This was prompted by some recent posts by my fried Wulf about ebooks. I've read a few ebooks on my Palms and my phone. These have all come from free sources such as Feedbooks. We still buy books, but mostly for Xmas and birthdays. I have enough to keep me going for a while as I don't find much time for reading apart from in bed and then I seem to be catching up on the interesting bits of that week's Saturday Guardian. I still keep a few books on my phone to fill the time when I'm hanging around somewhere with nothing to do. I've been reading one of Cory Docktorow's books for months now. A colleague has his Windows phone or iPhone on his desk with a book on screen to read whilst waiting for code to compile.

As previously mentioned I've been mostly playing my acoustic guitar since the band project dried up. I've been keeping an eye on sites like musofinder and Bandmix for possible collaborations. With my general lack of time it would have to be something local and not require too much commitment.

I must have been reading and listening to various incarnations of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for nearly 30 years now. I've re-read all the books, listened to the radio series, watched the TV series and film and played the adventure game. I'm currently reading the books to my daughter. Sadly Douglas Adams died tragically young and so didn't get the see the (disappointing) film completed, or finish the third Dirk Gently book. Now the H2G2 series has been continued by Eoin Colfer whose Artemis Fowl books my daughter also enjoys.

I see from my charts that I've been listening to lots of David Bowie, Eels and King Crimson this year. I've not bought a huge amount of music, but have bought a couple of download albums such as Embryonic and Echo. This may be the start of a trend. I'll buy downloads if the price is right and the quality is good. I'm running out of shelf space for CDs.

Thu 12 Nov – Muse, The Big Pink Very good show by Muse. Big Pink not so much my thing. My review at my blog

Wed 7 Oct – Michael Manring and Steve Lawson Review on my blog

We went to this concert at the Barbican with our kids and a couple more last night. There was a session beforehand where some members of the BBC Symphony Orchestra talked to us about the pieces and we got to make some music together. The kids took along their instruments.I was not familiar with the pieces, but enjoyed them. I've not been to many classical concerts. A full orchestra in action is a spectacular sight and sound.

Another year, another RSPB survey. We beat our record with 11 species recorded this time

I've not been making much use of Multiply lately. My friends seem more active on Facebook and Picasa. I still like some of the Multiply features. I find it the easiest for setting who should see each item and you can make things totally public if you want to, unlike Facebook.I tried sharing pictures on Picasa, but there are aspects of that I don't really like and only a couple of friends use it, so I may go back to putting my pictures here. There's even a plug-in for the Picasa desktop app to automate that, although it doesn't upload things like descriptions and other metadata you can set on your pictures.Anyone else got an opinion?

Shared by steevc I ought to read this and start using Ardour for some home recording

There is a new manual for Ardour available from FLOSS Manuals, a primarily volunteer organization dedicated to providing documentation for FLOSS ("Free Libre Open Source Software"). In this case, long time Ardour user and advocate Derek Holzer organized a week long effort to get the basics of the manual in place, with great results. At this point, there are more than a dozen contributors who have helped the documentation effort. The contents continue to expand and improve - you can volunteer to help out too if you wish. Read what Derek had to say about this on the Ardour forums.

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Shared by steevc The music industry is changing and the big boys don't understand that

2010 is – rather tragically – shaping up to be the year when Rock Stars (and old-industry millionaires) complain about the state of music on behalf of ‘the little people’.

Here are three examples:

Peter Waterman, in an interview with The Times, said that Spotify was a terrible thing. It, he says

“devalue[s] our artists, they damage this country economically, culturally and morally”

Why’s that then, Pete?

“The big stars are a tiny percentage; the rest are broke, including a lot of well-known faces. Who is developing new talent? Without money, new acts are strangled before they mature. We all suffer.”

Shared by steevc I hate hard-/software that concentrates on stopping you from doing things