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2023 top reads

Tried to go with a few different genres. Read 102 books in 2023, had a blast especially reading several travelogue-style books (a new genre for me), and reading about the Titanic, Patton/WWII, in addition to yet more survival/shipwreck tales.

The Innocents Abroad - Mark Twain Surprisingly enjoyable book. Mark Twain goes on a trip to the Middle East/Holy Land in the 19th century and it's both hilarious and eye-opening.

Untrustworthy - Bonnie Kristian Insightful explainer of current hot topic issues.

Truth and Beauty - Andrew Klavan Interesting book about some famous poets and how it relates to the gospel. Written well.

In the House of Brede - Rumer Godden A fascinating novel about a Benedictine community through a few decades. The characters are all brought to life, each with their own struggles.

The Other Side of the Night - Daniel Allen Butler Subtitled "The Carpathia, The Californian, and the Night the Titanic was Lost". The tale of two ships and their two captains, what they did on that fateful night and the subsequent inquiries into their response (or lack thereof).

The Wager - David Grann "A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder". My favorite genre. This one features The Wager that got separated from a convoy rounding Cape Horn, and then subsequently shipwrecked, castaways splitting into groups.

The Generals - Winston Groom 3 of the great WWII generals: George Marshall, George Patton, and Douglas MacArthur. Good unbiased primer on these 3 characters and how their paths in life differed/converged especially in WWII.

The Tower of Trebizond - Rose Macaulay Another travelogue type in the Middle East, also hilarious, but this one's definitely fictional.

Notre Dame de Paris - Victor Hugo I know Disney's version of the Hunchback of Notre Dame but first time reading this book - really it isn't so much about the "hunchback" as it is the building itself, Notre Dame. Has there ever been a more effective ode to a building in literature? What a story.

Dominion - Tom Holland I can't say I actually enjoyed reading this book, since it took me months to finish in bite-sized pieces, but it makes a very good case for how Western culture is basically shaped by Christianity. And this author's not even a Christian. Feels like there have been several other books recently with similar hypotheses but I think this book is the most comprehensive.

Other survival books I enjoyed: Ordeal By Hunger - George Stewart (story of the Donner Party, the American western frontier and cannibalism), Alive (story of the kids and the crashed plane in the Andes, and yes, more cannibalism), Empire of Ice and Stone (Arctic survival), Voyage of the Nimrod (Shackleton's other expedition that no one remembers), Into Thin Air (disaster on Mt Everest).

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Raspberry Pi and Pandora/Pianobar

Above: Pianobar playing a rather lame playlist via ssh.

So I bought the Raspberry Pi a couple of months ago, when I had a monitor. Thought I'd run XBMC on it. But it didn't run smoothly at all, which was rather disappointing. It may have been the SD card. Either way, I bought all the things that had to go along with it - wireless adapter, USB powered hub. It may be a $35 computer, but that doesn't factor in all the other things required for it to actually be more useful.

Fast forward some weeks, and I lost the monitor, didn't bother to buy a new one. So the Pi sat there gathering dust, until one day I was looking at my seldom used speaker, and thought to myself, why not make it a radio of sorts, since I have nothing of that kind.

Some general instructions on my process, which took maybe 3/4 hours, part of that was waiting for the OS image to download/unzip/write...

First, I downloaded Raspbian. After writing the image to the SD card, I had to make some changes for a completely headless operation (and no router access either). Since I'm using a Mac, which doesn't see ext4 out of the box, I had to boot up VirtualBox (luckily still have that old ArchLinux virtual machine from ages ago), connect the SD card, and configure wlan0 (wireless adapter) with a static IP under /etc/networks/interface.

Plugged the card in, boot Raspberry Pi up, in a matter of seconds, I could ping the previously set IP address. SSH in, sudo apt-get install pianobar, and followed the instructions on http://raspberrypiserver.no-ip.org/pianobar_pandora_remote_control.html

Fixed an error that showed initially when starting Pandora (something with the alsa sound driver) with a quick googling session, installed the pianobar remote onto my tablet. Had to change the hostname raspberrypi into my IP address. 

And that's it! The app is a little slow, and anyway I'm on my computer most of the time. So I set up a trigger on Quicksilver to run 'ssh -t pi@192.168.1.200 "pianobar; exec bash"' with a shortcut. Pretty cool.

Pros: Finally using my Pi/speakers for something, no need to hog my laptop's speakers and resources for music (which is great. Because I tend to stop my music, watch a video, and forget to turn the music back on). And also, looks cool playing music via command line. Another thing, don't hear any ads.

