Review of Ubuntu 14.04: The Trusty Tahr is out

I must admit, this was the most anticipated release of Ubuntu so far for me. I had been using 12.04 for a while on my main machine and I was eager to get my hands on this shiny new version of my favorite Linux distro.

After downloading the iso via torrent I installed it and here are my initial comments:

I very much like the aesthetic changes done, including the login screen, the colours and particularly the window resizing overhaul. I thought these would be barely noticeable for me but coming from 12.04 I definitely feel that the overall package looks shinier and more pleasant to look at.

I find it unfortunate that Ubuntu One is closing down but I do believe this doesn't really reflect on the health of canonical in general. One aspect of Ubuntu I think needs an overhaul is the software centre. It has pretty much looked the same for a while and if anything I think it may have looked better a few years ago than it looks now. I personally feel that while the rest of the OS has been evolving into a beautiful piece of software, the software centre still looks the same and it is already looking pretty dated.

*Before I continue, let me say that I have already adopted 14.04 to be my desktop OS for the next while. That's because I really really do like it. However I do have some criticism as well, so I wish that anyone reading this does not get discouraged from trying this distro based on the rest of my post.*

While I was very excited to use the latest HUD from Unity, I felt slightly disappointed so far because while the HUD idea is brilliant to the point of being almost revolutionary to me, it is still not doing what I believe it should be doing. I love the idea of having the HUD where I can not only use to open files and applications in my own computer, I would love to be able to easily pick filters and search engines that can be integrated to Unity that way. From my limited experience so far, it looks interesting but it is far from being what it should be. Part of the problem is that I did not find the HUD to be very user friendly and perhaps having a tutorial would be useful or some other way to really make the HUD intuitive and customizable. Once Ubuntu can do that effectively I would not be surprised if other OSs copied the idea because it is simply brilliant.

Some of the issues I had in the past with Ubuntu such as difficulty installing supported software like "Steam" are still there. I don't know why but when I try to install steam from the Ubuntu Software Centre it doesn't offer me an option to just "install", instead it says "Buy" which eventually leads me to errors.  I really hope little glitches like that are taken care of soon because I strongly believe having an OS that works as it is intended all the time is vital if Ubuntu is ever to be a true competitor of Apple and Microsoft.

I've also encountered some problems with my sounds settings. For some reason my earphones only produce sounds from the left side. I know it's not a harware issue since Windows plays sounds fine on my machine. After doing some research I haven't been able to find an easy solution yet and it is a bit frustrating. So often Linux advocates bash new users because they say Linux is too hard to use consistently and this exemplifies what I mean exactly. I know that it is often a result of hardware manufacturers not paying as much attention to Linux, however, in order for Linux to really become popular accross the board, it needs to have issues like this addressed.

While Ubuntu still offers all the customization that it has offered in the past, I don't like that Canonical has disabled a lot of the options that use to be out of the box such as multiple workspaces and things like that. I also think they have made some of the settings a bit harder to access now which is likely an attempt to "dumb down" the OS to make it more user friendly. Unfortunately I do not like having to spend so much time tweaking my distro just so it could run like my Ubuntu 11.10 use to run. But if doing things like this helps to get more users I can forgive Canonical for it, but maybe offer an option during install for "new user" vs "seasoned user".

Overall though, I am extremely excited to be finally running Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr. I have been waiting for this version for a while and I am very impressed with what I have seen so far. After attempting to use quite a few other distros like Xubuntu, Mint 16, Kali, Debian and Ubuntu Gnome, I still feel that Ubuntu continues to deliver the best experience of all of these. Mint has climbed significantly in popularity, but to be perfectly frank I don't think it offers any more user friendliness than Ubuntu does. I strongly recommend Ubuntu to anyone wanting to try Linux for the first time as it is a great system, and I would love to see some of the more persistent problems with the distro disappear so that Ubuntu can really make an impact on the desktop market. Unity may be a source of a lot of differences of opinion, but in my opinion Unity is the most inovative, the most attractive and the desktop environment with the most potential to become the new standard in the future. Keep up the good work Canonical.

