Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “Books”
In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.
Sun Tzu
Ever tried.
Ever failed.
No matter.
Try again.
Fail again.
Fail better.
You know how you slip once on a habit and everything goes crazy? Well, I’ve been 4 weeks without writing these, so here’s the accumulated reading from 4 weeks. Because, even if I don’t write it, I read a lot anyway. Also, there’s lot of interesting content this “week”.
The year has ended, what has been going on?
Down into some net rabbit hole, I stumbled upon a review of Work Clean. I chuckled: a productivity book, philosophizing about how cook’s approach to preparation (mise en place) would fix all our problems? Bring it on, I have a long commute.
I am trying to make these posts a tradition (even if a few days late). I thought 2016 had been a really weird and fun year, but 2017 has beaten it easily. And I only hope 2018 will be even better in every way. For the record, when I say we, it means Laia and me unless explicitly changed.
Taken from Flickr
In case you have not realised it yet, I’m a pretty prolific reader. Online reading (and having an iPad) have slowed down the number of books I read in a given year, and I don’t go to the lengths of my girlfriend (who is about to reach her goal of reading 102 books in this year,) I’m nevertheless a frequent reader.
This year I’ve read several good books that I’d like to share with you, after all, if you are reading this probably our tastes overlap.
Santa brought me the gift I wanted for Christmas: a pyrograph. In case you don’t know, a pyrograph is a tool to draw over wood, by burning it.
As you may already know, I love drawing (in particular, ink drawing). This is similar: you don’t have a lot of control over tone and a mistake can ruin the drawing.
This was the first time I used one, and to test how it worked I decided to draw a Celtic knot over a wooden box.
Below you can find a commented version of the LaTeX template I used to create two free ebooks and A6 booklets. Now you can tweak it as much as you like it!
The syntax highlighted TeX code comes from the htmlize package in emacs, to keep with my emacs 30 Day Challenge.
\\documentclass\[9pt,openany,final\]{memoir} % Set the font size with 9pt. Openany states that a chapter may start % in either page (recto or verso in publishing language).
If you are looking for the sample ebooks, open the post and scroll down a little.
A few weeks ago I realised that I didn’t have a printed copy of Sun Tzu’s Art
of
War,
and this thought collided head on with another old thought I had: could I use
pdfpages to create A6 booklets? I use it frequently to turn my papers into
handy A4 booklets (a few A4 folded in half), butI did not know if I could do it
another time to generate A5 booklets, or even another time to get a small and
nice A6 booklet
Disclaimer: For each sale that is made through the purchase links in this post I get a small commission (that does not affect your final purchase price!). Of course, I’d love if you bought this book through these links, but I have tried my best to make my review faithful. I don’t want anyone to come later at me and say they were tricked into buying the book and the review was unfaithful to the book.
A nice warm Sunday afternoon, I wanted something cold to drink and a good book to read in my garden. I glanced at my pile of books beside the door, the books I grab to read in the train to my office, a pile of 8 books. Then I remembered I had a few books in the library I wanted to read, another pile, 10 books. As I went down and put them all over the table, I realised I had a few books more in the computer room, 3 books.
Most of you may not know who Vladimir Arnold (Владимир Арнольд, also written as Vladimir Arnol’d) was, but for me his death on 3rd June 2010,was some kind of landmark. I own two books by him (Mathematical aspects of classical and celestial mechanics [1] and Mathematical methods of classical mechanics [2]), and are quite high in my list of most checked books, at least when I was starting my journey into the realm of dynamical systems.
The 23rd of April is a very special day in Catalonia. The legend of Saint George, in the Catalan version happens in a small town called Montblanc, and when the knight kills the Dragon from its spilled blood grows a red rose he gave to the princess. Since medieval times, men give their a rose to his significant other, and in 1923 something was added to this story.
A bookseller wanted to spice the celebration, and as Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare died on this same day, he promoted the giving of books as a present.
Below you can find a non exhaustive list of the best programming books I have read so far. I have read a lot more books about programming, but most of them I read and promptly forgot about them. I am reading currently a few more (Code Complete, Thinking Forth), and maybe they can make it into a list like this that my future self writes.
And now, the list of the best programming books I have read so far.
Last year our department got a nice and shiny Xerox WorkCentre, with scan+mail capabilities. Wonders of technology, now I can scan those chapters I use from books that weigth tons. But… of course, the machine scans two pages each time, and thus creates a double bound PDF.
And this doesn’t work well with my way to print booklets, so a working solution was to use ghostscript and ImageMagick from the command line.
I love the smell of old (really old, but not dusty) books. It reminds me of some kind of vanilla scent, that is only to be found in them. I smelled it a few weeks ago, when I bought Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, second hand 1972 Penguin Modern Classics edition (3€) in a second hand bookstore in Göttingen (Germany).
Softcover binding your own books is easier than you think
Bookbinding for dummies As of late, I have been printing quite a lot of long mathematical papers, and a few free pdf-books, or tutorials. And I wanted them properly bound, but didn’t want them so much as to pay for it. A few months ago, I found this tutorial on hardback binding. Although the tutorial, method and result are great, it is quite a lengthy effort.
This weekend I bought three books:
Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings (Bill Evans: Vida y Obra), Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury (Crónicas Marcianas) and The Lebanese Cookbook (a spanish edition). I have already finished Bradbury’s, I enjoyed it a lot. A masterpiece in science-fiction. In one of its short stories there is a poem by Lord Byron:
So we’ll go no more a roving
so late into the night