Book Review books gds WeekNotes work · 2 comments · 1,100 words
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 after a holiday. As for the rest... Bugs in publishing. As part of my quest to…
Continue reading →Book Review books Claire North ebooks review · 3 comments · 950 words
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, so there's only 6 entries here. Will try for a more relaxing holiday next year! First up, "Station…
Continue reading →Book Review books ebooks review · 2,800 words · Viewed ~202 times
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 equivalent of half a novel per day. (Now, there's an idea for a "quantified self" app - "how much have I r…
Continue reading →Amazon books · 2 comments · 500 words · Viewed ~3,835 times
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 that people were retweeting me, I rushed over to the Amazon stats page to see how I was doing. Holy cow!…
Continue reading →books drm ebooks publishing · 2 comments · 750 words
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 email from the publishers Simon and Schuster. NEW book by the "Prophet of …
Continue reading →books library · 1 comment · 500 words · Viewed ~615 times
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. While a few people were on Wikipedia, or checking out the…
Continue reading →books drm exchange kindle right to read · 5 comments · 1,350 words · Viewed ~334 times
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 on content producers and sellers who rely on artificial scarcity? This has been mulling over in…
Continue reading →books ebooks library · 29 comments · 900 words · Viewed ~2,532 times
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 Straczinsky. A complete set of Terry Pratchett was enviously…
Continue reading →books calibre dropbox ebooks linux php · 300 words · Viewed ~2,117 times
(These are mostly notes to myself!) I love Calibre, it's the perfect eBook management tool. It comes with a built in WWW server so you can easily access your library on the go. The only problem is that this really only works if you have a single machine dedicated to Calibre. For various reasons, I don't have a single machine. I have a desktop, laptop, and server. The Calibre Library is just…
Continue reading →books ex libris NaBloPoMo · 3 comments · 700 words
In my last post, I was talking about generating new cards for the fantastic game "Ex Libris". I emailed the manufacturers to see if they had any objections - and to see if they were releasing any updates. With their kind permission, I'm posting their reply in full. Dear Mr Eden, We are delighted that you love our game 'Ex Libris' and understand your frustration about the limited number of…
Continue reading →books calibre ebooks ex libris NaBloPoMo · 5 comments · 600 words · Viewed ~768 times
Ex libris is a wonderful game. No - better than that - it's a beautiful game. Here are the rules: Everyone has to write the opening line of a novel, based on the novel's summary. One player has the real opening line to copy down. One other player (the guesser) has to guess which of the opening lines is the real one. If you fool the guesser, you win the point. If the guesser is …
Continue reading →becky hogge Book Review books ebook hacking Open Rights Group org wikileaks · 2 comments · 250 words
An online acquaintance of mine, Becky Hogge, has released a book! Barefoot Into Cyberspace tells the story of the "hacker scene" over the tumultuous last few years. Yesterday, Becky released a transcript of her interview with Julian Assange - in it he discusses the News of the World hacking, amongst other things. A fascinating interview which helps set the scene for Becky's book. I've only…
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