Minty Review: Linux Mint 16 (cinnamon flavor)

After being on the top of the chart for more than a couple of years, I finally decided to give Linux Mint a try, after all why are people using it so much? I must say I was biased previously because I though Mint looked a little too boring for me and aside from being an easy to use sort of distro, I didn't see the appeal. To be perfectly honest, I never thought Ubuntu was hard to use so even that appeal I don't quite understand.

Anyway, now that I've played with Mint for about a week, I feel like I can form a more relevant opinion, and to be honest I was not impressed. First of all, as I feared the OS to me looks very vanilla, and offered as far as I saw, nothing dramatically interesting. As I mentioned, often mint is labeled as a great distro to start with, and while it is easy to use, I had two crashes in my first day of use and one of them was while watching a regular video. I feel that a distrubution that is known for media compatibility out of the box should be able to play simple videos without a hiccup.Ubuntu 13.04 VM or my Xubuntu 12.04 VM. I had a lot of issues getting a few pieces of software, including my email client to work smoothly and that didn't help me have a good opinion of it.

I do need to disclose that I was running it as a virtual machine, so perhaps my experience would have been better on a hard install, but these are issues I didn't seem to have with my

Perhaps I am being unfair by reviewing Mint as a VM, but I've done that with other distros before and considering Mint's reputation, I don't feel that it requires special treatment on my review.

Overall, I feel that Mint, much like Ubuntu, has really helped bring Linux to a lot of new users, and I applaud them for that. I think that if there is anything that can be done to make Linux more popular, it should be done. With all the discourse regarding online privacy, the NSA and hackers, a shift to Linux is a great first step into trying to protect yourself. The Internet is my favorite invention of the 20th century and I truly believe that popularizing Linux is just another step into giving people online freedom, and ensuring that we stay in control of our own private habits. So Mint gets points for doing that, however as a distrubution for someone like me, I wasn't impressed. In my opinion Ubuntu is just as easy to use to a user with some computer knowledge and it offers a much more inovative experience. I have to admit I am an Unity fan boy, even though it is bulky. If I want a less meaty distro, my current pick is Xubuntu, I have yet to see another really lightweight distro that looks so good and functions so well.

Mars Trilogy: Red Mars review

I have not read a book that really caught my attention in a little while. I had this one on my "to read" list for a few years and finally decided to try it out. It has surprised me greatly. I have to say it is now a contender for my top book series, potentially taking Dune out of the top spot. While this will have to wait until I finish the trilogy, I expect I will continue to enjoy the journey.

What made me appreciate Dune so much was the depth of the Dune universe and in particular the scientific discussions about ecology, geology, economics, politics and religion combined with some great characters and an epic feel to it. I loved the really interesting interplay of all those forces in a far distance expansive humanity. Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson starts the series with the theme of human's attempt to colonize the red planet. Once I started the book I realized it was much more than that. The book uses this Mars colonization as a medium, but the real story lies on the characters, which for the most part are thinkers, scientist philosophers, that want to colonize a new planet and make a fresh start for humanity. This serves as a great way to discuss social, political and economical systems that we have adopted over the course of human development. It is very interesting how a few characters really try to discard some of the most fundamental aspects of human culture as either inefficient or as an antiquated system that had a purpose originally but we managed to exploit it to turn it into something harmful to society. It's a book that really tries to challenge the status quo, and worked very well on me to get me to evaluate a bit more carefully some of the pillars of humanity. There are some very compelling ideas there.

I really don't want to give much away for anyone actually interested in reading this, but if you like books that are sometimes heavy on ideas and science, this is the book for you as it was the book for me. I look forward to every chance I have to read it, which hasn't been very often due to my time commitment writing my graduate theses.

Best headphones for your needs

I know it's a bit late for this post since people would have probably liked to see this before Christmas but hey, maybe there are some people exchanging gifts or looking for a nice pair of headphones to buy with their gift certificates.

