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Various people have contacted me about a few methods to give users of the EEE Stock checker a bit more of an edge against other buyers, one or two in response to this entry on my blog but some have been by email.

Anyway – just so that people know that things are moving forward with the EEE checker – I will be working on an RSS feed for the system – so you’ll be able to just subscribe to the feed and see the best ‘in-stock’ prices. It’s pretty easy to create this function – it’s just that I need to find some spare time to do it!!

I’ve been using Ubuntu since approximately version 5, I mainly got into it around about v6 and I’ve still got one of my regularly-used desktops running smoothly on v6. Since then though – I’ve been using v7, and then v7.10 Gutsy on my Targa laptop (Rebranded MSI S270).

To be honest – 7.04 was a BREEZE to use – it Just Worked(TM)…. But when I upgraded to 7.10 I started getting alsorts of weird little problems – with no explanation… Random crashes at first, and then it kept losing the screen configuration so I had to keep a copy of Xorg.conf safe somewhere! What with that and the ATI graphics/hibernate problems that 7.10 has – I finally got sick of the situation and decided I needed a stop-gap until a new Stable release came out. I looked at Fedora (lol: people seem to be selling CD-R’s on Amazon) – an OS I used to use before Ubuntu – v8 looks quite nice – but then I saw a posting on digg about an alpha release of Ubuntu 8.04….

So – in the usual trail-blazing way – I decided to take a look to see if they had fixed some of the problems with 8.04… And sure enough they have. It looks and works really well – even though it’s an Alpha release (Alpha 5 while I write).  Considering this PC is a day-to-day browsing platform with SSH and VNCing here-and-there there’s very little I can actually loose from being on the latest bleeding-edge technology, other than maybe if it crashes… And then I just nick my GF’s laptop .

I’ve resisted upgrading to firefox 3 on my other PC’s as I’ve made that mistake before – and paid for it by loosing my bookmarks and plug-ins… But obviously Ubuntu 8.04 comes with firefox 3 as standard…. But.. Firefox 3 Beta 3 is great – you wouldn’t have thought they could improve on Firefox 2 – but they have.. Just the small things like highlighting the HTTPS certificate owner in the address bar when you visit your bank (or presumably any other https site). The only thing that has annoyed me about Firefox 3 is that my bank say the browser is not a recognised browser – and say I can’t login for security reasons… But that’s not firefox’s fault!

Other additions to ubuntu are tweaks to the compiz graphics kit – to be honest I haven’t really taken much notice of them because although they look great and use much less CPU power than the Vista equivalents – they’re still using my precious power .

Also – they’ve installed some weird indexing service – just like the one in XP that scans constantly (AKA: Uses your CPU and wastes your hard drive power)…. So that got shut-off straightaway (just like XP) – but it seems to stay installed next to your clock.
Overall Ubuntu 8.04 is coming together as a very nice OS – far superior to XP and Vista in my opinion, and hopefully a sign of what is coming in the IT industry.

A friend of mine told me a few months ago that she had downloaded the Sarah Connor Chronicles series that had just started in America – and recommended that I take a look. As always – I took ages to get around to it – and by the time I did it had already started on terrestrial TV!
Anyway – one of the reasons why I’ve left it so long is because I’m actually quite a fan of the original Terminator movies (Terminator 1, 2 and 3). Yes – I know I’m in a bit of a minority because everyone else seems to hate 3!
When I heard about the new TV series I thought “Oh – this is going to ruin it all”. So I eventually dragged myself to watch it and I was actually quite impressed with it. Maybe the first episode was actually higher-than-average budgetwith all the shoot-outs and explosions – but I reckon it will turn out to be quite a watchable TV show overall.

Overall I’d say give it a go – you won’t be disappointed.
(You can reserve Sarah Connor Chronicles on DVD at Amazon – but it’s not out for ages ).