Well, I've had my Android G1 phone for a little over two months now and thought I'd write up my findings, and also put together a few tutorials on what I've done to my phone.

From day one, I've been impressed with my phone. I can't comment on how different the cupcake (1.5) software is different from previous releases as mine came pre-upgraded, but from all accounts it was a major step forward. I have since rooted my phone and put some experimental builds of the operating system on it with fantastic results.

Well, my laptop is playing up and getting a bit old so I'm in the market for a new one. I only want to buy one with Linux pre-installed, not for any anti-Microsoft reasons as such but just so that it can be noted that there is a market out there for Linux computers. My current laptop was bought from Dell with Ubuntu installed on it, which has done me well for the last few years, so I decided to give them my repeat business. Checking their Linux website shows no current devices available, so I decided to try and contact them to see if there were any future plans.

First off, when trying to contact Dell for any reason, they don't supply an email address! I find this most bizarre as I don't necessarily want to phone, snail mail, or chat online with a sales person. I bit the bullet and went to the online chat to ask the question and here is the conversation:

I've just finished moving my blog from running on Serendipity to a Drupal installation. Drupal seems a lot more stable and more customisable. Serendipity was only really a blog, but Drupal is a full content management system so I thought it might be a better idea to learn how it works!

Something I've been meaning to get round to for quite a while is setting up an openID server. I've finally done it! Even better, this server is linked into my ldap server which allows for consistent passwords for everything. Getting it working took quite a while. The openid-ldap software was fairly tricky to configure and the apache configuration was a nightmare for me of regular expressions, something that in all my geek years I've managed to stay away from in any depth. (I've learnt a fair bit through osmosis, but never sat down and looked at some regexp documentation). Read on for my instructions on setting this up.