Viral by Piers Platt

Unoriginal, uninspiring, underwhelming, bad science, but good story, interesting psych and sociology. 3/5 stars.

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mfw@wyle.org | 1.425.249.3936

Brothers to Dragons by Charles Sheffield

Good but depressing story, 3/5 stars.

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mfw@wyle.org | 1.425.249.3936

Planetside by Michael Mammy

Good military drama, decent space opera, 4/5 stars.

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.

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.

Win Bigly by Scott Adams

Interesting and entertaining.  3/5 stars.

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mfw@wyle.org | 1.425.249.3936

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.

Proteus Unbound by Charles Sheffield

Fun story, but the whole "form change" stuff is unappealing to me, 3/5 stars.