semicircular.net

Ideal things to look for in a laptop

Regardless of physical dimensions, a fine dot pitch display. My current screen is a 15″ normal (non-widescreen) display SXGA+ which has been great. That works out at about 116 DPI or a 0.2177mm dot pitch. It’s well worth whatever it costs extra to get a good built in display. Screen DPI calculator.
No shiny / reflective display finishes. Quite simply, a deal breaker. I hate those shiny screens.
Built in serial port. USB to Serial converters are such a pain. Having a permanent /dev/ttyS0 makes such a difference.
A good keyboard, or at least, one that you could type on all day without causing injury.
SD card reader.
Reasonably sized hard drive and lots of memory. Probably more important than a grunty processor.
Sensibly positioned USB ports and other sockets. Preferably on the back, as frequently used ports on the side can be annoying.

December 31st, 2009 Comments

Links for 30 August 2009

google-diff-match-patch – The Diff Match and Patch libraries offer robust algorithms to perform the operations required for synchronizing plain text. (tags: diff patch software algorithms)
The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get (tags: journalism writing)
You work for me, Computer: Dropping Django (tags: python django)
Liquidware Antipasto: Introducing the Illuminato X Machina (tags: arm electronics opensource)
Official Gmail Blog: Send mail from another address without "on behalf of" (tags: gmail smtp)
Damon Young – Opinion – Dreams don’t come in instalments – “The point is this: Freud devoted his home to his work, we often devote our work to owning a home. But the urge to ''own the dream'' can become a distraction from dreaming itself; from spontaneity, innovation, reflection and clarity.” (tags: philosophy mortgage life housing)
SparkFun Electronics – GeoChron Blue – Field-hardened GPS Logger with Bluetooth (tags: gps bluetooth logger sparkfun)
Fixing the font rendering in Ubuntu – Johan Kiviniemi’s series of tubes – "If you’re like me and hate the blurry font rendering used by default in Ubuntu since 8.04 (hardy), you might want to install the following config files" (tags: fonts linux lcd ubuntu)
Starcraft II delayed and other Activision Blizzard updates | Technology | guardian.co.uk – "Were you really expecting to play Starcraft II this year? Activision Blizzard announced last night that the long awaited RTS game would be arriving in 2010." (tags: games starcraft blizzard announcement newsarticle)
Rental Relocations Australia New Zealand United States Canada – Hire Now at StandByCars – Cheap deals for one way car / campervan rentals. (tags: travel australia cheap relocation)
Bill the Lizard – Blog featuring programming and mathematics puzzles. (tags: programming blog puzzle)

August 30th, 2009

Links for 23 March 2009

Command-line Fu The best UNIX commands on the web – (tags: linux programming reference bash shell)
Chrome Experiments – Detail – Browser Ball – “Open new windows. Throw a beach ball through them.” (tags: programming javascript)
GlobalScale Technologies – SheevaPlug Dev Kit – (tags: linux embedded marvell)
ack — better than grep, a power search tool for programmers – “ack is a tool like grep, aimed at programmers with large trees of heterogeneous source code.” Like an internal tool we have called “find-in-files” but way way better. (tags: programming perl find grep)
libevent – The libevent API provides a mechanism to execute a callback function when a specific event occurs on a file descriptor or after a timeout has been reached. Furthermore, libevent also support callbacks due to signals or regular timeouts. libevent is meant to replace the event loop found in event driven network servers. An application just needs to call event_dispatch() and then add or remove events dynamically without having to change the event loop. (tags: programming event epoll libevent)
Cocktail Recipes for the Recession: The New Yorker – Nasdaiquiri: Add a dozen IPOs to portfolio, wait until bubble bursts, drink all day every day. (tags: funny finance alcohol stockmarket)
Glennz Tees – T-Shirts – Some of these are classic. (tags: clothing cool t-shirts)
Balsamiq Studios, makers of plugins for Web Office applications – (tags: software design tools ui)
Technological Wasteland: Use Mercurial, you Git! – “I ordered a version control system, not a toolkit for building one! If I’d wanted building blocks for rolling my own, I’d have gone to Home Depot and bought a 1 and a 0.” (tags: funny mercurial git dvcs)
Yahoo! Connected TV: The best of the Internet on your TV – (tags: internet yahoo tv widget)
EmbeddedPython – PythonInfo Wiki – “On yet another hand, one can start with a full build, and simply remove unneeded modules (eg Tkinter) to realize a reduced-size Python with little effort.” (tags: python embedded)
The memory fragmentation problem: Solved? – (tags: programming memory research fragmentation)

March 23rd, 2009

Afternoon light

December 15th, 2008

Morning Coffee

October 12th, 2008

Links for 06 August 2008

Leaving Yahoo – Chad Dickerson: "I'm leaving Yahoo! to pursue another very exciting opportunity: joining the Etsy team as CTO." (tags: blogpost etsy yahoo)
AP News – Unlike McCain, many seniors depend on the Web – "How unusual is it for a 71-year-old American to be unplugged?" (tags: internet mccain politics usa)
Freighter Travel – Internet Guide to Freighter Travel – (tags: cargo freighter passenger ship transport)
Information Arbitrage: Monitor110: A Post Mortem – "1: The lack of a single, "the buck stops here" leader until too late in the game. 2: No separation between the technology organization and the product organization." (tags: failure management startup)
Large Hadron Collider nearly ready – The Big Picture – Boston.com – Some amazing photos of CERN's Large Hadron Collider and associated equipment… but "I have my crowbar ready for any unforseen consequences" … (tags: photography cern physics)
Liminal Existence: Announcing Jabber::Simple – The Twitter Jabber bot back in 2006: "So far we're running just a single instance, and it's doing fine. Scaling will happen later, and there are a number of mechanisms for doing it elegantly." … and where the hell is it now!!? (tags: jabber twitter bot programming)
Eatability – La Disfida Sydney – Pizza in Haberfield (tags: pizza restauraunt food sydney)
There’s a large hole in the plane: pilot – smh.com.au – "There is a big hole in the belly of the aircraft near the right wing about three metres in diameter…" (tags: newsarticle travel qantas aeroplane accident)
A Guide to Cheap Snacks in Manhattan’s Chinatown | Serious Eats : New York – MMm, dumplings! (tags: food nyc usa chinese dumplings)
allconsuming: The seven hour roast lamb – "This lamb is officially called Le Gigot D'Agneau De Montgeoffroy… marinate for 24 hours, turning when you remember… preheat oven to 120C …" (tags: recipe blogpost lamb roast cooking)