Tuesday, March 24, 2009

IdeaPad FTW!






Just got a new toy to satisfy my geek needs: a Lenovo IdeaPad S10e. So far, I'm pretty happy with it. Here are some thoughts after a couple of days' use.

It's a decent browsing machine. A 1024x576 screen resolution is just barely adequate for normal web browsing these days. Heavy flash use sometimes make scrolling a bit choppy. But the fantastic portability more than makes up for these shortcomings. (No, an iPhone doesn't really compete.)

The keyboard is not fit for serious development work. I'm typing this on the somewhat smaller-than-usual keyboard and I'm doing ok. However, there is only one Ctrl key, the tab key is tiiiiiiny, and the layout is kind of cramped together which makes it hard to touch type anything else than normal letters. The CPU and RAM might not be particularly impressive compared to your workstation, but for me they're not the main bottlenecks.

I like it. I've never had a laptop this portable. My normal work laptop is a 17" workstation model, which is great for the performance and screen size, but not so much for taking notes in meetings.

Now, to try out Ubuntu Netbook Remix in my copious free time...

Thursday, March 12, 2009

Mac Keyboard layout driving you crazy?

I'm officially giving up adapting to the incompatible Mac keyboard layout. This page explains what you need to do to fix it.

I'm also switching IntelliJ over to the standard PC-style layout, which is trivial to do. Life's too short to make adjustments to this crap.