A few weeks ago, I was thinking of getting a handheld eBook reader, and I saw a couple of Sony models owned by colleagues at work.

The PRS 505 is Sony’s early (first?) effort, but it was, well, old and superseded by a newer one. The PRS 600 is one of the newer ones, similar form factor but had a touch screen and I found this made it less contrasty and quite a bit shiny. Its extra features (dictionary, note pad, card reader) all sounded appealing, but you can’t get away from the shiny, low contrast display.

So I plumbed for the PRS 300.

This is high contrast, low shine like the 505, but in a smaller form factor. It also has none of the bells and whistles, but is it any good as a reading device?

Well, yes. It is.

I’ve now read two Iain M Banks novels, purchased from Waterstones online store. Immediately prior to this, I read another of Bank’s novels in paper form and I can honestly say that the eBook form is absolutely fine. If anything, less eye strain, and easier to handle.

I’ve also tried reading PDFs, but this is less satisfactory as the screen is a bit too small for the pre-formatted pages and reflowing with a larger type doesn’t work well.

Battery wise, it’s showing three out of four bars full after the two books plus lots of fiddling with PDFs, so pretty damn good.

The only real criticism I have is with the software used to move books from computer to device.

The Sony software doesn’t work 100% well on the Mac with Snow Leopard (it’s written in Flex/AIR, I think, so should be cross platform), but it really doesn’t work well with DRMed books as the necessary connection to Adobe Reader doesn’t work as expected.

I can live with this as I just do the connection in XP/VMWare, but the real pain is the total lack of useful information from Sony support, who seem to have a different story each time you call/email them.

Money-wise, eBooks from Waterstones are similar price or maybe a bit cheaper than the paper equivalents. This is good. There are also thousands of free books out there. Even better.

So all in all, a good buy and I definitely think I’ll be reading books in ‘e’ form where possible from now on.

I am one of those people that choose Mac but have to work with Windows and this has (loosely) extended to my mobile life. I choose iPhone, but also carry a Raspberry.

Sometimes this causes some confusion, e.g. trying to take a picture with the Raspberry (it has no camera) or staring at my iPhone email and wondering where my work emails have gone.

Fortunately, this doesn’t happen too often as the Raspberry is fugly, heavy and oversized (although smaller than many, mine’s an 8800).

Having to carry both is a tad annoying though. Maybe one day my employer will let me use Exchange support on the iPhone so I can dispense with the Raspberry altogether.

As my MacPro was a bit poorly, I installed a new graphics card last night. It’s an NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT.

Installation was easy (everything is easy inside a MacPro). The card itself is about half the size of the outgoing ATI Radeon X1900, but most importantly is mostly silent.

Now running something vaguely graphics intensive like iTunes visualisation or  Time Machine is a quiet relaxing affair, and not like descending into the bowels of a cruise ship’s engine room.

More importantly, it’s stopped crashing.

Hurrah!

My MacPro has been getting very noisy and a little unstable recently.

It’s an early (2006) model with a mere 4 Xenon cores of just 2.66ghz but still jolly splendid.

I’ve tracked the problem down to the graphics card, and with a bit of research there seems to be a common problem with ATI Radeon X1900 overheating and causing visual problems and even lock ups.

Right on cue, the fan is now ramping up – clearly typing this sentence is highly graphically intensive !

So I think a new graphics card is in order.

The easy option is the Nvidia Geforce 8800GT from Apple – pricy compared to the Windows PC version and not quite state of the art, but has a good power/performance/price profile and considerably better than the ATI.

The alternative is to force the case fans to go faster permanently to help in cooling and probably wear my noise cancelling headphones all the time too.

For a giggle, I thought I’d try this out.

I downloaded both the 32- and 64-bit versions to run in VMWare on my Mac, however, looking at the downloaded DVD images, I couldn’t tell which was which. Only one worked, however, and that was the 64-bit version.

First impressions? Well, like others have said, it is much quicker than Vista and in VMWare with 1GB to play with, it’s just as quick as XP, maybe even a bit quicker.

It has a very Mac-like dock – I like it.

But it crashed when trying to use 64-bit Java. Complete lock-up.

Oh well, it is a beta.

Looks promising for 2010, or whenever it’s supposed to be released.

