It’s been an awkward week, not helped by arriving at work on Wednesday morning to find a dead PowerBook on my desk. Locked inside it was all of my work: features, reviews, emails, budgets, spreadsheets. The lot. It looked quite serious; it couldn’t even mount the hard drive.

So, I started it fixing itself, and when I left last night it was still chugging away, about 30% of the way through self-repairing, if the progress bar is to be believed. I’m not entirely convinced I’m going to get it all back (or indeed any of it), but I’ve left it running over the weekend and, as I’m off in Berlin on Tuesday and Wednesday I may leave it chugging until Thursday if it needs it. It doesn’t seem to be spinning the drive much - if at all - rather sitting and thinking about things, and soaking up the sun that comes through the window and falls on my desk, so it shouldn’t do any harm.

In the meantime I’m using a lovely 20in iMac. I always liked them, but after half a week of splurging my work across such an enormous desktop I really really want one of my own.

Chris of the Phin has been having a hard week, too, having dropped all of his cereal on the floor one morning when we were all watching.

I gave him some of my Bran Flakes.

So this weekend really couldn’t have come soon enough. I had a lie in, a long, long shower, a faff around on the web and then a walk into town to pick up the car, left there last night because I ended up in the pub after work. I’ve refilled the fridge, thought about making cheese (but decided to put that off until next weekend) and looked at the rediculous valentines’ cards in Clintons, which covered everything from the cat to, in oedipal fashion, mothers.

In other news, despite last week’s unpleasant visit, I returned to the library and updated my membership. The woman at the desk didn’t seem able to write Ns, so my card says Sik Rawlisnos. I’m just glad of that missing ‘c’ in the Nik.

I was clearing out my hard drive and came across this picture, which I’d quite forgotten about. It’s the scan of an old page from the November 1988 issue of MacUser that I found when I was putting together the 20th anniversary feature. I dug it out and sent it to Phill Jupitus, who in turn passed it on to the Jonathan Ross people who went through all sorts of hoops getting me to agree to them showing it on TV. I did, but they didn’t use it in the end.

I like the wording of the ad, though. Directly below the pic it explains why he picked a Mac instead of a regular PC:

Jonathan Ross demands the best - designer suits, designer shirts, designer ties. so when he wanted a PC, it is hardly surprising he chose the Macintosh SE because, like Jonathan, it is stylish to look at, very, very productive and extremely versatile.

Now call me naive, but I just don’t get it. Where are they going to store this artificial sun? It’s life size. That’s going to take one hell of a big warehouse.

Oh dear. My PC is starting to show its age. I’ve had it a while, lovingly applying little upgrades and fixes, building it from scratch about four years ago, nursing it back to life the day it exploded and filled the room with smoke and bad smells, and kept it safe in an unreachable corner under my desk.

But tonight, for the first time, I’m stuck with an expansion dooberie without a slot to fit it in. Not because my slots are full; just that my motherboard is too old to do the job - it lacks the necessary kit.

Which means I now have a dilemma.

You see, I need to to do some freelance, so I could justify buying a new (cheap) PC. The money from the freelance work would pay for half of it, and I could claim some of the rest against my tax.

Except I don’t want to. I want to buy a new Mac later in the year when the mini makes the switch to Intel, and I’d like to upgrade my iBook some day, perhaps before the end of the year, so I can’t really justify having yet another PC hanging around the place. That would make one Linux machine, three Windows machines, two Macs and a Linux-based server all whirring away, making the underside of my desk sound like the launch ramp of an aircraft carrier.

And that’s before perhaps buying a Mac mini and upgrading the iBook.

But there’s another reason why I don’t want to buy a new PC: Office 2003 and XP Pro. If I bought a new one it would likely be running XP Home, and I couldn’t install the Pro edition currently on my PC onto the young upstart because it would refuse to authenticate. Likewise, I couldn’t install Microsoft Office 2003 on there for the very same reason.

That’s not a massive problem as I’d switch to OpenOffice, anyway, but it does mean that if I thought along the lines of the average user (and I think I am), then Microsoft is actually holding me back, and making me stay with what has proved itself, tonight, to be outdated, old equipment, simply because I can’t justify the cost of buying new copies of its software.

If I’m not a minority, I can’t believe the hardware manufacturers are too happy with that state of affairs.

iTunes was updated last night. I downloaded it this morning and found it had a brand new feature: it suggests songs you might like to buy from the iTunes Music Store on the basis of the track currently selected in your Library.

Now Apple is well known for its love of France and the French, or at least it seems that way over here. It’s had a large PR base in Paris, the main European Expo (admittedly not run by Apple) is in Paris, and we’ve seen a few Eiffel Towers behind correspondents in Jobs’ keynote weblinks to Europe. so why, when you pick a Jonatan Cerrada, the slightly short Frenchman who sung in 2004’s Eurovision does it suggest ‘Funny Little Frog’?

The second Tuesday after Christmas is always a late night at work, as it’s traditionally the day when Apple announces its new products for the first half of the year.

As anyone who’s been following the stories online (see www.macuser.co.uk) will know, it has successfully dumped the PowerPC chip from its PowerBook and iMac ranges, so finally the familiar G4 and G5 suffixes are being phased out.

How, then, did the BBC managed to miss the whole point, by saying the new G5 would have an Intel chip.

That’s like saying an unleaded car takes petrol. Or that planes are the best way of travelling through the Channel Tunnel. Considering the UK broadcast of the event took place in BBC TV Centre that’s a pretty poor showing.

Sadly, it clearly also applied some secret BBC staff pricing policy to the cost, too. In BBC land the low-end iMac is

Flashcard Exchange is “the world’s largest library of printable flash cards”.

A hidden gem I stumbled upon quite by chance, it really is incredibly extensive, covering not only languages, but also history, the arts, medicine… in fact, pretty much anything you could think of. Best of all, you can practice the cards on screen if you don’t want to pay the low ($16.95) one-time fee for downloading and printing.

Well… I guess that answers any questions we may have had about the new name.

Paul and I spent the afternoon putting up the weather station in the garden, having asked next door if we could drill holes in their fence posts. They replied by throwing apples over the fence at us, which I think was a gesture of friendship.

It’s very high-tech. The back of the shed is bristling with as many sensors as a government spy centre, all solar powered and wirelessly beaming their measurements back to the house. So, sitting on my desk, I now have read out for wind speed and direction, maximum gust, current temperature, wind chill, dew point (whatever that is), barometric pressure… the list goes on for about 50-odd items.

It’s ironic, though, that to make best use of it you have to leave it plugged into a PC, which will capture and analyse the data over time. But of course, the PC has to be left on full time, which must contribute to global warming…

…which must affect the measurements…

…which must render the results meaningless.