A big plus

They've finally started selling Freeview PVRs under the Freeview+ brand. This is very smart: Sky has spent millions telling us what a PVR is, to flog Sky+. Now Freeview's hitching a (nearly) free ride on the plus train (as, less flauntily, is Virgin).

There's talk, too, of PVRs with the iPlayer built in - presumably they've waited until now to let the BBC iron out the iPlayer's kinks.

Now, stick in a decent hard drive (500 gigs at least - why mess with less?) and a Bittorrent client, and you're getting close to beating Scott's Mac Mini, or a fully tricked-out PS3 (which, of course, has Blu-Ray, too).

Acers high

As I said, my Mac died a couple of weeks ago. It may still be fixable - but it'll take at least a day of scary screwdriver stuff and lots of waiting for things to install and reboot, and install and reboot. Not to mention dropping £100 or so on a new hard drive.

So to tide me over, I got a netbook - an Acer Aspire One. I'd been eyeing one anyway - I'm off to Vietnam next month, and the idea of having a super-tiny laptop out there appeals. And although £180 ain't exactly disposable, seeing it fall down a ravine (does Vietnam have ravines?), or trampled by an angry goat in the back of a minibus would be less painful than watching the same happen to an actual MacBook.

Colour aside - I got the blue one, purely because the shop didn't have shiny white - there are two basic flavours: £180 gets you 512 megs of memory and an 8 gig solid state 'drive', while an extra £40 buys a whole (oooh!) gig of RAM and a 120 gig standard hard drive. Oh, and Windows.

I went for the cheap one. I've had an awful lot of hard drives die on me over the years (it's all Bittorrent's fault), including the one in said MacBook, so I liked the idea of a laptop with just one moving part (the fan). I figured that since it was really only going to be fit for browsing and wordprocessing, 8 gigs would be plenty. OK, not plenty. Enough.

Plus, I'm a touch allergic to Windows. I've had to use it at work, and nothing about it pleases me. Beyond that, I figured the low, low specs of the AA1 would play more nicely with what I guessed to be the lower overheads of Linux. Yeah, baby: Linux.

Two weeks ago, I knew not very much about Linux. I knew it was open source. I knew it came in an unfathomable number of isotopes. I knew it was broadly similar to Unix, which lurks somewhere in the geeky heart of OS X. But Macs do a thorough job of hiding it. I think the only reason I've ever used the terminal on a Mac was because I read it had a hidden Tetris game. Beyond that, I knew that Linux gave my hardcore geek friend Scott a spontaneous woody. I'd never dared ask why.

So Linux posed, to put it mildly, a challenge.