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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I set myself an unofficial New Year's Resolution* - 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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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…
Continue reading →I like to go on holiday in order to read books. After last year's post a few people expressed surprise that I hadn't included many female authors. I felt compelled to rectify that, so I decided to read only female authors this holiday. I only had 7 days, and did quite a lot of sight-seeing,…
Continue reading →by Terence Eden, aged 35 & ⅚ths. I often wonder how much I read during the average day. A few thousand words of tweets, couple of hundred in Facebook posts, a dozen articles on blogs and news sites - and an unhealthy smattering of Reddit and other fora. All told, I am probably reading the…
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Late last week, I released an eBook copy of the Voynich Manuscript on Amazon. I sent a few tweets encouraging people to either download it for free from my website - or buy a copy from Amazon. Amazingly, given the choice, some people decided to throw a couple of quid my way! Once I saw…
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One of the "perks" of running a moderately popular blog is that sometimes people send you stuff. I've been sent wine, phones, apps, and all sorts to review - usually by PR people who realise that engagement with bloggers is a little different that their regular way of doing business. Yesterday, I received this delightful…
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I arrived at Woking Library shortly before 1600 on a Thursday. At that time of day, the library is filled - somewhat understandably - with people who aren't working a normal 9-5 job. Retirees, students, and the unemployed. I walked through the extensive computer section of the library. Dozens of computers with free Internet access.…
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The Internet is "the world's most efficient copying machine" -- Cory Doctorow. This is a long and rambling blog post which asks two questions: Given that we can only read one book at a time - can we set up a "Kindle Stock Exchange" for our unused media? If so, what effect would this have…
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My shelves are empty. The half-dozen Billy Bookcases I bought from Ikea are now little more than scrap. I have burned my books. A bonfire of ideas and ideals. My bookshelves used to burst at the seams. Every individual shelf bowed violently from the over-stuffed mass of paperbacks squeezed onto it. Shakespeare rubbed up with…
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