Being the thoughts and writings of one Gustaf Erikson; father, amateur photographer, technologist.
More stuff can be found at gerikson.tumblr.com and Flickr.
I was going to write some sort of retrospective for the year but didn’t really have the energy. This sort of thing should be prepared throughout the year, otherwise the memory is influenced by the happenings in the near past.
Anyway, I found that looking at the images I have posted to Flickr brought back some memories, here is a view.
This year’s blog posts are here. And if you can stomach it, here are my tweets for the year…
Happy new year, everyone!
What if there was a cure for aging? Would you take that cure?
I think nearly every human alive older than 25 would leap at the chance. That’s what they do in this chilling book, a world where a cheap genetic cure for aging is discovered and widely released. It’s a book length illustration of “be careful what you wish for”. Highly recommended.
I picked this up on a whim at the library and I knew nothing of the author. I was pleasantly surprised to read a decent tale of interstellar intrigue, in a universe where the Cold War still runs on after centuries and nearly a hundred colonised planets.
The military part of this novel is believable and well written. The depiction of the factions involved is rather cynical — I attribute this to the fact that Abnett is British and not American.
Recommended if you like military SF.
A new SF satire by the author of Jennifer Government. As before, the satire trumps the SF, but in this case the protagonist/anti-hero gets more say and is creepily believable.
I saw the HBO miniseries based on this a few years ago and to be quite honest the TV series is very faithful to the story. While this book is a fast read and well written I can really recommend the TV series instead.
A fine little graphic novel/biography of the author’s grandfather, a lieutenant in the Canadian Highland Light Infantry during World War II.
After dealing with the Singularity (The Fall Revolution cycle and Newton’s Wake) MacLeod takes a look at the Simulation Argument with his customary mix of politics and reminisces of recent (Scottish) history. We’ve been in these areas before - the parts of the Fall Revolution set in ex-Soviet Central Asia echo in the fictional Automomous Republic of Krassnia. And likewise the background in radical academia in Edinburgh in the 1970s.
If you’re a fan of MacLeod, as I am, this is not to be missed. But I’m not sure if it’s one of his better ones!
It’s hard to get a grip on this novel. It can be described as a modern-day geek technothriller. On the one hand, it’s densely plotted and very exciting, with none of the massive infodumps the author is (in)famous for. On the other hand, the entire book can be said to be a skeleton on which to hand a skein of infodumps. In other words, there’s a lot of action, but very little inner motivation.
I’d say it’s a season of “24” written by a nerd living in the US Northwest.
Stross continues to deliver on his near-future police procedurals set in an Edinburgh beset by the stormwinds of the future. What Stross lacks in empathy (he can be rather cold and clinical in his character portrayals) he more than makes up in sheer nerdy inventiveness. I can’t decide whether this book is better, worse or on par with Halting State, which is set in the same universe and contains a few of the same characters, but I do think it’s a book I’ll re-read just for the ideas.
This is a novel that’s that rare bird, believable space opera. Now, space opera by its very nature stretches belief, but even the fictional viability of the genre has been stretched in later years by that fell beast, the Singularity. Basically, the Singularity meme posits that sure, if we uploaded our minds into computers we might be able to solve the problem of faster-than-light travel etc, but we’ll probably no longer be human.
Williams neatly sidesteps the issue by creating an alien race,the Shaa, who subjugate all other intelligent species within reach of wormholes. They then keep everyone on pseudo-feudal societal stasis for a few thousand years, which lets the author provide his heroes with that space operatic staple, the quasi-Napoleionic navy. They also ruthlessly proscribe artificial intelligence, thus keeping the Singularity at bay.
Naturally, we plucky Earthmen lead the eventual rebellion against those pesky collectivist Naxids, who attempt to take over after the Shaa and basically kill everyone.
All in all, a hugely enjoyable read within its genre.
Wow, I finally made it to the end of a 10-book fantasy epic! I started the Malazan Book of the Fallen on book 3, Memories of Ice, and I remember getting thrown headlong into a weird fantasy universe unlike any other I’d seen before. Erikson operates in shades of gray, nothing more apparent than in this concluding volume where one of the main characters turns from antagonist to something like protagonist.
To be quite honest I don’t feel this last book was up to the standards of some of the previous. On the other hand, they retain the rare virtue of re-readability, and I look forward to reading through the entire series again.
