At the moment, I am engaged in mortal combat with the deadliest of enemies - the German government. Like any other great monolithic bureaucracy, the German government thrives on paperwork and I am convinced that German civil servants get a sexual thrill out of saying "we'll get that paperwork in the post to you and you send it right back to us!". But now that Skype has faxing capabilities with PamFax, I am speeding the process up by faxing stuff to them instead.

The only downside to PamFax is that you can't have stuff faxed back to you. So I am currently on the hunt for a good online fax service that allows me to receive faxes. Doe anyone have any suggestions?

PamFax has a very simple plain interface where you select a file from your computer to fax and then when you enter the recipient phone number and send it, the cost of the fax is deducted from your Skype credit. Easy to use and perfect for small businesses if you need to fax over a signed contract to someone for example. It integrates nicely into Skype and is very easy to set up.

Apologies for the lack of posts in the past week but I have been ill and not very productive. I've instead been spending my time catching up on my reading and also reading some blogs. I have also been working on my novel which I am determined to get finished for Christmas.

For a while now, I have been considering making my own Windows XP installation disk. Lifehacker mentioned it yesterday and it has always struck me as a good idea to have a disk with all our settings on it that I can just pop into the computer if we ever need to re-install everything (in the past 3 years, we have had to purge and re-format everything twice). But I lack the technical know-how to make such a disk and besides I need to locate our original XP disk first (I haven't seen it since ages!).

Having the original XP disk also means you can activate XP features which are normally deactivated. For example, I had absolutely no idea that you could send and receive faxes through XP. But to switch the feature on, you need to insert your XP disk into your hard-drive. Guess I'd better start looking for it. The attic is normally a good place to start.