got a little frustrated when I was working onNick’s armature and started working on programming and some other projects. I intend to get back to Sugar very soon now and finish it up by the end of the year.
Well, I’m filling up my space time with programming and animation. Here’s what I’m currently up to with animation. First of all, there’s " Sugar" . I have the script and most of the props complete for the animation. I got a little frustrated when I was working onNick’s armature and started working on programming and some other projects. I intend to get back to Sugar very soon now and finish it up by the end of the year.
Well, I’m filling up my space time with programming and animation. Here’s what I’m currently up to with animation. First of all, there’s " Sugar" . I have the script and most of the props complete for the animation. I got a little frustrated when I was working onNick’s armature and started working on programming and some other projects. I intend to get back to Sugar very soon now and finish it up by the end of the year.
This theme is really annoying me, mostly because it’s a fixed width theme. That means that the theme doesn’t expand if you expand your Window or have a wide screen monitor. Mostly, it means annoying things like this blog post title. As you can see, it cuts into the metadata such as the date/time. Also this theme doesn’t support tags. So you may see some strangeness as I change themes. I couldn’t find any that I truly wanted and, in the end, I think I’m just going to end up making my own theme.
This theme is really annoying me, mostly because it’s a fixed width theme. That means that the theme doesn’t expand if you expand your Window or have a wide screen monitor. Mostly, it means annoying things like this blog post title. As you can see, it cuts into the metadata such as the date/time. Also this theme doesn’t support tags. So you may see some strangeness as I change themes. I couldn’t find any that I truly wanted and, in the end, I think I’m just going to end up making my own theme.
Time to empty out my quotes from my AIM profile again, here are the latest:
“My vagina is always better than a white girl’s” - Mai
---——————————————————————–
Guest on Colbert Report: “Yes, you learned very well in Sunday School.”
Colbert: “I teach Sunday School Mother F-cker!”
---——————————————————————–
“[Operating System] Open Solaris is good for diversity”
“What? That’s like saying that schools should make sure they have enough Ginger Kids to keep diverse”
-LugRadio
Time to empty out my quotes from my AIM profile again, here are the latest:
“My vagina is always better than a white girl’s” - Mai
---——————————————————————–
Guest on Colbert Report: “Yes, you learned very well in Sunday School.”
Colbert: “I teach Sunday School Mother F-cker!”
---——————————————————————–
“[Operating System] Open Solaris is good for diversity”
“What? That’s like saying that schools should make sure they have enough Ginger Kids to keep diverse”
-LugRadio
Time to empty out my quotes from my AIM profile again, here are the latest:
“My vagina is always better than a white girl’s” - Mai
---——————————————————————–
Guest on Colbert Report: “Yes, you learned very well in Sunday School.”
Colbert: “I teach Sunday School Mother F-cker!”
---——————————————————————–
“[Operating System] Open Solaris is good for diversity”
“What? That’s like saying that schools should make sure they have enough Ginger Kids to keep diverse”
-LugRadio
Time to empty out my quotes from my AIM profile again, here are the latest:
“My vagina is always better than a white girl’s” - Mai
---——————————————————————–
Guest on Colbert Report: “Yes, you learned very well in Sunday School.”
Colbert: “I teach Sunday School Mother F-cker!”
---——————————————————————–
“[Operating System] Open Solaris is good for diversity”
“What? That’s like saying that schools should make sure they have enough Ginger Kids to keep diverse”
-LugRadio
Time to empty out my quotes from my AIM profile again, here are the latest:
“My vagina is always better than a white girl’s” - Mai
---——————————————————————–
Guest on Colbert Report: “Yes, you learned very well in Sunday School.”
Colbert: “I teach Sunday School Mother F-cker!”
---——————————————————————–
“[Operating System] Open Solaris is good for diversity”
“What? That’s like saying that schools should make sure they have enough Ginger Kids to keep diverse”
-LugRadio
It’s really funny because my brother just asked me to create a blog for him on my server and I was thinking, “Man, if Wordpress 2.5 is coming out soon. I’d hate for him to learn the 2.3 interface and then have 2.5 come out right away.” But I set him up with a 2.3 blog yesterday and went on my merry way. Well, today I login to my blog and don’t see any changes. Then I went to Wordpress Planet and I saw this blog post followed by this one and this one. (That last one is especially comprehensive of all the changes)
It’s really funny because my brother just asked me to create a blog for him on my server and I was thinking, “Man, if Wordpress 2.5 is coming out soon. I’d hate for him to learn the 2.3 interface and then have 2.5 come out right away.” But I set him up with a 2.3 blog yesterday and went on my merry way. Well, today I login to my blog and don’t see any changes. Then I went to Wordpress Planet and I saw this blog post followed by this one and this one. (That last one is especially comprehensive of all the changes)
On a recent business flight I took, I noticed that my tray table had become an advertisement for cough drops
Also, a plane ticket, which I, regrettably, did not photograph, had an advertisement for Papa Johns Pizza. Has it come to this? Are the airlines so desperate for cash that they have resorted to selling ad space on their tray tables and tickets. Flying used to be a refined affair that people got dressed up for. Now we have the same airlines that charged us so much money without giving us any food to eat, advertising on the tray tables.
I was writing a GUI for Pydvdauthor, my program for creating DVDs on Linux from an MPEG file. I wrote this in order to help me create the XML files necessary for dvdauthor. Here’s what the GUI looks like right now:
I updated the project on freshmeat, but they haven’t updated my main page yet. You’ll know because the tar file will be 0.1.6. I’m pretty excited as this is my first non-toy program GUI. With time it’s gotten easier and easier to do them - they were quite intimidating at first.
So I took a good look at the files and I had an xvid at 704x400 (I cropped a little) and an ogg theora with 720x480 resolution. Generally speaking, the ogg theora had much better audio/video sync. Throughout the entire film, the audio was just as in sync as on the DVD. The xvid file lost sync little by little, but never to a ridiculous degree. (Although it has happened to me with other discs)
I’ve tried a bunch of times, but apparently something’s wrong with the Syllable VMWare files and LiveCD because I was unable to get either to run. They both appear to be missing a bunch of necessary files.
(Note: I did the Haiku Part of this review in June of 2007, and didn’t get around to posting it, so some of these issues may have been resolved by now)
Everyone knows Windows, Apple, GNU/Linux and the BSDs. These computer operating systems have been around for 10-20 or so years and people know what they provide and how they function. However, there are two other OSes that sound as though they come from English class: Haiku and Syllable.
This year I decided to mainly support technological causes. I donated to the F ree Software Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I think that rms and the rest over at the FSF are really doing a lot of great work to preserve our freedoms. I especially like the Defective by Design campaign they’ve been running. So this year they get the lion’s share of my money.
The EFF has been doing a lot of work with other things I care about such as opposing the broadcast flag and overall protecting our electronic and Internet freedoms.
I don’t know if you liked my Indigo Render of Suanne as much as I did, but I wanted to make it into my desktop background. Thus I left Indigo running for 42 hours at the size of my destktop and came up with this beauty.
And I figured that I may as well share with others - perhaps someone else wants Suzanne to grace their desktop. Indigo, as you probably know, is a renderer where you let it render as long as you want. With each pass it becomes better and better and then you stop when it looks nice enough. I think 42 hours is the longest I’ve run it for and, being such a great number of hours, it seemed a good place to stop.
I’m not really impressed with the way that the audio was left out of sync when I converted my video to xvid as well as the strange artifacts in the videos. I intend to re-upload a director’s cut in the next week or so. When I do, I’ll announce it here.
I decided to get a little more organized for this animated short, so I put my tasks into the Gnome Project Manager. (Similar to MS Project) I also figure this way I know how long it should take so I won’t rush myself and compromise in quality. I want this to be the best animated short I can create with my current skills. I don’t want to be rushing just to get it out there. I’ve already put a few out there and now I want to focus on making one I can really be truly proud of and perhaps enter into the Suzanne Awards.
I decided to get a little more organized for this animated short, so I put my tasks into the Gnome Project Manager. (Similar to MS Project) I also figure this way I know how long it should take so I won’t rush myself and compromise in quality. I want this to be the best animated short I can create with my current skills. I don’t want to be rushing just to get it out there. I’ve already put a few out there and now I want to focus on making one I can really be truly proud of and perhaps enter into the Suzanne Awards.
I decided to get a little more organized for this animated short, so I put my tasks into the Gnome Project Manager. (Similar to MS Project) I also figure this way I know how long it should take so I won’t rush myself and compromise in quality. I want this to be the best animated short I can create with my current skills. I don’t want to be rushing just to get it out there. I’ve already put a few out there and now I want to focus on making one I can really be truly proud of and perhaps enter into the Suzanne Awards.
