I’ve been enjoying the “ten albums in ten days” challenge/craze/fad/thing on Facebook. The basic idea is that you post ten of your favorite albums or albums that had a particular impact on you, one each day for ten days. It was a neat opportunity to learn about new music, but really it was a way to learn my about my friends and the music that influences them. A few days ago, I was tagged to participate.
I should have known Guy Gavriel Kay wouldn’t let me down. Kay’s books are often classified as fantasy, but I think they’re firmly historical fiction. I don’t have anything against fantasy—I grew up on J.K. Rowling and Philip Pullman, and I still love it—I just don’t think Kay’s books fit the description. Kay’s characters believe in mysticism, but I think that’s more a reflection of how people used to see the world than an effort to inject magic into the proceedings. Sword-and-sorcery novels these are not.
Like Douglas E. Richards’s Infinity Born, Darknet is a near-future science fiction thriller about the dangers of artificial intelligence. But Darknet is a much subtler, carefully crafted, realistic, and enjoyable novel.
As I’ve continued to use Ubuntu as my Linux distro of choice on my XPS 15, I’ve made some modifications to my setup. I’m describing some of them here.
I didn’t like this book. It has some interesting and promising ideas, but none of them are well-executed. Ultimately it’s a book with boring characters about computer science and espionage that seems to be written by someone with little understanding of either computer science or espionage.
I’ve written a couple of posts about Linux lately, one about beautifying the GNOME desktop and one about setting up Elementary OS on my Thinkpad T450s. I recently upgraded my primary computer from the great but aging Thinkpad to a new Dell XPS 15. So far, I love the Dell, and a full review of that will come a little later. But now it’s time for a post reviewing the process of getting Linux up and running on my new machine.
I loved this book. It’s a really fun, fast-paced novel about a guy in a seemingly utopian future with an uhappy family who accidentally destroys the future utopia by using his father’s time machine to derail the technological developments that made it possible. But in the much-less-utopian present, our present, he finds that he’s a lot happier, his family’s a lot happier, and he has a shot at a life with the woman he loves.
The Daily is the New York Times daily news podcast. It typically runs about 20 minutes, and involves the Times’s Michael Barbaro taking a deep dive into an important news story, often with interviews of people involved and/or a Times journalist who covers the story, followed by a summary of the day’s headlines. The Daily is consistently excellent journalism, but the episode from yesterday was one of best in a series of phenomenal episodes. It told the story of Shannon Mulcahy, a factory worker in Indiana who worked at a factory that manufactured ball bearings.
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is a science fiction novel by Becky Chambers. It borrows some tropes of the genre that’ll be familiar to fans of Firefly and The Expanse. However, Angry Planet is light on world-building and plot; it’s almost entirely character-driven. I liked the first half of the book, when getting to know the characters—many of whom are alien species—and, for the most part, the characterization is well done. Unfortunately, it’s not enough to drive an entire novel.
Today, Google launched a major refresh to the design of Google Calendar for the web. The update is long overdue, but it’s extremely well-executed and looks stunning. Sometimes you just look at a design and it feels right. This is one of those. After using the new design for a while, I’d imagine it’ll be tough to go back to the old one.
Ian McGuire’s novel The North Water is a story about whaling. That alone invites comparisons to Moby Dick, and, indeed, both are gritty, realistic stories about adventures on nineteenth century whalers. But the stories are very different. The North Water is told in the third person and the present tense (which, combined with the graphic descriptions of violence and gore, has prompted comparisons to Cormac McCarthy).
Just a few days ago, I wrote about setting up my GNOME desktop on Linux. Unfortunately, the current state of play in the GNOME world is that it’s just really hard to make the desktop look polished. While there are a lot of themes that look nice, I’ve found a minor issues with almost all of them. I just couldn’t settle on a combination that satisfied me. That may change when Ubuntu adopts GNOME as its default desktop environment; Ubuntu is one of the most-used Linux distros, and it has an active community that creates a lot of great stuff. For now, though, I’ve decided to try Elementary OS for a while.
2017 is the year of the bezel-less smartphone. Ever since the LG Prada was released in May 2007, capacitive touchscreens have become the dominant smartphone interface. Apple popularized them with the original iPhone, and now they’re ubiquitous. But the touchscreen has typically been borderd by unsightly bezels. That started to change this year.
GNOME is a desktop environment for Linux. It’s pretty, intuitive, and feature-filled. By default, it’s not as customizable as some Linux desktop environments, but it’s extensible and has a good-sized library of extensions. After years experimenting with its own Unity desktop environment, Ubuntu has decided that GNOME will be the default desktop environment for its upcoming release, Ubuntu 17.10 Artful Aardvark. Here’s how I like to customize GNOME to make it beautiful and functional.
I’m no Android developer, but since I bought my first Android device, a Motorola Atrix 4G, I’ve always enjoyed customizing my phones and tablets with aftermarket ROMs, kernels, and themes. To this day, I’m partial to devices that are friendly to custom software, such as Google’s Nexus line and OnePlus’s phones. I love installing custom ROMs on my phone for a number of reasons: removing bloat, new features, beautiful themes, and fast updates.