Archive for August, 2011

After some hassles getting it, the X121e has been in the household for a few days now – so it’s time for  first impressions review. Design and build The machine looks and feels more like an IdeaPad than the ThinkPad’s I’m used to. This is no surprise given the price. The chassis seems pretty robust, but […]


I’ve lusted after a 30″ monitor for a while now, and got to use one some time ago (an Apple Cinema display) . The price of those beasts is headed in the right direction, but still – ouch. 27″ seems to be a different matter. A few weeks ago my brother was being disparaging about my […]


This isn’t a post about the nym wars. I understand why people are upset about the real names policy, but I’m pretty ambivalent about it myself. I certainly don’t have anything to add to the great stuff that’s been said already by IdentityWoman, ESR, Kevin Marks and Charlie Stross. My concern is more mundane – […]


OK – before I even start on this, I should know better – this sort of thing has happened before. Let me begin by saying that I love Lenovo gear. I like the build quality and durability. I prefer trackpoint over touchpad. I’ve had 4 Thinkpads over the last decade and they’ve all been brilliant. […]


I’ve been a fan of powerline adapters for some time. Ever since moving into my house I’ve had a PC in the garage, but sadly my attempts to run an ethernet cable there failed (despite the presence of trunking for the power cable). Initially I had a WiFi link out there, but it was always […]


After switching to using my tablet PC as my main machine I was missing the local storage and optical drive from my desktop. The solution was to get another HP Microserver to be a sort of sidecar when I want the extra drives. As the HP cashback deal is still on this is a surprisingly […]


For many years I ran a desktop PC in my home office, and it was always on in order to provide various services to other machines scattered around the house. The one good thing about this arrangement was that the room was always warm in winter. After getting my NAS and Microserver I started paying […]