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Support officially ends on 14th April 2014, but M$ will still be supporting it - if you pay! http://www.computerw...tors_picks=true Advice: XP users should give Ubuntu Linux a try. It's not a flavour of Linux I use personally but it's the one where you will get most help. And, if you recoil at C> (in Windows), it's surely the best way to go. If you don't want to fully commit just yet you can boot it from a USB stick, or even from inside your existing Windows installation whilst using the existing Windows file system. If you are buying a new machine then make sure you at least look at Chromebooks. They are incredibly good value and far easier to maintain than any Windows machine. They also have a very low cost of ownership. You are unlikely to see them feature in computer shops so don't be sold by a slick salesman on commission! It seems the latest commission driven up-sell is Symantec/Norton Anti-virus, which you shouldn't even take for free!

So the initial "Internet Honeymoon" is over, and you now realise that you've given too much of your personal information away. Or maybe you've just grown-up a bit? How do you pull back and get your account information removed from sites you never now visit? Always, of course, assuming you have the remotest idea of the data trail you've left. A couple of British lads have set out to help with an extremely simple concept: http://justdelete.me/ The buttons are colour coded to indicate the degree of difficulty you are likely to experience in getting your on-line account deleted. Maybe checking with justdelete.me before you create a new on-line account anywhere is the wisest thing to do.

Caution on this one I think - it's all politics! A Falklands style crisis would suit Cameron hugely (but it needs careful management to crescendo at the right time), and right now the Spanish lot are in deep doodoo and need a distraction from their own domestic troubles. The threats of "economic war" are laughable. Spain is in no position to wage an economic war with Bongo-bongo (a Clarkian term I use mainly to wind-up Guardianistas - as does UKIP ) let alone a major world currency. So, this is all mutually convenient. Joe Average, and Mr Floating Voter*, would do well to keep the Union Jack inside for just now, ignore the jingoism in the "popular press", and watch things develop with detached amusement. ____________ *Explanation for Guardian readers: this sexist grammar - in it's historically accepted form - implies the full, fair and non-discriminatory inclusion in the democratic process of Josephine Average and Ms Floating Voter.

A cheaped-up phone with a larger screen to be announced on 10th September say the rumours. It's interesting that this US article is bemoaning the lack of competitiveness in the US mobile space, and implies that Europe and particularly the UK is way ahead. It seems that Apple aren't going to rock the US carrier's cosy boat either by selling the 5C there. Obama's recent presidential decree to quash Samsung's patent victory against Apple whilst not intervening when the boot is on the other foot reeks of protectionism. It illustrates how introverted the US is becoming in technical matters, just as it already is in geopolitics. This is not healthy for the US.

Thanks to whoever tweaked the streaming, it's no longer distorting and now very listen able. Some great stuff, but when are we going to get it back for good? Anyway, a really really great community effort that everyone in Bedders should be pushing hard for. Congratulations to everyone involved.

Proposing a new class of member - Blockfinder General - with Maggie as #1. Keep the torture down a tiny bit please, and ensure you cut the nude scenes from the Bedlington release!

Pity they didn't ask about Balls. Quite how the architect of the current economic disaster is being offered up as our next chancellor never ceases to amaze me. It's like proposing Harold Shipman for treasurer of an old peoples trust. At least Gordo did the decent thing and crawled off into well-deserved obscurity. Either Labour think their voters have extremely short memories or they have a very very low opinion of their intelligence. ...and Cameron is by far the most popular leader - god help us! Maybe we need a US-type presidential system where the leader of the opposition can become PM? What do you think?

It could have been more convincing without the Aussie accent!

So, really, Uncle Clive's 21st century try was only slightly ahead of his time? www.envirotech.com.co This one is rather expensive, but there are some interesting performance electric scooters/bikes (800w-1Kw/h) now coming onto the market for not a great deal more than a half-decent push bike. Unfortunately it's highly likely that they aren't at all road legal. Want, anyway! I like the off-road bit here at about 4:00, you wouldn't get away with that on a noisy motorbike. It rather looks like the braking system puts some energy back into the battery.

