• Sum of All Fears

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    Saw The Sum of All Fears(2002) tonight. It was pretty good – much better than the terrible novel, which I tried to read twice, without success. I admit I don’t like Clancy’s novels, but 1040 pages? You’ve got to be joking.

  • Banks interview

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    View from the left Banks – another interview with Iain Banks (better than the Guardian one). “He played Civilisation 3 for a month recently, then wiped the files and binned the CD.” Ah, a man of my own heart.

  • Trees

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    While I was working at UC San Diego earlier this summer, I’d often hear some music (country style, usually) wafting over the trees as I was walking home. For about a month, I never really had any idea where it was coming from – I assumed that it was maybe from the bar or the…

  • Adverts

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    Lately I’ve been having a lot of fun (well, okay, some fun) going around the web with Mozilla 1.1 and BannerBlind making all the adverts disappear. Between them, they knock out all popups and most sizes of ad banners. For all the other ones that remain, I just block the images coming from the server…

  • Driving simulators

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    Something I’ve been idly wondering about on and off for a while is why there aren’t any decent driving simulator/trainers for PCs (or consoles). Surely there must be a market for this sort of thing? If you sold a package with force-feedback driving wheel, pedals and gearstick, together with a fairly up to date and…

  • DDR and iPod

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    I made my regular pilgrimage to the nearby bowling alley a couple of days ago to worship at the altar of the Dancing Stage Euromix machine they’ve got there (“I don’t want to go there just for DDR!” said I”), and was inordinately pleased to discover that you now get 5 songs for £1 instead…

  • Daily Summit

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    Nice to see that the British Council is running the Daily Summit weblog, providing continual coverage of the World Summit. It’s impressively teched up, with RSS feeds, and has a load of original content. I’d say that this was very forward-thinking of the British Council, but to be honest they’ve always sponsored cool stuff in…

  • Douglas Adams

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    I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed Douglas Adams’ writing until I started reading The Salmon of Doubt today. It’s not just his fiction that I like; his essays are equally – if not more – fun to read. Take this excerpt from his essay called Hangover Cures, for example, written in December 1999: “What is…

  • Easyweigh

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    Easyweigh is a nice little cardboard letter-weighing gadget that you can get for free from the Royal Mail. No, I haven’t used mine yet, but I do send letters abroad every so often. That it looks cool was admittedly a significant factor influencing my decision to get one.

  • iPod and RSS

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    Apple, bless their souls, have just started shipping the Windows versions of iPod, along with the update and restore software that allows users to reset their iPods. Since the Apple and PC versions of the iPod are have basically identical hardware, it’s a simple thing to go and download the update/restore software and convert your…