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My laptop is a second-hand X31 Thinkpad.

They’re an extremely durable and reliable device in my opinion. I love that it’s light-ish at 1.6 kilos but doesn’t compromise on the keyboard size. I actually purchased it just before the Netbook craze kicked into gear in 2007. Sometimes I wish it was lighter but I’ve read enough complaints from people regarding the keyboard problems on Netbooks that I’m happy.

I run Ubuntu on the laptop and it’s getting better with a couple of gripes. Originally in 7.10 there were some fan and wireless problems but now 9.04 has everything working except two parts broke that I’ll detail here.

• The external sound controls are no longer responding. Annoying but not too bad. I haven’t researched what has changed but I will update this post when I find out.
• A more pressing problem was a small change in the xorg.conf file. The result was a bizarre, sluggish effect on the entire interface of laptop that was worst when minimizing windows and scrolling a page in Firefox. By sluggish I actually mean unusable

The omission was (under the device section):

Option “AccelMethod” “XAA”

The responsiveness is back to normal with that inclusion.

I personally don’t need Compiz on my laptop (a waste of battery I find) so here’s my current xorg.conf file for anyone that’s interested.

Here’s a few lists of customisations I use in Firefox.

For web development:

• Firebug – All round awesome web development tool. Allows for on-the-fly alterations to CSS, the HTML DOM. Inserting break points into JavaScript, viewing any existing JSON objects in memory and providing a JavaScript interpreter for debugging.
• YSlow – Useful web profiler that adds itself to Firebug. Provides recommendations on how to optimise web pages as well.
• Web Developer Toolbar – I prefer Firebug overall but Web Developer has a few extra features like resizing the window for different screen resolutions.
• NoScript – Easy approach to enabling and disabling separate JavaScript files on a website.

My favourites:

• Compact Menu – Allows you to get rid of the regular ‘File’ menu in Firefox and provides either a small ‘Globe’ icon or the simply the word ‘Menu’ that’ll drop down and provide the regular Firefox menu when clicked. Saves a lot of screen real estate for the user.
• Fission – Turns the address bar into a loading indicator by representing how far loaded the page as a coloured bar spreading across the address. Similar to Safari’s address bar loading system.
• Download Status Bar – Does away with the regular ‘Download Window’ of yesteryear and provides information on the status of downloads on the regular Firefox window via a pop-up status bar.

An essential (but detrimental to this blog’s revenue!) add-on:

• AdBlock – Automatically hides (doesn’t even waste bandwidth on) adverts according to automagically maintained universal regular expressions.

Note: The ordering of the add-ons is not meant to indicate my preference or importance I place on them

Well I took a look at the exhibition my brother missed the opportunity to contribute to – here are some of the cooler pieces:

(more…)

Here is a photo of Chris:

Here is a photo of Will:

Saw this recent Coen brothers black comedy. The critics are loving it and I found it was pretty hilarious at times.

Brad Pitt and John Malkovich gave really great performances I think.

I recommend!

image source