(Part 3) Top products from r/geek

Going to put my 2 cents and Five Pounds Sterling in here as well. Probably in descending order of my favourites, actually!

As recommended elsewhere, the Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons, comprised of four books (in two Omnibuses (Hyperion, Fall of Hyperion and Endymion, Rise of Endymion) are an excellent read. One of my all-time favourites.

Spares, by Michael Marshall Smith, is a weird one. Maybe not pure-Scifi, but definitely something to look at.

Altered Carbon, by Richard Morgan, is a dark, violent read but with a compelling protagonist. Contains possible the best revenge scene ever. Not for the squeamish. Grips you from the very first page.

Unto Leviathan (known in the US as "Ship of Fools") by Richard Paul Russo, is one of the two books that I've finished in one sitting (the other being The Fall of Hyperion). Brilliant page turner. Just don't expect things to get wrapped up neatly at the end.

Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds. Great standalone book, but once again too many questions left at the end! But I guess that's the point!

Eon by Greg Bear is quite hard Sci-Fi, but if that's your thing you'll love it.

Marrow by Robert Reed has some wonderful ideas, but is sadly not the most well written book in the world. A spaceship as big as Jupiter, inhabited by thousands of different alien species, ruled over by immortal humans who have discovered something hidden in the core of the ship. The story spans thousands of years. Can drag a little in the middle, but definitely worth a look at, if only for the concepts presented.

Think it's time to dig some of these out and give them another read. Maybe after some sleep...

It's 4:30am here, so I appreciate my descriptions have added nothing of value, hence the links. The links aren't affiliated or anything like that, they're just there for Redditor's perusal. ;)

I'd recommend Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems, that should get you started on beginning to understand what goes on inside your computer. If you'd like further reading and you want a mental beat-down, you can't go wrong with Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming. Want to start with programming? One of my favorites is The C Programming Language by K&R. Those three recommendations, while they add up to a single semester's tuition, are worth way more than that. Good luck!

I hear ya man. I wasn't huge huge, but I was 185 at my biggest. I'm at 145 now. 138 at my lowest.

If you have an extra hour you should check this out Why we get fat

And also get this on audio book. It's very well done, enlightening, and entertaining. Born to Run (Acquirable on the internet)

I don't know how serious you are about health, but looking back I really wish someone would have sent me those two links when I started.

That's because it doesn't violate the 4th Amendment.

I'm 1000% in support of the RestoretheFourth kids, but the fact is, the 4th Amendment has been eroded away to practically nothing over the course of 200ish years of case law -- and it's been accelerating since the 1970s. The common understanding of "privacy" and the legal understanding are wildly different.

For more, read the excellent Nothing to Hide (don't click unless you don't mind being put on a watchlist).

I wish it weren't so, but the Fourth Amendment is kind of already super broken. Legal arguments against surveillance are better served, IMO, by basing them on the chilling effects they have on the First Amendment rights of the survielled.

What kind of circuits, and how deep do you want to go? I can recommend some books, but this is a very broad and deep field.

The most basic is linear circuits (R, L & C), you need for nearly everything electronics related. If you like physics and math, this book is excellent: http://www.amazon.com/Electricity-Magnetism-Berkeley-Physics-Course/product-reviews/0070049084/ref=cm_cr_pr_link_2?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&pageNumber=2&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending . It is a physics textbook, but highly related to those basic linear components. If you can stomach it, it will also blow your mind.

Holy shit... after seeing this, I went to link Zoltan's Lab and I found out that Zoltan has retired! NOOOOooooOoooOooooo!!!!

Thankfully, Archive.org is here to save the day.

In complete seriousness, I highly recommend reading David Levy's Love and Sex with Robots.

edit: I can't figure out how to get the Archive.org link to work. The markup keeps inserting a less-than sign, regardless of whether I try to escape the first 'h' or the last frontslash between the two http addresses. Anyone know how to fix this?

Outstanding book. But get Dragons Egg and Starquake together - because you WILL be reading them both.

Cheela rule! :)

I was in high school waaaay before Youtube, so I learned about hexaflexagons from the wonderful Martin Gardner. He wrote a column in Scientific American for many years. I was very proud of my dodecahexaflexagons -- 12 faces and close two 2 dozen different states.

Building Big is a more modern take on that, with a look at different bridges, domes, and dams build across history. One of my favorite books as a kid.

If Apollo tech geekery is your thing, the book Digital Apollo is a really interesting look at the human-machine interface of the moon missions

It's not SciFi--more like magical Gothic horror--but I'm finishing up Simmons' Drood right now, and it's SPECTACULAR. I'm a HUGE Simmons fan. I've given away more copies of Hyperion than I remember--it's one of those books I "loan" with really no intention of collecting back. Just keep passing it around.

For a while there I'd use the Wikipedia Book Creator to aggregate a bunch of articles on a certain topic and then download it to my eInk e-Reader to peruse in bed until I fell asleep.

One such topic was early computing up through the Microcomputing era and the 1977 Trinity.

At that point of history I was reading Empires of Light about the AC/DC war, Where Wizards Stay Up Late about the birth of ARPANET, Dealers of Lightning, about PARC, Commodore: A Company on the Edge (about the rise of Commodore through the PET, slaying TI, and faltering after the C64), and Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, which was enlightening, even though it was written for someone who couldn't tell a modem from a hub.

Try Principles of Marketing - found it to be fairly informative.

Perdido Street Station

try this. It explains everything up to first year university physics and electromagnetism, but written so a 5 year old can get through it.

https://www.amazon.com/End-Games-T-Michael-Martin/dp/0062201816

There was a similar guide out for the X-files that I had. It was called The Nitpickers Guide to the X-Philes.

http://www.amazon.com/Nitpickers-Guide-X-Philes-Phil-Farrand/dp/0440508088

The author spent entirely too much time watching 80s and 90s geek TV.