One thing I don't get about bitcoin is how the transition from paying for mining to charging for transactions is going to be handled. This seems like a big upcoming change now all this money is sloshing about.

I take it the plan for transaction fees is carefully worked out to make it still be attractive to miners and merchants vs charges for visa etc or have I got the wrong end of the stick?

There is no transition required. When send an amount of bitcoins to another address you specify how much of a transaction fee you are willing to pay to the miner who solves the block of transactions your transaction will be included in. Any given miner can prefer to solve transaction blocks with higher fees. Eventually it will get to the point that if you don't include a transaction fee your transaction will just be ignored and not included in the block chain. At the moment it will probably be included anyway because of the inherent reward for creating a valid transaction block.

Ive been using the VGA font since I started coding borland IDEs in DOS. I just cant find any other font that seems as easy to read. There is even a version of it with lots of unicode characters added.

http://www.inp.nsk.su/~bolkhov/files/fonts/univga/index.html

When I got a retina macbook the resolution meant each pixel of the font was 4 on the display instead of 1 so I tried and failed to find a substitute again. I ended up using fontforge to double the resolution of the font and smoothed it out by hand with some extra pixels. I like it even more now.

The readynas boxes are pretty nice.

i got a pro recently to share/backup a dropbox share over a network. The sharing, raid and backup stuff is all standard with the linux based os which makes it nice and easy. the pro readynas boxes are also intel atom cpu so its simple to stick the linux dropbox client on it.

This HP box looks much better value than the readynas though, as long as you want to install the OS/raid etc yourself.