Thunderbozz

With a few hours to kill last weekend, I thought I'd go for a wander around town and get some window shopping done (I'd incorrectly assumed that the supermarket opened at 10.00 on a Sunday morning, so rather than being the first person in the store, I was actually an hour early). This is always a slightly dangerous thing to do, because I'm not very good at resisting the temptation to actually buy something - usually music, but occasionally a new gadget or piece of hi-tech kit to play with. It was with a certain sense of inevitability then when I saw an ex-display (read: reduced price) HD Freesat box on offer in John Lewis... and ended up taking it home. In the battle of Head vs Heart, the latter was victorious, despite the very strong argument from Head that there was no guarantee that the "SAT" connection plate on the wall of the flat was connected to a dish at the other end. I'm very glad I did though, because although the channels available through ...

The internet has changed the way people think about business. Not only has it blast the marketplace wide open – at the expense of companies like Zavvi – but it's also turned the notion of the business model on its head: companies are able to offer services online for free , and still generate revenues. In the early stages, it looked like selling advertising was the answer. But the limitations of this approach soon became clear. Not only did they not generate very much cash, the system (where advertisers paid sites per click) was open to abuse. Furthermore, people soon became tired of irritating banners, pop-ups and splash pages... they used technology to block them, or voted with their feet and went elsewhere. Webco's were forced to be as dynamic and innovative with their business planning as they were with their internet services. For small-time sites, the " T-shirt economy " now provides a steady, if somewhat meagre, income which at least covers costs. Last...

Warning You are about to be asked if you would like to read this blog post. Alert Would you like to read the following blog post? Yes/No Notification You are about to read this blog post. This is what Windows Vista feels like. Last weekend I finally got fed up of not having a working computer, so I decided to pop down to Currys and see if I could grab a bargain. Not really wanting to spend more than £300, I was expecting to be faced with the choice of a feature-light netbook (impossible to type on) or a low-spec tiny-screen laptop. As it happens, I was plesantly suprised, and managed to pick up an 15-inch widescreen Advent with Dual Core processor, a good-sized hard drive and decent features for my money. Unfortunately, it also comes with Windows Vista. I'd heard horror stories about Vista, but never actually seen or used it until now. Sadly, this was also the point at which the pleasant suprises stopped. There are countless things I don't like about it, man...

My laptop's broken, which is an incredibly annoying development for several reasons, one of them being the unscheduled suspension of Thunderbozz until it's fixed.

After some faffing about with new hard drives and broken CDs, I finally got Ubuntu working on my laptop this week. I wanted to find out two things. One: could I replace my existing set-up (Windows, Office, Photoshop, etc.) with an entirely free equivalent, without compromising functionality? Two: would it be simple enough for my mum and dad to use it? The answer to both questions turns out to be "yes", but with quite important caveats. Installation was an absolute breeze: in less than an hour, I'd swapped over the hard drives, installed the new operating system, copied my old files across and was ripping CDs. The interface is close enough to Windows that the learning-curve is virtually non-existent, and any noticeable differences were often very positive changes. Finding files and changing settings is a far simpler process – not that many things need to be changed, thanks to the simple but comprehensive installer program. I very rarely use Office documents like s...

It's not the Soccer Saturday début we would have liked, but no-one ever said that life in the Premier Division would be easy. Dartford lost 3-0 yesterday and had a man sent-off, so it wasn't a good day all round. That said, our season-winning campaign didn't get off to a terrific start last year... and we're only three points off the top! ▫ I was slightly taken aback on Friday when I was randomly insulted by a postman. He rang the intercom, and, totally out of the blue, told me that I had a small package. Fortunately, I remembered in the nick of time that he was just delivering a parcel. ▫ That parcel was a brand-new hard drive for my laptop, which I'm planning on converting to running Ubuntu rather than Windows. Not because I don't like XP (because I think it's great) but because I'm interested to see just how practical running Linux can be. I'm hopeful that the answer will be "quite", especially as an increasing number of things c...

Image © Chris Sardelis With some time to kill (quite a few hours, as it turned out) online yesterday, I resorted to surfing You Tube. Sheffield's very own Arts Tower features in the first (excellent) film... the rest are just animals doing funny things. Enjoy, if you've got the time... Six minutes: Sixteen seconds: Five seconds: