• PDF-XChange (Windows, Basic: free, Pro: $34): loads real fast (much faster than the Adobe viewer), has all the basic options (annotations, graphic annotations, etc.) and the Pro version allows to reorganize the pages of a document or to extract text from it.
• Foxit (Windows/Linux, Basic: free, Pro Pack: $39.99): loads even faster, allows annotations (but only the Pro versio does it without watermark).
• Sumatra PDF (Windows, free): is even simple; everything is done for sheer speed.
• Apple PDF Preview (Mac, free): is very powerful (and it’s free, remember) and included in the MacOS offering; annotations, extraction, reorganization, all is available

Knowledge is always free.

Let’s contribute to the improvement of knowledge and culture in the Human race: This year, let’s read English novels of the highest quality. They may come from the old United Kingdom or from the newly liberated colonies of North America. Quality is always here.

The 100 Greatest English-Language Novels of the 20th Century

Here is the beginning of the list. Which ones did you actually read?

1. (1922) Ulysses James Joyce
2. (1925) The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. (1916) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man James Joyce
4. (1955) Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
5. (1932) Brave New World Aldous Huxley
6. (1929) The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner
7. (1961) Catch-22 Joseph Heller
8. (1940) Darkness at Noon Arthur Koestler
9. (1913) Sons and Lovers D. H. Lawrence
10. (1939) The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck
11. (1947) Under the Volcano Malcolm Lowry
12. (1903) The Way of All Flesh Samuel Butler
13. (1949) Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell
14. (1934) I, Claudius Robert Graves
15. (1927) To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf
16. (1925) An American Tragedy Theodore Dreiser
17. (1940) The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter Carson McCullers
18. (1969) Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut
19. (1952) Invisible Man Ralph Ellison

• Habeas Brulée is superbly written with elegant recipes and generally great photos.
• Rouxbe proposes recipes also very generous but presented in video.

Rhubarb Soup with Olive Cookie

The first ones are coming with a request to drink responsibly:

A Cognac glass (Rikke Hagen)

Vote for your favorite Martini glass design

Simple galssware (Martin Žampach)

A Klein bottle is a mathematical form whose particularity is to have no difference between its inside and its outside (this is elementary topology):

3 Klein bottles, inside each other (Alan Benett)

Finally, here is a vase that may have some difficulty to hold its water (it’s made of books):

Book vase (Laura Cahill)

SitePoint sensational Photoshop book is now FREE to Download!

Source: DaniellaSpinat.com.

The man blurred into existence behind the dense shrubs, and checked a small device he took from his pocket. Since time and date seemed correct, he straightened his sports coat and stepped from behind the bushes.

[...]

Source: Ironic Sans.

The Wall, the Alan Parker movie created with the eponymous music album from Pink Floyd stays a monument of moving images. But, now, you can look at the pages of Roger Waters and Gerald Scarfe, the original screenplay (in PDF).

Apparently, this comes from a conversation with Ed Benguiat, famous American typographer, where Allen wanted to know what a good typeface was.

Source: KitBlog.

But Sir Arthur C. Clarke was also the author of significant steps for science like the observation that geostationary satellites would be the practical solution to many telecommunication issues. I can vividly remember my reading of Interplanetary Flight; an introduction to astronautics, where in 1950 he stated very clearly concepts like the multi-stage rocket or the geostationary satellite and why they should be prefered to other technical solutions.

The old man (born on 16 December 1917) was living in Sri Lanka where he appreciated the leisure of all-year-long scuba diving.

Science Fiction can no longer be the same after he left us.

Arthur C. Clarke died at the age of 90 from respiratory complications linked to the post-polio syndrome that forced him into a wheelchair for his last years.

Source: BibliOdyssey.

• Collège de France : the most famous French scientific institution has free-access lectures all year long. Most of them are available online too (from Mathematics to Philosophy through Archeology).
• The MIT publishes a number of lectures in video-on-demand (and has a large web site named OpenCourseWare).
• OpenYale is presenting seven free introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University.
• Courses of all levels from the Washington University (introductory, undergraduate, graduate).
• PodCasts from UC San Diego
• Lectures from Vanderbilt.
• Computer and Computer Graphics, from University of British Columbia or from Virginia U.
• Webcasts from Oxford Internet Institute.
• Webcasts from Rice University.
• Podcasts from York College (NYC).
• Harvard at Home.

I could also advise you to check the Lecturefox Blog with a lot of information about these free lectures.