My Pocket PC (an HP iPaq) broke recently, and while I was scanning various online emporia for a replacement, came across the OQO O+ UMPC, which was a clearance item at Expansys. Since one of the main reasons for using the Pocket PC was as a means of tracking my cycle training, I thought a miniature PC running WinXP might be useful. The other significant use would be for delivering presentations. So, how does the device stack up? And given this is the old model, now replaced by a slightly more powerful device running Vista, are these comments valuable?

Hardware specs:

XO Laptop: It's the Software, Stupid! - A nice post about how the OLPC empowers kids creatively. A riposte to a number of rather scurrilously negative posts circulating on the web.

After buying a Squeezebox music player, I have recently been considering various formats I have music in, their relative merits (both sonically and aesthetically), and their convenience. Over the years, I've acquired a fair sized collection of vinyl records. To be honest, I rather like them - there's a sense of having to look after them, and the artwork of the sleeves has the capacity to be far superior in most cases to that of CD covers. Currently I use a Rega Planar 3 turntable for playback through a Naim Nait 3 integrated amplifier. They sound pretty damned good, too.

Of course convenience leads us all to CD. I have a good number of these now, and a Naim CD3 CD player.

What's prompted this discourse has been my purchase of a Squeezebox. This is a smart device, that runs an embedded Linux and hooks up through the wireless network to a fileserver holding audio files. The Squeezebox is in turn connected to the amplifier. It can play a wide variety of file formats, including mp3, ogg and flac. So. I've been ripping CDs to disk, and using the Squeezebox for playback. Is the quality good? Well, I guess not as good as CD, but that's countered by the sheer convenience!