The Gentle Art of Killing (Pearson's Magazine 1897)

Another illustrated article from Pearson's Magazine - The Gentle Art of Killing, from February 1897. A "light-hearted" history of rifles, with some interesting predictions of their future.

http://www.forgottenfutures.com/library/killing/killing.htm

Please let me know if you spot any typos, also if you have any problems with formatting since the layout was a bit of a sod. Thanks to everyone who helped with yesterday's article. I've fixed a dozen or so errors, about par for the course.

Barcode reader

Re my post yesterday concerning LibraryThing and DVDs; I forgot to say that I got one of these barcode readers for cataloguing my books (or at least the ones with bar codes on the covers), it works well and almost instantly, and seems to be very robust, especially considering the price:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/360721492990

So far it has gone to the right book about 90% of the time - the other 10% isn't a problem with the scan, it invariably turns out that the publisher has used a generic bar code that covers lots of books, rather than the ISBN of the specific book. A lot of the Buffy tie-in novels have this problem for some reason. Anyway, if you're going to be scanning a LOT of bar codes it's a lot more convenient than the iPad programs I've tried, and about ten or fifteen times faster. Highly recommended.