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They're using a printer you can buy on Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Draper-57567-Square-Mouth-Shovel-Fibreglass/dp/B0002GUMDW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1359722298&sr=8-1

Why the hell would you build anything for 4 people? Surely they can live in a big hole with a lid, can't they? This seems more like a job for a mining machine than a 3D printer. Then again, I'm not a rocket scientist, so I don't know what I'm talking about.

I've been studying economics in detail the last year, taking an approach I'm familiar with from programming/penetration-testing, learning through looking for the falsehoods/problems first.

Through reading books like Steve Keen's Debunking Economics, and following sites like Naked Capitalism (yes, I'm shamelessly plugging both ;) they are excellent resources), I have come to view modern economic teaching as one of the most politically corrupted and pseudo-scientific fields around at the moment, and by far the most dangerous, due to how greatly it affects literally everyone (every single person on the planet).

The deception in modern economics is so great, and runs at such a deep fundamental level, that even some of the most intelligent people out there end up believing theory, which is just plain wrong and without empirical backing, and which leads to economic policy that is enormously destructive.

Personally, I think that mounting an adequate challenge to the falsehoods and pseudoscience in economics, and pushing the field closer to becoming a real science (something Post-Keynesians in general are aiming for), is one of the most vitally important and urgent tasks that exists today.

I quick two second search on Amazon http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_3?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=raspberry+pi&sprefix=ras%2Caps%2C366 shows they have them in stock.

I guess you're being facetious, but for those not familiar with the awesomeness being referred to, here it is .

How much stuff have we seen already - absolutely ludicrous - yet it sells?

Indeed.

If you know, maybe you should be applying for promotion - some of the people that operate them obviously need help! http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B007QC9QS2

Install 7 then, it runs cooler.

Can you still get 7 legally?

Even with this, I'm still not sure...

I get 5GB data for £8.27 a month, I have pay-as-you-go sim for voice and text which I spend maybe £30-40 a year on. Works nicely with a dual-sim smartphone.

I spent £110 on a cheap dual-sim smartphone, if I keep the phone for 18 months that works out to 35% of the total cost, if I only keep it 12 months it will be 45% of the cost.

Uh, no?

Britain also seems to use English measurement drive sockets...

Same in France...

I went for the three LED model: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0097A6R2E/ref=oh_details_o01_s00_i00/ . It works really well on the lowest light setting - I reckon the highest setting would probably set fire to anything in front of me.

As a bit of a Lego fan myself, some discontinued sets, such as some of the older large Technic sets, are very desirable, and *appear* to fetch a high price when sold as a new/sealed set. (Example: http://www.amazon.co.uk/LEGO-Technic-8421-Mobile-Crane/dp/B00097E4JW/ - 4 sellers wanting over £1000 for what will have been maybe £150 originally)

Not sure how many people are actually paying that price, though, when there's the option of buying used sets for a fraction of the price, or buying modern sets instead. Perhaps they are just being traded between collectors/investors, and sadly never being built and played with as intended!

I think Dora is the least of your worries in all that, at least she's educational and non-sexist. Actually a pretty good role model.

And the excellent UK band "Stackridge" wrote a quite fun song about her.
Amazon UK link:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dora-The-Female-Explorer/dp/B001W0645C

America always gets things cheaper:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=asus+transformer&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Aasus+transformer

But it's all relative, as your proper Netbooks are cheaper too. You can't get a decent Netbook in the UK for less than £200. I expect sub-$200 Netbooks are common enough in the US.

It's occasionally helpful to pop a wiki page before ranting mindlessly:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoroastrianism#Relation_to_other_religions_and_cultures

The first sentence of that section reads:

Most scholars believe[26] that key concepts of Zoroastrian eschatology and demonology influenced the Abrahamic religions.[27][28]

(...)

[26] [author missing] (2012 [last update]). "ZOROASTRIANISM - JewishEncyclopedia.com". jewishencyclopedia.com. Retrieved 23 February 2012.
[27] Black & Rowley 1987, p. 607b.
[28] Duchesne-Guillemin 1988, p. 815.

