Inflight Science gives a brief tour of some major science concepts set loosely around the fact that you’re supposed to read it on a plane. There are miniature “experiments” to carry out whilst airborne (e.g. throwing a ball of paper in the air and noting that it doesn’t fly to the back of the plane), and all of the topics discussed are loosely associated with flying.

There’s nothing especially wrong with this concept. Its nature means that the explanations are brief, and the science discussed doesn’t go much above high-school level. Some of the links to being in-flight are tenuous at best: syphons are explained because toilets on planes don’t use them, for example.

My main complaints about this book are that it’s a touch simple, and a touch bland. There isn’t all that much about the science of flight, which is disappointing.

All-in-all, it’s a so-so book that whizzes through a few probably familiar scientific concepts. It might entertain you through a short flight, but you won’t be so riveted you’ll want to pick it up again once you land, and there are much better things you could be reading.

Inflight Science is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback and on Kindle.

This is a delightful book that I only came across after it was recommended by Shelagh Fogarty on Twitter.

It’s short, and full (mainly) of short anecdotes and reflections on events in the late Nora Ephron’s life. Sometimes, these take the form of full-on autobiographical anecdotes, such as her story of how she got into journalism. Others are just straight-out opinions, such as her six stages of her relationship with email. All are joyously funny; some are also quite touching. The whole gives a real sense of Ephron as a person. And the quality of the writing throughout is just sublime.

Some reviewers have complained about a degree of “bitchiness” in this book – and it’s true to say that Ephron’s opinions aren’t universally positive about everything. But I read these opinions as honestly held, and found them endearing.

There are glorious descriptions of some of Ephron’s reactions to the absurdity of celebrity, and the challenges of ageing: from how she reacts to finding a dish named after her in a restaurant, to coping with an inability to remember names.

There’s a chapter in this book that deals with Ephron’s “flops”: her films and plays that have failed to become financial successes. She describes with honesty how this feels, how it can never quite be forgotten, and how the failures stayed with her far longer than the successes. I’m someone who generally advocates embracing and learning from failure, and this chapter really made me view this in a different way. In a creative context, “success” and “failure” are difficult to define: Ephron considers her finest play to be one that commercially flopped. How can one learn from failure when, in the liberal arts, failure is very subjective? I know that’s probably obvious to most people, but this chapter really made me consider this in some depth.

I know that some have been irritated by the brevity of this book. It is very short. Yet I find it difficult to criticise something just because it’s brief: this is brief but excellent, and I wholeheartedly recommend it.

I Remember Nothing and Other Reflections is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback and on Kindle.

I really like reading books about other people’s jobs. I don’t quite know why I’m attracted to this type of book, but I almost always really enjoy them. So, since this was an Amazon best-seller, I thought it was worth a try. Unfortunately, this proved to be an exception to the rule.

Herrring gives an account of working as an IT officer onboard a number of cruise ships. He talks a little about his job, though these sections quickly become repetitive as he describes the same processes on several ships. He tries a bit of amateur anthropology as well, drawing conclusions as earth-shattering as discovering that people from the same country tend to stick together, as do those with the same job. But, perhaps surprisingly, the bulk of this book is about his sex life.

Now, I have nothing against books like this discussing sex. Clearly, to Herring, the the promiscuity that he and his fellow crew experience during their time working onboard cruise ships was a large part of the experience, and so it would be most unusual not to discuss it. But this goes far beyond that: this isn’t discussion of the general point, this is bizarre description of individual sexual encounters.

In fact, he times a number of the sexual encounters and reports their length to the second. As someone reading to find out about other working lifestyles, I can honestly say that I have precisely no interest in the fact that his sexual encounter with a youth counsellor from South Africa lasted only 91 seconds, nor that his encounter with a Lithuanian lasted two minutes and three seconds. Frankly, I’m amazed that anyone was interested enough to publish these sections!

The doctor in me is a little bit disappointed too that massively excessive alcohol consumption is discussed throughout with little regard paid to the consequences. There is a brief description of someone who has a physical dependence on alcohol, but little discussion of the wider problem, and no mention at all of any long-term negative effects of daily excessive consumption.

There is also a frankly bizarre chapter on booking cruises which appears to have been sponsored by a cruise provider, but isn’t clearly marked as such, which is a bit disappointing.

I don’t want to give the impression that this book is all bad. I did make it to the end of the book. There are some revealing insights in there. There are a few moments of humour. But my overall impression was one of this being a deeply bizarre and flawed book. The content could probably be edited and re-worked into a reasonable feature for a Sunday newspaper magazine – but in its current form, I really don’t feel able to recommend this book.

The Truth About Cruise Ships is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback and on Kindle.

I’ve mentioned on here previously that I’m a massive fan of Evernote, and ScanDrop is the main method by which I get paper stuff into my Evernote account. It’s another program which is brilliant for the fact that it just works. It scans and uploads directly to Evernote. I can specify which notebook I want the resulting note to appear in; I can tag them appropriately; I can even use the software to upload to other cloud services, or just save to my desktop.