I don't know why but it bugs me so much every time I see people wearing the stupid Beats headphones like it's jewelery. I supposed it shouldn't since that's basically what it is. I would love to know that people buy Beats headphones because it's fashionable rather than because they are good quality headphones, since they are not. If you are going to spend that kind of money on a headphone and you know anything about audio quality, you will stay away from that brand. Beets only has one thing they excel at, marketing. Below I posted a nice picture of Dr. Dre using his Audio-
Technica headphones :P (relevant http://www.reddit.com/r/audiophile/comments/16n8vb/i_bought_beats_by_dre_it_was_a_mistake_what/)

I should have made this post a few years ago when I was looking for headphones. I knew all the best ones at the time and I ended up picking up a pair of Sennheiser HD555. It was the best $200 dollars I could have spent on headphones at the time. The sound on them is absolutely brilliant, great treble, solid mids with good enough bass for my taste. Perhaps if you are going to be listening to music that is heavy on the low bands there may be a better match for you out there. Overall though, I don't think I could have spent my money on anything better. These are amazing for listening to my music, but also do an exceptional job for gaming and movies, which was definitely a consideration for me.


Now, this was a few years ago and now the models are different of course. But for anyone looking, here is a great resource that inspired me to make this post http://www.reddit.com/r/headphones

I think explaining the types of earphones you can get would be relevant before I continue:

Earbuds - I think everyone knows what these are. Basically the little ones that go inside your ear canal and will generally come with your iPod or other music players. These tend to be cheap and you will not get the same type of quality in these as you would with bigger pieces. A variation of eabuds are the IEMs (In-ear monitors) which are basically the same thing, but actually go further in your ear kind of lodging themselves a bit tighter. They provide a bit more isolation for the sound and in my experience tend to be of slightly better in quality.

Suggestions
Shure SE215 ($100) - Shure is a pretty popular manufacturer for music equipment, and back when I used to play in a band we always thought of Shure microphones being some of the best for our price range. Sennheiser PMX 680 Sport ($60) - These are a bit cheaper but they are supposedly good for listening when moving around alot, for instance during workout.

LH's Budget pick: Grado Labs SR60i ($80) and Sennheiser PX 200-II ($90)

Midrange: Etymotic Research HF5 ($150)

Highrange: JH Audio JH13 Pro ($1100) or Westone ES5 ($950)

Closed Full-sized Circumaural - These are the big ones that are fairly popular nowadays. They are full-sized if they basically cover your entire but circumaural means that they sit around your ear rather than on top of them. These are generally not very portable and I wouldn't necessarily walk around the street with them, although people do. The Closed part just means that they separate your ears from the surrounding sounds, meaning they isolate the sound so that they prevent your music from coming out of your ear but also prevent outside sounds from coming in. This is not the same as sound cancelling, that's a whole other technology, all it is is that they are closed and will provide some cancellation.

Open Full-sized Circumaural - These are very similar to our previous category of course, but instead of being closed to the outside they are open. Some of you may ask, why would that be good? Well I think there is a level of personal preference, but I think in general most people would say that these will generally provide a better and more realistic experince. While you will annoy more people in the bus with these and you will hear your neighbour cut the grass through them, they sound better. The closed earphones will bounce sound inside and around your ear while you listen to them, which can sound almost as if the music is coming from inside your head sometimes. They kind of give you this feel that you are listening to music in a studio, but to me that isn't how I think things should sound. I like my music and sounds to sound normal as if they were happening around me. So the open headphone allow the sound to dissipate around you which makes it sounds a lot more like you are seeing a live band. The sound just feels more alive and true to me. Of course that's why I ended up chosing the HD555 when I did. That is an example of a open circumaural headphone.


Suggestions
Low: Shure SRH440 ($100 - closed)

Mid: Audio-Technica ATH-M50 ($160 - closed) This is a very trusted brand from audiophiles and I certainly considered buying something similar when I was shopping around. It's a popular pick at this price range. Alternatively, the Sennheiser HD558 is the modern version of my headphone and tends to sell around $200 (open). This is probably what I would buy at this price range just because of my 3 year experience with the previous generation. They are superbly confortable and sound amazing. If there is one complaint I have is that they can get a bit warm if you are wearing them for a long time in the summer. The velvet pads are great when the temperature is nice, but not so great at 40ºC.


