Shorts: the Zune as a cautionary tale for Microsoft interoperability

The Microsoft Zune. Nice hardware. well thought through. Works with Xbox. However. Requires own sync software. Doesn’t work with Windows Media Player. Can’t interact with Windows Mobile. Two indexing mechanisms, on top of Windows indexing. Online social tools still vapourware. No integration with Mesh. And, for the record, no non-Windows client. Ouch.

Three’s a crowd, so what’s four?

This must be desktop operating system geek heaven – but even as I say that I realise ‘m missing out on a whole bunch of ‘em. To the point, I have recently come into the possession of a MacBook Pro, which is running OSX 10.4. With that, I’ve got XP running in a (donated, thanks) [...]

10 things I like about the OQO Ultra Mobile PC (and a few I don’t)

I’ve been road testing my new acquisition – the OQO Model 01+ UMPC running Windows Tablet. I’ve been hankering after one of these for a while, but it is only recently that price has dropped to a justifiable level (340 quid + VAT from Expansys). So, what’s so good about it? It really is a [...]

Geeking out: testing portable keyboards

I wrote this review of Bluetooth and infrared keyboards a while back, and then promptly forgot to do anything about it, so here it is. A word of warning – I have had issues with the (increasingly locked down) drivers for the Freedom Keyboard. Still, while I’m loving my OQO (review to follow), I can [...]

Should we be using computers to heat our own houses?

A random thought, prompted by a discussion with APC a few years ago. I was surprised to discover (having clearly been a poor student in O Level Physics) that the amount of heat output by a rack of processors, storage etc was exactly equivalent to the amount of power that went in. I know, its [...]

Goodbye dual boot, hello virtualisation

I confess, I nearly did away with Linux last week. Something was consistently going wrong and for the life of me I couldn’t work out what – the result was that, at far-too-regular intervals, my machine was hanging/locking/freezing. At first I took it as it came (good moment to sit back and stave off the [...]

There’s something about having enough disk… for a while

I had a bit of a screwdriver couple of days this weekend, building (or, in modern flat-pack parlance) assembling a bed, and also replacing the hard drive in my Archos 340 (AV300 series) audio/video jukebox. This latter task had been a while coming, as my music collection alone now takes up 48GB – the straw [...]

Has it been a week with Ubuntu already?

Its been an interesting experience so far – notably my reading and writing of blogs has suffered as I’ve been tinkering and tweaking, but I think I now have a stable environment, notably: – Ubuntu 7.10 running Gnome – VirtualBox for Outlook, Office and Mind Manager access – Firefox and Thunderbird for Web and personal [...]

What’s in the (Linux) box

Here’s a bit more information about my chosen Linux configuration. I’m using a Samsung Q35 laptop with a Centrino Duo processor and 2 gig of RAM. It’s partitioned with a 30Gb drive for Vista and the rest given over to Ubuntu Linux 7.10. I’ve installed a number of packages on top of the base install, [...]

Twitter’s just a big chat, right?

S’funny. There I was thinking that Twitter was in some way different from, well, anything else. To the extent that it had taken the web publishing model and reduced it to the finest level of textual granularity, expressed as a 140-character “tweet”. And it’s a platform, open API’s, the lot. Meanwhile, we’ve been using Skype [...]