Thraxas and the Dance of Death

~ Veselin ~ 1 Comment

It’s not common to read a book that’s not on Goodreads but this particular edition is unknown to it. It’s tiny and hard to hold. You have the feeling it will break if you press it too hard. It’s a fragile jewel, worth the read. The first page-turner for me in over a month.

Thraxas and a bunch of powerful wizards are after a green jewel that makes people kill each other and slip away. The story is good and has no villains, which is quite impressive given the large number of dead people.

Makri is accused of theft and wants to resolve the accusations her way by rolling heads. She’s surprisingly civil for a gladiator champion with ork blood this time.

Both cases somehow manage to connect. I couldn’t predict most of the stuff that happened. The only guarantee is that it’s a good read.

5/5

Spirea

~ Veselin ~ 7 Comments

According to PictureThis, the bush is Bridalwreath Spirea, native to Korea, China and Japan. It’s supposed to flower on the oddly specific date May 5th but flowered early because it’s in Sofia.

Jetpack App Improvements

~ Veselin ~ 3 Comments

I just got the new update of the app and I was actually excited about the update. I can now modify the font size for reading. It only applies to the post detail screen in the reader but it’s a good start for people like me who wear glasses and struggle with tiny letters, often switching to something else after reading a page.

The post tags feature is also getting better. This is how I find new sites to follow. It’s relatively inconvenient to browse by “new” and see a mountain of posts but it works better for discovery to me than the Discover feature where all the established blogs are.

I would previously subscribe and edit tags from the website.

Cheers to the Jetpack folks 🥂

April in Books

~ Veselin ~ 4 Comments

I read 6 books in March. This is a significant decrease from the previous months. I wake up before 7am and go to bed earlier, perhaps because of the daylight savings time. Falling asleep earlier means less time reading and fewer books in the monthly report. It may also be related to my choice of books, these 6 above are not page-turners.

The best book this month was Fearless Fourteen by Janet Evanovich. Stephanie Plum is blue like Smurfiette there and solves crime. The other 5 were also fine. Nothing stands out as particularly good or bad. The two Sand Wars omnibuses (6 novels inside) were classic sci-fi with aliens and had some good moments but can’t compete with a bounty hunter Smurfiette.

1337

~ Veselin ~ 5 Comments

I celebrated 1337 likes last week. It’s a hacker-speak for “elite”, and a short form of 31337 or l33t. Some kids would speak like that on IRC when I first got online in the late 90s. It was some form of an anti-language, made to obfuscate conversations so that you don’t get autokicked by the bots if you type something silly or hacker-related.

31337 was also the default port for Back Orifice. I was a n00b on IRC in 1998 when a friend sent me this funny .exe. It showed an alert with an okay button that could not be clicked because it’d move around on mouseover. I tried to click the button, failed, terminated it, and deleted the program. To my shock, an experienced IRC user pinged later that day to tell me was pwned. The exe had the Back Orifice trojan and my computer could be remotely controlled. It was hugely embarrassing and taught me a lesson 🙂