I was planning to buy it when I used iMac for couple of minutes back in 2006, because it looked nice both outside and inside — the interface of Mac OS seemed very beautiful to me.

The two problems preventing me to buy a Mac were absence of Macs in Uzbekistan and their price.

So, I saved some money, earned some experience in using eBay and decided to buy a Mac mini.

It is a factory refurbished Mac mini with a new Apple aluminum keyboard.

It looks awesome, it is very small and makes no noise.

Sure, it is not so powerful — Core Duo plus 1 Gb of RAM but can become a good jump-start into the Apple world in couple with my iPhone (which I also love, btw)

ZyXEL P-660HTW EE

I now have a wireless connection at home and can connect to the internet also using my PSP. Very convenient. And the device is decent too: it has 4 LAN ports, .11g Wi-Fi and a nice admin’s panel. The only con of this piece of hardware is its price — it is twice as expensive as a D-Link device with comparable features.

It is ZyXEL, you know ;-)

Why?

Because it is so slow — even in my 3.3 GHz Core 2 Duo and 2 Gb of RAM it takes about 2 seconds to start.

And you can’t just point the cursor to the upper right corner of your screen and click to close this program — you actually have to point to the “×” button, because it is around 10 pixels away from the actual corner of the screen.

And it has an awful zoom, so it blurs your text to death when not in 100% zoom.

Awful.

PS. I am just talking about the viewer part. Never used the organizer part, so no harsh feelings towards it.

Since when browsers are called “Internet software”? The definition is a bit archaic, IMHO.

Scythe (pronounced /ˈsaɪð/) Mugen (formerly known as Infinity) — Scythe’s flagship cooler. I didn’t think it was that huge. Check it out:

See? It is almost as big as my PSU! And I cut my fingers during the installation.

But I am totally satisfied with my purchase: it is effective and quiet. It won’t allow the case door to close, though (I always had it open anyways)

So, I now have two FFs — version 2 (still) being the default browser and FF3 for… fun.

(I also have IE 5.5/6.0/7.0, Safari 3, Opera 9.5 beta installed on my PC)

I was very sceptic about upgrating to a pre-release version of my favourite browser because I used every day with a lot of very important plug-ins. That’s why I had not upgrdaed until today when a release candidate became available to download.

After upgrading almost all of the plug-ins ceased to work, but after some manipulations and updates the most important ones are back on track.

So, people say it is faster than FF2 and consumes less memory? We’ll see.

So, the game (King’s Bounty: The Legend — an RPG with turn-based battles) was available to buy online using different kinds of e-money, particularly Yandex.Money and WebMoney (both are russian enterprises). It cost me 350 Russian roubles (approx. $15). Then I had to download it to my PC — the game weigh 1.9 Gb whereas I have a 2.5 Gb a month limit on that. But the game is worth it. I love it, actually.

The game is made by a Russian company and it is completely in Russian. Russians are particularly good at making turn-based and real-time strategies, for example, Heroes of Might and Magic V, Silent Storm (both created by Nival Interactive), Space Rangers 2: Dominators (by Elemental Games), and many more. But they suck at FPSes and racing games, to be honest.

I tried to install XP to disk D: in parallel with Vista (on disk C:), but I couldn’t. XP passes the DOS-based file copying part of the installation, reboots and says “Error loading operating system” and that’s all. Vista won’t boot either (you can fix the boot sector as I mentioned in one of my earlier posts and make Vista boot, though).

So, now my computer’s running XP. And it is running so much faster than Vista (also probably I haven’t installed many programs yet). But I will still have to have Vista on D: partition in order to play DX10 games.

I am pretty satisfied with XP right now. And downloading XP SP3 RC2 Refresh.