A VisionNet 204 DSL Modem died Friday night in a horrible packet crash and left no survivors. My VisionNet DSL modem. Around an hour after the local phone company office closed Friday my modem started acting up, taking longer and longer to load a web page to the point that it finally stopped working. Noticing no PPP light on the modem, I went to the modem setup page to see if it had reset and lost my PPPoE settings. Everything looked fine, so I hit save and reboot. That’s the last I spoke with it. After still not being able to log in, and still no lights, I tried once again to enter the setup page. I knew I was in trouble when typing in 10.0.0.2 into my browser received no response. Desperate now, I pressed in the reset button, but received no response. The modem would not even reset. At approximately 7:30 Friday evening, I pronounced my link to the internet dead. May God have mercy on it’s soul.

“Curator ($17.99) is the ultimate tool for managing the artwork in your iTunes music collection. It can add album artwork to your music, so the artwork is displayed in iTunes.”

I have always been frustrated ever since Cover Flow first arrived on the scene as my ‘collection’ is primarily made up of albums that I have collected over the years. I have huge gaps in the album cover art in iTunes as most of my music isn’t in the iTunes Store.

So, this is my first week of scouring the mac world for UK news.

Unlike the US, across the pond we don’t get a huge amount of UK mac news. Therefore, some weeks I may get a run, and it will be a bumper edition. Other weeks may be a bit light, and I may have to scratch around. Whatever happens, it is my intention to do this post (whether it be big or small) as a weekly round up. It will be released the Sunday after the preceding week’s news.

Many photographers fell in love with the art while on a vacation, or shortly after returning from one. I am included in that group. My favorite part of family vacations was taking pictures with my 110 camera, and later seeing the pictures.

Unfortunately I don’t travel as much as I would like. I travel less as an adult as I did as a child. What does a travel photographer do, when they can’t get out of their city? They play tourist in their own city (black socks and fanny pack are not required) No place like home, right?

The Miglia MicroSound speaker ($29.99) for iPod nano and iPod shuffle turned up as something for me to try and and review. I wasn’t really thinking of buying a speaker for my iPods since I happily lie on my bed listening to audio books with the Apple headphones. However, I was willing to give it a go and the speaker certainly looked cute and neat.

I was sent a white one to match my nano (black is also available) and it slotted obviously and easily onto the headphone jack.

I am not a big user of widgets in that I don’t have a lot, but those that I do have I use regularly.

I have recently been trying out the BBC Widget and have to say that I love it, especially the sports station. Living outside of the UK but wanting to keep in touch with some of the sporting events this is great.

Stations on offer are:

Radio 1
Radio 2
Radio 3
Radio 4
Five Live
1xtra
6 Music
BBC7
Asian Network
World Service

Hi, Tim again,

First, I wanted to thank you again for the support last week. It was absolutely overwhelming. More than 200,000 Pandora listeners contacted their congressional representatives! The entire fax infrastructure on Capitol Hill ground to a halt. We had to deliver faxes manually – literally boxes full of them were delivered to every office in the Capitol building.

The result has been swift and dramatic: more than a million people have already joined the cause! There is now a bill just being introduced called the “Internet Radio Equality Act, H.R. 2060″ to fix the problem and save Internet radio -and Pandora- from obliteration.

It is probably a generation ‘thing’ or maybe even a lack of technological skills but I have never been a huge user of BitTorrent. Truth told I would be hard pushed to give you a clear, concise explanation of what it is and why you should have it.

Now that the Mac mini and the Mac Book are ordered I have a few days to have a re think about how I distribute my data around the various hard drives:

- New Mac mini has 60GB
- Old Mac mini has 120GB connected to a 300GB LaCie drive
- iMac has 250GB connected to a 230GB external drive
- Desktop PC has 190GB split C: 30GB and D: 160GB

Everything is networked together so any data movement will be relatively easy.

Have just ordered a Mac mini and a Mac Book off the Apple site here in Spain. I thought about buying them in the States and getting them shipped here but by the time I added the cost of shipping and the ‘risk’ of customs, compared to the VAT that I claim back in Europe through my business, no delivery costs or insurance/customs risks it was only marginally more to buy them here.

I have wanted the Belkin Wi-Fi Phone for Skype ($179.99) from the moment they were first announced. Prudence (& cash flow) dictated that I wait until they had ironed out any teething issues, so it is only now that I have got one.

I have written about my use of Skype before but I want to explain it again to put this phone into context.

My father has decided that the time is right (age 72) to join in the Mac fun! He is pretty good technically with the ‘older’ stuff and has some well established IT ‘needs’:

- he does a lot of writing,
- he does a reasonable amount of presentational and design work for the Math Games he designs,
- he communicates a lot via email, IM and Skype,
- he is not heavily into music but uses iTunes already,
- he likes to use his digital camera.