I'd add another reference, where I picked up the anecdotes myself. Its first chapter goes through Mazdaism and its relations to local and neighboring beliefs almost exclusively:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Iran-Empire-History-Zoroaster-Present/dp/014103629X

30 books? What were you reading, the Mr Men collection? ;)

Small pocket coin-purse is really useful.

They're like £2 or so in any market, or even on Amazon or eBay - http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B008K09YAY/

Also, you don't need to carry your wallet, with lots of notes in; you can pay a bus fare and buy a sandwich or a beer or two with that pocket-full of coins.

1. A variable frequency microwave oven. These single frequency units that everybody has are just to slow. Just let it repeat a 10 second sweep from 2.3 GHz to 2.5 GHz. Dunno how long it would take.
2.Measure temperature with a IR camera shifted a bit in the 4th spatial dimension do you can look inside the whole thing. Use a normal microwave oven to heat the bulk, use a 4th spatial dimension shifted focused microwave to heat the coldest parts a bit extra so it cooks evenly.
2. Cook in cold fusion reactor.
3. Travel back in time to the optimal moment after the big bang, hold turkey outside TARDIS.
4. Debone turkey, run minced turkey through meat mincer, run turkey through 3d printer with laser add on to cook the minced turkey at the moment it hits the product. Print a model of Nataly Portman covered in hot grits.
5. order online
6. Genetically engineer dragon (w. fire breath) to roast it.
7. make -f turkey.h --delicious
8. Fry enough bacon to release enough fat to be able to fry the turkey in pure bacon fat.
9. Build robot to cook turkey for you.
10. ...
11. Profit!

Just finished reading Carbon Crunch. Helm is an economist from Oxford who assisted the European Commission in preparing the Energy Roadmap 2050. :Dieter claims coal is the #1 emissions problem, that and political cowardice. The U.S. and EU have done their utmost to shift manufacturing to least (wage) cost countries where 'energy' development is coal intensive. It makes U.S. and EU politicians feel good to be able to say they've decreased emissions when in fact all they've done is use the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to shift the location of source by financing infrastructure where labor is exploitable. If you measure emissions by consumption instead of production, the wealthy western countries are still financing the majority of the world's carbon emissions, even thought point sources have been moved to where the particulate fallout has been moved.

Currently there is no such thing as clean coal (anywhere, not even on the drawing board), and the shift to natural gas is inadequate to decrease emissions in the west and too expensive for the developing world. Wind & Solar only exist on the subsidies that have been used to prematurely pilfer the cookie jar for 'investors.' Even T. Boone Pickens understood this when throttled his headlong plunge into wind turbines.

Dieter likes to talk about Carbon taxes as superior to the failed EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). And he's clear that over decades of trying, Kyoto, Copenhagen, Darbun, et al, have all utterly failed to accomplish anything meaningful. He's just scratching ink into paper to tell you how and why. The taxes he'd like to see, and the emissions trading he and his ilk implemented are only designed to make consumption more costly. If the political will is sufficient to implement the taxes he now advocates, and the revenues aren't diverted to rebuild the catastrophic long-term infrastructure and property damage at the world's ports and coastlines, perhaps we can find a safe, peaceful means by which to upgrade the world's energy infrastructure.

In the mean time, maybe we can get the Pope to advocate for birth control and get used to watching wealthy people show up to red carpet events by mass transit.

But if if makes you feel better to replace your lawn mowers with electrics, go right ahead. Anyway you look at it, your great-grandchildren, should they still be able to read and have access to unadulterated historical accounts of the 21st century clay foot dragging contest, will probably not be impressed by anything done to date.

Acer C7 Chromebook £199 from amazon.co.uk (for a sterling comparison as you said £229). This has a Sandy Bridge Celeron so it's a cut back Core processor but it would be the one I'd be most interested in seeing benchmarked like-for-like with this $250 Arm Chromebook.

WTF, did you read his reply?

I'm sure he's aware that a cell tower near the DMZ could reach into North Korea. However, the only village near the DMZ is a propoganda village: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kij%C5%8Fng-dong where nobody lives.

Also, anything that transmits can be detected and located. You do know what transmit means don't you?

