Review: Bigger Leaner Stronger

Bigger Leaner Stronger was available for $1, so I bought it because most of the reviews said that it was actually scientifically correct. And indeed, it's fully of interesting facts that I didn't know, though the ultimate goal of the book is about as relevant to me as say, the Cyclist's Training Bible.

Here are a few interesting facts I got out of the book:

• You can't gain muscle without gaining fat as well. Basically, the only way to build muscle is to gain weight. Hence, body builders and people who are trying to "get big" go through cycles of "building" and "cutting." During the "build" phase you deliberately gain weight by over-eating by about 100 calories per day or so. During the "cutting" phase you deliberately lose weight by eating about 100 calories per day while exercising at intensity so that you don't lose as much muscle.
• Free weights are better than weight machines. There are only about four exercises worth doing: the bench press (and variants), the squat, the deadlift, the military press. Don't bother with isolation exercises. Obviously, form is very important in doing those exercises with heavy weights. If you do them wrong you can injure yourself. This is where a book sucks. Pages of description are probably worthless compared to a YouTube video.
• 3 sets of 4-6 reps at maximum capacity is what you'd want to do. In other words lift the heaviest weights you can still lift 4-6 times. Warm up by doing 8-10 reps at half your normal weight so you don't injure yourself.
• Unlike many weight-lifting/gym gurus, he doesn't say "Cardio is evil."  He just recommends doing it just 3 times a week and for no more than 20-30 minutes each. (The author would probably never survive a tour of the alps)
• As with the Cyclist's Training Bible: the emphasis is on rest. The author still wants you to go to the gym 5 days a week for an hour each, but each time you'll work a different part of the body so that there's recovery time for the muscles. 

Ultimately, the test of the book would be to try the program for a few months to see whether it actually gets results. But I'm probably not going to do so: getting "bigger" isn't on my list of things I want to do, and an hour a day in the gym is not my idea of fun. Being an extremist, the author doesn't have any programs for someone like me, but I'm probably not the audience for body-sculpting gym-time-heavy books like this.

Most of the book is actually spent on nutrition and eating habits. These are all covered well by courses such as Nutrition Made Clear. What I read in this book doesn't contradict existing research. There are no magic pills, magic supplements and diets. It's all just calories in and out, though of course, junk food doesn't tend to have sufficient nutrition to keep you healthy, and the author points that out.

For $1, this is a great book. Can't beat the price. The program: well, I'll admit it. I'm way too lazy to follow it. This is an exercise program for people who're way more mentally tough than I am. The thought of spending 5 hours a week in a gym gives me the shivers. I hate exercise!

Bowen Winter Tour 2018 Index Page

During the Martin Luther King long weekend, Bowen and I did a 3-day self-supported tour, starting from Los Altos and traveling to Capitola, Morgan Hill, and then back home. This is the index page for the tour.

• Pictures Link

Trip Report

• Saturday January 13
• Sunday January 14
• Monday January 15

Epilogue

Winter riding in California's great when you get a spate of good weather. Since we knew what the weather was like, we could reduce weight far more than we could have during a summer tour in England. Plus, for a short trip you know you can do without luxuries like stuffed animals or a Kindle. What was interesting to me was that Bowen didn't want to do any playground stops, even though we did pass several playgrounds during the trip. My guess was that the cold weather and empty playgrounds made them look rather unappealing, even when we had relatively large amounts of free time. Touring close to home also let us do away with what might be necessities on tour such as spare tires, chain tools, and spare spokes.

We did get one sour note, which was that the AirBnB owner we stayed at complained that Bowen had wet the bed and tried to charge us $400 for clean up. No hotel would attempt to do this, but obviously the owner saw an expensive custom bike and thought she could extract money from us, despite the fact that we'd tour'd all summer last year on AirBnB without a single owner attempting to do this. I'd definitely stay away from AirBnBs in the future while touring in the US with young children. We'll see how AirBnB's customer service responds to this.

As you get older, you hear people saying things like: "Time passes so fast." To be honest, I think that's because people fall into habits and routines and basically sleep-walk their way through life. Bicycle touring is easily one of the most intense experiences you can have in your life, and the memories you make while doing so will remain firmly fixed in your mind for years to come. It completely upends your daily routines, and forces you to make decisions constantly, and will make your life subjectively longer in pleasant ways. I feel sorry for people who don't experience it.

Bowen Winter Tour Day 3

Bowen woke me up at 5:00am! This bothered me a bit until I realized that he did the same thing to me on the Manchester to London trip. The little guy is as goal-oriented as any athlete I'd ever encountered and wanted to finish today! I managed to snooze a bit until 7:00am, whereupon I gave up and got up and made breakfast and then we got everything ready and left at 8:30am.

When I first laid out the tour on Komoot, it tried to route me along the flat section between Morgan Hill and Almaden Valley. In my past travels, however, I knew that the route leading through Uvas Road and McKean road, which took you through Calero reservoir and Chesbro reservoir was pretty and didn't have much climbing. The route there from Morgan Hill went up Willow Spring, which did see grades up to 12% but was short and fairly pleasant, with not much traffic even on a holiday morning. We stopped for pictures at Chesbro Lake but didn't find a good vantage point at Calero.

Once in Almaden Valley, my instinct was to ride over Shannon or Kennedy Road, but Komoot pointed me in a different direction, and I figured I might as well try it in case it was a good route. It's a good route for the last day of a 3 day tour, but not as isolated and pretty as the hillier alternative. Once onto Lark Avenue I knew where we were and we headed along familiar roads back to Saratoga, where Bowen asked to visit his Grandmother.

After a pizza lunch, we rode back home under darkening clouds, but confident that we would beat the rain. The skiers in California this winter  have been unlucky, but their luck was our gain: in 3 days, we had ridden 114.5 miles and 6704' of climbing, a very respectable tour for anyone in the middle of winter.

Bowen Winter Tour Day 2

The advantage of doing a tour near home is that you can take full advantage of all your local knowledge. For instance, when I saw the forecast, I immediately dumped the fender on the tandem and ejected all my rain gear. This allowed us to fit everything into one pannier, which saved us more than 2 pounds of empty pannier.  I'd ditched everything that could be considered a luxury, including my beloved Kindle Paperwhite. Bowen sacrificed bringing his bunny. The disadvantage of doing a tour in the USA is that public transit was scant, and here in California, we're surrounded by mountains, many of which are so steep as to have few equivalents even in the Alps, where grades are limited by winter snow.

Nevertheless, the compensations of California riding are many. We left the hotel around 9:00am, riding along the Pacific Coast bike route, but by the time we turned off onto Freedom Blvd, the day was already starting to warm up, and by the time we got to Corralitos around 11:00am, it was pleasantly warm at 70F. This was an area I was still familiar with, but I elected to let Komoot guide me to reduce climbing and in case it had found a route that was better that what I knew about. The answer was "no", it hadn't magically found a flatter route that was better. The flatter route simply had way more traffic than I would put up with, but with an unknown climb up ahead, I wasn't too unhappy about an easier day.

Once on Mt Madonna, the ride preview of a steep painful climb was confirmed. It was made worse by an exposed approach: I saw the thermometer on my computer reach into the mid 80s. Fortunately, I had brought and was wearing a sweat-band. I'd introduced Bowen to Radio Gaga by playing Singstar Queen on the PS3 with him,  so he entertained me throughout the climb by singing "Radio Gaga." Then he asked me why his GPS watch occasionally would think that we weren't moving even though we were, I told him about GPS satellite signals and the GPS antenna in his watch, he switched the lyrics to "Radio Satellite". Even though I'm as big a Queen fan as they come, I did get a little tired of "Radio Satellite" sung at the top of his lungs by the middle of the climb.

