11 Feb 2006
I found the perfect laptop for me. It’s cheap ($700, plus whatever it’d cost me to add wireless and 512MB of memory to it — has 256 at the minute), compact (12.1″), and insanely lightweight (3.53 pounds, which Google reliably informs me is 1.6KG).
But it’s an IBM, so it’s not an option. I didn’t realise this until after I’d got all excited over the specs and it was a shattering moment!
IBM have always epitomised appalling laptop design for me, mostly because of their insistance on a joystick as a mouse (what the HELL is with that?!) but also because of the inanity of their decision to arbitrarily change the layout of the keyboard… particularly omitting a Start key. I don’t care if I use Linux… I’ve mapped my start key in Ubuntu so that it works the same way! It’s a brilliant innovation (unless, of course, you’re a gamer with chunky fingers and dislike being dumped out of games… though that ceased to be a problem post-3dfx/dedicated 3D-accelleration-only cards!), and IBM have to go and ruin it for everyone. Angry angry angry.
It was such a nice laptop…
10 Feb 2006
Or, at least, I think they must think that everyone else thinks that they are. (Read that slowly).
A while back we filmed something and had a preview monitor underneath one of the cameras, which was pretty funny because whenever we were looking at it we appeared to be asleep (because our eyes were pointing down + eyelids followed, relative to the camera). It occurred to me on a bus today (observing someone’s eyes in a mirror overhead) that tall people must think that everyone they’re around must be constantly falling asleep, perhaps attributing it to their presence, as in other images people never look that sleepy!
Then again, maybe it’s just down to people who don’t make eye-contact enough (too-often me, as some have observed in the past!)
Shrug, struck me as being an interesting idea. Probably doesn’t actually work that way, but it’s kinda funny to think that the taller you are the more sleepy the rest of the world seems ;-)
10 Feb 2006
I’m vaguely hunting for a laptop. Well, okay, a little more than vaguely–but as they’re reputedly one of the more-commonly-fraudulent items listed on eBay, use of that service as a purchasing vehicle is less than certain.
Software piracy also features… but, of course, there seems to be little that can be done to actually report this (if eBay have a “Report violation” link, it’s adequately hidden from me). Observe this question from earlier today on an iBook with OS 10.4.4 and Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign, and MS Office for Mac included:
Me: Does this come with original CDs + licenses for OS 10.4, MS Office for Mac and Adobe software?
Seller: No.
(Yeah, that was fulltext of the question + answer!)
And on another listing (I didn’t ask the question on this one!) advertised as including iLife 06, MS Office 2004 and Adobe CS2:
Q: Are you selling the software disks too?
A: No. I’ve installed the software, and all the apps work, but I’m only going to be sending the laptop and its power cable. Thanks.
Sigh.
(p.s. though it may appear this way from this post, I’m not convinced I want a Mac laptop anymore. In fact, I’d probably prefer a PC because they’re lighter + cheaper than their Apple counterparts)
08 Feb 2006
Stumbled across this picture of more surveillance cameras than that bar should realistically be able to hold on Flickr today whilst building an RSS integration thingy (so, yeah, work related!)
Scary, huh?
07 Feb 2006
It works surprisingly well. I moved a site off a crappy server (so crappy, in fact, that core dumps were winding up in my public_html directory! Lame-o.) that wouldn’t let me have SSH access this evening to one that did, and tried for a while to get my head around *nix ftp‘s recursive get… then gave up, because whatever’s documented out there obviously wasn’t working for me.
Then I remembered wget (which I use all the time for grabbing big files, because I can just background the process and not think about it til I wonder “Hey, where’d this several-GB file on my desktop come from?”) had FTP capabilities and could spider websites. Recursive get shouldn’t be a problem!
And it wasn’t.
Just use wget -r ftp://login:password@example.org/public_html/ (or similar) and the server you’re on will happily leech from an older one! Good stuff.