Status-Q

Well, that's fine, because I haven't got one of those...

I don't normally think of myself as a terribly geeky geek, but the postman just called, and we now own the first series of Star Trek.

Actually, the first three series.

On Blu-Ray.

So I guess geekiness must come in bursts...

Here's a quick plug: my next door neighbour, Edel, creates beautiful handmade books. They range from tiny ones you can carry anywhere, to medium-sized notebooks which will make your friends' Moleskines look very dull, to A4 leather-bound guest books which would be a great wedding present.

As you can imagine, they're not cheap, but they're beautiful, they can be personalised in various ways, and you know you'll be giving a unique gift made with great care by someone who loves her craft. Worth checking out.

I'm enjoying Remembrance of Things Past, but my expectation of completing the whole thing has been somewhat reduced by my calculating that it's more than one-and-a-half times the length of the Bible.

Fortunately, Marcel Proust is a much better writer than God, but I fear that may not be sufficient...

Thanks to Richard Watts and Rob Hague for pointing me at Fujitsu's system for interacting with paper using finger gestures.

It's remarkably like the original DigitalDesk system created by my pal Pierre Wellner in 1991.

It's funny to think, now, that when Pierre made this video, there was no web to post it on.

At Baggy Point, near Croyde, Devon

On the way home from Devon, to avoid a nasty M4 traffic build-up near Swindon, we stopped off at Lacock, a small Wiltshire village owned almost entirely (and beautifully preserved) by the National Trust.

On the sunny afternoon after a bank holiday, it was a very peaceful spot, and a delightful antidote to the M4. (Or to Swindon).

Lacock is used as a location for many films - we recognised several bits of Meryton from the BBC's Pride and Prejudice, for example. But it also has an important place in photographic history, because a window at Lacock Abbey was the image Henry Fox Talbot captured in the first known photographic negative.

As we drove home, I couldn't help wondering what Henry F T would have made of Glenn Morse's very cool project to build a photographic enlarger. This is no ordinary enlarger, though - the negatives are their own light source, because they're displayed on his iPad screen.

One of the reasons I am sometimes envious of design/media companies is that they can get away with names that, in other sectors, would cause people at least to snigger, if not positively guffaw.

Can you imagine a law firm, or a steel manufacturing plant, deciding to name itself The Marmalade? Even in the technology world that I tend to inhabit, where many companies, let's face it, have some pretty silly names, I'm still impressed.

But you can get away with such names if you have other ways to make people take you seriously. And Seb Wills pointed me at this Fast Company post which suggests that The Marmalade may not find that too hard. The embedded video clip, showcasing some of their work, contains some very impressive sequences.

Yesterday evening, I accidentally tapped a button on my iPad screen. At least, I guess I must have done, because emails started coming back from all those who had accepted my LinkedIn invitation. Eh?

Yes, it turns out that I had accidentally spammed a couple of hundred people asking for a connection. I think it was everyone in my Gmail contacts who was on LinkedIn but not already connected to me. I know you can do such things, but I would never dream of performing so crass an operation deliberately.

And this is all very embarrassing. There are some I know well and would be delighted to connect to: I just hadn't got around to it yet. But there are many more whom I scarcely know at all, and I can just imagine them scratching their heads and making the same sort of face that I make when complete strangers ask me for a connection. And then there are those I know in a completely different social context: the wife of a casual acquaintance who is probably wondering why on earth I connected to her and not her husband...

All of which makes me ponder: have I ever actually had any benefit from my LinkedIn account (which I've had almost since the service started)? I can't think of any. There have been one or two people who have sent me useful messages, but I'm not hard to find elsewhere on the net, and frankly would much prefer to receive such communications by email. And then there was all that endorsement craziness a little while back.

No, the only positive thing I can really say about LinkedIn is that it doesn't annoy me as much as Facebook. But then, I do occasionally get some benefit from Facebook.

So I suspect that the right thing to do is to close my account. And yet, as I come to that conclusion, I think of all those distant acquaintances who, having received my annoying message, sigh and say, "Oh well, I suppose I'd better link to him", and click the button, only to be told that my account is no longer there, so I'd pestered them in vain. Argh!

You see, I can't win. Social gaffes threaten at every turn... Help! I'm LockedIn...

After a weekend clear-out, we're giving away a couple of dumbbell-type exercise weights, and an old HP Deskjet printer, on our local Freecycle list.

Seven people immediately expressed an enthusiastic desire for the gym accessories.

Nobody was interested in the miracle of modern printing technology.