One thousand three hundred and thirty days.
That’s how long I’d been away from New Zealand, and how long since I’d seen my family in person. But really, it didn’t feel that long. Regular Skype contact and Facebook updates mean that keeping in touch with friends and family on the opposite side of the world is easier than it used to be.
Still, it’s a long time between drinks, and it’s surprising what’s changed.
Five short years ago I wrote an article about my desire for a Nokia N900. I was extremely enthusiastic about the device, which I saw as the future of computing and a sign of things to come. I also said:
Personally I think Linux usage overtaking Windows on personal computing devices is inevitable, and this is how it’s going to happen (although the capabilities of the N900 will have to move down to a much lower price point first). We’ll see if I’m right in 5-10 years time.
It’s now 4 years and 4 months later. I was right about Linux overtaking windows on personal computing devices, but I was wrong about how, and it happened far more quickly than I could have imagined.
In what could only fall firmly into the first-world problems category, I’m currently suffering a dilemma as to what laptop I should buy. My requirements are common – a good balance of power, performance and portability. I’ve decided the specification I should go for is:
I think these specs make for the best price / performance balance on most of the laptops I’ve priced up.
Just picked one of these up at the airport on the way through. They have been going for around £350 for the GX1 body and 14-42mm Vario lens, or £330 with the standard 14-42mm lens. Originally an £800 kit, the discount is because Panasonic is clearing inventory to make way for the GX7, which looks amazing by the way. Far from 2.5x the price amazing however.
The Sony RX100 and Fuji X100S were also on my radar. The RX100 is a great camera and much more compact than the GX1, but it has a much smaller sensor and is still twice the price at around £600. The only snag is that I’m going to have to spend another £200 on a prime to exceed the low-light performance of the RX100, but the result is a more capable kit, and it’s still £100 cheaper!
I also made the mistake of handling the Fuji X100S. It was a mistake because it almost cost me £900, but I quickly realised this and put it down before I could get more attached! That is one sexy piece of kit, and is in a different league IQ and interface wise. I would LOVE one, but at nearly £1000 (!), it’s hard to justify with the GX1 being such a bargain.
The GX1 won’t replace my SLR (no affordable wide angle lens), or my old Canon S90 (not quite pocketable). But it is much much less of a burden to carry than an SLR, will go many places the SLR wouldn’t. I shall be putting it to good use while in Amsterdam!
Just moved this site to a larger VPS. If you can see this message you’re visiting the new host so the migration was clearly a success!
It should also be accessible over IPv6, although this has yet to be tested.
Facebook has to make money in order to exist. I get that. I also get that we, as its users, are the product.
But this is taking things a bit far:
Google updated its Play Store policy recently, and the changes appear to be designed to reign in spam on its app store. One of the policies reads “Product descriptions should not be misleading or loaded with keywords in an attempt to manipulate ranking or relevancy in the Store’s search results.”
Amusingly, the description for Google’s own Maps app contains a block of text which would do just that:
Here we have a classic example of user-hostile software design:
Only option is to “try it out”
No one expected it to be Stephen Donald that kicked New Zealand's winning points!
A: Haha:
Not quitting my day job.
Despite increasing revenue by 50% over the previous month I still need to increase revenue a further 500% to cover the costs of running this site. And at the moment it’s a tiny 256MB instance on Rackspace Cloud which, traffic depending, costs me a bit under £10 a month. To run WordPress properly however you really need 512MB minimum, even with the meagre traffic this site receives… so the cost should be closer to £20.
What I’d like to do is be able to justify running a cloud load balancer with two front-end web nodes and a separate DB node at the backend. Assuming all 256mb instances the cost of that setup would be about £1 per day, which should be too hard to deliver on an affiliate site, even if it isn’t this one. Hmm. Project time. :D
While this site does reasonably well on a few Ubuntu-related terms, it’s not hard to see why this site has such a poor click-through rate. For one thing the articles are mostly tech-focused, and I know myself when I’m Googling for a solution I literally skim the article for the code blocks, maybe think “that looks right”, and I’m gone in 10 seconds.
If it was a particularly tricky problem or the solution was a good one I might hang around long enough to leave a comment but most of the time I don’t, even though I like receiving comments myself.
The other reason it does badly is that I don’t really want the ad banner to get in the way, you’ll notice there’s only one banner, and its to the right and not even at the top.
Plus I’m using a stock theme and update once in a blue moon.
This site needs some love.
Or for more people to click the following link and spend lots of money with Rackspace. ;)