Expensive: Sennheiser HD800 ($1500 - open) Of course the top end I would suggest would be an open piece.

Full-sized Supra-aural - These are quite popular for people that have earphones hanging around their neck on the street. They can be seen as the portable version of the circumaural as they are smaller and only sit on top of the ear, meaning they don't have to cover your entire ear. This of course affects how natural they can sound if you aren't even using your full ear to add to the experience. I've tested a few of these but never bought one becuase I just don't have a need for it.

Suggestions
Low: JVC HAS400B ($35)

Mid-High: Sennheiser HD 25-1 II ($200) and Beyerdynamic DT 1350 ($300)

Noice Cancelling Headphones

I've tested a few but to be honest I have never found myself needing something like this. I don't fly very much and would have no other reason to buy them, meaning I don't know as much about these types of pieces. What I do know, is that they often require a battery because they have a tiny microphone on the outside that picks up ambient noises, with these they are able to produce changes to the soundwaves coming out into your ears so that they remove the annoying sounds from the outside. Some people don't even use them for music, they can be great for just removing ambient sounds. This technology is very cool, but will also make so that you will pay a pretty penny for these. They are not cheap and generally you won't get the best sound quality even if you spend $300 dollars for them. Not saying they are bad, I'm just saying you are paying for them to cancel noise, and not produce quality sounds. I tend to think that way about anything, I always try to buy products that fit my precise need and not pay for a bunch of technology I have no use for. I think that's a good piece of advice to anyone. Technology costs money and you end up paying for it even if you don't use it. That is money you could be spending on some other aspect of the product, in this case quality of the sound. Another piece of advice, don't ever think that spending more money garantees you a better product. Just look at Beets, Bose and Apple, you pay more for their stuff and that's it, you are not necessarily getting the best bang for your buck, and with these 3 I can garantee you that you are not. Unless having the most popular product is your bang and not the actual quality, than ignore what I'm saying.

For further literature check out that subreddit I linked above and Head-Fi.org. 

Shopping for a tablet

My wife came up with the idea of getting me a tablet for Xmas. I never really pushed to buy one before because of price and I thought I wouldn't really get my money's worth out of it. But as it is Xmas and the idea was planted in my head I decided to do a bit of research on it. After some research and consideration of my price range I was looking at:

• Google (ASUS) Nexus 7 -  This was the smallest one I considered, only 7 inches, but the reviews everywhere just praise this machine. It has great hardware, boasting 1920 x 1200 native resolution, 32Gb of storage but no SD compatibility. 2Gb of RAM and is the only one with Android 4.3 (Jelly Bean) out of the box. The machine is beautiful and it sounds like it has early access to apps via Google Play, although I'm still not sure what that means. I think if I could get the Nexus 10 I would have considered the google tablets a bit more seriously, however 7 inches was a tad too small for me. I really wanted something a bit more substantial.
• Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 10" - One of my top contenders since it's a 10 inch tablet at a fairly reasonable price point. It uses Android 4.2, which is not the newest but it's close. It has 16Gb of storage which is upgradeable through MicroSD to 64Gb. It has 1Gb of RAM which is actually not very much and is the reason I didn't pick it. It weights 510g with a 1280x800 resolution. I considered the 8 inch one as well, which seems a bit better in terms of hardware, but the screen was too small for my needs.
• Microsoft Surface 32Gb Windows RT - The weekend I was looking at tablets, this one was hugely on sale for only C$199. In terms of hardware I actually thing it was easily the best option available. As you may or may not know, the windows tablets also come with virtually full featured office suite, which is great if you want a tablet for browsing and work. I was very close to buying this model, but I'm glad I didn't now. The keyboard doesnt come with the RT tablets, and it is sold separately for pretty much the same price as any other keyboard for Androids. The RT OS is actually pretty restricting, only allowing you to use RT software you get from the microsoft app store. This is unlike the Surface 2, which can pretty much run like a laptop, but those things are very expensive. As I said, in terms of harware, it's great. Resolution of 1366x768, 32 Gb of storage, 2Gb of RAM. It's a bit heavier, weighing 680g. But in the end, I realized I'm likely not going to be doing too too much work on this thing so I shouldn't buy something so restrictive. Apple and Androids just have so much more option in terms of apps.
• Sony Xperia Tablet Z 10" - It hast only 16Gb of storage although that can be upgraded with a SD card. It's 10 inches which I think is important to me. It's one of the lightest machines around and has the added bonus of being waterproof. It uses Android 4.1, which is a more dated OS but it is an Android still.

