I received a letter from Dell about a week ago. I'd assumed it was one of their usual advertisements until my brother informed me that it was registered mail direct from Malaysia.

According to the letter my laptop's power adapter could become a fire hazzard and has to be replaced as soon as possible. In a move that must be costing Dell an enormous amount of money, 990 000 affected AC adapters are going to be replaced free of charge, with the old adapters being posted back to Dell, also free of charge. Because you can't just pull nearly a million brand new AC adapters out of thin air, Dell has to remanufacture them, so it'll be up to 6 months before I receive the replacement. Although it seems like a long time to wait (especially when the letter goes as far as warning you not to leave the adapter plugged in), that only gives Dell a maximum of 15 seconds to manufacture and ship each adapter if they work around the clock.

For those with a Dell laptop wondering if their AC adapter needs to be replaced, visit www.delladapterprogram.com and follow the instructions.

Firefox 1.0 has reached 11.4 million downloads in just over a month. I've been using Firefox and Mozilla for quite a while now and I can't imagine switching back to IE. I hope that Firefox and Mozilla destroy IE's dominance so there is finally a good CSS implementation being used by the public.

My friend (who I mentioned a couple of entries ago) has now been transferred to the Royal Brisbane Hospital's Neurology Ward for further tests, treatment and monitoring. After waking up a couple of Sundays ago and not being able to walk, more attention was paid to him by the specialist who subsequently arranged for the hospital admission (which is convenient timing as the specialist is now on holidays...). He's been in hospital for nearly two weeks, but hopefully things will start improving and the plan is to get him back next Wednesday. Tonight he suffered more side effects, migraines and vomiting, from the treatment. Those are favourable when compared to the other possible side effects, though.

Signing off.

On Friday I finally set aside some time and took the first step in learning how to kiteboard, playing around with and getting the feel for a training foil. Even just the foil, which is like a scaled down version of a paragliding foil, was hella fun. Despite their small size, the foils produce an amazing amount of force; easily enough to allow me to skate using my feet along the sand, and with a bit more pratise, use it to pull myself through the water down the beach. After being towed on Dan's harness as a demonstration of the power of the real kites, the thought of getting strapped on to one is interesting (read: scary), but I had a great time with the foil so I'm really looking forward to stepping up! I know what I'm going to be doing for the rest of the summer :)

I also got the chance to say hello to one of the other regular kiteboarders, Juha, who's just bought a new Ferrari. I don't know a lot about it, except that it's very fast, very expensive and looks ridiculously impressive. I'm hoping I can get him to take me for a drive in it some time ;)

I've also been working on two new board designs, both of which should be finished this week in time for the general release of this quarter's Kiteboarder Magazine. The new designs have a bit more of a snowboard design style to them.

A few weeks ago I decided it was time to get my own Dremel, so I'm now the proud owner of the latest Lithium Ion cordless model which I'm already putting to good use with the work I'm doing on the pinball machines. I found a great website, JustTools.com.au, that sells Dremel bits and accessories, with a larger range and at more reasonable prices than the local Bunnings.

Speaking of gadgets, tools and toys, I've just upgraded my PDA from an e750 to an e800, mainly for the doubled screen res and larger screen (640x480, 4"), but also because I was starting to outgrow the e750's RAM. Having 640x480 to play with is a huge advantage when using a "true VGA" tweak like ozVGA with Windows Mobile 2003 SE. Suddenly you have four times the usable screen area, and that makes a big difference in GPS tracking/mapping apps like OziExplorer, as well as when viewing websites in Pocket IE. The only disadvantage when using the "true VGA" tweak is that the integrated Transcriber pen recognition system has a few bugs, but I've upgraded to Calligrapher now, which was more than worth the small asking price. It does a vastly better job than Transcriber of deciphering my chicken-scratch writing and has a much larger feature set. The PenCommander functions are particularly useful, allowing you to define shortcuts or full scripts to letters or words.

Since I have another early start ahead I'd better stop typing and find some sleep.

More updates when I get the time.