Yes you can create mesh networks in Africa because in Africa you can transmit without being hunted down and placed in a forced labour camp along with your parents, grand parents and any children you may have. If you want to learn more, read this book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Aquariums-Pyongyang-Years-North-Korean/dp/1843544997

Cheap indeed but for speed of installation and recently bought a couple of packs of these Cablox which were a breeze to use.

To clear my desk I put the monitor on a wall with a cantilever bracket and colour-coded the Cat 6 cables ensuring they were all the correct length (most were too long previously).

Using hardware that you can fix to the wall helps particularly when using switches with more then 4 ports as the bend radius of data cables plus the power connector on the opposite side increase the diameter of the router to 15 inches or more. Get that stuff on the wall just below desk level to avoid visual clutter and to keep the cables off the floor.

Having been totally baffled by the summery. Which is incredibly confusing. Nothing has changed, VAT works like it always does the final customer pays it ALL thats the books buyer paying 20% http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=502578.

This is purely about dodgy maths. Amazon make deals on percentage of Gross Price with the publishers the UK full retail price of the book [net price+20%vat], not on the net price + [Vat in Luxenbourg] 3%. where publishers would get a slightly larger piece of pie . Neither Amazon or the Publishers pay a penny in tax so I fail to see why this is an issue. A better argument would be to standardise of Amazon taking a percentage of the net price as opposed to gross price, but all this should not matter, its really whatever they have negotiated between themselves.

This is a ridiculous Anti-Amazon article, I suspect to distract from the disgusting behaviour that Apple and 5 Publishers are involved in

Diesel Traction - A Manual for Enginemen

My late father found a copy of this in an old railway workshop he was converting into a heavy goods vehicle workshop and brought it home, when I was about six or seven years old. I picked it up and read it, fascinated by the cutaway diagrams of the engines and gearboxes that went into the different styles of locomotive, and the circuit diagrams of all the control gear. There were detailed explanations of how the automatic gearboxes in diesel-mechanical locomotives worked, and how the injector pump, fuel rack and injectors worked in a diesel engine.

At that point, I realised that while I would probably never work on a 1962 diesel railcar, I held in my hand the key to knowing *everything*. All I needed to understand absolutely anything I ever encountered was the right diagram, and the mental toolkit to look at what was in front of me and understand how different parts work together as part of a whole system. From that moment onwards everything else was easy.

You've just got to look at things and see the exploded diagram in your mind's eye.

I'm 47 and was a Novell consultant until 3 years ago. I managed to persuade a friend who owned a small ISP to let me virtualize his infrastructure (5+ years old crappy boxes that miraculously had not fallen over in that time).

Bought 2 hosts and a SAN from an IBM reseller. Built it all completely from scratch learning from a book (this one) using iSCSI to connect to the SAN. Rebuilt it twice or three times to make sure I'd captured all the steps.

Put it into production, virtualizing all the server that would be virtualizable (and old Slackware definitely wasn't one of those) and creating new Centos templates for easy deployment of the stuff that was on Slackware. Added QNAP boxes for Disaster Recovery.

After 8-9 weeks my friend's business model had changed beyond all recognition and I had brand-new up-to-date skills in virtualization and a reference site.

I'm now working for a consultancy doing VMware, SANs and Office365 migrations. My skills and experience are improving every day and Novell is far behind in the junkpile.

Oh and I'm going to get certified for Windows 2012 because [fighting words on Slashdot]Windows 2012 and Hyper-V rocks[/fighting words on Slashdot] and it cannot be ignored even by Linuxheads like me. My company wants my skills and my long experience to make them money, and I want them to let me gain skills and experience and get paid for it. Eventually I'll move on.

There's a ton of free stuff (Microsoft Virtual Academy, for example) for people to learn new stuff and even Microsoft let you play with Windows 2012 and Azure for a few months at no cost. Playing with Xen or KVM or Openstack costs nothing

Bottom line? 40 is a state of mind for people clinging to their 30s. It's not anywhere near the junkpile unless you do nothing about your situation except be afraid to change. Oh, and the key to re-engineering your skillset and your life in your 40s is mens sana in corpore sano. Tone down the drinking, leave the drugs alone and learn new stuff

for enterprise software the install should be no more complicated than install-package local-config.txt

How can this work if some of the dependencies lack an easy "silent install" feature?

