A Trilogy as Treasure

The Great Turning:Future Ages is the third book in a fine series and one of those rare literary gems that can make a reader smile, wince, cry, grind their teeth, and laugh out loud. Not once, but many times in the same novel. The love shown by Zola, Ted, Russ, and their extended family is … More A Trilogy as Treasure

NoMoNASA

Why NASA needs to focus on deep space missions A bit of history After the manned lunar missions, NASA was tasked with creating a reusable spacecraft to support future human exploration and Low Earth Orbit (LEO) projects. NASA engineers came up with several suggestions and shared them with hand-picked teams of post-grad engineering students and … More NoMoNASA

Vacation

While on vacation, my wife and I drove through Georgia and I made a geek pilgrimage to the MicroCenter outlet in Duluth, Georgia. As usual, I walked out about an hour later, with a bag of goodies and a much thinner credit card. More on this in a later post. We got a hotel and … More Vacation

Distro Hopping

As most of my readers know, I’ve been using Kubuntu Linux for more than fifteen years. Overall, I’m pleased with the latest 22.04LTS Kubuntu release. However there has been one annoying bug that I have learned has deeper issues. Several times a day, I get a popup from the tray notifying me that the Firefox … More Distro Hopping

Floating Cities

Science fiction authors have been envisioning floating cities for years. One was described in Neil Stephenson’s classic, “Snow Crash” as repurposing a discarded aircraft carrier. The latest South Korean plan to construct a 15 acre prototype to hold twelve thousand people will share many of the same problems of a space colony. For example, how … More Floating Cities

A New Meme!

I created this in about fifteen minutes with the Free and Open Source program Inkscape. The original painting is “The Silence” by Joseph Decreux 1790.

Inspiration

My mother gave me a science fiction paperback when I was about ten years old. I’ve been consuming books at an average of one a week, ever since. Over the years, I’ve been inspired by many people. Here’s just a few of them. I’m sure I’ll remember others after I post this. Futurists Stewart Brand … More Inspiration

New NUC

Recently, my wife encouraged me to go ahead and get myself a belated holiday present. I’ve been jonesing to try one of the new breed of NUC computers for some time now. An NUC, short for “Next Unit of Computing”, is a small box-shaped computer that often won’t measure more than a few inches across … More New NUC