All sorts of interesting stuff coming from the strangest directions these days! It even has a microSD slot - Google designers please note! The nipple is almost borrowed from the IBM/Lenovo ThinkPads, so maybe they should have - cheekily - named it a GoPad. The 3000mA battery (if genuinely rated) should give it a reasonable battery life. http://www.notebookc...ay.90650.0.html

Governments have always been in two minds about tobacco - they feel they need to social engineer but are hooked on the huge revenue it produces. I think smoking is pure crazy, but when it comes down to civil liberties the nanny state has gone too far and needs to get off the backs of people who still chose to. The revenue needs to be ring fenced to go into the NHS and I think smokers should be made to contribute to NHS costs directly related to their smoking (maybe by extra insurance). But all this packaging nonsense needs to stop, as does the ads and the lecturing. Teach kids at school about the dangers and leave it at that! Stop the moral crusading politicians, we don't need you to tell us how we should live our lives; just set a better example yourselves, like in the old days when politicians had to show a bit of backbone. Maybe make a start by doubling all the prices at the HoC bar - that's a bit of social engineering that would get my support!

Pity no one here was listening to Neil Kinnock on the radio last week. He entirely blames Scargill, and his refusal to hold a ballot - like every other dispassionate observer. He details his problems in getting rid of the same left wing militants who were trying to hijack the Labour Party and is very honest about the mistakes he made at the time. Detached from all the party political malarkey he comes across as a really decent guy. You can't review history through modern eyes and expect to arrive at anything approaching the truth. It's bad enough trying to pull things together at the time; later on it's so much easier to cherry pick what you choose to believe and what you chose to disregard. There was right and wrong on both sides, but at the core was a strike started undemocratically by someone who's sole aim was to overthrow a democratically elected government. Kinnock says that without Scargill the matter would have been settled by the usual compromise and without bitterness - as it had always been done. He's in no doubt about that, and he's right! Reliving the past - with rose coloured spectacles, or second-hand from what you've been told to believe - is a recipe for repeating the same mistakes. Mrs Thatcher rescued this country from total industrial collapse, and she certainly wouldn't have supported everything done by government henchmen - she was very pro the individual, and individual liberty. On the other hand Scargill has done nothing in his life but cause misery and dissent, and still tries to sponge off the NUM. Demonising one and choosing to overlook the pure evil done by the other is plain silly. Look at how reliving the past (by people who were never there but who have indoctrinated their children just as they themselves were indoctrinated) has destroyed Northern Ireland. The precise truth you will never know, even if you take the time to seek it out - which you obviously won't! The one big truth is that it should never have happened, and would never have happened if the NUM had not been so badly misled!

The Chrome (or Android) device doesn't stream the content to the Chromecast, it simply controls the Chromecast. I have Chrome on several devices but rarely use it; its lack of menu structure to do what I want to do is frequently infuriating. Interesting link. Illustrates the long drawn out death of M$, and the slow bleeding of Apple. I got really interested in the MS Surface until I looked into the software. Seems like most people who bought on looks (and sales pitch) now feel cheated. By contrast the Chromebooks look set to grab much of what Microsoft (and dinosaur Balmer) is throwing away. How long can he stay in control? Who will get the boot first Balmer or Cook?

Wasn't thinking about little SBCs in that context. There are dozens of little Android driven dedicated MCs now. OK they are mostly priced a bit more than $35 but they are vastly more versatile than Chromecast. With Chromecast you need an Android or Chrome device anyway to control it. So it's not a standalone device, and Google are a little naughty in showing it without the very necessary USB power lead. They also anticipate you will need to fiddle to get a decent WiFi signal as it's shipped with a short HDMI extender. i.e. nothing is THAT simple! I think it's another fail, to rank with Apple fails in the sector, but we'll see. They might rescue the project by near giving them away, but to the thinking person it's no substitute for a proper MC, and just another way into your wallet or purse.

