The BBC are running a trial offering some of their radio programmes as downloads, effectively making them podcasts. Might give this a go for some of the more interesting stuff.
Mark Kermode‘s film reviews might well become a regular listen.
Palimpsest Book Group
Palimpsest has a book group, discussing books read by all the members in a topic on the forum. It has worked really well in the past, but recently has fallen behind a little.
To try and perk things up a bit it was decided that instead of choosing books month-by-month, 6 books should be chosen to cover half a year’s group reading, meaning that everyone knows where they stand. After various discussions and slightly complicated voting systems, the final selection looks like this:
- 1 September 2005: The Temptation of Saint Anthony, Gustave Flaubert
- 1 October 2005: No One Writes to the Colonel, Gabriel García Márquez
- 1 November 2005: The First Men in the Moon/The Sleeper Awakes, H.G. Wells
- 1 December 2005: Dance, Dance, Dance, Haruki Murakami
- 1 January 2006: Virtual Light, William Gibson
- 1 February 2006: The Three-Arched Bridge, Ismail Kadare
Some pretty challenging stuff there!
Personalised Google
Go to a personaliseable (!) version of Google at www.google.com/ig. It’s actually pretty good. You have to log in with your Google ID and password, for example your gmail username, and you can set out various bits of info to have on your screen, as well as the Google search box.
The screen is split into 3 columns. On the left I have a list of favourite links, a preview of my Gmail inbox, a ‘Word of the Day’ thing and the latest feed from Slashdot. In the centre I have a few blogs which I like to monitor regularly. The latest 3 posts in each appear here. Any RSS feed can be subscribed to. On the rightermost (!) column I have various news site feeds, including the BBC and Google News.
When I get home I will stick an image of what my screen looks like. It makes for an excellent homepage.
Richard Yates on Palimpsest
One of the great things about Palimpsest is the way it throws up quality discussions about authors I have never heard of. And it brings together fans of that author that might not otherwise ever get to discuss his (or her) work with a fellow devotee.
This happened most recently with Richard Yates. Follow this link to the thread and enjoy. I am certainly going to invest in some Yates in the near future.