Good but depressing story, 3/5 stars.
-- mfw@wyle.org | 1.425.249.3936
Monday, August 27, 2018
Saturday, August 25, 2018
Wednesday, August 22, 2018
Cambrian Explosion lends evidence to "cosmic" origin of life
Cause of Cambrian Explosion - Terrestrial or Cosmic?
And octopuses may be space aliens because they suddenly appeared, can regulate their own RNA and slow down their own evolution.
Tuesday, August 21, 2018
Die Fahrt von Michael Gerdes
Interesting, melodramatic mystery with great suspense. The story plays out like a murder mystery dinner with new revelations every page. 3/5 stars.
Nightflyer and other Stories by George R.R. Martin
Decent space opera science fiction from the 1970s. He is a good writer and had talent when he was young. 4/5 stars.
Saturday, August 18, 2018
Thursday, August 16, 2018
Magic smoke escaped Zino's power supply
Long time readers of my blog (all 2 of you) will recall that in 2009 we bought a Dell Zino small-form-factor computer with blue ray optical drive, max memory (4 GB), most-expensive video card, and the fastest available processor. It was the only device attached to the 1080p projector in our home theater (15-foot screen, amazing surround sound with monster subwoofer). For 8 years, the boyos gamed on it, shaking the house and the family watched / streamed great movies. In 2016, Microsoft bricked the device with a mandatory win10 patch, so it ran Linux with Mint desktop and no one noticed -- VLC still worked; chrome ran fine, DVD's and BlueRay disks still played perfectly. Zino was a survivor!
However technology and planned obsolescence in the technology industrial establishment march forward, and the poor little device could not decode Matroska containers with highly-compressed 1080p H.264 MPEG4 content in real time. So I needed to transcode these files with handbrake before we could watch them and transcoding took 5-8 hours per file; transcoding also heated the house and made a loud fan noise. This practice lasted a few years until last month, when we replaced the home theater device with a new, low-end, inexpensive win10 machine that can drive a 4K monitor. But the little Zino sat in the man cave and I used it there for little linux / chrome tasks such as streaming, browsing, coding, email, & document editing.
Early this morning (0300 Pacific), we woke to the smell of a burning power supply. The magic smoke had finally emerged from Zino's power supply. But he "died with his boots on," churning through a major Ubuntu upgrade process. Farewell friend, you served us well and we shall miss you.
How to fail at almost everything. . . by Scott Adams
I enjoyed this one. The repetition, and non-stop disclaimers were very annoying. A little bad (older, debunked) science. I think young people could get a lot out of this "self-help" style book, with his emphasis on "systems" thinking and revelations about cognition / perceptions. I may even look at his blog now. 4/5 stars.
Saturday, August 11, 2018
Proteus Unbound by Charles Sheffield
Fun story, but the whole "form change" stuff is unappealing to me, 3/5 stars.
Zahltag, Kommissar Magnus
Extremely well-scripted, tight murder mystery exploring the misery of the working poor, 5/5 stars.
-- mfw@wyle.org | 1.425.249.3936
Web between the worlds by Charles Sheffield
Fun, colorful "golden age" space opera in the vein of Heinlein or Asimov, with bigger-than-life engineers, driven by their technology goals and interesting B story mystery, 5/5 stars.
-- mfw@wyle.org | 1.425.249.3936
Saturday, August 4, 2018
Bordbuch Delta VII by Mark Brandis
Great story, fun space opera, awesome characters and drama, a little dated now, not so much awe and wonder. 3/5 stars.
God's Debris by Scott Adams
Bad science, poor scholarship, silly thought experiments, good writing, 1/5 stars.
Trader's World by Charles Sheffield
I didn't like this one. The tech was bad; the AI was awful. The world was bizarre and silly. 2/5 stars.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
