Forgive me readers for I have sinned. It’s been ten days since my last post.

This is one of those rarer posts about my personal life for people who know or care…

This week Apple unveiled their new Mac MiniMac Mini powered by the Intel Core Duo processor and using Intel’s core graphics, effectively giving it a significant boost whilst still retaining the attractive £400 price point.

Apple are now saying “Live the digital life” and implying that the mini belongs as part of a home entertainment system. They’ve even gone so far as to bundle it with their Front Row media center and an Apple Remote control.

There exists a provision, some people mistakenly refer to as a “loophole”, in EU tax laws that allows goods under £18 to be imported tax-free from outside the EU.

Guernsey and Jersey are outside the EU and have no GST/VAT/sales/goods tax of their own and as such the islands have become prime locations for low-value mail order operations.

I’ve decided to fill in some gaps in my DVD collection and was quite interested to know what the current best deals were so filled up my baskets at various stores. All prices are quoted in £ sterling and were correct at time of writing.

Obviously the best deal is to order individual items from wherever they are cheapest. Amazon only include free postage if you order enough items so bear that in mind.

The BBC web site finally reported the phone outage that hit the island yesterday. Like the Channel TV article it was poorly reported with little detail. Cable & Wireless’ news portal decided not to run the story at all although an apology can be found at their corporate site.

Lets look at the BBC article and break it down. I’m not having a particular go at the BBC or really even C&W just looking at how reporters play their personal tone through selection or words and selective omission of facts;

So the phone lines here have been out now for well over an hour. ADSL is still working as is Guernsey-to-Guernsey mobiles but everything else is giving dead tones, no tones or “Network failure” messages.

So much for a single point of failure or resilient network. They currently boast;

As a frequent user of many of Google’s various services I continually find myself finding new tips and tricks for getting the most out of them. Here are a few to share;

Gmail are constantly introducing new features however the localised user-interfaces are often lagging behind and failing to expose the options. Set your language to “English (US)” to get access to the latest options.

One of the things that annoyed me with Visual Studio.NET 2003 and Visual Studio 2005 is the web “project” type.

The main problem is that these projects are not treated as traditional applications, but in order to please the ad-hoc web developer crowd they are treated as collections of files with no specific project options or compilation process — instead compiled on-the-fly by the web server.

My aging Dell 8100 is struggling with the recent demands of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 mostly due to the fact it only supports 512MB RAM. Paging is bad enough on a desktop but on a laptop with slower drives and battery drain…

Apple’s first x86 laptop is based on the Intel Core Duo processor and will be available later this month. The enclosure is very similar to the previous aluminum PowerBooks with some changes to the socket line-up but retaining the backlit keyboard and wide-screen aspect ratio.

Shopping on-line from the Channel Islands isn’t always a pleasant experience. Many companies can’t be bothered with the making a VAT-exempt outside-EU sale and when they do they like to use expensive shipping options instead of the often reliable and cheap Special Delivery service.

Here’s a few tips and sites to make things a bit less painless.