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Review: Cook’s Illustrated 2019
Cook’s Illustrated 2019 by Dan Souza My rating: 4 of 5 stars As usual, a great collection of the year’s issues. I’ve already made a couple recipes from this book and America’s Test Kitchen continues to excel. View all my reviews
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Review: Parable of the Sower
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler My rating: 3 of 5 stars 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…
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Review: The Great Hunt
The Great Hunt by Robert Jordan My rating: 3 of 5 stars 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…
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Review: A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking
A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher My rating: 4 of 5 stars 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…
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Review: The Official Scratchjr Book: Help Your Kids Learn to Code
The Official Scratchjr Book: Help Your Kids Learn to Code by Marina Umaschi Bers My rating: 4 of 5 stars 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…
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Programming Update for June 2021
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…
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Django vs Flask vs FastAPI
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…
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Podcasts I’m Listening to in 2021
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…
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How Desktop Environment Tweaking Helps Me Be More Productive
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…
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Software I used for Programming in 2020
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…
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My Programming Projects and Progress in 2020
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…
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Review: The Color of Magic
The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett My rating: 3 of 5 stars 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…
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Review: The Red Church
The Red Church by Scott Nicholson My rating: 2 of 5 stars 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…
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Review: Snow Crash
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson My rating: 4 of 5 stars 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…
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Review: Apex Magazine Promo Issue 2020
Apex Magazine Promo Issue 2020 by Jason Sizemore My rating: 4 of 5 stars 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…