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One of the consequences of the macbook dying was that I had to cast around for another laptop fast to work off of. Luckily, we happened to have a Lenovo X300 laptop in we were testing with the (pretty amazing actually) 64GB solid state drive it has.

Not being a windows fan, I installed Ubuntu 8.04 on it. Here’s my impressions.

First off, the laptop is light and fast and really well thought out. As a response to the macbook air, it’s an excellent one and at least from my perspective there is no gap between the functionality of the two. In fact, I’d have to say that the IBM actually goes one further having the DVD built into such a small frame and a full range of ports.

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Well, couple of bumps getting it out the front door, as well as having to deal with a killer 6am launch time to coordinate the global media strategy, but the mighty mighty AI web team managed in the wee hours of the morning and well in time for the first of or media blitz interviews with CNN.

Back in the day when I first got to Uni, the plan was to be an astrophysicist. I saw NASA as a viable career choice. Academia wasn’t enough like Star Trek that it could hold me long, but I still get a vicarious thrill from watching space exploration and dreaming of alien worlds to explore one day.

The Phoenix Lander is just getting to Mars today and starting its descent. But the red planet has managed to take out as many probes as have made it to the surface of the planet, so the outcome is far from certain.

Hard to watch but important to see.

I’m not sure if anyone but a close bunch of friends noticed, but I took the blog down while I was moving some things around in the background here. Nothing big, but moved a few subdomains over to the excellent slicehost and off my old hoster TextDrive (now Joyent).

They’re still excellent, but they’re not about to upgrade their old BSD boxes and it was getting to be a bit difficult with working with new stuff like git and rails 2.0.

It’s well known amongst my friends that I loath cleaning (though I love a clean house.). I’m not sure why. I have friends who find it therapeutic. It may be that it’s because cleaning, and especially dishwashing and vacuuming, were used as punishment for transgressions when I was a child – in fact, I used to “design” small saucer robots with treads (obviously powered by imagination alone) which would take care of the vacuuming for me.

I’ve been using the Firefox beta for a week now and I have to admit, it’s a wholesale improvement over the 2.x branch. More stable, uses lower memory and the OS integration is much nicer, particularly on OSX with the default Proto theme. Works just as nice as Aranox’s GrApple that I’ve been using.

Haven’t really taken advantage of most of the newer features they’ve developed though do like the way they’ve added tagging to the bookmarking though I imagine it will be a little while before the Delicious bookmarking Add-On moves in line with it.

I just got through cleaning up and prepping my old 12" G4 Powerbook (quite seriously, the best computer I have ever used), to give to a friend whose 1st generation iBook is starting to wheeze with the things she needs it to do (and who is giving it to her Mom whose computing needs are relatively modest in comparison).

Now, as a preamble, I try to live quite greenly. I use low power appliances wherever I can, use public transport, take the train whenever practical instead of flying and in general, think of myself as a (compared to most people I know) as quite an easy-on-the-planet kind of guy. My problem is computers. I know they are horrendously toxic and everything about them from manufacturing to disposal is the anti-thesis of green but I make both my living off manipulating and making them more effective.

Scarily, most of the most popular posts on my blog are not about my fascinating rock-star lifestyle, but actually revolve around:

1. Getting your iPod unstuck (all time highest)
2. A macro I wrote way back for converting Word docs to dokuwiki
3. Software I use on my mac

It’s been ages since I wrote about the software I use on my desktop, and it definitely needs a refresh as the changes are huge compared to when I first posted on what was on the desktop , but I did want to draw some attention to some new apps that are out recently that are definitely worthy of attention.

If you’re like me and use the excellent menu bar extra Meteorologist to keep up with the weather everywhere you’re going (or want) to be, you’ve probably been pretty annoyed that it’s impossible to add cities for a while now due to a broken search function.

I don’t know how I missed it, but someone released an unsupported patch that has a better solution to fixing the non-updating problem than I supplied a /etc/hosts hack for fixing both the update and the searching and adding cities problem.