I finally convinced my wife that I need (well wanted really) a new mountain bike and today I took delivery of the Trek 4300 Disc 2006 model Managed to fall off it on the maiden voyage but I thought it best to get that out that way before I tackle to Bracknell Woods this coming Sunday

My six year old MP3 player just isn’t up to the job anymore and I have been looking for an alternative, on and off, over that last few weeks. Ideally I would have liked a portable music player that supported Ogg Vorbis but as my home cinema isn’t Ogg Vorbis compatible I decided to standardize on MP3. No flames please!

I have lots of MMC and SD memory cards that I have collected over the years so decided get a player which could make use of them. I only need a player for use in the gym and while cycling so it doesn’t need to be too fancy, with that in mind I decided to get the Sumvision XT105 MP3 Player which is super cheap and surprisingly good considering the price

Initial impression are that the manual was obviously translated from Chinese to English using Google, the included headphones are not much cop. That said, once you plug-in a decent set of phones the sound reproduction is very good and more than good enough for what I want it for and although playlists aren’t supported playback by folder is. That player is very light and very small, so ideal for use in the gym and battery life is around 10-12hours from a single AAA battery.

It is also Linux compatible, although I have been using a USB card reader to populate my memory cards with MP3s as the XT105 is only USB 1.1 and therefore a bit slow. I am off to the gym now with some banging tunes

I picked up a pair of new headphones yesterday. I decided on the Sony MDR-EX71SL headphones as all the reviews I have read have been very positive, and after listening to a few of my favourite albums with them, I am also very impressed with their performance.

Due to their earbud design nearly all background noise is eliminated meaning you can hear your music very clearly at lower volumes, this good for preserving your hearing and also prevents you from annoying people nearby with noise bleed from the headphones. Bass performance is especially good and you get three different sizes silicon ear bud so everyone should be able to get a comfotable fit, the smallest size is best for me. I chose to get a black pair but the are also available in white for iPod owners.

I haven’t done much work on Stanley in the last few days because I rediscovered ScummVM and started playing ”Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders” for the first time in years ScummVM is a program which allows you to run certain classic graphical point-and-click adventure games, provided you already have their data files, allowing you to play them on systems for which they were never designed!

So, I decided to organise my old adventure games for use with ScummVM so that I can enjoy them all again, but this has led to a couple of eBay bids to buy some games I am missing. I have used the ScummVM tools to compress as the game data files so I can fit the games on my iPAQ 4150. Life is good.

I have been thinking of getting a new solid state Ogg Vorbis compatible portable music player but haven’t found one which completely suits my needs. So, my iPAQ 4150 is now standing in as my portable music player too. This is thanks too the excellent GSPlayer.

I have configured my iPAQ 4150 to be a full time entertainment device. Here is my essential freeware list if you want to do the same with your PocketPC.

• Blue Sorbet Theme
• eazyUnZIP
• Pocket Innovation System Monitor
• cLaunch
• MagicSS
• GSPlayer
• PocketScummVM

If you want to make GSPlayer look pretty then check out http://www.gsplayer-skins.tk too. I am off to get myself a decent set of head phones today, more on that later…