The climb was so tough we had to stop to rest twice, though the second rest stop at a winery turned out to be within a mile of the top! We saw no other cyclists on the road except a woman road biker coming down the road. The same road on the peninsula would probably have been flooded by cyclists as its well connected to a high speed descent on 152 in either direction. Strangely enough, once we reached the top, the sky clouded over and we did the dirt descent on Mt. Madonna road under cloudy skies at least 20F cooler!

The unpaved eastern side of Mt Madonna Road was slick and muddy, forcing me to brake often and stop once in a while to check the rim temperatures, but given the cool day and light load I needn't have bothered. We reached the paved section after about 10 minutes and then after we put on clothing I gave the tandem its head and we barreled down the descent in the high 20s.

Once onto Redwood Retreat road, we finally started seeing other cyclists, including a couple on a tandem but no one stopped to chat or even do much other than wave to us. To be honest, with only one pannier we didn't look like people on a bike tour, just a father and son on a day ride.

The ride into Morgan Hill was a slog, but we found the AirBnB with no problems (though Kelly the owner told us not to let her neighbors know that she was running an AirBnB). She told us we were less than a mile from downtown, so we dumped most of our gear and rode over to Provo which was still serving brunch!

Bowen Winter Tour Day 1

When your firstborn son comes to you during winter break and asks for a 3 day bicycle tour instead of fancy toys or trips to Disneyland, your fatherly heart swells with pride and you say, "Yeah, we can do that!" Unfortunately, I had to break that promise, as I came down with whatever viral infection his brother brought home for the holidays, so when the forecast came to good weather on the MLK weekend (which he had time off for), I decided I would make it up to Bowen.

Joining us for the start was Eva, who graciously took some nice photos of us while climbing up Old Santa Cruz Highway. We actually had to walk the dirt section (granted, the sign says "walk your bike" in both directions, but I'd never actually respected that sign before), between the Saturday hiking crowd and the slightly sloppy conditions. We did explore an alternate entrance to the Los Gatos Creek trail off University avenue, which, while not tandem friendly was something new to me.

Eva split off at Mt. Charlie road on my advice in order to avoid the nasty section on summit road between Old Santa Cruz Highway and Highway 17, and Bowen and I had lunch at the summit store just a little past 1pm.

After that, the descent down Soquel San Jose was fun and pleasant as always, and at the bottom of the descent we found the hotel with no problem whatsoever.

A shower later, we made it to Gayle's Bakery, a place famous amongst cyclists, but that I'd never actually visited. Bowen had the ginger creme brulee while I had the chocolate eclair. That must have been a pretty good creme brulee, because Bowen became adamant that we had to have dinner there as well, and so we did.

Chris Kuhar called and suggested that we walk down to downtown Capitola, and so we did. Despite having lived in the Bay Area for most of my adult live, I'd never actually visited downtown Capitola before, and found it as charming as any Italian village I'd been to, complete with waterfront restaurants, cafes, a beach, and a riverside walking path that took us past a windmill house!

I finished reading Watership Down to Bowen that night using the Kindle App on the phone, an accomplishment that I hope I didn't have to repeat any time soon.

Review: Batman, the Telltale series

Ever since I realized that the Telltale Games series are basically movies with fake choices (as opposed to the real choices provided by Heavy Rain), I've stopped buying them. While the writing is generally nice, the fact that my choices don't actually change the outcome means that the series feels more like watching animated TV episodes than like a choose your own adventure type game.

Batman: The Telltale Series was one of this month's PS+ selections, however, and I'm a sucker for all things Batman, so I fired it up and played it through. The engine is clunky and stutters, particularly during action sequences, but not so badly that you can't get through it, and neither does the game crash.

The story places an emphasis on Bruce Wayne, which is good: what's interesting to me is that unlike the Batman stories in the canon, this version of Batman discovers that his parents were not what he thought they were (or at least, one of them), and the incident in crime alley wasn't a random mugging. This has severe knock-on effects on Wayne, not just psychologically, but on his standing in society. Other versions of Batman in games (such as the excellent Arkham series) never have you consider whether Bruce Wayne cares about anything other than dressing up as a bat and beating up thugs. This also makes up for the fact that the Telltale Batman isn't as invulnerable and competent as other versions.

The inter personal relationships in the game emphasis betrayal. Wayne betrays and is in turn betrayed by many of the people in his life (all but one anyway), and this drives the plot. At every point you're given a chance to play the tough guy Batman or the compassionate fool Batman, but as I indicated earlier, the choices don't mean anything: the story will plow  ahead in roughly the same fashion anyway.

The crime scene investigations in this Batman never lives up to the billing. You're just given a bunch of clues and asked to link them together. There are never more than 6-8 clues so the solutions are pretty obvious.

I wouldn't pay the current $15 used price on Amazon for the game, but for the approximately $3.50 monthly fee for PS+, this is worth the play-through. Mildly Recommended.

Review: Joola Compact Ping Pong Table

My wife got it into her head the Ping-Pong would be a good thing to do indoors during the rainy season. I haven't played since I was in graduate school (and even then it was more or less a social game, no attempts to keep score or anything like that --- just hitting the ball at each other trying to keep a volley going). I was concerned about space, so the compact table at a fairly low price seemed like a good idea.

Opening the box, the table's assembly is of extremely low quality. On one of the legs, 3 of the screws that are supposed to anchor the leg were missing! I dug through my tool kit and found some compatible wood screws, but wow, this is extremely low quality.

The table is small. It definitely takes quite some getting used to: any excessive force is going to cause an out. This means that you're getting even less exercise than standard ping pong. I found myself deliberately having to hold back force or I was going to be even worse a player than I already was. The net is regulation height, so there's a bit of a learning curve as you can't just uniformly back off your hits: you still have to clear the net.

Once you get used to it, it feels almost like playing "real" ping pong. But the quality of the product is poor, so I'd recommend looking elsewhere.

Here's how I integrate my library into Amazon

Sometimes, people assume that with the volume of reading I get done (my annual lists are the tip of the icebergs: for instance, I never review books I don't finish, nor do I review magazines I read), I must spend a ton of money on books.

That's actually not true. Here's the primary tool I use, which is Library Extension. I set it up on Chrome, enter all my library cards and library accounts, and then whenever I visit an Amazon page for a book, the extension automatically checks whether the book is available at the library, both as an ebook and a paperbook, and how many copies of each are available (if any). This lets me decide on the spot whether the book's something I want to pay for so I can read it right away, or whether it's something I'm happy to have on my hold queue. (In cases where there are no ebooks, sometimes it tips me into buying the book)

This extension has saved a ton of money for me. And what's nice about it is that it fills my hold queue with a bunch of great books for free. The extension makes money for its author by injecting a referral link so that the author makes money from stuff you buy from Amazon. (Yes, he makes money even if you always change the URL to smile.amazon.com) But it's such a useful extension that he deserves however much money he makes that way.

And yes, Amazon's OK with this of course, since even more than before, I'm now trained to search on Amazon for books. I don't consider Google Play (no support for Kindle --- Google doesn't understand my love for epaper), I don't even bother visiting my library's web-site directly, since Amazon's reviews are so much better.

