It was on a top 100 list a few years back that I started working my way through. I really disliked the book having not read or even heard of it as a kid. It seems that it is generally well liked, so I'm not sure what didn't connect with me.
And from my experience New Zealand was a decade ahead of the US for a long time. Growing up everywhere accepted card payments. I had a bank card when I was about 10 and that's how I spent my pocket money. Over here in Germany some places that do accept card only accept EC cards, which my N26 MasterCard isn't. Not having the right payment method to pay the people who installed the kitchen in the apartment I was renting was a very foreign situation.
Most cars (from my experience) in Germany have separate tyres for winter, so changing them is something you need to do twice a year. Back in New Zealand I drove for about 12 years and never had to change a tyre.
I also went through that process with my app Picfx. Using OpenGL for filters is much quicker, the only downside I've found is being limited by the texture size, I did set up a way to process images in tiles but ultimately decided to just limit images to the texture size. Great info on the colour space, I'm sure it will be useful.