books

I have built a large library of PDF books over the years, using the Calibre ebook management tool to manage the collection. For a long time I ran it on my local PC, but sometimes find myself wanting to refer to something when I don’t happen to be sat at my home office desk. So I wanted a way to have an online mirror so I could access my library wherever I was (while securing it from unauthorised access). And this article provides an overview of how I did it for readers who are interested in doing the same.

Earlier in the year we acquired a ukulele. Having played violin years ago, I was impressed by innovations - a digital tuner is much better than the pitch pipes whose pitch varied depending on how hard you blew - I know I should have been able to do it all with an A and an ear…)

And I only now learned that the metal bars running across the fingerboard of ukuleles, guitars, etc. don’t just guide the fingers but actually stop the string themselves, making tuning more precise - which set me wondering why I never had frets on my violin…

[This post - on Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys when it was still new, my own French and maths education, and comedian Adam Bloom’s narrative maze-hedging - was originally published on LiveJournal on 4 August 2004 and is re-posted here as part of a migration from Livejournal. It has some minor editing, interjections from 2022, and fixing/replacement of broken links - not everywhere has been able to follow Tim Berners-Lee’s 1998-and-still-there advice that Cool URIs don’t change.]

In May 2020 I compiled a quiz based on the openings of a variety of books on our bookcases - a mixture of the well-known and the slightly obscure, the literary and the popular, with a dusting of SF/fantasy sprinkled in. I’ve now put together a second quiz, this time on book endings.

This page has the book endings but not the answers - there is a version with answers also available.

In May 2020 I compiled a quiz based on the openings of a variety of books on our bookcases - a mixture of the well-known and the slightly obscure, the literary and the popular, with a dusting of SF/fantasy sprinkled in. I’ve now put together a second quiz, this time on book endings.

This page includes the book closing lines and the answers: there is a spoiler-free version with only the questions also available.

I recently compiled a quiz based on the openings of a variety of books on our bookcases. It is a mixture of the well-known and the slightly obscure, the literary and the popular, with a dusting of SF/fantasy sprinkled in.

This page has the questions only: when you’re ready, there is a version of the quiz with answers also available.

I recently compiled a quiz based on the openings of a variety of books on our bookcases. It is a mixture of the well-known and the slightly obscure, the literary and the popular, with a dusting of SF/fantasy sprinkled in.

This page includes the book openings and the answers: there is a spoiler-free version with only the questions also available.