My biggest complaint about the extension is that it doesn't work on Android. (Not a surprise when you look at the UI)

If you have a library and a Kindle (or some other electronic reading device), this extension is a must have. Highly recommended.

Review: Summer Wars

I came to Summer Wars with low expectations, thinking that it was part of Hosada's pre-Girl Who Leapt Through Time work. Turns out that it actually post-dates that work and of course is a much better title than the latter.

There are several cliches that seem popular in Asian literature and film. One of them is the person who has to travel to a family gathering and (to keep up appearances) decides to present a friend as a significant other to his or her family. At first, Summer Wars seems to be exactly this movie.

Mixed in with all this, however, is a story about virtual reality and the take-over of an essential online service by a malicious AI. The technical details of this part of the story are far-fetched and unbelievable (no computer scientist will consider this plot anything other than laughable), but it serves the purpose of bringing the story of a multi-generational family with its long-term unfathomable disagreements, bitterness, and history together.

With all that in place, the story suddenly transitions into a family drama, with the people we think of initially as the primary protagonists suddenly shoved into the background. In any other director's hands this would be a major disaster, but Hosada somehow makes it work, and the end result is impressive.

Make no mistake, this isn't nearly as good as The Boy and the Beast. But it's significantly better than The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and is worth your time. Recommended.

Review: Runaways Vol 7-8

I picked up Runaways Vol 7, 8, and 9 from the library. Live Fast is the last collection written by Brian Vaughan, and unfortunately, it's also his weakest. The story involves resurrection and an attempt to undo a sacrifice done in the previous volume, which always leads to disaster.

Vol 8 Dead End Kids, written by Joss Whedon, was also disappointing. In one scene, he has the leader of the group yell, "Runaways, RUN AWAY!" I groaned at the pun and unfortunately the plot isn't anything worth writing home about, with a complicated mess involving time travel and more ret-conning of the timeline. With that, I did not even bother cracking open the covers of Vol 9.

I guess that means I'm done with the series.

Three Mamoru Hosada Films

This holiday period, I was hoping to take Bowen on a bike tour. (Yes, rather than ask for a Christmas present, he asked for a bike tour!) But instead, I caught a flu virus from his brother and could only spend most of the holidays catching up on media.

I'd missed all of Mamoru Hosada's movies over the years, but caught them both up due to a trial subscription to Funimation. (The app is horrible, and the selection seems slim, so I'm going to cancel)

Wolf Children, is the middle work, showing how Hosada's maturing as a film maker. Mature, poignant, and well-written, it's full of the bittersweet nature of parenthood, as well as the duality of nature and how much of parenting involves letting go. It's not as compelling a narrative as say, Totoro, and Bowen got bored and couldn't even make it past the first 20 minutes, so don't buy or stream it hoping that your kids will love it the way they love Totoro. They won't.

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, an earlier work is both a time travel story and a rumination on the nature of relationships and lost opportunities. The time travel story is unfortunately very weak: not only is it low on exposition, the protagonist seems clueless about the limited nature. Worse, one of the characters in the story talks about time leaps as though they're a commonplace mechanism, but no one else in the world experiences them as such. OK, time travel is mostly fantasy, but the rumination on relationships and lost opportunities is equally weak. The writing never quite sells the protagnoist's feelings and epiphany, and as a result the emotional impact of the final 20 minutes of the movie gets completely diluted. I wouldn't avoid it, but it's clearly much weaker than Wolf Children or Your Name, another time travel movie.

The Boy and the Beast is a revelation, and clearly catapults Hosada into the stratosphere. It starts off fooling you into thinking that this is one of those traditional kung fu movies, where a boy comes under the tutelage of a master and becomes a major ass kicker. Then it throws in literary and cultural references to A Wizard of Earthsea, Journey to the West, Moby Dick. The movie blew me away with its intelligence, resolution, and a unique look at the relationships between master and disciple, between a boy and his father, and a deep understanding of what it means to come of age into a society while retaining what's unique about yourself. If anything can convince you that Mamoru Hosada is the true successor to Hayao Miyazaki, this movie will. Go watch it. I'm going to see if I can convince Bowen to watch it, though I suspect he might need just a bit more maturity to appreciate it more. But that's OK. Miyazaki's best movies are great for kids and even better with a few years of experience behind them. Do what you have to in order to watch this wonderful movie, which beats out everything I saw in 2017, including the surprisingly under-rated Dr. Strange.

I guess I'm going to have to watch Summer Wars next too.

Independent Cycle Touring 2nd Edition Now Available

The best bicycle touring book just got better. Mostly, this is an update of the things I've learned since I started cycle touring with Bowen. It's got a much improved cover (thanks, Scarlet). I've raised the price since I've observed that with the first edition, the lowering of the price to something absurdly low hasn't helped sales any. In exchange, if you buy the paperback of either this book or How to Interview a Financial Advisor, you now get the Kindle version for free!

Thanks to Pengtoh Sim and Phil Sung for providing new pictures for use in the book.

Review: Nex Machina (PS4)

Through a combination of discounts and Amazon credits I got a copy of Nex Machina for $4.50. Resogun was one of the first games I finished on the PS4, and I had similar high hopes for Nex Machina after the developers revealed that it was a mash up of Robotron and Smash TV. Jon Blow and I used to burn quarters playing Smash TV at Berkeley, and I had fond memories of the experience.

Nex Machina is a twin stick shooter. You run around the level, rescuing humans and defeating enemies with an upgrade-able main weapon and several side weapons that are all too short range to be of any use to me. You can also do a dash that lets you run through enemies and obstacles. The game is difficult: even on Rookie mode I simply could not get through the first series of stages until I'd mastered dash. Even then it was a bit of a slog.

The game has a local co-op mode. Unfortuantely, it's so hard that I couldn't help Bowen out and he ended up dying a lot, which made it a lot less fun for both of us. I eventually sat down and ploughed through all 5 worlds (it takes a couple of hours), but by the time I was finished I didn't feel like going back and playing it again at high difficulty levels, which was not how I felt about Resogun.

Nex Machina hasn't sold well, causing the developer to say that they're not going to make any more arcade-style games. I'm not surprised. None of the style and verve of Smash TV is there, and it's difficulty curve is too challenging. There's also times when I couldn't tell what on the screen was a safe place to step on and what was not, indicating that the game needed a bit more of a tutorial or needed to be more consistent in its use of colors.

The best thing I can say about the game is that it's short and so won't overstay its welcome, but that's not saying a lot.

Review: Planet Earth II

The original Planet Earth was the must-buy BluRay demo disk that heralded the world of 1080p high resolution screens. Planet Earth II looked like it would do the same job for the UHD/4K TV set. I still haven't upgraded to 4K yet, so I simply checked out the BluRay discs from the local library, where the hold queue was surprisingly good and the discs arrived in surprisingly good shape.

One reason for not buying the series during an Amazon sale was that I was afraid that it'd be a rehash of the original. By and large, that's not turned out to be true. There are a few sequences in the rainforests and deserts episodes that were a little bit too familiar, but the rest of it felt original.

In particular, the last episode, Cities was a revelation. And it's well worth buying that one episode watch if you're not interested in the usual nature shows. Time and time again when I watch episodes in this series I'm reminded that these are the best nature photographers/cinematographers on the planet. No doubt they'll go on sale frequently and you'll get a chance to acquire them at a good price, but if you recently got a 4K/HDR set and want something to show it off this is definitely the series to get.

