Building Christlike character one story at a time.

We’d like to introduce to you our collection of rare books and audio dramas along with a colorful cast of characters who live out a biblical worldview centered around four truths:

1. God is good.
2. God works all things together for good.
3. God keeps His promises.
4. God allows suffering to grow our character so we can experience His love.

Steeped in these biblical themes, each Lamplighter book and audio drama demonstrates how “suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope, and hope never disappoints, because God’s love is gushed out into our lives” (Romans 5:3-5).

As you engage in these life-transforming stories, you’ll experience the Word of God as it was intended, for it is alive and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword! In a day and age when Hollywood and social media have captured the hearts and minds of our children, it is our goal that each reader and listener be inspired to know God intimately, proclaim Him passionately, and enjoy Him infinitely!

Psychological Warfare by Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger

Subject: Hacking the brain
The historian and scientist Yuval Noah Harari talks about the means by which the great companies hack our brains. If you read the last paragraph of this book you’ll see that Edward Bernays talks about the same thing. The only difference is the technology used to hack into our minds.

This is a full posting of the short story by Arthur C. Clarke. It is titled “Superiority”. “Superiority” is a science fiction short story by Arthur C. Clarke, first published in 1951. It depicts an arms race, and shows how the side which is more technologically advanced can be defeated, despite its apparent superiority, because of its own organizational flaws and its willingness to discard old technology without having fully perfected the new.

Denis Villeneuve’s ‘Dune’ is a spiritually empty, imaginatively bereft upscale spectacle, engineered for fans of Kamala Harris and subscribers to The New Yorker //

Who, after all, in 2024, can imagine a world in which anyone believes in any cause higher than girl power? Who can conceive of a moral order predicated on anything other than the dictates of intersectionality? Not Villeneuve, which means that his Dune: Part Two, as splendid as some of its details are to contemplate, is as completely and utterly sterile as any new luxury hotel in Dubai.

Without instilling in his characters the realness of belief—that is to say, without allowing his Fremen to be Fremen, not modern, solipsistic creatures that yowl about the future being female—what the director of our latest Dune has given us is the digital equivalent of a sandstorm: awesome while it lasts, then wiped away without a trace. Even nature has been sliced into metaphor: Those sandworms, so menacing in Herbert’s novel, have, in Villeneuve’s telling, been so thoroughly tamed as to be nothing more than toothy Ubers, summoned for a ride with the click of a button, more convenient than terrifying.

What do you get when you rob faith of its magic and meaning and reduce it to metaphor? First, a very boring film. And second, license to make the film mean just about anything you want. The consistently craven New Yorker even managed to review the film as a metaphor for Israeli aggression post-Oct. 7. “The movie,” cackled the world’s once-greatest magazine, now the upscale prose equivalent of Kamala Harris, “pitting Fremen fundamentalists against a genocidal oppressor, can scarcely hope to escape the horror of recent headlines.” Actually, as The New Yorker knew back when it was run by much smarter and more soulful men and women, great works of art can escape the headlines with ease, because they are committed to big ideas, not slick and comforting conventions. They make us uncomfortable, as Frank Herbert’s book did when it ended with the Muadib realizing that his followers were about to shed much blood and plunge the universe into decades of violence. Villeneuve ends his with Chalamet triumphant. The goodies have defeated the baddies. The damsel rescued herself, of course. Nothing more to see here, folks. Not a stick of furniture is out of place.

One day, inshallah, we’ll get the Dune film adaptation we deserve, a Dune that takes faith seriously and isn’t afraid to go a little gross and a little crazy trying to understand how and why we humans believe the things we believe. But as long as our pop cultural industries remain in the hands of men and women drained of all serious religious and moral imagination and intention, we’re better off with books.

THE HISTORY OF

THE STANDARD
OIL COMPANY

BY

IDA M. TARBELL

AUTHOR OF
THE LIFE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN, THE LIFE OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE,
AND MADAME ROLAND: A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY

ILLUSTRATED WITH PORTRAITS

PICTURES AND DIAGRAMS

Best practices for manipulating data with Pandas. This book will arm you with years of knowledge and experience that are condensed into an easy to follow format. Rather than taking months reading blogs and websites and searching mailing lists and groups, this book will teach you how to write good Pandas code.

Patterns for Data Manipulation
Manipulate your data with ease.

