Back in September last year I talked about the potential for Peer to peer power and Combined Heat and Power (CHP) boilers, which would enable streets and blocks to generate their own power and share the generated power among all the local properties through a grid like exchange system.

I still think there is a huge potential here for many companies and individuals to generate their own power and therefore help reduce the reliance both on the large power stations and the burning of fossil fuels.

The reasoning is quite simple, both CHP boilers and personal turbines are 'green' producers of electricity, and for many they provide a level of input and control over their power requirements that is hard to beat.

There's a new software company on the block, and they have an amazing range of software available at some unbeatable prices.
 
They have an office suite that provides full Microsoft Office compatibility, Acrobat PDF compatible products for producing and editing PDF documents, an SQL database product, music editing software, and even a photographers dream.
 
All of the products are available for Windows; some of the products are also available for the Mac too. Prices range from as little as $10 to up to $30.
 
Oddly, there are no Linux versions of the software.

There's a review of the Motorola PEBL mobile phone at Gizmodo.

I'm not promoting the PEBL (I have no idea what it's like - that's what the review is for), but what is cool is that the review is done in video. Yes, that's right, a video based review, on the Net, of a new piece of hardware.

What's even cooler that the video even works when the reference is embedded into the RSS feed, even in my self-developed web-based RSS reader.

It sounds like the review will be the first of many. It certainly shows how far the technology and the Internet have come if we can get the video reviews as mainstream.

The power of the individual to compete with companies that do them wrong has for many been small compared to the power of the big corporations.

When individuals managed to get the refunds or apologies for bad service, it made the headlines - especially if the original events that triggered the consumer response were beyond both belief and common sense.

The consumer and the individual was the little guy beating the big guy.

Now the tides are beginning to change, and they are changing for two reasons. The first is a social change - people are getting fed up of having to tolerate problems that should never have occurred in the first place. I think that safety and knowledge has come from a combination of TV shows and newspapers that help the consumer. They show people that it is possible to complain and get a reasonable response, although for some the only time they get a reasonable response is when the newspaper or TV get involved.

Bill Thompson at the BBC took a lot of stick for an article he wrote about Mac users and complacency on security. He's responded to that piece here.

He raises (and indeed raised) a number of good points both in his original article and in the response article linked above. While in some respects he's on the back foot here, I think some of his points are perfectly valid.

The fact that there aren't any viruses, trojan horses or other nasties available for Mac OS X now does not mean that there won't be in the future. One of the nice things about computing is that it is constantly changing, but that applies in equal measures to potential threats as well as potential opportunities.

On one of my recent visits to my parents, I had to do some IT administration - as I often do as the person who supplied them with their IT equipment.

My key task this time was to install some additional RAM. The machine had just 128MB, which although technically OK for Windows XP is not quite as useful as it could be, especially once you get one or two applications open.

I doubled the RAM up to 256MB and the results and improvement in performance were dramatic, especially considering the cost of the upgrade was fairly modest.

The relationship between RAM and performance is understandable once you know how your computer uses it's memory and hardware. Nearly all OS make use of the hard drive as a secondary memory store (swap space) to make better use of the faster physical RAM. But the problem is that the use of the hard disk is slow enough to cause slow responses in your machine. The more physical RAM you have, the better the response.

With the launch of the XBox 360 there are going to be a lot of original XBoxen lying around that nobody wants. I'm a keen re-user of hardware - some of my machines are 5-10 years old and at least second (and possibly third or fourth) hand. If it still works, why dump it?

There are lots of things you could do with them, none of which I can think of right now, but how about using it as a Linux box. There's an Intel CPU, 64MB of RAM and a 8-10GB hard drive in each machine - perfect for running, or even just trying out, Linux. With a little stack you could even create a small grid or cluster.