Sillybean

Ikea hack: keyboard drawer for Mikael desk

Ever wanted a keyboard drawer for your Mikael desk? If you happen to have an old set of Magiker bridge shelves lying around, you’re golden.

While I was documenting the hack, I decided to photograph the rest…

Hastings vs. Barnes & Noble vs. Amazon: the problem with buying books locally

Steven Brust’s Iorich comes out today. I would like to buy a copy. I’ve long been in the habit of tracking forthcoming books with a (private) Amazon wish list, then lumping together the ones that come out around the same…

Howdy, stranger.

I know, it’s been ages! How are you? You look thinner. Have you done something different with your hair?

Me? Well, I was sick for a while there. No, not hamthrax. Not even a virus, really; turns out the stuff…

Ice cream

I’ve been making a lot of ice cream lately. Thanks to my friend Shaima, I’ve become a fan of David Lebovitz’s blog, and when the weather turned hot I finally broke down and bought his ice cream…

in lieu of a personal update, book reviews

Lots of big stuff going on in friends’ lives. It’s been a really crazy week, but I don’t feel that I can divulge their personal business to the internets, so I’m going to blather about books for a while. Between…

Amazon: staffed by hypocritical jackasses

Not five minutes after posting a quick word about #amazonfail, I skimmed my home page to see what I’d linked to lately, just out of curiosity, and visited the onion goggles from the Castle…

Changing Publishing

Can we put Michael Tamblyn in charge of US publishing? All of it? Like, right now?

Some highlights from his presentation, 6 Projects That Could Change Publishing for the Better:

DRM is the biggest problem with ebook readers.…

Vorkosigan discussions on Tor.com

Jo Walton is posting about each Vorkosigan novel over on Tor.com, and there are now some illuminating remarks from Lois McMaster Bujold in the comments. (You might recall that I was in transports over this series when I…

Improving IndieBound

Earlier this week there was a post on The Written Nerd about IndieBound (formerly BookSense), inviting booksellers and bloggers to share ideas on how it could better serve independent bookstores. I’m writing to the marketing person,…

Break it to me gently

I’ve just zipped through the Dresden Files series at a pretty spectacular clip. I’d meant to do it before Jim Butcher appeared at ConDFW, but, y’know. Life.

So. Exactly how bad was the TV series?

(ETA: pretty bad.)

Book reviews: The Agency, Beguilement

The Agency, by Ally O’Brien

What a snarky, raunchy, sharp romp of a book. It’s the story of a woman who works in a big London agency. Her biggest client is a somewhat dotty old lady who writes…

2008 reading list

I had a very quiet New Year’s. Allergies have been kicking my ass all week and I’m barely starting to feel human again, so I’m going to ramble at you about books for a while.

For the last four years…

Miles and Miles and Miles

The reason I haven’t posted in a couple weeks? After kicking the cold I came home with, I started physical therapy for my ongoing neck and shoulder problems. (Turns out the muscles in my back are knotted up like strands…

Mercy movies?

Of all the recent werewolf/vampire/etc. series, Patricia Briggs’s is the last one I would have picked to be optioned for movies, since it’s perhaps the least fluffy.

I’m just having trouble picturing this. Peanut gallery, what say you?

Ubiquity command for BookMooch

A couple of weeks ago I posted about Ubiquity, a new Firefox extension. Today I wrote my first command for it: mooch, which will search BookMooch for selected text on a page (or whatever…