I've Gotcher Policy Right Here
Today I recycled over twenty solicitations for contributions from
alleged politicians and activist organizations. I have never sent money
to any of them. I also set aside solicitations from four organizations,
to whom I have previously given money.
Here's the deal. The first one to actually do something useful which
makes the world a better place and lets me know about it without
bundling it with a solicitation for donation gets money.
From now on, I'm going to recycle without reading anything which even
smacks of begging me for money. Stop panhandling me. Get to work, you
greedy parasites.
posted at 14:48 PDT (-0700)
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A Laptop of One's Own
After I moved to the Bay Area, my desktop machines began the long slow death
march which machines undertake after they've been bumped around from state
to state for a half decade, and seen heavy use as development platforms,
house servers, and world facing servers. Which is to say they got gradually
less useful / available to me on a personal level. Meaning that for the
past three years or so, I've been using whatever laptops my job issued to me
for anything I needed to do at home. Meaning I stopped coding on my personal
projects, stopped enjoying much of the material the web has to offer. You
know. Pr0n.
But now that's changed!
I bought a laptop for myself, my very first just-for-me laptop, in May of this
year and as I threatened at the time, here's my review of it.
First off, what is it? It's an XW1560 from RCubed. I'd link to it but they
seem to have discontinued that model. The closest match is probably
their XW1580. It's about the same size, had the same CPU choice,
different video, similar RAM. So pretty comparable to what I have.
How do I like what I have? It's AWESOME.
I got a dual boot configuration because there are a few things I need to
provide technical support for in my superhero identity which require me to
use Windows but I only tend to boot up in that mode when fighting crime or
when a particularly exciting Patch Tuesday has happened and I need to catch up.
Otherwise the laptop runs Ubuntu 6.06.
Despite it being a dual core 64-bit CPU, it's running the 32bit release of
Linux so that I can have multimedia flash support. Remember that bit in the
first paragraph where you thought I was joking? I'm still making that joke.
One of the services RCubed provides with an Ubuntu pre-install are nice icons
to install proprietary binary-only multimedia drivers. That means I can watch
Windows Media and MPEG-n format video on this laptop and getting to that
point was painless. Yes, I know how to do that manually and yes I've gone
through that loop more than once but oh how nice it was to have someone else
do the work for me on this. The downside to that is that I'm leaving it at
release 6.06 until the next Ubuntu LTS releases, rather than chasing the
cutting, or even the stable, edge.
Things I do with this laptop which seem pretty cool to me
- watch DVD movies
- watch videos from the web
- use wpa2 wireless access points
- code in as many languages as I care to (I exclude here the ones which suck, ie, are proprietary or otherwise lack SDKs for Linux)
- boot painlessly into Windows when I need to suffer the Land of Suck
- use a number of solid state removable media with it, no gotchas
Things I don't do with this laptop but wish I could
- use the built-in camera; maybe a newer kernel / drivers will help
- use the firewire or E-SATA interfaces; none of my devices need this so the ports just sit idle and I couldn't tell you if they work
- go on battery power for more than two hours; my only real complaint, the battery life is shitty but I think I'm just spoiled from using other laptops
- make better use of the SD/MMC bay; all my solid state stuff is CF (oops!)
Things I'd do differently if I were to buy a laptop today
- nothing; this is exactly the laptop I wanted and I didn't pay more than seemed reasonable for it
Who might enjoy a laptop from RCubed
- people who want to get a dedicated Linux laptop without doing a lot of research / labor to get to that point
- people who like to use the little magic key stuff on laptop keyboards; they come configured to work with Linux (thanks, RCubed!, thanks, Ubuntu!)
- people who will not be angry when UPS drops the package and
SOAKS IT IN WATER as they did with mine; man, UPS keeps working my teats.
If I could change one thing about RCubed it would be to have them
provide shipping options other than UPS ones
I did buy myself a ShaggyMac screen protector because I'd been very
happy with what a similar set of laptop pajamas did for a Powerbook I
bought some time back and am pleased at how well that has helped keep the
RCubed laptop clean and crud-free. So that's a pretty cool purchase I
made, there.
posted at 12:06 PDT (-0700)
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Camera Madness
I went to a couple social gatherings yesterday and took pictures.
Photo sets here and here.
Yeah, they're in my regular flickr stream but evidently
not everyone subscribes to the RSS feed there or even looks at the
site top where I have the flickr badge.
posted at 11:28 PDT (-0700)
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