Two film reviews: The Desolation of Smaug and The Desolation of Smaug

I’m just back from seeing The Desolation of Smaug with the family and I’m really not sure what to think. I enjoyed lots of things about it, but still left feeling very dissatisfied. I liked the Tolkien material very much; and I liked the comic barrels-and-dragons action-adventure lots, too. But I can’t for the life of me figure out what they’re doing in the same film.

The entrance to Laketown

We’re selling our model railway

Remember back in 2011 we started building a new model railway? (That blogging series didn’t really get off the ground — though I’ll finish it one day, because the actual railway has come out pretty nicely.) But in part zero of that series, I showed our older railway, built in 2004:

Well, we’re selling that railway now on eBay. We need to recover some space, and we can’t really justify keeping both old and new layouts.

Spotify’s recommendation engine could use some work

Right. Because someone who likes 1970s prog rock and 1990s-to-contemporary singer-songwriter neo-folk is probably the sort of person who will also like One Direction.

Another Doctor Who book that you should read

I’m actually a fortnight late, but I just noticed that Andrew Hickey’s Doctor Who book is out. It’s available as in paperback, hardback, Kindle (US and UK) and other e-book formats. I just bought my copy: paperback for £10, with free shipping using the “FREESHIP” coupon code.

How can I make chapter links in my Kindle book?

In putting together the Doctor Who book, I’ve used proper heading styles rather than manually bolding and resizing the headings of the various sections. By using Heading 1, Heading 2 and Heading 3 styles, I’m then able to automatically generate a table of contents (which I’ll append below as a taster).