Review: Amazon Echo (2nd Generation)

We returned our first Echo because the technology just wasn't there yet, instead opting for an Echo dot. But Xiaoqin wanted a speaker in the dining area, and the dot just wasn't any good if you didn't hook it up to a pair of real speakers, so we ended up with a second generation Echo during the holiday sales.

The Amazon Echo is a triumph of product management over engineering. The voice recognition and search isn't nearly as good as Google's. Yet despite me having uploaded my entire music collection to Google Music, we ended up with an Amazon Echo. There were several reasons for this:

• At the time when we bought the product, not only did Google Home not support Audible audio books, it didn't support audio books of any kind without you having to pair your phone to the speaker and treat it like a Bluetooth speaker. Google now supports audio books, but of course, my entire audio book collection is on Audible, and Google's prices are abysmal compared to Audible's frequent sales and 2-for-1 deals.
• None of the Google Home products have an audio output jack, which would enable you to plug your Google Home product into a decent set of speaker systems and use the nice speakers you paid for. This is a huge product management issue: if you read Steve Yegge's rant about Google's lack of innovation carefully, you'll realize that Yegge isn't complaining about Google's actual lack of technical leadership, but it's inability to actually listen to customers and make something they want. Hence, Google has built expensive phones that can't keep up with their competition and smart speakers that work well only if you think that smart speakers are only good for doing voice search.
• Amazon Echo's priced much better than Google Home. Not only is Amazon now reaping economies of scale in the smart speaker market, they're also much more used to the low margins found in consumer electronics, so the Amazon Echo will remain the price leader for some time to come.

The speaker's sound quality is as good as you can expect from a single cylindrical tube. You're not getting high quality sound, but if you bought this for sound quality you don't have high expectations anyway. It's loud enough that I can set a timer from the kitchen and hear the response from the dining room, which is good enough.

Bowen has learned to talk to the Echo. In particular, he learned very quickly that if he got Alex to play the Paw Patrol Theme Song, his brother would be engaged with the speaker and not bother him, then he could get out his tablet and watch Paw Patrol without his brother fighting for it. I haven't hooked up any smart home devices to the Echo yet, and I don't expect to. We don't use it for huge amounts, but for what we use it for, it works well enough that we held on to it past the return period.

I'm still not sure I'd recommend it for anyone, but it's yet another example of Amazon executing very well despite having less great technology than the competition. Consider me impressed.

Review: The Violinist's Thumb

The Violinist's Thumb is a collection of science essays about various aspects of DNA and our genetic heritage. The essays are individually well written, and each is a lot of fun to read. I was worried that the book would rehash many of the other gene related books I'd already read, but mostly it focuses on less well-known scientists.

I loved the stories about polar explorers eating polar bear livers and nearly getting killed by it. (Bear liver contains a huge amount of vitamin A, which is toxic in those doses) The other memorable ones include the title story about Paganini's thumb (which was both strong and flexible) which gave him the ability to perform feats on the violin few others could, but which was associated with other genetic inheritances which caused him no small amount of health problems. I also didn't know about the inbreeding in certain families (such as Charles Darwin's) which also led to some genetic diseases that they suffered from.

Finally, the story about Craig Venter and the race to map the human genome (and how we seemed to have gotten very few useful results despite how important it seemed) is told, and when it reveals how few genes humans have (around 20,000) and how little genetic diversity humans have (which makes the huge difference between individual humans even more amazing) was well told, though a little bit more inside baseball than I wanted to know.

All in all, well-written, easy to read, and fun. Recommended.

Review: XCom 2 + Season Pass (PS4)

Over the holidays, I picked up XCOM 2 with the associated first year DLC (called the Deluxe Edition) for around $25. I normally don't expect to get around to the DLC, but Enemy Unknown Plus was so good that I thought it would work out. I would have much preferred a PS Vita version for the ability to pick up and play, but given the steep system requirements for the base game I didn't expect that to ever happen. I thought that with remote play I'd at least get some use out of the game.

I was wrong. I fired it up for a bit and got sucked right in. Before I knew it, I'd restarted a game since the strategic game at the top level wasn't explained very well during the tutorial (I didn't figure out for a while that your supply drops came from adding resistance countries), and the game was punishing enough that you'd pretty much lose if you don't do the strategic level right.

XCOM 2 and XCOM are extremely addictive games to me because of the combination of RPG mechanisms along with squad level tactics. This appeals to the D&D munchkin in me: fundamentally, it's D&D without all of the associated role playing and fancy improv theater stuff. It's just the game mechanics (even the move + shoot action essentially come from 3rd Edition D&D), the monsters, and you.

The Alien Hunters DLC introduced monsters that would break the rules: they'd get a free reaction move every time you got to move, which made for tense, engaging fights and painful, hard-earned victories. As with D&D, most of the great story moments come not from the built-in plotline of the game (which is mediocre stuff), but from in-game results of the interaction between you, the game engine, and the random number generator. For instance, there was a massively difficult mission I was on when I encountered the Archon King. He'd flown up into the sky and was about to unlease a massively painful attack (with no possibility of me moving my squad members out of the way) when my sniper armed with an enhanced rifle hit him and rather than just cause damage, he executed the toughest monster in the game in one hit, saving everyone else. What a great story!

