Have you seen the rather lovely Library Thing website?

For book lovers it provides a great way of finding information about books, about what other people like, and what you might like. It also lets you host a list of your books, letting you see and search amongst them, even showing their covers in its ‘bookshelf’ view. Here’s our library. (It also has some widgets for bloggers, and that’s how you can see a few books in the right hand column of this one.)

It also has discussion forums around particular books, authors and the like. On it some people have committed to reading and reviewing 50 books this year. Martha’s taken up the challenge, and has started here. Why don’t you put some of your books up? We’d love to be able to discuss books or authors we have in common?

Interesting views from Tony Turnbull in the Times Magazine (25 Feb 08) on our coffee habits:

Don’t you think it’s one of the great myths of our time that we British bave become a nation of coffee aficionados? Yes our high streets may be blanketed by a competing froth of Starbucks and Costas and Caffe Neros, but can we really claim to be true lovers of the brew itself?
…

Why else would the decaf whipped caramel latte exist? Why would you flood a single shot of espresso with half a pint of milk and laughably call it a latte? These aren’t coffees, they’re milkshakes. We haven’t come on that far from the milkbars of the fifties.

Makes me wonder about my coffee preferences. I still have regular coffee most of the time, with 10% or so added milk, but given my favourite is a glass of mocha, I appear to have picked up the taste for hot milkshakes like the rest of us …

We do enjoy playing Scrabble, and normally take a travel set away with us. But the games are long, and we weren’t sure whether we’d have the concentration for it. So I was thinking of alternatives, and remembered playing Racing Demons with Rachel and Phil, and having a lot of fun. I dug out some rules, bought a pair of packs with different coloured backs (most important) and we gave it a go. It took a few minutes to get the rules, as there are 4 different groups of cards in play which you can do different things with. But halfway through the first game it felt easy. We played 20 hands or so, and Martha roundly beat me. Despite that, it was still fun. Probably more so - and certainly would be more frenetic - with 3 or 4 players. And a large enough table to play it on!

It’s also called Pounce and Nerts, by the way. Another recommendation

Bourton is, thankfully, not fitted out with a Starbucks, a Costa or a Ritazza. But we do both prefer more ‘interesting’ coffees than straight instant or filter ones, and so after a morning’s strenuous window shopping, we thought teacakes and latte / mocha was in order. The Mad Hatter tea shop looked good from the outside, and inside had some good Alice-in-Wonderland murals, but everything else seemed a bit uncared for. The tables were peculiar as they were covered a large doily covered with a thick pane of glass. Probably easier to keep clean, but they made me uncomfortable, particularly as between the two were tucked large adverts for a local B&B. The teacakes were OK - though why do they always have to go cold so quickly? - but the drinks weren’t. Delivered in mean-sized tea cups, which bothered Martha, the froth on the top looked suspiciously artificial, and the liquid appeared to have any coffee and milk that once been in there filtered out. I hardly ever complain in places, but this time I didn’t drink or pay for it.

We went in search of a better one, and as we were looking we went into a Christian books/gifts store on Moore Street, that looked like it was run by volunteers. The display of new and second-hand goods was pretty good in places, but still a long way from the professional but commercial of a Wesley Owen shop. It had a little café, adorned with a complete jumble of every kind of Christian poster and prayer. We got 2 lattes to takeaway, and were told that there was no charge for them, though we were invited to leave a donation and/or a prayer for God’s work in the Cotswolds. The coffee turned out to be less than impressive, but I think the attitude they had was. It seems a bold sign and reminder that God provides, and that they were trusting him to do that. And within that it allows hospitality and aid for those that can’t afford it - a concrete way of showing God’s particular concern for the poor and oppressed. (Though, you do have to wonder how many poor and oppressed are likely to be living in or visiting a small Cotswolds village?)

To bring this too-long story to a close, I’m happy to report that the next day we hit success at The Riverside Cafe, overlooking Kings Bridge. They produced a pretty good latte and mocha, in generous-sized glasses. (And good soup and danish pastries as well.) So, it took a day, but now we know where to get a good coffee - which they also do take-away. Recommended.

[The next few posts will appear a few days after they were written ...]