Cons: The wireless adapter can be rather finicky, drops sometimes. In which case, since I can't see the actual screen, I have to reboot the Pi (added a crontab to check for IP, so should sort of fix that issue). Also, no easily accessed notifications or global key shortcuts. 

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galaxy note 8.0

I usually know exactly what I want when it comes to guitar gear and tech stuff. Yes, so I know the Galaxy Note 8.0 is rather expensive, when compared to the cheaper 7-8" tablets like Nexus 7 and Kindle HD. But the S-Pen was far too intriguing and in this case, I thought it'd be worth the extra money.

I am no artist, however, so I can't say that the S-Pen is as useful as it ought to be. But I like the pop-up notes whenever the pen is removed. And I am actually playing Fruit Ninja again. A different feel to it when you're slashing at fruit using a blade-like object that is not your fat finger.

I'm enjoying the tablet, if only because these days, I realize how slow my ancient 2008 MacBook can be. Now I can watch two videos at the same time!

(On another note, it's almost a little tragic that when I look through my phone's camera gallery, 95% are screenshot pictures from work).

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So... I haven't got any new gear lately. In fact, I haven't had GAS since... the Alpha Dog. And my last post. Unbelievable. And I haven't been using my pedalboard too, mostly because my room was so tiny I could barely fit anything.

So it was only in church that I got to bring my pedalboard along, but that isn't a regular thing. A couple of weeks ago on Sunday, we played 'From the Inside Out', so I got to do that intro. Turned it up on the neck+mid position, into the Nova Repeater, into the Joyo American Sound - wow, now that was a great Strat sound. Fantastic. But I'm not so happy about the drive though. The Timmy, while very transparent, has a grainy sound that I can't really get used to. And the Alpha Dog seems to put a blanket over my tone. 

On the other hand, what's this? Could it be a Nexus 4??

  Haven't bought a real proper tech gadget in... 4 years. About time. And this was tremendously exciting. Waited about a month for it, and worth it, so far.

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Gear updates

Woah. When I said random information, I didn't include spam. Which I've deleted. Anyway, 4 months since my last post, and quite a bit has happened. Got a job and am regularly playing in the church p&w team. 

As for new gear - sold the Barber LTD, replaced it with a Timmy. Took the FuzzHugger Algal Bloom off the board and put a VFE Alpha Dog on. My impression - the Timmy does have a fine, very transparent drive, although slightly more gritty than what I prefer. I play everything direct to PA through a Joyo American Sound. On a good day, it sounds fantastic. On a bad day, the overdrive is too muddy. I don't really know why, the settings don't change that much. The monitors can vary quite a bit, for some reason sometimes the connection doesn't work and my signal doesn't go through completely.

As for the Alpha Dog, which is a RAT clone, it is quite dark, I feel. It does have a lot of distortion going though, and a lot of tweakability, which is nice. Especially when putting it on the germanium setting and which adds more harmonics to the distortion. Sounds great on leads, but it's not like I'm playing any leads anyway. 

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New pickup

Saw a used Seymour Duncan SSL-5 pickup on eBay relatively cheap, so I couldn't resist. I have been wanting a bridge pickup with higher output, since all my current pickups are rated at about 6k. Sounds nice, vintage cleans, but not very satisfied with the gain sounds. So the SSL-5 seemed to be a good fit - high output but still retaining some of the vintage quality - at least after extensive research.

How did it rate? At first, I was a little underwhelmed. It is much brighter than the old pickup, although not as ice-picky as the original ceramic pickup. (and that was judging from old clips that I recorded). The gain sounds were great. It grew on me. Overdrive smoother than the old pickup, good lead tones. With a fuzz + overdrive + delay + chorus-y sound, it was actually roughly close to the Comfortably Numb tone, at least, more so than what I've ever tried.

One problem though, apparently something about magnetic polarity and whatnot, the 2nd position (bridge/mid) sounds thin. I think I'll have to reverse the pickup leads. But... kinda lazy to do so. I managed to change out the pickup without removing the strings, but it was definitely a little more bothersome.

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Of stuck plugs and super glue

So apparently the TC Electronic Corona Chorus hates cheap Hosa patch cables. Couple of months ago, the tip of the cable broke off inside the input jack. It was pointless to take the back off - no access to the guts anyway. But whatever, I thought, there were stereo jacks, so I just used the other i/o jacks. And made sure never to remove the cables.

