A review of Power By Tom Larcombe

This week has been interesting. I finished another audio book Power by Tom Larcombe.

If I had to describe this book, it is a system apocalypse novel. Instead of the entire world being transformed at once, it starts off in a small area of Colorado. From there, the main character Max survive the first transformation by the skin of his teeth. As the transformation expands, more people are transformed. It starts with his neighbors and the small town that he lives nearby. Eventually, it grew to include most of the state of Colorado.

One of the most interesting things about this novel is the character’s skill development. Unlike most system apocalypse novels, Max isn’t granted a super powerful skill ability right off the bat. He wasn’t given a choice of his class. Instead, the intelligence behind the system forces a particular basic class on him. Later on, the intelligence does give later converts the ability to choose. However, all choices are based upon the skills they have developed over their lifetime.

                One thing that makes the main character stand out the most is his ability to fix modern equipment. Due to the energy changing the world, all existing technologies are breaking down. Cell phones, computers, and cars all stop working shortly after being exposed. Thankfully, the main character was granted a skill that allows him to resolve the issue in these devices.

I have to say that I’m I would recommend this novel to anyone who likes LitRPGs or system apocalypse novels.

In addition to finishing a novel, I did two other projects. The first thing that I worked on was my home lab environment. For the longest time, I had my lab powered off. I wanted to get it back up in running because I had to renew one of my sans certificates. Usually, when I’m starting my renewal process, I like to brush up on my skills. This time, I wanted to get the lab in a more secure environment. So, I purchased an Ubiquiti Cloud Gateway Ultra instead of setting up a virtual firewall. The gateway has 4 GbE Rj45 ports and thankfully the Wan port supports 2.5 GbE Rj45. I love the ease it was to setup. All it took was a few minutes and the Ubiquiti app. After the installation, all of my lab equipment was on and running.

Now, that I’ve gotten it back online, I will have to setup my virtual machines and find ways to use the IDS in the gateway. One thing that I’m looking forward to is seeing if I can get the logs into a SIEM solution. I haven’t decided between using an ELK stack or possibly using Logscale community addition. I guess I’ll have to make a decision.

The only project that I’ve been working on is another new hobby. Over the last couple of days, I had to cut down a few branches on one of our trees. While I was cutting it down, one of my kids asked me to carve a play cut out of the branches. I was able to use one of the knives to strip the bark off easily enough. Though I had problems carving out the center. The problem is the knife wasn’t a good tool for scraping out the center. So, I decided to purchase a basic carving set. I am debating on getting a really nice setup but I figure it would probably be better if I just get a basic decent set instead. So, I ended up getting the BeaverCraft Wood Spoon Carving tool kit S14 deluxe.

 This set comes with several pieces including a wood carving knife, hook knife, gouge and a leather strop. I’m hoping that the hook knife will clear out the center.

I’ll probably try it this weekend and let you know next time.