Here I spoke about how a problem had caused Nick’s hair to look blue. I was using some transparency effects on the hair to let it fade away like real hair. (I was following the hair tutorial in “Introducing Character Animation with Blender”) However, I am using ray tracing for transparency to have good looking transparency in glass and other things. So I also have to use it for the characters.
Pete of Penguin Pete’s has recently become something of an Inkscape ace so I asked him to help me with some textures on one of my planned animated shorts. This short is currently titled “Sugar” and I’m working on it at the same time as " Wedge". So here is the first fruits of that collaboration with Pete. I may fix the proportions a little, but here we go:
I absolutely hate the rest room by my new office. It was clearly designed by someone with a Catbert-like hatred of employees. Either that or it was designed by someone with the sanity of the guests at the tea party in Alice in Wonderland.
Pretty much all of my hatred for the rest room revolves around the washing up phase. There are three sinks there. The left sink opens like any sane sink in the USA - counter-clockwise. The right sink, however, opens clockwise. So right off the bat, depending on which sink you use, you will probably end up looking like a fool who doesn’t know which way to turn the knob to turn on the water. And then turning it off again often has me first opening the water even more.
In the world of computer generated cartoons and images, we have a very awesome trick we can do which cannot be done in real life. We can have unlimited Depth of Field. If you aren’t a photographer or involved in filming, you probably have no idea what that means. Well, in real life lenses cannot have everything in perfect focus from the front of the scene to the back. This is controlled by the f-stop. The bigger the f-stop, the more everything is in focus from front to back, the bigger the depth of field. Although, the f-stop is expressed as a fraction, so technically it is smaller numbers that are in higher focus. For example, f/2.8 will have your main character in focus and the rest of the background blurry. This is very useful in photography to force the viewer to focus primarily on your subject while having the background just provide some color. For a landscape image, a photographer may use f/11 to make sure that a large portion of the image is in focus.
I used to to love Anime. I don’t hate it now, but I don’t have as much zeal for it as I used to. Two things happened. First of all, anime is very expensive. Most DVDs have four episodes and cost $24 dollars. Usually it takes 6 DVDs to complete a season or $150 + tax. That’s a lot of money. Second, now that it’s mainstream it’s hard to tell the good anime from the bad anime. Back when I first started watching, it was just starting to become mainstream. There weren’t many titles available and whatever existed was pretty darned good. Studios couldn’t release crap over here or it wouldn’t sell. Basically there was awesome anime and hentai. Now there’s so much anime that best buy almost has an entire aisle dedicated to it in Ithaca. I remember when it was a few shelves and resided next to the porn. I hated being in that section. Now it’s usually by the sci fi movies.
" Wedge" will be my next animated short film. It will be around 3 minutes long and will, if things go well, feature a soundtrack by my good friend Mauricio Tinoco. This is the project I was working on when I decided to make " Jose’s Dinner" I came up with the idea for “Wedge” in March of this year and I hope to have it done by the end of this year, although I may be able to finish earlier or it may take longer. I really want to do this one well and take the time to make good textures and as good an animation as I can. Here’s to " Wedge"!
Alright, all of the video portion of “Jose’s Dinner” is now complete! All I’m missing now is the soundtrack. I’m currently emailing some people I think would be interested in providing the musical accompaniment. Once I get that in, it’s just a Cinelerra render command away from becoming my first animated short. Yay!
I now plan to refocus on some more basic Blender skills and give myself a break from the rigors of creating an animated short. I’ll be putting up some of the videos so you can see some of the neat concepts I’m learning. Hopefully some of them can make it into my next film and make it look even better than “Jose’s Dinner”.
YAY! Finally! The jittery frames have been re-rendered and everything is now A-OK. I now start production on the credits (opening and closing), the music, and possibly the sound effects - depending on how the music comes out.
I figured out the reason for the stuttering video - one of my render nodes in the farm had Blender 2.43, while the others had 2.42. Something changed between the two versions that caused the camera to be at a slightly different place. So, don’t mix Blender versions!
The render took about 6 hours this time, thanks to the laptop participating in most of it and the fact that I gave the Windows computer even more frames to render. It still finished about 30 minutes before the *nix boxen, so I really need to get it integrated into drqueue. I worked on that a little yesterday, but it turns out I’m going to have to do some upgrades for that to happen and I’ll just wait until I’m 100% done with “Jose’s Dinner”, since I already know this setup pretty much works. The animation finally looks pretty good so I think I’m done tweaking it. I might do another render next week because for some reason a bit of a twitch was introduced into the animation which wasn’t there last time. Depending upon when I get someone to do the music, this could be done by the end of June or earlier.
I reviewed last night’s render today and I found a few little gaffes here and there. I made a list and fixed them up. I’m pretty confident that the next time I will be rendering the definitive version of the film. I’m pretty psyched. All that’s left now is to start up on the credits and add in the soundtrack. I’m hoping to be able to tap into some musical talent to do the soundtrack, but I haven’t found anyone yet. If you want to volunteer your skills, leave a comment.
Well, the rendering is now done for “Jose’s Dinner”! Quite an improvement over 25 hours! Thanks to DrQueue, it only took 9 hours and 36 minutes! That is quite impressive! And, it would have been even better if my Windows computer had actually had DrQueue installed. I did a calculation that had me rendering 283 frames on Windows and letting the *nix boxen take care of the rest via DrQueue, but the Windows computer finished a litter earlier than I had expected (partially due to the laptop acting up). So the system wasn’t as efficient overall as it could have been. Could it have been as short as 8 hours? I’ll tell you one thing, though, it certainly is nice being able to have it finish over 9 hours. Instead of leaving it to render over night and waking up with it still going and then still going through work, it can now be done overnight. (At least for this particular animation with its level of complexity) If I can convince some more people to donate their POS computers to me, perhaps I can have myself a mini-Pixar. q;o)
Well, today I finished up all the animation details on “Jose’s Dinner” and set it to render. I’m excited to see how long the render will take. I started it at 1438 today. However, it hasn’t been without hitch. Due, I think, to the wireless card trying to kick in, the laptop rendered for a while then suddenly couldn’t find the network anymore. That cost me about 30 minutes where the laptop wasn’t rendering - so that will skew the stats a bit. q:o(
While cleaning up the animation for “Jose’s Dinner”, I was having a bit of trouble with the character’s mouth. I told it to open, but it still appeared closed.
It turns out that when I duplicated him and didn’t use the duplicate, I forgot to erase it. So there was a duplicate right underneath. What I was seeing was the closed mouth of the duplicate inside. It was as though he had eaten himself! Once I fixed this, it explained some of the problem I had been having and now, he was able to open his mouth!!
Jose’s Dinner is what I am calling my first true animated short film. Unlike " Penguin Flight", it actually has a plot! A lot a books I’ve read on animation have influenced the production of this short film. Most importantly, I created a 2D animatic - or animated storyboard. It REALLY helped me to get the timings correct and made the process a LOT less frustrating than it was with " Penguin Flight", where I was always trying to guess how long/how many frames an action should take. As I have no training in animation, my timings might still be a little bit off, but they are MUCH, MUCH better thanks to the animatics!
Recently I’ve been reading a lot about guns. First, there’s Andrew talking about how he’s really into guns now. Then there’s esr’s Ethics from the Barrel of a Gun about how guns are our ethical duty to own. Finally, there’s that Cho kid from Virginia Tech that everyone keeps talking about. So guns have been metaphorically waved in my face quite a bit recently.
All three events have made me think about why it is I don’t own a gun. There are myriad reasons. For starters, I would be highly annoyed (to put it mildly) if someone broke into my house and killed me with my own gun. I’m too lazy to do the research in this case because I think that gun control is like abortion - all the information out there is total BS. Each side claims to have irrefutable reasons as to why they are right. However, the anti-gun people always counter the pro-gun intruder defense by saying that the intruders kill people with their own guns. How often does this actually happen? No one knows. Second, I’m afraid that my kids (well, when I have some) will find it and kill themselves or someone else. Again, there are tons of stories about kids killing each other event if the parents told them they weren’t allowed to touch it or had the bullets somewhere else or both. I know someone near my family died this way, but I don’t remember who - it was my parents’ friend. Third, related to these two is the scenario where I kill my own kid because I think he/she is an intruder. I’ve only heard this in that stupid chain letter and I know chain letters are BS. However, I could totally see it happening - it’s why was always careful when I woke my dad up in the middle of the night. He had a machete by the bed. (It’s a Cuban redneck thing)
Reading a post from Miss Izzy is like watching a Simpsons episode. The beginning has nothing to do with the end, but serves only to set up the source of conflict. While reading Sunday Digression, she moved to a topic I feel pretty strongly about, the value of art in culture. She writes:
If you think about it, nearly all the most famous modern fiction work that is set in a world after a sort of semi-apocalypse has the burning of books and the confiscation of cultural capital as the fundemental conflict between the state and the people. 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Vertigo’s V for Vendetta, all of it have books being burned and the media under tight scrutiny. You’re kidding yourself if you think Art isn’t important and that I’m nothing but a cultural elitist.