Then couple of days ago, I was seized with a desire to try out the toneprint app. But my pedal's firmware wasn't up to date. Instructions for updating included taking out the cables. Lo and behold, yet another tip came off and got stuck. I upgraded the firmware, then stared at the pedal dismally. Well, so much for toneprints. If I couldn't get this out, then I simply had a $100 nice green brick. 

I found a little screwdriver that fit into the little tip inside the jack, squeezed superglue on it and glued it in. First 5 times it was a failure. The next time I left the screwdriver in longer, and it was much harder to remove. But the screwdriver eventually came out on its own. That was when I finally decided to use the broken plug. Practiced stuffing it in a couple of times - kinda difficult. Then left it in, and voila, couple of hours later, a quick pull on the plug and it came out with the tip!

So there I was, finally, with a working pedal that could switch toneprints with ease (I thought that was a pretty ingenious app). And at least I didn't end up having to bring it to somebody to repair, with a screwdriver superglued in it.

On another note, updated my pedalboard with a new member. Will post a pic later.

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What I've been up to (technically)

Deleting the old XCode 3 and installing the newer XCode 4 freed up nearly 10 gigs of space on my always-full hard drive (I know, I'm a slow adopter of new things). So that meant I had some space for a virtual machine. Now I've done Ubuntu, Mint, Puppy, Jolicloud and all the rest of them. It was time for some more hardcore stuff - ArchLinux.

Took me maybe 10 hours in all to get where I needed to me. Everything done from scratch, which meant random errors. What threw me off, mostly, was Xcfe4 which didn't run for some reason on VirtualBox's video drivers. At least, I couldn't get it to work. After a bit of trying (and lots of rebooting), I deleted it and installed LXDE instead. That worked fine. I'm actually not sure whether anything I did (changing the conf files) made any difference, or where the exact problem was, but I'm not going to bother about that anymore.

Then I spent some time trying to install colemak. I did eventually, it's a layout variant apparently rather than an actual layout. I think it was some added line in the xorg.conf file. Maybe.

One thing I learned was to actually look through the logs carefully if errors pop up. It may sound obvious, but anyway, the specific errors helped greatly in the obligatory google searches.

Of course, I wasn't satisfied with simply the basic LXDE theme. Downloaded the GTK theme Elegant through packer. Then I messed around with Conky. Downloaded the conky-colors, took me quite a while to understand what was going on. Even so, the background transparency wasn't there (a visual setting should be set to 'no'), and the sidebar cut off (changed the minimum size).

So I think I'm done for now. Like my many other computer ventures, I'd probably rarely touch the build again, but it's all in the fun of the process. Did get to learn quite a bit about linux.

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CNY is here

So we're half a day late, but CNY is here too. I haven't seen Sibu-ian fireworks in years. But I guess tonight we're having fireworks of our own - a thunder, lightning, and hail show. Yes, tornado season is apparently starting tonight. And I thought it doesn't start till March. There are times that I think this is a pretty good place, until tornado season starts and I think, "Nope."

Got some new gear though. Finally got a proper pedalboard, wired it up. Don't have enough cables, so the Rogue delay and tremolo is just sitting there. I only had 6-inch cables, so the pedals had to be positioned a little strangely to get everything in. Anyway, It was a pretty awesome deal, $45 for a pedalboard + 2 pedals + patch cable + adapter. Oh, and I added a Barber LTD SR over the break. Transparent stuff, it adds just a little grit when dug in. 

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Curiosity

If you haven't known about it yet, Curiosity is the new Discovery Channel show, featuring a host of different topics. Loving it so far - last week's 'World's Dirtiest Man' featuring Mike Rowe is an absolute treat. All the bacteria and parasites living around us, on us, with us. Brings back (partially) fond memories of the invertebrates class last year. 

Other episodes include a reality show-esque experiment of living a stone-age life for 10 days (sorta like Colony, another show from some time ago), possible world-ending disasters, alien attacks... and living a very long life (featuring Adam Savage, a great episode as well).

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Back in the Fall (with more music-related gear)

Wow, I've completely neglected this blog. Probably because I had no new gear to write about, and this has become something of a 'my new gear blog'. 

Anyway, school semester starts! I had hauled my guitar in my check in bag for my trip back and forth in the summer, look what happened:

Looks pretty awful right? Ah well, gives the guitar a more battered look, I don't really mind the 'road worn' type look.

Okay, now for the new gear. Bought the Corona Chorus - the first time I tried uploading the firmware, the pedal kinda crapped out on me. Didn't respond to the footswitch. Days later, I tried the same thing again, it worked. But that's the least of my problems. The thing is, I've got the tip of a cheapo patch cable stuck inside, somehow. The pedal's got stereo input/outputs, so it isn't the end of the world. Still... I think maybe the cheapest patch cables aren't worth it in the long run.

