So I received my Asus EEE PC yesterday and immediately set about playing with it and changing the interface. The device itself is just great and I’ll blog about it later but I wanted to share my thoughts on Linux first.

The EEE uses a customised version of the Debian distribution and out of the box has what is called the simple interface (shown left). I initially eschewed this in favour of the advanced version which is basically a Windows XP look-alike. I quickly realised that this was adding little value as it just gave huge areas of empty space … Read the rest

One of my biggest gripes about eBay has always been the feedback system and how it works – in fact I have written about it previously and often refer sellers to this post when they write to me asking for feed back. So I was interested to see on the BBC website today that eBay are due to bring in some changes to the system from May. However,  the change seems to be to simply not allow anything but positive feedback. It seems that people were reluctant to leave negative feedback for a seller in case they retaliated by similarly … Read the rest

So it is all over the web today that Microsoft are making a bid to purchase Yahoo no doubt in an effort to regain some of the ground lost to Google in the search space. How different it could have all been though. Microsoft were late in realising the power of the web and seem to now be paying dearly ($44.bn) for their lack of foresight. However, whether they would have ever had the flexibility to match the agility of Google is another matter.

It is difficult to image two more different business than Microsoft and Yahoo and so knitting … Read the rest

My younger son got a new PC for Christmas and this was blessed with some flavour of Microsoft Vista which apart from requiring a new wireless card as Vista drivers weren’t available for the old one, was reasonably painless. Well that is apart from having to relearn where everything is that you have become so used to finding. The real problems began, however, when we went to access the network storage (NAS) device we have on the home network. Vista was able to see the device but whenever Mat went to open a folder on the device a green progress … Read the rest

As I migrate away more and more from desktop applications I have been trying a number of online services, the latest of which is Google Reader. As an RSS reader this web based solution is functional rather than easy to use. For example, there are no pop-ups to tell you when a feed has been updated and I find it difficult to keep track of what has been updated without having to positively look – which seems to defeat the object a bit.

One of the things that attracted me to Reader in the first place was that it had … Read the rest

Since my post yesterday about the iPod Touch update that add new applications and features to the device I have discovered that it also takes some things away. A couple of the existing applications were Calendar and Contacts which you could sync with Microsoft Outlook – not any more. It seems that this ability has been”lost” and Outlook no longer appears as an option – in fact there are no options listed at all! A quick search of the Apple support forum reveals that I am not alone in having this problem. I suspect that this is a bug … Read the rest

So the picture on the left is what my iPod Touch looked like after I had applied the software update announced at Macworld earlier in the week. The big question is, however, is it worth the £12 price tag that Apple have cheekily applied to it? I think the short answer is no, it’s not and only serves to highlight the differences between the Touch and the iPhone. It also raises questions as to whether the Touch is trying to be a music player or a fully featured PDA.

The update itself adds five new applications: Google Mail, Google Maps, … Read the rest

I was really excited when I saw advertised the Gear4 BluEye product as it seemed to offer the opportunity to have phone capabilities to my iPod Touch with an add-on smaller than an After Eight. Even better it also worked as a wired remote and had FM radio capabilities too – all for thirty quid. Installation was easy and it paired to my phone first time. The remote worked as expected and makes using the Touch much easier, especially when it is in your pocket. However, that was when the good news ended.

What is supposed to happen when a … Read the rest

OK this was not strictly speaking “my” first PC but it was the first one that I got to use to do anything meaningful.

I was very lucky that the secondary school that I attended, some 30 years ago now, had links with the Rutherford Appleton labs and had a teletype connection to a mainframe there. I remember writing a simple program in, I think, COBOL and excitedly receiving back the punched cards with the program and the result. Even more clearly I remember playing some Star Trek type game on it. I was hooked.

After a couple of years … Read the rest

Surfing the net last week I came across the following article on Firefox extensions (20 must-have Firefox extensions) and there are some real gems listed there. Rather than go through them all here (read the article) I wanted to highlight one which I think is superb.

I really like Firefox and switched a while back after problems with the IE7 beta but there are still some sites that only work with IE – mostly those run by Microsoft it would seem. This includes Windows Update and Outlook Web Access (OWA). While OWA does work in Firefox you don’t … Read the rest