Nikolaus Rath's Website

Review: KDLinks X1 Dashcam

Overall, the X1 is well designed. The picture quality is very good and the support is very response. The installation is relatively straightforward. However, in my opinion the camera fails where it matters most: in reliably saving footage of critical situations.

On the Beauty of Python's ExitStack

I believe Python's ExitStack feature does not get the recognition it deserves. I think part of the reason for this is that its documentation is somewhere deep down in the (already obscure) contextlib module because formally ExitStack is just one of many available context managers for Python's with statement. But ExitStack deserves far more prominent notice than that. This post will hopefully help with that.

So what makes ExitStack so important? In short, it's the best way to handle allocation …

No vigor regeneration bug in Witcher 2 with FCR

I recently stumbled over a nasty bug when playing The Witcher 2 with FCR (the Full Combat Rebalance mod). The symptoms are that all of a sudden your vigor is stuck at zero and does not re-generate anymore. If you look at your character attributes, you will find that vigor regeneration has indeed changed to zero both in and outside of combat.

There are other reports of this problem to be found in the internet, but surprisingly enough no one …

Book Review: Zoo

This is a review for Zoo, book one of the Enclosure Chronices written by Tara Elizabeth.

Zoo is written in the first person. The protagonist, Emma, tells the story of how she dies and then wakes up in an "Anthropologic Center" in the future. We quickly learn that at some point in the future, time travel was invented but quickly banned because it caused all sorts of problems. However, there is one exception: anthropologic centers are allowed to travel back …

Book Review: Exodus: Empires at War

This is a review for the first book of the Exodus series written by Doug Dandridge.

Empires at War comes across as an ambitious project. There is a huge number of characters, locations, and plot lines. Normally this is something that I like (for example, I think the Nights Dawn triology from Peter Hamilton is fantastic), but in this case I have the feeling that too much has been compressed into a single book (of just 384 pages). Essentially, this …