The Departure

I just finished reading The Departure (Owner Trilogy 1) by Neal Asher.
Asher has taken the Orwellian nightmare, and pushed it to its horrible, brutal limit using some more modern SF devices such as AI integration. Set a century or so in the future, the world governments have centralized their power into a monolithic, all-controlling, ever wasteful "Committee". Those in power enjoy wealth, while the rest of Earth's twelve billion not only languish in poverty, but are instructed on politically correct thought and constantly monitored to ensure compliance. Those guilty of incorrect thought, are sent for "adjustment" which involves incredible torture and very often termination, including being fed live into an incinerator.
Of course, Asher describes all of the horrors in gloriously intense detail. My favourite part of the Committee control infrastructure was the readergun, which is a massively powerful automatic weapon emplacement with an id-chip reader, programmed to annihilate anyone with an ID on a blacklist, or alternately anyone not on a whitelist. A very nasty control device indeed. Then there is the laser weapon satellite network designed to similarly zero in on and kill individuals.
The story follows Alan Saul's journey of revenge against the Committee, and a particular member of the Inspectorate. It all comes down to control, who has it, who is willing to use it, and how far they are willing to go. Since this is a game of the highest stakes, all the main characters were willing to commit massive amounts of atrocity to achieve their aims and their struggle makes for some hugely violent reading.
Entertaining, satisfying and very dark.

Monitoring of Torrent Downloaders

A friend recently passed me this article. Probably significantly overstates what is actually happening, but still. You might want to consider paying for a binary news server instead of using torrents.

The Trilisk Ruins and The Trilisk AI

I just finished reading both The Trilisk Ruins and The Trilisk AI.
Both of these were pretty small, but tight reads (200-300 pages), and at $6 for both, it was a pleasure to read a new author. I read and enjoyed the first enough to go straight into the second, which is unusual, but I couldn't resist.
The first was probably the better book, introducing new aliens and technology which is always fun. There was a switching between the alien point of view to the humans across chapters producing great contrast. This also made it difficult and quite interesting to work out just what the hell was going on for a while in the quite novel environment of the Trilisk Ruins.
The characters were ok, maybe a bit washed out, but they had their faults and challenges and individual goals, and the author was quite happy to kill many of them off too. That helps.
I'll definitely be interested to see more in the series.

A Game of Thrones: A Song of Ice and Fire

I just finished reading this, by George R.R. Martin.
Obviously I read this because I enjoyed the TV series so much. I don't usually read Fantasy anymore, although I used to read quite a lot of the genre, and at the time this book was released, but I never picked up on this author. I knew all the authors who wrote one liners for the book, just not Martin. Ah well, I'll be catching up with his work now, although not however before watching the TV series that corresponds to each book. I don't want to spoil the awesomeness.
I enjoyed reading the book as much as watching the TV series, and I really didn't think I would. It was really great to get a deeper feel for the politics and relationships of those involved as well as some of the history and greater events and happenings. It's really well written too; the language is quite beautiful in parts, and there are the classic one-liners and dialog that we know and love from the TV.
The characters and events closely followed the TV series, and I now have even more respect for the screen version given how close it is to the novel.
Thoroughly recommended.

Does the ABC actually get it? *gasp*

Wow. The ABC are going to make Dr. Who episodes available as digital downloads immediately after they have originally aired in the UK. Part of the reason is apparently an attempt to reduce piracy by providing supply where there is obvious demand. This is a big step in the right direction for television stations making themselves relevant again in terms of rebroadcasting material from foreign networks.
OK, the episodes will appear on iView, which is a pretty low quality streaming broadcast, but this is a good step and shows they are trying to make progress. I find iView excellent for catching recently missed ABC programs, however it still doesn't really compete with downloading 720p content from the intertubes, either torrents or news servers.
Good stuff ABC, I hope the Dr. Who fans go for it.
(Thanks to The Register)

It's all in the Cloud

Mozilla's recent announcement of putting Thunderbird into maintenance mode has prompted me to sweep away the last vestiges of keeping my personal information on my local desktop.
I've just started uploading my entire local (Thunderbird) mail history to my gmail account via IMAP. I probably won't ditch the local copy entirely. Maybe I'll still use Thunderbird over IMAP to gmail for a while.
Recently I started paying for Google Drive, and using Cloudfogger for encryption, I am now storing all my personal documents and projects there. There are a bunch of providers of cloud storage these days, but it does make sense to use one provider for everything, and Google covers pretty much everything. Sure, I use the Apple cloud for storing some stuff between my iDevices, but they tend to exist behind their own little wall anyway, and it tends to presented more as magic integration between devices. GDrive is now available for ios devices too.
Next on the list is all the family photos and video and all that will be left is my cache of films and music. That's a little big for the cloud at the moment.
Cloud. It's a just wanky term for server storage.

Discovery of the Higgs Boson

You should already know by now that CERN is calling a discovery on the Higgs boson. Probably the best coverage I've read yet is at the New York Times.
This is exciting stuff, not because they've essentially confirmed a theory, but because it may lead them to further discovery and understanding as the LHC is ramped up to full power.

