As a user of windows phone 7, I’m pretty excited at the fact that the Mango release is due within the next two weeks.
The user interface of windows phone 7 is by far and above the best experience of all mobile devices I’ve used, which include Symbian, Blackberry, Android and iPhone!

Windows Phone 7 is so extremely slick and intuitive, and needs to be seen/used and lived with before anyone passes judgement/fan boy ism comments. There’s just so many nice things about it, and the mango release looks set to address some of the more irritating issues, whilst adding a whole host of additional features!

As such – I’m also pleased to see Windows 8 going in this direction, along with the XBox360 Dashboard.

It looks like Microsoft is onto a winner here, be interesting to see the state of the mobile/OS/games console market in a couple of years time!

I’m still using my NSLU2, though it’s pretty much serving as a firewall and remote access gateway now.

Currently it’s configured with DenyHosts, an SSH server configured with public/private certificates, and not too much else.

I then connect into my home network with my private certificate via SSH, and can then tunnel onto any other machine.

I’ve also purchased an arduino and am considering the possibility of some home automation via the slug!

Do other people still use their NSLU2 and if so, what for?

I’ve implemented a new ‘theme’ for the site, so expect a few issues over the next few days as I iron out any teething issues!

If you spot any problems, or want to make any comments about the theme, please reply to this post.

I’ve also now fully moved the host so it’s properly hosted at pembo.co.uk rather that a redirect to ukfsn.org.  This transition should hopefully be seamless and you shouldn’t notice any difference.  All downloads are currently hosted in both sites, and the ukfsn.org address now redirects to pembo.co.uk!

This morning, I’ve upgraded WordPress to the latest and greatest, and have corrected a couple of the download links that were pointing to the wrong files!

It’s dead no more.

Was the PSU under volting.  I’ve replaced it with one of these and it now boots 

After spotting the older download links were not working, I have now repaired them and all the downloads should now be available again.

You can find them here

I was wondering how I’d cope if my slug suddenly gave up the go, and have been considering some alternatives for the past couple of months.

The best of these so far seems to be to get an Asus EEE Box, remove windows and replace with a linux distro, probably Ubuntu or Gentoo though I’ve also been considering whether or not I’d install a console only flavour of unix and carry on using it as a server only.

The EEE-Box…

is low powered, reasonably priced and isn’t too large – seems a viable alternative when my Slug finally goes.  Hopefully it’s got some life left just yet, though I do make it work hard

Microsoft has finally released IE8.

You can get if from here if you’re interested: http://www.microsoft.com/ie

I’ve tested this page and it seems ok.  Other than for testing – I think I’ll probably stick to firefox for now!

I’ve upgraded wordpress to the latest version.  Everything looks ok from what I can tell – the theme still works fine and all the links and posts look ok.

If you find anything odd with the site, please leave a comment and I’ll try and rectify the issue.

I spotted a few peculiarities with the rounded corners and the rendering in any webkit based browser so I’ve corrected this.  It now uses a CSS based corner technique using a transparent circle image, rather than the JQuery corners plugin.  This should be cross browser compatible.  If the page looks a little weird when it loads, hit refresh as its probably using a cached CSS.