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I love paging through this coffee table type book from time to time. It showcases stunning photographs ranging from huge beaver dam structures over termite mounds to bird nests of fascinating complexity. It also has some incredible photographs of bowers, the mating sites constructed by bowerbirds with an attention to detail that rivals any fussy interior designer’s. This is more a “show” than a “tell” book, a great way to get dip your feet into topics you’ll turn elsewhere to explore more fully. But as such, I consider it a lovely addition to my library and a great conversation piece.

Habitica (formerly HabitRPG) lets you turn your life into a classic role-playing game: design your character and level up as you complete real-life tasks. There’s lots of little goodies like pets you can collect and level up, items for your character, etc. But it’s all connected to things you want to do in the real world.

Did you really complete that task? That’s up to you being honest – or you can form a party with other players who can hold you to account if you’re not telling the truth. The game can’t punish you in real life (unlike systems designed around commitment contracts, like Beeminder), but it does reduce your hit-points if you fail to meet your commitments for the day.

Overall it’s a playful take on to-do lists; I used it for a while and found it fun but eventually grew tired of it. The RPG bits aren’t so well done that they really draw you in, so you’re left with a to-do list with pets and levelling. With that said, it’s a very active project – definitely worth checking in, or looking at again if you haven’t in a while. 3.5 stars, rounded up because it’s an open source project.

Great vegetarian+vegan comfort food, lovingly prepared. A bit on the heavy side but when that’s exactly what you’re craving, don’t hesitate. Not far from the waterfront if you’re looking for a nice place to sit down.

Individual menu items I’ve tried:

1. Italian sub - really solid, fresh & filling. Five stars.
2. BLT on wheat (with avocado - do it!) - fantastic, with great veggie bacon and lovely nutty flavor. Five stars.
3. Bacon cheeseburger - decent, but didn’t love the cartmade patty. Four stars. [*]
4. Chicken salad - ginormous but a bit bland (basically just a huge amount of soy curls). Maybe try it with some extras. Three stars as-is.

[*] There are veggie patties and then there are “fake meat” patties. This one falls more on the veggie side. I’m personally more a fan of patties that come closer to meat-like flavors & texture without the dead animals (e.g., Beyond Meat’s Beast Burger patties). YMMV.

If you’ve watched BoJack Horseman or Adam Ruins Everything, you’ve seen work by some of the founding members of Olde English: Adam Conover and Raphael Bob-Waksberg. When they were still students in the early 2000s, the members of OE started producing many comedy video shorts and put them online. Not all of them are comedy gold, but I found a few of them pretty amusing. My favorites include:

• Kill Jim Liebowitz, an amusing take on the “video games cause violence” frenzy
• Dishes Like To Be Dirty, for everyone who’s enjoyed life with a roommate and without a dishwasher
• One Picture Every Day, a parody of many, many similar YouTube videos

This is old-school stuff, with embedded Flash player and everything. You’ll find a few of them on YouTube as well, and hopefully the rest of them won’t disappear from the face of the Net.

Pokémon Go is a free-to-play location-based augmented-reality game developed by Niantic for iOS and Android, released in July 2016. In its first month of release it was downloaded by more than 100 million people worldwide.

Pokémon Go has gotten mixed reviews. It’s been applauded for encouraging players to go outside and be social. But it’s been criticised for weak security, for being buggy at launch, for leading to accidents and robberies, and for having poor internal scaling.

Here are some tips for playing:

1. Below level 16 is just grinding: capturing pokémon and visiting pokéstops. Don’t buy anything from the shop at this stage, except for incubators if you want them. Don’t power up or evolve/train your pokémon: save that for when you’re catching better ones later. You can use incense and lures if you want (there is no reason to save them), but if you’re in a city you won’t need them. Your fastest route to XP at this point is walking among several lures in a densely-populated area. Catch as many pidgeys, weedles and caterpies as you can, to maximize XP gains later.

2. Use pokémon radar to see what pokémon are near you, but not to try to track down individual pokémon. The radar is legendarily a mess and doesn’t work very well.

3. You will get eggs every time you have visited 10 unique pokéstops, and sometimes more frequently. Eggs are a major source of new pokémon. Once you have nine you’re capped until one hatches, so always incubate eggs immediately and buy new incubators when you need to.

4. Keeping the game open when you’re in a vehicle will help you incubate eggs faster and let you unlock pokéstops. You won’t get incubator credit when you’re traveling faster than 20 kph, but you will at lower speeds.

