Spare time

Sunday was uneventful, pretty much spent the day being lazy and watching DVDs. I watched all three series of the Inbetweeners, which was funny but did get somewhat repetitive after a while.

Yesterday went into work, despite it being a day off, just to check up on the systems and say hi to people, then took my Mum to her writing group thing which is why I'm off this week so I can look after the dog.

Not sure what to do with myself now. I don't want to just slob about but at the same time I can't think of anything to do. Annoying. I have however discovered how dreadful daytime TV is, the only acceptable things so far seem to have been a rocky music channel and the original series of Star Trek that's being rerun.

Trying to rationalise my computers a bit more. I'm considering selling the M15x while it's still worth a bit and then using the funds to apply some upgrades to the M17x and the M11x. Also I've found myself not really using the PowerEdge 1950 as much as I thought so that can go as well. The only problem with that is that it's awkward to ship, and the box it arrived in was accidentally burnt in a bonfire.

The main upgrades I'd like for the M17x and M11x is SSDs. The M11x would benefit from this since it does get moved around a lot. The M17x is currently running two drives striped as a RAID1 array, but what I'd do is use the SSD for the main system and then keep a hard drive in the second bay for backups and to keep VirtualBox machines separate.

Windows 8 is a difficult one at the moment. On the one hand it has a lot of nice tweaks over Windows 7, such as much faster booting, a really nice task manager upgrade, that sort of thing, but on the other it has the new gimpy Start screen and the Metro stuff optimised for touch screens. I suppose there's no reason why you can't just use it like 7 but with a different start menu. I've found that with 7 I just pin my most popular programs to the taskbar and hardly ever use the Start menu anyway. I did see some Windows RT tablets in Berlin, which seemed rather strange. To have Windows running on ARM is interesting but I'm not really sure that having two incompatible processor architectures running what looks like the same thing is a good idea, too much potential for confusion.

Probably the best thing to do right now is to stick with Windows 7 and see what happens over the next few years. I'm not really happy with the way that Apple has made the walled garden approach trendy and acceptable and how everyone is now going in that direction, but at least Android and Windows 8 allow sideloading of applications. It's going to be an interesting time I think.

It's difficult for a long-term enthusiast to accept that computers are becoming dumbed down appliances for everyone to use. I suppose the same thing happened to cars, and probably other technologies too. What will probably happen is the market for self built and enthusiast computers will become much smaller and specialist, like the kit car market today. That might not be a bad thing I suppose. And if computers become tablet like appliances with the data being held on the Internet rather than on the device itself, then there will still have to be servers and people to administer them.

It does seem ironic that they are pushing cloud storage so much when storage is now finally cheap and plentiful. I still find it ridiculous that I can put a 32gb MicroSD card into my phone for under £20, and 4tb hard drives are just becoming available.

Trying not to have a bit of a rant about Apple, but I'm really quite pissed off at what the company has become.