Somewhere out there!

A study on 15″ Powerbook battery life: 15″ PowerBook Battery Life Tests.

Author makes some interesting suggestions about portable vs desktop Mac laptops.

Short review of the Mini Mac at OS News: The Mac Mini Experience. Check the picture on the first page, I didn’t realise how mini the Mini actually was. Its not much bigger than the tape.

A Friend and I were discussing laptops, in particular Apple Powerbooks. He recently acquired a Powerbook from his work, plus he has an old G4 under his desk, used as a server. He usually has insightful comments, so we often have conversations about this and that new geek gadget. During the discussion we started talking about battery life and the best way to charge. I purchased a R30 for my brother two years ago with an additional Ultrabay battery. It still often gets 8+ hours of hard office-type use running WinXP. Every comment I’ve read and my experience has show that IBM hardware kit just works. This should be the inspiring goal for any laptop battery system. Although following the “Conservation of Greatness” rule, I’ve been told the IBM’s service often sucks. Luckily I’ve never had to deal with them.

Anyway we started discussing batteries, and how to best care for your battery. Based on a page I’d read several years ago I’d always been of the opinion with Lithium Ion batteries, that constant charging is a good thing to do. This page had stated that Li-Ion batteries have a finite number of ‘deep’ discharge cycles. Thus it was better to keep the battery charge to preventing the ‘deep’ discharge cycles occurring.

Richard’s opinion was the opposite of this:

“Nah I got into talking with a laptop guy on this one, and it’s the continuous connected to the mains stuff that destroys them. Doesn’t matter the battery type, if it’s continuously trickle charged it will die.”

I figured it was time to do some goggling.

Sharp Zaurus SL-C3000 review.

Planning to learn a new language. I don’t have anything at the moment, so a good pair of headphones is probably worth investing in. These guys seem to like the Sony MDR-V6 (“Best Headphones Ever: (by Jeremy Zawodny)”). Also some comments here about this HeadPhone.

I need to move back to working on laptops as I’ll be doing a bit of travel. Been thinking about switching to a Powerbook, this seems like a good place to start: The Tao of Mac – HOWTO/Switch To The Mac.

Lack of an OSX Openoffice port, it probably the main thing that is holding me back. We use OO in our business, so it would be a pain to be without it. Especially the upcoming 2.0 release. I could of course run Debian/PPC, but that somewhat defeats the purpose. Then there is the NX option from my colo box. I’m not sure if there is a native NX client for OSX. Something to explore.

Doing a bit of research on Multimedia keyboards in Linux. I have a Microsoft Natural Wireless Multimedia keyboard, and as this guy says they make “excellent peripheral hardware”. He’s got some other interesting comments about Linux hardware, but that’s another story.

Anyway, I constantly get this warning message: “kernel: keyboard: unknown scancode e0 59”, on the console while installing new systems when I’m using this keyboard. Damn annoying. Couple times I’ve broken the keyboard input using random keycodes with setkeycodes, and had to hard reset. Damn stupid. So I decided to get a little smart, and while in the process of installing Debian on my new colo machine to go do some hunting for a quick fire solution.

No luck yet, mostly stuff for KDE, but a list of some interesting sites to conduct further investigation.

* Some comments about Kernel 2.6 and Extended Keyboard Codes. Nothing completely informative.
* The lineak project seems quite interesting for using extra keys in KDE.
* Although I’m not sure exactly how well it compares to the hot keys method.
* This article though has a very useful indepth discussion about unknown keys in kernel 2.6.x.

Finally a test the water Mac Mini, at the right price point.

I’ve found The Unofficial Video Card List very useful over the last couple months when examining different video card options.

Even though my Psion is doing everything I need at the moment, this PDA is still quite high on my wish list. Anyway I need to do some business development work, with PDAs and RFID or barcode scanners sometime soon.

• FirstLoox.org – Reviews
• Mobile-review.com Fujitsu Siemens Pocket LOOX 720 the third Pocket PC with VGA display
• Mobile-review.com Review of the PDA Fujitsu Siemens Pocket LOOX 720

Firstloox also has a nice comparison of the recently release VGA PDAs. The ASUS models also look nice.