If you find that the Memory Integrity setting in Windows 10 turns itself back on when you reboot after having turned it off, try this: go to Control Panel → Programs → Turn Windows features on or off, and enable Hyper-V. Reboot.

I paid for it once, therefore I should be allowed to keep it running forever. Thus spake my sense of entitlement. My sense wasn't wrong, but it sure didn't know what suffering was ahead.

When recompressing videos it's a good idea to get the video as right as possible. Since we're going to apply lossy compression to it we want to make sure that we end with as good a copy as possible.

A sign of spring, a herd of deer graze on the small green shoots found under the thick layer of last year's autumn leaves.

A large cemetery in Siena, dating from 1784.

Near the center of Milan, in its Zone of Silence, you can find a building with a very stylish intercom - right next to the entrance is a large bronze ear where guests could announce their arrival. It's Casa Sola-Busca, more known as Cà dell'oreggia or House of the Ear. This old-school intercom was in use until it became famous enough that random passers-by would shout into it and annoy the tenants.

I think it's time we started properly curb stomping Russia. You don't win by incremental means, you win by really going for the kill.

Shape, not color. Maybe not strictly brut (raw) due to polishing, but I'd say raw enough.

A winter walkabout.

Get into video, and you soon realize one thing - these files take up space. "But storage is getting cheaper!" someone says. Yes, and I want that to translate to actual savings for me, not get eaten up by a horde of gigantic movie clips.

I find ice formations fascinating. A bit like the old-school plasma effect.

Nice winter sunset.

It's been hovering around freezing for a bit, but finally we got a proper delivery of the white stuff.

South of Perth, there is a place where every gnome can find a home.

It's winter: with the cold, but without the snow. Fun fact: the name Laduviken translates to "Barn Bay", but it's a lake, and the name comes from 17th century which was before the post-glacial rebound lifted the land enough to seal off the entrance from the Baltic Sea.

The forest may not tell, but the people reading sure will.

Ett ord för blod (A Word for Blood) tells the same story as Tills alla dör by Diamant Salihu, but from the perspective of someone whose family is involved in the brutal gang war.

Sophisticated MIDI keyboards like the Roland A-800PRO let you operate more than one instrument from them by splitting the keys into zones. For example, you can play background strings with the left side of the keyboard and the main instrument with the right side. But if all you have is an old Casiotone CT-640, you'll have to do it in software. For that, we'll use loopMIDI and MidiLayer.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 has the absolutely best visual flying experience I've ever seen. Younger me, who had to settle for a lot simpler graphics, would have had his little mind blown. But in what I consider one of the premier fumblings of product management, Microsoft and Asobo Studios turned Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 into Microsoft Dashboard Simulator 2020 by not making it possible to turn off the virtual cockpit. There is even a Home Cockpit mode they taunt us with that claims to do that but, alas, it doesn't work, never did, and likely never will.

Once you have read and understood Hack Music Theory Part 1, you should get this PDF. If the aforementioned book is the best ten dollars a beginning musician can spend, this PDF is easily the next best ten dollars. It basically answered exactly the questions I had about how to compose music.

I made a a sliding drawer for my keyboard, and while at first I thought that I would not further derail myself from actually practicing, you know, making music, a brief experience with LMMS sent me right away doing things other than actually doing music. See, the keyboard is not just a bit in front of my "typing" keyboard and my mouse - it's also offset a bit to the left. This makes it quite a reach to get at the mouse when I needed to do something in LMMS, and of course that's a job for the hobby engineer to solve.

Tills alla dör (Until Everyone Dies) is a brilliant nonfiction book that could well fit into the horror genre, if it weren't for the fact that it's a true story.

Echopraxia is a side-quel to Watts's hugely successful Blindsight, taking place almost in parallel with the events of the latter. It continues Watts's argument against the utility of consciousness, expanding it to an argument against logic, reasoning, and the scientific method. The argument against the latter three proceeds in the same way as against the first - Watts acknowledges the utility of them, but believes they will be superseded by other methods by post-humans.

A friend asked me if I could help out with some product photos. It was Thomas Erikson, author of the popular book Surrounded by Idiots who needed some photos for his website.