The way the news keeps talking about the Virginia Tech killings, you’d think it was the only thing going on in the news. Did everyone forget about Darfur, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, missile defense in Poland, Russia, Chinese bootlegging, the failure of Windows Vista, etc? I mean, yes, it is extremely tragic that 32 people died who are, at most, only five years younger than me. They had their entire life ahead of them. If my kids died before me I’d be devastated. But put this into perspective!
Those of us who read the newspapers, which tend to be focused on more details than Tv news, have read the stories that neither the administration nor Tv news have focused too much on: Iran was cooperating with the USA after 11 Sept 2001. They were helping us go after the Taliban and catching terrorists. Of course, I’ve learned recently they also had a self-interested motive in doing so as the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan was [along with Iraq] one of their long-time rivals. However, they were helping us. Then Bush named Iraq, Iran, and North Korea in the Axis of Evil in the 2002 State of the Union. Besides providing a lot of fodder for SNL and other Late Night Shows, this had the effect of Iran ceasing to help us. They were thinking, “Axis of Evil? You SoB, we were just helping you in Afghanistan!”
FiveFour years ago I was on Spring Break and watching CNN at 0000 (midnight) or later. I was talking to my wife (then my girlfriend), although I don’t remember if it was over the phone or on AIM via my dad’s laptop. There was a breaking news bulletin and then I saw a night vission goggles image of Iraq being blown to bits. Shock and awe they called it. I was certainly shocked - although I had been vaguely following Colin Powell and the others making the case for WMD. I didn’t have cable Tv in my dorm, so I wasn’t really following the news at all that year. I was pretty impressed when, about a month later, the fighting portion of the war was over. Actually, as far as I was concerned, the war WAS over. Recently, we have learned, Rumsfeld had hoped the same thing. It was his idea to get rid of Saddam and then let the Iraqis do their own thing. However, some other demons - perhaps Cheney or Wolfowitz - whispered into Bush’s ears about making it into a wonderful Democracy and all kinds of BS that had nothing to do with the WMD/Al Qaeda lies they told us to get into the war.
We’re currently mired down in a war that is wearing our armed forces thin. The military is having a hard time meeting its recruitment targets and they have resorted to lowering their recruitment standards. Reports in the news have talked of people with drug problems and prior prison time being hired. Open gays? No - can’t have that! What about the fact that some of them can speak arabic and we’re fighting in a bunch of arabic countries? No - still don’t want them.
So, today I heard the biggest shock of 2006, Donald Rumsfeld was sacked! This was a surprise because Bush emphatically declared, going into the election, that he would not get rid of Rummy. It was also a surprise because I thought Bush would let the democrats fight to get rid of Rumsfeld, thus putting the blame on them if things went wrong. Instead, the day after the election he was out and Gates, a former CIA head is in. I didn’t really like a lot about Rumself and the way he ran the Pentagon, but hopefully we haven’t taken a step into WORSE policy!
I saw something today that disgusted me. It’s relatively old news, but it’s the first time I’d actually seen the story on tv. It seems there are some Christians who have made it a point to undermine Christianity at all costs. What makes it even worse is that these guys are a bunch of Baptists, which is what I was raised as. The churches my parents went to were never so ridiculous. What I’m speaking about is the group who is protesting at soldier’s funerals. This made me so sick and outraged! They claim that 11 Sept 2001 was punishment because America is tolerant to gays. They also believe that the soldiers have done evil because they are fighting for an evil administration.
For a while I kept wondering what the heck was going on in Iraq. Why were the Shi’ites and Sunni killing each other? Aren’t they both Muslim? What barbaric behaviour to kill your own compatriots, not because they are a different religion, but just a different sect! But then, one night as I lay awake in bed, I thought of Europe in the 14-1800s. Dozens of wars were fought between different countries in Europe because one side was Protestant and one side was Catholic. Heck, the British suffered through a few civil wars over different sects of Christianity. So, I guess it’s not so strange to see them fighting this way.
I was watching ABC Family a few nights ago when I discovered that Who’s Line is It Anyway? was on right before I went to bed. Right after the second episode of Who’s Line, ABC family became CBN. I am not sure, but I think that stands for the Christian Broadcasting Network. I guess that meaning for the acronym because the show that appeared on my Tv was some 700 Club news program Co-hosted by Pat Robinson. We all know that Pat gives quite a bad name to televangelists everywhere, as if it were possible to give them a worse reputation. He calls for absurd things like taking down Hugo Chavez from power. But they were talking that night about myths involving the War in Iraq and I was intrigued to see what they would say. Some fellow was on who had written a book on the subject and basically made a bunch of claims contrary to what we’ve been hearing in the news. He claims we haven’t been hearing about it because of an agenda that news organizations have to discredit Bush.
Two days ago, the Democrats called a secret session of congress to look into whether the Bush Administration purposely misled the American public with respect to the resons for the War in Iraq. This is an open secret to me. Only a fool doesn’t know that Bush or his cronies purposely lied about the war in Iraq. They wanted to go to war from the time they came into office and the terrorism attacks simply gave them the excuse they needed to waltz right in and take the country.
I mean, that’s the whole point of the Valery CIA Leak investigation. Her husband found out the yellow cake excuse was BS. When he told the Administration they ignored him. When he leaked to the press, they put out his wife’s identity. Why do this? Because they were lying! Otherwise, why be scared of what he was saying?
Today it was announced that there have officially been 2000 deaths in Iraq. This has been called a benchmark by a lot of anti-war protesters and they want to have 2000 people meet up in Washington DC and act dead to show people just how many people are dead if 2000 people have died. I, as my readers know, am against the war in Iraq because I believe it was a war of convinience, not a necessary war. However, I am very surprised at the big deal over 2000 deaths. In the Vietnam War there were hundreds of thousands of deaths. In World War I there were millions of deaths in just the first few years. Countless wars have caused many more than 2000 people to die and in a much shorter period of time.
If there’s one thing those of us who have been creating websites for a long time know - it’s that inlining images is not to be tolerated. It’s considered very rude to waste someone else’s bandwidth - especially since they are probably paying per mb. What’s inlining you say? It’s displaying an image on your website when that image is on another server. You’re supposed to download the image to your server and then put it up. That way you only waste your own bandwidth. When the owner of the blog ascii.textfiles.com found out that someone had decided to use an image of his inlined in myspace templates, he had to get back at them. So he replaced the image with a very, very disgusting one. That’ll teach those stupid tweens not to inline images!
My wife gave me the idea to have some budgies star in my next short, my first true short after understanding everything I learned from " Penguin Flight" and " Hello World". So I started work on modeling them last night around 2200.
At first I figured it would be very hard and was getting quite discouraged. But then, I figured out a shape that seems to approximate the bird enough for a cartoon. After all, I’m not making a scientific textbook or something. I still have things to add (such as eyes) and texttured materials, but I think I’ve made some amazing progress.
On the same principle as I presented yesterday, I thought I would embed part one of my brother’s Sims 2-based machinima, 10 Little S’mores, so that, instead of having to go to Some Sort of Productions, my readers could watch it from the comfort of my blog.
Please enjoy this great, funny little movie from my brother and his girlfriend, Tamlin. Oh yeah, the first 3:18 minutes are an intro into mapping the characters in the short film to their real life counterparts. (This was originally an inside joke film, which I convinced Dave to share with the world) So if the first few minutes leave you confused, just watch a little longer.
What I referred to as Dave’s S’mores night video is actually entitled “10 Little S’mores” and he’ll be fixing the title on Vimeo soon. (It’s my fault, as I uploaded the clips for him)
it is FAST! OMG is it fast! They weren’t lying about the optimizations with the latest GCC! It loads into Gnome so much faster than it used to and all the programs launch much faster as well!
The other day I decided to read the Constitution of the USA. I don’t know what compelled me to do this, other than the fact that I stumbled upon it online. I don’t have anything specific to say about it except that I’m amazed at how they thought of nearly every contingency. For example, the House can Impeach the President, but the Senate conducts the hearings. Thus neither house has complete power. Also, they can’t change the President’s salary while he’s in office in an attempt to coerce him. Below I will just mention little things I noticed as I read it.
