WibblePress

Partly out of my own curiosity and partly because a friend is planning to buy herself/be bought one as a birthday present, I’ve been playing around with the idea of an Apple laptop.

Along the way, I’ve noticed a few interesting things.

Macbook – bit old?

Firstly, the MacBook seems ridiculously underpowered low-spec compared to its 13″ Pro cousin and, at least with Higher Education discount, doesn’t seem to be as much cheaper as it is lower-specced. The differences:

There’s also a collection of other bits missing from the MacBook:

• Thunderbolt and Firewire 800 (no real loss in most cases, I’d suggest)
• SDXC slot (useful if you have a camera that uses SD cards)
• FaceTime HD camera (I’ve never used the webcam on any of my laptops, someone probably does).

Before someone goes all [citation-needed] on those claimed differences between the CPUs and GPUs, Geekbench source and forum post with NotebookCheck graphics benchmark.

Now fair enough, there’s a difference of £130-150 between the two and the weight and thickness differences are arguably minute, but you’re still getting a slower CPU, less memory and a smaller hard drive (you could argue that either CPU is more than powerful enough for most people but it’s been claimed OSX Lion wants at least 2GB, you don’t really want to be at the minimum; just about everyone seems to be able to fill disk space with video, music and crap).

Adding the missing 2GB of RAM and getting a bigger hard disk in a Macbook costs a total of £121 (£80 for the RAM alone¹) retail and £103.20 (£68.40/£34.80) in the HE store, bringing the Macbook price up to £808.40 or £988 retail. That’s still including the other differences I’ve already mentioned.

Given all of this, it’s probably no surprise that they’ve been listed as “Don’t Buy! – Updates Soon” for a while now.

HE Software – huh?

After that, the really strange thing:

At the non-discount prices, iWork is £72 whether you buy it separately or as a build option.

Similarly for MS Office Home and Student 2011,

• on the normal store: £89.95 build to order, £109.95 family pack separately
• HE store: £76.80 BTO, £109.94 family pack separately
• £58.40 from Amazon, £37.89 from “Software4Students”, even if the site looks a bit iffy though they say they’re a MS Partner.

How does that make any sense?

1. yes, you could get RAM cheaper elsewhere; that’s beside the point [↩]

The weekend before last I did the unthinkable and bought one of those fruity tablet things – for what it matters, the 16 GB WiFi model¹.

It bought it from the store in Glasgow and it has to be said that the “experience”² was remarkably good. I’d reserved one online to collect on a Saturday and it was obviously going to be pretty busy but despite being warned I might need to wait it took a few minutes at most to find someone who was free. The person I got was partcularly helpful and all told I spent around an hour in there.

The actual collection process was a faff about. She needed to find a free computer and go to some webpage³ to get one of their stockroom imps to bring it out before we go and wait for them at the location specified then finally it’s to be paid for⁴.

She went through setting up email, a quick demo of some of the features (things like the multitasking bar weren’t immediately obvious if I hadn’t RTFM) and a few suggestions (things like http://ipad.tvcatchup.com/ and saving a bookmark of the user guide to the home screen). All basic stuff, but it was nice to get that introduction rather than “here it is, give us your money, go away”. Vertical integration FTW, I suppose.

On to the device itself – in general I’m surprised to say I actually quite like it! Beforehand, I’d been researching the return policy and, at least subconsciously, expecting I’d hate it and want to get rid.

If I had to change one thing it would be the screen – a higher resolution would make text a lot nicer to read. On the other hand, no other device does any better (for example, the Motorola Xoom: near enough the same pixel density albeit at a different aspect ratio).
I still don’t get why you’d want to watch videos on it (besides the sort of casual YouTube browsing that works on a phone). The screen’s AR is just wrong and although it doesn’t eat up battery power quite like I expected it to, it just seems like a bad idea. I know some people do it, though.

One real surprise, having used (and written apps for) an Android phone, is the size of apps. The storage space appears to be contiguous (rather than internal/external but built in/SD like on Android) so it seems less of an issue for iOS apps to be much bigger. For example, I’ve got Angry Birds installed on both devices: on Android, the app is <20MB (dropping to ~2MB if the "move to SD" option is used) whereas the iOS version is ~50MB. There are video cookbook apps which are coming on for 1GB!

The title's partly inspired by the reaction I've had from some people -- someone described it as a "dirty little secret" , another seems to have gone running⁵ saying I'd "abandoned my principles" (?!).

One last thing – 670MB software update, for a point release (4.3.2), what the hell?

