Posts

My requirements for the next laptop were pretty simple: 3rd Generation i7 or better 16GiB of RAM Light and thin (jealous of the wife’s Macbook Air) Fingerprint Scanner Pointer thingie Run Linux Additionally I had hoped for a Nvidia GPU, but realized the Intel GPUs have gotten to the point they can play Civilization which suffices for me. Unfortunately the trend appears to be less is more for the ultra-portables out there. The toughest of the above requirements was the 16GiB of RAM. Most of the machines are maxing out now at 8GiB which is not enough for honest VM work. The HP zBook that was released was a good choice, but the ATI graphics and stupid pricing pushed me away. ...

I have run the hotel/apartment room server off a BeagleBoard-XM for a few months now. I had no case for it, so I was a little worried to have an exposed computing platform hanging out there while the cleaning team and visitors were around. This put me on a search for a ARM-based platform that was small, silent, and could run Arch Linux. Up till this point I had used the Beagleboard with Ubuntu due to the ease of install. Yes it is capable of running Arch, but it isn’t a seamless process. Additionally, being ARM v7 it was not able to run Plex which is my media streaming platform of choice for the ouya ...

I like to look back at the year and see how good (or bad) my investments were in stocks for the year. As the rest of the year is going to be crazy busy I wanted to type this while I couldn’t sleep last night. I doubt there will be any huge swings from now till 31 Dec. I buy and hold-on to stocks vs. quick trades so my goal is not to make a quick buck on a flip. There were a few interesting surprises and fails this year. I am leaving my overall investment dollars out so you just get percentage gained. Overall my portfolio is up 21% which isn’t my best showing, but better than zero. If anything this reaffirms that I should stick to ETF and Mutual Funds for 2014 :) ...

Most likely my favourite addition to my otherwise untouched BASH profile is the calc function. From the shell on my Linux box I can simply type “calc 2*10+10/1” and be presented with a result. Having been on a Mac with spotlight the past 3 years, this is something I truly missed. Additionally I missed a universal extractor that was easily accessible. File-roller works sufficiently in the GUI, but I wanted something quick from the CLI. Now I can type “extract archive.tar.bz2” and away it goes… ...

I started my day with a run and was lost in the writings of Norman Angell. A month or so ago I read his book, Great Illusion, and was awe-struck on how much pre-WWI Europe mirrors our own world today. He makes the case that globalization in those times would prohibit the tinderbox from catching fire due to the inter-dependencies. I see those same arguments today (article from The Telegraph) and feel a sense of misery from past mistakes being forgotten. ...