Rubénerd!

Aside from the technological significance of the DEC PDP11 computers, I'm also so thoroughly in love with their design, colours, fonts and advertising material.

Quintessentially 70s. I want that chair! The carpet! The red walls! A bank of dead PDP11s for hanging my clothes in, with a Mac Mini running an emulator inside it!

Scan by PanelswitchMan on Flickr.

The webs are all a-twitter this evening about Seagate buying out LaCie, the storage company perhaps best known for their premium Mac hard drives, and memory keys in the shape of keys. I can still remember flipping through the catalogues and gawking at those gorgeous bright yellow FireWire 400 drives: they could hold a whopping 8GB! Needless to say, another enduring brand that I grew up is slowly fading away.

Of course, the story is a little more complex than what is generally being reported; Seagate is buying a controlling stake in LaCie, and may buy the company outright with government approval. In light of Google and Motorola Mobility though, I doubt this will be too much of an issue.

Aside from giving me an excuse to get nostalgic again, I only mention this because I only just blogged about LaCie. Looks like I'll need Makise Kurisu's help... again!

While attempting to find the right diagnostic tools for a bunch of drives, in my sleep deprived state I figured if anyone would be able to help, it'd be Makise Kurisu! I should have just gone to bed.

Pixel art by homura on Pixiv.

John McDuling for the Australian Financial Review:

Optus and Vodafone Hutchison Australia have signed a deal to share and build critical infrastructure to boost coverage and bolster their networks for the launch of superfast mobile services. [..] Optus will be granted access to around 1000 additional sites [..]

My sister gets excellent coverage on Vodafone in Earlwood, but Optus is bad enough to be non-existent. Assuming this gets ACCC approval, this would be the quickest fix for our area! Something tells me I shouldn't get my hopes up too much though.

A wow moment after reading Yahoo News:

Microsoft Corp will invest $300 million in Barnes & Noble Inc's digital and college businesses, valuing them at $1.7 billion. [..] Microsoft will get a 17.6 percent stake in the new unit, while Barnes & Noble will own about 82.4 percent

This has the potential to shake things up big time, if they play it right. Will the Nook become a Windows Mobile device? Will Microsoft use B&N in their phone's media store to take on the iPhone and iTunes? Will this largely ignored mobile platform and this runner-up to Amazon fizzle out? I don't know! The battle lines are being drawn though.

And before anyone asks, yes I know that Jeff Bezos is the CEO of Amazon, I just thought it was a fitting image!

As Bruce Leibowitz says on his photo page on Airliners.net, a rare glimpse at part of an aeroplane we don't normally see!

The Boeing 767-200ER was first introduced in 1984, so we have some pretty retro computer hardware here. Funnily enough, I'd trust my life to such hardware before some of the newer stuff coming out now.

Beautiful photo of a beautiful piece of classic hardware, John Gruber's Apple Extended Keyboard. I've been using an IBM Model M clone Unicomp SpaceSaver with my desktops and a ThinkPad as my primary portable computer since 2009; regular keyboards make me feel like I'm typing on a thawed fish.

If you type a lot, you owe it to yourself to use wonderful keyboards. They'll do more for your productivity than any other upgrade, and I'd hazard a guess most people don't give theirs a second thought.

What started as a mere observation regarding the obvious cuddliness of the Airbus A380 resulted in the this tweet from @johncarneyau, the tweet below from @DrRachie, a Google search and the above plushie!

@Rubenerd it's totes your fault I googled this! bit.ly/HL8Pru bit.ly/HL8ODU #want #huggableA380 @johncarneyau

I'd had a pretty difficult day, but this made me grin from ear to ear... in public! :D Who says Twitter is nothing but people complaining?

Quote from a 3/5 star PC Magazine review of the Samsung display I picked up back in 2007:

While I'm pleased that the digital port is HDCP compliant, I think a monitor in this price range should offer something more in the way of multimedia connectivity, such as an HDMI port or a card reader.

A monitor losing points because it doesn't have a card reader? No wonder my toaster only got 3/5 stars.

Sorry I couldn't resist, I've always wanted one of these.

Was intrigued by this graphic from the Windows Live login screen. Arguably all three phones are displaying the same information for each message, and (barring the names) even the text is a similar size. Yet iOS and Android manage six to seven full previews, and WP only does four.

I'm not arguing message counts and more efficient layouts automatically correlate with increased productivity or usability, but it'd certainly cut down on time spent scrolling!