Here are my “reviews” of some of the previous books, in order of the series:
Set in the same sort of bleak, post-Peak Oil future of The Windup Girl, this YA novel is a classic tale of boy of the people meets high-borne girl and goes on quest. But Bagigalupi keeps it real with a gritty and brutal story, pulling no punches in showing what’s needed to survive once “The Accelerated Age” collapses around us.
The chilling thing of course is that the inhuman conditions of our hero’s work dismantling old freighters along America’s Gulf Coast is occuring right now, on the ship breaking beaches of India and Pakistan.
Now the summer’s almost gone, it’s time to start reading some more. The following books have been acquired either via the library or SF Bokhandeln this weekend:
I’m pretty sure I could have persuaded the library to purchase at least a few of these books, and it’s not as if I really need any more… but it’s also nice to have a good fat queue of books to read.
Evening light in Hammarby Sjöstad, shot with a lens from 1971. Sometimes you just want to shoot something pretty.
I’ve been listening to audiobooks and reading on my iPhone lately so I’ve lost the discipline of actually mentioning the books I “read”. Here’s a roundup of recent ones.
A novel set early in the Known Space universe, it’s the story of how the Pak protectors, the third stage of maturity in the originators of mankind, finally discover the ancient colony of Earth.
I haven’t read Niven in ages, and it’s fun to see how some themes of hard SF echo from this work to other novels written later.
A kind of wrap-up of Earthsea, dealing with the so-called afterlife there. Recommended for Earthsea completists.
Some decent stories here. For all his certified nerdiness, Vinge really can spin a story and he’s decent at characterization too.
A great collection of stories from the Revelation Space universe. Great audiobook reading by John Lee.
A classic post-apocalyptic novel.
A brilliant near-future thriller set in Turkey. It’s not as far-out SF as Brasyl but very good nonetheless.
I guess I wasn’t the only one seduced by Bruce Chatwin’s elegy over the last moleskine notebooks in The Songlines, as Moleskine the company have re-introduced them. I’m a fan of the original hardback notebook, but I wanted to try the softcover version.
Now I’ve read some bad reviews of it online but I figured those people had had in their back pockets or something. I carry mine in the inside pocket of my jacket.
Well it turns out that it started falling apart almost immediately, and after a year of moderate use the bottom of the back pocket had split, allowing stuff to fall out of it. I got a new hardcover instead.
The Volant are coloured, slightly thicker versions of the cahiers. They suck though, as they lack the cahier’s back pocket/flap. This can split too but it’s easy to reinforce with some tape.
This is the third novel in Gibson’s “Bigend cycle”, and like his previous trilogies (Sprawl and Bridge) it wraps up the stories of the protagonists we’ve met so far. It feels like Gibson’s getting lazy, basically recycling the tropes and even the plots of his earlier novels, using the viewpoints of two different characters to present the same scene, engineering little love stories.
Also, if you like me read BoingBoing all the time, very few of the cool gadgets and concepts will be new to you.
But, Gibson is always Gibson and he can spin an entertaining yarn. I must say I didn’t really see the plot twists coming and even though the McGuffin in the beginning felt really lame it escalated nicely towards the end.
Another book set in the same world as Quantico. Not bad if you like near-future thrillers.
A stunning novel, opening new vistas into a possible dystopian future and bursting with cool ideas and locations. Highly recommended.
Many people enjoy shooting sports. I am not one of them.
Every year the company I work for has a bandy[1] match during lunch. I can avoid actually exerting myself on the ice by being the designated photographer.
Last year my only long lens was the Nikkor-Q 200mm ƒ/4, a manual focus lens from the late ’70s. I’ve since acquired a Nikkor 70-200mm ƒ/4 AF lens, and thought that now having zoom and autofocus would make my pictures even more awesome[2]
However, it was not to be. Perhaps counterintuitively, I got more shots I liked with the tele prime. This was due to three factors. First, I had a better vantage point (halfway up a set of bleachers). This year, the match was played on the side of the pitch without bleachers. Second, it was colder this year which made concentrating on the game harder. And third, the fact that last year I only had one focal length and manual focus meant I concentrating on the goal areas as they gave a better framing and I could pre-focus.
This year I was trying to capture both play at the endzones and in the middle distances. Whether it was the cold, or the vantage point, or the fickle light, I felt I got less keepers this year despite “better gear”.
[1] it’s never called “Russian hockey” in Sweden
[2] for “even more awesome”, read “slightly less pathetic”
This powerful work is the full text of Genesis, illustrated with the incomparable style of Robert Crumb. The earthy style suits this part of the Hebrew Bible perfectly, with it’s unwashed bearded patriarchs subsiding essentially as goatherds in a country looking very much like the modern Israel.
