I've been impressed by the growing volume of free talks, books and other high-quality informationalistic edupodloads. I thought I'd list a few of my favourites here - read on for the link-love...

I can now verify that asking for a "Short Cappuccino" in Starbucks does indeed work, at least here in Leeds. My order was accepted without comment. It cost £1.85, and was indeed a sensible size and strength. The foam, however, was run o' the mill chunky froth, so my search for a flat white must continue.

image:1678 align=right width=150 Last weekend the Edinburgh Festival Fringe kicked off, and we went to see our first show - Tim Minchin. We saw his show last year (for which he won the Perrier Newcomer Award), and thought it was fantastic, so we booked tickets to see him again as soon as this year's program came out.

This years show, 'So Rock', was very good indeed. The songs and standup were almost all new material, with the balance a little more towards the standup side than in last year's 'Darkside'. The only repeat from last years show was the song 'Canvas Bags', where Tim implores the audience to take their canvas bags to the supermarket instead of using plastic ones. The song is funnier than it sounds, I assure you.

Just to balance up after yesterday's entry, I thought I'd tell you about a rather nifty new feature of Google. The search engine now has the ability to act as a calculator, so you can do stuff like this: 1+1 is....

The really clever part is that the Google calculator understands units and knows a fair number of physical constants, so you can ask it stuff like this:

`2.883kg*c*(1.21 kph + 88 mph)/(2.0*pi*1 A.U.*6.3m/(s^2))` in `lb`

And you get the right answer. Pretty cool, in the extremely geeky sense of the word cool.

Was looking for some cake recipes, as I am cooking cakes for friday-buns-on-thursday this week. During the process I discovered DeliaOnline and The BBC Recipe Archive which both seem to be excellent recipe sauces.

Unfortunately, I just remembered that my flat does not have a proper oven. It's a blokes flat where everything is either fried, boiled or microwaved (but mostly fried). Looks like I'll be buying a cake instead of making one, but at least I have a good excuse!