Monthly Archives: December 2002

Books Catch Up

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Just a quick catchup on the books I’ve read in the last couple of weeks that I may or may not have mentioned.

JK Rowl­ing — Harry Pot­ter and the Cham­ber of Secrets
JK Rowl­ing — Harry Pot­ter and the Gob­let of Fire
JK Rowl­ing — Harry Pot­ter and the Pris­oner of Azkaban
Jill Murphy — The Worst Witch
Narinder Dhami — Slee­p­over Girls Go Designer (The Slee­p­over Club)
Steve Perry — Men In Black

I was think­ing of list­ing my favour­ite books of the year, but given that I’ve read well over a hun­dred books in the last twelve months, and I have no idea which were pub­lished this year (very few of them) I decided not to.

I’m cur­rently read­ing The Lord of the Rings: The Mak­ing of the tri­logy.

Junior Ready Steady Cook Popcorn Maker

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I found this story today: Kids go pop­corn crazy at Christ­mas about the Junior Ready Steady Cook Pop­corn Maker. Which claims

The £29.99 pop­corn maker has been tipped by industry experts to become one of the top 10 Christ­mas gifts.

and goes on to say

The Brit­ish Toy and Hobby Asso­ci­ation and the Brit­ish Asso­ci­ation of Toy Retail­ers both agreed the pop­corn maker was up there with the best of them.

Well I guess there will be a lot of dis­ap­poin­ted kids round about now.
Jamie got one of these from her grandma for Christ­mas and I can only say it’s rub­bish. Really! It is powered by an 80-watt light bulb. Which I’m sure is nice and safe, but is next to use­less for pop­ping corn.
It takes 10 minutes to heat up, and then it pops about three ker­nels at a time every fif­teen seconds or so into the tiny col­lect­ing bowl. But it also throws out five unpopped ker­nels too which then have to be seper­ated and put back in the top. In all it took about 15 minutes to pro­duce a hand­ful of pop­corn.
After the second lot, it switched itself off (prob­ably for ‘safety’ reas­ons) and then took half an hour before it came back on. Jamie was very dis­ap­poin­ted.
The only good thing it has going for it is that it looks great. It’s a pity it doesn’t live up to its prom­ise.
We will be tak­ing it back tomor­row and get­ting the money back. We’ll prob­ably put the money towards a proper pop­corn machine. The Prima ‘Duck’ Pop­corn Maker looks good and at around half the price.

B2 Link Manager version 1.0

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Woo hoo! B2 Link Man­ager has made it to ver­sion 1.0!
This new release includes:

A fix to the install script.
A sep­ar­ate con­fig­ur­a­tion file.
A cookie to remem­ber ‘show’ fil­ter set­ting when man­aging links.
A rat­ings sys­tem.
An auto-toggle cat­egory flag.
and the sort order can now be descending.

Of par­tic­u­lar interest is the rat­ing sys­tem which includes the abil­ity to dis­play images to indic­ate the rat­ing of a link. And the auto-toggle cat­egory flag which forces only one link in that cat­egory to be vis­ible, auto­mat­ic­ally tog­gling the oth­ers invis­ible. Think ‘cur­rent CD’ or ‘cur­rent mood’.

You can find a zip file and tar­ball at the B2 Link Man­ager page.

As ususal, com­ments, bug reports, etc to the forum topic please.

Google Viewer

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Here’s a neat idea from the Google Labs: Google Viewer.

The Google Viewer dis­plays the pages found as a res­ult of your Google search as a con­tinu­ous scrolling slide show. You can view your search res­ults without using your key­board or mouse and you can adjust the speed with which the images move across your screen. Each image of a page’s con­tents is accom­pan­ied by a short “snip­pet” describ­ing that page.