bookmark_borderDon't panic

Watching the news, watching the cars queue at the garages, sucking them dry.

Which is all fine aside from the fact that OUR tank is close to empty. The car computer reports we have 94 miles left, so let’s presume we can squeeze that to around 120 miles (at the very very most). Given that we put about 55-60 miles on the car each day for our daily commute (kill the planet!!) and… yeah, I’m a little concerned. I will be going out later to fill our tank.

And next time we buy a car, we’ll be getting a hybrid of some sort. Performance be damned (mark my words please, I’m quite serious about this and have been watching the developments Honda are making with keen interest). To be honest, if it was more affordable I’d consider converting our existing car.

We are completely reliant on having a car. It IS possible to get to my work on public transport but it would (presuming everything ran on time) take just short of two and a half hours. One way. I’d really rather not spend five hours of my day commuting, which is, of course, hugely selfish of me.

Perhaps we should move.

But we like it here. We like our little house and, besides, we can’t actually afford to move. Have you SEEN the house prices? I know what our house is (allegedly) worth and it is, quite frankly, mental. I certainly wouldn’t have paid over £100k for it. Mental.

But things seem to be changing, and I’d really rather be a little ahead of the game, and remove some of our reliance on oil sooner rather than later.

bookmark_borderKVM Recommendations

More techy questions, I wonder if I’ll ever have the perfect setup?

Anyway, I have, as I may have mentioned, a MacBook. It’s a wonderful little laptop but the screen is quite small and I do find that I miss having a mouse. The obvious answer is to plugin a mouse, and hook up the laptop to my nice LCD screen but, there are still sometimes when I want to use my PC and…

Well, long story short. Rather than having a spare keyboard and mouse lying around cluttering up my little office, I think it’d be much easier to install a KVM switch (Keyboard, Video, Mouse).

But which one? Price is a LARGE factor, which is a bit of a worry as most of the cheaper KVM switches get scathing reviews. Belkin in particular seem to be a bit hit or miss.

I’m not fussed about audio outputs, and it has to be USB ports for keyboard and mouse, not PS/2. Both monitor inputs are DVI with DVI out a must.

Small form factor is another requirement, with something that doesn’t look like it was engineered in 1973 being a must. Have you SEEN some of the stuff out there? Grey plastic boxes with rudimentary, functional styling. Ick.

Over to you then, anyone seen anything that you’d recommend? Do you use a KVM switch?

I’m leaving the whole PC/Mac keyboard thing right now, I’ll worry about that later…