Anyway, I ended up decided on the Sony Xperia Z tablet. Despite not seeing it appear on a lot of review websites, I absolutely love the machine and now I can't believe I never had one before and that it doesn't receive more praise around. It is simply a perfect extension from my PC in the home. I love using it to connect me to all my devices and just have easy access to everything I need anywhere without needing my 5kg laptop. It also happens to be the only waterproof tablet around and it even has remote control capabilities, so I can use it to work my TV and whatnot. It's just perfect.

 

In terms of apps I actually use on it right now, I have evernote and dropbox for my cloud needs. I have Lemon SSH to connect to my home/media server. I use a reddit app and I downloaded Dungeaon Crawl Stone Soup for android which is availabe on Google play. It's actually not a terrible port to be honest. This tablet also has great integration with all my google accounts, including my schedule, my emails, my contacts. I'm still exploring what apps there are, but I'm very impressed with my Android so far.

As a last comment, I didn't really consider an iPad for 2 main reasons. First, it is fairly expensive for what you get compared to the Androids. More importantly, I hate Apple. I think they make good products and they have the best marketing team in the world as far as I'm concerned. However I hate what Apple stands for. They produce great products that unfortunately restrict their users to a lot of the software they want their users to use, instead of trying to open up so that users can have freedom if they chose so. How many times have I been stuck with a problem on one of my iDevices that I simply would not be able to resolve without a huge amount of headache if it wasn't for Linux. I can always just acces my apple machines with the help of my Linux and that usually allows me to have the freedom that Apple seems to always want to take away. A lot of people claim this is solely to protect users from making mistakes, but I think often it is to prevent users that are already paying a premium on their products from steering away from other products they will be happy to charge their customers for. It's just like Burton snowboards, that force you to buy the bindings from them and then the snowboard boots from them as well. People get tricked into buying their product, just to be stuck using all their other products in the end. I refuse to fund a corporation that uses these types of tactics to make money.

Linux distro sampling - Ubuntu GNOME and Kali Linux

I decided to try a few new distros this week after realizing that my current Ubuntu 12.04 install is wrecked. Before picking what to install next on my dual boot machine I decided to try out a couple of things in a VM form. So I downloaded VirtualBox, installed that, changed my BIOS to be able to run a virtual machine and off I went installing Ubuntu Gnome.

Ubuntu GNOME

I had seen a few videos of the distro and read some reviews of Gnome 3 and thought this looks quite nice, looked nicer than KDE and it seemed a bit more practical and fast than Unity. Well after installing it I'm not nearly as impressed as I thought I would be. I don't like a lot of aspect of this version of gnome. I thought I would like the idea of a desktop environment that's simple, clean and minimalist, but I don't. I like the search function of the DE but it's not even as good as Unity at that. Not having minimize and maximize buttons is annoying even if they are not essential. The color scheme is annoying and I can't find a quick way to remediate that without downloading something. I know this is probably not related to my desktop environment, but the software center in this distro has no search function, and that's just abnoxious. I ended up downloading synaptic which I do like but seriously. I'm also not a big fan of the file manager that comes with this distro, Nautilus in my opinion is superior. All in all I think I would go back to the regular Ubuntu as soons as I can unless I do find something better before I make the jump back.

