A couple of days ago, someone in my vicinity needed to create a Powerpoint presentation with lots and lots of JPEG files. She was doing this on a netbook which is usually pretty fast, but after adding a couple of pictures, she noticed it slowing down to a crawl. She was working on a USB key, [...]
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Book cover of "The End of Mr. Y" by Scarlett Thomas A while ago, I read PopCo, also by Scarlett Thomas, and I found it a fantastic read. It had a compelling and believable story and it gave me lots to think about, which is basically all I need from a book. I was therefore looking [...] I never shared the Martin Bril’s predelection for France, or his interest in Napoleon, but the fact that the emperor started the ninetheenth century by sweeping away most of the decadent European aristocracy must mean that he had some kind of vision. In some ways sadly, this was as definite as a wednesday security patch for [...] I have a wrist watch, which runs pretty accurately, but for five times a year I have to set back the date one day, because the date dial has 31 positions, and it’s not a very smart watch. That however, doesn’t make me think that each month in the year has in fact 31 days, that [...] Forward the Foundation is the last book Asimov wrote for his Robot/Foundation metaseries. It is the second book about Seldon’s efforts to develop his psychohistory science, a way of predicting the future using statistics. The events in the book take place after Prelude to Foundation and before the first book of the original Foundation trilogy. Like [...] The story centres around Hari Seldon, who proposes a statistical way to predict the future of humanity, during a talk at a conference on Trantor, the Galactic Empire’s capital planet. The Empire’s aide Eto Demerzel, as well as the Emperor’s main challenger, the Mayor of Wye, both want to make use of this new tool to [...] I upgraded my desktop box from Ubuntu Jaunty to Kubuntu Karmic today as well, since I find the latter’s advantages over the former outweighing its disadvantages. Among the advantages are the standard availability of Firefox 3.5, the out of the box working of sound (no hassle with sound systems this time), and faster booting up. Also, [...] Kubuntu 9.10 seems to have the same problems waking up from sleep/suspend on my Vaio, but at least it has the decent sense to tell me its the compositing manager that’s in trouble, and then shuts it down, so I can go on working. What’s actually worse than in Ubuntu is the screen artefacts. The green and [...] This weekend Canonical released their new OS, Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala”, and I upgraded my Sony Vaio laptop. So far, I’m sorry to say, I’m not impressed. The first thing I noticed was lots of screen artefacts. The login screen as well as the desktop had lots of green and red pixels all over them. Downgrading the [...] Yesterday evening I saw Slumdog Millionaire, by Danny Boyle. It won eight Academy Awards, and there was quite a hype surrounding it, so I wasn’t expecting too much. I wasn’t disappointed. The story was perfectly entertaining, at times somewhat dramatic (if not melodramatic), and quite humorous, and the acting was okay. Still, it lacked the depth and [...] |
Hi! You've reached my blog. I use this to express thoughts on various topics that somehow interest me, like technology, science, the environment, democracy and the like. Planned books:
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