The Books and Games that got me through 2020

 Tis the year-end. And here I am reflectin' on the year past. 

Its been a Topsy-turvey year so far. Things don't go to plan, but in 2020 the plan was tossed into a black hole. Holed up in your home for months, watching the stories unfold on news channels - mostly pretty bleak hasn't been that great for the mind. 

Add to it the work pressure. Where things used to take a few mins, now it takes a day. There is this story of a server going down in the office which needed to be restarted. The launch was in a few days. The offices - actually the whole country - was on lockdown. How do you do that ? Its been crazy. 

I do not watch much TV apart from a few shows like The Kapil Sharma Show. Most of my free time goes into gaming and reading. Following is the list of 2020. ( You can also check out the list of books from 2019 here )

Books

I haven't read a lot of books this year. My goal was 12 books, and I have fallen short of that. Not enough time. Here's a small list from this year :

Ender's Game 

This was a re-read. I had read this book a few years back. Then watched the movie. Then read the book again. Now it started to make a lot more sense than earlier. After researching a bit it seems that this book is binary - some people like it some don't. I liked it after the 2nd reading.

 

 

 

 Dune

A sci-fi classic. However, I don't really rate this one high. The reason being that this says sci-fi, but it really has very limited sci-fi aspects to it. Its more of a political setting with a prophesy. Over the years, I have started to dislike stuff with prophesies, as that means that main hero is really not doing anything themselves. Its all written in the stars. I like books where the hero stumbles along and tries to make the best of the situation. I re-read it again this year as the new DUNE movie is coming out, so wanted a refresher. 

The Anarchy

This book by William Dalrymple traces the history of how a small company run out of a small building in England became the biggest corporate of all time, and conquered the unconquerable lands of India. This book along with An Era of Darkness (by Shashi Tharoor) and The Men who Ruled India ( by Philip Mason ) provide a good insight into how England was able to rule over India. 

Roars and Trumpets : Tales from the Wild

A fantastic book by Gurpreet Singh who spent much of his life overlooking tea estates in Assam and his encounters and love for the wild life there. A must read if you are interested in wildlife and doubly so if you ever had wondered "what was life like in India a few decades back" . It traces the life story of Gurpreet Singh from the time his dad used to take him hunting in the North West Provinces before India got Independence to the life in the far flung reaches of Assam. A time when guns could be carried in as baggage in planes !

Early Indians

A book that traces the ancestry of Indians via DNA studies of current population and matching with the DNA from archaeological remains found all over the world. While the book is good in the sense that it tries to make the esoteric scientific advancements and how the migrations happened, it is very repetitive, like the publisher told Tony Joseph that his book was too lean and he needs to add more content into it. The unfortunate effect is that in many places things are repeated again and again.

Black Panther Comics

For a brief time, Comixology was giving Black Panther comics for free as a tribute to Chadwick Boseman. So I got as many of them as I could. 

Wakanda Forever !

A Promised Land

A master orator, Obamas latest book is a riveting read (I still haven't finished it). It traces his journey from his early days into the field of politics. A very straight forward written book, and I was quite surprised by how easy it is to read.

sha256 mismatch errors - Ubuntu running in VirtualBox on Windows host

 I had this peculiar problem of updates and pip installs failing on an Ubuntu #linux VM running in VirtualBox on Windows

Errors are like the following:

$ pip install --upgrade django
Collecting django
Using cached Django-3.1.4-py3-none-any.whl (7.8 MB)
ERROR: THESE PACKAGES DO NOT MATCH THE HASHES FROM THE REQUIREMENTS FILE. If you have updated the package versions, please update the hashes. Otherwise, examine the package contents carefully; someone may have tampered with them.
django from https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/08/c7/7ce40e5a5cb47ede081b9fa8a3dd93d101c884882ae34927967b0792f5fb/Django-3.1.4-py3-none-any.whl#sha256=5c866205f15e7a7123f1eec6ab939d22d5bde1416635cab259684af66d8e48a2:
Expected sha256 5c866205f15e7a7123f1eec6ab939d22d5bde1416635cab259684af66d8e48a2
Got caa8b913f298bf97bf9a826f14519b3d777d63b034561f3acfc57dbe099577d0

I spent the greater part of the day working on fixing this as I needed to start a new django project. 

Here are a few things you can do to make sure this is working:

• Update to latest version of VirtualBox
• Check if you have any other virtualization software running on your host OS. In my case I had docker running. Uninstall it.
• remove the cached pip files . Typically this is : $ rm -rf ~/.cache/pip/
• Now do a  $ pip install django . It should work now.