Working Stiff by Kevin J. Anderson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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:

Morning Star by Pierce Brown

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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.

Make a Raspberry Pi-Controlled Robot: Building a Rover with Python, Linux, Motors, and Sensors by Wolfram Donat

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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.

The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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.

Getting Started With Raspberry Pi by Matt Richardson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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)

Qt5 Python GUI Programming Cookbook: Building responsive and powerful cross-platform applications with PyQt by B.M. Harwani

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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.

Getting Started with Adafruit FLORA: Making Wearables with an Arduino-Compatible Electronics Platform by Becky Stern

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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.

Getting Started with Arduino by Massimo Banzi

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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.

Korean Home Cooking: Classic and Modern Recipes by Sohui Kim

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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.

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Love, Fishie by Maddy Gaiman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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.