Enjoyed

An enjoyable book with some interesting action.  It is lacking in grand sci-fi concepts other than the sulfur stuff, which I thought for sure was going to be a cargo ship loaded with iron filings based on some commentary I had seen before reading.  But there is a good amount of near-future envisionings: drone concepts, live streaming, climate impacts, etc.

The climate topics overall are a no for me.  I don't identify with the people who dread climate impacts all day long in real life.  So even though I think it is plausible for such things to happen, I guess I really do not care to read a book about it.  I think I envision all these "dreaders" also reading the book and being like, "yes, see that is what will happen!" and want to roll my eyes so hard.

I wonder what topics I enjoy reading that would cause such eye rolling by others?

Lastly, I am really not sure what to think of the non-lethal border wars!  Is there some kernel of this developing already that I don't know about?

The overall premise of magic dying out for the given reasons is pretty clever overall, and the time travel mechanism/effects holds up to some examination.  I find the historical setting to be fun and pretty well detailed in this book.

The "found documents" format is tedious, and especially so for my eBook situation due to some formatting difficulties.  I think quality dropped a bit towards the end as some plot points became less plausible.

I set up my own mail server about a year before reading this book so the timing wasn't great, but still this was a good read.  And fortunately I had chosen almost exactly the same software stack.

I will probably use this to go back through and fine tune a few things on my server...eventually.  The rspamd config comes to mind.  I don't think it is updating any definitions as I mark new messages as Junk.

This book was great for putting me to sleep.  But that's OK!  It probably isn't great to read something that amps you up and keeps you up.

An interesting read, weaving between topics of operating system histories and philosophies.  I am about a year into my Linux journey and I think this mostly motivational for me to continue that, but also made me think what would have been different if had succeeded in my experiments to get Linux running at home in the basement during my high school years.  I remember burned Mandrake Linux CDs and also Ubuntu ones that I got in the mail for free.

I chose this book knowing that it was old.  My thoughts were that it would be interesting to see how things used to be, and also that it would focus more on what nowadays seem to be basic principles.  I can report success of both points.

The book overall had a nice balance of hacking stories, security principles, protocol analysis, and functional recommendations.

I did not realize how old this was when I started reading it.  I was thinking early 90s for some reason--off by 20+ years!  So my initial thoughts of mediocre quality of framing of technology and processes were similarly off and it is really a great book in that regard.

I am not a fan of the report/write-up structure, with the frequent wry sidebars about how the scientists were missing things.  One or two of them did nice foreshadowing but that is all I will concede.

I recently read Project Hail Mary and I wonder if some concepts with regards to the organisms in that were inspired by this book.  Or maybe it is kind of a genre and other examples exist.

First book of a three-person book club that I am in.  The "He might have a kid of his own at home" message of the opening sequence really set the tone for the rest of the book--it is a message of positivity and being thankful.

I found myself a bit bored in the middle of the book.  It was repetitive but also firmly established some kind of Americana vibe, so fine overall.