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.