So yeah, income tax return time… Got a nice shiny MacBook Air waiting for me at home.
I waited to see what Apple announced at the event last week because I’d heard rumors about a newer MacBook, but I was less than impressed with their offering. A 12" screen was tolerable, since it’s a retina display, and the small-ness and lightness of the MacBook is nice. Unfortunately, it suffers from a shorter battery life and a distinct lack of ports.
Since I planned on using a smaller, lighter laptop as a device to carry with me and do things like programming Arduino microcontrollers and such, I want USB ports that I don’t have to carry a clunky dongle around to get. I think the USB-C thing is going to bite Tim Cook and crew in the ass hard. I’m also feeling very “meh” about the redesigned keyboard. I like the chiclet keys on the Apple keyboards and have grown used to typing on them. To make the keys sit flush with the keyboard and then actually recess into the keyboard? I don’t forsee this being a good thing for my fat fingers.
With my less-than impressed reaction, I was happy to see the offering of the Core i7 processor in the existing MacBook Air, so I ordered one with that processor and 8GB of RAM. Still only a 256GB SSD, but since I actually have USB ports built in I can plug in a variety of cheap USB thumbdrives and portable hard drives to do my bidding and hold all my Arduino sketches etc.
Now the real test will be avoiding smashing the damn thing.
I found a keyboard cover for my Nexus 7 (1st gen). It’s the only one I could find with a stylus loop, too. My old Macbook is getting hard to lug around for writing outside of home or writing group, it has more distractions available, and the (new) battery lasts maybe two hours, at best. Writing on the tablet is much more efficient and portable. I have to train my fingers for slightly new typing patterns, but so far it’s working out well!
We’ll see. Down here we get some pretty serious amounts of UV, particularly during summer. Most summer days the UV index goes into “11+” mode. Even today it’s supposed to be a “7”.
Your lens can take more of a beating than you might think. I’ve seen a bunch of photos of lenses that had their UV filters permanently wedged on because the housing got bent after a drop & made it impossible to unscrew.
I used to use UV filters, but then I started seeing lots of little reflections caused by them on my photos.
Worth pointing out that the battery numbers on the new macbook are all still Apple-provided. No one has yet published a real review with battery life testing (and every “review” out there right now is really just a write up of that person’s or blog’s brief hands-on at the Apple event a couple of weeks ago).
Far more concerning to me than the battery is the soldered 8GB of RAM and the Broadwell Core M CPU. Ugh. At least the macbook air still has an i5/i7 option.
I got a rack-mount surge protector/switch for my home rack. if nothing else, it makes it easier to switch the ‘white noise’ gear on and off. (This power strip controls my Cisco switch I only use when working from home, and the laptop power adapter for same. Also a couple old routers for lab use, but only they’re on even less often.)
Also, when the kids wake up, they will learn that Daddy bought Lego Batman 3 (on sale for 10 bucks) yesterday and it’s finally done downloading on their computer on the television in the living room.
They have about 170 hours (!) logged on Lego Marvel Superheroes, as Steam helpfully informs me. Well, minus the 3 or 4 hours I’ve gotten to play.
WASHINGTON — Maj. Gen. James Post raised eyebrows this month when he warned fellow airmen in Nevada that talking to Congress about the embattled A-10 Thunderbolt could qualify as treason.
“If anyone accuses me of saying this, I will deny it … anyone who is passing information to Congress about A-10 capabilities is committing treason,” Post told an audience of officers at Nellis Air Force Base according to the military blog John Q. Public.
Fully populated with 2GB WD Red drives for a formatted total of around 8.5TB space. Doesn’t sound like much these days but my desktop PC and server have just over 2TB of space combined with plenty of wiggle room, so I think we’ll be OK for a while.
I am very impressed! the UI is very slick, the performance is excellent and the things it can do are many and varied. RAID 6 allows me to sleep better at night, and there are a couple of automatic cloud-based backup options that I am looking at for important photos and videos.
Well not yet, but in another month or so we will be getting new windows and gutters in the house. This is not a small expense since counting everything up works out to about 24 windows (the sliding door counts as 4 and we have 2 large windows in the front of the house that count as 3 each). But these are super nice windows with lifetime replacements. If a screen pops a hole, I just phone them up with the serial number of the window and someone will be out within a week to replace it.
I’m not sure if this is a plus or not, but we got $800 off the gutters too. Ours are so horrible, they want to take some before and after marketing photos. So… go us? Anyway, no new shiny’s for a while. Good thing I snagged the Nexus 6 before all this.
We’re getting new gutters this spring as well. Can’t ever replace the windows, old double hung 1925 workmanship, most of them with the weights and ropes still attached., damned if I’ll give that up for aluminiumiumuniuminmoum replacement windows. I think there is a place that will put double glazed glass in your original windows, but that damn money tree just isn’t growing.
