Category Archives: Tech

A day earlier than expected, and in fact a day before the official release, my new Amazon Kindle arrived along with a leather case to hold it.

First impressions are good, it’s fairly idiot proof, very slim and light to hold, and the screen seems very easy to read from a quick play around with it. Even the web browser works, well, sort of works given the limitations of the black and white e-ink screen.

I’ve left it charging for the moment, I’ll take it to bed for a proper read later.

Rather than being hosted on a VMWare virtual machine on an aging server under my stairs, this is now running on a proper virtual machine at Bytemark. It should be a lot faster, and won’t break when my ADSL goes on strike again.

Now to move all the other sites, none of which ever actually get looked at these days.

If you can see this, you’re looking at the new server.

So I can’t install this NetApp software on a Windows 2008 server because it requires Windows 2003 or Windows 2008?

Google street view has been updated and covers pretty much every road in Bath except for a small spot just outside the centre of town.

Guess where I live? That’s right, in one of the block of five roads they didn’t drive down. The lazy bastards.

Apple have today announced the iPad which will come as a surprise to absolutely nobody at all. It seems to me to be nothing more than an iPod Touch on Viagra. Admittedly it’s got a nice big 9.7″ screen, and the option of an external keyboard and 3G if you spend another £100 or so, but there’s no camera, no multi-tasking, and you’re limited to apps in the App Store. It doesn’t act like a phone, it’s too big for a pocket so you’ll need to put it in a bag, and it’s more expensive than a netbook. If I’m going to be carrying a computery type thing around in a bag, it’ll be a proper one like my 13″ Macbook Pro, or my 9″ eeePC. If I want something portable for web/email checking or a quick game, then I’ll use my iPhone.

I can see the iPad having one use though, a computer for use while having a shit. Not sure I’d spend £400+ for that one job though, even if they called it the iJobbie.

As I have a handful of M&S vouchers and money from Christmas I was perusing the M&S site to see what they had. One thing that caught my eye was the Sony eBook reader. It’s not cheap at £200+, but what’s worse is that the eBooks are often more expensive than the paper equivalent. For example the latest Jeremy Clarkson book is £10 in hardback, and £14 in electronic format.

I think I’ll stick with killing trees for the moment.

Apple seem very excited with the news that I’ve bought a MacBook Pro, they’ve just sent me 5 emails thanking me for registering it.

I’m aware that the conversion of a windows stalwart over to OS-X is a monumentous occasion, and one worth celebrating, but one email would have sufficed.