PC ← A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way

I may have too many computers…

Oct

2012

I’m doing some dev work on an ASUS Zenbook running Ubuntu that I am carrying around. I have a Macbook Pro that I carry around for productivity and photography apps. A hand-built WIndows box at home for Steam (tho it has been frightfully long since I played a game). A Raspberry Pi, another ARM sbc, ...

ASUS Zenbook UX31a and Ubuntu — seem like a fine pairing

Oct

2012

I need to be able to do some Linux-based dev work while mobile. I’ve limped along using OSX and also using VirtualBox, but neither of them are really optimal, notably for ARM-targeted work. For instance, building a Raspberry Pi kernel and then emulating it under OSX is very very tricky, and doing it in a ...

If you are coming from the PC universe, the Raspberry Pi boot sequence is funky

Oct

2012

Read the “RPIforum”:http://elinux.org/RPi_Software outline carefully. No boot rom, no boot loader. Instead: The boards do not include NAND or NOR storage – everything is on the SD card, which has a FAT32 partition with GPU firmware and a kernel image, and an EXT2 partition with the rootfs. We’re not currently using a bootloader – we ...

Dorking around with an intel atom home theatre system

May

2012

“Rich”:www.tongfamily.com asked me what setup I am using — here is what I have so far * Zotac IONITX-S motherboard with Intel Atom D525 proc Nivida ION 512MB GPU. You can pick up at “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/ZOTAC-Dual-Core-Intel-Wi-Fi-Motherboard/dp/B004V3X9D2 if you want it fast or there are cheaper slower options. * 4G of DDR3 800Mhz FSB RAM. This is ...

MSFT’s biggest miss — another facet of MSFT’s stagnation

Feb

2012

“Microsoft’s biggest miss”:http://minimalmac.com/post/17758177061/microsofts-biggest-miss is a nice discussion of another issue for the company, the slippage in relevance of Office. I can’t speak to the whole market, but my document composition has moved almost entirely to vehicles like Evernote, Dropbox-hosted apps, Google Docs, and draft emails because the absolute #1 feature I need is document availability ...

MSFT and the decline of the PC hardware ecosystem

Feb

2012

In the late 80s, IBM attempted to reassert control over the PC hardware platform with the introduction of the PS/2 and its proprietary “MicroChannel”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Channel_architecture architecture. The cloners fought back, customers voted with their feet, the PS/2 initiative failed, and the era of open PC hardware continued and flourished. This was hugely beneficial for MSFT as ...

Holiday PC Builds

Dec

2009

Time for our biennial system build exercise. We built two systems over the last two weeks. While I still use my MacBook Pro for 95% of my productivity work, the Mac game market is moribund, and there is some joy in building a machine from components. So for the fun of building, and for gaming ...

Mac vs PC anecdote

Aug

2009

My Macbook had a motherboard failure two weeks ago. Both USB ports on left side blown, wifi chipset blown. (Blame Tekkcharge but that is another discussion). Discovered this at about 4pm on a Wednesday, went to Apple.com and scheduled a genius bar appointment at 830pm same day. At 830 I roll into the Bellevue Square ...

Charles on the stupidly overpriced Sony Netbook

Jan

2009

“They seem to have built the PS3 of netbooks” via Platformonomics – Sony and the Joy of Overpriced Netbooks.

Samsung NC10 Netbook

Oct

2008

Amazon.com: Samsung NC10-14GB 10.2-Inch Netbook (1.6 GHz Intel Atom Processor, 1 GB RAM, 160 GB Hard Drive, XP Home) Blue: Computers & PC Hardware. — supposed to have great battery life

Dell Netbook

Sep

2008

Dell Inspiron Mini 9 Details. Pretty interesting price point. If i was starting a company, why wouldn’t I equip everyone with these and ask them to use google docs and other cloud services? Massive cost savings relative to the old way of doing things.

Kill cell phone speaker buzz

Jun

2008

Clever Uses: Magnets Kill the Cell Phone Speaker Buzz — an old but effective idea