The first ever Oor Wullie annual, first published in 1940, has just been reprinted in facsimile edition.

Another in D. C. Thomson's reissues of Dudley D. Watkins' classic comic books, which I received for my birthday this year. Thomson published The Broons and Oor Wullie strips in the weekly paper The Sunday Post, and compiled annuals from the strips - The Broons and Oor Wullie annuals appeared (and still do) on alternate years. Personally, I far prefer Oor Wullie - I think The Broons tends to use very repetitive story lines.

KeyJnote A rather neat alternative to PowerPoint or OpenOffice.org Impress for organising and delivering presentations. It uses pdf files or collections of images, and makes use of OpenGL for some quite nice transitions. I'll be trying this out live and for real in January - watch this space!

Pros - It's open source. Easily installed from the Ubuntu repositories, which simplifies the installation of dependencies. A KDE GUI, KeyjnoteGUI, is available, which streamlines startup considerably.

Uses either a pdf file, or a directory of images - I've used the latter.

I recently bought a copy of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte (Graphical Press LLC, Cambridge, USA). Tufte's website gives quite a bit of information on his publications.

Edward Tufte has written several books, generally on the effective graphical display of data. This volume is the first of a series of four, and was originally published in the late 80s (I have the second edition, fourth printing, 2006), before the appearance of Microsoft's PowerPoint application.

BackupPC This is a very flexible backup system. I'm presently using it to backup a WinXP and two Ubuntu 7.10 laptops on a daily basis to my home server. It's pretty easy to configure, especially following this guide.

This website is built using the Joomla! open source content management system (version 1.5.5 at the time of writing. I am using this website for several purposes:

• To host my genealogy work.  Check out the introductory page - this material is password-protected, contact me for details. 
• To host articles about my main interests - cycling, reading, music and science
• To blog about interesting (to me) topics in science

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You can navigate via the separate menus on the left hand side of the screen.  Note that some menu items (for example, most of the Genealogy items) will only be visible if you are registeredand have logged in.  In addition the Logi/Register menu is only visible in the Home page.