A few months ago I made a decision: Whatever new ‘iPhone’ Apple reveals at WWDC, I’m not interested. I don’t have any money, and I’m perfectly happy with my iPhone 3G. My intentions were good, but unfortunately I got sucked in by Apple’s Reality Distortion Field along with everyone else. At one point I actually found myself welling up at the promotional video for the new iPhone 4’s Face Time feature; thinking to myself, “I need that.”.
OK, jokes aside, I decided to take the plunge and upgrade to Microsoft Windows 7 this week. I was keen to see if it lived up to the hype, and wanted to see for myself whether this really was Windows “Vista Redux”.
I was an early adopter of Windows Vista, and to be honest I’ve been reasonably happy with it. I can recall a few months of driver problems when I first switched, but that was to be expected with a new OS. Being a long-time Apple OSX user, I actually liked the new Aero design and the easy search features that had been added to the Start menu – even if at the time it felt like Microsoft were trying too hard to be like Apple. (more…)
I’m a Microsoft developer. There, I said it. I’ve grown up in a world of BASIC, from the early days of QuickBASIC through to VB.NET today. It’s a fantastic, easy going world to live in – particularly since .NET – as everything (and I mean EVERYTHING) is laid out for you. As a development environment, it’s so easy to get started – and often leaves you thinking “surely it’s not that simple?!” after writing a single line of code. (more…)
For quite some time now I’ve toyed with the idea of setting up a home server. Actually, I’ve setup plenty of home servers over the years but since I moved house I just lost interest. I had a perfectly good NAS, so there seemed little point …
In the past I’ve downloaded numerous Linux distros, installed them on some small unsuspecting box and very quickly got bored. The problem is it was all very well having an old PC sat in the corner of my living room proudly displaying a logo of a penguin, but what could it actually do for me? (more…)