Also, I returned the SubDecay Liquid Sunshine, just wasn't all too fond of it. I like the Signa Drive though, very versatile, I brought that back home for the summer, always sounds great. Updated (messy) board:

Last but not least, since I gave my Sennheiser HD202s to my brother, and my Soundmagic PL30s crapped out on me (sent it back for warranty repair), I decided it was time for a new pair of 'phones. After extensive (and I mean extensive) research, I decided on these Denon DNHP700. DJ headphones, yeah, but um, it's portable, looks pretty, not too expensive, sounds marvelous with a good bit of bass. Needs a little more driving than the normal stuff though. I bought it used, but it looks pretty brand new except that it's a little loose. Alright, I can't describe headphones like an audiophile, but these sound great. 

What a bad photo. I didn't even realize till now that I accidentally cut off the top. Yeah, not a good photographer.

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I think my eyebrows shot up a couple inches when I received the church bulletin. David Beckham, on a church bulletin? It was kinda weird and funny all at the same time. Granted, nobody probably knew who he was except me - even though Beckham played MLS soccer Americans usually don't follow soccer. I asked a friend (who follows Arsenal, kind of) if she recognized the picture, she said he was familiar, but couldn't say who..

Just thought I'd share this picture. It was probably some advertisement for a phone or something, because the sermon was about communication with God.

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journey for a media center

1. So I finally got my RAM replaced. Took like 2 weeks - sent it off, had to wait till they received it before it finally arrived today (after missing the delivery yesterday). So far, so good, no random freezing. This is fantastic, finally I can go back to Firefox after hanging out with Chrome for a few days.

Not to fan the debate flames, but Chrome was better than Firefox 3.x, but I'd stuck to it out of loyalty. Not really, just that I'd everything set up in Firefox, speed dial and keyword searches and passwords and extensions and all that, didn't want to go through it again with Chrome. Anyway, yup, back to Firefox 4 now, with at least 20 tabs opened at one time. The panorama feature is great, now I don't have to stare at the tiny opened tabs trying to figure out what is what.

2. I spent 3 days over spring break setting up a 'media center' using the desktop that a neighbor had given us. It was a pretty rad desktop too - 6gb of RAM, Windows 7... too bad the graphics card is just the integrated intel one. Anyway, I couldn't do anything with it because the 26" monitor that they gave us didn't work, so I had to borrow another monitor.

That was a strange day, when the people were moving in a hurry and just threw the load of their stuff our way, including two desktops, a 5.1 surround system missing one speaker, a load of pots and pans and foods.... like manna from heaven. Seriously.

Anyway, I've been dreaming about a XBMC setup for a long time, I spent the first day going through Windows 7's junk - they had all their settings and everything including Yahoo messenger which actually signed into their account... so I just deleted the load of it. Also spent a boatload of time wondering why the surround system wasn't working, I plugged everything in, replugged everything, still nothing. Then I plugged one of the three cables into my laptop, and there was sound. That was like an oasis in the desert. Hope on the horizon! I plugged it into the desktop, it crackled, and from then on, everything worked. I have no idea why it wasn't working in first place though.

The second day I started with partitioning the desktop harddrive - I was wondering how to go about doing it, when I suddenly remembered the Puppy Linux cd I had burnt so long ago before coming to the States, because I thought 'just in case'. That came in handy - I downloaded a newer version, burnt it to the cd-rw (back to the old optical drive days, because I didn't have a spare usb drive), and partitioned it from in there.

At first I was trying to go about installing OpenELEC, then XBMC on top of it, but it was kinda complicated, and after hours, I suddenly thought, why the heck am I not using XBMC Live? Which was far easier to deal with, I installed it, it ran fine.

The third day I spent mostly customizing the XBMC installation, loading up my library. For some reason, it didn't recognize my 'Movies' folder, so after spending some time thinking about a solution, I came up with an easy one. Just renamed the folder to 'My Movies' and then everything was peachy. Anyway, now the computer dual-boots XBMC Live and Windows 7. The only remaining problems that I haven't bothered to figure out yet is that XBMC doesn't produce surround sound - rear speakers have no sound. Windows 7 does it fine - it was great listening to one of the Eagles' concert DVDs. Actually I was just picking up the rear speaker listening to the crisp guitar sounds.

I might post some pics, but well, the monitor isn't even widescreen and it's pretty small, which is a bummer.

