Here now is a first look at the CCCP Cook Book: True Stories of Soviet Cuisine (Fuel Publishing) by authors and historians Olga and Pavel Syutkin. It's a rare glimpse into the decades around when the USSR (CCCP) was transitioning to Communism. Food shortages and limited access to staples like bread, milk, and fresh produce were commonplace in the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s. Whenever rations are tight, creativity rules. Every day citizens were inspired to invent dishes that sustained them through long winters and hard economic times. Meanwhile, the ruling class feasted on luxuries like suckling pig and caviar. Class distinctions are crystal clear in each recipe; the Syutkins note that some of the images are of dishes that would have only been considered "aspirational fantasy for the average Soviet household."

So yeah: if you’re into making hard strategic decisions, and aren’t put off by having to learn a huge array of acronyms and nuclear weapon names, Bravo Romeo Delta has a lot to offer, even if it is all wrapped up in one of the most impenetrable interfaces I’ve ever encountered. Playing it a few times will give you a new appreciation for how absurd the whole idea of “limited nuclear war” really was — how hard it would have been to stop such a war, once started, from snowballing into the end of the world. Which will make you thankful that nobody ever had to try.

Every major language has thousands of libraries which enable programmers to reach higher, further and faster than before. Package managers (the online systems for sharing code) are key to a language's success; Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and Node.js all have strong offerings. But which one is the best and what can we learn from each of them? This article is the first in a two-part series where I review each package manager. Part one focuses on searching and using packages and part two will look at how easy it is to upload and share packages.

In 2007, Michelin published its first-ever restaurant guide to Tokyo and awarded the city more stars than even Paris. Jean-Luc Naret, Michelin’s editorial director at the time, was emphatic: Tokyo, he said, was “by far the world’s capital of gastronomy,” a comment that seemed as much an indictment of Paris, and of France, as it was a nod to Tokyo. [...] With its 2013 guide, Michelin has again affirmed that the “muse” has relocated to Tokyo: The French food bible awarded three stars, its highest rating, to 14 restaurants (compared with only 10 in Paris) and dished out a total of 323 stars -- more than to any other city in the Michelin firmament -- to 281 establishments overall.

IDG-tidningen ”PC för Alla” har testat sex olika robotdammsugare. Allt ifrån enklare, billiga modeller från en tusenlapp till mer avancerade med ett pris på över 5.000 kronor.

Testets vinnare blev den dyraste modellen, Neato XV-25 (en förbättrad version av Neato XV-15), som även är den enda med 360 graders laserskanner som kartlägger rummet. Enligt ”PC för Alla” är det också den modell som har bäst sugförmåga.

Man konstaterar också att robotdammsugarna ännu inte är redo att ersätta den vanliga dammsugaren. Ett optimalt hem för en robotdammsugare har stora öppna ytor, är sparsamt möblerat, har inga sladdar eller mattor på golvet och eventuella trösklar bör vara låga.

Shouldn’t we struggle against Facebook? Everything in it is reduced to the size of its founder. Blue, because it turns out Zuckerberg is red-green color-blind. “Blue is the richest color for me—I can see all of blue.” Poking, because that’s what shy boys do to girls they are scared to talk to. Preoccupied with personal trivia, because Mark Zuckerberg thinks the exchange of personal trivia is what “friendship” is.

...

I can’t imagine life without files but I can just about imagine a time when Facebook will seem as comically obsolete as LiveJournal. In this sense, _The Social Network_ is not a cruel portrait of any particular real-world person called “Mark Zuckerberg.” It’s a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore.

Pintley is a new kind of beer website—one that only recommends beer you're sure to love.

Unlike other beer sites, Pintley doesn't just know beer; it also knows you. Pintley learns from your ratings and tasting notes to understand exactly what pleases your palate the most, so you can be your own beer expert.

As a game for katagi (yakuza slang for "civilians" or "non-yakuza"), it's tremendous fun — but what do the yakuza think of this game? How do they rate it? I was able to get three reviewers from the major crime groups who do not want to be identified by their real name. (While yakuza fan magazines do exist and the yakuza are not a hidden part of Japanese society, due to recent crackdowns by the police, the "reviewers" here choose to remain anonymous.) Midoriyama is a now-retired former mid-level faction boss. Shirokawa is a high-ranking boss from a different group connected to Midoriyama through a ritual sake exchange. Kuroishi knows them both but is also from a different group.

I almost never play computer games, but the screenshots of gameplay in Kabukichô make me want this one...