Content here is by Michael Still, mikal@stillhq.com.
While being a fairly transparent metaphor for refugees, this book is also an excellent read with a relatively believable premise. I especially like the ending, which I thought was quite unexpected. I don’t want to ruin any of this for anyone, but I really really enjoyed this book. Title: Children of Time Author: Adrian Tchaikovsky…
This is a book about common sense. Specifically, it’s about how when you’re told a fact it seems obvious — common sense — that it’s true. Interestingly, this can be the case even if that fact is in fact untrue. This is at least partially because common sense is mostly practical, that is it’s more…
This is yet another accidental purchase of a self-published book, although I think this one makes a lot of sense as a self published work. Writing a technical reference book isn’t a particularly lucrative pastime for most authors, and self publishing likely makes it more worthwhile than the traditional publisher route, especially if you can…
This book was a short but fun read. Sufficiently short in fact that perhaps it was a little over priced, but not outrageously so. It follows an adventure of a slightly rogue but generally nice cyborg SecUnit which has charmingly named itself MurderBot. That’s confusing, because said cyborg is too busy being depressed and anxious…
With Cisco announcing that they no longer need 12% of their staff this calendar year (5% in February, and another 7% in September), I am left wondering what is so terribly wrong with American Capitalism. Interestingly at about the same time someone recommended I read this book, so here we are — seeking to understand…
This book argues that technology, especially social media, has been deliberately engineered by Silicon Valley to be addictive, and that often there are detrimental impacts to the products we all use every day. That argument makes sense in that these products are measured by the amount of time they are used per user (and thus…
This book is an interesting read coming straight off the back of Human Origins. The book starts out by explaining the impact the invention of the plow had on humanity — it asserts that farmers being able to produce substantially more than they needed for their own subsistence was a driving factor in the creation…
In 1986, Clifford Stoll and his coworkers were frustrated by what they thought was a billing error of 75 cents in their monthly accounting. Suspecting a software bug, the new guy (Clifford) was put on to working out the error as a starter problem while he got familiar with the systems he was to manage……
I’ve owned this book since it was new in the year 2000, but it has sat on the shelf alone and unloved for at least 20 years. I think I did probably read it back then, but it pre-dates blogged notes about books like this one. However, with my new found interest in assembly language…
So this went well… The Intel 4004 microprocessor has slightly weird power supply requirements by modern standards. You see, it needs to be supplied with +5V DC, and -10V DC at the same time to work. Now, I found this example circuit in someone else’s project: Which to me looked quite a lot like these…