My blog is still here! With the upturn in Facebook and Twitter over the last 12 months I've not posted much as I guess l've become a bit of a FB'aholic and am fascinated by it from a professional point of view. The introduction of AJAX powered chat in a browser has seen a lot of my friends contacting me via FB chat and the private message system provides more personal messages than I get through email. From a cynical standpoint, FB is potentially very sinister as they've got too big but the same could have been said about Google a few years ago but their star has waned slightly.

Having used a Happy Hacker Lite Keyboard for quite a few years, I'm used to having to use key combinations to page up, go 'home' or even to perform F4. Now that I'm using the Apple Wireless keyboard, through the lack of Apple providing standalone drivers, I need to make Vista work myself. On one hand I can understand why Apple don't want people using their peripherals on Microsoft machines which could be looked at as devaluing their brand.

I've been trying on and off for about six months to get my Apple Wireless Bluetooth keyboard working on Vista 64. The first part of the puzzle was finding a bluetooth dongle that had support for Vista 64. Most only support Vista 32. Here's the one I found:

http://www.trust.com/products/product_detail.aspx?item=15542

Twelve quid from Novatech. The key thing is that it has a Widcomm chipset.

Google have taken another step towards total world domination through the introduction of their new mobile phone OS. With the recent spate of Apple's lack of consistency with regard to what is and what isn't allowed on the App Store swiftly followed by extension of the developer non-disclosure agreement to stop folk publishing their rejection letters, maybe Android is the way to go?

Whilst I mull this over I think I'll have a play with the HTC Android emulator:

http://tmobile.modeaondemand.com/htc/g1/

I dropped XAMPP on my Mac yesterday to do some offline dev work. It really highlighted the shortcomings of my 12" PowerBook G4. It's been a tireless workhorse over the last five years, being replaced once by a newer, swisher Intel Macbook Pro that lasted less than six months before I sold the new upstart and returned to the old faithful. It's great for running a web browser, a few terminal sessions and a mail client. But asking it to run Apache and mysql with PHP running on top is proving too much.

My neighbour's just bought himself an iPod touch. Wow! It's a lovely piece of kit. Paired up with a wireless connection it does a lovely job of displaying the BBC's iPlayer content. Very impressive. One day when the iPhone has 3G+ data speeds I may be tempted..