Well it's Xmas day, we've watched Doctor Who and eaten too much cake. The hit of the day is our new Nintendo Wii. We thought we might not have one by now due to the general shortage of units in the shops, but one came up in a charity auction at work and I won without paying much over RRP. So far all we have is the standard pack withe Wii Sports plus the Wii Play games that came with an extra remote.

I've not played much with consoles of the last few years and so am very impressed. The motion-sensing remotes are very intuitive and the graphics look fine on out old TV even though it's only using composite video. Sound is in Pro Logic through the surround system and sounds good. The games are fun for all the family. I look forward to getting something more involved, but fear that this will eat up all my free time. There are annoyances such as the safety warning screens that keep appearing warning you to use the wrist straps and take breaks. They get boring fast. I bet their lawyers insisted on them.

I've not been reading up too much on what is available and worth getting for the Wii, so I am open to suggestions. I know a few of my readers have them. Leave comments or email me if you prefer.

I'm still messing with the bass. I've found some good sites for instruction and inspiration. These include:

• TalkBass.com - a very active forum
• GuitarNoise - has a nice series of tutorials, including Pink Floyd's Money
• Beautiful Bass Podcast - Solo player Jeff Schmidt talks about his own playing and that of his friends. Amazing stuff that I don't even aspire to yet.

I've still not done any recording due to on-going problems with Ubuntu and my hardware, but today I discovered that I could record in Audacity as it was using OSS rather than ALSA for input. I might try doing something with that in my days off this week.

I did a few updates on this site recently. I removed some non-working external links and fixed my favicon that was being diverted by the static page plug-in. On the static page front I have added a few more about my music, computer and green activities. Only the first has much content for now. I shall write up the others as I find time. Those pages also allow for comments if you want to use them. I'm happy to take emails, but comments can make the site more useful if they contribute information on the topic.

I'll probably write again soon, but I'll say happy new year now anyway.