Regular readers will have noticed there hasn't been anything much to read regularly here for a while. That's because I occasionally like to remind myself I'm not actually a geek, I just play one on TV. The rest of the time, I have totally different hobbies, one of which is drawing. The last time I seriously sat down and devoted several hours to drawing anything besides cartoons and application diagrams was in 2011 when I drew Oskar. Seeing as he grows pretty fast, it was about time for another.

Here are some shots of the progress:

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And the finished drawing:

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Of course, this isn't drawn from a live posing session. There is no way Oskar would sit still for even 2 minutes, never mind the 10 hours it took to draw this. Jenni took an amazing photo of Oskar in the Westberlin coffee shop which provided the perfect reference.

A year ago, I started a little experiment (and not one of my usual web experiments).

I decided to give away my book, Explanating, for free. The website has links to download the book without charge and also links through to Amazon and Lulu. I asked people to download the free one then, if they enjoyed it, they could come back and buy it.

Twelve months later, I now have the answer.

• Free: 315
• Amazon: 2
• Lulu: 0

Erm. Yeah. Not quite as successful as I would have liked. Still, the point was to measure the 'conversion rate'. Admittedly, it's a small sample size but it would appear to be about 0.6%. At this rate, I only need another 97,465,886 people to download the free one and I'll have made £1,000,000! Sweet!