Master predictable patterns to clean, visualize, prepare, pivot, summarize, and predict data. Write code that is easy to use, debug, come back to a week later, and put into production. Stop worrying about if you will be able to use your Jupyter notebook when you come back tomorrow.

Learn how to quickly and reliable load, clean, and prepare data. Think about data processing like a "recipe".

Reading indeed makes you smarter. Studies indicate that reading regularly enhances brain functions. It allows you to think better, respond more efficiently to problems, make you a better speaker, and expand your knowledge and vocabulary. The culminating result is that you become smarter.

Reviewer: contradiction in terms - favoritefavoritefavoritefavoritefavorite - December 24, 2016
Subject: A book about life under a total ideology
If you read Gulag Archipelago and your take-away was "the bourgeois classes have treasonous ideas," then I don't know what to tell you!

"Marxism had a grip on the academic communities of all the major universities, once and for all I was able to resist the drip, drip, drip of the propaganda" in particular is exactly the kind of thing a Soviet ideologue would have said, although they would not have said Marxism but imperialism or liberalism or something.

One of Solzhenitsyn's themes in this book is not that Marxism had some unique poison in it or that the Soviet Union was a shocking stain on the otherwise spotless behaviour of the human race, but that it all HAD to turn out like that in a state with a perfect ideology, an answer to everything with no holes in it.

p. 173-174 of I-II: "Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble―and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.

"Ideology―that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. [...]

"Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed. How, then, do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn dedicated his book about the end state of communism ‘to all those who did not live to tell it.’ //

My parents emigrated from the Soviet Union. From what they told me, I developed a deep reluctance to being frog-marched to Kolyma courtesy of unilateral disarmament peaceniks, who are nowadays called “woke” with alternate grievances but the same collectivist Borg mentality. //

In part I’s fourth chapter, Solzhenitsyn encourages humility about human vulnerability to evil. “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” //

In part VII’s third chapter, Solzhenitsyn excoriates apologists for Soviet misrule: “All you freedom-loving ‘left-wing’ thinkers in the West! … As far as you are concerned, this whole book of mine is a waste of effort. You may suddenly understand it all someday — but only when you yourselves hear ‘hands behind your backs there!’ and step ashore on our Archipelago.” He knew his disclosures would meet that era’s version of cancel culture. //

The will to dominate runs deep in the human psyche. Archipelago reminds us such despotic cruelty became commonplace in living memory with few held accountable.

Moreover, such atrocities continue today behind barbed wire in western China, North Korea, and elsewhere on the globe. Solzhenitsyn warns us all of the consequences should resistance to totalitarianism fail.

Indeed, in all the cases above, the film version of the story is the definitive version — the original text is, at best, complementary to the film. This is because the film is the better telling of the story. And it’s not simply because some stories are better told as films for visual purposes. It’s because the texts did not best express the story. It doesn’t mean the books are bad — Baum’s Oz books, for one, are a delightful read. It simply means the story is more completely serviced in film.

As is the case with The Lord of the Rings. Director Peter Jackson is famously a huge fan of the Tolkien books, but based on the movies (and the various commentary I’ve read from and about the man) I think it’s more accurate to say he’s a huge fan of Middle-Earth — he seems very nearly enamored of the work other artists have done in the place as he is with Tolkien’s prose.

AWARD-WINNING AND BEST-SELLING AUTHORS CONTRIBUTE NEW STORIES: All-new fiction from Dragon Award winner and New York Times best-selling author David Weber, Dragon Award nominee D.J. Butler, best seller Jody Lynn Nye, indie best sellers Chris Kennedy and Mark Wandrey, and more. Also featuring an introduction by multi-award-winning and New York Times best-selling author Larry Correia.

It is 2185 CE. Humans now live throughout the Solar System, but their most ambitious adventure is about to begin. The starship Victoria will carry over 10,000 colonists to a new world outside the solar system. The larger-than-life exploits of those colonists will become legendary. The colonists will build a new civilization, and the actions of a few individuals will become famous—and infamous—forever marking their new colony with the Founder Effect.

Writing is great fun. I have been doing so rather diligently since 1990. More recently, I've published 20 books in just the past decade. My portfolio spans four technical works, eleven novels, and five anthologies, including a short story, The Girl with the Flaxen Hair, which was nominated for the 2014 Sidewise Awards for Alternate History!