There are no elisions of repetitions or the recounting of obscure kings and cheiftains, each lovingly depicted in a mini-portrait.
I haven’t read Genesis since in high school (and maybe then I just looked for hte juicy parts, like Sodom and poor doomed Onan). This was a nice reunion with a text that for all its brutality and ancient weirdness still resonates in our culture.
Please note that the biblical circumlocution “to know” is graphically depicted, so if you’re uncomfortable seeing, for example, Lot’s daughters getting their dad drunk and making sure their lineage survives, you may have picked up the wrong book. The same goes for the multiple depictions of violent death and rape.
But it’s not in any way a sacriligeous text. Crumb takes the story literally, and renders it as it should be — a myth of one people’s beginnings, made special only because it survives from the mists of the dawn of time.
[This is an updated post!]
Twitter is a great resource, but once you follow a couple hundred people and don’t sit glued to it all day, it can become overwhelming. I’ve devised a way that works for me to keep track of my followers.
It’s home-brew, hackish, and not for everyone. But it’s the sort of stuff I like to faff around with.
Here’s an overview of the process.
ttytter, an awesome console Twitter client. I run it under screen on a remote server, so I’m always “connected”.ttytter that saves every tweet to a file, named after the date. The extension is based on the example “A Twitter logger” here.The publishing part of the process enables me to linkify URLs, twitter names, and hashtags, and lets me filter out crap like paper.li announcements and Foursquare checkins. I have links to each individual tweet so I can easily reply or retweet.
You obviously need some building blocks for this to work. Your own server capable of serving files for one. You should also be comfortable with scripting languages.
There’s another solution available if you don’t have access to the above. It’s a service called TweetedTimes. I’ve tried it, and while it does a decent job of keeping track of links posted by your followers it also posts links posted by their followers, which is not always what I want.
Let me know via the comments if you want more information!
The Belkin TuneBase is a FM transmitter for use with the iPhone and iPod. Audio from the iDevice will be sent via low-power FM radio to the car’s stereo.
(The image on Flickr has notes, click on it to see them!)
I used to have a FM-transmitter that attached directly to an iPod, which was compact but the connection was fiddly. In addition, the device worked poorly with the iPhone. There was a lot of interference from the iPhone’s mobile interface.
There are some very good things about this gadget, and a few drawbacks.
When I got it, I was worried that the “pillar” part would interfere with my stick shift. But it’s not a big problem. Once in a while I happen to hit the controls circled around the frequency display but there’s no problem shifting gears.
You should have a look at the placement of the cig lighter in your car before getting one though. It’s optimal if the ligher socket is part of a vertical surface. The frequency display is a bit hard for me to see from the driver’s position; on the other hand, it’s not something that changes a lot.
There’s an option to let the unit scan for a free channel to transmit on. I haven’t used this option, as I found a channel that works for me a long time ago. But when driving long distances this should prove useful.
The part holding the iPhone is rotatable so you can have vertical or horisontal orientation. It’s relatively easy to change playlists etc. using it. It’s much more preferable to having the iPhone lying loose between the seats.
To connect it fully, you need to connect a lead to the headphone jack but this is quickly done. I have a silicone sleeve on my iPhone, it’s a bit tight but not problem to connect.
You control playback and calls with a button below the iPhone, it’s a bit fiddly to double-click to skip tracks.
Sound quality is decent for an FM transmitter. There’s a standard 3.5mm stereo output built into the pillar. You can use that to connect to the stereo if you have that input jack. There’s also a USB socket for more charging options.
Calls work OK if you’re already tuned in to the channel the device is broadcasting on. If not, you’ll have to switch to it, and it takes a few seconds for the Tunebase to be “picked up” by the stereo. If you’re making a lot of calls, and regularly listen to FM radio, this may not be optimal.
The few calls I’ve made have been rather hard to hear, according to my interlocutors.
I’m very happy with the TuneBase, it’s a great way to listen to audio from the iPhone while driving!
I like using FreeBSD compared to Linux (or “lulnix” as we cool kids say nowadays) but distros like RedHat and Ubuntu have the edge when it comes to making it easy to keep your system up to date with the latest patches.
You’d think there was a simple one-shot way of doing this, but so far I’ve settled for the following method. It’s documented here as much for my own memory as anything else.
cvsup -g -L 2 /usr/local/etc/ports-supfile (you should edit the ports-supfile to reflect your geographical location).portupgrade -a -PP -Rr -i. The options I use for portupgrade are: