Sorry about the slow news over the last four days - I sneaked off home for my 21st birthday and discovered that there was no internet connection. :-)…

A bit random, but Astraware are celebrating Halloween in a particularly blood filled (and delicious) baking extravaganza. Included on their new blog (along with some dodgy staff photos!) are some Halloween recipes for spiderweb cake and spider biscuits. Full details here - enjoy!…

I arrived home from Tunisia at 4am this morning and have made a start on the mountain of emails sitting in my inbox. I will do my best to reply to them all today, but if you sent me one over the previous seven days and it appears to have been ignored, do please send it again….

Last week I took the dangerous step of moving to Vista RC1 as my full time OS, partly to experiment with Pocket PC syncing (it’s why I applied for the beta), but mostly because it’s new and I’m a sucker for shiny things….

Also seen on PocketGaming.de (yep, I’m getting all the news from there tonight!) is this great video showing a multiplayer game in Quake 3 between a Pocket PC client and a desktop PC… with the Pocket PC acting as the server….

…because my phone line was once again zapped by a lightning bolt, knocking out the broadband internet….

It’s rare that I lose my temper, let alone post the reasons why up on PocketGamer, but Handango has once again managed to infuriate me beyond belief. Case in point: their “What’s New” page for games, which would be fine if the page concerned actually had new games on it… but which currently has a completely random assortment of games released over the last five years….

Today is Mike Wagstaff’s 28th birthday, and I’d like you to join me in wishing him a very happy birthday! Mike’s name doesn’t appear on the front page of PocketGamer much any more since he got a job in the real world, but he’s the genius behind this site and it wouldn’t be here without him. I know he’ll be reading this, so please leave him a nice birthday message….

Not really gaming related, but useful nonetheless. Pocket PC Addict has the scoop that Macromedia has released the Flash 7 Player for Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PCs. I haven’t tried this yet as I just had to hard reset my X51v - darned thing suddenly started having serious Activesync problems. Does it integrate with Pocket Internet Explorer, and, more importantly, does Pandora work now?…

A couple of days ago I added a link to PocketGamer to Aximsite’s links database. I checked back today and apparently, 126 people have voted it a score of 0/5. …

“For the past three years, gamers and geeks around the world have raised nearly a million dollars in toys, games and cash for sick kids in Children’s Hospitals across the globe through a grassroots charity called Child’s Play….

Not strictly game related, but I’d love to know what freeware applications and games are on your Pocket PC. What do you find indispensible, or makes your Pocket PC that much more valuable?…