Latest purchase is the new Amazon Kindle. They’ve really nailed down the price (nearly under £100 for the WiFi only version now), and the quantity and quality of books on there seems to be going from strength to strength. Basically, I wanted a device that I can sit in bed and read on without messing up my eyes, and also carry with me for odd moments where a book would come in handy. Having textbooks on there as well would be a huge bonus, saving on weight and cash! I’ve been meaning to get back into reading books for a long time, and am really glad I bought a Kindle – I’ve hardly put it down since!

First book I bought was Nikki Sixx’s book – ‘The Heroin Diaries‘ – it’s an absolutely fascinating view into the mind of a drug addict, as the main bulk of the book is a diary that he was keeping at the time, interspersed with stories and dialogue from the people close to him. I’d thoroughly recommend it! The buying process on the device is nowhere near as awkward as I anticipated either, the menus do flow quite nicely. I’m yet to try it with any textbooks (waiting to see what I need to read up on this year!), but I’m sure that even if I can get one course textbook on it, it’ll be a lifesaver in terms of weight!

A lot of people tried to dissuade me from getting one (Seb Payne & I were going to argue it out on Tech 107, but life got in the way!), saying that the Apple iPad was the way to go forwards, or to wait 12 months to see if colour e-ink displays come into the market. Buying an iPad is something that’s never even crossed my mind to date, the technology behind it is no different to my iPhone, which I have on my person most of the time, so buying a slightly steamrollered device that does the same job doesn’t make much sense to me! I do, however, want to see if colour e-ink displays will start to come of age soon, but I guess that (as with the Kindle) they’ll be extremely expensive on launch.

Well that’s my £0.02 on the matter of tablet computing (or whatever market you’d classify these devices in!), I’d better get doing something vaguely useful as opposed to writing blog posts. Dads & Lads camp with Cubs next weekend, and back up to Durham the week after to get prepared for the onslaught of Freshers week – can’t wait!!

Install was a breeze, OS booted fine first time, all drivers found and installed by Windows Update – apart from one…

Seems I was stuck with the 640×480 VGA resolution driver, Intel doesn’t think their 8XXGM series drivers work well with 7. Never fear – a bit of Googling revealed this site: http://www.groundstate.net/855GMWin7.html, which contains instructions for tricking 7 into installing the old drivers! Result! Although Seb may have had a slight point on this weeks Tech 107 (episode 3) about Macs being easier due to them not needing separate driver install. Ah well.

So – I’m now officially off Linux and 100% Windows again. Lets see how long it lasts this time!

The "Find Me" service on Maps isn’t too brilliant it seems… it told me that I am currently somewhere in Poynton. Well duh!

The changing of the home screen is quite nice, however I don’t like the shakey effect when changing icons around – I think it looks tacky!

I’m yet to see movie rentals for the UK…

Multiple texts is a bonus though!

On another note – the "MacBook Air" has been shown off to the world (well… the people who were at MacWorld – I’m still waiting for the video to be released!). Not that I’d want a Mac anyway…

Yes, almost 1 year to the day of it being announced at Macworld – I hold in my hand the epitome of cool.

The adverts really can’t show it at all, its an awesome bit of kit, only got a few complaints:

• No multiple texts
• No MMS
• Headphone jack
• Home button
• Applications "crash" to the home screen quite often

Most problems should be fixed with the 1.1.3 update, however, which hopefully is out next week, being announced at MacWorld!

Anyway, back to life…

Got exams this week, had Maths C2 yesterday (went okay, thought of an answer as soon as I left the hall though there goes 5 marks). Got Physics resit and Maths C3 tomorrow – fun. I intend to have a fun time at Nic’s party tomorrow evening though – I may not make it home!

Handed in my Physics coursework, a month before I had to ! I’ll wait and see if it comes back though, teacher’s still had my last piece for 3 months without marking it -.-

I’m rather depressed about going back to school, would much rather be off to Uni tomorrow!

On the subject of Uni – I’ve had offers from Kent, Nottingham and Edinburgh so far, and have interviews at York and Durham! Kent want me to visit though, which means a 6 hour journey on the train just to get there May have to drive… somehow!

According to Mr Jobs, HTML and Javascript loading times are nearly cut in half from the ever popular FireFox. This may be so, I have not tried their testing program, but what use is this when communication times are so slow!

From what I’ve seen, Safari takes a lot longer to process the actual request, making the improvement of HTML loading times un-noticeable.

If Apple want to dominate this market, at least put out a piece of software better or equal to the competition! However, in my opinion: the layout of Safari for Windows puts it on a par with, or even behind, IE7

He always bangs on about how “crap” Microsoft is… but now decides to release a version of his browsers for Windows…

Hypocrite.

Still… if you can’t beat them – join them