My Mac Mini had drive trouble some time ago and I ‘fixed’ it by booting off an external drive.

This has been most acceptable for the last 15 months or so, but recently, with a rejig of media stuff in the living room, I thought it would be nice to have the mini working properly off its own disk.

I found some money languishing in my PayPal account, did some interweb research on best drives and upgrade instructions and this morning set at it.

It’s an Hitachi 250GB drive (old was one 100GB) and the instructions were found here. Thanks Sole!

I was particularly impressed with the ease in which a disk can be cloned from one to another and then just boot from it. No hassle at all and all handled with Disk Utility.

I was also impressed with my Stanley putty knife and am proud to be the owner of such an essential Macintosh DIY tool

Five or six years ago, we had fairly cutting edge A/V set-up in our living room.

A brand new (and v expensive) Panasonic 42″ plasma panel – one of the best panels money could buy at the time, hooked up to a Sky digibox via SyncBlaster and a Sony digital 5.1 amp and DVD player.

Fast forward to today where  SD plasma panels, especially those that don’t have a tuner or SCART socket, are a bit, well, quaint.

So time for an upgrade.

The panasonic went to a good home and a shiny Sony 46″ Z series Bravia took its place.

The Mac Mini now hooks up via HDMI and looks splendid. No more fannying about with VGA switch boxes.

PlayStation 3 on order – should arrive shortly, so HD gaming and movies are on the cards. 

Same Sony AV amp as before, but it does have optical audio input so no need to change that.

One of the biggest improvements (for me) is that now the screen automatically switches from 4:3 to 16:9 via SCART control. Joy!

No Sky HD though as my building has a somewhat quaint shared single-LNB satellite dish arrangement, but BluRay will fill the HD movie gap.

Now, I wonder if all this will seem equally quaint in another 5 years?

I finally upgraded my iPhone to an iPhone 3G this weekend.

Or more precisely, I bought my lovely wife an iPhone 3G and thought I might as well get one for myself at the same time

To keep things simple, hers is black, mine is white, although I have to say, the black one does look much nicer.

The purchasing side was somewhat elaborate. We were going to Bluewater anyway, so I thought I’d go to the Apple Store there.

Upon arrival, I explained I wanted to buy one and upgrade one, but the Apple girl said you have to go to O2 (or possible the Carphone Whorehouse) to upgrade, so perhaps do both there. Fair enough.

I wandered around the corner to the O2 shop, where it was empty except for a bunch of very bored looking people sitting around the outside. Apparently these were the shop assistants, and once I’d managed to wake one up, was told it’s not possible to upgrade my existing iPhone.

A classic “computer says no” moment. What’s more, the O2 drone denied that it was ever possible to upgrade an iPhone because of the remaining term on the 18 month contract; this despite the fact that just about everyone I know who had an original iPhone did upgrade some months back.

The O2 drone invited me to call O2 and ask them when I could upgrade (probably in 3 months)… I replied that it was somewhat ridiculous that I should call O2 when I’m in an O2 shop, but, and straight out of Little Britain, all I got was a shrug.

So giving up on the upgrade prospect, and secretly hoping that the O2 drone never procreate, I bade her farewell and went back to Apple Store and said: two spangly new iPhones please, upon which the Apple guy said: yessir! take a seat.

What followed next was somewhat time consuming and convoluted, but not really unpleasant.

In summary, to buy an iPhone you need to do a credit check on an O2 website, sort out contract (on a different O2 website) then do something funky on a wireless device wielded by the Apple Guy.

Twice (two iPhones).

The slightly embarrassing part for Apple is that the O2 websites are such a steaming pile of shite, you need to use Windows Internet Explorer to use them properly. So Apple guy fires up VM Fusion on the iMac to do so. 

This is all very different from when I bought my original iPhone, which went: I’d like to buy an iPhone please / Yes sir, here you are, that’s £lots please, have a good day.

Now, what to do with the old iPhone …

Am I the only one who thinks these creepy Xbox 360 ads make you think that Microsoft wants to lobotomise* its customers?

* ok, I know it’s surgery to the pre-frontal lobe…

I’ve given up waiting for the full version of GT5 to come out on the PS3, so will just go back and play GT4 on the PS2 all over again.

It’s still a great game.