New toy (and new blog software!)
Years ago I bought a fairly good scanner. I seem to recall paying over 200 quid for it at the time but in recent years I’ve not been using it as it had no drivers for window XP and needed a parallel port (which of course, my Apple Powerbook doesn’t have). I was interested to discover a couple of weeks back that some mad hacker has reverse engineered the protocol and made an XP driver. Installation wasn’t quite as slick as the original (tbh, it was pretty evil :)) but it did appear to work. Unfortunately, the scanner didn’t. While it maybe a driver issue it looks to be as if a section of the scan head has died (big stripes of magenta up the page). Then mich came home from work the other day asking if I could scan something for her. Ideal chance to upgrade 
After much faffing about and reading I decided on the Epson 3490. It is peecee and Mac compatible, it’s got good reviews and it can be used to scan film which appeals. Ended up buying it from PC world (a place I would normally avoid) using their “collect at store” service. Basically, a scanner that is 70 quid in store but 55 quid on the web can be collected at the shop if you order it at least 1 hour in advance. Odd. Still, I’m not complaining.
Now I just need time to play with it
A slightly less exciting upgrade comes from me finally plucking up courage to upgrade my blog software, wordpress. Dreamhost (my hosting company - *highly* recommended) make it stupidly easy with their new one-click-upgrades. One click and a couple of mins wait and Im upgraded \o/.
