Back in July 2013, someone in the office mentioned the beautiful iconic 80's disaster that is the Sinclair C5. Inevitably someone asked what they're worth now, and apart from the fact they cost £400 new, was dropped to £199 shortly after and then the price plummeted like a stone, I had no idea. So I turned to the reliable font of knowledge in these things; eBay. Generally, they were going for more than I expected, then I came across this sorry little thing With 4 days to go, the price seemed far too low, despite it being described as "Spares or repair", so, just for curiosity sake, I decided to watch the auction. With 15 minutes to go the price was still too low, so I bid a stupidly low price... and was the highest bidder! But with 2 minutes to go, I got outbid! Well, the eBay red mist had descended, and I wasn't having any of that, so I bid again... and won it for £34.56! What the hell was I going to do now?
I bought a mobile phone mount for my car several months ago, and it was one of those with the sticky blue dot on. It was fine, worked great, and simple to use. For a while. Then one day my phone flew off whilst going around a sharp corner. And again a few weeks later. Then again, and again. Despite cleaning, the sticky blue dot was loosing it's sticky. So I turned to a couple of old faithfuls for help; Sugru and Lego! The first thing to do was decide upon a 'design' for the Lego. It needed to be a large enough contact area to hold securely - even if I aligned the two halves a bit to the left or too high. It needed to fit on the car mount I already had. It needed to be made from the selection of Lego I had to hand. I also wanted a shape\position on the phone where I could instantly identify which way around the phone was without even looking at it. Oh, and it had to look cool too!
So, the goal of switching from Windows 8 to Linux was to get myself a usable computer. One where I can just log on and do whatever it is that I was going to do, without having to fight the OS just to do something simple. One which is intuitive to use. One where I don't have to learn a totally new way of doing things.
Just over a week ago, I took the plunge, and installed Ubuntu Linux on my main home computer. It's not the kind of decision I take lightly, and I've probably been building up to this for some 10 years or so. But a few recent events have told me that the time is now right for me to make the switch from Windows. As an IT Engineer, I work with Microsoft products all day every day, and I used every version of Microsoft Windows since 3.11. Some with more success than others, but, as my Twitter followers will testify, I have not got on well with Windows 8. I had a pretty sweet set up with Windows 7, and thought I'd take advantage of the cheap £25 upgrade to Windows 8. That was probably the biggest mistake I've made! It broke software. It was slow. My hardware, despite being compatible didn't always work as planned. I struggled to find my way around. I was no longer in control of my own PC - Windows 8 was controlling me! It was driving me up the wall and it was time to change.