Today I became a little more involved in FOSS. Until now I had just been a user of FOSS without giving back. But two days ago I did what can be considered the simplest action in FOSS, I filed a bug report. Actually, I filed two bug reports! Why is this more than just complaining? And what’s so useful about it? Well, since FOSS developers are working for free, they have to do most of the coding in their free time. So they don’t have time to go over every single scenario looking for bugs. Heck, the Windows programmers ARE paid and they don’t have time to go over every single scenario. So, by submitting bug reports, you can help programmers find problems. They may also not know how annoying a bug is, unless people complain about it.
In our recent move, my wife and mother were on a mission to get rid of as much junk as possible as I’ve been labeled by them as a pack rat. I saved this poem from destruction. I don’t remember anything about it, not even the circumstances in which I wrote it. But here it is for you.
Life
It’s no longer yours.
You can’t do what you want with it.
That’s like coming back to live in/remodel a house you’ve sold.
You see, the owner dictates what happens to his property, as demostrated in Merchant of Venice.
But what do you do if you’re caught in the moment?
Especially with the other being so tempting, so manipulative.
To give in is a breach of contract.
At the same time, you know the judge is forgiving.
As far as you know, there is no limit to the forgiveness.
Do you push it?
Test the limit?
Is one moment worth eternity?
Especially one quickly forgotten.
But…that IS the main question….
the one up for debate.
We have access to law books, but they are written in confusing jargon.
If only the judge would answer you directly.
Yet, he is a witty man.
His favorite means of communication is through metaphors and analogies.
So I stumble through the books looking for the answer.
How do you confront the other without risking it all?
It almost seems like one or the other.
There must be a compromise…
somewhere…
But right now… right now somewhere is as good as nowhere.
Patience is not my strength.
If it is wrong to do it directly, then can it be done indirectly?
Is it now right?
Half as wrong?
Still fully wrong?
I really need to know for I fear jail almost as much as the side effects/penalties.
In such a “now” world, it’s hard to consider eternity.
So now I continue to wonder…
I hope that I will somehow find the answer in the books.
Until that time I simply dreak making the decision.
Which will it be - the moment or eternity?
I am not a data point.
I am a human being.
I am not the customer who buys anime, computer hardware, and books on Linux.
I am not the customer who sends flowers to my mother-in-law in Brooklyn.
I am a human being.
I am a college student, a writer, a poet, a photographer, a journalist, a hacker, a fiancee, a revolutionary;
but I am not simply a set of bits describing what I buy and how often I do it.
Give me back my identity.
Who said you had the right to keep track of where I go and what I buy and who I talk to?
Who said you had the right to piggy back on my software and force me to agree to your terms?
Who said you had the right to put cookies in my browser all day long to track what I do?
Am I a terrorist?
Am I a criminal?
What have I done to warrant this level of surveillance?
I am not something to be analyzed so that you can figure out how to squeeze every last dollar out of me.
I am a human being -
GIVE ME BACK MY IDENTITY!
Today would have been my grandmother’s birthday. She died this past March during my Spring Break and I loved her very much. I know that she’s up in Heaven now having a heckuva time with her husband who was taken from her more than twenty years ago. She remained faithful to him to the last day and never remarried. I miss her so much whenever I open up my phone and think of someone to call. I would always call her when I had a free minute. I always get so mad that she didn’t get to see the wedding or my graduation. I mean, I’d like to believe that she was able to see it from Heaven, but she didn’t get to hug me that day. I didn’t get to see the smile on her face. The best way I know to remember her is to use my talents and remember her through my photography. Here is a tribute to her on her bithday:
Today I made my first 911 call ever. Of course, the events leading up to this event were the most surreal of my life. As I was waiting to cross the street into the Gun Hill parking lot, a bunch of cars started passing by, as usual. We have a joke that they purposely come by only when we want to cross. Then, as if out of a Monty Python or Stephen Chow movie, a bicycle rider comes out behind the cars.
A series of epidemiological studies were conducted. The results were as follows:
-Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans
-French eat a lot of fat and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans
-Japanese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans
-Italians drink excessive amounts of red wine and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans
To all the US citizens who read this blog: Happy Tax Day! I did mine a while back, how about you? Today is the last day to postmark the filed returns or an extension request.
The Princess Who Saved Herself[/caption]
The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi
The Ruin of Kings by Jenn Lyons
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy
Lightspeed Magazine, June 2014: Women Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue by Christie Yant
The Consuming Fire by John Scalzi
Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins
Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells
Artificial Condition by Martha Wells
All Systems Red by Martha Wells
Black Powder War by Naomi Novik
The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell
Final Fantasy VI by Sebastian Deken
Lightspeed Magazine, April 2014 by John Joseph Adams
Generation Xbox: How Videogames Invaded Hollywood by Jamie Russell
Programming Perl by Tom Christiansen
Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett
Introducing Go: Build Reliable, Scalable Programs by Caleb Doxsey
After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall by Nancy Kress
Lies of the Beholder by Brandon Sanderson
The Gryphon’s Skull by H.N. Turteltaub
Palpitations: The Highway To Never After by S.K. Munt
The Boys, Volume 1: The Name of the Game by Garth Ennis
Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett
InvestiGators: Off the Hook by John Patrick Green
Princess Academy by Shannon Hale
Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler
Cook’s Illustrated 2019 by Dan Souza
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
Third Daughter by Susan Kaye Quinn
Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett
The Great Hunt by Robert Jordan
A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher
The Official Scratchjr Book: Help Your Kids Learn to Code by Marina Umaschi Bers
Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett
The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett
Firefight by Brandon Sanderson
The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett
Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson
The Red Church by Scott Nicholson
Apex Magazine Promo Issue 2020 by Jason Sizemore
The Brisket Chronicles: How to Barbecue, Braise, Smoke, and Cure the World’s Most Versatile Cut of Meat by Steven Raichlen
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms by George R.R. Martin
Dawnshard by Brandon Sanderson
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Thrilling Adventure Yarns by Robert Greenberger
Indian-ish: Recipes and Antics from a Modern American Family by Priya Krishna
Ruby Wizardry: An Introduction to Programming for Kids by Eric Weinstein
The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
The Gospel Reloaded by Seay Garrett
Hippopotamister by John Patrick Green
The Mongoliad: Book Three by Neal Stephenson
Don’t Stand Too Close to a Naked Man by Tim Allen
Spiced: Unlock the Power of Spices to Transform Your Cooking by America’s Test Kitchen
Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 143 by Neil Clarke
InvestiGators by John Patrick Green
Jumpstarting the Onion Omega2 by Wolfram Donat
Getting Started with Soldering: A Hands-On Guide to Making Electrical and Mechanical Connections by Marc de Vinck
Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 142 by Neil Clarke
Jumpstarting the Raspberry Pi Zero W by Akkana Peck
The Crimson Campaign by Brian McClellan
Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 141 by Neil Clarke
Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 140 by Neil Clarke
Rave Master Vol. 9 by Hiro Mashima
Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 139 by Neil Clarke
Rave Master Vol. 8 by Hiro Mashima
Rave Master, Vol. 07 by Hiro Mashima
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Rave Master, Vol. 06 by Hiro Mashima
Wild Cards III: Jokers Wild by George R.R. Martin
The Cuban Table: A Celebration of Food, Flavors, and History by Ana Sofia Peláez
Rave Master Vol. 5 by Hiro Mashima
Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 135 by Neil Clarke
The Princess in Black and the Hungry Bunny Horde by Shannon Hale
Rave Master, Vol. 04 by Hiro Mashima
Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 138 by Neil Clarke
The Princess in Black by Shannon Hale
Rave Master Vol. 3 by Hiro Mashima
The Bob’s Burgers Burger Book: Real Recipes for Joke Burgers by Loren Bouchard
Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 137 by Neil Clarke
Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 136 by Neil Clarke
Rave Master Vol. 2 by Hiro Mashima
The Philosopher Kings by Jo Walton
Rave Master, Vol. 01 by Hiro Mashima
Tiamat’s Wrath by James S.A. Corey
Stronger Than a Bronze Dragon by Mary Fan
Serious Python: Black-Belt Advice on Deployment, Scalability, Testing, and More by Julien Danjou
Over the Wine-Dark Sea by H.N. Turteltaub
Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 134 by Neil Clarke
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking by Samin Nosrat
A Man On the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts by Andrew Chaikin
Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 133 by Neil Clarke
Steelheart by Brandon Sanderson
Breakfast: The Most Important Book About the Best Meal of the Day by The Editors of Extra Crispy
Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 132 by Neil Clarke
Make: LEGO and Arduino Projects: Projects for extending MINDSTORMS NXT with open-source electronics by John Baichtal
Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 131 by Neil Clarke
Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 130 by Neil Clarke
Cook It in Your Dutch Oven: 150 Foolproof Recipes Tailor-Made for Your Kitchen’s Most Versatile Pot by America’s Test Kitchen
Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 129 by Neil Clarke
Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 128 by Neil Clarke
Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History by Florence Williams
Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 127 by Neil Clarke
Make: Bluetooth: Mobile Phone, Arduino, and Raspberry Pi Projects with Ble by Alasdair Allan
Working Stiff by Kevin J. Anderson
Make a Raspberry Pi-Controlled Robot: Building a Rover with Python, Linux, Motors, and Sensors by Wolfram Donat
The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan
Getting Started With Raspberry Pi by Matt Richardson
Qt5 Python GUI Programming Cookbook: Building responsive and powerful cross-platform applications with PyQt by B.M. Harwani
Getting Started with Adafruit FLORA: Making Wearables with an Arduino-Compatible Electronics Platform by Becky Stern
Getting Started with Arduino by Massimo Banzi
Korean Home Cooking: Classic and Modern Recipes by Sohui Kim
Geekomancy by Michael R. Underwood
The Circlet Treasury of Erotic Steampunk by J. Blackmore
Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 126 by Neil Clarke
Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson
Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 125 by Neil Clarke
A Mind Forever Voyaging: A History of Storytelling in Video Games by Dylan Holmes
One Night in Sixes by Arianne “Tex” Thompson
Terris: Wrought of Copper by Alex Flagg
Promise of Blood by Brian McClellan
The Mongoliad: Book Two by Neal Stephenson
Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke
Mr. Spaceship by Philip K. Dick
The Eyes Have It by Philip K. Dick
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
Dead Man’s Deal by Jocelynn Drake
Kingdom Hearts II by Alexa Ray Corriea
Aces High by George R.R. Martin
His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik
Huckleberry: Recipes, Stories, and Secrets from Our Kitchen by Zoe Nathan
The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal
Grilled Cheese Kitchen: Bread + Cheese + Everything in Between by Heidi Gibson
Rachel Khoo’s Kitchen Notebook by Rachel Khoo
Persepolis Rising by James S.A. Corey
Bread Illustrated: A Step-By-Step Guide to Achieving Bakery-Quality Results at Home by America’s Test Kitchen
Bowls!: Recipes and Inspirations for Healthful One-Dish Meals by Molly Watson
Vegetables on Fire: 50 Vegetable-Centered Meals from the Grill by Brooke Lewy
Project Fire: Cutting-Edge Techniques and Sizzling Recipes from the Caveman Porterhouse to Salt Slab Brownie S’Mores by Steven Raichlen
Cook’s Country Magazine 2018 by America’s Test Kitchen
Strange Dogs by James S.A. Corey
All That Outer Space Allows by Ian Sales
Riley Parra Season One by Geonn Cannon
Churrasco: Grilling the Brazilian Way by Evandro Caregnato
Then Will The Great Ocean Wash Deep Above by Ian Sales
White Sand, Volume 2 by Brandon Sanderson
The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself by Ian Sales
The South’s Best Butts: Pitmaster Secrets for Southern Barbecue Perfection by Matt Moore
Python 3 Object-Oriented Programming: Build robust and maintainable software with object-oriented design patterns in Python 3.8, 3rd Edition by Dusty Phillips
Arcanum Unbounded: The Cosmere Collection by Brandon Sanderson
What is Obscenity?: The Story of a Good For Nothing Artist and her Pussy by Rokudenashiko
Babylon’s Ashes by James S.A. Corey
Muffins & Biscuits: 50 Recipes to Start Your Day with a Smile by Heidi Gibson
The Future is Japanese: Science Fiction Futures and Brand New Fantasies from and about Japan by Masumi Washington
The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokemon - The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World by Steven L. Kent
You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop: Scalzi on Writing by John Scalzi
White Sand, Volume 1 by Brandon Sanderson
Neon Noir: A Delilah Street Paranormal Investigator Anthology by Carole Nelson Douglas
The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson
The Complete Cook’s Country Magazine 2017 by America’s Test Kitchen
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
The Complete Cook’s Country Magazine 2016 by America’s Test Kitchen
Mistborn Adventure Game by Brandon Sanderson
The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson
The Plot to Hack America: How Putin’s Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election by Malcolm Nance
The Witch of Portobello by Paulo Coelho
Best Mexican Recipes by America’s Test Kitchen
Caliban’s War by James S.A. Corey
Beyond Lies the Wub by Philip K. Dick
The Secret History of Star Wars by Michael Kaminski
Sex & Violence by Jimmy Palmiotti
The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson
Chester 5000 XYV: Isabelle & George by Jess Fink
Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie
The Emperor’s Soul by Brandon Sanderson
The Kissing Booth Girl and Other Stories by A.C. Wise
The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson
Superman: The Unauthorized Biography by Glen Weldon
Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Mad Tinker’s Daughter by J.S. Morin
Dead Witch Walking by Kim Harrison
Chew, Vol. 3: Just Desserts by John Layman
Chew, Vol. 2: International Flavor by John Layman
Chew, Vol. 1: Taster’s Choice by John Layman
Big Pulp: Interrogate My Heart Instead by Bill Olver
Truckers: The First Book of the Nomes by Terry Pratchett
Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey
To Pixar and Beyond: My Unlikely Journey with Steve Jobs to Make Entertainment History by Lawrence Levy
Milk Street: The New Home Cooking by Christopher Kimball
Project Smoke: Seven Steps to Smoked Food Nirvana, Plus 100 Irresistible Recipes from Classic (Slam-Dunk Brisket) to Adventurous by Steven Raichlen
Cook It in Cast Iron: Kitchen-Tested Recipes for the One Pan That Does It All by America’s Test Kitchen
Weber’s Big Book of Burgers: The Ultimate Guide to Grilling Backyard Classics by Jamie Purviance
Barbecue Sauces, Rubs, and Marinades–Bastes, Butters & Glazes, Too by Steven Raichlen
Raichlen’s Burgers by Steven Raichlen
Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner
The Mongoliad: Book One by Neal Stephenson
Weber’s Charcoal Grilling: The Art of Cooking with Live Fire by Jamie Purviance
The Bloodline Feud by Charles Stross
Meathead: The Science of Great Barbecue and Grilling by Meathead Goldwyn
Race for the Iron Throne: Political and Historical Analysis of “A Game of Thrones” by Steven Attewell
The Lives of Tao by Wesley Chu
Science: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness by Zach Weinersmith
The Holy Bible: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness by Zach Weinersmith
Station Breaker by Andrew Mayne
Wild Cards by George R.R. Martin
Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 124 by Neil Clarke
Elantris, Part 3 of 3 by Brandon Sanderson
The Hope of Elantris by Brandon Sanderson
Infomocracy by Malka Ann Older
The Camelot Shadow by Sean Gibson
Elantris, Part 2 of 3 by Brandon Sanderson
Battle Royale Slam Book: Essays on the Cult Classic by Koushun Takami by Nick Mamatas
Elantris, Part 1 of 3 by Brandon Sanderson
Uncanny Magazine Issue 1: November/December 2014 by Lynne M. Thomas
Warbreaker, Part 3 of 3 by Brandon Sanderson
Put this in your brain by Stu Norvath
Warbreaker, Part 2 of 3 by Brandon Sanderson
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Parts 1 & 2 by John Tiffany
Pay Me, Bug! by Christopher B. Wright
Warbreaker, Part 1 of 3 by Brandon Sanderson
The Trinity Paradox by Kevin J. Anderson
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Lightspeed Magazine, March 2013 by John Joseph Adams
You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself by David McRaney
Whiskey and Water by Elizabeth Bear