After more than 2 weeks off work with stress, it’s half term and Martha and I are taking a short break in Bourton-on-the-Water. The aim is to take it easy, and for other people to look after us for a change. As Martha’s been ill - or at least out of energy - as well recently, it’s been a difficult time at home. We have done a few things to help, such as getting the supermarket to deliver to us rather than carting a heavy trolley round. (Though, the first time it takes just as long, as we get to grips with their website. Next time it should be quicker as we can use some of the same details from last time.)

We’re staying at Meadow Rise B&B a minute’s walk from the River Windrush that slowly flows through the centre of the village. Our room at the top of the B&B is good and large, and looks out over fields and to some hills. At first glance it was a boring large grassy field, but in a different light I saw that it was more ridged than I’d expect. Perhaps they’re barrows? Maybe Saxon Kings are buried under it? Maybe that’s why there are no crops or livestock on it. It’s also quiet, which is wonderful. The B&B owners are very attentive and the full English breakfast was very good. (Though as one of the them is originally German, and still with a strong accent, I couldn’t work out whether she was offering me fresh prunes or prawns. I didn’t risk either.)

And our eating place last night can also be recommended. The Old Manse Hotel had a wonderful menu - too good, really, with enough really tempting dishes to last a whole week. Shame we don’t have that long. It has a very warm décor and candles, and a wine list with a good range of wines (including my fave Rosé grape, White Zinfandel), all of which were also offered by the glass (both 175 and 250ml). This is rarely true in my experience, often with only the ‘house’ red and white on offer by the glass. We rarely drink more than a single glass, so buying a bottle between the two of us always seems a waste. The wines also came at appropriate temperatures: the rose quite cool, but the red not cold at all.

Soon after getting my Mac, I obviously wanted to sort the backups out, and to make them much more sensible than my previous PC-based lashup. I’ve still not really tested out a restore from Mozy, but I like that it’s a secure, remote, service, and that for 2GB it’s free. The OS X configuration client is slow and crashes easily (yes, a beta in action not just in name), but the underlying backup appears to happen without problem. It’s just doing a backup of my working documents, not the OS or music etc.

But what about Time Machine, arguably the biggest addition to Leopard (OS X 10.5)? It was time to look it over, now I’m on a point release or two on from 10.5.0, and people do seem to like it. So, worth trying a full system set-and-forget backup with it. You need a second disk, which can be external, for it, and (in my case) that’s at least 37GB. I already had an external 150GB drive, with some backups from the PCs on it. I tried just mounting that, and Time Machine refused to use it, as it didn’t have an HFS+ partition. The rest of this post is how I achieved that. Non-geeks look away now.

I wanted to keep the existing data, so I went back to the PC and used my tried-and-trusted PartitionMagic tool to shrink the existing partition down and create a new empty 70GB one. (I’m not sure if there’s a tool in OS X to do this whilst keeping the old data. I wasn’t about to make a mistake there.) Then some googling turned up these old instructions for making a FAT32 and an HFS+ partition. Given I’m not needing the HFS+ partition to be bootable, which is the main debate of that thread, it turned out the only necessary parts were:

• ls /dev/rdisk? with and without the external drive mounted, to find the drive device name (/dev/rdisk2 in my case)
• ls /dev/rdisk2* to find the volume name of the second partition
• sudo diskutil eraseVolume "Journaled HFS+" TMBACKUP /dev/disk2s5 to fill it with a nice new HFS+ partition, and mount it.

The 37GB is what it needs for its backup - which is ignoring my music and movie files. As far as I can tell, it’s not achieving any compression, as the OS and data comes to about 37GB at the moment. After an hour or two of the initial backup it showed a figure that made me gulp: Backing up 1,075,096 items. Yee-ouch! These modern OSes sure are complex …

Ernie Rea was chatting wiht some Muslim experts the other day on ‘Beyond Belief’ (heard via the R4 podcast). They were supposed to be talking about Madrassas, but I wasn’t connecting with it, until they talked to a Pakistani arts festival director, who was a strong Muslim believer as well.

(I can’t quote directly as I don’t have the podcast any more as iTunes has been too efficient.) He said that the Prophet Mohammed said that the struggle (jihad) with others is over; the remaining struggle (jihad) is with ourselves, to make ourselves pure. It was following the Russian invasion of Afghanisation that religious leaders declared the war against the Russians to be a jihad, and it has been applied progressively more since then.

