Since my last summer update, we have had no rain at all - so it is
very dry now, and wildfires have started popping up in our province
(and others in eastern Canada). That has put the brakes on pretty
much any outdoor activity that one might do in the woods. All crown
land is closed to camping, and local parks have closed their
trails. It's still possible to enjoy the water, so my wife and I
have been doing more kayaking. The rivers and lakes are low, but
still fine for boating. Hopefully we get some rain soon.
~
Ian at gopher.icu talks about books, specifically physical books and
their advantages [0]. He mentions a phlog post where the author
passed up some O'Reilly books in a thrift shop. I remember reading
that post as well, which made me think that the author was crazy to
pass those up (I don't have the link to it, unfortunately).
Anyway, although I've pared down my library over the years [1][2],
among the few technical books I've kept were the O'Reilly ones -
they were simply the best resources on Unix/Linux topics from the
1990's and early to mid 2000's. I kept Unix Power Tools, Vi and Vim
Editors, Bash Cookbook, Classic Shell Scripting, Mastering Regular
Expressions, and some of their Perl books. I do have a printed copy
of the FSF's 'Effective AWK Programming', but I've preferred Perl to
AWK over the years, and so kept more books on the former. I agree
with Ian that reading paper is easier on the eyes, apart from e-ink,
but ebooks have their own issues - the loss of control that he
brings up, but also cost and DRM [3][4].
[0]:
gopher://gopher.icu/0/phlog/Philosophical-ramblings/Hard-copy-and-physical-media.md
[1]:
gopher://republic.circumlunar.space/0/~slugmax/phlog/phlog_archives_2017-2019/books
[2]:
gopher://republic.circumlunar.space/0/~slugmax/phlog/phlog_archives_2017-2019/downtime
[3]:
gopher://republic.circumlunar.space/0/~slugmax/phlog/phlog_archives/ebooks-cost-too-much
[4]:
gopher://republic.circumlunar.space/0/~slugmax/phlog/phlog_archives/ebooks_still_too_expensive
