Well we’ve had the baby fish for a while now and in spite of not making any special arrangements for their safety we still have four of them. They now look like proper fish not just tadpoles with tails. I think they have reached a size that the other fish don’t look on them as food.

Neither the Guppies or the Mollys have had any more babies so I’m hoping that we have only females because if four were to survive every month the tank would fill up very quickly.

I’ve been looking for a small bluetooth keyboard to use with my Mac Mini HTPC. The Frogpad seems to be almost a perfect match. Basically it’s a one handed keyboard that measures roughly 12×8 cm. It’s very similar the old Spectrum ZX keyboards where there were four options per key that were accessed via modifier keys. The keys are layed out so that the commonest letters are the main key options and the lesser used letters, numbers and symbols are all under modifiers.

I connected it to my laptop first to learn how to use it. After a couple of hours I was easily past the hunt and peck stage. I think it has uses far beyond the Mac Mini, I can use it with my Palm, in fact it’s what I’m typing this blog post on now.

For HTPCs I can’t really see I’ll need much more than this.

Several months ago I ordered some Converse from Noflysonus - an online clothes shop. I patiently waited for my new pink shoes to be delivered. After a week I had received no shoes and no emails to keep me updated as to when I could expect them so I went back to the site and logged in to see if there was any information. I was informed a had a problem with my credit card. I had not long changed address so this was not surprising (I’d had this problem with another shop).

As there was no information on how to rectify the problem I emailed them using the address I had set up specifically for them. (I tend to alter my email address to companyname@mydomain.com so I’ll be able to tell if my details ever get used elsewhere). I received no reply.

Fast forward a month and I started getting loads of spam to the Noflysonus email address. I guess they either broke their own Terms and Conditions and the Which! Web Trader code of practice they claim to adhere to…

…We will not e-mail you in the future unless you have given us your consent. We will give you the chance to refuse any marketing email from us or from another trader in the future…

…The personal information which we hold will be held securely in accordance with our internal security policy and the law and the Which? Web Trader Code…

…or their server got hacked and my details were stolen. Either way I’m quite glad they weren’t able to process my credit card as I really wouldn’t want that finding it’s way online.

Just got home and counted up the Molly fries and I think there are three left. Of course more of them could be hiding in the plants. The littlest one seems to have found a good place to hide inbetween two rocks, he just darts in and out of there. I think I should put my money on that one surviving.

Before the next batch I think I’m going to space out those rocks a bit.

I’ve completed the redesign for this site. It comes not long after the previous revision but I wasn’t entirely happy with the style of that version. I went with a wider design for the first time, everything has more room to breathe and as its my personal site I’m not so concerned with designing for smaller monitors. I’ve also moved the blog to WordPress rather than continue adding bits of programming to the CMS - there’s no point reinventing the wheel.

My comparison of music download services. Note that I have only included the bigger more mainstream services. There are many niche services, see the bottom of the post for a list of these.

I’ve included the Zune service for the sake of completeness even though it isn’t available in the UK yet.

I have omitted Napster’s basic services as it does not allow you to move the music to a portable player.

Personally I do not buy anything from stores that use DRM as I play my music on an a wide varietly of platforms. An iPod, a PSP and a Linux jukebox to name but three. Also who is to say what I’ll be playing music on in the future.

Undoubtedly the best in terms of both cost and quality of files is Allofmp3 but this site is of questionable legality and it looks like it’s days could be numbered.

We’re continuing to stock up our aquarium so this weekend we bought four Guppies and three Mollies. Two days later I had a bit of a shock when I give them their breakfast - the Mollies had had babies! I counted them up as best as I could (they move around a lot), we had eleven. Eleven one centimetre long aquatic knats flitting about the tank.

I researched our new fish online, which I’ll admit is something I should have done to start with. Both the Guppies and the Mollies are what’re called Livebearers. Mollies can have twenty fry per month and we have at least two female Mollies. I’m still trying to decide what the third one is. I’m hoping it’s another female and we just had the unfortunate luck to buy an up the spout Molly, the tank cannot support that many fish.

A lot of the fry will be eaten by the other fish in the tank but if even one survives per month we’re in trouble. Doesn’t stop me from wanting them to keep out of the way of the big fish though, it’s a different story when I’m actually watching them.