I’m getting urges for a new laptop again.

The main requirements when I got this laptop (Compaq 2510p) were:

• Small and light-weight (it’s 1.4kg)
• Long battery life (~6 hours)
• Runs Windows well (it’s part of my job)

The Compaq has worked pretty well for me but my biases are changing. My new requirements are:

• Relatively lightweight (but not so worried about small any more)
• Backlit keyboard (I do quite a lot of writing at night but I don’t touchtype. A backlit keyboard would make both Kim and me happier.)
• High resolution screen (at least higher than the current 1280×800)
• Well over four hours useful battery life (i.e. I might accept four but I really want more)
• I’d still choose battery life over performance and I’d prefer it not to have an optical drive to save weight.

And while it’s not necessary, I suspect that any laptop that meets those criteria will have one of the much cooler solid-state hard drives. They’re lighter and use less battery, plus they have no moving parts so they’re more reliable.

When it comes to the operating system, while I’d like to have a proper go using Mac OSX, Windows 7 fulfils most of my requirements and is more appropriate to my job.

Finally, it’d be nice if it looked kind of stylish, maybe even with a bit of colour.

Contenders

I recently had a play on a Dell Latitude Z600 and I have to admit it was pretty good even though it was much bigger than anything I’ve considered before. It’s thin and surprisingly light for its size. Sadly, while the 16″ screen at 1600×900 has more pixels than my current screen, you’d think they could have increased it even more. Unfortunately it costs an ungodly amount of money and I believe the battery life is apparently atrocious.

The HP Envy 13 also looks pretty good. Stylish, good screen (1600×900 is acceptable on a 13″ screen), good battery life – but no backlit keyboard.

Dell have just put out the Vostro V13 at a good price but I really don’t want to stay with a standard res screen and no keyboard backlight.

The Sony Z is rather cool. 13″ screen at 1600×900, good battery life, backlit keyboard… why not? Sadly I have absolute faith in Sony’s ability to screw it up by filling it full of crap software and failing to provide good hardware drivers. It’s a pity because otherwise I think it might be the winner.

When it comes to the Apple range, the MacBook Pro 13″ is rather nice (and the price recently dropped). It fulfils most of my requirements (except screen resolution) but the styling is looking a bit dated and I don’t trust Apple to do a good job of releasing drivers that will allow Windows 7 to work to its full potential.

As normal, I find myself wishing I could cut’n'paste features from multiple models so that I could end up with the perfect laptop!

Late addition

I ended up with the Sony Vaio Z (the high-end version with a 1920×1080 screen, 8GB memory, 256GB SSD, etc). It’s a very nice laptop but my fears that Sony would do their best to screw it up were not unfounded. It came with 9 ugly stickers as well as a whole load of badly written Sony software pre-installed. Luckily that could all be cleaned up and I’m really very happy with it.

I thought it might be interesting to record what tools I currently use and how I use them. Ideally I could update it every year or so and thereby create a personal technological timeline.

And my first thought on looking at it? “Gosh that’s a long list.”

Tools

I do nearly everything through the following two pieces of hardware:

• A work-supplied HP 2510 subnotebook is used both at work and at home. It’s small and light (12″ screen, 1.4kg), but gets plugged into a 24″ screen at work. Currently running Windows 7 beta. I like it but want it to be lighter, get more than six hours battery life, and to have a keyboard backlight.
• An Apple iPhone 3G for portable voice, text and internet. Jailbroken to allow the use of software not approved by Apple. Favourite applications are Tweetie (Twitter client), LimeChat (IRC client), Scrabble, Quordy, email, web-browsing and Weather NZ. Stanza and Bookshelf are used to read e-books.

Data Storage

• All of my information is stored on a Dlink DNS-323 home NAS system with two 500GB drives (mirrored for total 500GB storage).
• This then gets backed up each month to an external USB-connected hard drive and stored at work.
• I’m not currently using an internet-based storage but I expect to be doing so soon.

Personal Communication

• Google Mail (wih my own domain thomasbeagle.net) for email. I use the web interface, and also occasionally check it on my iPhone too. I keep my work and personal mail completely separate.
• IRC for general chatting (MIRC on the PC, LimeChat on the iPhone).
• MSN for instant messaging with Kim at work (using the Pidgin client on the PC).
• The very occasional phone call on the iPhone. No other voice calling although I have used Skype in the past.
• SMS text messages sent on the iPhone.

Self Organisation

The most important thing about these is that they have both web and iPhone interfaces.

• Google Calendar for scheduling.
• Zenbe Lists for to-do list management.
• Personal contacts are stored in Google mail.
• SplashID for secure password storage (PC client instead of web as I’m not sure I like the idea of storing my passwords online).

Documents and Photos

• Windows Live Photo Gallery is used to organise and tag photos.
• Photos are published to friends using Flickr. Live Photo Gallery uploads to Flickr from the PC, while Darkslide is used on the iPhone.
• Other documents and information are stored on the NAS in a hierarchical file system.

