Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending a talk by Richard Stallman, the pioneer of the CopyLeft movement, at the University of Sussex. Stallman was speaking on the need to reform a copyright system which has outgrown the historical circumstances of its creation and now serves the mega corporations, such as Disney, as opposed to the majority of the population.

As a scholar working on literature, I am often asked to describe my work in potted form. This necessarily involves an introduction to the work of Thomas Pynchon, an extremely difficult task. Pynchon's novels cannot be considered normal literature; they are vast, sprawling pieces that encompass hundreds of characters, vast historical scope and dense prose.

Featured image by Пероша under a CC-BY-NC license. I am currently reading Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem and came across the phrase " in dubio contra reum " on p. 214. My Latin being a little rusty, and it being late in the day, I whacked the term into Google and was disappointed to find that there was no adequate definition of the term in the search results; merely band names and a German entry.

Reading Daniel Domscheit-Berg's Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website gives the twofold impression of a deeply ideological personality, but also a man stinging from hurt naivety.

A few weeks ago, I tweeted that the first beta of Android for Mendeley was almost ready. This post is an update on that status. I'm afraid to say that, about ten minutes after I posted that status, I ran a test on the oAuth code only to find that it was not working. This was strange as I had made no changes and it was previously working.

Image credit: Still Burning under a CC-BY-NC license. Perhaps one of the strongest arguments for universal suffrage, even among the convicted populous, can be taken from our recent history. There has been, in recent times, an over-identification of the law with absolute moral right.

Featured image copyright, and courtesy of, My Open Router. I've been, over the past few years, through about 3 different routers. I had a Thompson Speedtouch, a Netgear DG834GT and, most recently, a Netgear DGN2200. The problem I have always experienced, though, is that when I open a large number of connections (say, using BitTorrent), all these models die a miserable death.

Last night I was privileged enough to attend an event forming part of the British Library's Evolving English series featuring the novelist Russell Hoban in conversation with renowned satirist, novelist and generally sharp guy, Will Self. The conversation was focused around Hoban's masterwork, Riddley Walker.

This is my second review of a book on WikiLeaks, a subject which holds almost indefinite fascination for me, the first being David Leigh and Luke Harding's WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy . The book I am covering today is Greg Mitchell's self published The Age of WikiLeaks: From Collateral Murder to Cablegate (and Beyond) . Before proceeding, however, it's worth checking out this video: This video is an apt

Image credit: Copyright Eduroam, used here as fair use to indicate the network in question. It seems there's a few bugs in various Android variants that prevent a valid routing table being setup when connecting to an institutional eduroam network. The problem, which I have seen people reporting on XDA, occurs when you can get onto the wifi network, but still no resources are available.

Image credit: Robert Burdock under a CC-BY-NC-SA license. This is an announcement regarding the formation, and first UK meeting, of the UK Academic Pynchon Network, to take place on Friday the 1st of April, 2011 at Durham University. The format will be fairly informal, mainly a discussion group inviting work in progress, papers, ideas, chapters etc.