2016 Books I'm waiting for

Another year, another book list. Mostly Urban Fantasy with some scifi.

Staked (Iron Druid book 8) - Kevin Hearne - January 26th
Burned (Alex Verus book 7) - Benedict Jacka - April 5th
The Hanging Tree (PC Peter Grant book 6) - Ben Aaronovitch - June 14th
The Perdition Score (Sandman Slim book 8) - Richard Kadrey - June 28th
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (HOLY SHIT) - J.K. Rowling - July 31st
Babylon's Ashes (The Expanse book 6) - James SA Corey - December 5th

I'm sad to say that I'm dropping Steve McHugh's Hellequin Chronicles from my list. It's a drag, but I really don't like the way the series is going. Jim Butcher is also out for a while, since he's decided to bench Harry Dresden in favor of some retarded steampunk venture. More power to him, but it's totally not my style. Larry Correia seems to be too busy fighting the liberal media and arguing with George R.R. Martin to write any more MHI books. Craig Schaefer appears to have benched Daniel Faust in favor of the Harmony Black spinoff series. I might check those out, but I'm not excited enough to have them make the list. No release date yet for Ilona Anderews' next Kate Daniels book Magic Binds. Looks like Richard K. Morgan is out of the game for a while too, as he's going to have his hands full working on the Netflix adaptation of Altered Carbon. 

Some stuff I'd like to see: 

- A sequel to last years surprisingly delightful The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers. Goodreads is calling this series "Wayfarers" but I don't know if that's official or not. 

- It'd be cool if Patrick Rothfuss could finish that Kingkiller trillogy. I really don't want to start reading it until I'm assured that it has a reasonable ending. I don't need another Game of Thrones situation. 

- Speaking of, the next A Song of Ice and Fire! Come on George, you can do it! I believe!

Apple really hates unsigned kernel extensions

Just a quick tech note here. If you use any unsigned kernel extensions (for example tuntaposx for IPsec VPNs), please note that the method used to allow you to load them has changed under 10.11 (El Capitan).

The unsigned kext control in 10.10 (Yosemite) could be disabled by setting the nvram variable boot-args="kext-dev-mode=1". Sadly, this method has been deprecated, and no longer functions.

In 10.11, you'll need to boot the system into recovery mode to disable System Integrity Protection. Boot into recovery mode by holding command-r. Open a terminal under the Utilities menu and disable SIP with 'csrutil disable'. After rebooting, unsigned kexts can be loaded.

Go Go Power...holy shit.

Featuring Katee Sackhoff and James Van Der Beek. Seriously.

Interesting video on the problem with modern action movies

2015 Books I'm waiting for

Looks like it's that time again.

Foxglove Summer (PC Peter Grant book 5) - Ben Aaronovitch - January 6th (I missed this!)
Prison of Hope (Hellequin Chronicles book 4) - Steve McHugh - April 14th
The Scarlet Gospels - Clive Barker!!!! - May 19th
Nemesis Games (The Expanse book 5) - James S.A. Corey - June 2nd
Armada - Ernest Cline - July 14th
Veiled (Alex Verus book 6) - Benedict Jacka - August 4th
Magic Shifts (Kate Daniels) - Ilona Andrews - August 4th
Lies Ripped Open (Hellequin book 5) - Steve McHugh - August 25th
Normal: A Novel - Warren Ellis - November 3rd

May as well get a head start on next year while I'm at it!

Staked (Iron Druid book 8) - Kevin Hearne - January 26th, 2016
The Hanging Tree (Rivers of London) - Ben Aaronovitch - June 14th, 2016

The 9th Doctor recalls the Time War

Things Yosemite (OSX 10.10) broke

It's upgrade season again, and I thought I'd list stuff that stopped working after installing Yosemite.

- vpnc

     This was due to a decision made by Apple to lock down .kext kernel extensions. As a result, the tuntaposx kernel extension would not load. You have to set an nvram (!!) parameter to get this going again.

sudo nvram -p | grep boot-args (Check for existing boot arguments)

sudo nvram boot-args="kext-dev-mode=1" (Disable kext signature checking)

     Clearly, if you already have boot arguments, you should append instead of replacing.

- mvim

    Looks like a library problem. I'm updating the dev kit, and will grab the latest version of mvim when that's done.