Kim Stanley Robinson is an author with a message, and after reading this book you will understand why terraforming is impossible and why humanity will never succeed with interstellar colonization. Aurora is the counterargument to his earlier Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars), which, if you were to read them, would make you understand why terraforming is a practical method for taking humanity to the stars.

After Blindsight, I went on a Peter Watts spree and after reading his masterful short story The Island I ended up with The Freeze-Frame Revolution.

I knew I wanted a big diffuser to go with my Godox TT350. The salesman at the camera store recommended a $140 Joe McNally Ezybox Speed-Lite 2 Plus, but given that the flash unit itself only cost $120 I balked.

Would a $25 diffuser do the job? Turns out it did, and very well indeed.

I think Peter Watts is trying to tell us that he isn't conscious. Besides being a science-fiction version of The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger, Blindsight is a story that sets out the author's argument that consciousness is an evolutionary mistake and that we would be much better if we would just let our unconscious get rid of that slow and unnecessary awareness.

The book is good enough that I'd be willing to buy that argument if he'd reveal that it was written unconsciously.

Much like Hugh Howey, Greg Egan is an author that I approach with caution. They are both capable of great writing, but they also have their limitations.

The Azure Window is a natural arch on the west coast of Gozo. It is quickly eroding, and the top of the arch is not expected to last for many more years before plunging into the sea. The window will then be renamed "The Azure Pinnacle". The HBO series Game of Thrones filmed Daenerys and Khal Drogo's wedding here, but covered the uneven and rocky ground with a layer of sand prior to filming.

Much like excruciating stomach cramps may be a sign that deadly nanobots are eating you from the inside, a proliferation of subtitles usually means that a good story is being gobbled up by the franchise it spawned. With the subtitles come the world-building, the fan-built wiki and the most dreaded thing of all: A self-replicating, never ending swarm of books and spin-offs. Juliette replacing a a rubber gasket on one line of Wool is now an Epic Saga of no less than fourteen books. It was therefore with a sigh that I noticed that Howey, not one to go for half measures, bounces straight from the four-letter Wool to the almost comical First Shift: Legacy (Part 6 of the Silo series) (Wool). Oh dear. I'm never buying that.

Wool is a story about survivors of a global catastrophe living in an underground silo. Poisonous air above, cold rock below, and an oppressive fascist system within. Humanity bottled up in a post-apocalyptic cliche.

Zelda proved that a raging, alcoholic, self-destructive, self-hating, self-absorbed, irresponsible, manipulative, fat, hairy feminist could be an engaging and sympathetic character, and that a comic about such a character could be a lot of fun to read.

Happy Valentine's Day, all!

Monster Island is very much a followup to the excellent Fragger. Like its predecessor, it involves lobbing explosives at enemies, but expands on the gameplay by introducing different types of grenades - called "minis" in this game. It stacks up surprisingly well. Like Fragger, the Flash version is available at Miniclip.com.

The delightful little game Fragger started life as a Flash game by Harold Brenes. (You can still play the original flash game at Miniclip.com.)

When I first saw the cover to Blod Eld Död, the name stuck in my head immediately. I recognized it from somewhere, but couldn't place it. Maybe it was a translation, so I translated it to English and ended up with Blood Fire Death. Of course - it was the title of Bathory's album from 1988. I scanned the table of contents and found, to my great satisfaction, that a whole chapter about Bathory started on page 49.

...and now for something completely different. No history, no war, no genocide. Just a little Snail's Heart beating with love.

When I scourge the pocketbook shops at airports I end up with something involving Hitler too often for it to be a mere coincidence. Given that Adolf was active between 1933 and 1945, either his presence on the bookshelves is way out of proportion to his slice of human history, or I'm some kind of subconsciously controlled Nazi drone.

Way back in 2000, a man named American McGee created American McGee's Alice. It was a re-imagining of the Alice in Wonderland stories in the form of a first person shooter / platformer. I bought it for the visuals and loved it. Alice: Madness Returns is the sequel, now powered by the Unreal 3 engine. On the whole, Alice is a great game that is brought down to "barely passable" by some very poor decisions by its creators.