Today's great conversation
Scarlett: I’m not an onion!
Danielle: But sometimes you make me cry.
(Laughter)
Scarlett: why are you guys laughing?
Updated to KDE 5
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.
btrfs needs autodefrag set
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.
Review: Mockingjay
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
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.
Review: What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
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.
Review: Love Hina, Vol. 12
Love Hina, Vol. 12 by Ken Akamatsu
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
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.
2014 Blog Stats
Wordpress sent me my Jetpack stats email for 2014. Here’s what they said:
- Post with Most Views in one Day 2014: Using Digikam from the Point of View of a Lightroom User (10 Sept - 216 views)
- 76 New Posts
- 13 day streak - best streak
- Day of week with most posts? Wednesday (15 posts)
- Top 5 Posts: 1. Using Digikam from the Point of View of a Lightroom User 2. Visiting Disney with a 2 year old 3. Virtualbox vs KVM 4. Teenagers, Sex, School Sex Ed, and The Church 5. Leaving Crunchbang for Lubuntu
- Top referrers: lifehacker.com, distrowatch.com, popehat.com, wordpress.org, and facebook.com
2014 Video Games Report and Game of the Year
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.
Last.fm 2014 Listening Trends
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.