Clipping Through: One Mad Week In Video Games by Leigh Alexander
The Making of Prince of Persia by Jordan Mechner
Big Pulp Fall 2011: On The Road From Galilee by Michael D. Turner
The Machine God by MeiLin Miranda
Black Mercury by Charlotte E. English
Massively Multiplayer by P. Aaron Potter
Hunt at the Well of Eternity by Gabriel Hunt
Augie and the Green Knight by Zach Weinersmith
Singular Irregularity: Time Travel Gone Terribly Wrong by Kimber Grey
The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
Absolute Power: Tales of Queer Villainy by Erica Friedman
Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein
Tampa: A Novel by Alissa Nutting
Hanzai Japan: Fantastical, Futuristic Stories of Crime From and About Japan by Nick Mamatas
The Emperor’s Agent by Jo Graham
CBLDF Presents: She Changed Comics by Betsy Gomez
Working for Bigfoot by Jim Butcher
The Razor’s Edge by Joss Llewelyn
Piranha Frenzy by Colin F. Campbell
Lovecraft’s Monsters by Ellen Datlow
The Magician’s Land by Lev Grossman
The Magician King by Lev Grossman
Star Wars: The Crimson Empire Saga by Mike Richardson
The Manga Guide to Physics by Hideo Nitta
The Manga Guide to Calculus by Hiroyuki Kojima
The Manga Guide to Electricity by Kazuhiro Fujitaki
Constellation Games by Leonard Richardson
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams
Tithe by Holly Black
The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin
A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin
Super Mario Bros. 3 by Alyse Knorr
Arcanum 101: Welcome New Students by Mercedes Lackey
A Feast for Crows by George R.R. Martin
Star Wars: Dark Empire II by Tom Veitch
Bible Adventures by Gabe Durham
Lightspeed Magazine, July 2010 by John Joseph Adams
Video Games Are No Fun by Kill Screen Magazine
A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A Clash of Kings by George R.R. Martin
Star Wars: Dark Empire by Tom Veitch
Return of the Jedi Radio Drama by Brian Daley
The Empire Strikes Back: The Original Radio Drama by Brian Daley
Star Wars: The Original Radio Drama by National Public Radio
A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin
God Is Disappointed in You by Mark Russell
Who Censored Roger Rabbit? by Gary K. Wolf
The End of All Things by John Scalzi
The Human Division by John Scalzi
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
This is How You Die: Stories of the Inscrutable, Infallible, Inescapable Machine of Death by Ryan North
The Rapture of the Nerds: A tale of the singularity, posthumanity, and awkward social situations by Cory Doctorow
The Sagan Diary by John Scalzi
Questions for a Soldier by John Scalzi
Machine of Death: A Collection of Stories About People Who Know How They Will Die by Ryan North
Just the Tips by Matt Fraction
Old Man’s War Boxed Set 1 by John Scalzi
The Happiest Days of Our Lives by Wil Wheaton
How I Proposed to My Wife: An Alien Sex Story by John Scalzi
Super Mario Bros. 2 by Jon Irwin
Big Pulp: Ted Bundy’s Beetle by Various
With A Little Help by Cory Doctorow
The Beautiful & the Damned by Jonathon Wolfer
The Pen & the Sword by Jonathon Wolfer
Wool Omnibus (Silo, #1) by Hugh Howey
Encouraging the Heart: A Leader’s Guide to Rewarding and Recognizing Others by James M. Kouzes
The Anatomy of Super Mario Vol. 1 by Jeremy Parish
Gamers at Work: Stories Behind the Games People Play by Morgan Ramsay
Reinventing Project Management: The Diamond Approach To Successful Growth And Innovation by Aaron J. Shenhar
Irregular Creatures by Chuck Wendig
Shambling Towards Hiroshima by James K. Morrow
Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow
Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett
What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe
Love Hina, Vol. 12 by Ken Akamatsu
Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The Intern’s Handbook: A Thriller by Shane Kuhn
The Forbidden Knowledge of Enoch by R.J. Von-Bruening
Coral Hare: Atomic Agent (A WW2 Spy Novel) Inspired by actual historical events by Clive Lee
The Hidden Power of Social Networks: Understanding How Work Really Gets Done in Organizations by Robert L. Cross
Managing the Risks of Organizational Accidents by James T. Reason
Pwned by Shannen Crane Camp
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Chrono Trigger by Michael P. Williams
Borg Like Me & Other Tales of Art, Eros, and Embedded Systems by Gareth Branwyn
Havana Nocturne by T.J. English
Mother Fucking Flowers by Tammy L. Witzens
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks
A Midsummer Night’s Steampunk by Scott E. Tarbet
The Silver Ninja: Indoctrination by Wilmar Luna
The Sword & Sorcery Anthology by David G. Hartwell
The Mocking Dead Volume 1 by Fred Van Lente
How Music Works by David Byrne
Don’t Know Much About Mythology: Everything You Need to Know About the Greatest Stories in Human History but Never Learned by Kenneth C. Davis
Escalator by Brandon S. Graham
Complete Multiple Warheads TP by Brandon S. Graham
To Be or Not To Be: A Chooseable-Path Adventure by Ryan North
The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure by William Goldman
Zombies vs. Unicorns by Holly Black
Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan
A Once Crowded Sky by Tom King
Walrus: Brandon Graham’s All Bum Album by Brandon S. Graham
Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary by David Sedaris
The God Engines by John Scalzi
At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson
The Map of Time: A Novel by Félix J. Palma
lil kids - CC licensed by jepoycamboy[/caption]
BBQ Thermostat: Arduino MKR 1010 and Therm Shield measuring temperature during a smoke
Grafana graph of my BBQ Thermostat while measuring the smoker temp
Yakuake with Dracula theme
Kate with Dracula theme
Seinfeld - Kramer Moviefone[/caption]
LG Chocolate Touch - the phone I will be talking about in this paragraph[/caption]
Best Selling Jeryk - weird Amazon Typo[/caption]
Firefox (aka Red Panda) busy Not Spying on You[/caption]
xbmc - default skin as of 20121031[/caption]
Apparently I mostly shoot wide[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
Noticed the Catbite sticker on the wall with the others
cover of Panic by MxPx
MxPx Front Cover
Album front cover
The Misbehavin’ Maidens at the New Deal Cafe
Cover of Canon Eyes
Oliver Brewing Company Tasting Room
FIF Concert (Nov 2013)[/caption]
Fall Out Boy - Save Rock and Roll[/caption]
last.fm top artists[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
(all of these are pictures of Relient K, even in the sections when I’m talking about other bands)
The opening act, Sherwood, was actually really good. I like them a lot. Their style sounds pretty similar to Relient K. Pretty happy music overall. Some girls in front of us knew every word and were bootlegging the performance on tiny video cameras. I’d buy their CD if I had some extra cash.
The second group, Mae, was not so good. At least, I didn’t like them. Unlike the other two groups, they didn’t have the same type of sound and their singer, in my wife’s opinion, couldn’t sing. We took their set as an opportunity to go outside and get some fresh air. It was funny to see all the parents there.
Tilevania in the Unity UI
Glitch Garden during development
Laser Defender - a Galaga Galaxian clone
Arkanoid
GOG Galaxy - Settings
Civ 5 - Lefties 1896[/caption]
Civ 5 - Lefties 1898[/caption]
Poker Night 2[/caption]
Civilization V - against Dave - Fighting Barbarians at the Gates - 2620 BC[/caption]
Skullgirls[/caption]
Back to the Future: The Video Game - The Pseudonym Fun of the series continues[/caption]
Civ 5 - Against Dave - Choosing Meritocracy[/caption]
Civ 5 - Against Dave - Trade Route[/caption]
Civilization V - against Dave - Meeting the Egyptians[/caption]
Civilization 5 - against Dave - people from ancient ruins join the Chinese Empire - 3220 BC[/caption]
Civilization V game against Dave - 4000 BC[/caption]
Civilization 5 against Dave - 3460 BC - Ancient Ruins[/caption]
Civilization V against Dave - 3700 BC[/caption]
Civilization V game against Dave - 3760[/caption]
Assassin’s Creed: Revelations[/caption]
Costume Quest - DLC[/caption]
Quantum Conundrum Science Ball[/caption]
Chell from Portal[/caption]
Cities XL - Trio - buildings up close[/caption]
Elites have some NICE houses in Cities XL[/caption]
Saints Row: The Third - End Credits[/caption]
My Cities XL Region - 1 city with 75 thousand residents[/caption]
Saint’s Row: The Third - Playing with Dan - the only way I could beat this mission[/caption]
Saint’s Row The Third: The Ho Boat[/caption]
Civ 5 - Gods and Kings - Otakuism[/caption]
Final Fantasy VII on pcsx-r[/caption]
The Walking Dead video game[/caption]
Saints Row: The Third - My Engineer Mask[/caption]
The Walking Dead - “Oh, FL…..too often the butt of jokes”[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
Messing around with the Neopixels Strip
PyCharm asking if I want to add the new file to source control
KDevelop
Cornell’s CS101 class textbook back when I was a freshman
I don’t remember what class this was for, but Cornell sure loved Java back then.
GitHub activity graph
git before merging master to devel
git after merging master into devel
[/caption]
[/caption]
This blog was on the server on the right, the left is a server for Phi Sigma Pi[/caption]
Just a photo to showcase Scarlett’s new haircut. But when I saw it a month later, I really liked how it looked.
