Once again, I’ve succumbed to my inner laptop-fanboy and ordered a new laptop. The previous one is now two years old and thoroughly out of date. Add to that its 3.7kg weight (on a good day) and its battery life which is somewhere between 1 and 1.5 hours (on that same good day), and it’s obvious that it’s time for a new one. Or so I rationalise, at least.

After months of searching and researching, I settled on the HP NC6000. See the ZDNet review and the Ars Technica review. It’s a goodie. Especially pay attention to the 5 hours and 42 minutes battery life under MobileMark 2002 productivity load (i.e. running Office, Mozilla, Virus scanner, Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Flash and doing stuff the whole time) and the more than luggable 2.3kg. To make it all that much sweeter, HP decided to equip it with an ATI Radeon Mobility 9600: that means I’ll be able to play around with those neato shader thingies.

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I just saw this in a signature of a mailing list posting:

_There are two rules to success in life.

Rule one: Don’t tell people everything you know.

_

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This is how you can configure your OpenOffice installation to use A4 size (or any other size) by default for your page format and print paper size: http://www.jca.umbc.edu/FAQ_Computing.html#1.3.

In short, edit /path/to/OpenOffice/share/psprint/psprint.conf and change the value of PPD_PageSize.

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Because I am supposed to be writing my thesis, the WAB-side has been calling very insistently. Well, every so often, it’s just too much and I have to WAB for an hour or two. A great place to WAB is my baby^H^H^H^Hsoftware, called DeVIDE, which is a kind of a thingy with which you can do visualisation and image processing thingies easily. That is, if it doesn’t crash. Oh wait, it never crashes. *cough*

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I’ve determined exactly what I want in a laptop (he he he).

It shouldd weigh 2kg or less, it should sport a battery life of 3.5 hours at the very least, its processor should perform at at least the level of a 1.5GHz Banias, it should have a 5400 RPM, or faster, hard drive (in any case no Toshiba, thank you very much, they’re dog slow, even the ones with 16MB cache), the 3D graphics should support pixel and vertex shaders and should rack up at least 7000 on 3D Mark 2001, it should have at least 512MB ram at at least 333MHz DDR and the screen can be anything from 12″ to 15″.

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This weekend, I started playing around with CoolTabs. This really useful little program attaches to the side of your desktop somewhere and is always available when you need to drop a URL, document or directory. In the same way, it’s always there when you need to access the files, applications and URLs that you dropped, but without being obtrusive. See the animated screenshots at the bottom of the CoolTabs page.

Under *ix, there’s BasKet, but that’s not quite ready yet. The fact that CoolTabs attaches unobtrusively to the side of the desktop is one of the things that makes it so useful and BasKet does not do this yet.

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Today is the day that I officially begin writing up my thesis.

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Usually, it costs us 62.24 euro cents per minute to call home to ZA. With the “voordeelnummers” discount of KPN, it costs 43.57 euro cents per minute. Obviously we’ve activated this for the numbers we call often.

This weekend I decided to have a look see at the alternative long distance carriers again. We’d had a bad experience with Tele 2, but that was some time ago. After a bit of googling, I came across bel1601: we now call ZA at 7 (yes SEVEN) euro cents per minute and 5 cents startup per call. Tonight I had the privilege of paying EUR 1.90 for 27 minutes of chatting.

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Why do the clever people at Microsoft persist in labelling their buttons with “Ok” and “Cancel”, even when these words have almost nothing to do with the actions that will be performed when such a button is clicked? Take this dialogue for instance (I got to look at it many times as I was debugging an ITK memory allocation error with 700MB of data in memory):

It would be fantastic if one of the brightsparks up at Redmond suggested: “Hey boys, why don’t we rather label those buttons ‘Terminate’ and ‘Debug’?!” But they probably won’t, as labelling buttons with descriptive verbs is Apple territory.

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It seems that (finally) my ADSL will also be upgraded at the beginning of April. The monthly fee stays the same, but my unlimited 1.5Mbit/s down and 256 Kbit/s up will be changed to an unlimited 2Mbit/s down and 1 Mbit/s up connection. I was quite happy with my download bandwidth, but the upload was getting a bit restrictive.

Now I’ll be able to upload home-made porn much faster to the pay-per-view porn site that I run.

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