little bits of everything

I'm going to break Rule One  and muse a little on the past 10 years. I've just read someone else  thinking how to celebrate their blogs 10th anniversary and I thought I'd check this blog, and lo and behold, it's over 10 years old. I started my first blog in 1999, but it was on editthispage.com  which has since been taken down. I have all the content though, and if I had more time I'd put it back online . This blog started when blogger.com wasn't part of Google. My first post was about The Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams . Full marks to Bloomsbury for making a 10 year old link still do something useful. I can't remember if I ever did actually read it. I probably did. I toyed for a bit with using it as a place to record comments that I'd put on other people's websites , so I could keep track of them, but I soon tired of that.  Then, in order to make myself blog more often, I tried to blog just 10 words per day . Of course to think of exactly ...

Opening Ceremony Wow. Just. Wow. I thought it was one of the best things I'd seen. If the rest of the family hadn't been so entranced too they would have probably told me to stop saying wow all the time. I thought the highlight was when the fifth ring rose up and joined the others. Danny Boyle really pulled off a great show. When he took over after the previous person gave up there was some cynicism about whether he'd be able to do something memorable, but I think he confounded those critics. When I was a teenager my favourite album was Tubular Bells, so I was very pleased to see Mike Oldfield given the stage. It was also good to see a geek - Tim Berners-Lee, get recognition too. The way the prerecorded video was linked in the live stuff worked really well for a TV audience. I liked the music so much I bought the album. Russell Davies wrote a really interesting post about it: I saw a generation realising that it was now Top at Culture. 30/40 somethings w...

Yes, really. Knitting. For reasons I can't go into I found myself knitting a couple of weeks ago. I had done a bit when I was a kid. I was pleasantly surprised to find that once I'd cast on my motor memory took over and I was turning out stitches. For more reasons I can't go into it got wider as I went along, but it wasn't a problem as I just turned it into little hat. I can highly recommend the multi-coloured wool for beginners as it means that there's a contrast between previous rows and the current stitches. That's all.

When I got a Playbook I wanted to use it to listen to BBC iPlayer while doing the washing up. So I made a cardboard tablet stand out of the cardboard you get with new shirts. Recently I came across a video by Jude Pullen showing how to make a right angle joint with card and it inspired me to share what I'd done, via a PDF rather than a video though. The PDF below is for a Playbook but I would have thought that any seven inch tablet, like the Kindle Fire or the Google Nexus 7 would fit. If in the unlikely event they are more chunky than the Playbook, you can just cut the slot wider. It's probably more sturdy if you make it out of a corrugated cardboard. Seven inch tablet stand

Those talented people at Utata  have released their latest "big project" which I've taken part in this time. My photos were taken on our Norfolk Broads boating holiday.