[/caption]
Noah’s Chaos
Stella’s Chaos
Tight Formations
Scarlett Spells Something
Noah’s Expansion Spell
Noah’s Magic Hands
Audrey’s Shapes
Firework Fun
Audrey’s Circle
I love the idea of having art on the gates that come down when the the restaurant is closed. Rather than the ugly grey, possibly tagged with grafitti, we get this amazing art.
Not sure what the story behind this setup, but Scarlett set it up one day. Also, she made some of the clothes the dolls are wearing.
You Know It
Annual Self-Portrait (2020)
Scarlett (March 2020)
Sam and Stella at the Park - taken by Danielle
Sam at the Bronx Zoo
I’m on a motorcycle!
I see you!
Yeah, I know how to use this
Something seems a bit off here
Sam’s duck
Haven’t seen one of these in a while
Baby birds in BBQ prep station - the mom thought it was the best place to make a nest
One day the forest outside my house just looked all ominous
Sam in the leaves
Sam’s First Carousel Ride[/caption]
Up in the jungle gym at Centennial[/caption]
It’s interesting that, at least to my eyes, it’s easier to see the second rainbow on the left and I don’t even see it on the right. Also, this What If is particularly relevant and I’d read it just before going to the party.
On my way out of the house in the morning, and this great bit of art just happens due to the sun being in just the right place. I’ve never seen this in the half dozen years I’ve lived here. But this morning, it was there to give me a little mood lift.
I know that Scarlett is just 4 and she’s still learning things like putting in pupils and giving people proper heads and bodies. But sometimes I wonder if I have the next Tim Burton living under my roof. Plus I think the thick, black marker adds to the effect.
Baltimore Comic-Con - Black Cat and Spider-Man[/caption]
Aida at the Park back before digital[/caption]
Scarlett’s Natural Curls[/caption]
Tony Hangs On[/caption]
Scarlett’s First Easter[/caption]
now it’s:
now it’s:
which has actually moved up since I did my Top 200!
As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I’ve been into photography since I was five years old. That’s when I got my first Kodak Instamatic camera and started shooting photos and creating photo albums. I have about ten photo albums, with most of them coming from when I got to high school and could really afford film and developing. Ever since I got my first digital camera in my second semester of college, the number of photos I’ve taken yearly has increased nearly exponentially. Because I’m an organized person, I started off putting my photos into event-based folders. Once I realized that’d quickly get unwieldy, I decided to put them in folders by date. Eventually, software like Picassa, Lightroom, and digiKam came out which would have allowed me to continue to to organized my photos by event because they could read the metadata and reorganize them by date. However, I’ve found that my system has two main benefits 1)my photos remain organized even if my descendants don’t have access to programs that can read the metadata on the photos. 2) it’s very easy for me to very quickly find a photo. It would be somewhere like 2010->Jan 10->So and So’s Wedding.
now it is:
and now it’s:
and now it’s:
which was not in the top 20 before, so it has really gained a lot of views. That comes from the fact that it’s on Pixel-Peer as an example of that lens’ abilities.
and now it’s:
and now the #13 photo is:
and now it’s:
which has fallen just one position from #15. Pretty funny that they’re both fireworks - although on very different scales!
and the current #18 photos is:
this photo has been on the rise ever since Bradley Manning’s trial started up.
With 1194 views
[/caption]
[/caption]
triscadecaphobia (also spelt Triskaidekaphobia) is the fear of the number 13. I don’t have triskaidekaphobia - I am not paralyzed on Friday the 13th. However, I do get bad vibes from the number whenever I see it. On the other hand, 2, for me, is a conforting number. But I like it in script better than printed.
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
![A wonderful and [most importantly] natural smile](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/175/429778032_b081cde0d5.jpg)
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
Last time I wrote about my dabbling in the film world I had had 3 Holga rolls developed. My Yashica and Franka Solida III had arrived after my trip to NYC so I had yet to run any film through them. I shot a few frames with each camera when Danny and Dina came to visit in April and then let the cameras lay dormant. As I explained in a previous post, with the cost of film and development so high, these cameras were somewhat for special occasions. I took the cameras with me to Delaware (a trip I have yet to blog about), and shot with the Holga and Yashica.
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
The Huge Mess
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
What should I buy?
Of course, I took my Canon 400D and Fujifilm A 345. Overall I did pretty well. Out of 800+ pictures only 63 were out of focus. Also, for sake of mentioning it, 61 were of my wife. That’s a new thing for me as we usually don’t take the usual tourist-y pictures. Our first day were were still on Eastern Time so we got up at 0400 and went to watch the sun rise.
Check out the story behind this image by following the link.
And this guy……has my dream setup in terms of monitors.
#40 - 274 Views 
#60 - 223 Views 
#80 - 189 Views 
#100 - 175 Views 
#120 - 165 Views 
#140 - 156 Views 
#160 - 148 Views 
#180 - 141 Views 
#200 - 133 Views 
But it was time for me to finally upgrade to a camera with sufficient resolution, but which I could carry in my pocket. My Fujifilm Finepix S7000 is a great camera, but extremely bulky. It was a little annoying at Disney to have that huge thing with me. So today I bought a Fujifilm Finepix A345. It’s a 4.0 Megapixel camera. Yes, they have 5 Megapixel point and shoot cameras, but as I tell everyone, unless you plan to blow the pictures up to 16 x 20, a 3 MP camera is enough. So I wanted to give myself the lattitude to be able to do creative things with this camera, but without going overboard. My S7000 is now for planned shots that I want at the best quality. The camera is a little heavy to walk around with everywhere and since 11 Sept 2001, police don’t like people coming into places with bags. So I will have the A345 in my pocket for any shot that comes up and for those fun little shots that you can’t capture on the big boys. I’ll miss my Kodak, as it ushered me into this era, but I think I will really love the A345. And today, being the end of the year, seemed to be the perfect time to get the new guy.
Architects ran through the engineering quad and in and out of bulidings screaming
Running Vivaldi for the first time.
Choqok[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
If you read a lot of technology news on the interwebs, it appears as though we will soon all be using cloud computing. No longer will people have hard drives or buy programs. They will lease it all from the cloud. (There are many, many things listed under “cloud computer” from Gmail to Twitter. I am talking about the ultimate goal of those who advocate “cloud computing” where your “computer” is on the net and you just connect from home) There are many reasons why cloud computing is not for everyone.
Let me start with the reason closest to my life - high end photography. I went to a baseball game on 10 April and shot over 4 GB of photos. I then loaded these photos onto my computer for editing and sharing with others. It seems to take longer that I can stand to get the photos off my camera and onto my hard drive. I can’t imagine how annoying it would be to have to wait to upload them onto a cloud computing environment. I shoot only in RAW files so I can do some serious editing on the photos and retain the best quality. Sometimes I delete up to half of the photos from a shoot because it’s hard to tell from the back of the camera if it’s subtly out of focus. So imagine waiting forever to upload photos only to ultimately end up deleting them! Photoshop and Lightroom require pretty beefy computers to work correctly, I can’t imagine how slow it would be to have my screen refresh after each edit. It already takes longer than instantaneous on my home computer. This use case - high end photography - also lead me to another reason cloud computing will not be for everyone: bandwidth limits.
[/caption]
Wizzywig: Portrait of a Serial Hacker by Ed Piskor
Comics: A Global History, 1968 to the Present by Dan Mazur
Baltimore Comic-Con - Stan Lee[/caption]
[/caption]
This had the subtitle:
Facebook defines relationships. ‘Yeah, we would have broken up last night, but the net connection was down.’
courtesy of Randall Monroe over at xkcd
Tried watching “Little Miss Sunshine” on OnDemand. But the POS kept going on the fritz. We decided “to hell with it” and went back to bumping Netflix to an infinite number of discs per month. Today it kept messing up while Danielle was trying to watch some sort of scary movie.
Ready for the Race!
Yup, there’s snow accumulating on my head
if you look at my knee, this is after I fell
The starting line when I first arrived to the race.
