I like my notebook a lot. Lenovo did a great job assembling this piece of hardware, the Yoga 2 Pro, bought almost 2 years ago. Light, fast, portable, durable. It came with the weird Windows 8 and the last month it upgraded to Windows 10. It was really appreciated, because Win10 is definitively better and faster but also it is definitively the most invasive of privacy. I was getting more and more annoyed about Microsoft approach on Windows.

In fact, I’m currently in a vibe of doing things by myself to preserve privacy and enhance my general experience, personalizing things.

The main reason that I have to use Windows is mostly games: both playing and making them. But the current investment of Valve to bring it’s Steam gaming platform to Linux and Unity finally building a Linux editor, I was getting much more comfortable testing new things…

At the same time, I started to read very good comments about the new line of KDE kits. KDE, the one desktop environment that I like the most, is reinventing itself again, it major focus on performance. Performance enough to aim into mobile space, they say. It grabbed my attention.

In a leap of faith, I removed the Windows license and installed a brand new Kubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf, currently in beta, to check this out

What a cool experience! I’m still rediscovering it, but it is going well so far. KDE is really much faster and more responsive. The app selection is more robust and solves most of the problems out of the box. It lacks a better online app store that the ordinary and very unappealing repos tough.

I’m not going to, for now, give a final impression, because it is a beta phase for Kubuntu and me too. There are too mane quirks to ignore, but It can be just matter of getting used to. Maybe after a month I will close an opinion about it.

The Martian is often described as Cast Away in space. I agree. It presents the incredible task of surviving, alone, on Mars. Just like Tom Hanks surviving on the island.

But improvising life on Mars is several degrees more complex than on that island. This is why the main character in The Martian has to be a very, very very smart guy, a little too MacGyver to be honest. Imagine Apollo 13, the movie, when NASA focuses on converting ship scraps into an oxygen filter, but for the entire duration of the movie, it was done mostly by one guy.

80% of the book, Mark Watney is in dire straights. Always facing high odds of dying. This is why the book is so compelling. It sucks your soul, making you wonder at night “how he can pull this off now?”. Watney must have a clear state of mind all the time. I understand that it would not make any sense to write a book about a normal guy that gets lost on Mars and dies after the first disaster. But Watney is too much the perfect guy to be lost in spaceace.

The book sometimes abuses the technical description of the solution. It could be shorter by a bit. However, and this is not a small achievement, there are at least 2 moments when I was crying due to the narration and climax feeling.

It will become a movie directed by Ridley Scott and started by Matt Damon. I will see the movie for sure.

Without any delay, I give it to you: Mark of the Ninja entered to my Top 10 Games of All Time. That is the how much I liked the game.

This beautifully crafted 2D action stealth game. You are asked to go through the stealthy approach in the entire game, but if you are more willing to make it a blood bath, it is a viable option too.

The controls are sharp and the levels are very well designed. And just like Super Meat Boy, the difficulty level is at the point that it you will get compelled to replay it for a better score.

Music is great, story also very good (makes you wanting to know more about the mysteries ahead). I got really inspired by the Klei production.

I played it until I got almost all the badges and challenges completed. When I finally got almost everything possible, it made me sad to uninstall it.

Microsoft announced that they will make Visual Studio available for free for everyone, for every type of application. Paid versions would bring essentially better support, ideal for enterprises.

They are also tightening more and more to the open source world. They started to use GitHub (instead their own hosting service and version control systems), made public available general use programs, libraries and APIs. The JavaScript successor, TypeScript, is an internal creation. An open source C# compiler, Roslyn, is in the works.

Times are changing.

I believe they realized that Google and other vendor are gaining more and more traction by using an open approach. Giving people pieces that free and charge for premium services. The mass of new developers are now programming for web applications, with tools and environments that Microsoft products are not in a strong position. Everybody will win. They maintained the leadership in several software markets not by accident or luck. Their experience will benefit all the community.

Welcome aboard.

Edited: the original article was found at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive12/opening-up-visual-studio-and-net-to-every-developer-any-application-net-server-core-open-source-and-cross-platform-visual-studio-community-2013-and-preview-of-visual-studio-2015-and-net-2015.aspx

I was waiting a moment with my girlfriend to watch what I was expecting to be a silly romance story. The Fault in Our Stars was a bestseller book, adapted to the big screen. And it is more than enough to make me shiver. Twilight Saga and Fifty Shades of Grey are recent proof of what book editors are bestselling.

But for my surprise, this one is a great movie. Amazing character development, very sad story with a great dosage of first love romance. I cried from start to end.

The actors deliver the characters with nice performances. I cannot remember right now a single actor that was bellow-par. Shailene Woodley is gorgeous and with the make up and different haircut, she is even more beautiful. Great actress too, because she makes you care deeply about her character, the protagonist Hazel.

Her friend and lover Augustus, played by Ansel Ergot, is less believable, but very likable. He is always positive about life and drives the whole dark tone of cancer with much lighter.

The human relations, even on very dare moments of life, is really

I recommend this movie.