Kali Linux

After trying to get my old copy of Backtrack 5 running on my newer laptop and having a lot of issues to fix I decided to go ahead and download a more recent version of BT which would be BT5R3. Well I discovered in this process that there is a whole new distro that is the next BT called Kali Linux. I did a bit of reading and despite my natural propensity to avoid change I went ahead and downloaded Kali. First thing I noticed was how much smaller the ISO file is compared to BT5. The OS uses KDE and it isn't nearly as sleek looking as BT5 was, but obviously aesthetics of a distro with this kind of purposes is kind of a silly thing to worry about. The bottom line is that I'm extremely impressed with this distro. I don't think I will ever touch BackTrack again after experiencing Kali. It's faster, lighter, does the job with minimal problems. It also took a lot less configuring to get things I needed working to work such as the network adapter. I would strongly recommend anyone using BT to try Kali next chance they have, it's a wonderful change from BT in the sense that it does what you need it to with minimal to no headache. Great move by the developers.

Ubuntu Server 12.04

Since I'm at it and this was something I did recently I figured I'd post it here too... I mentioned in earlier posts that I'm also working with a server distro on my old laptop. I'm using it headless with Putty on my desktop machine. Right now I have it running a samba server which shares any HD attached to my dock, and this week I installed miniDLNA on it to share media over my network to other machines as well as my PS3 (mainly to my PS3 really).

My experience so far with this distro has been very positive. It's so fast even on my old shitty laptop. Working on it through a command line and no GUI has actually been quite an interesting experience. I'm not going to say it's not a bit more challenging to work on it this way (at least for a noob like me), but I feel like I'm learning quite a bit and it just makes the whole experience "cleaner" if you understand what I mean. It's nice having such a minimalist OS running in my server.

Overall (tl:dr)

Ubuntu GNOME 13.04 - I want my unity back, sorry Gnome 3 but it's just not going to work out.
Ubuntu Server 12.04 - Fast and reliable, what else do you need from a server?
Kali Linux 1.0.3 - An upgrade from BT5, I didn't think it was possible. It was love at first ARP spoof.

Joseph Heller's "Catch-22"

 The chaplain was apologetic. "I'm sorry, sir, but just about all the prayers I know are rather somber in tone and make at least some passing reference to God."

"Then let's get some new ones. The men are already doing enough bitching about the missions I send them on without our rubbing it in with our sermons about God or death or Paradise. Can't we take a more positive approach? Why can't we all pray for something good, like a tighter bomb pattern, for example? Couldn't we pray for a tighter bomb pattern?"

This was one of those books I had been planning to read for quite some time, and it was as good as I expected. It is an interesting read, since it is written in quite an unusual way. The story is not told in a chronological order, instead you are told events in a way that all the pieces are presented as different characters are introduced and explored. Heller keeps feeding you different parts of the story and only giving you hints to when the events occur. The hints on the timeline are given in a very clever way, by using the number of mandatory missions pilots have to have before they can be sent home, which keeps going up as the war progresses.

The story is really interesting and Heller really twists things up as you go, by starting the book in a very humorous tone, that eventually turning it into a dark humor that really paints a grim image of war. Better than the plot in my opinion, was the prose. Heller, to me, writes some of the funniest proses I've ever seen, and even when I felt that the plot was dragging a bit, I never felt compelled to quit, because there were so many hilariously absurd dialogues.

Overall, this was a great book, and a must for anyone looking to read a classic WWII satire. In the next while I would like to read Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, as I've heard it is also a good satire. For now however, I will leave Catch-22 with a 8.5/10.

