Recent on Vladimir's page
An unfortunate side of being a proper adult is that occasionally I wake up at 5 AM, and wonder what I should do then. And with all this Windows 11 turmoil, I have a handful of acquaintances who have switched to Linux. The selection is not huge, but sizable enough. So far everyone settles on Ubuntu — not particularly surprising, Ubuntu remains the face of Linux. Whether it’s the…
And I saw prices rising, having three vendors serving seven transnationals, and on their heads Jensen Huang’s name. The bottom line is, older computers are fine. I thought of some battlestation upgrades, then changed the plans. The market is not a culprit, the reasoning converges to the infamous “we dun need it”, an argument that happens to fit. Of course, some folks are in IT,…
The year went wild with fiction. Books were the main source of entertainment, as holding a sleeping baby for hours excludes other activities. Feels good, nevertheless. I never maintained a reading journal before; this year I did, the list is below. Let it be 2026 resolution No.1: write down impressions continuously, the last week of December is not the best time. (of note, I am a seasoned filofax…
The subject deserves a few toots rather than a post, however, I would like it to stay here. I don’t read many e-books, prefer paper, and I won’t list arguments against the e-publishing practices, even Stallman had a say more than a decade ago. That said, Russian books are not traded in the EU (whenever they are, the pricing is funny — I have two copies of Patriot , the…
With time being scarce lately, I am jotting personal reflections when I can. These touches have been discussed aplenty elsewhere and, like many other posts, they have the vibe of a mediocre self-help book. But I don’t think that the redundancy hurts. For few weeks I’m drafting some material on a bigger subject, it goes slow. That writing feels dull, I clearly miss the right words.…
I love to refer to the letter “Can a biologist fix a radio” , often in a manner ill-suited to the debate. However, hard science folk might be overconfident with other disciplines (software engineers being the biggest know-it-all). Feynman himself has outlined this unawarely with his experience mixing the drops. As physics and engineering shaped science fiction to the modern state, the…
For quite some years, I spend summer vacations with my in-laws, in a tiny mountain parish in central Portugal. The area is rural, a testimony to dying agricultural Europe. There is an annex, the annex hosts goods collected over decades. The valuables include 6 CRT TVs, countless radios, perhaps, a thoroughly cataloged archive of the local newspaper and some culinary magazines. Among them, an old…
“He ate his own leg. Soft cannibalism, he called it. Legs are of no use in space. He blogged it. Then it went viral.” This is merely a bait, the novel is not grotesque. Actually, it is classy and lacks postmodernism completely, subjectively unexpected from an author mentioned frequently alongside the word “cyberpunk”. A not so important personal record…
I thought of a different title, “The new luddism is okay”. Apparently, neo-luddism is an established term, and I did not fall for the Ted Kaczynski meme yet. Likewise, I would like to avoid the trendy rant on topics of “digital minimalism” and “information detox”, the subjects online celebrities are focused on lately. I quit smoking at least two times, so far,…
I skipped a post on this topic in 2023 and don’t really remember why - probably just laziness.The retrospective this year is shorter than it was in 2022 . For a good reason, the year was busier and probably even overwhelming in its second half, I became a dad. Chemistry book I have been eager to check “ “Laboratory Guide to Enzymology” , expecting some sort of reincarnation of…
Not to start with a resolution, that can wait untill the New Year, but I took a decision to write here often. There are few reasons behind, the main — the writings I do daily are job-related and very technical, and I am loosing the skill (or, rather, its rudiments). There is also a minor reason: I enjoy stand-alone blogs a lot, so why not to keep one myself? Self-hosting and OpenBSD This…
I took time to catalog the household library, LibraryThing platform was very handy. Of course, my partner is beyond half of the collection, so I don’t have opinion on many entries. I will add index to the site later. Books are a huge hassle to move house I buy paper books. I love the concept of antilibrary - it is about accumulating the sources. But the freedom aspect is more important. I…
Well, Happy New Year. Here I list the best content I passed during the 2022. Stuff in internet Two nice posts on Medium, “The digital biotech startup playbook” and “The biotech startup’s guide to data and communication software” . I liked especially the latter one. Not a revelation now – but I would be so happy to read it 5 years ago. Internal wikis are solid, I…
Let’s put aside “Sprawl” and “Bridge” trilogies. I am not religious with the fact that Gibson has stopped writing cyberpunk. Ten years ago I read “Pattern Recognition”, enjoyed it a lot. Then I tried “Spook Country” - to that date, it was a disaster, the Russian translation was an absolute garbage, unreadable. So I bought the book again many…
Now I see it — indeed, the members of totalitarian societies do not often realize how bizarre their world is. I emigrated from Russia in 2014, being 22 years old fresh graduate, basically same day the crisis in Ukraine has started, and never followed state politics. Since then, I spent less than 2 months cumulative in Russia at most — occasional 1-2 weeks long visits to parents over…
I have my own, very special relationship with the “Dune” saga. Herbert’s universe is a subject I love for more than 20 years, “God Emperor of Dune” — probably the best novel in the whole genre, and “Dune 2000” is the best installment in C&C series. And I did not really like the new movie. It is definitely not a fail, and I will watch the next part…
I was never political and, voting for Prokhorov (we did 8% that year!) and Titov (0.76%) during the 2012 and 2018 elections, did not get upset with the results. I am considering Russia being really close to an autocratic state, yet I was never sure whether the current system or the opposition are more repulsive. Navalny is controversial. There are aspects of his political career and political…