I've just had mail from my router, advising that some 1337 h4xx0r had been trying to login, and it had banned them at the firewall within less than 30 seconds. Plonk!

One can't really be too careful. They might have set the video to record Richard and Judy or something.

The pace of computer advancement seems to have slowed down, at least for me. In 1983 I had one of the first 16-bit (ACT Sirius 1) and in 1988 one of the first 32-bit machines (Atari 520ST), but it's taken another 18 years to redouble my word length. The new PC has an AMD Athlon 64 X2 processor. Dual-core might be useful when the operating system and applications catch up with CPU development.

It's quite a bit smaller - I beg its pardon, more compact - than most current PCs, but still too big. Nice and quiet, for now - experience says the heat sink will get coated with dust in a year or two, and then the fan will run continuously. The 19in monitor's pretty groovy (I don't think our TV's as big as that) and so's 2Gbytes of RAM.

Being a fuddy-duddy old stick-in-the-mud I declined Windows Media Center Edition™ in favour of XP Pro, and have now completed downloading the 47 Critical Security Updates (to Service Pack 2, FFS!) from Microsoft. It says 'ere it's Vista Capable, but as a Firefox user I can't check.

Annoyances so far: no wireless card option, and I had to take a hacksaw to the one I bought, to make it fit. The laser mouse (what?) has many features, not including the auto-double-click which was so convenient on its predecessor. The rear panel boasts four USB ports, but two are occupied by the keyboard and mouse. There's no Firewire port either, and so I'll have to use slow old USB for the iPod.

Hopefully it'll scream through CPU-intensive stuff like re-encoding Film4's DVD-incompatible MPEGs (the old one took nearly a week, on and off, to process four hours of sand). Last night it transcoded and wrote Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls in under ten minutes - good going I thought.