A library of all my book reviews


A grid of books with their titles and star ratings.

One of the things I love about having a database-backed blog like WordPress is that's it opens up a delightful range of possibilities for displaying content. I've read and reviewed around 300 books over the last few years. So I wrote a scrap of code which goes through all my book reviews, grabs their cover […]

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Google Books - search results confuse reviewers with authors


Google Books Search Results page.

Google Books is one of many projects that Google has forgotten about. There's no support available and, of course, it's impossible to send them a bug report. The best anyone can do is write a ranty blog post and hope it gets noticed. When I search for my name in Google Books, it returns books […]

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Success at 2D Printing a Bookcase Mosaic!


A large canvas print of a photo of me and Liz in a top-down car. On closer inspection, the print is made up of lots of smaller prints.

Yesterday, I revealed my disappointment in being unable to print a bookcase. Today I revel in my cleverness at coming up with a solution! I decided to create a photo-mosaic of a nice photo of me and my wife - using all our book covers. The Result Close Up The image was printed on high-quality […]

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Searching online for books in local libraries


List of items matching the search "Song of Achilles" - includes two versions of the book, an audio book, and other work by the author.

This is a mixture of lament and how-to guide. Suppose you've reviewed lots of books. It's pretty easy to generate a link to let people buy the book at Amazon or any other online store. But how do you link to a user's local library? You can't. There is no "search every library in the […]

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A couple of book clocks


I was inspired by this delightful bookshop clock: David Coates@OziasMidwinterBookshop clock... pic.x.com/1tvwjii4kn❤️ 42,165💬 490♻️ 017:03 - Sun 16 May 2021 I wondered - if it was possible to create a similar clock using books from a single author? So here's my first attempt - using Agatha Christie's novels. I've tried to use first edition covers, […]

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A year of only reading books by women


A montage of books.

Last year, I set myself a challenge to read a new book per week. I managed to read 50 books, which I was pretty happy with. This year0, I decided to only read books written by women. Here's what I learned. Obviously, COVID had a fairly negative effect on my reading rate. I went months […]

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Usability of Footnotes


A very long footnote.

I've been reading lots more non-fiction books than normal. And I'm getting increasingly annoyed about footnotes0. Footnotes are a weird skeuomorph hangover from the days of printed text. I don't think they are really suited to eBooks - but they seem to have come along for the ride into the future. There are a few […]

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Weeknotes: Reading Week


A book towering above some flames.

Last month, I took myself on holiday with one aim - read as many books as possible. My wife and I tend to alternate our holidays - one relaxing break then one adventure break. Our previous trip was a 3 week road-trip through Australia, so this time I opted for an all-inclusive break in the […]

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A year of actually reading books


Montage of book covers.

I set myself an unofficial New Year's Resolution0 - to read more books and write a review of each of them. I wanted to read about one new book per week. Well, I fell a little short of that target - what with getting a new job, moving house, road-tripping across Australia - but I'm […]

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Week Notes 2


Terence Eden standing outside Number 10 Downing Street.

Covering 2 weeks of holiday and 1 week of work. This is how I've spent my time... Talks The lovely folk at JS Oxford invited me to talk about my recent experiments with SVG. Headlining the bill was the brilliant Nicky Thompson with her talk about CSS shapes. Work Mostly deleting emails, as is appropriate […]

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