Monday 21 July 2014

I Think, therefore I...

Hello! Well, after promising in November last year to blog more, I of course haven't. I took a hiatus when my stepfather (z"l) sadly died, untimely at the age of not quite 61, not long after writing that post - a hiatus which simply got longer... and longer... and longer.... So I apologise for the delay. But today I hope to resurrect this blog for the long term.

This isn't a technology blog, but I wanted to mention that I'm writing this on an IBM (yes, IBM) ThinkPad which I bought, reconditioned, last week. (As some of you may know, Chinese PC manufacturer Lenovo took ownership of the ThinkPad brand from IBM shortly after this laptop was released, and markets its laptops as ThinkPads to this day.) It's from about 2005 and came reconditioned with 1.5GB of RAM and a 40GB hard drive; it has a CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive, 14.1" screen and the customary trackpad and "TrackPoint", a pointing device embedded between keys on the keyboard which bears a (vague) resemblance to, and is therefore often nicknamed, a nipple. Although I have installed Manjaro Linux, a derivative of Arch Linux, on it, it came preinstalled with Windows 7, and though I'm not the biggest fan of Windows, I have to say that the speed of the Microsoft operating system on this box is pretty impressive given that it was released four years after the hardware. Since there's no Windows recovery partition to use if I want to reinstall Windows 7, I opted to shrink the partition to half its size and install Linux in the empty space, so that I could dual-boot the two OSes - although since installing Manjaro I haven't bothered rebooting into Windows other than to check it still loads up. I have always wanted a ThinkPad for their sturdy construction, excellent keyboard (not guaranteed on a laptop) and good Linux compatibility, and it doesn't disappoint in any of those areas. Fans of technobling, however, will probably hate (or either love or hate, รก la Marmite) its black, boxy, unsexy looks.

Although it's a bit laggy playing Youtube videos, and might not be able to keep up playing modern games (a use I'm not likely to inflict on it anyway since I have an iMac and a Playstation too), I'm pretty impressed with the speed of this laptop, and with the progress that's been made with Linux stability and ease of use - the latter of which is in large part due to the Manjaro team. I've always been a fan of Arch and although I love Macs and OS X, in a lot of ways using this laptop is a lot like coming home since I used to have a Dell desktop which came (miracle of miracles!) preinstalled with an Ubuntu LTS release. I don't by any means intend to ditch my iMac but I'm sure this ThinkPad will see lots of use - not least since with its 27" screen the iMac is not exactly portable! It's rather amazing that in the supposedly fast-moving technology industry, a laptop that's nearly ten years old still works so well and so quickly. The only bad thing about it is that the battery only lasts half an hour (!) so I went straight to Amazon and ordered myself a new one. But overall I'm very pleased with it! In particular, I've always been sceptical about TrackPoint but (although I love my iMac trackpad and those on MacBooks), the TrackPoint, surprisingly, is not only more usable but also, in my opinion, preferable to the ThinkPad's trackpad; however, this could well be due to the size of the pad, which is absolutely tiny compared to the trackpads you get with Macs. On the other hand, so far it's more usable than the one on my MSI netbook, which is about the same size as the IBM's.

In the next post, I will be returning to the subject which this blog was created to explore. Shavua tov!

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