It’s a fun server that’s pretty active. They have a good set of mods, so anything from advanced technics to home decorating is supported. The mobs are hard, but not too hard once you get diamond stuff. The mummies drop diamonds and die in the sun, so spend a couple starting gold on a house in a village and just wait.

I’m Baph in-game, or spudboy@social.coop on mastodon, I’m totally willing to hook up new users with gear, ore, a place to build, etc.

The forums are active, and the in-game chat is accessible from IRC or Matrix, as well as in-game. I don’t think any other server do that.

The group in charge, https://tchncs.de/, does a lot of cool projects too.

I stayed in Yosemite Village in one of these Tent Cabins, 4 beds and a light, one plug, a heater, and a safe. It was pretty nice but it got muddy in front, as it was raining a little. They had some rubber mats down, but not enough.

Bathrooms and showers were fine. Clean and not too busy. The buffet resturant and pizza place were awesome and not too expensive. Booze was fairly priced too. There’s a community room with shitty books, board games, wifi, it was pretty fun.

There’s a free bus that goes around to most of the cool places. It was never too full.

I suggest all you can eat brunch at the fancier hotel (i forget the name). It was like $30 but the food was really good, fresh cut roast beef, all sorts of stuff. Great place to hit after an overnight hike and totally go overkill on the food.

I know it can get really busy but maybe the weather discouraged people. It was rain/mist for 2 days and light snow on the third. The kids loved the snow, it got surprisingly deep near the waterfalls with all the mist.

I learned about David’s Sling when recommending another of Marc Stiegler’s books, Earthweb, to a friend. He said this book had really affected his thinking when he read it back when it was new. If you only pick up one of those two books, I’d recommend Earthweb, but David’s Sling is also a good read if you liked Earthweb or any of Stiegler’s other work.

The general gist is that the Americans and Soviets are fighting using “industrial age” technologies, while an organization called the Zetetic Institute, which became famous for developing an effective technique for quitting smoking, is trying to develop an “information age” weapon. I don’t want to give too much away, so suffice it to say that the “old guard” aren’t too keen on seeing some upstart organization show them up by building something faster, cheaper, and more effective than the extremely expensive stuff they’re taking forever to build.

The book also covers a bunch of the techniques the Zetetic Institute uses, chief among them being the “decision duel”, which I imagine is a precursor in Stiegler’s thinking to prediction/decision/contract markets, which show up in Earthweb, and are what got my friend interested in these markets before Earthweb even came out.

Available as a DRM-free ebook from the publisher (Baen), though it’s clearly from a scan of a printed copy without a lot of human editing.

Its website advertises L‘Étagère Gourmande as a shop for marmalade, but it is also an extremely cute café with nice, «pètit» plates such as deliciously topped toasts, soups etc.

We went there for brunch and I guess there are two types of brunch: if you are looking for huge, protein-filled plates of Eggs Benedict, L’Étagère Gourmande is probably not for you. Otherwise, definitely go there: the brunch menu (at $29 not that cheap, though) includes a small plate of crêpes with delicious, self-made marmelade, two amazing «tartes» and a small glass of granola-marmelade yogurt. It left me feeling rejuvenated for the rest of the day!

And if you aren’t travelling with light luggage, like we were, afterwards you will almost definitely also buy some of their marmelade to take back home.

Woothosting is a low budget web hosting provider. They provide vps, shared, hybrid and dedicated-hosting.
They oversell. They do set very high limits on the resources you are allocated in both shared and vps-hosting. That means you easily get abusive users.
The support agents are robotic and does not seem to do any change.

They continue sending out “exclusive” and limited offers each 14 days or so. Nothing new. Very repetitive.

The shared hosting is very unstable and overwhelmed by all the users allocated to each node.

The reason why they get 2 stars and not 1 is their vps speed. Decent speed. Seems stable.

I chose this pub to visit in the м. Менделеевская area because of the name;
this was my second visit. Just like the first time, I had a bit of trouble
actually finding it in the building: you can’t access it through the Irish pub,
but only through a stairwell through a door on the side. After a coat-check
(which you aren’t allowed to use, if you are visiting the /craft/ pub), you
pass through several bars until you get to the very back.

What you find is a very nice pub, with a few (but not too many) televisions
with popular sports, some nice wide, deep wood benches with cushions on top,
and a decent selection of craft beer. Russian selection is unfortunately
limited: no Salden’s or Konix (maybe the two most popular Russian craft beers),
but decent selection of European and British craft beer.

The staff was friendly and helpful, giving good descriptions of a few of the
more obscure draft beers, and let me sample before deciding. Prices were
reasonable, roughly 250rub for a half-liter. They had no trouble interacting
with a foreigner with poor Russian, and I’m sure it would be awkward but
managable if I tried just using English.

I’m generally a big fan of Kurzgesagt, a channel of animated explanations/explorations of various topics ranging from the Fermi paradox to fracking. But the videos would not be nearly as enticing without the Epic Mountain soundtrack. The music playfully blends piano with 8-bit beeps & boops and the occasional epic theme reminiscent of a Hans Zimmer soundtrack, or even a jazz detour.

