A ragbag of things.

In order to consign yourself to an endless linky hell of exploring what other people think is interesting, and let's face it they're often going to be right, have a look at http://populair.eu/ - more linky than you can shake a mouse at.

In Second Life I now patrol the waterways in an elven pirogue, and I don't care who knows it. Recommended. I am doing my SLing on the desktop box, and it is s-l-o-w compared to the laptop beast. The laptop beast, though, is in my bedroom and I am increasingly not. So I draw masochistic delight from creaking about on the desktop thing. Two pieces of software help a bit: Second Life First Look, which right now has beefed up rendering compared to the default release client, and on my machines is pretty stable. Secondly (boom boom) I have upgraded to the latest drivers for my graphics card. It's easy to forget to do this periodically. If you have an ATI, as I do, additional frustration can be experienced by a download site which makes it impossible for me to officially download the latest drivers using Opera, Firefox or Internet Explorer despite messing about with the security settings on each in accordance with the instructions unhelpfully displayed on the page which appears every time the download fails. Try it. What a crock...

I mean, what planet are AMD / ATI on? I've seen mythical dragons guard their treasure less jealously than these jokers guard their drivers. You'd think it was in their interest to show their hardware in the best light, by making it easy for we punters to upgrade our drivers. Why the hell is it so difficult? What am I going to do with them? Run them on hardware I bought and paid for. Somewhere a little troll is saying to the webmaster "don't make it too easy to get the drivers - they'll all make their own ATI cards from string and glitter glue and run them". Or not. In the end I simply downloaded the whole lot from a third party site, checked carefully for viruses, and ran them without issue. So WTF? No more ATI hardware for me in future, I'll be an nVidia boy on the one remaining box I have that isn't already so. Well done ATI, job done.

I now have so many USB devices that things have become silly. I used to scorn anything that couldn't be USB'd to my computers. Now I rather admire standalone stuff. This is partly because I cannot for the life of me see why I have to use three kinds of small USB connector, and partly because I have become frustrated by the various photo-organizing softwares I use fighting amongst themselves. One cannot help thinking, again, that there might be one package out there to rule them all. But I know there's not.