Tram those books

It was a cold and windy day in Prague so after exploring the squares, alleyways and delights of the

Old Town we decided to take a tram ride. We had bought 3 day tickets on arrival so a warm tram to see the sights outside the tourist areas offered a welcome respite to the biting wind. We boarded a number 24 not knowing where it would take us. After crossing the river and wandering through the suburbs it stopped outside a notable building where many folks were alighting. We decided to explore.

This was the Exhibition Ground and with great planning on our part, we had arrived at Book World Prague, the 20th International Book Fair and Literary Festival. Not to be outdone by the lack of an entry ticket we managed to walk through to the Exhibition Hall. From the mezzanine floor we had a good view of the activities below.

  

On descending back to ground floor level, I explored the displays and took some photos for all my friends in library land. 

Great to see Matthew Reilly's books promoted

Easy to see that fantasy has a large readership in languages other than English just by looking at the covers of many books displayed

Spotted some picture book favourites

Garfield and The Simpsons appeal in many languages

One English book stand amidst books from far and wide

What a delightful unplanned surprise the book fair was for me. What were you doing today friends?

Travel tales: Prague

Prague: What a city of magnificent buildings! At every corner the vista changes and even though I have long admired the buildings of Paris for their timeless elegance, those of Prague outshine them in so many ways.

From medieval to Baroque, Romantic and Victorian, all those influences and many more can be spied in the architecture of Prague. The sheer number, size and variety of buildings viewed in even a single day has delighted me and no doubt many hundreds of thousands of other tourists through the years.

From Prague Castle and St Vitus cathedral with its magnificent windows sitting high above the city down to the Old town square, beautiful buildings abound. Never before have I snapped 70 photos in a day but the architectural delights of Prague I fear have spoiled me for other city adventures. My camera skills are limited but even I am delighted with many of my captures which will help enhance my memories of our visit here. I look forward to sorting, editing, saving and labelling at the conclusion of our journey.

Food and recipes

Organise those recipes

I've been steadily getting rid of all those scraps of paper saved from magazines that had a recipe I just could not resist. In the process I investigated a variety of ways of digitising those resources.
My process is quite simple.

1. Use Evernote - create a notebook for recipes
2. Scan those pieces of paper using the phone or tablet
3. Add tags
4. View cook book in Evernote food - not at all necessary as Evernote does such a good job, but the Evernote food app is visually pleasing.

The power of Evernote search is the winner for me, it even searches the text within the images of my handwritten recipes from years ago. Once I was set on this path I continued to add interesting recipes read through Feedly or clipped from the web via the Chrome extension Clearly. Once I had loaded the Web clipper extension and turned on related searches, any Google search now searched my Evernote notebooks too. 

The only problem left was all those recipes in my shelves of recipe books. Here Eat your books came into play. It indexes the recipes in your cook books, making it easy to find which cook book had that favourite recipe. You can add five books for free but need a subscription to add more.

I put this information into the presentation below for patrons of Noosa Library Services along with some other interesting food sites. The apps and sites I used are detailed in the slides.

Digitise your recipes and enjoy!