In the evenings I tend to have the laptop on the coffee table and tippy tap away at stuff whilst the telly's on. But it gets uncomfortable sitting on the settee crouched over the laptop and I miss the dual monitors and beefy workstation power that's in my office.

So today I invested in a TV card for a spare PC + monitor and ran a coax cable from the Sky box in the lounge into the office. I gotta say I wish I'd done this ages ago, it works a treat. All I need now is a remote kit for the Sky box handset so I can channel hop without having to run to the lounge and flick.

The card is a Hauppuage WinTV-HVR 1100 which I bought because it had a built in digital terrestrial TV decoder and remote control. But sadly Perth for some reason hasn't made it to the digital age for telly (even though we do get DAB) so I might exchange it for a cheaper model.

I just noticed that VMware have introduced a free version of VMware server. It's in beta at the moment but they expect to release the finished version in the next few months. You can grab it here. You can also download a bundle of pre-built appliances and virtual machines here which will run using the server, existing products or on the free VMplayer.

David Wang is a member of the IIS team and he can be found in the IIS related newsgroups. His blog has loads of good stuff about IIS based on questions asked in the newsgroups and privately. I've been subscribed since September last year, you should too.

As part of an exercise to see if I can reclaim some tax, I went back through all the invoices I have for IT book purchases since 2002. It comes to £1234.61. 2003 seems to have been a good year for Computer Manuals where I managed to spend £470 with them.

I'm missing a batch of invoices from 2001-2002 and I know I spend a serious pile of dosh with them as I gaze across my lounge at the straining bookshelves.

http://www.ipspotting.com/

Mine scored only 15

Via slashdot.org.