Social Networking

• LiveJournal for personal/social journalling. However, its popularity is dropping.
• My own hosted Wordpress blog at thomasbeagle.net for publishing more serious material when I get the urge.
• Twitter for microblogging (also automatically updates my status on Facebook) accessed via the web interface on the PC and with Tweetie on the iPhone.
• Facebook just because everyone else does (and it has a great Scrabble game).

Information Sources

• Google is used to find everything.
• Google Reader makes a good RSS reader to aggregate content/articles from multiple sites. It also works quite well on the iPhone.
• Wikipedia is the first point of call when looking for information about something.
• The only news sites I read directly are stuff.co.nz and nzherald.co.nz, everything else is aggregated or pointed to from elsewhere.
• Digg.com is my main “find interesting things happening on the net” site.

Media

Unlike many people I know, I’m not much of a collector.

• Music is downloaded from emusic.com (US$10/month for 30 tracks) or acquired from friends.
• Movies come from the DVD store (although I guess I could download them if I wanted to).
• The very occasional TV program I watch is downloaded for me by Kim.
• Everything gets played on one of two original Microsoft Xboxes (lounge and bedroom), hacked and running the Xbox Media Centre. All content is stored on the NAS.
• The car has a Pioneer car stereo with a donated iPod (20GB) connected.
• E-books are acquired from friends and then read on the iPhone using Stanza or Bookshelf.

Gaming

• We have an Xbox 360 hooked up to a 37″ flatscreen LCD TV. Favourite games include Forza Racing, Settlers of Catan, and Zuma.
• The iPhone gets used for casual gaming a bit. Scrabble is good, so is Peggle and Quordy.

Infrastructure

• The home network is connected to the internet via 10Mbs/2Mbs cable. It is routed around the house via 802.11n wireless networking + cables.
• We have an old PC running pfsense (FreeBSD-based router) as an internet firewall/router.
• Everything else is a mixture of ethernet (gigabit backbone, 100Mb offshoots) and 802.11n wireless. This includes an AP acting as wireless-wired bridge (WAG54G with DD-WRT) to get content to the bedroom media player.
• We get our internet through TelstraClear cable. 80GB of traffic at 10Mb/sec (in theory) for $150/month.

Specifications

And just to record some of the specifications for future amusement (“I can’t believe it was that small/slow/big/expensive!”):

HP 2510p Subnotebook

Core 2 Duo ULV 1.4GHz
2GB memory
120GB 1.8″ disk
1280×800 12″ screen
DVD writer
802.11n wireless
Gigabit ethernet
Bluetooth
6 hour battery life
Weight 1.4kg
Cost roughly $3k wholesale

When at work, also connected to a Dell 24″ LCD monitor and has a bluetooth mouse

Apple iPhone 3G

8GB storage
GPRS and UMTS
802.11g wireless
Vodafone calling plan at $80 month for 120 minutes voice, 500 texts, 250MB data.

• about $5-15 for an ‘album’ worth of music. But only if it’s high-quality and unencumbered digital files. I don’t want your bits of plastic or your DRM.
• up to $25 on a physical book. But I use the library more.
• up to $10 on an electronic book, even if it’s encumbered and locked to my reading device. I’d consider paying more for an unencumbered one.
• up to about $40/year for access to a good website or online service (e.g. salon.com or fitday.com).
• up to $10 for an iPhone app, or up to $5 if it’s pretty trivial.
• $15 to see a movie or $17.50 if it’s in 3D. (Although I normally go on cheap Tuesday.)
• $10 to rent a movie on DVD or online.
• $1-2 for a downloaded TV episode.

Naturally it’s all subject to change. I used to pay $30 for a music CD!

My first computer was a 1990 i386 with 2MB of memory and an 80MB hard drive, scrounged from the offices of a local shipping company. Complete with serial mouse, IBM Model M keyboard, and 15″ color VGA monitor, it was my parents’ hope for making me into a competent writer, but it better succeeded in making me a PC gamer. This ancient machine, 17 years old, is incredibly outdated in the physical basis of every technological detail, except one: its hard disk.

This is the introductory paragraph for a rather lightweight article about hard drives. It’s also a great example of a writer saying something obviously stupid purely because it suited the rhetorical framework that they had chosen to use.

Yes, the hard drive does still take the basic form that it did 17 years ago. But when kept to the same level of required similarity, so does the memory, the CPU, the motherboard, the case, the power supply, and the keyboard. Indeed, the only two major physical design changes I can think of when it comes to the common PC is the replacement of ball mice with optical mice, and the rise of the flat-screen LCD monitor.

Don’t you just hate it when reality gets in the way of a good line?

They’ve got this new “consumer” bug where they think they’ve got to be a player in every consumer market. I think they would be better served sticking to their enterprise roots and not chase every consumer trend.

