• Tricks of the Mind (Derren Brown)

    There are some very good bits in Derren Brown’s Tricks of the Mind. His previous two books Absolute Magic and Pure Effect were really great, with an enjoyable writing style and (of course) superb content. They were a lot to live up to, and his latest book isn’t as good.

  • The Time Machine

    When I was in the library, deciding what to watch I saw The Time Machine (2002) sitting on the shelf. I’ve wanted to see this for ages, mostly because I dimly recall seeing the original film and liking it, and partly because I saw the trailer ages ago. So I picked it up. Oh, for…

  • Virgin to drop Lost?

    Can it really be true that Virgin, run by that nice man Richard Branson, are thinking about dropping Sky One from their cable TV offering? That’s certainly what the rather alarming advert said in the middle of last week’s episode anyway, and it seems to be corroborated by The Guardian. Virgin recently bought NTL, and…

  • One man’s junk

    Amazing what you can find when you start looking. I went up into our loft to get down the old BBC computers I’d kept from ages ago, and they were in better condition than I thought they would be. I also found a computer (an HP 9000/340) I’d forgotten about completely. I still don’t quite…

  • New job options screen for s-c-printer

    I’ve been trying to make the job options screen better in system-config-printer. The original screen is not particularly friendly: just a list of tersely-named options like “cpi” with no explanation of what they are for or how they work. I spent some of Friday prototyping a new idea for the screen: instead of only listing…