My most recent tech purchase was an Amazon Kindle. It wasn’t an easy one mind you. Life was beginning to get a bit expensive and I was trying to not spend any money other than on the essentials, but with a week-long trip to Juba in the coming week and a near 20 hour plane journey ahead I decided it would be worth the purchase. In the end I plumped for the bog standard, no frills, with-buttons, wifi-only, £89 version. And it only came in grey.

My previous experiences with e-Readers hadn’t been great. I’d tried to use “Books” on the iPad without much success. I even bought Stephen Fry’s most recent book in an attempt to push me into using the device as an e-Reader. This didn’t work. The device is too heavy to use as an e-Reader. I couldn’t hold it for too long before I needed to move my arms, change my position, even rest the iPad on something else. In the end I gave up because using the iPad to read simply became something I didn’t want to do.

Continue reading

Before the blog starts to whitter on about new tech, new application purchases, features and functionality found and how use of tech has helped or hindered me it’s probably useful to get a baseline written of what tech I currently have and what I use day to day.

First off, desktop computers.

  • At home it’s a 27″ Apple Mac.
  • At work, a Dell Optiplex running Windows 7

The Mac also runs Parallels, which through the use of a Watchguard VPN allows me to connect Outlook to my work mailbox. My own personal mail is collected in Mail on the Mac. At work I’m a Development Director for a software company so most of my time is spent in Visual Studio 2010 and now 2012, Outlook and YouTrack, our bug tracking/ticket software from JetBrains.

Continue reading