Reread: Watership Down

I remember reading Watership Down as a teenager. I remembered that it was about rabbits or bunnies, but not much else. Despite Bowen's love of bunnies, when I went to the library, the book was so thick and intimidating that I didn't even bother checking it out to read to him. I tried the movie version, but 5 minutes into it Bowen was bored.

Eva Silverstein's a much better parent than I am, so on Bowen's birthday, she bought me the Kindle version of the book, which forced me to read it to Bowen. Bowen, being Bowen, is making me read a chapter of the book to him nearly every night, which indicates that the story is at least interesting to me. We're about 70% into the book, but I couldn't help it one night and just plowed all the way to the end, so even if Bowen hasn't finished the book, I have.

I can see now why the book didn't leave a deep impression on me. Much like Lord of the Rings, it's full of digressions, side-trips, and irrelevancies all merged into the narrative. The side stories do serve a purpose, granting the world of the bunnies a deeper folklore and worldview with history all of its own, but also distracted me from the main storyline, making me impatient to skip over them and go on to the "what happens next?" It also turns out that the plot of the novel is based on the mythology of the founding of Rome, which has no resonances for me, since I didn't have a classical background. The chapter start quotations are also clearly targeted for an adult audience, going over Bowen's head. But I read them all to Bowen anyway!

Each of the bunnies have a distinct personality, and according to Richard Adams came from research he did by reading non-fiction books. The rules he set when writing the novel was that the rabbits would never do something that was physically impossible for real bunnies to actually do, even though the behavior of many of the bunnies in the book are quite unnatural for bunnies.

I have a hard time recommending this book. I think the story itself is OK, but the structure and pace don't make for easy reading to a 6 year old, and there are many places that are a slog. Nevertheless, Bowen is loving the book. I'm dreading that when I get to the end he'll make me start all over! Clearly I'm not made out of the stuff that Jo Walton is.

Review: Critical Business Skills for Success

I checked out Critical Business Skills for Success from the library. Until January 10th, Audible has a deal where you pay $5/month for 3 months for an Audible subscription. If you sign up for this deal, this audio course should be one of the audible books you use your credits on. I plan on doing so, despite having listened to the entire 30 hour course. It is that good.

Have you ever wondered about how to read a balance sheet? Income statement? Wondered why people make a big deal out of free cash flow? Curious about how an accountant could have figured out that Enron was running a big fraudulent operation through forensic accounting? The tools needed for you to do so are in this course. What if you're an engineer and always wondered what a marketing person is supposed to be doing with his time? Is marketing just about creating and placing ads? The answers are here. What is a business strategy? How should investment decisions be made? How do you get the best out of your reports? There's a sequence of lectures here about this as well.

As an investor, I frequently hear people discuss investments without an understanding of what finance is, and how to use it to analyze a business. Just that alone would be worth the price of this audio course. Throw in the rest of it (the weakest part of the lecture series are the ones about HR --- everything else is pure gold), and this lecture series is worth every minute of your time.

Highly recommended for everyone. Go buy it.

Review: Varmilo VA87M Wired Keyboard

Writers and programmers spend all their time in front of a keyboard. In fact, most of our output is directly driven by the keyboard, rather than the mouse/pen that artists typically depend on. I'd gotten  by on Logitech keyboards in recent years, mostly because my wife had complained about how noisy my previous mechanical keyboards are. But in recent years, there's been new keyboards with Cherry Brown Mx switches that are quieter while retaining the brilliant mechanical feel that I loved so much in the old IBM keyboards.

The Varmilo VA87M is one of them. I completely screwed up when I order this. Massdrop occasionally has VB87M Bluetooth Keyboards available for sale, but I checked the price against the VA87M on Amazon, and decided that Amazon was a better deal, completely neglecting to realize that the one on Amazon was the wired model, rather than the Bluetooth model. Since you can get Cherry Brown mechanical keyboards for much less than the Amazon price, I probably wouldn't have bought the keyboard otherwise.

Once I got the keyboard, however, I changed my mind. First of all, a bluetooth keyboard would have issues interrupting the computer during startup to get into the BIOS menu, for instance. Also, switching between computers (e.g., when I wanted to switch between my desktop and laptop) would have required repairing the keyboard, which is much more painful than unplugging a USB cable and plugging it to a different machine.

Once plugged in, the keyboard has a great light action feel while retaining the tactile feedback that only a mechanical keyboard can give. I also like it that the tops of the keys are blank, so over time they won't fade. From a distance, it looks like the entire keyboard is blank, and my wife asked how I could type without seeing the keys on the keyboard (which I could always do because I'm a touch typist, but my wife never noticed before). There are a few annoyances in the keyboard, largely to do with setup --- the keyboard can be setup to disable the Windows key, for instance, but doing so takes an arcane combination of keypresses that I somehow enabled by accident. The lighting is a worthless feature --- I don't know why anyone uses it. The keyboard is not noticeably loud enough to bother my wife, which is a big plus.

All in all, there are cheaper mechanical keyboards out there, but none so small (this one eliminates the number keypad). The wireless version of this probably isn't as good when it comes to response time and the convenience. I do wish that Logitech would make a Unifying mechanical keyboard around this size, but their PMs probably don't listen to people like me, so in the mean time, this is probably your best choice.

Recommended.

First Impressions: Garmin Index Smartscale

The most dangerous aspect of the human mind is its ability to deceive itself. I discovered that when I was done with my weight loss program: all through the years when I was gaining weight, I rationalized that this was a good thing. Even when I shot way past my goal. It took my doctor and a nutritionist to tell me that what I was doing was just plain wrong.

The thing about weight is that it fluctuates naturally, depending on your state of hydration, what time of day it is, and whether you just recently ate. That makes it easy for you to rationalize it. Even if you have the discipline to write down your weight every time you weigh yourself, it's easy to lie to yourself and say: "Oh, that was because I just drank a ton of water." A smart scale is the way around this: it's always at home, and you can always make yourself weigh in say, before your daily shower. Over time, the trendline and graphs will keep you from lying to yourself about your weight gain. (Or if you're not gaining weight, you'll stop being neurotic about the weight fluctuations on every weigh in!)

For better or worse, I'm part of the Garmin ecosystem, as opposed to the Apple or Fitbit ecosystems. The reason is fairly basic: Garmin is for athletes, the other devices are for people who want to be "fit." (i.e., they'll never do a bike ride for more than 4-5 hours and still expect their devices to still be powered on). That meant that the Garmin Index Smart Scale is the device that will provide weight data to all your devices. This makes the calorie counter more accurate (again, not significant unless you gain or lose a lot of that).

Set against that is a bunch of lackluster reviews, including from DC Rainmaker. (By the way, if you want the short summary of his reviews, just checkout the statement where he says he returns the review unit. If he says he'll run out and buy it from a retail store, then it's good, otherwise, it means that he doesn't care for it)

I didn't fully understand the lackluster reviews until I received the unit. Basically, if you're a single person using the scale, it's great. You sync it to your Garmin Connect app on your phone, answer basic questions about yourself (height, approximate weight, etc so that the BMI calculations are correct), and you're done. If you're setting it up for a family, however, it's counter-intuitive in multiple ways that are designed to drive you nuts. Your family members cannot add the device to their Garmin Connect themselves. What they must do is to connect their account to yours (an obscure, unituitive process that requires them to search for your Garmin Connect handle, and then request to be your friend, and then you have to accept), and then YOU have to invite them to use the Smartscale, after which THEY have to accept the invitation, and then go on to answer the questions.

