Recently in Computers Category
Dublin Bikes
Just spotted the advertising for the new Dublin bike rental scheme - called, funnily enough, Dublin Bikes - which is due to be launched on 13th September.
With some 450 bikes available in 40 different locations in the city centre, users can take a cycle for free for up to 30 minutes, and after that it’s only 50 cents per half hour.
August 10, 2009
Simple Pleasures
Somebody showed me this morning how to turn the display of my computer upside down, and it’s been entertaining me ever since. I’m not sure if this works on all computers, but you could give it a go. Press Ctrl + Alt + Down Arrow to turn the screen upside down, and Ctrl + Alt + Up Arrow to restore it. Have fun.
MacBook Hard Disk Replacement
Last night I performed a hard disk upgrade on my Apple MacBook. The original 60GB disk that came with the machine has always been woefully inadequate from the start - particularly as I have about 64GB of music files alone. And so, up until now, I’ve always had to store my media files on an external drive.
The upgrade was inspired by various tutorials available on the net, and is made especially painless by the OS X Leopard backup tool Time Machine, which enables an easy restoration of files onto the next disk.
You can use any 2.5inch SATA disk drive as a replacement. I bought myself a 250GB drive from a local computing shop for just under €100, but you can probably get larger and cheaper drives online.
The physical swap over of the drive only takes about 5 minutes. Just follow the instructions in the online tutorals. But you might need several hours to restore the data onto the new disk afterwards. In my case, I had to partition the disk (using the Disk Utility on the Leopard install DVD), and install OS X onto the disk (taking about an hour), before restoring all my applications and files from the Time Machine backup - which took another couple of hours.
Asus Eee PC 900
I’ve been thinking about buying one of these Eee PC 900 laptops for the last week or so, because it’s so small and cheap, and would be perfect to carry around with me for a bit of casual web surfing and email.
I love my MacBook dearly, but it does get a bit heavy to carry after a while. Anyway, so I’ve been hunting around all the online retailers, and they all seem to be out of stock. And I suspect it’s down to the fact that a new model is about to be announced, and so the manufacturer has stopped making them.
The new model - the Eee PC 901 - is expected to be announced in early June, and sports the new Intel Atom processor, which is meant to be a lot more power efficient - thus giving the machine a longer running time when battery powered.
I spoke to a customer service representative from 20GB Linux White model will be back in stock in 3-4 days, they’re actually not expecting any more deliveries until mid June.
Techno Lust
I’m suffering from a bout of techno-lust at the moment — the uncontrollable need to go out and spend huge amounts of cash on amazing bits of technology.
It was sparked off by a friend of mine who recently returned from the US with a sub-notebook sized Sony Vaio laptop. It’s a real thing of beauty - albeit a pink thing of beauty - but my friend’s quite a pink girl, so that’s okay.
And it’s not that laptop that I desire. No, my love of all things Apple means that I only have eyes for the MacBook Air, the super-svelte laptop that grabbed the headlines when it launched earlier this year. Okay, so they’re mega-expensive, with prices starting at €1,699; they have a relatively slow processor; and a pretty small and slow disk drive — but despite all that, I *really* want one.
This issue is also clouded somewhat by the promise of an upcoming business trip to America some time in the next few months. That would give me the ideal opportunity to purchase the machine more cheaply. And who can resist a bargain, eh?
Well, I don’t know. This dream may just be that little bit too far out of my reach. And I may have to resort to another product to satisfy my techno-lust… namely, one of those miniature Eee computers. I don’t know much about them at the moment, but they look quite dinky, and I think they are a much more affordable purchase.
I have broadband
Joy of joys! I now have broadband, and can waste time at a much faster speed than before.
For the last six or seven months I’ve been making do with different wireless internet connections - all of which have been pretty flaky. With slow download speeds and dropped connections, its kind-of criminal that they sell these wireless services as ‘broadband’. They’re maybe okay for the very occasional web user - someone who checks their email a couple of times a week - but not for me.
Back in Edinburgh I used to have broadband internet over cable (Telewest), and had very few problems with them. In fact, over the 5 years I was a subscriber, I think I only ever had to call the tech support line about three times. And so I decided to go for the same thing here - or more specifically, I am now connected up to UPC Ireland - Broadband Express, giving me a 3 megabit connection.
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