With the advent of OS 3.0 being released imminently, I thought it’s time I highlighted a particular bugbear of mine on the iPhone - well not on the phone itself, but on websites designed for it.

As I spend a fair amount of personal time on the train, I spend it surfing the internet -often following useful links from this site, digg and slashdot.   However around once/twice a week I find that the link doesn’t take me to the linked article where I want to go - but to an iPhone specfic website “thats more optimised for a mobile handset”.

A lot of these sites don’t even have a mode to offer to “take me back to the regular browsing experience” - although some thankfully do.      Annoyingly those that do have the option don’t you generally to the original article - but it does at least present a way for the normal website to be viewed.

The only way around this appears to be to install an alternate browser sending another user-agent to the website in question - but should we really have to resort to the appstore to fix this?

So I am asking all website designers nicely.   Yes you can create an iphone version of the site…  but please don’t force it upon us…     Some of have iphones for the “real web experience” but on the move, not a “for handset” experience.

Please comment with your thoughts and a list of sites that appear to force this on you if you feel like naming/shaming these annoying sites…

My personal bugbear being a science fiction fan is scifi.com - which on my last visit forced a version of the site that you couldn’t get out of on the handset.

Hardly a year goes by without something seeminly going wrong with my PC.

Last week the graphics card died a death - nice corrupted graphics on the bios screen a sure fire sign.    It worked fine when cool, but 2 mins after booting, corruption occurred.    It wasn’t cooling as the fans were running fine..    So bye bye Nvidia 8800GTS to the graphics card maker in the sky (it was 2 months out of warranty typically!).

Now without a main  graphics card - it left me with research to do - I used tomshardware.com to look at which card would be best for the money, in combination with the 3 online component retailers in the UK that I trusted.    I ended up ordering a Zoltan Nvidia GTX 260 with 896Mb of graphics memory- for£135 including delivery charges.    I chose Nvidia over ATI due to previous bad experiences with ATI cards and drivers prior to me having the 8800 card from Nvidia - and overall being happier with the Nvidia 8800 than any previous graphics card.

When the card arrived, I was frankly amazed - it was a bigger physical footprint than the old 8800 - in fact it took difficultie and alignment to actually get it in the slot (I think I have 2mm clearance!).    I  also needed 2 PCI X addtional power connectors compared to the one before - this is the hurt fingers incident.     For PC builders thinking of using stanley knifes to cut cable ties, experience and a bandaged up thumb now tells me snips are the way to go.

Overall, I’m totally happy with the new graphics card - its a bit quieter than the old 8800 - and a lot more powerful - gaming using it is quicker.     And it cost considerably less than the 8800 did at the time I purchased it as always.