Got to be "Fulfilled by Amazon" I think. Think that means you send all your goodies to their warehouse, and they don't charge you too much for storing them. If you are a little seller they tell you how much you have to charge for shipping, which can be ridiculously high for small low-cost items. Bigger sellers don't have this drag, but, yes, they have to pay Amazon a fixed fee per month. Win win all the way for Amazon!

Ah, 37p for 'World Cup Fever' beats my 83p! Good find! Who will be the first singer/band to work out that producing a six-figure quantity of CD's in China for pennies each, and selling them on Amazon at 36p, will automatically result in that much cherished chart topper? I'd call the album "Super Saver"!

pcDuino update: Not the fastest computer in the world, but I'm still very impressed. A few silly design decisions like fitting the microSD socket on the underside of the PCB, meaning I've had to remove one of the redundant mounting pillars on the case just to be able to swap the card without unscrewing the PCB from the case every time. But the software support is impressive, even though there are bugs in the Bluetooth preventing recognised devices to pair properly. This has prevented connecting a Bluetooth keyboard/mouse so far. The stock Ubuntu image comes with XBMC as a load option, and I've had that spooling movies from the local NAS at reasonable res, though it has problems with real HD stuff. Got it running a minimal webserver in minutes (lighttp). Full ARM GCC++ on-board is very impressive, and they've provided access to quite a lot of the I/O pins and on-chip peripherals through the file system. I'm not bothered by the Arduino "compatibility", so that's a bit of a waste, and it pushes things in a direction I don't want to go. But I suppose for someone with minimal hardware experience (and whose sole experience comes through Arduino modules) it could be a big plus. My main beef with this is that they've only pinned-out a sub-set of the A10 I/O to the Arduino connectors. I very quickly filled the balance of the 2GB of on-board flash, resulting in an O/S that wouldn't boot. Perhaps I shouldn't have downloaded a full length movie to it before running the Synaptic package manager to add to the storage bottleneck? Solved by preparing a Ubuntu (lubuntu) microSD and booting from that, then cleaning the on-board flash. The O/S from the on-line image is more complete, and there seems to be little overhead from running out of the microSD. I haven't created a dual boot Linux/Android system just yet, but I will when more cheap microSD cards arrive. Anyway this has fired me up with enthusiasm for tiny Linux SBCs, and I've just ordered an A20 Cubie Board with case and all leads for a tad under £50 including shipping. There'll surely be hours of endless fun connecting things to the pcDuino before the Cubie arrives from China, and some of the "projects" may get published. I'd say to anyone thinking about a RasPi: look further afield, there's now far better out there; better faster chips, open architecture, and more memory, for the same sort of money. Just seen a RasPi and case offered for slightly more than I paid for the pcDuino and case, which is silly.

At first glance it seems a very attractive proposition, an HDMI dongle that turns your TV into a smartTV for $35 (UK price yet to be determined). But look more closely and you see it for what it really is: an Apple-type trojan to enable control of your living room and ensure *all* revenue streams flow through Big G! Most of the engineering seems to have gone into making it a API platform for third party providers, and of course all this is heavily locked down. Give me one and I might just use it now and then ("free" is the usual Google proposition you can't say no to), but to ask people to pay for the privilege of helping to establish another media empire, well... only for Appleheeds! There are plenty of little Linux/Android boxes with HDMI making fairly decent Media Centres for not much more money, and they aren't nagging to get into your wallet all the time!

Amazon have scrapped "Super Saver" delivery on small items under £10. Quite often you'll be asked to pay more for shipping than the item costs! Tip: Look for a cheap CD (you can find some for 83p), and add it to the order. Then the whole order qualifies for "Super Saver" again.

