Junior Ready Steady Cook Popcorn Maker

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I found this story today: Kids go popcorn crazy at Christmas about the Junior Ready Steady Cook Popcorn Maker. Which claims

The £29.99 popcorn maker has been tipped by industry experts to become one of the top 10 Christmas gifts.

and goes on to say

The British Toy and Hobby Association and the British Association of Toy Retailers both agreed the popcorn maker was up there with the best of them.

Well I guess there will be a lot of disappointed kids round about now.
Jamie got one of these from her grandma for Christmas and I can only say it’s rubbish. Really! It is powered by an 80-watt light bulb. Which I’m sure is nice and safe, but is next to useless for popping corn.
It takes 10 minutes to heat up, and then it pops about three kernels at a time every fifteen seconds or so into the tiny collecting bowl. But it also throws out five unpopped kernels too which then have to be seperated and put back in the top. In all it took about 15 minutes to produce a handful of popcorn.
After the second lot, it switched itself off (probably for ‘safety’ reasons) and then took half an hour before it came back on. Jamie was very disappointed.
The only good thing it has going for it is that it looks great. It’s a pity it doesn’t live up to its promise.
We will be taking it back tomorrow and getting the money back. We’ll probably put the money towards a proper popcorn machine. The Prima ‘Duck’ Popcorn Maker looks good and at around half the price.

B2 Link Manager version 1.0

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Woo hoo! B2 Link Manager has made it to version 1.0!
This new release includes:

A fix to the install script.
A separate configuration file.
A cookie to remember ‘show’ filter setting when managing links.
A ratings system.
An auto-toggle category flag.
and the sort order can now be descending.

Of particular interest is the rating system which includes the ability to display images to indicate the rating of a link. And the auto-toggle category flag which forces only one link in that category to be visible, automatically toggling the others invisible. Think ‘current CD’ or ‘current mood’.

You can find a zip file and tarball at the B2 Link Manager page.

As ususal, comments, bug reports, etc to the forum topic please.

Google Viewer

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Here’s a neat idea from the Google Labs: Google Viewer.

The Google Viewer displays the pages found as a result of your Google search as a continuous scrolling slide show. You can view your search results without using your keyboard or mouse and you can adjust the speed with which the images move across your screen. Each image of a page’s contents is accompanied by a short “snippet” describing that page.

Christmas

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Wow, two whole days with hardly a blog. I’ve been busy.
Christmas day was great. We went to see my mum and my sister, and then went out for our Christmas meal. It was at the Shaandaar in Rusholme. An Indian curry for Christmas dinner was definitely different.
Afterwards we all went back to Jackie and Grahams. We stayed there till the early hours.
Boxing day was pretty good too. After going to see my niece Chloe for her birthday, we went to Jackie and Grahams again for a traditional Christmas dinner. It was a joint effort with everybody providing part of the meal and Paula putting it all together. It was great, thanks Paula. Later we went round to Sharon and Ian’s. We didn’t stay too late there and got home before midnight.
Finally today, we did nothing! We got up very, very late, and slobbbed about the house all day reading, watching TV, etc.
All in all a great Christmas!
PS. I’ve got some pictures from the last couple of days, I’ll try to add them to the gallery tomorrow.