Rubénerd!

Responding to my Compaq Presario post, @dai1313 on Twitter posted a link to the beigetastic PC box he had. I recognised it instantly, a early Dell Dimension tower!

While I wasn't a fan of Dell, there was something understated and clean about those designs. This was the height before everyone desperately stuck coloured plastic panels everywhere in a half-arsed attempted to emulate the entirely new iMac. Then everyone went black, and nobody went back.

Just as 1980s Commodore computers have seen a resurgence in interest because people grew up with them, kids who grew up in the 1990s will have seen these, and I'll bet a few would pay for modern replicas of their old machines. Laugh all you want, but nostalgia can be a powerful force!

What started as a post describing what a really ancient Compaq computer would look like spawned an entire investigation into an embarrassing aspect of my childhood, and even promoted WordPress to publish the drafts before they were finished!

That's an old computer

I have no idea how I got there, but a few days ago I stumbled across the above so-called Ancient Compaq for sale. With a title like that, who could refuse a look?!

It turns out the machine was decidedly less ancient than what I was expecting, but it turns out I had a soft spot for the Compaq Preario towers from the 1990s. These later models were less interesting, but I remember as a kid desperately wanting one of the earlier models that looked looked like a little spaceship. I'd buy one of those and fit it with a modern board quicker than you could say NOSTALGIA, if I could remember the model number.

Tracking it down

At that stage, I was ready to post this silly entry and move on. But a part of me was interested in what model of Presario I wanted as a kid. A few minutes on Google Images turned up which series it was: the Presario 5510! Relesed in 1998, the entry level Presario 5510 had these impressive specs:

• 266MHz Celeron CPU
• 64MiB of RAM
• 4GB hard drive and a
• K56Flex fax modem

The 5030, 5110 and 5520 to 5560 models had higher specs, such as 8GB drives and 350MHz Pentium IIs.

Clearly my 12 year old self had an overly active imagination, looking at that picture now it's embarrassing to think I once thought it looked like a spaceship. I suppose the curved lines resemble fins on a rocket... slightly. Maybe. Oh Ruben, you silly kid!

Still, it stuck with me in my head all this time, and now I must locate one and purchase it, if only to satify that little kid in me. If you couldn't have stuff as a kid, you can get it when you're older, right? And I could replace the internals with a modern board and use it as a file server. This is called justifying frivolousness.

As I've found with a lot of these kinds of searches, it was Japanese sites that had the most information. For detailed technical lists ranging from old computers to mountain bikes, nobody does it better than the Japanese. Their meticulous attention to detail impresses even my German genes.

I'll be mirroring local copies of these PC Watch, InverseNet.co.jp, pc-kaitori.jp pages, just because.

It is with a solemn heart but with loving memories that I bid farewell to an old friend of mine, my Samsung SyncMaster 2232GW 22" display.

Images were taken yesterday, 2010 and early 2008 respectfully.

Purchased in Singapore's Funan Centre during a sale in November 2007, she was manufactured in Malaysia during the same month. Clad in a glossy black plastic case with a elliptical base and generous vent, she matched my later 24" SyncMaster 2433BW perfectly on my desk.

Equipped with both DVI and VGA ports, she displayed images at a 1680x1050 resolution, a generous horizontal upgrade from my previous 1280x1024 display without sacrificing vertical resolution. The biggest difference was her 2ms refresh rate, a vast improvement over the 12ms and subsequent ghosting of my previous display.

She displayed imagery from numerous computers, including my short lived Nintendo PC (so named because the case looked like a Wii), my venerable MacBook Pro, as a second monitor for my Mac Pro and as the primary display for my Antec A300 Sim Lim Square tower. In those capacities, she's shown me Mac, KDE, Gnome, Xfce and Windows 2000 desktops.

This monitor was the first I ever owned with a glossy panel. To this day I probably still prefer matte displays, but I will admit she did render beautifully deep blacks provided I didn't point her at a window.

Earlier this month, without provocation, the display started flickring upon being turned on. At first the flickering only lasted a few seconds, slowing down gradually until it returned to normal operation. Today, it takes many minutes, during which time I get a headache even having her in my periphery.

Goodbye old friend, you served me well.

It's as inevitable as the WiFi failing at UTS: I go to an anime club screening or to one of my classes, and someone jeers at me for having a Mac laptop and/or an iPhone. When I ask why, they say I'm a tool of advertising, and that I should be using an Android device with three words in its name, or something.