Rule 34

I just finished reading Rule 34 by Charles Stross.
I would say that writing near future SF would have to be one of the hardest genres to write to. It has to be plausible enough for 20 years in the future, so recognisable, even familiar, yet encompass changes worthy of SF and futurist predictions. I think Stross does an excellent job here, and has produced probably the most interesting near future novel I can think of.
In addition to cool SF and futurist possibilities, its also quite, er, dirty! Murdered sex fetishists, psychopath sex scenes and internet porn memes abound.
The technology being used was very cool. Some obvious ones like self driving cars, remote operated police air-drones, and HUD glasses, and some more subtle things like virtual machines on smartphones. Nothing crazy here, all quite plausible, and in fact much of it in prototypes now. In fact, it was very cool to have a vision of how some of this prototype tech we do have would affect us if it was usable and completely functional.
Stross writes very well. I prefer his writing to Neal Stephenson's because its tight, interesting and punchy. I often have to hit the Kindle dictionary which is always fun. Fun because it's so easy, and you learn crazy new words.
I won't ruin the story, you should go read it. Excellent. Hmm. I may have to read it again actually, I mean, what was...

Conquest

I just finished reading Conquest.
The series is starting to wear on me now. I think the first person narrative is starting to annoy me. As is the main character, he's just a bit of a dick. The other main characters are becoming more shallow rather than being developed.
But in the next book they build a huge space weapons platform!
Meh.

Anomaly

I recently finished reading Anomaly.
Although quite short, and more like a long short story, this had some great concepts and is well worth the read. Not your typical alien first contact storyline, I found this engrossing and somehow plausible. Oh, except for the bit where the U.N. invades the U.S., that was jsut silly, but nevermind.
OK, I don't want to spoil any of the actual interesting content, so just go read it. Short, cheap, interesting.

Rebellion

I just finished reading Rebellion.
Quite good fun, light reading, not particularly well written, but still very readable.
In this episode of the series, the machines keep pushing the human marines to fight for them, but Rigg's Pigs fight back, having had enough, it being pretty clear the Macros are just going to make them keep fighting until they are all dead.
There were some good concepts and sequences, involving a race of centaur-like people that have been forced off their homeworlds to live in giant space habitats. They did seem a little fragile though, not sure how they haven't all been killed off looong ago. There was also an introduction of a new race of group intelligent bio goop, a new Nano intelligence and some more information regarding the Blues.
So a nice easy holiday read, maybe a bit sexist and simple, like the protagonist, but there is still interest for me to keep reading the series.

REAMDE

I just finished reading REAMDE by Neal Stephenson.
Designed as a play on README, the commonly found computer file, REAMDE is a virus written by one of the characters in the novel, aimed at making money from a massive online role playing game called T'Rain.
This covers about ten percent of what REAMDE is about though, as the story is by far outweighed by a story of survival, fighting terrorists, Russian mobsters, and just plain bad luck. There is one really massive coincidence that drives the plot from about 30% of the way through, but I figure you can always forgive one plot device, it's what the novel is all about after all.
This is a really long book at over 1000 pages. Stephenson seems to be in the waxing lyrical mode, or failing that, the just plain too-much-detail mode. A couple of times I was thinking, "just get on with it!".
But generally, it is very well written, and paced, so this isn't a big deal.
Lots of violence, shootings, beatings and so on, crashes, money, more guns, heriocs.
Good stuff.

Review of DigitalCentre

I recently tried to buy a receiver from DigitalCentre (digitalcentre.com.au). (Not linked, don't bother)
On the surface, it appears this site sells equipment at very good prices, but I'm here to tell you, you'll pay in all sorts of other ways if you use this site. The only hint that you may have problems is in the FAQ where they specify that purchases may take "up to 12 business days but this can vary".
In my experience, I waited the 12 business days, then received an automated email saying it was on back order. I rang up to cancel the order as I wasn't willing to wait any further for them to get stock. I don't think this is entirely unreasonable, in fact, I've had other online sites call me proactively shortly after purchase to tell me when there would be a delay and give me options on other products, a refund or waiting. The manager stronly wanted me to wait for another week, when he guaranteed I would have the product delivered by Friday.
By the Wednesday, I was calling them to see how it was going, and by Thursday afternoon I had finally managed to get the manager to call me back to tell me that in fact, no, it would be delayed for another two weeks. Uh-huh. I just cancelled on the spot, and sent the required email to request refund. At this point its already been three weeks into them taking my payment, and I asked when my refund would happen. This started out as being, "sure, by next Wednesday", and for the next three weeks, every time I managed to get someone to tell me when it would be refunded, it was always either tomorrow, or "by Friday". I eventually received a refund. I should note that the FAQ specifies that you can lose 20% for cancelling an order. Seriously!! Happily, that didn't happen to me.
Generally, I am very unhappy with the customer service and the experience. Rarely did anyone call me back, let alone respond to email. Promises of time periods were not once accurate.
I think though, that I didn't have as bad an experience as some others.
This person posting on whirlpool was told after a long delay that they would have to pay extra because the price had gone up. That's outrageous!
This person had a horrible tech support experience.

Just don't use this site. The customer service is just horrible. Don't expect to get equipment within a month, and don't expect any happy support if you do.

Snow in the Desert

I just finished reading Snow in the Desert by Neal Asher.
This is a Short Read (novelette) set in the Polity universe from Asher's Cormac novels.
You have sex, violence and plenty of action packed into this punchy little short story. It adds a new bio/tech anomoly to the Polity setting which was interesting, and ties in various aspects from the Polity that we already know and love.
Good stuff.


[updated for typos]

Pink Noise: A Posthuman Tale

Just finished reading this.

It was shorter than I had feared halfway through.