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Dogs of War

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Another combat anthology, this time edited by David Drake. Or Battle's Sound (Harry Harrison): already read in Battlefields Beyond Tomorrow and Body Armor: 2000. Liberty Port (David Drake): already read in The Complete Hammer's Slammer's Volume 1. Straw (Gene Wolfe): steam punk mercenaries in a future which is more like the past. A good read. Tomb Tapper (James Blish): this one has a nice twist at the end, although I found the underlying premise of the story hard to believe. A Relic of War (Keith Laumer): already read in The Compleat Bolo. Basic Training (Mark L Van Name): this one is a bit sad. Well, all of the stories in this book are sad, but I find this one a bit harder than others because the main character is about the age of my kids. Witch War (Richard Matheson): an interesting little tale which doesn't end up at all like you expect. Transstar (Raymond Banks): I didn't think this story was all that good when I was reading it the other night, but its the one I kept thinking about for the next day. There are lots of interesting issues raised here -- arrogance, response, the cost / benefit of…

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Body Armor: 2000

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I love a good anthology, although I'd read a few of these stories before: Contact! (David Drake): this story is quite unlike the other stuff of his that I have read, mostly because its set in the Vietnam War, not the far future. A good story with an excellent twist. The Warbots (Larry S. Todd): this one wasn't for me. I'm not sure what point the author was trying to make, if any. Its just a long history of imaginary weapons. The Scapegoat (C. J. Cherryh): this is long, being a novella, and a little hard to read in places because the story jumps around. Overall, a good read though. My first Cherryh, although I have a lot queued up on the shelf. The Last Crusade (George H. Smith): this was a good story, and would have fit well in Battlefields Beyond Tomorrow as it has a similar war-is-hopeless tone. Hired Man (Richard C. Meredith): there is a nice twist at the end of this one, although its obvious a few pages before it happens. Early Model (Robert Sheckley): I was surprised by this one, its the first Sheckley story I've read that I didn't hate. Its not fantastic, but…

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Lyonesse

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This is another book I read as a child, except in this case I didn't really remember much of it -- the only bit I remembered was the punishment of Madouc's mother, but that might have been because I was a teenaged boy at the time. Overall this is a very good book. It took me a while to read because of being distracted with other projects, but the ongoing oppression of Princess Suldrun didn't really help either -- it was interesting at first, but got depressing after a while. Its also disturbing how many times sexual assault is used as a plot element in this book... [award: nominee nebula_novel 1983] [isbn: 0441505309]

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Building a hygrometer with a HS1101

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The next sensor I wanted to add to my home was a set of hygrometers. Specifically I wanted an exterior one, and a matching interior one. This would be useful as we have evaporative cooling, and if the humidity level outside is already high, then it doesn't make a lot of sense to put extra water into the air. Worse than that, it can also damage my books and make the house really clammy. So, adding some sensors was the first step in some form of alerting. I picked up two HS1101s from ebay quite cheaply (about $4 each IIRC). These devices are capacitors whose capacitance varies proportionally with relative humidity. You also need to provide a temperature at the sensor to correct the value, although the correction is pretty minor so I guess you could skip this if you really wanted to cut costs. Given I have plenty of code for Dallas 1820s now, I just dropped one of those onto the board too. I just used the circuit from the data sheet for my design, with a few simple tweaks (like the DS1820). Here's my surprisingly unprofessional circuit diagram: The DS1820 stuff that's not on the data sheet…

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The Man in the Rubber Mask

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I'd been looking for this book for ages, as it is quite rare, so it was exciting to find it at Gould's the other day. This is the memoir of the dude inside the rubber mask that Kryten wears in Red Dwarf. The book is an easy read, and entertaining, although I wouldn't call it funny. Most of the book focuses on how terribly horrible it is to be encased in rubber day after day while shooting a comedy in terrible locations. Oh, and Robert is slightly insecure which doesn't help. Overall I'm glad I found this book, and glad I read it again. [isbn: 0140235752]

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The Renegades of Pern

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This book starts off in quite a disjointed manner, with the introduction of a variety of seemingly unrelated characters. The only thing that they all have in common is that they're holdless. However, as the book progresses these characters are all weaved together into a relatively cohesive story line. I say relatively because there are gaps in the story telling, which can be a little jarring. Interestingly, this book also clarifies some of the events of the others in the series. Most satisfyingly it includes more detail of the buried settlement at Landing than The White Dragon did, which ties in nicely with the introduction provided in Dragonsdawn. This gives me hope that later books will take the science fiction track I've been wanting them to for a while. [isbn: 0345369335]

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Asimov’s Mirage

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If I was to name one flaw with the Robot City and Robots and Aliens series, it would have to be that they're not very good. They're lackluster, have difficult to believe plots, very simple structure, and are overall poorly thought through. Its a similar sensation to that I feel when I read the tie-in books written after Harrison's Bill the Galactic Hero series. I feel a little sorry for the writers in later books in these series, because I suspect their hands were tied by the poor decisions of previous authors (similarly to the mess that Bear's Foundation and Chaos had to dig that series out after Benford's tragically terrible Foundation's Fear). Robot City and Robots and Aliens were disappointments because I read Roger MacBride Allen's Caliban series before them, and Caliban is ok. Not awesome, but ok. I say all of this as an introduction to Mirage. I guess what I'm saying is that I've been wading through Asimov robot tie-ins from other authors for a while now, and some of them are not very good. That's why finding Mirage was such a delight. Its well written, has a similar style as Asimov's own writing, reuses characters and…

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The Beer Fridge saga continues

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Since the last update on the beer fridge, we've had to do some murdering of the original PCB to get it to fit in a case. In addition, we'd failed to take into account the startup power draw for the compressor (5 amps), and had to upgrade the relay we're using from a 3 amp solid state relay. Luckily Doug had the beefier relay just sitting around in his shed. That means we've lost our opto-isolation because the new relay is a simple mechanical one, but we have a relay coil doing the same thing now. A new PCB will make the world a lot neater, which will be nice. Oh, we've also been mentioned on Hack a Day, which has generated some interesting comments on their site. I've observed that sometimes the relay doesn't turn on, even though the arduino thinks it has done so. An example can be seen here: (Note that graph is a Google chart server image, generated by a simple visualization program I wrote in python. If you're that way inclined, the visualization software is in my public SVN repository). At first we thought this was a software problem with comparing ints to floats, but…

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Buy Jupiter Short Stories

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This is another Asimov short story collection. The following stories appear in the book, although I have already read a couple as part of either the Robot short stories or the Nightfall collection of short stories. To be honest these stories aren't Asimov's strongest. They entertaining, but they're not as amazing as some of his other stuff. I guess its hard to be a genius all the time. The following stories appear in this collection: Buy Jupiter1975 The Complete Robot1982 Robot Dreams1986 Darwinian Pool Room Day of the Hunters Shah Guido G. Button, Button The Monkey's Finger Everest The Pause Let's Not Each an Explorer Blank! Does a Bee Care? Silly Asses Buy Jupiter A Statue for Father Rain, Rain, Go Away Founding Father Exile to Hell Key Item The Proper Study 2430 A.D. The Greatest Asset Take a Match Thiotimoline to the Stars Light Verse [isbn: 0575041994] [awards: nominee nebula_short_story 1965 (Founding Father)]

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