hardware UI

I realized something recently. The only reason I’ve been happy with PC (and specifically, desktops) is that I get to control all the “UI hardware” that matters. The screen. The keyboard. The mouse. The speakers. The primary input and output of a computer. Behind those devices is just a box with cpu, memory, and a […]

Lenovo x220 one month review

I like this laptop a lot. It’s got a few issues, but nothing fatal. Pros: Light. Lighter than the 13inch mbp I had before. Probably about the same as the MBA 13 Amazing battery life. I don’t work too much on the weekends, but it often gets me through to monday without recharging. Top notch […]

Just when I thought I was livin’ the PC life, several things break on me all on the same day. My laptop has trouble connecting to the work wifi network. The recurring issue where my home desktop’s hard drive doesn’t show up on resume started happening again. Sigh.

Scrolling

Hurray for totally random sketchy utilities that make or break your computing experience. Enter TwoFingerScroll, a modded version of an old google code project that brings fairly decent two finger scrolling to windows. This thing is _WAY_ better than my x220’s built in scrolling, provided by the ultranav driver. It’s quite embarassing really. Synaptics engineers […]

Tools vs Appliances

PCs are tools, and Macs are appliances. Fundamentally, when Apple designs a Mac, they’re making a device that looks like a computer but is targeted at very specific use-cases. At one point, it was the “digital hub” idea. Now it’s added a “internet client” flavor. Their high-end stuff is arguably targeted at content creation. In […]

Two hour impression of x220

Test driving this smaller thinkpad at work. Seems plenty fast, even to drive the 30 inch screen (unlike the previous x201 which had the crappy old intel graphics). I didn’t get an IPS screen so can’t tell how that is. Bummer. Screen is also definitely lower contrast than Apple display. Touchpad is awful as usual. […]

ugh

I don’t get it. I can type for a long time on my laptop’s built in keyboard. But I can’t last nearly as long on the little standalone apple keyboard of the same size. Is it the slant? It doesn’t make any sense!

lion safari

The two-fingered swipe left to right feature to go back a page is cool, and the animation is slick, but it sucks that a lot of times, the revealed page doesn’t react to further scrolling for a few seconds. Feels glitchy. If the previous page needs to load somehow, I wish there were some visual […]