Fortunately, I have access to everyone's smartphone, so I went ahead and created accounts for everyone and went through that rigmarole. After that the scale is like magic. In fact, when my wife stepped on for the first time and she saw her initials she said, "Hey wait, how did it know it's me?!!" The scale is fast, just a couple of seconds and it'll give you all the details like BMI, body fat percentage, amount of your weight is water weight, how much muscle mass you have, and how much bone mass you have. It then updates your Garmin Connect account wirelessly, and you're done. No hassle.

The other big issue is of course, how durable/reliable the device was. I bought the refurbished version from Amazon (and it looks brand new) with a credit card that extends the manufacturer's warranty by a year just to be safe. But now that I've gone through the setup, I think I understand how people can fail to set it up for a family and rather than deal with the hassle of figuring out all the vagaries, would rather just return it to Amazon. Oh yeah, if you buy refurbished, the first thing to do after installing the batteries is to hold down the factory reset button for 5 seconds.

If you've read with this so far, you now have all the information to take advantage of the certified refurbished prices on the scale on Amazon. It really is a decent device, just silly expensive for what it does, but if you're like me, Garmin has their hooks in you nice and deep and no other Smart Scale will integrate with the ecosystem anyway, so you might as well just buy it. At least, if you're the type of person who's capable of lying to themselves about weight gain (and my history has proved that I am!), a Smart Scale is probably a good idea.

Recommended.

First Impressions: Playstation Gold Wireless Headset

I had returned the Playstation Platinum headset because for $120, it just didn't offer great bang for the buck. But when the Gold headset went on sale around $60, I picked one up because it's nice to have a wireless headset. (Note that you can plug your headphones into the Dualshock 4 on the PS4, but you're not going to get the nice virtual surround sound) Evidently, lots of people liked the deal too, since Amazon's now out of stock on the headset.

Just like the Platinum headset, you get a dongle which you plug into the PS4 (but is also compatible with the PS3 and your PC/laptop/desktop as well!) and then you turn on the headset and now you get virtual surround sound. It's not as nice as the magic Sony put into their VR headset, which granted really amazing localization, but when turned on, it does make even the movies on Horizon Zero Dawn sound better, so I see no reason to turn it off. The battery lasts about the same as the Dualshock 4. There are people who complain about that, but I don't get that much time in front of the PS4, so I don't.

For the price, you get nice sound (though nothing like the Sony X1000XM2, but that doesn't give you surround sound, nor does it pair wirelessly with your PS4). I returned the Platinum because it wasn't good enough value, but I'm not going to return the Gold headset.

Recommended.

Review: Runaways Vol 4-6

After I read the first run of Runaways, I picked up from the library, volumes 4-6: True Believers, Escape to New York, and Parental Guidance. Because the artists were changed dramatically between volumes, there's no consistent art style.

The biggest problem with the series is that since the group had accomplished their original goals (preventing their parents from destroying the world in the previous collection), the new story arcs aren't nearly as fresh or compelling. There's some intra-group rivalry/jealousy/romance, but none handled as maturely as you might like. The leader is (for a change) a half-asian woman, but the art style is such that you can't really tell if she's Asian.

The Escape to New York has a great segment when the Runaways meet Spiderman, who's cooler in this comic than in practically any other comics where he teams up with other heroes. Finally, in the 6th volume Vaughan decides to go for the comic book cliche of resurrecting an old villain. I guess this is where the book jumped the shark. Tom Galloway says the book stays good until Joss Whedon takes over, so I'll keep reading for a bit.

First Impressions: Playstation VR Skyrim Bundle

For a limited time, you can get the Playstation VR Skyrim Bundle for $334.89. My brother got me one as a late birthday present. This is the bundle to get, because unlike other SKUs, it includes the second generation VR headset, which features HDR passthrough for the day when I get a HDR-capable TV. The move controllers are also improved over the ones I got for the PS3, since they take a microUSB charging port instead of the older mini USB model. It also comes with a camera.

When I built my PC this summer, my initial thinking was that I'd eventually get a VR capable GPU and then run VR through the PC. This didn't pan out, because the cryptomining craze has driven GPU prices beyond what I'm willing to pay. Furthermore, recent announcements (such as for the Fallout 4 VR) now specify that the minimum system requirements are such that you'll need at least a GTX 1070 to run them, with the GTX 1080 as the recommended requirement. The price of such video cards is such that you can buy a PS4, and the PSVR for almost the price of just the GPU alone. And of course, things being the way they are, the requirements will keep ratcheting up. By contrast, the PS4 is a stable platform and content released for it will not require better hardware until the PS5 shows up.

I bought a few games in addition to Skyrim, so I'd have an interesting collection of content to play. All of them cost around $10 or so during the black friday season. And the nice thing about buying discs is that you can resell them if the content isn't what you want. I picked up VR Worlds and Eagle Flight. My Playstation Plus subscription also gave me RIGs and Rush of Blood.

VR Worlds was surprisingly fun, with London Heist being the centerpiece. I think I finally realized how my reaction to a VR goggle was different when I started dodging bullets and flinching. I wonder if that goes away with exposure, but definitely felt different from watching a video. Rush of Blood was surprisingly hard, but also gave me a great sensation of actually being in a roller coaster. While the graphics are definitely dialed back from what the PS4 is capable of when displaying on a regular TV, it's definitely "good enough" for presence.

Eagle Flight was surprisingly disappointing. I felt less like flying than like operating a remote drone. That's because the UI is in conflict with the game design. The UI wants you to turn your head, but the idiot game designers at Ubisoft decided that the game would be more fun if the challenges required you to make tight turns. Because to do so would hurt your neck, they encourage you to tilt your head instead of turning your head to make turns, which is unnatural and difficult to train yourself to do, and results in you not feeling like you're a bird in the sky.

Rush of Blood was fun, but too intense to play in more than short bursts. Skyrim looks like an ultra-long RPG and will take me a while to get around to doing.

I also found the page on the best free apps on PSVR. Both my wife and Bowen enjoyed Invasion (also viewable as a youtube video), the Spiderman: Homecoming experience, and Alumette. What's very apparent with these VR videos is that if something comes within reach, human beings wearing VR goggles will want to try to touch it. Which means that the best true VR experiences are games using the move controllers, not VR videos. There's also apparently a ton of VR videos on YouTube, so lots of free content.

The PSVR social screen is also great. You can have a conversation with the VR user and comment on what they're seeing, since what they're seeing is also projected to the TV, etc. (And as a parent you can monitor your little kid's VR use, not that Bowen's allowed very much of it)

Regardless, the device, while expensive, seems to have a lot of content that's available fairly cheaply, and is surprisingly comfortable to wear and use. If you already have a PS4, picking this up is far cheaper than even buying the cheapest GPU + VR headset available for the PC platform. Clearly this is the way to go, until GPU supply catches up with the apparent infinite demand generated by cryptomining.

Review: Runaways: The Complete Collection

The only reason I own a tablet is to read comic books on it. For everything else, my phone or my Kindle is a far better device. One of the best apps on the tablet is Hoopla, which lets you check out comics from the library (limited to 3 a month) and read them. The UI is just as good as the Kindle/Comixology app, and  you can't beat the price.

Runaways: The Complete Collection (which you can checkout as 3 books from Hoopla) is a comic set in the Marvel Universe. In it, a bunch of teens discover that their parents are evil. Not just the evil you regularly expect parents to do, but real-life supervillains intent on destroying the world. The teens discover that their heritage means that they have powers (what a shock), and then set out to right the wrongs their parents intent to wreak upon the world.