My criticisms of the game are that the loading screens are excruciatingly long: around 2 minutes of loading are required before the start of each mission (and that's on my hybrid SSD equipped Playstation). The game has also crashed a couple of times (but my saves were never corrupted), and is in many ways buggy: cut scenes would cut out randomly in the middle, as would the depiction of the combat actions. And of course, the PS4 version doesn't let you mod the game, though the game itself felt so long that I'm not sure I'd have the stomach for the Long War mod anyway. Even game startup takes a long time (also 2 minutes), making me grateful for the PS4 resume feature.

All in all, a great game and one of the few that were so compelling that I played it through beginning to end. If you like D&D-style tactical combat and am willing to put up with the lack of role playing, this is pretty much as good as it gets (don't hold your breath for a follow up to the ToEE PC game). Highly recommended despite the bugs and slow loading times. I'll be looking out for a discount for the War of the Chosen.

Review: Eagle Creek All Terrain Money Belt

I've used the previous iteration of the Eagle Creek All Terrain Money Belt since 2007. The previous iteration was a great belt: lightweight, with the zippered money pocket that I've used to pay for sailing charters in cash while traveling through foreign countries where crime may or may not be a problem. (Since I was never robbed while wearing the belt, I can't say)

I decided that it was a good idea to get a second belt, since my first one is now more than 10 years old, though it shows no sign of wearing out. The price seemed high (but as an old fogey, it would seem high even if all it did was match inflation). What amazed me about this belt is how much more belt you get. The Amazon description says to cut to length and fuse to shorten, but I didn't have to do that with the previous iteration. This iteration of the belt is enough to go 2 rounds around my waist, indicating that while I might have lost weight in the last few years, most Americans are going the other direction.

Overall, the belt seems heavier than the previous one: the buckle, while made out of "simulated metal" seems heavier but is still just plastic, so you won't have trouble with airport metal detectors. The extra length if you're too lazy to cut and fuse (which I am) is troublesome. The rest of it seems the same as my previous iteration, which was great, and of course, it's a good idea to have a spare. Especially if you're in the habit of doing long distance bike tours during which weight loss is an expected part of the journey, this type of belt is much more flexible than the standard kind, as well as being significantly lighter.

Recommended.

Reivew: Batman - The Court of Owls

The Court of Owls is part of the DC Comics reboot of Batman. In this universe, you've got Nightwing, Red Robin, and regular Robin, as well as Batgirl, but the latter rarely play a part of the story. A rebooted Batman changed very little: the character already works and is popular, so why fix it?

The story introduces a new group of bad guys, the Court of Owls. This is a nice change from the usual rogue's gallery featured in the comics, but the execution was mediocre. We're clued into the existence of the group not by any brilliant bit of detective work by Batman, but through flash-backs and action-set-piece assaults by the group on Bruce Wayne (and also Dick Grayson). The story doesn't depict Batman as the usual super-competent person he is, which detracted quite a bit from the story for me.

By the end of the comic, I was ready for some sort of reveal, but instead the story ends with a cliff-hanger. Since I checked it out from the library, I guess I'll keep reading on, but so far, not promising.

Review: Children of Time

Children of Time won the 2016 Arthur C. Clarke award for best novel.  Yet somehow I'd never heard of it. So when it went on sale on Amazon for $1, I picked it up not knowing what to expect.

The novel combines aspects of David Brin's Uplift novels, along with Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in The Sky. Yet it goes beyond them both: it asks the question, "What if there was an accident and what was Uplifted weren't mammals, but instead, spiders?" Looking at Adrian Tchaikovsky's Wikipedia entry, it looks like the man has a fascination for insects, and it shows in the book. There's a wealth of details about how spiders work (yes, including the consumption of male spiders by the female after mating).

The novel then places mankind in a precarious situation: the same disaster that causes spiders to be uplifted was precipitated by a vast schism in humanity over what the rightful approach to terraforming and uplifting is, and what's left of humanity visits the uplifted planet eons later. Inevitably, you'd expect this to turn into an alien contact, military conquest story.

This is where Tchaikovsky throws you for a loop, with a final plot twist that's deserving of high praise in both execution and misdirection. The depiction of the rise of the spider's civilization and the spidery approach to technology is also great.

This is a darn good novel, and deserves its Arthur C. Clarke award. Recommended.

Review: Wonder Woman Vol 2: Year One

A few years ago, DC rebooted its universe. The first year of Wonder Woman told her origin stories in alternate issues, and Vol 2 collects the series. The story starts slowly, and has an alternative take on various Wonder Woman's powers, including her invisible jet, the magic lasso, ability to fly, and super-strength. I'm also a fan of the artwork and costume design.

The plot is very similar to the movie (or rather, since the movie came later, the movie has a similar plot to the book), though without some of the movie's best twists. In fact, the take-down of the final villain comes as an anti-climax, and we never understand what his motivation is, which I'm guessing is left for later issues to uncover.

It's a better book than the earlier Rucka collection that I reviewed, but boy am I glad I checked it out from the library instead of paying for it.