I've been reading "Continuous Delivery" by Jez Humble, which seems to be the bible for this, and the conclusion there is something like
1) Pester the supplier to make a silent install feature
2) Write one yourself
3) Switch to something else (if there's an open source replacement for the software it probably installs silently).

I'm still working out the best way to have a configuration applied to software. I like the idea that the binary should be the same no matter what environment the software is deployed to (which is a change from how we do things at the moment, with ${placeholders} filled in for a particular environment at compile-time.

Why not just throw in a free copy of this and refer to the page numbers!!?

Seriously, I can walk into any local bookshop and browse through any number of books with reproductions of famous artworks, most of which are pretty cheap. They could do worse than picking up a copy of "The Story of Art" by Gombrich.

Failing that, could they not take the position that Wikipedia do: 'The official position taken by the Wikimedia Foundation is that "faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art are public domain, and that claims to the contrary represent an assault on the very concept of a public domain'?

For music, there's the amazon mp3 store. You get DRM-free mp3s that you can copy to a USB stick if you want. I've been using them for years and am quite happy, and they carry a lot of indie music, not just the big-name MPAA based stuff, so there's a lot to pick from.

For movies, I dunno.

Not everything is DRM-free; many recordings contain personally-identifiable metadata:

Record Company Required Metadata: Music file contains unique purchase identifier.

(example)

What stops the students from sharing an access code?

I didn't have to buy *any* books for university. There were plenty of copies of anything "important" in the library (with a portion of them not available for loan), and most lecturers just gave a list of 10 or so books, only a few recommended one book over all others. One lecturer once set questions from a book, about half an hour later a student sent an email to the discussion list for the course with a scan of the relevant page. The lecturer forwarded it to the whole class. (I actually bought the book, I thought it was interesting.)

It was this book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/MACHINE-LEARNING-Mcgraw-Hill-International-Edit/dp/0071154671 which is £34 / $54.

On Amazon.com the paperback "International Edition" isn't sold; the hardcover is $163 http://www.amazon.com/Machine-Learning-Tom-M-Mitchell/dp/0070428077 How's that free market? ;-)

Interesting that you attempt to make this (easily refuted) argument on a science and technology site. The same processes of inquiry, hypothesis formation, testing, refutation, evidence gathering etc etc that led to the invention of semiconductor transistors, laser diodes, optic fibres, LCD displays and such other technologies as you are using to read and post on this site, when applied to biology, have led to the acceptance of speciation by evolution and provided evidence for this from every scale from the geological to the molecular.

If you don't accept evolution as a fact, then you shouldn't believe in the Internet either.

Go on, have a read of George Dyson. Evolutionary processes are as evident in information technology as they are in biology. It's just that the mutation and selection mechanisms are different.

I agree that it is better to use testing data over testimonies, however there is evidence to suggest that passing drugs tests isn't a guarantor of not being doped. Consider: -His competitors and team mates admitted to doping, without testing positive -He had doctors on his team that were convicted of being heavily involved in doping http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/cycling/18788834 Having doctors on your side would help enormously in the planning of getting a clean test -Athletes in other sports, eg the BALCO scandal, tested clean in many races before being caught - I agree the tests in the 90s were a joke, and (I imagine - see the quote) only testing out of competition became the norm during Armstrong's winning streak: "The rise to prominence of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) in the late 1990s was a significant stimulus to the development of established and transparent out-of-competition testing practices" - I couldn't find exactly when out-of-competition testing became the norm in cycling http://www.faqs.org/sports-science/Mo-Pl/Out-of-Competition-Testing.html#b What the East Germans used to do, before going to international competition, was to test every athlete. Those that tested positive were withdrawn with an "injury". So even though he has tested clean - he had doctors that helped with doping, and teammates who were either convicted / admitted to doping. In this case the science is unfortunately all that its cracked up to be, hence the added weight to testimonial evidence I have a friend who is a big cycling geek, and a great source of info is this book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Breaking-The-Chain-Drugs-Cycling/dp/0224061178

Got to love the demonisation of the poor. It's much cooler than being racist. SImply change the word "black" for "welfare recipient" in all of your rants and no-one will bat an eyelid.