The art is transparent, nothing fancy. The characters a good, if a little stereotyped (though the plot twists are pretty great, and not as predictable as I expected), and like a good dungeon master, the story provides a good explanation of why the other superheroes in the Marvel universe aren't taking care of this.

Even better, the book completes an entire arc, rather than dragging on and on without resolving the teens' relationships with their parents. But the whole thing was so well done that I went ahead and started placing holds on the paper copies of the following books in the series from the library. That makes this one of the few good comics I've read in recent  years. Recommended.

Review: Uncharted - The Lost Legacy

The Uncharted series of video games are pretty much movies with a choose-your-own-action-sequence game mechanic. Uncharted: The Last Legacy doesn't deviate from the series' charter, and was originally conceived as downloadable content for Uncharted 4, but turned into a game.

As with Uncharted 4, the graphics and art direction is gorgeous. The run time is about 10 hours, but features perfect pacing, switching from traversal to exploration to the usual gun fights, feels like  a much shorter game, which is a very good sign. You're never tired from overuse of any of the game mechanics, and no, Nathan Drake never shows up as part of the game.

The story is basically that of a buddy movie, with female protagonists instead of male ones. Yes, the game passes the Bechdel test. The plot is rather thin, with a MacGuffin, the usual action set pieces (which are fun to watch and play), and a large open-world-style exploration area. The puzzles are usually no challenge, but even if they were, the game detects your level of frustration and lets you skip those.

Lots of game critics complain about game length being short. I don't. A short game length means that I'll actually get to play the game to the end. That's a feature, not a bug. As such, this game comes highly recommended as one of the few games I actually finished this year.

Review: Sky Force Anniversary (PS3,PS4,PS Vita)

We got Sky Force Anniversary as part of the PS Plus subscription. It ticked all the nostalgia boxes that I had growing up playing vertical shoot them ups. You have an upgradeable ship with parts you can buy, and lots of things to shoot at.

The repeated play model requires that you replay levels to earn medals and make progress, and by the time I was done I was pretty sick of the game, but the game itself was well done, and I was surprised to learn that it started as a  smartphone game as there was no onerous in-app purchasing, loot  boxes, etc.

The game has cross-save, meaning you can pick it up on the PS4, PS Vita, or PS3, and save games automatically carry over from system to system, which is a great feature and was ultimately what made it possible for us to finish the game on long plane flights, etc. It also has couch co-op, which makes many levels that are too hard for a single player a lot easier. Too few games have all these features.

Recommended.

First Impressions: EOS M5 and EF 50mm/1.8 STM

I wasn't actively looking to replace our EOS M3. But Canon was blowing out refurbished EOS M5s that included an adapter and several accessories (including a body jacket and several straps) for just over $600, as well as a 50mm/1.8 STM for $85, so I picked up the camera as a birthday gift for my wife, selling the old EOS M3 and my old 50mm/1.8 II on eBay for about $350 or so after fees, making it a relatively cheap upgrade. Since the battery is compatible with the older M3,

The big draw is the electronic viewfinder, which is a great tool for when it's too bright to use the LCD screen. The latency is high enough that it's noticeably not as good as an optical viewfinder in DSLRs, but hey, that's why this thing is tiny and the DSLRs are huge.

The autofocus is significantly quicker than the M3, though not so good that there aren't missed shots, and the occasional hunting in low light conditions. Together with the 50mm/1.8 STM, however, this thing takes amazing portraits very beautiful background blurring:

In fact, my wife likes it so much that most of the time she shoots with just the 50mm/1.8 STM, ignoring the 22mm/2 and the 11-22mm zoom. In practice, we'll probably travel with just the 22mm/2 and the 50mm/1.8 and only bring the zooms when we're not constrained by weight.

For landscapes, the camera's not too shabby either, and works well even when backlit. My only wish is for Canon to integrate GPS in the camera (today that has to be done using a smartphone app and the camera's bluetooth connection, but I can't remember to do that).

I wouldn't pay the near $1000 retail price asked by Canon, but for the price we paid (especially since we had all the existing Canon kit, and the upgrade was painless by selling on eBay), it was a good deal. Recommended.

2017 Puerto Vallarta

We visited Puerto Vallarta over thanksgiving break.

This was Bowen's first chance to try his new Snorkel Mask and adjustable fins in open water. We got him a snorkel mask because he'd forgotten how to use a regular snorkel, and had bitten off the bite valve on the snorkel he had anyway, which meant that I'd have to buy a new device anyway. Snorkel masks are useless for diving since you can't equalize (can't pinch the nose through that hard plastic), but realistically, he wasn't going to dive deep enough to do that anyway. Unfortunately, the snorkeling wasn't actually all that great: compared to the Carribean, the water is murky, though there's plenty of wildlife, the cold water meant that Bowen got cold in about 15 minutes, and so missed the sightings of the giant manta rays that I got while diving.

We tried ziplining at the Los Veranos Zipline tour. Bowen liked it so much that we did it twice, once on Xiaoqin's birthday.

There were beautiful sunsets and lots of great food, but Boen got an unwanted souvenir: while sliding down the waterslide at a hotel he cut his chin on a decorative fake rock, so he ended up getting 2 stitches on his chin. But he's still able to eat ice cream and doesn't seem too distressed.

We spent lots of time in the swimming pool, and there, Bowen finally learned to duck dive in a swim suit! All in all, nice but not better than a sailing trip in the Carribean or cycling tour anywhere, but you knew I'd say that. I probably wouldn't repeat.

2018 Book Reviews

Books of the Year 2018 have been picked!

Non-fiction

• A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age
• Bigger, Leaner, Stronger
• The Violinist's Thumb
• The Disappearing Spoon
• Balancing On Blue
• Caesar's Last Breath
• The Lost Art of Finding Our Way
• The Year of Living Danishly
• The Nature Fix
• Barking Up The Wrong Tree
• Spring Chicken
• Educated - A Memoir
• The Great Influenza
• Bad Blood
• Leonardo Da Vinci
• Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics
• It's Better Than It Looks
• Spider-man: The Art of the Game
• If Stones could Speak
• Finding Ultra
• Never Split the Difference
• Factfulness
• The Diabetes Code
• The Water Will Come
• How to be a High School Superstar
• Deep Work
• No Apparent Distress
• Blood, Sweat, and Pixels
• American Sniper

Fiction

• Watership Down
• Sea of Rust
• Children of Time
• The Hobbit
• The Tangled Lands
• D&D Starter Set
• The Sun is Also a Star
• Atomic City Girls
• Autonomous
• Legends of the Fall
• Airframe
• Crazy Rich Asians
• Dark Matter
• Harriet the Invincible
• Needful Things
• Beauty: A Novel
• Of Mice and Magic
• Words of Radiance
• Ratpunzel
• Free Food for Millionaires
• China Rich Girlfriend
• Whiskerella
• All the Birds in the Sky
• Rich People Problems

Audio Books

• Brain Myths Exploded
• Law School for Everyone
• Stress and Your Body
• How Music Works
• Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and what the Ocean tells us about ourselves
• The Universe from Nothing
• Why You Are Who You Are

Graphic Novels

• Runaways: The Complete Collection (Vol 1)
• Runaways 4-6
• Runaways 7-8
• Greg Rucka's Wonder Woman
• Wonder Woman: Year One
• Batman: Court of Owls
• Oh My Goddess!
• Batman: City of Owls
• Vision: Director's Cut
• Carol Danvers: The Marvel Years
• 5cm per Second
• Monstress

Review: A Mind at Play - How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

A Mind at Play is a biography of Claude Shannon. When I was an intern at Bellcore, his name was often spoken of in reverence, as the person who invented and developed information theory, which the book does a good job of explaining as well as it does the life of Claude Shannon.