I use Apple products

There are practical and personal reasons why I use Apple devices. Having tried the rest, Apple have the best after sales support and student discounts, absolutely no competition. The iOS platform runs the best of breed software for my needs. OmniFocus is the best GTD organiser, NetBot and TweetBot are the best ADN and Twitter clients, Sleep Cycle is the best health application. If I gamed, I'm pretty sure they'd be on iOS too.

Then there are reasons I don't use the competition. Android's anaemic and patchy font offerings don't please a typography nerd like me, and the platform is made by an advertising company whom I've increasingly lost trust in. I don't like the UI direction Windows Phone and Windows 8 are taking. Tizen could be appealing, but it's not mature enough yet. Blackberry has nice hardware, but not the software I need. My beloved Palm has all but died.

Foam foam foam!

Reading Marco Arment's Magazine article on the issue, I can relate to his experience. You shouldn't ever read blog comments anyway, but if you unfortunately do by accident, the web is saturated with angry Android fans.

As I said in the intro, this isn't just limited to the web, I get this iRL too. I have a hoodie with an Apple logo on it, and have even been accosted by Android users while waiting for a train, telling me with colourful language that I brainwash people and that their phones are better. The irony of their mob mentality was seemingly lost on them.

I'm not a sociologist, and am not aware what it is about the Android platform that breeds this vitriolic, knee jerk mindset in a larger subset of their users. I think it goes deeper than simple logical reasoning.

Whatever the case, it's a sad state of affairs when people like @TypeDom have to specifically say they're platform agnostic, then explain why. I should be able to just say I use Apple products without having to say I also run Linux and BSD to take some of the heat off. Having Tux on the lid of my MacBook Air seems to have helped a lot. Because yes, shock horror, I also use Linux. I must be pretty brainwashed by advertising.

Ultimately, people will use the devices that suit their needs and budget. For a large percentage of people, that's an Apple device.

From USA Today, even though it came out yesterday:

Instead of shoehorning the electric powerplant into a conventional GM compact-car platform, the next Volt will be purpose-built. That will allow the ability to better package the batteries and other specialized components, says Mark Reuss, president of GM North America.

Shows my ignorance, I thought it was purpose-built. The Honda Civic Hybrid isn't purpose-built, and it doesn't come with a premium price tag.

To me, this reads like a book coming out in hardcover for the people who really want it, then releasing the paperback for everyone else.

And now I've exhausted all my car knowledge, and have lost my train of thought.

Me, exactly one year ago:

For me, an ultrabook would fill the niche between my souped up desktop at home, and my smartphone. As a "power user" and developer with very specialised software requirements, I need the lightest possible machine with decent battery life, a full sized keyboard and the ability to run desktop applications. My back can't take carrying a 15 inch MacBook Pro any more. iPads and Kindle Fires can't fill that roll, nor are they intended to.

I was commenting about Intel Ultrabooks, but I'm now a proud owner of a MacBook Air, so it's all good. To use some of Apple's language, it's wondrous how all my above requirements were satisfied with it.

It also occurred to me that I used "roll" in place of "role", again. Ever since I was a little kid, I've used the words "dishwasher" and "washing machine", "elbow" and "shoulder", and "roll" and "role" interchangeably, even though I know better. Old habits dye hard.

For just over one week, I've moved from a Mac Pro, a 15" MacBook Pro and two X Series ThinkPads to an 11" MacBook Air as my primary machine. You read that right. So how is it working out?

Context

For the first couple of years of university, and subsequent staying home to look after my mum, my primary machine was a first generation 15" MacBook Pro. For a desktop replacement I could carry regularly between Adelaide, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, its gorgeously large screen, discrete graphics and ExpressCard slot were wonderful. So much so, that I was willing to live with the burden of lugging a 2.5kg (5.6lb) device around with me in a giant bag, even when I was just heading to a local coffee shop or to classes.

Now that my university is the same place home is, the pressing need for a portable powerhouse evaporated. Despite being a fraction of the power of that MacBook Pro, I carried a ThinkPad X40 then X61s with Fedora Linux to university classes and coffee shops. For similar battery life, they were easily half the weight and meant I could take much smaller bags. For the heaving lifting, a refurbished Mac Pro had far more expandability, and meant I could dismantle my stonehenge of external drives.