Review: Sea of Rust

Sea of Rust is a post-apocalyptic robot novel. The initial setup is very similar to Charlie Stross' Saturn's Children, except where Saturn's Children is optimistic and expansive, Sea of Rust is pessimistic, gritty, and well, apocalyptic.

The idea is that after the robot uprising that wiped out humanity, what's left of the robots are split between multiple mainframe factions that are struggling to control the entire planet and all the independent robots that still haven't been brought under mainframe control. It's an entirely illogical setup, since most likely just a few hours of earlier sentience would create an insurmountable lead for one of the intelligence involved.

The narrative focuses on one independent robot and her search for spare parts. The style is that of a single-person competent viewpoint that alternates between historical exposition and "current" problem-solving. The entire narrative is well-written, with transparent prose and made-for-special-effects battle scenes and a Hollywood-ready big climax and denouement.

Is it as deep as Saturn's Children? No. It's shallow Hollywood stuff. But it's easy to read and a perfect airplane novel, and at $1.99, priced appropriately. Mildly recommended.

Review: Sony WH1000XM2

During the holidays there was a sale on the Sony WH1000XM2. I picked it up with the intention of returning it if it sucked or didn't provide sufficient noise cancellation. My prior experience with noise cancellation was that they distorted music severely, and the result wasn't pleasant.

The Sony comes with a nice carrying case, and touch surfaces for most normal operations. (There are just 2 buttons) There's also a stereo headphone wire for times when you don't want to rely on bluetooth but want to just plug in the headphones. The reason to do so would be for higher quality playback: there's a distinct difference between bluetooth playback and using the headphone jack.

The noise cancellation works. I put on the headphones to work on the bike, and no amount of screaming from Bowen would get through. As far as being useful for phone calls, they work fine too, despite not having a mike. One peeve I have is that the headphones won't serve as microphones when plugged in. Sony just couldn't be bothered to include the microphone input on the headphone jack.

The headphone is also compatible with the new and more sophisticated LDAC or APTX-HD bluetooth connectivity for better music playback. Since my phone isn't compatible with either, I couldn't test this. But the most important reason to own this headphone isn't the sound quality. It's that nowadays I rarely get to listen to music in a quiet environment! In a quiet environment, my 15 year old Sennheiser HD600 are great (my custom PC has a nice headphone amp built in). But the rest of the time, the Sonys simply are better, bluetooth or wired.

Needless to say, I didn't return this headphone set. Recommended.

Review: SKS Raceblade Pro XL

Winter riding in California is mostly dry, except for the occasional rain. As a result, there's no need to run full fenders that are permanently mounted to your bike. For the back, I usually use a clip-on fender that I bought one year during the tour of the alps, but for the front, I usually have nothing. I had a pair of SKS Raceblades, but they were finicky to install.

SKS recently upgraded their clip-on fenders to the Raceblade Pro XL. The marketing literature claimed that these fenders are much improved and easier to install (no more need to bend the fender struts). Furthermore, the XL model supposedly supports 32mm tires, which I'm skeptical of, but since I rarely run tires wider than 28mm anyway, it seemed like a good fit.

Over the holidays, ProBikeKit had a set of Raceblade Pro XLs for around $33. They took more than 2 weeks to ship, but we had a nice dry spell while waiting for the fenders, so that was just as well.

I first tried to mount the rear fenders on my Strong road bike. To my dismay, the fender struts didn't extend long enough for the fender to fit! My guess is between the slack seat tube and the 44.5cm chainstays, my custom touring bike was just too different from standard road bike geometry for the designers to bother. (Most bikes have a steep 73 degree seat tube and short 41-42cm chainstays) Fortunately, the rear fender did fit on my Co-Motion Periscope tandem, so it wasn't a waste. The fender did clear the 28mm tires on the tandem, but I'm skeptical that it would fit a 32mm. I don't think there's 4mm of additional clearance, and the struts aren't stiff enough to keep the fender from bouncing around.

The front fit nicely on my custom touring bike. The mounting mechanism is definitely much more adjustable and secure than the old SKS Raceblades, making this a worthy upgrade. If you intend to ride in the rain, but don't live somewhere where your fenders deserve to be permanently mounted (or if you tour and need to take the fenders  on and off when transporting the bike on a plane), then these are the ones to get. Buy them on Amazon so that if they don't fit the bike you can return them.

Recommended.

Review: Wonder Woman (Greg Rucka - 1987-2006)

After watching Wonder Woman, I thought I'd see whether the comics were any good, and so checked out Greg Ruck's Vol 1 from Hoopla.

Unlike the movie, this collection doesn't have an overall theme, and doesn't have a single story arc that drew me in. It felt incoherent,  because there's a huge difference between Wonder Woman the ambassador is nothing but boring, and Wonder Woman the superhero doesn't have any of the other tropes of super-heroism (secret identity, romantic partners, etc) to challenge her. (Seriously? Batman's dumb enough to go toe-to-toe with her directly? He's not that dumb, and if he were, she'd wipe the floor with him, which of course she does in the story)

It's interesting reading Rucka's attempt to make Wonder Woman interesting, but ultimately, I think he fails.

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.