Just back from three weeks trundling around South Florida, where we found this edition of the Rough Guide to be more than up to usual standards. Miami is very well covered, as you would expect, but we spent more time in the Florida Keys and in smaller towns on the Gulf Coast, where guide coverage becomes extremely useful.

In short:
- We booked Hotels using a combo of TripAdvisor reviews and recommendations from the Guide: all were accurate and great choices, from the more-expensive (Tropical Breeze, Siesta Key) to the cheap gem (Hotel Ponce de Leon, Miami)
- Every restaurant/diner recommendation was spot on
- Recommendations on things to see and do tallied closely with our actual experiences
- Loads of useful detail on smaller locations, diversions and places

In particular, the guide was very good when it came to A/B choices: this museum over that museum, etc. Which had us visiting the sublime Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum of the Seminole indians rather than the tacky Muskogee indian village. It got us to the parts of the Florida Keys that most suited our tastes (you could have had a totally different Keys experience using the guide too - the options are all covered), and it helped massively with selecting places to visit on the stretch of Gulf Coast up to Tampa.

Rough Guides are known for the ability to get you to see places a little off the beaten track and in the case of the Everglades it delivered on that promise - we took tracks where other vehicles and people were rare and saw a whole load of remarkable things as a result.

Very pleased.

We went from a standard Avent microwave steriliser to this and I'm very glad we did. Like most microwave sterilisers, the Avent was simple but huge and required careful stacking of the items inside. It was often in the way on a worktop at annoying moments. Switching to a fixed counter-top unit has worked really well: you retain the simplicity of a microwave steriliser (though it's a lot slower: 8 mins + cooldown versus 4) but the fixed location means you just find it a corner, fill it up with stuff (capacity is excellent) and leave it be. Sixty quid is pricey but like the rest of the Medala kit we've got it's very well made.

The historical detail in the 12 Tribes of Hattie is fascinating, and vividly drawn: the movement of African Americans from the segregation and violence of the South to the promise of freedom in the North. Features heart-breaking events that turn Hattie from an optimistic young woman into a hardened and emotionally damaged older one.

The book is structured around the intertwined stories of Hattie's 12 children, ranging over decades, from the '20s to the 1980s. They live through a world never far removed from the time of slavery in the USA.

There are echoes of Toni Morrison in the book, but this lacks Morrison's originality and power. The lives of Hattie's children sometimes a little too obviously stand for something, seeming to exist only to explore an issue - religion, Vietnam, child abuse, mental illness. But Hattie herself is a great character who holds the book together, making it more than a collection of stories.

Beautifully written, with an immediately captivating setting and idea - it follows Eve, a girl born covered in hair, as she marries a showman and ends up in a freak show. Her story is intertwined in alternate chapters with that of Abel, a man who seems to be able to heal from any wound, and ends up in the same show, recovering from knife cuts on stage. This is a magical realism, characters with fantastic secrets that they don't themselves understand.

Eve and Abel are vivid characters, and their strangeness is believable - for both it is the core of their character.

There are some threads of the story that I wanted to hear more about - characters who have enticing hidden stories hinted at that are never fully explored. While Eve and Abel's separate stories are individually engrossing, the relationship between the two, when it happens, feels rather rushed. This is partly because it is overshadowed by their respective relationships with other characters, which are much more strongly drawn - Abel and his friend Alfred, Eve and the Fat Lady Lizzie (who could fill a novel of her own).

But this is a memorable and enjoyable book, a quick dip into a strange and seductive world.

You might think bathroom scales is an odd place to find wi-fi, you might be convinced that bathroom scales have no place as a node in a tech set-up. You'd probably be right, and yet once you begin to use wi-fi enabled scales you quickly wonder how you ever coped without. Step on the scales. Step off. Have a look at your phone... bingo: there's a record of your weight today but also yesterday, last week, last year - it is incredibly motivating. I found my challenge to lose a little of the middle-age spread became easier when I had both properly accurate measurement and a simple way to track progress - the WS-30 provides that. Yes they are expensive but comparisons to Apple's industrial design and build standards are fair: these are beautiful scales and an excellent addition to a nicely designed bathroom.

Great fun - loads of daft make-and-do projects: from a Pong duvet-set to a hugely creepy Maggie Thatcher wall stencil. The format is nice: it's physically a good size and makes a nice gift package. We got a lot of enjoyment from the content and found that a couple are hilarious when issued as instructions for a party or as an ice-breaker. Lots of heart and some great memories for us old gits.

This is a neat solution to a niggling problem: that of producing small batches purée for a growing baby. The unit is small enough to be convenient on the counter, built well and appears reliable and comes with an excellent set of bowls and spoons. Also included are six neat food storage containers - they're relatively small but actually perfect for one baby meal and easy to fit into the freezer or fridge. Very easy to recommend.

This camping lantern design has become something of a classic (and you'll find other very similar versions of it easily). It's easy to see why: good bright light with a significant 'wash' into the normally darker corners of a family tent but compact and with very long battery life. You can hang it upside down as a 'ceiling' light or let it free stand or hang by the handle on a side wall. It's light enough to comfortably carry off to the middle-of-the-night toilet break too! Simple, versatile, dependable and good: exactly what you look for in camping equipment.

This is a great early book for your baby - loads of thrills and discovery but within comfortable and easy boundaries. Each page has a robust flap which flips one way to reveal a 'nice' picture and the other to reveal a 'nasty' alternative. The nasty stuff isn't very nasty, certainly fine for all babies and enough of a 'yuck' to have some fun. We bought multiple copies of this one to give away to friend's babies too. Really good.

Mine never worked properly. Transferring large chunks of data causes this adapter to heat up and that appears to then cause it to error-out. Judging by the massive volume of similar experiences reported here, that appears to be the default state for this 99p piece of junk.