Found on The Devils Kitchen

Having navigated for years without a Satellite Navigation system in my car, I have finally got one. I was interested in getting a TomTom Go 720 (£193) but having already got an HTC S620 WM6 Smartphone there were other options.

I finally settled for:

BlueNEXT 51 channel GPS receiver for £24 this was a bargain and had great reviews on Amazon

S620 car charger £4

Co-Pilot Live 7 software for windows mobile £72

Total cost of about - £100. Even with a Western Europe map upgrade for Co-Pilot, the total will come to less than £150.

The GPS receiver is excellent and works well indoors or outdoors. The Co-Pilot software is great and so far has proved great for navigating within the city as well as on motorways.

I opted for Co-Pilot in preference to TomTom 6 Navigator software as the HTC does not have a touch screen but has a querty keyboard and TomTom requires hacks for the keyboard to work with the navigation software. Co-Pilot however, works with the HTC keyboard out of the box and is pretty simple to use.

Co-Pilot central (the desktop companion software) is just a little bit flaky on Windows Vista, but nothing I cannot live with.

For the in-car cradle, I made one from bending a coat-hanger - light, airy, free and work a treat. The HTC sits in the cradle hanging off the central airconditioning grille in the dashboard.

High bloody time. MPs are paid by what I and the rest of the tax payers give to the Inland Revenue and are there because we elected them to be in office. It is about time that their expenses were investigated and subject to the same public scrutiny that other government spending comes under. It infuriates me to see that some people manage to get away by exploiting every single loophole in a policy, while the rest of us are expected to toe the line as "good citizens".

Expenses being used to build property portfolios, expenses kept "within the family" - I hope that MPs realise that they are spending "public money". I wonder how much more money would be in the NHS budget or allocated to social care of the elderly if public money wasn't being misused.

It is however sad that the investigation will be carried out by the Commons investigations committee. MPs investigating MPs, I wonder whether their would be bias at all??!!

BBC News

Bought a new MP3 player last week. I am very anti Apple/i-Pod products and was never going to get one of those. It was either going to be a Sony or Creative. Sony didn't appeal very much because of the dependence on their own software to encode and transfer tracks (except for the new players). I liked the Zen Stone Plus for its simplicity, the ability to drag and drop tracks, charging via USB and the decent capacity. My main aim is to use it for listening to Podcasts while driving.

I am very happy with the player. The display screen does get greasy and dirty easily but maybe because the player is black this is just more visible.

Yesterday, I installed Webroot, SpySweeper, I usually am happy with the inbuilt windows defender, but decided to install SpySweeper because of the offer of a free license.

The installation went fine and required a reboot. After rebooting Vista discovered an unknown device and attempted to install drivers for it and coudn't.

Upon investigation the unknown device appeared under "Other Devices" in Device manager. The entry had no identifying strings and looking through the registry I could not find any pointers to the device's origin.

Disabling SpySweeper from starting up with Vista did not solve the problem.

I guess this was the software hook from SpySweeper installing a new device driver to monitor KeyLogger activity. After trying several times to sort the problem out (unsuccessfully) - by disabling KeyLogger shield in WebRoot, and rebooting several times - I uninstalled WebRoot.

On a positive not, their technical support seems very responsive and commendable - I raised a support question via their website and had a response within 10 minutes. It instructed me to uninstall SpySweeper using a cleaning tool and then reinstall the software. I elected not to do this.

My main gripe is with software that installes devices and drives that are unexpected and cause unnecessary hassles and fuck with the basic operation of the OS.

http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/commentary/sexdrive/2007/04/sexdrive_0406

True and hilarious!

Moved from WordPress to BlogEngine.Net