If you’ve spent any time around UNIX, you’ve no doubt learned to use and appreciate cron, the ubiquitous job scheduler that comes with almost every version of UNIX that exists. Cron is simple and easy to use, and most important, it just works. It sure beats having to remember to run your backups by hand, for example.

But cron does have its limits. Today’s enterprises are larger, more interdependent, and more interconnected than ever before, and cron just hasn’t kept up. These days, virtual servers can spring into existence on demand. There are accounting jobs that have to run after billing jobs have completed, but before the backups run.

Author : Sol Lederman

What Is a Container and How Are Containers Used? A starting point for an exploration of containers and how they’re used is this simple definition: a container is a packaging format for a unit of software that ships together.

A container is a format that encapsulates a set of software and its dependencies, the minimal set of runtime resources the software needs to do its function. A container is a form of virtualization that is similar to a virtual machine (VM) in some ways and different in others. VMs encapsulate functionality in the form of the application platform and its dependencies. The key difference between VMs and containers is that each VM has its own full-sized OS, while containers typically have a more minimal OS.

Author : Greg Bledsoe

“If you build it they will come.” Are freeways built to travel between existing communities, or do communities spring up around freeways? Is this a chicken-and-egg problem, or is there a complex interaction where such things shape each other?

The use of UNIX and Linux security tools raises similar questions. Do people work the way they do because of the tools they have, or do people have the tools they have because of the way they work?

Author: Kyle Rankin

This book explores system administrator fundamentals. These days, DevOps has made even the job title “system administrator” seem a bit archaic, much like the “systems analyst” title it replaced. These DevOps positions are rather different from typical sysadmin jobs in the past in that they have a much larger emphasis on software development far beyond basic shell scripting. As a result, they often are filled with people with software development backgrounds without much prior sys- admin experience. In the past, sysadmins would enter the role at a junior level and be mentored by a senior sysadmin on the team, but in many cases currently, companies go quite a while with cloud outsourcing before their first DevOps hire. As a result, DevOps engineers might be thrust into the role at a junior level with no mentor around apart from search engines and Stack Overflow posts. In this book, I expound on some of the lessons I’ve learned through the years that might be obvious to longtime sysadmins but may be news to someone just coming into this position.

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Bottom Line Up Front.

Or, in other words, make your point immediately, then follow up with only the most pertinent supporting information to help set context or tone. //

Why do we write the long way?

The type of writing we’re required to master in school trains us in the opposite direction. We’re raised to produce that longer, more verbose style. It’s also more polite and conversational, and as such is a more natural flow for many writers.

But it’s not the most efficient way to convey this sort of information. //

It’s unlikely that publishers would even consider changing to this format, but it’s been an interesting exercise to think about. It’s certainly a wish of mine that these books were written in a format that was more efficient to consume.

The jingling of the door-bell announced four arrivals: a blast of cold December wind; a spray of fine snowflakes borne upon it; the sound of horses clopping up the cobbled street; and two gentlemen. They were good portly fellows, pleasant to behold. The younger of the pair doffed his top hat and shook fresh snow from the brim as the elder consulted a list.

“Cratchit,” read the old gentleman. “Ware-housing, Pawn-brokering, Business Loans.” He looked up to find the sole occupant of the establishment seated behind a large wooden desk: a slight, sandy-haired young man of twenty-odd years with a genial expression. The gentleman adjusted his spectacles. “Have I the pleasure of addressing Mr. P. Cratchit?”

Historian Bruce Gilley’s provocative book, ‘In Defense of German Colonialism,’ makes a compelling case that many historical narratives surrounding Africa are motivated by politics, not facts. //

Our anti-Western conceptions of colonial Africa are equally misinformed. In 1904, a policy in German East Africa decreed that all children born to slaves beginning in 1906 were free. Moreover, between 1891 and 1912, more than 50,000 slaves in the colony were freed by legal, social, and financial means. By 1920, slavery had virtually been eradicated from the region.

German East Africa was also environmentally conscious, codifying laws prohibiting unlicensed elephant hunting and creating the first game reserves. It promoted education by natives: By 1910, there were more than 4,000 students in state schools. “The Germans have accomplished marvels,” noted a 1924 British report on local education initiatives. The education system in German colonies provided instruction in local histories, cultures, and geographies, as well as technical subjects common in German curricula. Because of this, local language media prospered. “German transformed Swahili from a coastal language of Muslim elites to the lingua franca for the future country of Tanzania,” writes Gilley.