Jousting knights

At Lulworth Castle on our holiday

Prime Obsession

Rating:	★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Science
Author:	John Derbyshire

Mathematical history I just read is reviewed on my blog.

I've still got a small mound of books to work through before I find any more, but I'm always interested in recommendations. I find Amazon quite good for this, even if I don't actually buy the books there. I can still log those I own to affect what it recommends.

I don't know if anyone objects to the emails they get when I update my site. If you are a Multiply member you can set your options to select which emails you get. You can also switch them to text mode if you prefer. Non-member can either join and set their options or should mail me with their preference.

Free and cheap phone calls

I've been playing with Skype for
some time as a means of talking to other people via the net. I don't
make many international calls and so have not used it to call any land
lines yet. Skype is handy as it works on Windows and Linux. I have over
40 contacts, mostly for work as my employer is encouraging Skype usage
to save on phone calls. Skype's rates semm competitive, but you have to
buy at least 10 Euros. I have a few cents credit that they gave away
recently.



I've just read about VoipBuster
that has some similar functions, but also offers free calls to phones
in most of Europe, USA, Australia and a few others. Unfortunately it's
Windows only

Boing Boing

http://boingboing.net
I'm going to try having a 'link of the week' spot here. We'll see how long that lasts.

I've been enjoying this site for some time as a source of weird and wacky news. It covers everything from internet rights to freak animals. It's run by Cory Doctorow, an author who allows you do download his books for free in the hope that you will buy the paper version.

Some of the links they give may be described as NSFW (not safe for work). This usually refers to 'adult' sites, but it should all be legal.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Rating:	★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Kids & Family

Actually I give it 3.5/5 over at my blog

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Mystery & Thrillers
Author:	Mark Haddon

Review at my blog

Kingdom of Heaven

Rating:	★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Action & Adventure

Reviewed over at my blog.

Anyone else want to voice an opinion? Multiply is all about participation. You don't have to just be a consumer of information. Anyone can publish.

Oh, Canada

I'm currently in Toronto. More details on my blog.

Multiply does tags

I see that they have added yet another feature in the form of tags.
These are keywords that you can attach to entries to make them easier
to find.



The technology has been around for a while. My favourite us is in del.icio.us, an on-line bookmark system. I've got about a thousand links there, but can still find the ones I want via their tags.

Up for a challenge?

Tilly has been playing this Lilo and Stitch
game on the Disney site for a while. It's an old-style scrolling
shoot-em-up like I used to play. I had a go the other day and got
further than she had (level 4). Then yesterday I reached level 6 before
I had to abandon the game and go out. Got about 1.2 million points with 2 or 3 ships still left.
There's lots more levels to it beyond that.



Can you do better?



Any other cool games you have found?



I know it's not as good as a Playstation, but I used to pay money for
games of this sort on my BBC Micro and Amiga. The kids are quite happy
to play them for now, but I can imagine that in a few years they will demand something better.



Update: Got to level 7 and 1,644,000. Gets very hard.



Update 14/08: I've since been to level 8 and nearly 2 million points.
This was all on the kids' slow old PC. When I tried it on the faster
one the game got a lot faster. That makes it even harder.