Have tidied, played with kittens (latest kittensquee : arriving home, finding kittens were *not looking out of the window!* then looking up and seeing them looking at me from their vantage point upstairs :) :) ). Cairo has been bitten again. Maisie a bit more happy. Can't they stop fighting for my attention...

Played a bit too much Planescape:Torment and got to bed a bit late, fantastic game though. Party this weekend with etriganuk.

Have also resisted the lure of ebay and cheapish old hardware - far better to do new stuff instead of wasting time on old things, and still need to look at video on the O2 boxes..

Need to start helping improve bi.org, and at some point (I haven't forgotten) on the Guide to Buying Old Computers. A precis so far is 'Don't bother unless you have something specific to do or can get it ultra cheap - a modern Core2Duo is ridiculously fast, reasonably low power and has advanced virtualisation included'.

On the side of virtualisation, whilst for ages there's been a whole host of vmware images all of which work in the free vmware player. I've noticed there is also Free OS Zoo - a whole host of free Qemu images, or live OS Zoo - online, free, live OS images controlled via a java applet or VNC. The live site didn't seem to be up when I tried it, but that's probably because it's hosted on a non standard website port.. Still, worth checking out if you don't have a standard Windows/x86 system.

It's notable, that one reason to run old computer kit is because you need to play with the native kit, rather than a different operating system. There are lots of options for emulating x86 (Intel, AMD PC) hardware, but precious few for different architectures. It's just about possible to run specific Linux configurations on sparc32, MIPS and ARM (and then sometimes only with serial port/network card interfacing - not that that's a problem if you run a local X server). Running multiple operating systems on non x86 architectures is still somewhat troublesome..