The MacBook Air!

So we come to this gorgeous, lightweight 11" MacBook Air my sister and father generously bought for me for Yule. I could rave on and on about it over a long series of blog posts... so I will. Stay tuned for individual posts discussing specific experiences and technical specs over the coming weeks ^_^.

Ultimately though, as one can't gauge how delicious a meal is simply by the ingredients that go into it, the technical specs of such a device are secondary to how it actually feels to use. That's a pretty airy fairy statement for an IT professional to make, and certainly I'm aware the MacBook Air is no slouch, but to me this device represents a fundamental shift in the way I live my life.

This 11" MacBook Air is fast, the battery life is fantastic, and its so small and light I can throw it into my tiny backpack and almost feel as though there's nothing in it. That, its charger and my Amazon eInk Kindle already weigh less than the lightest ThinkPad I own, and less than half the weight of my MacBook Pro. Weight has been lifted off my shoulders in every conceivable sense.

Tradeoffs?

And yet, I don't feel like I'm losing anything. Quite the opposite, with this form factor I feel as though I can carry it around with me everywhere. I'm an odd fellow, and inspiration for code and prose come to me at the most bizarre times. The fact I can just whip out this tiny computer and throw my ideas onto it with Xcode, TextMate 2, Homebrew, OmniFocus, TextExpander, MacVim, Alfred and Parallels Desktop along with the Gimp, Inkscape, LibreOffice Draw, Dia and all my beloved shell apps and languages is just... it's indescribable.

Perhaps having heard me describe my ideal machine many times, my family opted to spend the extra money on upgrading the memory from 4GiB to 8GiB, rather than upgrading the stock 64GB solid state drive. It was a wise choice; having used ThinkPads with 20 and 30GB SSDs, I've become used to the idea of using portable computers for current projects, and using rsync to back them up to my Mac Pro with its masses of storage. The fact my MacBook Air now has more memory than my Mac Pro blows my mind! But technical stuff is for the next post.

Suffice to say, I'm a week into using this machine, and already I can't imagine my life without it. If that's not a sign of an indispensable device, I don't know what is. #boom.

This. Is the single greatest video. I've ever seen.

I'd react the same if I were given a mint Commodore 64 box! I got my 64 (and 16, and Plus 4) second hand on eBay when I was 18, and have loved them. Born too late for the home computer revolution, too early to have the internet in primary school. Never used datasettes, but had 5.25" floppies. Feeling sorry for me yet?

Found by @elkeee on The Clearly Dope. C=

My first reaction when I saw this Hatsune Miku figure in 2011 was "jeepers, you'd get a twisted back doing that!" Today, I feel like an idol who's spun too far, though there's nothing virtual about MY neck!

"A curved spine is The Devil's roller coaster!"

As a young, healthy, immortal person who's only health issue is recurrent family headaches every few weeks, when I do get sick or have pains hit me from out of nowhere, I take the opportunity to complain about it whenever and however I can.

Since this morning, the back of my neck towards my spine has been in such horrid pain it's indescribable. I've had neck pain before, often when I've slept in an awkward position or that time I fixed a computer tower under a desk rather than bothering to lift it up and work on it where there was plenty of light and space.

This pain is different through. It's as though someone has a drill and is boring a hole into the top of my spine. As long as I sit perfectly still with perfect posture (the latter is probably a good thing to do anyway) the pain is dulled, but the instant I turn my head or eat or sneeze, I'm suddenly a drunk sailor.

My mum's cancer treatment often left her immobile for many days, and as a result I'd help her perform exercises to release tension in her joints and muscles. A common one we did for her neck was to have her stand in the corner of the room with her arms on each wall, and leaning as far forward as she could before the pain set in. Years later, I found myself doing the same thing this morning. I could feel (and, gulp, hear) things happening with my body, and afterwards the pain was slightly more tolerable.

Not the French bread kind

I'll be heading to the GP first thing in the morning to see what I should do. I've never done this before, will I get a referral for a physiotherapist? And while I'm on the subject, what's a physiotherapist?

If anything, this is a wake up call. I'm not a teenager any more, and can't afford to take things like my posture and ergonomics for granted. I liked to think I do the right things for my back and neck, but there are probably many more things I could be doing.

Thank you for letting me whinge ^_^;