It's not like we're in the middle of the worst economic crisis for decades, with many people being laid off and needing society to help them get by while they try to be the one person out of the two thousand who applied to actually get the menial, low-paid job that is all that's on offer in the ex-industrial town they had the misfortune to be born in. Heaven forbid anyone would aspire to owning a consumer good which the constant saturation of advertising states is the only way to validate yourself as a person.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Chavs-Demonization-Working-Owen-Jones/dp/184467696X might open your eyes (UK context but applicable to many western countries)

Not sure where you got that price from. If it's actually "consumer grade" (i.e. appropriate for use on skin) you could make a killing making these

From that amazon page:

Indications: Hard skin on the feet Remove calluses Remove horny skin Foot massage Natural foot care

That must have been written by someone with a foot fetish!

Not sure where you got that price from. If it's actually "consumer grade" (i.e. appropriate for use on skin) you could make a killing making these

Seems like something like this or this is what you're after. These cases are generic, so most ebook readers will fit in them. I guess you'd still need to be a bit careful dropping them, but from the post it seems like you want the device to be protected from moisture/dust/sand rather than rough handling.

Didn't think I'd post here because even though I I know many of the ones mentioned here, they've all kinda have worn out their scare to me.

Then I just remembered the 80ies German teenager novel "Die letzten Kinder von Schewenborn". There's a UK edition called 'The Last Children'. It's like 'On the Beach' but like 10 times as much. A young teenager and his family experience a nuclear holocaust during a trip to his grandparents. The children born in the months and years after are heavyly mutated and handycapped. He's basically the youngest remaining 'normal'. The story is open ended and grim beyond anything else I've read.

The book is written as a cautionary tale and is an expression of the german environmentalist movement of the 80ies and later. Today it is part of the regular 8th grade German curriculum reading list in Germany.

Definitely the most realistic nuclear holocaust scenario I've read to date. I do not want to read again. Seriously.

THE MACHINE (Industrial Edition Re-edit)

Odd, weird, fits the bill and is wonderful.

Working Effectively with Legacy Code http://www.amazon.co.uk/Working-Effectively-Legacy-Code-ebook/dp/B005OYHF0A/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1344190021&sr=8-1

Personally I found the book 'Working Effectively with Legacy Code' (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Working-Effectively-Legacy-Robert-Martin/dp/0131177052) offers some great suggestions about how to integrate new functionality and changes into legacy systems.

I've just bought one of these for personal use in anticipation of my new gaming PC I'm building this weekend: APC Back UPS ES8 Power Saving Outlet 700VA

Found it while scouring for surge-protected multi-plugs with good reviews. The really good quality multi-plugs were already pretty pricey, so going for the UPS seemed logical. Based on its specs, I'll get about 8 minutes to shutdown my PC safely. Not too shabby for less than £100.

I see what you mean. After all, I couldn't find any of the N versions on any of the major web stores.

Maybe use archival DVD's?

I wonder if education might help here. We all have a lot of mis-placed vanity, and I wonder if knowing more about what's involved in our purchase might help slow us down a bit.

Just this morning I was looking for short, cheap optical cables. I found this one and had a little chuckle to myself:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Resolution-Professional-suitable-HD-Surround/dp/B003F60WWM/ref=sr_1_7?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1342613690&sr=1-7

Yep, it's a 24ct gold plated optical cable. I'll bet it's just a crappy polymer optical fibre, but it's gold plated for "BEST DIGITAL SURROUND SOUND". The smallest bit of education would render sales for this pretty difficult ;-)

This is not psychohistory, but actuarial science. Psychohistory is about predicting future behaviour of groups by analysing their psychology.

Psychohistory is the holy grail of psychology. Philosophers and other scientists have expressed doubt about psychology's "scientific" credentials by pointing out their bad history in predicting human behaviour. As an example: researchers asked psychologists and psychiatrists to predict which offenders that were just given parole would re-offend. At the same time, they ran properties of the offenders through an actuarial process. The result? Psychologists and psychiatrists (even the ones who were treating the offenders) predicted the re-offence rate no better than chance, while the actuarial method performed much better (reference: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Incognito-Secret-Lives-David-Eagleman/dp/1847679382).

