• Lois McMaster Bujold's Penric stories finally have a proper print edition, having been collected in Penric's Progress and Penric's Travels, the latter out in May.  These form volumes four and five in her World of the Five Gods series.
  
  If you enjoy well-written, tightly-plotted fantasy with relatable heroes and complex villains, you can't go wrong with these.  The first two books, The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls, form a trilogy where the first volume doesn't exist. Instead, the history of those events comes out naturally as the characters discover it. 
  
  I call the hypothetical Chalion trilogy Ista's Fall, Ista's Redemption, and Ista's Glory.  That's a minor spoiler but nothing you wouldn't get if you read the blurb for Paladin before reading Curse.
  
  The remaining books in the series are actually set earlier chronologically, but work fine because they're not prequels, just stories that happened in the past of Curse of Chalion.
  
  If you prefer science fiction and haven't read the Vorkosigan Saga, pick up either Shards of Honor or The Warrior's Apprentice.  My own experience started with The Vor Game, which actually comes after The Warrior's Apprentice, and that works too.
  
  They are absolutely brilliant military SF with a focus on the people rather than the battles, though there are certainly battles.
  
  Bujold's other major series is Dag and Fawn Go on a Boat, otherwise known as The Sharing Knife.  Which is very well written and engaging but doesn't have the same impact.
  
  
• Repairman Jack uses DuckDuckGo.
  
  The latest Repairman Jack book - The Last Christmas - is a sort of sequel to the Ice Trilogy, which happens during the events of the Repairman Jack series, which happens during the events of the Adversary Cycle.
  
  F. Paul Wilson started out writing the Adversary Cycle, found he had a hit with Repairman Jack, the main character in the second volume, completed the Adversary Cycle first, then circled back and added in 15 books in the chronological middle of the main series, plus six additional prequels.
  
  And then updated the original six volumes to fix up the chronology a bit, because the last volume of the series by internal chronology was published in 1992, and the second last in 2011.
  
  These are all well worth reading.  The two starting points are The Keep - first book of the Adversary Cycle, or The Tomb, the first book of Repairman Jack.  The Keep is set during WWII and The Tomb in present-day New York, and it takes a while for the events to link up, but they do.
  
  
  

• Everyone is reviewing the Fractal Design Define 7.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's a case.  I built a couple of servers in Fractal Design cases for work, years ago.  They were fine.  This is version 7.
  
  
  
• DigitalOcean is borrowing $100 million for expansion.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Some interesting details on their size and revenue in the article.  They are basically 1% of the size of AWS.  There's no comparison between the management UIs of the two platforms, though: DigitalOcean leaves AWS in the dust.
  
  
  
• Time for PCIe 5: New Kioxia (Toshiba) SSDs now saturate PCIe 4.0.  (Serve the Home)
  
  I believe PCIe 5.0 is still on track for next year.  Very unlikely to go straight to the desktop, though.
  
  
  
• An AI project scanning a vast database of known chemical compounds to search out potential antibiotics has found some, including one that is proving effective on multi-drug-resistant bacterial strains.  (The Guardian)
  
  This is good.

Posted by: Jay at Saturday, February 22 2020 12:38 AM (mrlXS)

Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, February 22 2020 10:39 AM (LMsTt)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, February 22 2020 02:36 PM (PiXy!)

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