Linux Command Prompt in Color

In this modern world, basically every terminal is compatible with VT-52 terminal sequences. These includes Windows Terminal (free from Microsoft on the Microsoft Store), Terminal.app (on macOS) and most terminals available under Linux. Further, most of these support emoji and 256 colors. Yet, most of the advice out there on how to deal with this suggests hard-coding these escape sequences directly into your prompt. This is great, and probably will work just fine, but I find it to be painful....

19 Nov 2021 · 3 min · Gary Allen Vollink

[Book] Of Curses and Kisses by Sandhya Menon

Book cover I usually don't do the comparative thing, but this one stuck me pretty directly.  Imagine the movie Crazy Rich Asians, but teenagers at a boarding school in the mountains outside of Aspen, with a broadly international cast.  Main point: pretty much everybody is insanely rich. The main character, Jaya Rao, is a princess from an old kingdom of India who is literally there to break someone's heart....

22 Jan 2020 · 2 min · Gary Allen Vollink

Stopping Regular Book Blog

For over a year, I have published a book review every other week, on Wednesday, at noon.  Every week in the middle of both summers. Reading for review My wife is a librarian, and when I started this blog, it was partly a way for me to share something about the numerous pre-release books that she and I would get when we went to book events.  Also, when I started, doing this was fun, and I figured that if I were any good at it, maybe I would reach other readers....

6 Oct 2019 · 2 min · Gary Allen Vollink

[Book] The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen

Title Illustration I read somewhere that the story of Disney's Frozen was based on this book, so I decided to read and review it for this blog.   I want to be clear that there is almost nothing that the story of Frozen has left in common with this original fairytale, except for a talking reindeer.  This is a short read, and I've linked to the full text via Project Gutenberg in the book information block below....

3 Oct 2019 · 2 min · Gary Allen Vollink