out of date
Ebay bought Skype
Telewest and NTL finally merge - took them long enough, I wonder what will happen to my cable account. If past experience is anything to go by (when Telewest bought Cable London) I will not see any change for some years. I seriously hope this is not the case!
Boots merge with Alliance Unichem - well Boots were going to have to do something, they havent really been going anywhere for years, I wonder if much will change out of this? Maybe this will help them compete with the supermarkets?
Office 12 was announced and they finally added pdf support - I can only think of one major reason why they did this - Open Office. They have known this was a feature in huge demand for years and have not added it to previous versions - I cannot remember a time when Microsoft added support for a third party’s technology when they were the dominant player in the market (They always do in the reverse scenario). Anyhow, it is good news for the consumer :) Now, if we can enforce a standard on one document format spec the market would truly be competitive. Not that I would move to Open Office just yet, and Office 12 is sounding like a much more worthwhile upgrade than Office 2003 ever did. Lets hope its not vapourware!
Onto other things.. having got net access at my new flat set up and a decent computer at home for the first time in ages, I figured I could now host my own blog rather than living with the restrictions of MSN Spaces. I have used pretty much all the free blogging services in the last 18 months so maybe I should write up what I thought of them.
Anyhow, I initially thought of Movable Type and was all set to go with that when I heard of WordPress. I was swayed by a lot of the writeup in the blogs that this was a better way to go - amazingly I felt WordPress was the better one over the medium term than Movable Type. Why amazingly? Well WordPress is open source and I am always a little nervous about how often and how well open source products are updated - sometimes this is well founded sometimes not - depends on how popular the software is. Anyhow, I felt WordPress was definitely well supported and what with it being blogging software it is probably ideal as an open source product because not only will it stay free, but as the community grows it will be able to add whatever the latest gimmick is quickly - and we all like a gimmick 
MovableType obviously has a thriving plugin community right now but I wonder if that will always be the case - I think more and more of those guys will move to WordPress over time - plugin developers will use some of the most complex features available and if the platforms are equal and one is freely available to them they will move to that. If MovableType continue to restrict their product features some will start to switch. That’s where I am standing now.. I hope I am not wrong if only because I do not want to have to up roots and move!
Installation was a breeze, my php is poor at best and its difficult to accept that the web that I knew years ago is completely different - layout using CSS, it was only an experimental idea the last time I played with designing websites! Seems to work well enough, though some parts are still confusing. I am definitely going to miss the MSN Spaces photo album 
Anyhow, I started moving across all my blog entries about a month ago and my photos are almost there. The design is still a long way from being complete but then I am never happy with my designs so I’ll probably make it public in the next few weeks barring anythign else coming up. It’ll be live on www.razorshine.com when it does but I’ll blog here again before that happens.
Popularity: 5% [?]
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OLED - now in mp3 players :)
those who know me accept that I am OLED’s biggest fan. As you can see on my wish list, an OLED TV is on my list of must haves. The reasons are obvious - none of the perforance issues of plasma and LCD, viewing angles that compete with CRTs, manufacturing is supposed to be much easier than LCD or plasma with failure rates being significantly reduced. Now all that needs to happen is for the damn things to be produced in enough quantity for me to be able to buy one and hopefuly at some point afford one :) Anyhow, the reason for this entry - MPIO have released a new MP3 player which sports an OLED screen - now the screen is 1inch in size and in 65K colour - not exactly the sort of screen to view photos and video on so a standard colour screen would probably have sufficed - except maybe this means OLED screens are cost effective enough now to replace the current batch of screens out there. Fingers crossed this can be extended to TVs soon!
Popularity: 6% [?]
the mighty mouse by apple
there is one word which sums this entry up.. FINALLY! I have to say a little more.. it actually looks cool - unsurprisingly from Apple - it would be interesting to get hold of one and actually try it out. I have a feeling it will take a little getting used to. The big downer though is its going to cost around £35!! looks like its one for macophiles only..
Popularity: 5% [?]
Virtual Earth
Virtual Earth just launched - I had been looking forward to seeing how Microsoft’s implementation would compete agains Google’s Mapping tools and when it loaded up, it looked good. It centred on the States, but then Google Maps did that to start with, so I figured they would solve this over time. Even better, when you scrolled across you could see the world - not just the UK sitting all on its own off the east coast of America as with Google. So onto the searching - I started with something easy - Oxford Street - and shock horror "No results were found in the current view. Try zooming out". Searches for other content brought back US addresses.. Yes, as always seems to be the case with Microsoft’s MSN group, content is minimal outside the US - non existant when it comes to Virtual Earth. It is shocking to me that a company the size of Microsoft cannot get localised content sorted out. It took them years to bring out hotmail.co.uk, MSN UK is still a huge disappointment when compared to MSN US, MY MSN - even though I am using the URL http://uk.my.msn.com/ (note the UK), it insists on providing me US sports and news from Fox and MSNBC. So guess which services I am using? Here’s hoping that they update Virtual Earth quicker than they sort out My MSN.. Minor Update: If you scroll around, the map never seems to completely download - there seems to always be one or 2 squares that does not show. Anyone else seeing this?
Popularity: 14% [?]
Freeview DVRs
I recently bought this box for my parents and I have to say its a godsend. There is a minor question mark on picture quality but this could be entirely down to the poor quality broadcasts on freeview compared to analogue broadcasts rather than the box. I watched the Liverpool FC v TNS game on wednesday on ITV2 and there were times when the players were square blocks! It was a shame I couldn’t switch to analogue to do a direct comparison. (The cynic in me would say this is due to the imminent launch of HDTV over here..).
So anywhay, why is it such a godsend? Well did it ever annoy you that recording digital broadcasts stopped you from watching another channel if you did not have a second freeview box handy? The box comes with 2 freeview receivers built in so you can watch one while you record on the other - of course this is a feature that is already available in analogue solutions but nothing like playing catchup! It makes explaining usage to people much easier! On top of all this it has a 40GB hard disk which is fine for my prarents (And supposedly can be modded to 120GB - useful!), so it has the ability to pause live broadcasts.
The key thing - it is easy to use - surely the number one pre-requisite!
now if only Freeview did interactive properly..
[update] I would provide a link to thomson’s own website for this product but to be frank their website is awful and I could not find it on there.. try and find it yourself at http://www.thomson-europe.co.uk - good luck!
Popularity: 6% [?]
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