But good to see a point of similarity with Christians - acknowledging that our lack of purity (could say our ’sin’) is the main problem, not other people. I think I detected a difference as well, though. For the Muslim, it is indeed a personal struggle; for the Christian it can be (and should) a struggle but with the aid of God the Holy Spirit, as often we are almost powerless to change our characters.

In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. [Romans 8.26]

I was given a DVD-RW that had 2 videos on it, which couldn’t be read by ordinary DVD players, but I could see files on it when put in the Mac. My challenge was to get the videos playable on an ordinary DVD. Research in wikipedia showed it was written in DVD-VR format, which allows for changes in content once written, but isn’t understood by most domestic players. Instead of VOB files, which can often be treated as MPEG-2 files by just changing their extension, it has a single VR_MANGR.IFO (small; metadata) and a VR_MOVIE.VRO (large; audio + video data) inside an DVD-RTAV directory.

Video is recorded as an MPEG-2 program stream. Video resolution depends on the recording quality and the video format used. Multiple audio encodings are allowed including MPEG Audio, Dolby AC3 and Linear PCM.

Not much video software appears to read this format: on the Mac iDVD and iMovie both don’t, but MPEG Streamclip, AVS Video Converter, DVDxDV and VisualHub do. I tried MPEG Streamclip and it doesn’t understand the IFO files, but it does read the VRO ones. It got me very confused for a while, as it was only finding one of the 2 videos, despite reporting the full 1.5GB worth of file. But some fiddling in the options to fix timecode breaks, made it possible to find the second file. However, exporting it out as an MPEG-2 file doesn’t seem to work for iDVD, despite this being what DVD Video format uses. Humph. Next step is to try QuickTime, this being an Apple product. This produces 2.8 GB for 23 minutes. I also tried DV format (5GB). Shame since the MPEG-2 was only 700MB. And, as expected, there’s a very long transcoding process (130 minutes elapsed for the 100 minutes of video). Frustrating!

(For Windows machines, the DVD FAQ Q4.10 (~2005 vintage) notes: “use Heuris Extractor or Panasonic DVD-MovieAlbum to copy them to a hard disk in usable format. Alternatively you can use DVD disc creation software such as InterVideo WinDVD Creator, MedioStream neoDVD, or Sonic MyDVD can import from -VR discs and write out standard DVD-Video discs.”)

I almost ignored this post by Tony Morgan, but I’m glad I didn’t:

Make eye contact. Prove you’re talking to me.

Show your personality. Let me see your quirks.

Don’t reveal too much too soon. (That’s awkward.)

Compliment me…but make it sincere.

Be confident.

Ask questions. It proves you’re interested in me.

Create curiosity.

Dare me to try something new.

Don’t yell. Sometimes your whisper is more effective.

Anticipate some rejections, but don’t dwell on them.

Leave me wanting more.

Because of this final line:

(Now apply all of this to your blogging.)

Good advice!

At the weekend I had my first trip around Bristol Zoo. It was OK: I did have an appropriately small-sized child in tow. (OK, I did see one group of 20-something men going round without children, but frankly that just seemed a little odd.)

After the flamingoes, who I felt must be a bit chilly, we admired the lion and lioness they have. It looked like a fairly good habitat for them, though in common with the other enclosures, rather on the small side. The information board said that it was common for them to walk up and down the edges of the enclosure, as this is there in-the-wild way of checking their territory. But I have to say that it felt more like they were going stir crazy. But who am I to say? This was my first experience of lions — discounting the rather wonderful afternoon spent watching The Lion King in London a few years ago. [Picture credit: captainmcdan]

A low roar filtered through to me from the next area - and I ran back to see whether it was really the lion. I couldn’t easily see because of reflections on the grass, but it sounded rather amplified to me. Later on I heard what sounded like exactly the same pattern of roaring, and I can’t help thinking it was pre-recorded.

The next area was also a little strange - the Twilight World - where they had lots of mammals (eg, sand rats) that are most active at night or in twilight. It was accordingly very dark, and I wondered whether the animals get a dose of bright light during to simulate day-time, during our night period, when there are no visitors? Otherwise wouldn’t they get tired out?

We also saw monkeys, meerkats, mice, gorillas, fruit bats, ducks and lots of others. We didn’t get to see the hippos, gibbons, red pandas or penguins … but it’s unlikely they’ll all escape before I can next visit.