I recently performed a few upgrades to keep my PC up-to-speed and thought I’d share a few tips.

You really need to know what’s going on inside your PC and Everest is a great package to do just that. It will tell you more information about the components in your PC that you’d care to know about and can also be used to peek in on the temperature of the CPU, hard-disk and graphics chip providing your system supports it. Best of all the Home version is free although there are commercial versions for corporate and “ultimate” usage too if you have a few dollars ($29.95 at the moment) to spend.

I really like Hitchhikers Guide, a lot. I’ve read all five books and listened to the radio series on CD far too often. I then put them on my iPod and listen to them regularly. I’ve got the original TV series on DVD, it replaced my VHS copy…Recently things got moving again with a new radio series and the long-awaited movie…

The original radio series was published on CD imaginatively titled the Primary and Secondary phases. The radio series continues this tradition with installments packaged as the Tertiary, Quandary and Quintessential phases.

Here are a few more useful bits and pieces to improve you browsing experience if you’re a Firefox user.

This great extension provides a framework that allows scripts to run against web pages from your own machine. The upshot of this is…

Every developer has his own favorite set of development tools and libraries that he’s come to rely on. Here’s a round-up of some I use or am looking at.

I’m also on the lookout for a replacement for my object-relational CodeSmith templates I knocked up a while back and have been refining since. While they are functional and incredibly fast I’m now wanting features they don’t provide such as database independence, lazy loading and locking patterns.

A little after 5am Friday morning last week when I arose somewhat dazed from bed and made final preparations for a trip to Prague. My sister is getting married in July and my future brother-in-law was kind enough to invite me along to his stag night.

We arrived at the airport for our 7am flight to London Gatwick and I was introduced to two of the guys, Glen H and Michael Knight… Within minutes local airline Aurigny had announced an hour delay to our flight because of fog. Fog is a regular problem here and when it occurs planes are not allowed to land, despite the landing guidance systems in place, for reasons best known to the airport. There are few flights out from Guernsey and even fewer destinations means being fogged equals missing your connecting flight and there goes your holiday. Fog coming back means sitting or sleeping at Gatwick and explaining your absence to friends, family, or boss.

Living in Guernsey requires you develop a thick skin with regards to availability of goods and services. Many a time you can find a great deal on-line only to find they won’t ship here or if they do they want to charge you £50 to get it here. And get used to phoning and emailing companies for your VAT back every time you order (such as for Amazon and Apple).

One such annoyance is the inability to use short-code text messages such as 604664 for Google SMS as well as the silly UK TV voting systems.

I want faster DSL…. 512KB just isn’t cutting it, I used to enjoy 2MB in Jersey… Let’s examine the pricing shall we…

Yes you could argue the C&W Gsy has better contention ratios but the fact is they don’t even offer a home service for anything above 512KB.

We checked in as two small groups to avoid the disproportionate delay with checking in larger groups and headed off to the airport shops for breakfast and retail therapy.

Somebody once told me that there is no rationalization for checking in hours ahead and it is merely a ploy for you to spend money while you wait. Those in government cite security concerns but the fact is you can drive through most of the borders of Europe with only a cursory glance and minimal security checks.

Every year I head out skiing with some snowboarding pals for some high-adrenaline thrills coupled with binge drinking. It’s not always a pleasant combination and this year I took my fifteen year old brother with me so my drinking took a back seat.

Not every day was eventful so here’s the first part, the London experience!

If you’ve been using Firefox for a while you might like to look at some of these tips and tricks to get more from your web browser. If you’re not using Firefox to find out what all the hoopla is about.

Firefox, like most applications, is compiled without optimizations for specific processors. Some third parties such as Moox make processor-specific optimized builds available for download.