Three things are pretty well established (among both psychologists and economists):
a) Perceived happiness equals actual happiness (If we look at the brain activity near pleasure centers, we notice that how happy people say they are has very strong correlation with active those areas are. So if Antti from Finland rates his happiness at 60 and Ted from USA rates his happiness at 70, it's likely that Ted is actually happier and it's not just that they would have different scale due to culture, language, social class, etc...)
b) Absolute wealth increases perceived happiness only up to about 2000 dollars a month (If we look at countries below that threshold, average income correlates strongly with perceived happiness. Above that limit, very little)
c) Relative wealth to your peers increases happiness constantly (Look at essentially any country and you can bet that the wealthiest quarter is happier that the poorest quarter, even if the poorest quarter about reaches the threshold mentioned in b)
I don't have the time to write all evidence/arguments behind the above claims but if you're interested, I do recommend either the British economist Richard Layard's book Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (note: despite the name, it isn't any new age / self-help book) or getting up to date on the basics of modern psychology.

That being the case, it's a bit silly to make comparisons to medieval times and look at absolute wealth. Sure, we can say "Most of the poor no longer need to worry about starving to death in western countries" and that is a huge, happiness-increasing thing over the middle ages. But comparing their absolute wealth to aristocrats is more or less useless, because they are likely to be a lot less happy than the aristocrats (due to having low wealth and status relative to others instead of being considered the privileged elite of the society).

Also, you're pretty comfortably middle class so when people talk about the poor, they don't talk about people like you... but that's getting a bit offtopic.

I have one of the new Logitech Ultra thin keyboards. This is pretty slick and looks as though it was designed for use with the iPad. It uses the magnets like the dock connect to hold it in place. It's stable on a lap or bed or sofa. It's much easier to hold than the iPad on it's own. When folded up it looks like the silver back of the iPad over the front.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00835UQK8/ref=asc_df_B00835UQK88477193?smid=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&tag=googlecouk06-21&linkCode=asn&creative=22206&creativeASIN=B00835UQK8

It's not quite a dock, but it certainly seems well designed. Apple couldn't have done a much better job if they'd designed it themselves along with the iPad.

Jason

You can still buy used VHS players...

You can still buy *new* VHS players. Not much choice, but they do exist.

e.g.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Funai-D50Y-100M-D50y-100m-VHS-Recorder/dp/B004TQINIW/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1340273883&sr=8-3

When I was his age, I really loved reading the choose-your-own-adventure type books. The wording is easy, they're suitable for boys and the gamification of reading is pretty good at holding a kid's attention.

I really recommend the Fighting Fantasy series by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingston, the co-founders of Games Workshop (Warhammer). Ones I fondly remember were Robot Commando, Temple of Terror and Midnight Rogue. I also really enjoyed the larger scale "Sorcery!" series that Steve Jackson did.

These gave me a pretty good appetite for getting into Dungeons and Dragons, Warhammer 40K and other Sci-Fi and Fantasy reading.

When I was his age, I really loved reading the choose-your-own-adventure type books. The wording is easy, they're suitable for boys and the gamification of reading is pretty good at holding a kid's attention.

I really recommend the Fighting Fantasy series by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingston, the co-founders of Games Workshop (Warhammer). Ones I fondly remember were Robot Commando, Temple of Terror and Midnight Rogue. I also really enjoyed the larger scale "Sorcery!" series that Steve Jackson did.

These gave me a pretty good appetite for getting into Dungeons and Dragons, Warhammer 40K and other Sci-Fi and Fantasy reading.

When I was his age, I really loved reading the choose-your-own-adventure type books. The wording is easy, they're suitable for boys and the gamification of reading is pretty good at holding a kid's attention.

I really recommend the Fighting Fantasy series by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingston, the co-founders of Games Workshop (Warhammer). Ones I fondly remember were Robot Commando, Temple of Terror and Midnight Rogue. I also really enjoyed the larger scale "Sorcery!" series that Steve Jackson did.

These gave me a pretty good appetite for getting into Dungeons and Dragons, Warhammer 40K and other Sci-Fi and Fantasy reading.

You might like Irrationality by Stuart Sutherland as well. It is amazing how many different ways in which your brain can get it wrong, and essential IMO to any hope of bettering yourself.