1. I didn’t see much point paying the extra for 3G; I have a phone that will work as a wifi hotspot and a tablet’s not something I can see me taking out of the house *that* often anyway [↩]
2. Not the best term; I’m exchanging money for a product not getting married [↩]
3. I hope it was internal, not that I can recall the address either way [↩]
4. What happened to the combined iPhone/card reader devices? This was a standard PIN pad [↩]
5. To her mother of all people...long story! [↩]

Every other year, Duncan Smeed holds “Gunk Dunc” — having water, wet sponges and the titular “gunk” chucked at him — to raise money for Comic Relief.

Some photos were taken¹:

Although after tipping this²:

some payback was had:

…and £770 was raised. All very good fun!

1. 500, circa 6GB’s worth! [↩]
2. gelatine, Irn Bru, custard powder, Bovril, food colouring, cornflour, golden syrup [↩]

I meant to post this long before now but other stuff and general procrastination got in the way.

So last year it seemed like a good idea to take some kind of look at the year that had just gone, through the lens of the stats I gather on Daytum. This is the same again for the year that’s about to end.
I suppose these are like a much duller version of Nicholas Felton’s annual reports. Getting to the point, a comparison between this year and last:

So the tl;dr version: twice as much tea (six cups a day!?) and water, lots less orange juice.

The other stuff I mentioned last year:

• 442 car journeys (about twice every 2 days)
• 132 shaves (about twice every 5 days)
• 250 bus journeys (i.e. 2 every 3 days)

Last time I said I’d like an S60-native interface; since then I’ve done away with my Nokia N96 for an HTC Desire (running Android). An iPhone app recently entered some sort of beta and apparently the API is “built out enough for the iphone app” that they could give access to it but there’s no sign of that so far.

I also said I’d struggle to justify the price of a “pro” account – eventually I wanted more “displays” (views into the data to which some criteria can be applied, e.g. a pie chart of drinks in the last year) so I upgraded.
The privacy options were a nice addition but I’m not sure that privacy is something you should have to pay for.

It feels as if progress on the whole site has slowed to a crawl — I’m not sure whether the issue is time, finance or something completely different.

Almost a year ago, I signed up for daytum.com.

The premise of the site derives from Nicholas Felton‘s “annual reports” (linked in the previous post) – keep track of something you do (trips to the gym, drinks, distance walked, whatever; at one point I noticed someone was tracking their trips to the toilet and what they did while they were there…) and the site presents it with some pretty graphs in the same sort of visual style as he uses and also with some basic analysis (time since the last entry etc.). To be honest, I didn’t expect to keep it up (fnar) for anywhere near a year, but for some reason I’ve found it strangely compelling.

To the numbers…

After a year, I suppose now is as good a time as any to have a look at some of the numbers. From New Year’s Day 2009 to midnight on the 28th December, I’ve had:

1. 958 cups of tea
2. 719 glasses of water (with or without diluting juice)
3. 620 glasses of orange juice
4. 474 glasses of Irn Bru

after that, the quantities get a lot smaller (best of the rest: 192 cups of coffee; keeping up the rear: 4 bottles of M&S Christmas Orange/Grape/Cranberry stuff).

That still means, though, that in an average day I get through about 3 cups of tea, 2 glasses of water, 2 glasses of orange juice and a glass of Irn Bru (amongst other things).

Some other stuff I tracked:

1. circa. 485 car journeys (1.34 a day)
2. 230 bus journeys (almost twice every 3 days)
3. 141 shaves (i.e. twice in five days, or once every 2 weekdays if you assume every time was on one)

New things I’d like to see

On the last part, one feature that I think might be useful, analytically, would be separating weekends and weekdays or perhaps taking account of the academic year (i.e. separate terms or term-time and otherwise) Daytum do let you download the data in CSV format, so it’s possible to deal with those issues; I just can’t really be bothered doing it myself.
One other feature I’d use would be a more native interface for my current mobile OS, Symbian S60. Not having to use the phone’s web browser and the iPhone interface (which works relatively well, in fairness) would be nice. Daytum are apparently working on an API though, so it should be possible to build some sort of application to do it.

The last thing is the future – what Cool New Thing™ should I start tracking this year?
I think I’d be interested in the total distance I travel, or better still a breakdown of time and/or distance in a car/on a train/walking. I’ve toyed with using Nokia Sports Tracker on my phone (Nokia N96 all-black) but it flattens the battery in no time at all because it insists on using the phone’s GPS and data connection – a whole day would take a miniature fusion reactor to keep it going. Which kinda sucks.

Something I think Daytum could do better at is showcasing the novel things people use the service for.
There’s a premium version, which gets you more features (separate your stuff into pages, some privacy settings) as well as more categories and items to store data with. I use the free version, mostly because I’d struggle to justify the cost (four US Dollars per month). If I bumped against some of the limits of the free account (here’s the opportunity to promote novel, or otherwise, uses and make some money out of it), I’d consider upgrading.