Stephen King's "The Gunslinger"

“The greatest mystery the universe offers is not life but size. Size encompasses life, and the Tower encompasses size. The child, who is most at home with wonder, says: Daddy, what is above the sky? And the father says: The darkness of space. The child: What is beyond space? The father: The galaxy. The child: Beyond the galaxy? The father: Another galaxy. The child: Beyond the other galaxies? The father: No one knows. - 

Just finished the first book in the Dark Tower series by Stephen King. It's a bit of a unique book as I find it hard to give it a genre, maybe a fantasy/western? Overall, not a bad book, it was my first S. King novel and since the books I've read lately have been so big it was nice that this novel was a bit more compact. The chapters were short and the book had a pretty good tempo. I'd recommend this book to anyone looking for a relatively quick read, it's not a heavy book but you do have to keep track of a bit to follow the story. I've also read that this is being made into an HBO series, so that could be very good. I guess George R R Martin's series was such a success for them that they want to find some other book series to milk. This is probably a good pick for that, although I would have preferred something like Dune. I know there are several attempts at Dune out there, but none were well done.

Overall, it's a decent read. I'll definitely pick up the other books of the series at some point. It gets a 7.5

Joe Abercrombie's "Best Served Cold"

"Sometimes you must take one life to spare more, and when those times come, sentiment helps nobody." - Shenkt

Joe Abercrombie's Best Served Cold - I just finished reading Best Served Cold, after hearing so many good things about this young fantasy author, Abercrombie. I thought the book was pretty decent, it is a fun and gritty fantasy novel. The plot is essentially a "Kill Bill" set in a medieval Italy like setting. Quite interesting and a bit different from other fantasies I've read. I was expecting a violent and graphic novel and it was. It has lots of fights, bad ass characters and even weird sex. It may sound like too much, but it is written almost in a comical way, so even though the scenes aren't often funny, Abercrombie manages to make it sound funny in a very dark and twisted way (at least for me), which was good, even if it eventually got old. The book is fairly long and the "humor" didn't work the whole way through, but that might have just been me.

One criticism I have with the book though is the fact that I didn't necessarily care about any of the characters. Not to say that there weren't interesting characters in the book, but no one was good enough that I cared whether I would see him at the end or not. So much so that my favorite character didn't survive the story and I didn't necessarily care too much.

I'm definitely considering Abercrombie's First Law trilogy at some point. I've heard good things about it, and it takes place in the same world as this novel, so that could be fun.

Overall, it's worth a read if you want to read something fun and violent. I'll give it a 7.0

Editing PDF files and looking at the stars

Just today I had to send out a PDF document that I've received a few days ago, however in this document I had about 12 pages of irrelevant information I didn't want to share. Well there I went to look for a nice app to just remove pages off of a PDF file, and that's when I came by this neat little app on the Ubuntu Software Center called PDF Shuffler. It is a very simple and very small app that just did exactly what I needed, it literally took me less than 5 minutes to search a program like this on UBC, check a couple of reviews, download and install it. It works very well.

As I was in the Software Center, I decided to download this other program called Stellarium, which is an Astronomy app. It is great if you are interested in finding out what star you are looking at night. It's neat that you can also look at the sky anywhere in the world, and it will give you names of stars, planets and constellations. I recommend.

Finally my new PC specs

So as I've been saying, I got myself a new machine, or at least most of my machine is new.

MOBO: ASUS P8Z68-V LX Z68 L1155 GLAN DDR3
CPU: Intel Core i5-2500K 3.3GHz 8MB L1155
RAM: DDR3 8GB (2x 4GB) KVR1333D3N9K2
HDD: SATA II Seagate 1Tb 7200RPM 32M
Case: ATX Coolmaster 922HAF
PSU: Antec Truepower 650W
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium :(

The whole thing cost me C$950 which is a pretty competitive price. I got it at Sonnam Computer at College and Spadina in Toronto. I looked for these part at various shops around that area and online so I know the price isn't too bad. I picked this particular shop because of the service, the sales people were quite helpful and willing to give me a discount as well. I do however have a complaint. While picking my part I specifically asked them to not install any OS on the machine. I wanted them to put some of the parts together, but since I was going to dual boot it, I preferred to take it home and partition the HDD myself and start from there. Well even though I asked them that in more than one occasion they still installed my OS and did the authentication online which was very annoying. Overall though, the experience wasn't bad.

Sonnam Computer (457 Spadina Ave.)