ScanDrop doesn’t do anything that I can’t do manually. I could use my scanner’s proprietary software, or even OSX’s Image Capture, and then upload manually. But ScanDrop is an all-in-one solution that just makes life easier.

ScanDrop has a free version available, and works on Windows or Mac. Give it a go!

A little later this morning, I’ll be publishing the tenth and final review in a successful series of posts about my favourite Mac apps.

From next week, Wednesday mornings will feature book reviews: some original, some I’ve published elsewhere, and some a combination of the two. This series will continue pretty much indefinitely (read: until I get bored of it). I’ve even created a brand new skeuomorphic post template for this series, so you won’t want to miss that!

Autograph is an example of an app that does only one thing, but does it brilliantly. All Autograph does is allows me to sign things on my computer. A simple press of a universal shortcut causes a window to pop up, inviting me to sign my trackpad. I sign the trackpad, press return, and the signature is inserted into whatever I’m working on.

That is all it does. There are other, less elegant, solutions to this problem. I could have a scanned and stored JPG of my signature which I would import into a document as and when needed. But this solution is so simple and so elegant that it’s worth the couple of quid the app costs.

Check out their website, and see if you wouldn’t find a use for Autograph. I really recommend it.

I don’t understand why Kuvva isn’t more popular. It’s brilliant, simple and free: what more could anybody want?

Each week, Kuvva get an artist to design a series of desktop wallpapers. The free app then changes the desktop wallpaper to a new design each day. Over the course of a week, the wallpapers are all from a single artist, usually in a single style. Then, the following week, it’s a new artist and a new style. Sometimes it’s photography, sometimes it’s digital art, sometimes it’s hand-drawn. It’s a really brilliant idea, and it’s totally free.

Occasionally, the art is bizarre enough for me not to want to display it at work, but there is a function to designate “favourite” artists, and have only their work appearing.

Overall, Kuvva is brilliant, free, and available for Windows and Mac. What are you waiting for?

I’m a fairly recent convert to extensive bookmarking. Despite doing an awful lot of stuff online, I’ve survived most of my time with about 30 bookmarks in my bookmarks bar. Up until recently, I considered bookmarks as quick-access links to commonly used sites.

It’s only relatively recently that I got frustrated with losing sites that I didn’t use all that frequently, but wanted to refer to from time to time. And so, after reading about it on the Guardian site, I tried using Pinboard to allow me to store and search through far more bookmarks. This cleared some of the less frequently used ones from my bookmarks bar, which was appreciated, and meant that I got much better at bookmarking any site that I thought I might want to refer back to in future.

Pinboard has a bookmarklet system which allows you to add new items, but Delibar takes this to the next level. Delibar sits in the menubar, and gives me instant, searchable access to all my bookmarks. It also installs a (customisable) universal shortcut which allows me to bookmark any page in mere moments.

It’s a very, very simple app, but one that does it’s job perfectly. It also works with delicious, but I’ve never felt able to get on very well with that particular service, so can’t really comment on how well that works.

Delibar and Pinboard have revolutionised the way I bookmark, and they might do the same for you. Give them a go!

Since I use and love Evernote and Dropbox, you might wonder what possible use I can get out of Droplr. After all, all three apps store things in the cloud, and all three apps have sharing features.

The thing I love about Droplr is its pure speed and simplicity. It doesn’t do anything that Evernote and Dropbox can’t do, it just does it more gracefully. Essentially, if I want to share something – be that a file, a URL, or just a chunk of text – I drag it to the Droplr icon in my menubar. That automatically uploads it to Droplr and sticks a short URL on my clipboard. So, to send that last sentence to Droplr, I simply dragged it to the icon, and it generated this URL: http://go.sjh.im/IsGt. A simple Cmd-V then inserted it into this post. That’s just two actions: drag it to the icon and paste.

It’s that simplicity that I love about Droplr. And it’s free. So why not give it a go?

When I first came across Read it Later and similar services, I struggled to understand what they were for. This might sound odd, because I had a long-term habit of emailing myself links to stories and videos that I wanted to deal with later. For example, an interesting link might appear on twitter when I haven’t the time to follow it. Previously, I would (really) email myself the tweet. Then I discovered a better way.

Read it Later is now Pocket, and I use it all the time for saving links that I might want to follow up later. I use ifttt.com to send all of Bobbie Johnson’s If You Only tweets directly to Pocket, and then delete them from there on the rare occasion that I’m not interested in the subject matter.

I do most of my Pocket reading via my iPhone or iPad, but occasionally I fancy reading something on my Mac. I could, of course, go directly to the Pocket website, but I like something a little cleaner. The answer to this problem is a simple app: Read Later, which works with both Pocket and Instapaper. It’s a ridiculously simple app, which shows a list of my saved stories on the left, and a simplified, easy-to-read view of the article on the right. Perfect. There’s a also buttons to share articles by any one of a number of means, be it email, Twitter, Facebook, Pinboard, or something else.

The beauty of Read Later is that it reduces the barrier to reading all of that stuff that I mean to read. I don’t have to fire up and login to a website, it’s a single click on my Dock, and I’m in. It’s fantastic, free, and worth a download.