There are lots but I think these made tangible changes to the way I think Animal Farm - My Dad was a socialist, its was the first time I questioned his political dogma The Amiga ROM Kernel manuals Code Complete - 1st ed. Steve McConnell The Art of Electronics - Horowitz & Hill The BSA Bantam Haynes Manual - 32 years on I'm still spannering bikes The Camel book RSGB Radio Communications Handbook (an ancient pre-transistors copy) The Cuckoos Egg

Meh, the world is getting full - we need more ways for numbers to be reduced. Before you suggest it I'm already trying to do my bit by risking my life by commuting on a motorcycle every morning, and plenty of drivers do their bit by trying to kill me but oddly theres usually no speeding involved.

I spoke to the police about FAST when their sales pitch was essentially join us or we will raid you - the police couldn't care less.

Same old same old: government terrified of the internet, USA pushing its own agenda in other coutries politics, police/spooks wanting to widen their scope to the point where they can do what they like, sprinkle in a few think of the children / terrorists and apply to just about any country just lately.

The newer system doesn't include detailed local news and weather either - when fell walking in the Lake District I could look at teletext to instantly see how low the cloud would be, windspeed etc. you don't get that on the dumbed down national weather forecast or the regional weather pages. There used to be 10 pages of local news on Ceefax, that has gone too. Sure I can get this on the Internet but if I'm staying in a holiday cottage I probably dont have a connection.

The whole New Sun, Long Sun, Short Sun series. Very rewarding and much of it only makes sense when you've read all of it. Then you'll want to read it again to pick up all the clues and references you missed the first time around :-)

As I said to one of my kids - My youth was charecterized by what you could do, fly to the moon, travel at insane speeds, do fantastic stuff. His youth is charecterized by what he's not allowed to do. Sad indeed.

My friends had no lawn darts so they came up with a game that involved a piece of foam rubber on each shoulder and an old open face crash helmet. Throw a dartboard dart high in the air and try and 'catch' it by letting it stick in your crash helmet as it comes back down. What could possibly go wrong!

Been there done that, gave my IPod away in disgust and put Linux on my Mac. Naturally Apple couldn't care less about that and only geeks will be interested at the moment. However they should care, I was trialling Apple hardware at work; the trial has been abandoned and when friends and colleagues ask my geek opinion I no longer recommend Apple.

That's a matter of opinion. I may not be representative of the general public but for a variety of reasons OS X doesn't work for me so my Mac Pro got set up to dual boot OS X and Kubuntu. While I am a geek I was surprised to find the wife and kids almost always choose to use Kubuntu day to day, even though the default is OS X. In fact about the only thing the kids use OS X for is Lego software.