I had offered to teach an evening of map reading with the local training ship of the Nautical Training Corps. This had come about after leading them on an evening walk from Woodingdean to Rottingdean windmill during the summer, with them carrying maps, and me explaining what we were seeing along the way, such as a local trig point and tumuli and the windmill itself, on Beacon Hill.

I’ve been using rsync to maintain a copy of a website on an external hard drive, which I bought and just started as is, but there are a few problems that I’ve been looking to correct. Firstly, external USB drives come pre-formatted for Windows, with an NTFS filesystem. This works just fine on Linux, with the drive being mounted with the ntfs3 driver. The nice things about this is that I could, if required, just plug it into a Windows machine and copy files straight off.

With World Book Day nearly upon us, I was pondering ways in which children could be engaged with reading books.

I know how children enjoy trading cards like Pokémon, so could we encourage them along more wholesome lines, that don’t involve rarity and competition, and facilitate a discussion about what books they’ve enjoyed?