My brother and his wife very generously gave me a Kindle for Christmas.

I first want to talk about the plug. Duncan tells me that the iPhone plug works like this as well, but the Kindle is the first place I've seen it. The adapter is built into the plug …

It was at the end of The Golden City, the last of the Fourth Realm trilogy, that J12H made a privacy argument that I thought had something going for it. In Gabriel's climactic broadcast, he says:

And some of you may ask: 'Is there any value to privacy?'
All new …

In Country House, Blur sing:

He's reading Balzac, knocking back Prozac
It's a helping hand that makes you feel wonderfully bland
Oh it's the centuries remedy
For the faint at heart, a new start

Eugenie Grandet is my first Balzac and I very much enjoyed it. He has fairly long …

I wondered why there weren't any cheap Ubuntu laptops for sale, so my business partner Nicky and I have posted the following advert on Gumtree:

Brand new laptop for sale, running the latest Ubuntu operating system.

Model: Novatech W12
Screen: 12.1 inch LED
Processor: AMD Neo MV40
RAM: 2GB …

Patrice pointed out that the HTTP HEAD method in Imprimatur doesn't work, so I've fixed it in Imprimatur-019. Let me know if you have any problems with it.

My colleagues and me in 007 attire:

I got a bulk email from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall advertising his Fish Fight campaign.

The campaign is asking people to sign the following letter:

To Commissioner Damanaki, Members of the European Parliament and all member state governments,

I have seen images of dead and dying fish discarded in European waters.

I …

Sitting alone in the Rondo theatre on a cold and misty Monday evening in November, a few weeks before my 39th birthday, preparing to watch a documentary on nuclear waste disposal in Finland, I wondered what my life had come to.

The waste in the film has to be stored …

Thanks to Patrice for pointing out that the URL of the Imprimatur DTD http://imprimatur.sourceforge.net/imprimatur-008.dtd is returning the wrong content type. IIRC it used to be text/plain, but then it must have somehow changed to text/html, I've now changed it to application/xml-dtd which …