Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

One of the biggest problems for volutary organisations dedicated to putting out of copyright works online, like Project Gutenberg, isn't finding books to digitise - it's getting copy proofed and formatted. Enter, Distributed Proofreading, a tool for spreading the load across millions of screens and keyboards. As they say, "just one page a day"...

We've all heard those sayings, the "when the cows come home" words that mean "that'll never happen". In Caroline Stevermer's kingdom of Aravis, people think back to the reign of the Good King Julian, and say "when the King comes home" shake there heads and walk on by. Or at least, that's what they used to say. When The King Comes Home is the story of what changed that, as it's what happened when the King did just that; two hundred years after he died.

Hail Rosmer wants to be a great artist. She's been apprenticed to one of the kingdom's great painters in the bustling city of Aravis. It's a fream that leads her into obsession, and inadvertant crime. As she runs from the city, she meets a fisherman under a bridge, a man who's not who he seems. With the face of the revered King Julian, and the soul of his best friend Istvan, Hail's new acquaintance is her key to misadventure. Magical plots are afoot, plots that threaten to weaken the struggling state, run by the Prince-Bishop as the aging king lies slowly fading away. As Hail stumbles into plot after plot, she finds herself witness to the return of the King - and her obsession with the long-dead artist Maspero the only key to releasing the enslaved souls.

Stevermer writes with an eloquent ease, bringing the self-obsessed Hail to life in a few brief paragraphs. It's nt so much a story of the King's return, as a story of Hail's coming of age. This is her rite of passage, one that she has found herself falling down, an Alice in a rabbit hole of circumstance and danger.

An enjoyable short book, and one that fills in some of the back history of the alternate magical Europe familiar from Sorcery and Cecilia and A College Of Magics.

The Post Office's automated underground mail railway is likely to close after 75 years.

One of the secrets hidden under the streets of London, the Mail Rail railway carries letters along a 37km route from Paddington to Whitechapel, stopping at various sorting offices on its journey. It's also London's only operating narrow gauge railway...

It'll be a sad loss.

I'm pretty sure most of you who read my wibblings will be familiar with Tasmin Archer's song Sleeping Satellite.

But looking at the lyrics for Jethro Tull's For Michael Collins, Jeffrey and Me I realised it had to be yet another mainstream rock song about the Apollo missions, and the dream that died...

Michael Collins was the command module pilot on Apollo 11, and remained in orbit while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon.

(It's now nearly 30 years since man last walked on the moon.)