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3 types of college majors

Disclaimer: Not to be taken too seriously. Just for fun.

There are actually only three types of college majors. A couple more if you're really nitpicky about it. Anyway, here goes my ramblings.

1. The papers major - They hang out at libraries or computer labs, staring at Microsoft Word as they try to complete paper after paper. Papers are a huge chunk of the class grade. When asked about how their semester is going, a typical response is, 'I have tons of papers due this week...', with a tired tone. These are the psychology, social work, etc majors.

2. The projects/homework majors - These people have endless homework and projects. They hang out at specific areas made for them to do their work. Projects are their grades. Typical response? None, because you never see them. Or they're zombies. These are the art majors, and to a slightly lesser extent engineering and math majors.

3. The exams majors - I fall into this category. In part actually a more 'comfortable' category, after all, I was trained on the exam-heavy education all my life. It really depends on the class, but it's all about studying and that (hopefully) double digit score in red ink on the test. Typical response? "I've a huge exam tomorrow, and I haven't actually started studying yet!" Biology majors mostly, and maybe some others.

So really, the three basic types of majors. The rest of the majors just fall into those categories but are perhaps less extreme. And to be honest, the 'exams major' takes up less time than the rest - if you've got a good head for memorization and learning. Because you can't cheat on time with papers and projects, those take forever and ever, but studying isn't as time-consuming. Still, studying isn't much fun.

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more about the gear

1. RAM - like I said in the previous post, I took out the 2gig, switched places with the 1gig, exchanged that 2gig for the other one, and my computer has absolutely no problem. Looks like it is a problem with that ram - I guess I should RMA it. But I'm kinda reluctant to go back to the 2gb slowness.

Of course, the new Macbook pro updates were released today, quite delicious sounding. Although certainly overkill for most people.

2. So how is the Signa Drive coming along? Well, I had a chance to further play with the stacking in between today's tornado warnings (yup, welcome to the mid-south). Yesterday I tried going Liquid Sunshine > Signa Drive, I wasn't really pleased. Just kinda muddy. Today tried it the other way round, sounded much better. Clarity and all. Although now that made the boost kind of redundant at the beginning of the chain, since it pretty much does what the Signa Drive is doing to the LS now - upping the gain. I'm kind of reluctant to put it at the end of the chain though, considering it isn't just a clean boost. Well, we'll see.

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Gear

1. New RAM.

Decided to take the plunge and upgrade to 4 gigs of RAM. I like having everything open on the computer, which then makes everything slow to a crawl. So I got a pair of 2gig Mushkin sticks for my Macbook. First 10 minutes were happy minutes, when I opened up everything and it all ran smoothly. Then came sorrow. The computer froze every now and then, popped up with kernel panics in between, so that I had to hard reset it more times in one night than I've ever had in all 2.5 years of having this laptop.

Did memtest on the single user mode, it detected no problems, although last night with Rember it did have the 'data mismatch' error. I must've had some app on.

I switched out one stick for the old one, left it running for a couple of hours with stuff on while I went to class, came back, messed with it a bit and was met with yet another kernel panic. Ugh. Reset, try yet again, watching online videos - the main culprit of the previous night. 10 mins and it froze. So I switched out the RAM, putting the other 2gig into the second slot instead of the first, and so far, no problems. Although truth be told, I haven't tried Hulu-ing yet.

2. Guitar pedals

There's nothing like receiving new guitar pedals in the mail. Alright, so I admit that I don't believe all the hype about boutique pedals - most certainly aren't worth $100 more than the mass-produced ones, but boy, they are pretty. And satisfies the snob's heart.

So say hello to two new additions.

"

That's a new overdrive - CMATMODS Signa Drive, and a new boost pedal - NOC3 Surge, which I've been waiting for months to arrive (it got lost in the mail). Yeah, I really don't need so many overdrive pedals, but the Signa Drive is cheap compared to most boutique pedals. It sounds very different from the Subdecay Liquid Sunshine, more open sounding. As for the boost, it didn't work when I first plugged it in, which filled me with horror, but somehow, it worked later after I unscrewed the back and stared hard into its guts.

School work is more than I've ever had, plus this RAM problem and all, really cutting into my free time. For now, unable to disturb the sleeping populace, I guess I'll just have to stare at those pretty pretty lights (and think about what to get next).

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Heartwarming to see the Christian love shown even though they were persecuted (the Egypt bomb church incident)...

p.s., in case you're ignorant, the title is a link. Which is why it's green and not blue.