This book came highly recommended by a good friend whose opinions on stuff I generally trust. I mentioned to them that I needed some books for travelling, and they announced that they loved the Murderbot series by Martha Wells. With a lot of planned transit and transfer time in my life, I grabbed all of the available Murderbot books and loaded them on my Kindle, ready to read.
I didn’t do a whole lot of reading on the flights over. It wasn’t until I was on the train, trying to conserve roaming data, from Rome to Pompei that I finished No Way. I started, and finished, All Systems Red on the flights from Catania to Venice. I know it’s a novella – but reading a book in a single sitting is nearly unheard of for me. I think even Matthew Reilly’s Cobalt Blue took me a couple of sessions.
That I managed/could read it in a single sitting says a lot about the novel. It was punchy, interesting, and pure/hard enough Sci-Fi that I was captivated the whole time. I found it very interesting that I assigned a gender to Murderbot before I started reading the book. I wonder if that had something to do with the person who recommended it to me.
I’m moving on to Artificial Condition (the second Murderbot Diaries novel) next.
Frank’s back. I guess in many ways he never left. This is the continuation of One Way by Simon Morden.
It’s going to be hard to talk about this book with out spoiling things about One Way. So if you’ve not read One Way, and plan to, you might want to turn away now. Come back once you’ve read it and let me know if you agree with me.
Spoilers below.
You’ve been warned.
I was surprised when Frank was left on Mars in the last book. But I probably shouldn’t have been – it was ripe for a sequel (or more) with the imminent arrival of the NASA crew and all the excitement around that.
The detailed writing style of this novel makes you feel like you’re on Mars with Frank. The fear. The focus. The relief.
I don’t think any of the twists or shocks in No Way surprised me – not like in One Way. It was quite predictable. That said, it was a very enjoyable read.
The final chapter was a doozy for me. Hit me right in the feels.
It took me a couple of gos to get stuck in to this. I’m not a voracious reader, and it often takes time for me to get into a book, let alone start one properly. I think maybe I was trying to read it while I was too tired.
Once I got over the hurdle of the first few steps, though, I was hooked and i managed to read this surprisingly quickly.
The book follows Frank as he travels to Mars to establish the first structures there in preparation for the first fleet of the ‘real’ settlers. Things, of course, don’t go according to plan. There weren’t any really surprising plot-twists or turns, and I could have handled some Neal Stephenson-esque deep dives into some of the science around the space suits or habs or something, but it doesn’t happen. There are hints of it, and they were enjoyable, but I would have liked more.
Actually. There was a surprising plot-twist, right at the end. It turns out there’s a sequel. I’m on to that next.
I found the instructions on how to migrate self-hosted Ghost from one host to another quite lacking. It took a lot of tinkering to get it to work properly. And I still don’t quite understand why just picking up an install folder and database dump on one host and dropping it into the new doesn’t work. But I guess this isn’t LAMP-stack PHP-based simplicity.
So. Here goes.
Caveat
This post is going to assume a lot of knowledge, and doesn’t go into detail about specific steps. More about what steps are required than exactly how to do them. It’s also going to assume that your server is ready for running Ghost – all the prerequisites are there including ghost-cli. This will most likely be taken care of in Step 3 if it isn’t ready for running Ghost, but it’s not going to be covered here.
There will be downtime.
Caveat emptor. YMMV etc.
Step 1 – Export the Ghost data from existing host
Export all members to a CSV. Export the site details to a JSON – on older installs this is under Settings -> Labs, in the newer ones, it’s under Settings -> Import/Export. Grab a copy of the config file config.production.json
Step 2 – Update DNS
Point your domain to your new server IP. Don’t forget to do IPv6 too. Wait for propagation to happen. 10 seconds or an hour. Who knows! DNS is magic.
Step 3 – Install Ghost on the new host
This is done with the ghost-cli command ghost install in the directory that you want it to install. Once the installation process is complete, log in to the site, create your user and do all the basics. Delete the default posts and other users.
Step 4 – Migrate images over from the old host to the new
I think this is the 3rd year in a row that I’ve dragged friends out to swim in the middle of winter. A celebration of the winter solstice. And end to the darkening. The beginnings of the lightening. Optimism. Encouragement. It’d be nice if the weather started to get better immediately, but at least the days are getting longer.
This year’s swim was a day or two late.
Close enough. Right?
There will be some more photos coming, but I’ve not developed the second roll from the beach visit yet.
It was a stunning day. Hardly any wind at all. The sun had enough bite that I could feel it on my skin. The water was crystal clear and cold. The swell was reasonable, but the waves were smooth and gentle. Lots of time between waves. Couldn’t have asked for a better day for it, really.
