James Patrick Kelly's "Free Reads"

James Patrick Kelly is providing free audio-book downloads (in MP3 format) of some of his short stories and novellas. He's running it as a tip jar experiment, and has already raised enough money to record a second batch of stories.

I heartily recommend "The Pyramid of Amirah"

Another triumph for Creative Commons.

Best trade show tat ever?

IDF rocked - lots of fun stuff to learn, and a show floor that gave journalists the chance to get at the tchotchkes first...

I'm not sure which were the best, though - the PDA pointer/pen with added laser pointer, the little acrylic boxes of Jelly Belly jelly beans, the aspartame-free chewing gum (yay!), the freezable blue LED ice cubes, the rather useful little brush for dusting off your keyboard, or the neat little translucent PC fan shaped fridge magnets in glorious iMac colours.

Somehow, as I seem to have ended up with a set of 8, I reckon the magnets won out. However the mogs seem rather fond of chasing the the laser...

Not quite Slashdotted, but nearly...

I go away to the US for a week, and find that while I was buried in the concrete caves of the Moscone Centre the last piece of fiction I posted was linked to from the excellent Die Puny Humans.

Thanks, mistersleepless.

Now, of course I have to finish it, don't I...

(Oh, and hello to everyone who popped along from Warren's linkage)

CF memory price crash...

A 2GB compact flash card now only costs $136.99. That's quite a drop from $443.59.

A pity Buy.com doesn't ship outside the US. Or even accept non-US payment. Don't they realise the web is international?

.Mac on the PC? No problems...

Especially now that Apple has released an iDisk utility for Windows that happily maps your iDisk space as a drive on your PC. Just install it, feed in your username and password details, and it's there ready for you to use.

Now if only connecting my TiBook to the network here was as easy.