The thesis of the book, which is that Shannon uniquely approached the development and engineering of technology as "fun" rather than work, however, doesn't seem to hold. What I got out of the book was that Shannon was cultivated and mentored by various established scientists (including Vannevar Bush), who appreciated his talent. The "fun" part was that Shannon pursued various other hobbies (including juggling and uni-cycling) rather than just the work he was famous for.

It is true that Shannon has long been neglected compared to other luminaries of his age. This book goes a long way towards correcting that. As such it is recommended reading.

2017 Books of the Year

I read 55 books this year, and then on top of that piled on 20 audio books and 9 comic books, which makes this a bumper year for books read. As usual, non-fiction takes the lead in terms of books worth your time.

My book of the year is How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Whether or not you agree with the premise of the book, it's a different approach to understanding emotions and debunking prior models of emotional intelligence and thinking. It's very much well worth your time to read, and will make you a better person. Other books of note include: Hillbilly Elegy, The Undoing Project, and Einstein.

On the fiction side, I really enjoyed My Sister Rosa.It's an outstanding novel about family dynamics as well as an excellent coming-of-age story. It doesn't have the usual happy ending, but in exchange, it grants you unusual insight into what a high functioning sociopath is (and there are many in society), and how to recognize one. It's well worth a read, and even beats out excellent rereads that I did this year like Stories of Your Life.

For Audio Books, I really enjoyed the Medical School for Everyone series. In particular, Pediatrics Grand Rounds would have saved me a lot of angst when my children were smaller, and I encourage every parent to audit it. The other books in the series: Emergency Medicine and Grand Rounds Cases are by the same lecturer and have no overlap, so if you enjoyed that one, you can pick up the others in the series and not fear any repetition.

Alas, I didn't read any comic books this year really worth recommending.

Review: Batman - The Long Halloween

The Long Halloween is a story from the early days of Batman. As Batman stories go, it's pretty good. Early Batman means there aren't that many silly things, like sidekicks, Batgirl, and the rest of the Bat  family. It's also an interesting take on Harvey Dent (aka TwoFace), in fact, easily the best Harvey Dent as portrayed in the comics.

The mystery revolves around the Holiday killer, and who it is. The authors kinda cheated in an improbable fashion (I won't spoil it for you, but I think if you read it you'll not be wondering why I consider the solution to the mystery unsatisfying), but it's one-third fair. (To say more would be to give away the mystery)

The rest of it is a bit cookie cutter. Mildly recommended.

Review: The Sudden Appearance of Hope

The Sudden Appearance of Hope won the world fantasy award for best novel in 2017. I was surprised to discover that this novel was readily available at the local library for a kindle checkout (despite having only one copy), so I proceeded to check it out.

The premise of the novel is that Hope Arden is a woman who cannot be remembered: if you met her, a few minutes after you can't see her any more, you'll have forgotten the encounter. This seems like such a great gimmick. I imagined a novel where the non-memorable woman is metaphor for all the people whom you pass by during the course of the day whom you'll never give a second thought to. Maybe they're too plain, or in the case of us Asian guys who get mistaken for each other by white people, just not considered interesting enough to make an impression. At the very least, it's a nice change from the plethora of vampire/werewolf/night magic fantasy crap that we see all over the place.

Well, I was wrong. There's some philosophizing in the novel, and there's plenty of angsting to go around, but Claire North has gone for the super-thief approach, complete with a full exposition of the limits of her powers (e.g., cameras can still record her appearance, you can still take a picture of her and write notes to yourself to remind you that you saw her, etc). The protagonist is also said to be beautiful by many she encounters (hey, if you're going to go Hollywood, you need to make sure the casting director can hire a big name star for the lead).

The plot revolves around a smart phone app called "Perfection." Perfection is the ultimate app that Google, Facebook, and Snapchat are evolving towards: the ultimate behavioral control and reprogramming app that changes you towards being perfect, making tons of money in the process. Why it exists, what the goals of the organization that launched are, then becomes the focus of the novel.

My problem with the novel is that long parts of it is pretentious, unreadable drivel barely worth skimming. It references Byron, but does nothing with it. There's plenty of stream of consciousness, some of it hints at a cool statement of what it must take to exist in a world where no one can remember you, but all of the characters in the book have no motivations that make any sense to me. The book never explains Hope's special powers (that's OK, it's fantasy), but Hope's antagonists never come up with more sophisticated approaches to trying to capture her either: e.g., machine-based feature recognition, biometric identification, or even simply tracking her via fingerprints. Since Hope frequently travels in countries where people with dark skin are viewed with suspicion, I would have expected racial profiling at the very least!

I finished the book hoping for an ending that somehow justifies the World Fantasy Award. I came away completely unfulfilled and wishing I had the time I'd put into the novel back.

Not recommended.

Review: Batman - The Complete Hush

I finally got around to reading The Complete Hush because of the Kindle Fire. You can download the Hoopla app and with your library, check it out of the library for free. The app does a great job of showing comics and letting you zoom in panel by panel. There's a delay when you switch between horizontal and vertical layouts (the 2-spread pages in comic book pages frequently tempt you into doing this), but otherwise it works great.

The content of the story seemed very familiar. Then I realized that this story was part of what went into the story line for Arkham Knight! I enjoyed the story but it felt a bit rushed and compressed. The weakest part of it was Batman: through the entire story arc, he didn't feel competent and in charge (and that's despite of course his ability to manage Superman). I felt the video game did a better job of portraying Batman than this book did.

First Impressions: Kindle Fire HD8 2016

Kindle Fire HD8 tablets are well known for being cheap. Cheap, however, does not mean good value, and I thought I'd avoid getting the 16GB model since I've had so many struggles with 16GB phones running out of storage. Well, Amazon's currently running a 25% sale on refurbished 2016 Kindle Fire HD8s, which meant I got one for $40. I figured with Amazon's generous return policy I could return it if I didn't like it.

The refurbished model looks indistinguishable from a new one. I booted it up and it was reasonably fast, but what's amazing to me was that when I opened up the storage setting I discovered that it had 12GB free, which was much more than what I'd experienced from similarly sized Android phones. Amazon's done some significant shrinkage on their version of Android.

One of my prior objections to the Kindle Fire tablets were that they didn't have the Google Play store. That's not quite true if you're a technie: there's a well-known way to get the Google Play store on the tablet, and it works just fine. Everything works as you might expect from a tablet.

The shortage of RAM is an issue: these devices come with only 1.5GB of RAM, rather than the 3-4GB that regularly ship with even midrange phones. On the other hand, the device is only driving a 720p display, which meant that even games ran reasonably well. The only times when the device stutters is when you're switching between apps rapidly: garbage collection pauses and app swapping pauses then become apparent.

The reason I bought the tablet was for reading comics: those don't translate well on the Kindle Paperwhite (which I still love, but costs 3X as much as this tablet). Those work great on the Kindle Fire HD8.

