The contrast between my experiences of owning a Mac for the last five months and recent PC experiences has been instructive.

I recently visited a friend whose PC had become all-but-unusable because of spyware and viruses (not a problem on Macs – at least not for the moment). Now we just acquired a Dell laptop and we’re finding getting it set up to be something of a hassle.

While Bluetooth just works on my Mac, configuring it is a mess on the Dell. XP insists on sticking icons on the desktop that we don’t want, and several of the games I had hoped to run on the Dell (Battlefield 2 and Doom 3 for example) don’t work either, so I’m not even able to profit from the advantage the PC has in availability of games.

And the way XP handles multiple users on the same machine is weirdly inconsistent – sometimes programs are installed for all users – other times they only seem to install for the user who is logged in at the time. Not that I haven’t had a few problems getting to grips with the way Mac users and permissions work, but at least it has seemed more logical in the way it functions.

My wife just took delivery of her new Dell notebook. She is rightfully afraid that because it is a PC I will be tempted to spend lots of time on it playing games… But when we started filling in the XP setup stuff one of the two example texts given for the computer’s “friendly description” on the network was “David’s Game Machine”. She hadn’t typed my name in… How did they know?! 😉

I’ve taken a few pictures of our trip to Geneva and uploaded them here. It’s hard to go wrong when taking pictures of the alps…

Flickr would have been a better place to put them (it offers more flexible organization, easy commenting tools, more storage etc) but I have exceeded the meagre 20Mb a month limit on uploading pictures to their free account. If anyone reading would be willing to donate $25 or a reasonable fraction thereof to buy us a year’s Pro subscription as an unbirthday present, I would be grateful…

Ever decided to change ‘l337’ to ‘elite’ in a dozen (or a hundred) different documents? As far as I know there is no easy way to do it in Word – and certainly no way I know of to do it across text documents written in several different applications. This Windows program makes it easy – I don’t know if it would work on native Office files as well as plain text and HTML ones but you could try it on some test files and see what happens…
Thanks to “Tales from the Terminal Room”:http://www.rba.co.uk/tfttr/ for the tip.

A ‘smart bag’ that tells you when you’ve forgotten something. It’s one of several ‘smart fabric’ applications that have been explored in the bYOB (build your own bag) project at the Media Lab. This kind of thing has been discussed for many years now. I hope they stop talking about them and start marketing them soon – I’m always worrying I’ve left stuff behind when I’m packing.

My (French) wife turned out yesterday to vote for the European constitution but in vain. I can understand the French nationalists opposing it for similar reasons to those of our own anti-Europeans, but the idea among the Left that the constutition should be renegotiated to include more of a “social dimension” is just wishful thinking, and the idea promoted by old Left unions and right wing politicians that we should shut out the workers of the nations of central and Eastern Europe to protect our own jobs is both immoral and wrong-headed. Of course, it goes without saying that voting against the constitution to spite Chirac is equally misguided (since all major parties agree that the constitution should have gone ahead).

The constitution has plenty of weaknesses but if renegotiations did take place and in the unlikely event the result did pull the constitution further in a ‘social’ direction, it would be even less likely to be passed in Britain.

I can’t put things much better than the Guardian’s recent editorial:

For all the anger about liberal Anglo-Saxon economics, the text does not include economic prescriptions that are any different from those in the Treaty of Rome in 1957… the text does improve on the botched Nice treaty and delivers significant improvements to the EU’s rickety institutions. It certainly makes more sense to have a full-time president of the EU, to give it strategic direction and continuity, than to go on with the musical chairs system … It is a good idea to have a foreign minister to boost Europe’s faltering global role. It makes sense to reduce the use of national vetoes to avoid gridlock, to slim down the European commission to streamline delivery and to give more powers to the European parliament. It is good to have a charter of rights.

All of the above seems now likely to be lost or delayed or weakened.

To my small collection on Flickr. I have to say it’s pretty astonishing to me that my 44 pictures (mostly pretty rubbish or unlikely to be interesting for anyone but myself and family) have been viewed altogether 2153 times to date. Of course several of them were taken at a wedding which would help boost pageviews…

Having decided on a Dell Latitude 410 in the end (see comments to earlier post), I went online to Dell Canada to see what they would charge and found it would actually cost me 20% more to have my parents buy it there (never mind the cost of them getting it to me from there etc). Bizarrely, for example, they charge about 75 pounds for delivery in Canada… Of course I qualify for the education discount here which helps.

New GPS-based bus tracking will replace the never-accurate ‘countdown’ system based on roadside beacons starting in two years’ time, the BBC and Silicon.com report. I wouldn’t mind paying a small fee to get a text message when a bus is about to arrive at the stop nearest me, although these days they arrive so often we never have to wait long…

A bit like voice over IP now that I think of it – it became easy to talk to people over broadband just around the time that conventional telephone rates here using alternative providers (who probably use VOIP anyway) sank to nearly zero anyway making free computer to computer calling not nearly as advantageous…

The hard drive on my lashed-together several-years-old PC desktop has failed for the second time in a year so I have decided to stop trying to revive it and plan to replace it with a laptop that my wife can use commuting as well.

Priorities:
1 Durability
2 Good support (mainly good repair and overall customer service but
telephone tech support might help). Good coverage in Europe/US a plus.
3 light/small and acceptable battery life (3 hrs?)
4 acceptable games performance (don’t tell the wife!). Otherwise will just
get used for word processing etc so don’t need lots of processor power.
5 Not too expensive (< 1000 quid) Mainly on the basis of 1 and 2 I limited myself to Toshiba or IBM and have more or less narrowed down to: Thinkpad T41 or a Portege A200

Should I be considering an HP or other brand as well – if so which? Which
of Tosh and IBM deliver better support these days? Any “gotchas”/tech dead
ends I should look out for when making my decision?

My prejudice tells me the IBM will be the sturdier choice…