Loudmouthman

Review : The Bookman by Lavie Tidhar

Posted on 31. Dec, 2009 by nikbutler in Books, blog

The punkgenre has a new term, BookPunk. The Bookman pokes at the fat and waddled body of steampunk with its walking cane and leaves it on the roadside with its fresh take on Victorian London without loosing any steam on its way.

The Bookman takes a little of Verne and a little more of Gaimen and wraps the story of Orphan into a tale of personal discovery , romance and action across London Hospitals, Pirate Ships and secret lost islands. Lizard Kings rule as a social elite and books explode in the face of their owners and The Bookman chases and is pursued by the Orphan. Orphan , his name as well as his status, is  Poet living in a London that feels like it may have been created in collaboration between Jasper Fforde and Neil Gaiman every character fills the page with their own vices and histories. The Bookman is a masked Terrorist whose actions motivate Orphan and take the adventure on sea bound adventures more reminiscent of Jules Verne. There  much in the story that reflects familiar concepts and characters which feel most natural as Orphan encounters them and the pacing of the adventure left me turning pages ( well pressing page turn ) and enjoying the voyage.

The Bookman by Lavie Tidhar is available from Amazon and is published by Angry Robot Books

Thanks for reading..

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QNAP TS410 The Real Drobo Killer.

Posted on 30. Dec, 2009 by nikbutler in Technology, blog

Earlier this month I had the chance to play with the  QNAP TS-410 out of the box this device does what the Drobo should have delivered on a long time ago.

• Built in Network Connectors , two of them at 1Gbit each.
  Meaning it plugs into my network and bonds those two connections into one BIG connection.
• A Media Server.
  All my music, photos and videos were visible to my PS3 and my XBOX and thanks to the above connection I could stream content and upload content and the box didnt skip a beat.
• Rsync duplication.
  I can back up this device to another rsync service either locally or via the internet.
• Bit Torrent Client.
  A web interface where I can pass .torrent files to have them downloaded and available to the mediaserver.
• File Sharing.
  With Users, Groups, Shared Directories etc etc.
• iSCSI Targets
  Making backing up and managing  disk images of other Macs and Windwows PCs a doddle.
• Virtual Slices
  Allowing multiple QNAP devices to be aggregated into one large disk.
• iTunes Library sharing
  Creating a shared library for all my iTunes libraries.
• expandable RAID storage ( in multiple configurations )
  Pulling the same trick as the Drobo I can upgrade the storage in my RAID as I grow my needs.

The TS-xxx range from QNAP has ended my interest in Drobo and I must thank the wonderfully helpful people of Ultimate Storage for their help in getting me a review device. You can follow Ultimate Storage on Twitter as StorageExperts

Thanks for reading.

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