Amazon does a better job of integrating SD Card storage than Google does on its phones and tablets. This is important for a consumption tablet that has limited storage. By default, once you install a microSD card, all media gets moved into the card. Not only that, FireOS has retained the old Android feature where apps can also be moved to the external storage, which means that even a 16GB Kindle Fire is usable.

I've often complained that Google's product managers seem to live in a world where internet is everywhere, with unlimited, free bandwidth. Amazon's PMs clearly don't live in that world, which is a great thing for the products. Recommended.

Review: The Innovators

The Innovators is Walter Isaacson's history of the IT industry. It has two theses it argues for: one is that innovation and breakthroughs don't occur in a vacuum: it takes a team to make revolutionary change in industries, and the team could take the form of a company (startup or traditional research lab) or open-source style collaboration, or a partnership.

The time spent on each individual or team is pretty shallow, since Isaacson's covering huge periods of time (from Charles Babbage through the invention of the transistor to the introduction of the world wide web). As someone who worked in publishing, he had his biases, for instance, choosing to focus on blogger but not say, friendster or Facebook.

The book makes the point that the growth of the social networks and interlinked web is the culmination of the vision laid forth by Vannevar Bush's Memex. I wonder how Bush (or for that matter, Isaacson) would have thought of the current revelations that foreign governments did take advantage of the distributed nature of the web to attack American democracy (not that the stage weren't set by various political movements that came before).

The second thesis of the book is that augmented intelligence has won over artificial intelligence. I actually think that it's too early to say that, especially in the light of recent advances in statistical machine learning.

All in all, the book's not up to the standard set by his biographies of Einstein or Jobs, but it still made for decent reading. Mildly recommended.

Review: Gravity Maze

Rekha and Roberto gave Bowen Gravity Maze for his birthday, and this was immediately the most played toy in his birthday present set this year. Since he liked both Rush Hour and Laser Maze, this was probably predictable.

The idea behind the puzzle game is that you have a source tower and a target location, and a certain number of pieces with which to build a series of connections such that a ball dropped from the source tower will end up in the target location from the correct direction (the target tower is opened on only one side).

The concept is simple, but the game has several flaws that make it less than perfect:

1. The pieces are finicky, making it easy to dislodge them while placing other pieces. This is true even for an adult, let alone a 6 year old.
2. Some of the solutions are dependent on the height from which the ball is dropped. This has a couple of problems: first, there exist solutions which occasionally solve the puzzle, but don't do so all the time (an indication that this is not the solution the puzzle maker wants you to reach), but there are also solutions which are finicky, meaning if the pieces are not placed firmly or the ball is dropped a bit too low you will not consistently get the ball to hit the target.
3. The colors chosen are very annoying if you're partially colorblind, as I am. The orange/green pieces are not distinguishable, and the subtle differences on the printed cards that differentiate purple and black are so subtle that I frequently have to ask Bowen what the colors are whenever he asks me to setup the next puzzle for him. Fortunately, he's soon reaching the age where he can setup puzzles for himself, but some of the setups involve one puzzle tower on top of another, and he doesn't quite have the coordination to do it yet. This is yet another example of how the world of UI designers just doesn't seem to have enough color-blind people for people like me.

Bowen likes the game a lot, and plays with it a lot. But this is one clear case where the user experience would be improved if the physical pieces were all thrown out the window and replaced with a computer simulation/app instead. Computer reality is much more well-behaved than this finicky design. Avoid if you or your child is clumsy, and avoid if you or your child is even a little bit color-blind.

Nevertheless, it's a great concept that maybe someone else will refine and execute better than ThinkFun has.

Review: Little Tikes Jump 'n Slide Bouncer

Someone last year gave us a Little Tikes Jump 'n Slide Bouncer. I'm not normally in the habit of reviewing kid's toys, but this one gave us a ton of use. With a long power cord, the blower for this bouncer still requires a power strip: the reason is because the wall wart is nasty and long, and wouldn't fit into any weather protected wall sockets, so you have to use a power strip for it. Fortunately, the power draw is relatively low (400W maximum). It comes with several stakes for holding down the bounce house on grass/lawn, but since we usually use it on a wooden deck or concrete we rarely use those.

In use, the bounce house mostly works great, but Bowen can reach the roof and pull it down. Similarly, Boen has discovered if he slides against the walls the roof will come down and he can grab it as well. For whatever reason the kids think this is great fun, but so far after a good 6 months of use the toy has still not fallen apart.

For Bowen's birthday party, we decided we'd rent a generator and run this jump house instead of renting a bigger jump house. But renting a generator cost $200, while a Tailgator from harbor freight cost only $109. I tried shopping from Amazon, but because of California's air quality regulations and because most generator companies can't be bothered to present their California certification to Amazon, you can't buy such low end devices from them. Along with the generator, you'll have to get 2 cycle engine oil and fuel stabilizer. Since the Tailgator was good for 700W it was perfectly matched with the bouncer. (Note: the generator has a 25 hour break-in period, during which you're not supposed to exceed 50% of the maximum wattage the generator's supposed to provide, so 400W is about right)

The generator requires more maintenance than you would expect: you're supposed to run it every 3 months for at least 15 minutes, but since one use of it has already paid for itself I'm not too concerned about the longevity.

Most kid's toys get played once or twice and then are left to languish. This one gets used over and over, so I recommend it if you have the room.

Review: Two HandGrinders

Because of my Aeropress review, I received a free sample of the Handground Precision Coffee Grinder for review. This is a large (not really portable) grinder with an easy grinding action. The device oozes high build quality, complete with a warning not to grind with the grinder empty as this could damage the ceramic burr mill.

Unfortunately, I don't think this grinder is very good for Aeropress users. Even when setting the grinder to the finest grind setting, the grounds produced are very coarse, and will not have much flavor unless you use very hot water or leave the grounds in the water for a long time, which defeats the purpose of using the Aeropress. I think this grinder would work very well for those who use the French press.

Not recommended for Aeropress users, and I was quite disappointed as otherwise it's great. I'm back to using my old Cusinart. And yes, that I'm writing a negative review is why I'll never get a free unit again.

By contrast, I bought a cheap Macinino/Bassani Burr Grinder to replace my older Hario Mini Mill, which had died. While nowhere as elegantly designed as either of the alternatives, this one could grinder coffee to powder thin (not that you should do this), which in turn delivered flavorful coffee, much more so than the Handground, and on par with my Cusinart. If you're on a budget, this is the one to get!

My prices have gone up!

In recent days, I've had a spate of clients for my compensation negotiation service. In all cases, I've managed to raise my client's pay by at least $10,000, and usually by several multiples of that (in one case, by an order of magnitude). While I would like to help every engineer, it's clear to me that I've been pricing my services too low.

Effective today, my services now run $5,000 per negotiation, with a $1,000 retainer. Even at this price, you will find that I add much more value than my asking price. If you've already engaged me in an active negotiation, rest assured that this increase in price does not apply to you --- you've been grandfathered into the old rate. Keep in mind that most recruiters, etc. work on the other side: for the employer. Google, Facebook, and other companies pay 30% of an engineer's first year's salary in exchange for a head-hunter's services. I'm getting paid a pittance by comparison, but I sleep much better at night working for an individual contributor/engineer than working for a corporation.

If you can't afford $1,000 up front, buying my book is much cheaper and the time spent reading it (provided you're a high quality engineer) would easily make enough money to afford my services at the next go-around.

Thanks to all my clients, past, present and future. I don't like to see engineers short changed, and I'm happy to have helped you out in any way.