Enterprise roots? Microsoft may be the company that ended up changing how enterprises (I don’t like the term and it hurts me to use it but it’ll have to do) implemented IT but it took a long time to happen and they definitely didn’t start there. Indeed, the enterprise fought against Microsoft and their silly PCs for quite a while, and even when they let PCs in to the front office they still weren’t prepared to let Microsoft into the datacentre.

If you had to pick a term, “hobbyist roots” would probably be more accurate.

Now in the comments at this post from Rob Drury we get the Vodafone PR guy Paul Brislen boasting that “The front page of Stuff alone would cost a fortune to open…”

So, he’s using his company’s unconscionable pricing model to justify providing their own limited walled garden (Vodafone Live) that they just happen to make lots of money with.

They really do have no shame.

I’d recommend not installing it for now.

(I ended up fixing it by uninstalling it and reinstalling the Dell audio drivers from scratch. Other options would be using System Restore to go back to before you installed it.)

I’m kind of disappointed because Windows Update has always been so amazingly solid for me in the past.

Secondly, I have completely and utterly lost the habit of buying CDs and I’d hardly know what to do with one once I got it. Thirdly, I can’t really be bothered with the hassle of finding and downloading music illegally. (RIP Oink, I miss you and your universal catalogue of well-ripped and properly tagged music.)

Fourthly, and in some ways most importantly to me when it came to actually signing up and paying money, eMusic did it right. The music you download from them is unencumbered moderately high-quality MP3s. No silly Apple or Microsoft enabled controls on what you could do with it or where you could listen to it.

I enjoyed using the service and got some good music to listen to (we’ll ignore the album of death-metal I downloaded by accident). But last year it didn’t seem worth it to me any more as I had no income and no decent internet connection, so I let my subscription lapse.

But eMusic is cunning and every so often they’d send me a little reminder email, “Come back! We has musics! Join us!” And then they got even more enticing and offered me 75 bonus downloads if I signed up again – so I did.

But there’s a new twist on the old service. eMusic’s catalogue was always a bit patchy and it was often a case of finding something good to download rather than going there with a particular artist or album in mind. But now it’s got even harder as:

We’re sorry. This album is unavailable for download in your country (New Zealand) at this time. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Even worse, eMusic is sending me titillating emails that are promoting the very albums that I’m not allowed to download!

Yes, the music industry is back to its old tricks of trying to impose their will on their customers, saying that they’d rather not take our money so that their “product/marketing geniuses” can continue to play their consumer segmentation games.

I thought they’d learnt, that the invisible hand of the marketplace had given them a good slapping around and that they had resolved to not be so stupid any more. Apparently I was wrong and we’re going to have to go through another round of watching the music industry indulge in self-destructive behaviour. Maybe one day they’ll finally get it and they’ll actually make it easy for me to give them money in exchange for music.

Then things went from bad to worse as the meeting started one of those silly go-nowhere arguments. It was at this point that I realised that the developer next to me wasn’t earnestly taking notes on his shiny TiBook (they were new and cool at the time) but was reading some website about digital cameras. This looked far more interesting than a pointless debate about code check-in comment style and I had to resist the urge to read over his shoulder. I then knew that I wanted the flexibility of that be-anywhere portable connection.

I’ve had wireless at home since soon after that meeting, starting with 802.11b at 11Mbps, then upgrading to the faster 54Mbps 802.11g when that was released. This upgrade was partly spurred by buying a new digital camera – loading 400kB photos over the old conenction wasn’t too bad, but the new camera’s 2000kB files just took too long.

We’ve been waiting for the next standard (802.11n at ~300Mbps) for some time now and it’s still not finished. That hasn’t stopped a number of manufacturers releasing equipment based on the draft standard, including Dlink and the DIR-655 that retails for just under $300. Of course you also need your computer to support 802.11n (many modern laptops do).

There has been some scepticism about the real performance advantages of using 802.11n, with some people reporting disappointing results that are hardly faster than 802.11g. Here’s the results from my simple test of copying a 1GB file (distance of a few metres from the access point, 802.11n network using mixed g/n).

That’s roughly 2.5 times faster. I’m happy with that.

AGENTSMITH – The Matrix
BASIL – Fawlty Towers
BLUESTEEL – Zoolander
BORAT – Ali G/Borat
CORLEONE – The Godfather
CYBERTRON – Transformers
DRGONZO – Hunter S Thompson
MAGGIE – The Simpsons
PEDRO – Napoleon Dynamite
RAOUL – The Addams Family
RATCHET – Transformers rather than the Ratchet & Clank video game
REN – Ren & Stimpy
RIVENDELL – Lord of the Rings
SHELOB – Lord of the Rings
SHOCKWAVE – Transformers rather than The Shockwave Rider
STARSCREAM – Transformers
STIMPY – Ren & Stimpy
VERBAL – The Usual Suspects

Notable omissions:

• Star Wars
• Star Trek
• Buffy/Angel/etc

(I did consider whether there were any confidentiality or security implications of posting this and I couldn’t think of any.)