The Laptop That Could Change the World - A news report from Fox, about the excellent One Laptop per Child plan...nearing reality, and if you're in the USA you can contribute by a buy one, give one programme.

MS Word edit history snares Scottish Labour on donations - In which the beleagured leader of the Scottish Labour Party is undone by invisible comments in a Word document...sadly amongst the IT-challenged among the great and not-so-good, this isn't a rare occurrence. See this example from archFUDsters SCO, in their Bleak House-style comedic legal case aimed at destabilising Linux. Check out groklaw for the whole saga.

Beautiful Design (2006, Graphics Press LLC, Cambridge USA) is Edward Tufte's fourth book in a series discussing and analysing the visual presentation of data. According to the introduction, there is a fifth volume planned.

Day 1: Tayport to Killin

The first day of our tour began sunny and bright, though a little cool at first. We left Tayport at about 8.30 am. Because this was the first day riding with full panniers, we decided to detour via St Michael’s crossroads, for a bit of bike practice, which turned out to be a good idea. Unfortunately the roads were quite busy at times as rush hour approached. Rather than traverse Dundee’s new traffic system, after crossing the Tay Bridge, we headed out along Riverside, and out through Invergowrie, Kingoodie and Longforgan, where we crossed the main A90 at the Longforgan underpass.

In 2006, we decided to have as change from touring, and rented a cottage in Lochcarron (View Map) on the west coast of Scotland, taking the tandem and one of my solo bikes. A chief attraction (for me, at least) was that the famous climb over to Applecross (Bealach-na-Ba) was a short ride away. This worked out more social, as our friends Will and Cath were staying within reasonable range for a walking trip. Additionally, the weather turned out on some days to be completely disgraceful!

Stage 1: Tuesday 27th May Ullapool to Lochinver

Stage 2: Wednesday 28th May Lochinver to Durness

Stage 3: Thursday 29th May Durness to Altnaharra

Stage 4: Friday 30th May Altnaharra to Ullapool

Stage 5: Saturday 31st May Drumbeg coastal circuit

Stage 6: Sunday 1st June Ullapool to Poolewe

Stage 7: Monday 2nd June Poolewe to Shieldaig

Stage 8: Tuesday 3rd June Applecross

Stage 9: Wednesday 4th June Shieldaig to Ullapool

The first ever Oor Wullie annual, first published in 1940, has just been reprinted in facsimile edition.

Another in D. C. Thomson's reissues of Dudley D. Watkins' classic comic books, which I received for my birthday this year. Thomson published The Broons and Oor Wullie strips in the weekly paper The Sunday Post, and compiled annuals from the strips - The Broons and Oor Wullie annuals appeared (and still do) on alternate years. Personally, I far prefer Oor Wullie - I think The Broons tends to use very repetitive story lines.

KeyJnote A rather neat alternative to PowerPoint or OpenOffice.org Impress for organising and delivering presentations. It uses pdf files or collections of images, and makes use of OpenGL for some quite nice transitions. I'll be trying this out live and for real in January - watch this space!

Pros - It's open source. Easily installed from the Ubuntu repositories, which simplifies the installation of dependencies. A KDE GUI, KeyjnoteGUI, is available, which streamlines startup considerably.

Uses either a pdf file, or a directory of images - I've used the latter.

I recently bought a copy of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte (Graphical Press LLC, Cambridge, USA). Tufte's website gives quite a bit of information on his publications.

Edward Tufte has written several books, generally on the effective graphical display of data. This volume is the first of a series of four, and was originally published in the late 80s (I have the second edition, fourth printing, 2006), before the appearance of Microsoft's PowerPoint application.

BackupPC This is a very flexible backup system. I'm presently using it to backup a WinXP and two Ubuntu 7.10 laptops on a daily basis to my home server. It's pretty easy to configure, especially following this guide.