I enjoy listening to this music for concentrated work where the goal is to attain a flow state, but also just for its own sake. As with many soundtracks, there are recurring themes in the different Kurzgesagt tracks, but this only enhances the feeling of being transported into a carefully crafted, interconnected soundscape. If you want to listen in, I suggest starting with some of their most popular tracks: Emergence, War, Optimistic Nihilism.

lib.reviews is an open platform to post reviews and a one- to five-star rating on basically anything. Anything with a URL, that is, and sensibly you are not allowed to review individual persons unless they act as a business. The system is actually pretty clever: every review is attached to an object, which is identified by one or more URLs. And if the URL points to a supported source — at the moment primarily Wikidata — the system will automatically pull in metadata such as a description from the data source.

I also like that the site is actually quite easy-to-use and uncluttered and built with full internationalisation in mind: the interface is available in many languages and supports non-English reviews as well. The only UI issue I have is that the language your review gets assigned to is based on the interface language you have chosen. This is not that intuitive and leads to quite a few mislabelled reviews, because the reviewer might be using lib.reviews in e.g. Portuguese but write an English review, not noticing that this review will be labelled as being in Portuguese. (It also makes writing reviews in multiple languages a hassle, as you always have to switch the interface language.)

I believe the future for Internet reviews should lie in decentralised networks, either federated (e.g. using ActivityPub) or fully peer-to-peer (e.g. built on top of Secure Scuttlebutt). But lib.reviews, by being open source and open data and being available in the here and now, can be an important first step towards that goal: by being open source, the platform itself can evolve towards enabling decentralisation. And even if it doesn’t, by being open data the reviews posted on lib.reviews can form initial content for any future platform.

I like writing reviews. I like helping out others in discovering new bars or restaurant, avoiding tourist traps or crappy products and in general discovering cool new stuff. However, it has always nagged me that I am really writing for free for those huge corporations that then go on to sell ads (or apply, as with for example Yelp, even shadier business tactics) next to my reviews.

So, for me at least, lib.reviews is the solution: Not only can you review everything that has an URL (which, let’s face it, today is basically anything), but your reviews will be published under an open license so that everyone can freely download and benefit from them (similar to Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap). And by integrating with open data sources such as Wikidata or (hopefully in the future) OpenStreetMap, the reviews will be tied into a vibrant, open and truly free data ecosystem.

Life at the Edge of Sight by Scott Chimileski and Roberto Kolter is one of those rare books that makes a complex subject — microscopic organisms including bacteria, fungi, protozoans, viruses, phages, archaea — genuinely exciting and wondrous, not by over-simplifying it, but by illuminating it through brilliant photographs and lucid explanations.

You may have seen the authors’ photographic and micrographic work before, for example, in this Quanta article: The Beautiful Intelligence of Bacteria and Other Microbes. If you find the images stunning, the book provides the additional context to understand what’s going on. How and why do bacteria form biofilms, and how do they communicate with each other? What are mycelial networks, and how do they interact with plants? What exactly is a slime mold, anyway, and what makes these brainless creatures so smart?

The slime mold Physarum polycephalum. (Credit: Scott Chimileski and Roberto Kolter. Fair use.)

The book succeeds in conveying a view of the “web of life” that makes humans seem less like a pinnacle and more like one element in an ever-changing, ever-adapting network that transforms our planet both at the smallest and the largest scales. Moreover, life we may consider to be purely microscopic or single-celled often goes through macroscopic or multi-cellular stages.

To drive this point home, the authors include a chart that show the “size ranges” of different organisms, from individuals to collectives. The largest single living organism on Earth may well be a humongous fungus in Oregon— while human spermatozoa exist at the microbial scale.

The Verdict

This is a great book for anyone curious about the smallest dimensions of life. The list price of the hardcover edition as of this writing is $35; you will likely be able to get it for less. That’s a very reasonable price for a gorgeous, 370 page science book that’s also—for the most part—a great read.

If I have one criticism, it’s that the book goes into jargon-heavy explanations early on, which might deter some readers before they have a chance to really dive in. Here’s a quote from page 19:

Archaea, like the gram-positive bacteria, have one cell membrane, but the archael membrane is composed of different lipids than those in the bacterial membrane. Archael cell envelopes often also have an outer crystalline lattice of proteins called an S-layer.

Judging by some of that early writing, you might think the entire book is going to be highly technical, but it isn’t. For example, there’s an extensive description of the microbial life inside a block of cheese; the description is given in the form of an imaginary journey of an explorer who shrinks herself to the microscopic scale and gets into a fight with a cheese mite. In other words, this is a book that allows itself to have a little fun with its explanations.

The bumpy beginning is a minor concern, and I highly recommend this book regardless. If you do pick it up and don’t already have the domain expertise to parse the above quote, don’t give up too quickly; the writing becomes a lot more accessible in later chapters.