5. If you don’t manage your inventory it’ll fill up, especially between levels 10 and 20. Keep low-level potions and revive medications pruned. Once you start getting razz berries, use them with every pokémon: you can’t trash them outside of a pokémon encounter. I sometimes toss ordinary poke balls at pokémon for a while just to get rid of them, to make room for the higher-quality great balls and ultra balls.

6. Around level 15 you should be ready to use your first lucky egg. Use a pokémon calculator like http://www.pokelevel.com/ or http://www.pidgeycalc.com/ to figure out how to maximize your XP gains.

7. At around level 20 the experience required to level up skyrockets and the game becomes a lot less fun. It’s rarer to find a new pokémon, you aren’t gaining any new abilities, the pokémon break free much more easily, and the XP requirements to level up increase exponentially. This is a time of sad grinding. You will probably flatten out for weeks.

Revival by Stephen King is dark and captivating, but not very ambitious; its substance and terror could have been preserved at the length of a short story or novella.

In 2008, King himself published N. (as part of Just After Sunset), a story which is similarly inspired by Lovecraft and Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan, and which also explores themes of madness and the darkness that lies beyond. N. packs its horror very tightly in comparison with Revival, which spends unavoidable but not especially rewarding time with one of King’s recurring themes, addiction.

What makes Revival enjoyable is not the narrator, but the character of Charles Jacobs. King paints a portrait of a man ultimately obsessed with one thing: the violent, relentless exposure of truth. I would have loved to see more of his journey, and his impact on others, and less of Jamie Morton who is, at the end of the day, just not that interesting a character.

Went to the theater without expectations and came back with a smile!

All of the supporting actors give memorable performances but Viggo Mortensen just shines.

Even though the family has an extreme and marginal way of life, we come to understand why it doesn’t really matter and the single most important thing they learned in the woods is to care for one another.

Would definitely recommend!

LINE is a messenging app popular in Japan. It runs on Android, iOS, Windows, and as a Chrome browser addon.

Unlike competing apps, it is not very social, which can be seen as a pro or con. Most users don’t post anything, so most walls are empty.

Pros:

• Since most people uses it, it is convenient to communicate.
• Does not disclose much information about you.
• Low creepiness: You can not see other people’s friends. It does not suggest to add other people’s friends.
• Chat history is locally stored. Good for privacy, but obviously losing your phone means losing your chat history. Taking backups can not be easily done without a rooted phone.
• Free.
• Original stamps.

Cons:

• Some features require age verification, which only works if you use one of the few big Japanese carriers. No luck for MVNOs.
• LINE steals your contacts and keeps this data on their servers.
• The Chrome browser add-on is unreliable, messages often do not show up.
• Migrating chat history from a phone to another is a huge pain, and group chats can not be migrated.
• Getting locked out of one’s account is a real risk, especially for non-technical persons. The rate of people losing their accounts is unseen in other apps.
• No way to mute a group conversation.

Webpass is awesome. Over six years with them, I’ve had consistently fast internet with only one outage ever. I pay once a year, and never hear from them until it’s time to renew. When I moved buildings they transferred my old account to the new place for free, and if I remember right they gave me a day or two of overlapping service while the move happened.

I’ve lived twice in buildings that didn’t offer Webpass. The first time I had Comcast, which was a nightmare of outages and billing errors and upselling and ridiculously bad customer service. The second time I used Sonicnet, who is a great back-up choice, but not as consistently excellent as Webpass.

“Vem är vem i böckernas värld : litterära gestalter från A till Ö” (250 pages, in Swedish language) is a very useful encyclopedic dictionary of 2500 fictional characters, ranging from Gilgamesh to Pippi Longstocking. This title (Who’s who in the world of books) refers to the editions published in 1992-1995, which is an updated version of “Litterära gestalter” published in 1985, which was the first work of this kind in the Swedish language. With an average of ten entries per page, each entry is rather short, but covers the essentials - which book(s) by which author features this character and a very brief summary of their role. The book is beautifully illustrated, both with classic book illustrations (such as Maurice Leloir’s drawing of The Three Musketeers) and with monochrome photos of wellknown (mostly Swedish) actors portraying the characters (such as Khlestakov from Gogol’s The Government Inspector, played by Ernst-Hugo Järegård). You would think nobody needs a printed reference work of this kind in the days of Google searches, but the fact is that many of the 2500 names presented here are not found in Wikipedia (at least not yet, this might change with time) and Google searches present other, real-life carriers of the same name rather than the fictional character. More than twenty years have passed since this book was published (1995-2016); Google was started in 1998, Wikipedia in 2001, but they have still not caught up with its contents.