Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Today, I shall mostly be running Office 12 Beta 1 on Windows Vista Build 5270.

Yes, it's fast forward to the future here!



And it's slightly annoying that the Office folk are still using their own UI widgets, so the Office 12 metallic look and feel persists on Vista - which is a pity as Vista's Aero Glass UI is starting to look quite decent.

Yesterday we went out and bought a new PC.

Nothing fancy, but something to eventually replace my current desktop, which is slowly failing after a PSU went "phut", let out the magic smoke, and took out a chunk of the motherboard. It still works, but there's going to be a day soon when it finally kicks the bit bucket.

We wandered down to PC World, where we picked up a small Athlon 64 machine. The specifications weren't too bad: 2GHz 64 bit processor, on-board ATI Radeon graphics card, and 512 MB of RAM, a dual layer DVD burner, 160GB of 7200RPM SATA hard disc, built-in gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0 ports, firewire, and a whole pile of media readers. It's quiet and small, and in a reasonably attractive mirrored black case. The days of the beige box are long gone.

Not bad pricing, either. Including VAT it cost us around £360. We didn't need a monitor (they'd have sold us a 17" LCD for another £100).

That's over £130 cheaper than a Mac Mini, for a machine that's significantly more powerful - and with enough expansion capability to turn it into a nice little media box, too. (I have made one change, dropping in an extra half gig of RAM, but I'm currently using it to run a beta version of Windows Vista, with lots of debug code still in place, and it's performing comparably to a hyperthreaded Pentium 4 machine.)

With Apple rumoured to be announcing its Intel Mac Mini in a week or so, it's going to need to seriously consider its pricing structures. People are going to walk into PC World, look at the specifications of a hypothetical Intel Mini, and compare it with a generic Intel or AMD PC. It's going to be (as they say) Apples to apples - not G5 to P4. In which case, prices are going to need to come down some. Sure, Apple will be able to initially have some uplift thanks to the brand name, but the days of high margins on branded hardware will be behind them, and the market will force them to parity with the HPs and Dells of the world.

Interesting times.

A recent addition to my list of Firefox extensions, is Performancing for Firefox, a blogging tool that fits neatly in the browser, and works well with both Blogger and LJ (I've yet to try it on my Wordpress Blog or with MSN Spaces - and don't have a TypePad account to try it out there). It even handles LJ communities well.

Performancing is a neat tool that gives you WYSIWYG HTML editing and a decent entry preview, along with tools for adding Technorati tags to your pages (and adds a Blog This context menu item to Firefox). You can even save content locally for future use as Notes. Just click the status bar icon to open the blog editor, and start typing.

I've been using it for a little while already - and have grown rather fond of it.

Recommended.

Technorati Tags: performancing, blogtools, firefox

Looking out from Grosnez on a stormy winter evening, towards a crumbling relic of the Occupation.

St Ouen, Jersey

December 2005