A week past on Saturday I went to Glasgow’s Zombie Walk to take photos of the brain-munching undead…it was fun, and here’s hoping next year’s even better!

Some of the photos I took that have made it to Flickr so far…

I did mention there’d be computer assemblage porn in my last post but in the end that didn’t happen. I guess at some point I’ll need to have the side off to connect some of the extra ports that were included though so there is some potential for computer pr0n yet.

I did, however perform some comparison with the i7 CPU in that machine doing some useful real world task: compiling Firefox (from mozilla-central) and Thunderbird (from comm-central) on Linux.
VMWare Workstation only allows the assignment of a maximum of two processors to a VM, but it still manages to do the job ~25% faster than my laptop (Dell Latitude D820, T7200, 2GB RAM running Ubuntu), churning out a completed build of either from scratch in about twenty minutes.

Running Debian in a virtual machine was always going to be a requirement (it’s useful for a lot of things, including some far too risky to attempt on the live machines; it’s something I also do on the X2 3800+ and something the i7′s extra 6 “processors” come in handy for).

The machine was running the Windows 7 Release Candidate, but using either VMWare or VirtualBox on there is just one big clusterfsck. The Debian installer locks solid at some point along the way in both, and using NAT in VMWare is also busted.
Fortunately I’ve got spare Vista licenses up the wazoo, so it wasn’t hard to step back to Vista Ultimate while waiting for a fixed VMWare and the release of Windows 7.

My just-over-three year old desktop machine was due a replacement.

    type     |                       name
-------------+---------------------------------------------------
 Motherboard | Asus P6T Deluxe
 CPU         | Intel i7 920 D0 Stepping Retail
 RAM         | OCZ 6GB PC3-12800C8 DDR3 (3x2GB) (OCZ3G1600LV6GK)
 Case        | Lian-Li PC-A71B
 Graphics    | XFX Radeon HD 4890 1GB
 HDD         | Western Digital Caviar Black WD640AALS
 PSU         | Antec TruePower New 650W
 DVD-RW      | LG GH22NS40
 Backup HDD  | Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EADS
 CPU Cooler  | Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme
 Fan         | Noctua NF-P12 120mm
(11 rows)

Initially, it’ll be running some version of Windows 7 (though I also have a spare Vista license) but given it’s not released there’s no point considering how much that’ll cost for now.

The plan is to put the two WD6401AALSs in a RAID array then backup in some manner to the WD10EADS. Given the price of RAM (£70.99 for 3x2GB), I’m half-tempted to go nuts and have 12GB of RAM.

Some sort of computer-assemblage pr0n to follow – the motherboard and CPU cooler should be with me tomorrow…

Before Christmas I hired a Canon 100mm f/2.8 macro lens from Lenses For Hire. It’s a really nice lens, although, as with any macro lens the depth of field at the minimum focus distance (32cm) is rather small (~1mm at f/2.8, ~4mm at f/11)

So I bought one…a few shots from the other day:

Next order of business is a new camera bag and a decent tripod.

A while ago, in response to someone commenting about Opera being faster than Firefox I posted this, among others, based on my own testing:

(Results are from the Sunspider JS benchmark. Opera 9.60, Chrome 0.2.149.30, Firefox nightly is from the 17th October 2008)

Before anyone points it out, I get that there are issues comparing an Fx3.1-ish nightly with a release version of Opera but

1. There was no “nightly”/pre-release version of Opera that I could find, at the time
2. Even if you compare to Fx 3.0.3, Opera 9.60 takes~1.33 times longer to finish the test

Anyhoo, out of interest I reran the tests adding Firefox 3.0.6 and the latest Firefox trunk nightly, Chrome 2.0.160.0 and Webkit’s 40471 nightly.

I can’t be bothered testing IE because a) it would take too long and b) I wouldn’t get comparable numbers, because the machine I ran all of these on only has IE6 and it’s too much hassle upgrading and downgrading and sidegrading. The general trend (from messing about with it on Windows 7 and Vista on other machines) I’ve observed is that each new version is faster than its predecessor and IE8 more so than IE7.

TM = TraceMonkey, the new bit to Firefox 3.1′s JS engine. For the purposes of this, I set javascript.options.jit.content = true for TM, and false otherwise. True is now the default.

Obviously Sunspider isn’t representative of, well, anything (Dromaeo tests DOM manipulation too, and there are loads of benchmarks around, some more useful than others) but it’s interesting to see (I guess) that the general trend is for things to get faster…