Like it or not, I spend a lot of time in front of a screen and a keyboard. I did not pay much attention to it until recently…
My setup at home is nothing extravagant, a plain table, a laptop stand to have the screen up to my eyes, my logitech trackball (not my original one, but a newer one), a trusty calculator, and my keyboard, a Drevo Gramr.
Filed under curious
This has been a small nightmare 🙂
So, I own an SN30pro gamepad mostly used to play Nintendo Switch. It works wonders, EXCEPT when running in multiplayer mode alongside other controllers, where I get a totally noticeable input lag
I stumbled upon a lego map in twitter and I thought it was quite fun and I should do something similar:
And here’s the result. One with NaturalEarth data colours for height, and another one with a set of official lego colours 😀
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NOTE from the future:
Since everybody in twitter was to keen to remind me, First the map in EPSG:25831, then in 4236 😀
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I went into this because there were so many good reviews of it and I was looking for a holiday book. The summary and the cover were not very amusing, and it being a 1200 pages novel did not help either. But I finally decided to give it a go, what else to do two weeks while camping?
It wasn’t only hype, this is really good entertainment. Mr Sanderson knows how to tell good stories within in an interestingly built world. That’s all there’s to say, if you like fantasy books this one is a must. And I’m hooked into buying the second part of the story (if that’s an indicative of how much I liked it).
Be warned though, you’re in for a slow burn. A set of stories and small backdrop pieces set up the world and present it from various point of views: A naive young noble with a disgraced family, a surgeon apprentice turned soldier and fallen into slavery, and finally, the classic portrait of a ruler who has a very strict view of honour. Those three are the bulk of the book, sprinkled with an assassin, a fisherman on a remote land, the young king and etcetera.
Compared to other fantasy like Game of Thrones it is a very tame book. Yes, there’s war, there are assassins, some characters get tortured one way or another, some fall in love, a lot die… but it feels like a book a younger audience could also enjoy. Lots of mystery, fights, special powers, plot turns… I would not be surprised if the story is pitched in the future for a Hollywood adaptation.
On the things I did not like… I’m not a fan on how the drawings and pictures are treated in my edition (Spanish 6th edition). The original art tries to give the feeling of an old parchment. In my print it does not look convincing, and to add to the injury the translation on top of the images uses a regular font instead of giving it a manual treatment, it falls too hard into the faux parchment area for my taste. There are also some mismatches between the country names in the map and in the text… nothing that detracts from the book, but looks cheap for such a huge and expensive novel.
As a closing, I like this post of Patrick Rothfuss about the way of kings 😀
Totally recommended!
Filed under books
Let’s get out of your way, here’s the full-resolution map:
Barcelona Equidistant Azimuthal.
Available in my zazzle.es shop.
Now that you’ve seen it and ordered a print :-P, I can start going on on the full process 🙂
Coming back with another bcn map. this time I’m not representing anything from open data, but I’m playing around the network analysis tool available with Qgis. The following distances map has been generated using those tools:
Castells 