It was part of my college visitation trip and it was a surprise that we would get to see NYC. It was a miserable day, but I was ecstatic to see this place I’d only heard of in movies.
lamb and onion burger
beef short rib ragu
chicken cacciatore
Chicago-style pepperoni pan pizza
hoisin-glazed baby back ribs
oatmeal-rasin bread
Grilled brined zucchini with cilantro-yogurt sauce
succotash
vanilla icebox cookies
bistec de palomilla
bistec empanizado
potaje de frijoles negros
lechon asado
Almost No-Knead Bread
Brown Sugar Cookies
a post-race selfie
1 Hour Pizza
Quesadilla
cinnamon swirl bread
Chicken Chilaquiles
Fried Tofu with Cabbage Salad
Dave’s Fish Tacos
Easy Weeknight Chicken Tacos
Great Grilled Pizza
Pecan-Crusted Fish
Fluffiest Pull-Apart Rolls
bigger on the inside burger patties
FreshJax Bold Bayou Rub
pit beef
quick cheese bread
quinoa taco salad
roasted asparagus with gremolata
Speculoos (aka Biscoffs)
Oatmeal and toppings
beef enchilada casserole
grilled chicken with mustard-tarragon paste
bratwurst “hot tub”
crispy chickpeas
grilled steak fries
Vermont Maple-Mustard Glazed Burgers
Piadine
Tilefish with Jax Citrus Pepper rub
scones
Bake-Sale Berry Muffins
banana poppy seed muffins
gochujang chicken
black bean soup
boiled carrot with Cumin, Cilantro, and Lime
chicken burritos mojados
chicken burritos mojados
cinnamon swirl bread
cinnamon swirl bread
first from easy fish and chips
chips from easy fish and chips
Lemon-Buttermilk Pound Cake
Lemon-Buttermilk Pound Cake
pull-apart garlic rolls
pull-apart garlic rolls
pull-apart garlic rolls
Rosemary Focaccia bread
Rosemary Focaccia bread
Rosemary Focaccia bread
Rosemary Focaccia bread
rustic italian loaf
rustic italian loaf
rustic italian loaf
skillet-roasted cauliflower
Vietnamese Rolled Beef (bo lui)
Vietnamese Rolled Beef (bo lui)
Buttermilk Biscuits
Buttermilk Biscuits
Vermouth Cracked Potatoes
Skillet Turkey Burgers
Pork Posole
North Carolina Cheese Biscuits
Stuffed Chicken Breasts
Thai Chicken Soup
Big Butts Pork Steak
Big Butts Pork Steak smoke ring
fattoush
Happy Mouth Yakitori
Macadamia nut, White Chocolate, and Cranberry Cookies
Bourbon Burger with Caramelized Onions and Horseradish sauce
chopped winter salad with butternut squash
Egg and Sausage McMuffin
English Muffins
English Muffins
Ground Beef Enchladas
Ladybird Johnson’s Barbecue Sauce
roti canai
Brussels Sprouts with Lemon
Thai-Style Pork Burgers
chicken tonkatsu
donuts
Georgian Chicken Soup (Chikhirtma)
Grilled Chicken Fajitas
Milk Street Barbecue Rub No. 2
Mushroom Pork Omelet
Chicken and cauliflower tikka masala
Cuban Picadillo
Ground pork tacos
Teriyaki Chicken Thighs
Teriyaki Chicken Thighs
lemon-dill biscuits
Za’atar chicken cutlets
Korean Pork and Kim Chi Stew
brussels sprouts and garlic chips
Mouse living on my Weber Spirit
Mouse and fuzzies in my BBQ
I took the skin off because Danielle was going to take off the skin anyway and since this was a rub-based recipe, that would remove all the flavor as well.
I don’t know how easy or hard it is to get a door frame in where all the pieces are at right angles to each other. The previous home owners failed at that and so the door could never close correctly. My father-in-law tried to fix it, but he shaved the wrong side. So when my parents and grandparents came, they decided to fix the door. And that’s a great thing because I’d always thought it’d just be something that would take an hour or 2. No, this door took an entire workday’s worth of hours to get to a point where it would correctly fit in this not-quite-rectangular frame that the previous home owners had put up. But thanks to my grandfather and father’s hard work, we now have a door that properly closes and can be locked.
Self-Portrait[/caption]
Rock the Universe (1999)[/caption]
[/caption]
Arranged in birth order and inverse size order
[/caption]
Red Hat Linux and Fedora Unleashed Cover
Gnome - 20151002
Arch Linux Installation Begins
Language Selection
the output of man dnf
Kdenlive 18.12
self-portrait at Red Hat Summit
Gparted for new drive[/caption]
Gparted for new drive1[/caption]
NPR All Music Considered works correctly now[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
Not too shabby. Looks pretty similar to KDE3, but with a “Vista Black” thing going on. But here’s where I really got excited:
First time soldering headers
Peer Review or It Didn’t Happen - more and more important to remember nowadays[/caption]
Atmel Webserver[/caption]
The Elevator at the Sears Tower[/caption]
Sandisk Sansa Clip Zip in Packaging[/caption]
German Kids using inflationary money as blocks in 1923 - Bitcoin is supposed to be immune to this[/caption]
The Liberator - the world’s first working 3D Printed Gun[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
Ready for my first USMS swim meet!
D&D for 55+
Blender “version control” before I knew about VCS
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
Laptops might be seized at the UK border[/caption]
MLK in a Hoodie (you can buy prints here)[/caption]
The Family by the Willamette in the mid-90s[/caption]
Citi Bank is one of those too big to fail banks[/caption]
[/caption]
Scarlett’s scientific journal entry about a duck and a baby duck
Scarlett and I in the Kitchen before Bedtime[/caption]
The Childrens Place T-Shirt - Girls are Good at Shopping, Not Math[/caption]
The “Family Dinner” Early July[/caption]
Scarlett and her cousin, Lan. Two different approaches to language.[/caption]
Scarlett Sleeping[/caption]
So, if gays get married this will no longer mean anything?[/caption]
The Capitol[/caption]
Game of Thrones - coveted by Australians[/caption]
[/caption]
Cooking[/caption]
Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey
I’d gotten OK at drawing with a mouse[/caption]
Drawing with pen for the first time[/caption]
Drawing with pen for the second time[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
Four filthy fat flamingos fly for freedom from five fat flies from Florida.
Mitch Hedberg - I haven’t slept for 10 days because that would be too long[/caption]
Mitch Hedberg - I’m against picketing but I don’t know how to show it[/caption]
Sam’s human looks like something that belongs on Rick and Morty
Of course, what we “see” is dependent upon our state of mind. Having been watching lots of fairy tale cartoons, her first guess was that I’d drawn a dragon and a dinosaur. Her second guess, of course, was correct that it was a giraffe and rhino. She then added a bird and some apples for the giraffe.
Dan making pizza for the family
Crazy boutique Hotel Diva Blackout Curtain[/caption]
[/caption]
Photo by Chris247[/caption]
Scarlett Trick Or Treating at Ellicott City[/caption]
(you should view these large to get the full effect)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
MRI of Clitoris converted to 3D model[/caption]
First of all, it’s a complete accident of timing that this post appears next to tomorrow’s post. I wrote tomorrow’s post about a month before I wrote this one.
Love Hina, Vol. 11 by Ken Akamatsu
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
You’re probably asking yourself two questions. 1) When did Eric get awesome at modeling humans? and 2) What are these bald, naked women doing on this site? In fact, you probably asked yourself those questions in the reverse order. Extra points for the MakeHuman team if you didn’t even realize those were computer images and thought they were real.
So, to start off with question 1, I didn’t model those humans in the traditional sense. In other words, I didn’t start with a box or plane and build up a human from there. Instead I used a program called MakeHuman which has similar goals to the commercial software Poser. Poser, as those of us into 3D art and animation know, is software for the posing, animating, and rendering of humans (and occasionally other creatures). Both software packages exist because animators may not want to also be character modelers. Instead they may wish to use a package such as MakeHuman which creates the character meshes and materials for them and then work on the animation. In such a context I wouldn’t call it cheating. After all, in a studio, most artists specialize on one part of the animation (eg animation, modeling, texturing, etc). I may even see myself using MakeHuman or Poser if I wished to have a realistic human character in my animation.
I even got a little bold and added some color to my furry sphere.
But things got a little messed up when I tried to add fur to Danny!
](http://server.ericsbinaryworld.com/images/blog/xkcd/purity.png)
Also, a plane ticket, which I, regrettably, did not photograph, had an advertisement for Papa Johns Pizza. Has it come to this? Are the airlines so desperate for cash that they have resorted to selling ad space on their tray tables and tickets. Flying used to be a refined affair that people got dressed up for. Now we have the same airlines that charged us so much money without giving us any food to eat, advertising on the tray tables.
I reviewed last night’s render today and I found a few little gaffes here and there. I made a list and fixed them up. I’m pretty confident that the next time I will be rendering the definitive version of the film. I’m pretty psyched. All that’s left now is to start up on the credits and add in the soundtrack. I’m hoping to be able to tap into some musical talent to do the soundtrack, but I haven’t found anyone yet. If you want to volunteer your skills, leave a comment.
It turns out that when I duplicated him and didn’t use the duplicate, I forgot to erase it. So there was a duplicate right underneath. What I was seeing was the closed mouth of the duplicate inside. It was as though he had eaten himself! Once I fixed this, it explained some of the problem I had been having and now, he was able to open his mouth!!