Blog now hosted by 1and1.co.uk

In case you haven’t noticed, for the past 2 to 3 weeks this blog has been offline due to me taking my personal webserver (hosted at my flat) offline after a nasty electric bill. So since then I was looking at alternative hosting options. I’ve settled after recommendation to switch over to 1and1 from my previous domain provider (Netbenefit) and host the blog there as Netbenefit could not host WordPress it seems and found it hard to even call their support centre.

After a little bit of trial and error I got WordPress hosted and the blog was fully restored last night and am now a happy 1and1 customer.

Finally moved out

On October 8th I finally moved out of my parents house to a flat of my own, well renting it anyway. Since then this website has been unavailable and only just restored it this morning to blog this post as of now.

I’ve finally got used to living on my own with no one bothering me so going well I think. The place is a 1 bed flat with balcony and over looks a communal garden so will be good in the Summer and due to the close proximity of Farnborough Airport it will be good for the Farnborough International Airshow I should get a good view if it from the balcony.

Mozilla Firefox 4 released

Mozilla has released version 4.0 of its popular browser to its official download page after two Release Candidates found their way to testers earlier this month. Mozilla will be hoping to top their previous Guinness World Record of 8,002,530 downloads within 24 hours for Firefox 3.0, which took place in June 2008 with parties in over 25 countries.

Based on the Gecko 2.0 engine, Firefox 4 comes with an all new user interface, new ways to organize tabs, a revamped add-on manager, support for HTML5 video standards, multi-touch support on Windows 7 and a range of performance and security enhancements.

Windows 7 / Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 now RTM

The Windows Team Blog the other day has announced that Windows 7 / Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 has finally reached RTM.

On February 16th, both will be available to current customers of the Windows Volume Licensing program, as well as subscribers to Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) and TechNet. On February 22nd, both will be available to all customers through Windows Update and will also come preinstalled on new servers ordered.

Apple iOS 4.21 released and MobileMe’s Find My iPhone now free

Yesterday Apple released iOS 4.21 for the iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, the iPod Touch 2nd, 3rd and 4th Generations and the iPad. Get the update now though iTunes.

The battery life once again seems to be better on my iPhone 4 but will see if the improvements stay.

In other Apple News, the “Find My iPhone” feature of MobileMe is now a free service, just add a MobileMe account using your existing Apple ID from your iPhone to activate the service.

25 years of Microsoft Windows

Computer World has created a nice article for the 25th birthday of Microsoft Windows. On November 20th 1985 Microsoft released Windows 1.0 and didn’t catch on as well as Microsoft had hoped.

It was not until Windows 3.1 which started to get the ball rolling with the major turning point being Windows 95 which really started to get home computing going en masse.

Visual Tour of 25 years of Windows

Windows Live Essentials 2011 released

This evening Microsoft released the final build of Windows Live Essentials 2011 just a month after the last beta refresh.

Live Essentials includes the programs like Windows Live Movie Maker, Mail, Messenger, Writer, Sync, and Family Safety and Version 2011 takes advantage of the ribbon UI and integrates further into Windows 7 by using jumplists.

Web Installer: http://explore.live.com/windows-live-essentials
Offline Installer: http://g.live.com/1rewlive4-all/en/wlsetup-all.exe

iOS 4.1 released for iPhone and iPod Touch

Apple today has released iOS 4.1 for the iPhone and iPod Touch onto iTunes.

iOS 4.1 is available for iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPod touch 2nd generation, iPod touch 3rd generation, and iPod touch 4th generation. The release includes fixes for the iPhone 4 proximity sensor, iPhone 3G performance and Bluetooth issues and also includes a new game centre to allow multi player games to be more social. Apple is also expected to release iOS 4.2 in November for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.

Sluggish iOS 4 performance on the iPhone 3G?

A Neowin.net reader as posted a fix that seems to solve the sluggish performance on the iPhone 3G. This fix seems to also resolve the battery drain problems I was having on my 3Gs as well.

The fix is this, Go to “Settings->General->Home Button->Spotlight Search-> deselect every option” and this will stop background indexing on the phone.