Ive got a small and very underpowered System76 meerkat hooked up to my LCD TV.  The meerkat is the first “net top” they released in 2009 which you can think of as the desktop equivalent of a netbook (remember those?) and shipped with an Atom processor, one GB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive.  It came in with Ubuntu 8.10, but has been upgraded many times over the last three years and currently runs Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.  Although its integrated Intel video makes it feel slow, it boots up pretty quick.  It won’t do full screen HD without choppiness so its definitely on the list to be replaced at some point, especially since pushing video to my TV is this things only job in life, but I can run video in a standard quality which looks pretty good on the big screen anyway. Mostly I use the thing to stream YouTube or TED Talk videos, but sometimes I’ll stream music from another machine on the network and run a slideshow, or the kids can play some silly online games on it.  I never bothered to upgrade the hard drive in the thing which might make it more useful as a storage device, so with its little 80GB drive I end up storing nothing on it at all.  Once in a while I might copy a bunch of MP4s or other ripped video to it, but not often.  With my old Logitech S 510 cordless keyboard and mouse connected to it, theoretically I could lean back on the couch and control the action in comfort.  What actually happens is that I end up putting the keyboard on the coffee table and hunching over it because I can’t see the text on the screen.  I could probably solve this problem easily by just getting a pair of glasses but I hate wearing glasses unless I really have to.

Youtube promised to make it possible for me to control whats playing on the TV from a handheld or tablet device with their new YouTube TV service. The idea here is that most of you now have a handheld device and are hanging out on the couch with it while the TV is on, hitting up IMDB when you see an actor you recognize, or looking up some obscure factoid on Wikipedia inspired by the educational program you’re watching… well, thats what I’m doing. The media execs think I’m rushing off to Amazon to buy whatever crap they’re hawking in the commercials I don’t see since I use noscript and adblock. Whatever.
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Recently one of my monitors at work was refusing to go on in the morning. I’ve got two: a Samsung SyncMaster 940T and an HP L1950. Its sort of a wierd setup in that the (now quite old) PC I’m using came with a single VGA output, so I ended up buying an add-on DVI card, but I usually end up with whatever parts are left over after deploying stuff and I could only scam one DVI screen so I’ve got one VGA and one DVI screen hooked up. The problem was that every morning the screen was blank but the power light was blinking in a sort of double flash pattern. There was no message on screen for “No Signal”, and I know now that the blue light means that I was getting signal, but the monitor couldn’t display it.

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Installing Ubuntu on the MacBook recently, I knew there would be a bunch of OSX programs I would no longer be able to run but I was pretty confident that I’d be able to get some Windows programs going with wine. Having had good luck with Temple of Elemental Evil on the Elitebook last December, it was as simple as copying over my .wine folder to bring that over to the MacBook, and it seems to work well (so far). I was a little worried about WarCraft III since I hadn’t ever tried that on the Elitebook – I’d always run it under OSX, but as it turned out, that wasn’t anything to worry about either. Hey, I realize this is a 10 year old game, but its one of my favorites and I like to putter around in it from time to time! My notes on getting it set up follow.

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Last year when I got an HP EliteBook for work I thought my days with the old MacBook were numbered. The MacBook isn’t that old, its a 2009 Core 2 Duo aluminum body 13″ model, but the EliteBook’s iCore 5 was is faster. The Mac screen is better, but not by very much. Both processors support VTx which helps a bit when running Virtual machines. A big factor for me was the OS – I had set the EliteBook up with Ubuntu 11.04 (and upgraded it several times till it was running the latest 12.04 LTS), and I was constantly being annoyed by OSX every time I went back to it. Eventually I stopped using the MacBook almost entirely. Once in a great while I’d come across a task that was easier on the Mac – making movies for instance, something I’ve been able to work around in Ubuntu but never equal for the ease and utility of iMovie. But then the EliteBook died. Yes, it was fixed and returned, but my confidence in it had died as well. I moved back into the Mac and used the EliteBook for meetings and other drudgery. Eventually my annoyance with OSX grew and I eventually realized that I really had no need to keep OSX on the MacBook.

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In the first week of July I received in a bunch of machines off my company’s UPS technology subsidy. The story of the subsidy is probably worth a post all its own, but suffice to say, UPS basically gives the company a bunch of PCs every so often based on how much we ship with them. One of the machines we got this time was a laptop that I thought might replace my aging desktop at work and be usable at home since I’ve often got to access our network from offsite. My personal Macbook, one of the early all-aluminum chassis 13″ models from late 2008 is also aging and I was hoping this HP would make a nice upgrade / replacement for home use as well and I’d just give my old Mac to my brother as I’ve done with my last two Mac laptops. I’m sure he was looking forward to that possibility as well. When the HP came in, I was in love. It took only four short months for this relationship to sour.

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