Sunday, January 9, 2011 at 08:02PM 
My mouse went bonkers today and contrived to take my computer down in a very interesting way. The picture shows that sometimes even a crash can look quite good….
Life Saturday, January 8, 2011 at 10:58PM Found this today on sale cheap and just had to buy a copy (although I prefer the phrase “invest in” rather than “buy”.
Very clever hardware has been shoehorned into five little battery powered boxes. Each shows a particular letter and when you put them in a row that makes a valid word you hear a beep and the game gives you some points. There must be a bunch of little radio serial ports and some RFID devices inside that let the blocks work out where they are, along with quite a reasonable sized dictionary.
Of course number one wife cares little about how it works, but she does enjoy playing the game, as do I. Well worth the investment. Comes with a nice little box you can carry the letters round in, along with some rather good party play modes.
Rob
One slight issue that we have noticed though is that the game seems to be fitted with an american dictionary. Which means that it is happy to accept words like "favor" and the like. This is a tad annoying, in that we bought what we thought was an english product (in all senses of the word).
Still fun though.
Friday, January 7, 2011 at 08:50PM If you are interested in modern languages you have got to get this for your Windows Phone. For a mere two pounds you get a Ruby runtime and editor which lets you create and run programs on the device itself. Let me be clear about this; it means you can create brand new programs and store and run them on your phone, without using a PC or anything else. Astonishing.
The installation comes with a bunch of programs including a Twitter client and a passable Tetris clone.
I’ve not played with Ruby much, but I’m always fancied having a go, and now I have the perfect platform. You can find out more at http://www.iron7.com/
Thursday, January 6, 2011 at 01:41PM Does anyone know why Adobe Reader still does this? And why it takes so long? And why the document looks rubbish when it has finished? And why the message is wrong, even though it has been been wrong for the last few versions of the stupid program? (all of which have a stupidly laborious upgrade procedure)
There. I feel much better now…. Oh, hang on, the reader has just crashed..
Rob
And yes, I have spotted the irony of just having distributed a PDF version of the Windows Phone Blue Book.
Life Thursday, January 6, 2011 at 09:08AM 
Why not just put the instructions on both sides?
Life 