Books Jan-Jun 2015

I'll be updating this as I finish books for the first half of the year, then reposting it in July as a summary.

• 2015-01-10 • ★★☆☆☆ Five Billion Years of Solitude by Lee Billings (ebook)
  
• 2015-01-25 • ★★☆☆☆ Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (ebook)
  
• 2015-01-31 • ★★★★☆ Ever After by Kim Harrison [1]
  
• 2015-02-07 • ★★★★☆ Bowl of Heaven by Gregory Benford & Larry Niven [1]
  
• 2015-02-16 • ★★★☆☆ Shipstar by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven [1]
  
• 2015-02-23 • ★★★★★ The Undead Pool by Kim Harrison [1]
  
• 2015-02-25 • ★★★★★ Crux by Ramez Naam [1]
  
• 2015-03-04 • ★★★★★ The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison
  
• 2015-03-06 • ★★★★★ Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel [1]
  
• 2015-03-15 • ★★★★★ Data and Goliath by Bruce Schneier [1]
  
• 2015-03-21 • ★★★★☆ Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie [1]
  
• 2015-03-23 • ★★★★☆ Fire with Fire by Charles Gannon (Tales of the Terran Republic #1) [1]
  
• 2015-03-29 • ★★★★☆ The Witch With No Name by Kim Harrison [1]
  
• 2015-04-07 • ★★★★☆ Trial by Fire by Charles Gannon [1]
  
• 2015-04-10 • ★★★★☆ Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie [3]
  
• 2015-04-18 • ★★★★☆ Gilgamesh: A New English Version by Stephen Mitchell [3]
  
• 2015-04-18 • ★★★★★ Letters to a Young Scientist by E.O. Wilson [1]
  
• 2015-05-02 • ★★★★★ Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey [1]
  
• 2015-05-09 • ★★★★★ The Arsenal of Democracy by A.J. Baime [1]
  
• 2015-05-16 • ★★★★☆ Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast Trail by Cheryl Strayed [1]
  
• 2015-05-30 • ★★★☆☆ Singularity Sky by Charles Stross [1]
  
• 2015-06-06 • ★★★★★ Caliban's War by James S.A. Corey [1]
  
• 2015-06-09 • ★★★☆☆ You Don't Have to be Evil To Work Here, But it Helps by Tom Holt [1]
  
• 2015-06-21 • ★★★★☆ Wool by Hugh Howey [1]
  
• 2015-06-27 • Abaddon's Gate by James S.A. Corey [1]
  

Total to date Jan-June 2015:
ebooks: 23
paper: 0
audio: 2
total: 25

[1] Purchased from Amazon/Kindle store
[2] We own a paper copy
[3] Purchased from Audible

Neat find

At the recycling station today, while throwing away cardboard boxes, I saw something weird looking and took a peek. Someone had thrown in cases of promotional pens. They're not supposed to be in there, but that's not my battle to fight. I decided to grab a couple, because once in a while a promotional pen will turn out to actually be pretty good and I might get lucky.

EDIT: YAY, the biggest box that I got, probably has 1000 or more pens in it, is identical to the previously favorite pen that I got from Kensington Court in A2!

I thought they were probably all the same but an hour later one of the kids said "this is a pencil." Sure enough, there were two kinds in the two boxes, and one box was full of rather nice metal mechanical pencils. I got in the car and went back to take a 2nd look. There were no more pencils, but there were cases of different kinds of pens. I grabbed one of the other styles than the one I got.

Pens are never a problem. Mechanical pencils are much more desirable. We do have probably 200 of them now, though DB grabbed over half of them to take to band, I guess he figures he'll be the go-to guy for people with no pencil to mark up their music for the rest of the year.

If anyone needs pens, I have a couple thousand. There are probably 10,000 more in the box skip, but they'll be buried by the end of the weekend. I had to dig a bit even after going back an hour later.

Raspberry Pi use found

I have done some fiddling around over the last few weeks and got the Raspberry Pi that I bought a year or so ago into a printed case and attached to an external drive. It's sharing the drive via Samba, and I just got MiniDLNA working on it so I can stream video from it to our various devices (smart TV, BD players). Since it draws only a few watts and the hard drive spins down after 10 minutes of not using it, I figure it's about as low power as I can get for a media server. I have also been using a 64G thumb drive plugged into the back of my router which draws even less (probably a small fraction of a watt) but it doesn't provide larger backup space that I wanted.

The Pi also provides me with an automation platform, it goes out and downloads my podcasts and picks up a few other things that I've scripted over the years. I like having a Linux box to do the scripting on, it's much more familiar and useful than desktop OSs.

It's nice to move that off to an always-on PC, I'm getting to the point where sometimes I go all day and never turn my Windows PC on - I use my phone plenty, my tablet some and my Kindle a bit, with all that sometimes there's not really a lot of reason to turn on the PC.