Computers ⁽¹²⁸⁾

Brian Bilbrey September 6, 2011

"Day off"

Wherein I: That last item may deserve a bit more explanation. A while back, I picked up a 160 GB SSD to muck around with. Since I was in a bit of a limbo with the Mac at the time, I chose to drop the SSD into the big workstation and load Windows 7 onto it. Because that box is a VM host (VirtualBox) and gaming machine, I put a 1TB drive in as 'S:' (for "Storage") - that's where all the multi-gig games are installed. It's a fast-booting windows box, and that's no bad thing, since it's one of…

Brian Bilbrey August 16, 2011

Another use for the Xoom

It turns out that the Xoom fits right nicely in the book-holder slot on the elliptical machine. But I really can't read while I'm exercising ... and I've never gotten the knack of listening to audio books. But hey! There's a lot of video lectures out of MIT and elsewhere. That's one of my biggest problems with exercise - I get bored. This has possibilities! No, there's no woman with improbably blue contacts and a glass of some liquid fiber product lurking just outside of the frame. Multi-tasking has its advantages, though.

Brian Bilbrey August 8, 2011

Something In The Air Tonight...

No, not the Phil Collins song, although I like that a lot, too. But I as I sit here in the family room with this airy bit of fluff that is nearly the fastest computer I have, I am pretty damned pleased. I liked the MBP when I got that a few years ago, but at that time, the Air was still a year away from introduction. When it came out, it was gorgeous and light ... but underpowered in almost every measurable way. Today's Air is a powerhouse. Seriously. It's not got enough moxie to be a decent virtual…

Brian Bilbrey August 5, 2011

Agog, Shiny

Shiny is actually an attribute of the new machine, henceforth known as Agog. Agog was my state of being when kindness by others turns out to have been expressed in the form of a 13" MacBook Air. Core i7, 4G, 256G flash drive. Fast, light, and gorgeous. It's funny, really, that I should have decided, just last night, that the right choice was to get a new battery for Darla, the MacBook Pro I picked up in January of 2007. Darla runs OS X Lion just fine, if a little bit slow. But slow is relative. I executed a test…

Brian Bilbrey July 11, 2011

Byte? SRSLY?

First off, Byte is back. Yeah, SRSLY, Byte. Talk about your basic reincarnation myth, remixed about 5 times over the last 10 years. And equally fully of #FTW, Jerry's involved. Huzzah! * * * Also, Jerry's got a column out, having finally battle his way past nearly four months of creeping crud. I just finished the editing pass and got the column posted for him within the last hour. There's still kinks to shake out of CMR at the new hosting site, but we'll get them licked, one way or another. * * * Nothing else going on, work and…