Posts Tagged ‘review’

TL;DR I’ve been very happy with the X250 – it’s given me the same performance I got from my X230, but with better battery life, a smaller form factor and it seems more robust. Long term review I started writing this post in January not long after I got my X250, but I never got […]


TL;DR This is the best gadget I’ve bought in ages. It’s quick, fuss free, and comes with an excellent software bundle. Background I’ve had a bunch of flatbed scanners over the years. Earlier ones succumbed to a lack of driver support as I upgraded my desktop OS, but I’ve been using a CanoScan N670U for […]


I had some fun last year putting CohesiveFT’s VNS3 cloud networking solution onto Raspberry Pi. It gave us something to demo on at trade shows, and we could also give away Pis as part of promotions. The Pis were like geek catnip. I’ll be using Pis again for Cloud Expo Europe later this month, but […]


It’s almost 3 years since I got my HP Microserver – time for a change. 8GB wasn’t enough RAM for all the VMs I want to run, and even with an unofficial upgrade to 16GB I was running out of room. The NL40 processor was starting to show some strain too. The time had come […]


TL;DR The S4 mini is a fantastic piece of kit. The size is right, the screen is vibrant, the battery lasts, it works fine as a phone. The *only* thing I might ask for as an improvement would be a higher resolution screen. Dual SIM is very nice too. Background 2 years is too long […]


I first came across the BeagleBone when Roger Monk presented at OSHUG #18 in April 2012. It was easy at the time to write it off  as too expensive and too underpowered – the Raspberry Pi was finally shipping and the lucky first 2000 already had their $35 computers whilst the rest of us waited for […]


Shiva Iyer at Packt Publishing kindly sent me a review copy of Instant OpenELEC Starter. It’s an ebook with a list price of £5.99, and I was able to download .pdf and .mobi versions (with an .epub option too). It’s also available from Amazon as a paperback (£12.99) and for Kindle (£6.17). The book is […]


Since the screen failed on my wife’s Lenovo s10e netbook (and I turned it into a TV attached media player) she’s been using my old s10e, but that’s been on its last legs for a while too. The time had come for something new, with a full sized keyboard and screen. I’ve been looking around […]


Shortly after starting my new job it became apparent that I’d need a new laptop. As most of the other CohesiveFT team use Macs (and iWork) I was very tempted by the 11″ Macbook Air, but its limited memory and need for dongles to connect to things like VGA and network dissuaded me. I may come to […]


First the really good news – Lenovo (or more specifically their fulfilment partner Digital River) managed to take an order from me and ship (on time) without some major disaster happening (as I’ve suffered before, repeatedly). They seem to have entirely given up on supplying order tracking information, which is little change in practice to […]