Everything you read and hear about Bad Blood by John Carreyrou is true. It is an incredible — TRUE — story, told exceptionally well, about the lethal cocktail of greed, ambition and narcissism. If this wasn’t non-fiction I would have dismissed parts of this book as contrived. We are used to Silicon Valley success stories, but reading about such a supposed success, which raised 900 million dollars at a 10… Read More »Bad Blood – John Carreyrou
In general, philosophy has a reputation of being hard to understand, and Kierkegaard certainly does nothing to lessen this reputation. He was largely misunderstood in his lifetime, but also very aware that he was ahead of his time. Maybe that’s why he was an enormously prolific writer. His works are often complex and paradoxical in tone and plentiful enough to ponder on its meaning for many lifetimes. This book has… Read More »Kierkegaard – Patrick Gardiner
On my honeymoon in 2009 I asked the store clerk at the Hemingway house on Key West: “what’s a good book to start with?”. She recommended The Sun also Rises. And I understand why. Because this novel is probably the most accessible summary of the typical Hemingway writing style. Very much set in the 1920s — yet timeless — it is a story about classic themes such as friendship, love,… Read More »The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
I picked up this book in the bargain bin of a HMV in Manchester in 2006, when I was on a — sort of — pilgrimage. But I left it on my bookshelf for 12 years, thinking I probably knew most of it already. But books are meant to be read, so I had to get to it eventually. I think I understand why this book was already in the… Read More »Joy Division and the making of Unknown Pleasures – Jake Kennedy
I literally received this book from the hands of Jimmy Carter himself at a book signing in New York. I never met a president before — even if only for a few seconds — so I was keen to read his book! Carter always struck me as an interesting person. A multifaceted outlier: deeply religious but pro science and evolution, anti-NRA but pro guns, peanut farmer by trade and a… Read More »Faith – Jimmy Carter
This was an exhausting book to read. Because it reads like a prolonged poem with a stream of thoughts about everything and anything and with very little dialogue. Two things are very clear though: Woolf went very deep and therefore this book can not be anything else than autobiographical. Feeling already exhausted as a reader, I couldn’t even imagine what the process must have been for a writer to put… Read More »To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
In 2018 I read 24 books (25th in progress). Here is a list of 10 books that stood out in one way or another. Some are recommendations. Besides music biographies, computer history and management/business books, I tend to read bestseller novels from a few years ago. By then the crowd has decided what’s good and thrift stores will carry a lot of these books — which can be an indication… Read More »Ten notable books I read in 2018
Paper always beats rock and scissors. Because one of the few inventions greater than writing itself, is writing on paper. Paper writings are absolute, self-contained and transferable units of knowledge, which after publishing become and stay available and accessible for hundreds of years or more. Don’t take my word for it, there is this great quote by J.C.R. Licklider found in Libraries of the Future and brought to my attention… Read More »Can we replace paper?
Advent of Code is a yearly programming contest created by Eric Wastl and it is currently being held at adventofcode.com. That means that this site spawns two daily programming challenges — until Christmas — to see who can solve them the fastest. But it is not just about being fast, Advent of Code is also a great way to improve your programming skills with daily puzzles or learn a new… Read More »Advent of Code
It’s been over a week since I ‘finished’ the most anticipated game of 2018 (or maybe even of the last five years); Red Dead Redemption 2. I say finished in quotes, because I clocked in around 50 hours in a little less than three weeks just to finish the main campaign, but the more I learn about the game after finishing, the more I become convinced I haven’t even seen… Read More »The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Red Dead Redemption 2
For a movie where you can’t expect surprises about the main story line — because it’s in every history book — this movie certainly did not disappoint! In fact, First Man is a phenomenal movie. The opening scene immediately sets the tone. In a shaky, chaotic, sweaty and nervous test-flight, a few years before the moon landing, we are introduced to Neil Armstrong. But also to the fact that mankind… Read More »First Man
This week my Pi stopped working. After hooking up a monitor I saw kernel errors related to VFS. So the file system was obviously broken. Oops. The end conclusion is that the SD card is physically ‘broken’, but I still managed to salvage my data — which is more important than the card. Here’s how. Broken file system: fsck or dd? What didn’t work for me, but you might want… Read More »Save data from your broken Raspberry Pi SD card with GNU ddrescue