If you think Italy is "right wing" you haven't studied your history (or lived there)! All it's current problems stem from a "lazy left" mentality - I'm all right Jack, and the world owes us a living! This is why Berlusconi - self-made millionaire - resonates with such a large proportion of the population. They hope (in vain) that some of it will rub off on the country. Immediately post WW2 the country very nearly joined the communist block when the commies fixed the vote to ditch the monarchy. Realising what was going on the R.C. Church, CIA, our own security services etc., allied to keep the commies out of power. It was a close run thing! Today communist still isn't a dirty word, and communists regularly get elected to high office. And... Dave may be a toff but that's all the politics of envy Left has against him. Otherwise you could have swapped him with Mlliband and no one would have noticed the difference. Dave could cruise the champaign socialist cocktail parties with ease. If you think I'm wrong it's you who hasn't got your feet on the ground - witness the completely undemocratic back-room deals going on social issues like "gay marriage" and Dave going over the heads of the LDs to push things through with quiet Labour support. Labour now says it will continue with Dave's policies if elected - whilst hoping this commitment went over the heads of it's deaf and blind traditional supporters. Case proven me lud! Mrs T may be the subject of much irrational hate locally, but her views were far closer to those of working people than the current lot. No one was more relieved that she broke the unions stranglehold on the country than the Labour elites who had tried reform and miserably failed, as had incompetent toff Ted Heath. Things are generally a lot more intertwined than the political classes would like you to believe. Complex strategies don't get votes, and make politicians appear to be "scheming" - which of course they always are! BTW the car was just a joke, and I drive an extremely unsymmetrical Fiat, though technically it may belong to my (opposite sex) wife.

Insincere, moi?! I was just being my usual antithetical self - confuses me at times too. Actually, it all depends on whether you buy into the CO2 thing. I sort of don't, but the connection with dark satanic mills leads to a compelling feeling of wanting to see significant reductions. I'm much more bothered by plastic waste in the environment though; it's an even bigger problem, but not one that's become profitable to any scare lobby group just yet. Energy: I hear the "we'll just use less" thing lots of times in Italy. It's generally from folks whose extended country pile is lit so's it registers well with NASA cameras, who keep their fruit trees and vast veggie patches well watered throughout the year, and who have aircon going in all rooms. They actually mean everyone else - the people who don't really need it - must use less! Affluence, like effluents, is a global problem!

Ah the Stalinmobile, symmetrically designed (by a people's comittee) to be driven in either direction (along the party line); depending, of course, on what Uncle Joe had had for breakfast that day. But never mind the motors, history really wants to know who KP was, and just who thought he/she was "Great"(?).

Yup, let's burn more "cheap" imported coal and release carbon that's been stored for millennia. Then we can build a carbon sequestration plants that use oodles of energy to stuff as much as we can of it it back underground. Pointless I know, but think about all those pointless jobs in the construction industries and the operation of the plants. This may go just some way to offsetting all the jobs we will lose/have already lost, by our overpriced electricity and our "carbon taxes". So ignore the resulting balance of payments deficit and futility of it all, there's still mega opportunities for political sound-bites - electioneering on the back of being "the greenest" party/government/country in the world. All those windmills, and huge public subsidies for them, are wearing rather thin now; also any more and on a calm night the lights will go out, with someone having to face the music for being so dumb not to see that they were an unsightly and costly mistake. As Gerry has recently discovered, they screw up the market for investment in reliable 24/7/365 energy providers, and make them even more disinclined to invest in reliable power generation.

You may have noticed the current offerings of Nexus Tabs have had "(2012)" added to their names. That's because: http://www.google.com/nexus/7/ The 4G LTE version looks a really interesting proposition with dual band WiFi and 2GB RAM. Screen resolution is way higher than the Apple mini, but there's still no microSD slot. It looks like they've improved the sound though, as the original Nexus 7 wasn't up with my Acer A110 in that department.

It had to come, an open RasPi! http://cubieboard.org/ It's based on an Allwinner A10 as now used in 1001 cheap tablets, and Cubieboard are already producing a dual-core A20 version. I will probably order one, but I've already had a pcDuino (also A10 based) on the way directly from China for well over a month. Will likely report on that soon.