SSD – When will the prices come down?

The price per Gig of SSD Drives is too high. I was reading about the performance gains of the MacBook / Pros reported by Macworld and couldn’t stop thinking why haven’t SSD thrown the old spinning HD to the history shelves? Usually when a new technology is so much better the the old one it just replaces the old one. Look at CDs and K7s for example, or MP3 based players vs CDs and vs Mini Disks. So, why aren’t SSD totally replacing HDs in computers? Are the prices being kept artificially high so companies can milk early adopters?

Lithium battery charge recovery strategy for MacBook Pro

Lithium batteries don’t really like to be full discharged and they don’t really like to be used fully charged. Their sweet spot lays somewhere in the middle. To keep the battery of my Macbook Pro healthy I sometimes adopt a regular discharge / charge cycle, (but we should completely discharged it).

I use the following bash script, that I then put in into a cronjob running every 10 min and this alerts me every time the battery charge is lower than 40% or higher than 80%! Lithium batteries don’t have memory, so If you’re like me and have the Laptop used mainly as a Desktop, instead of having it always plugged in, use this strategy some times during the month. It will revitalize the maximum charge of your battery. Then, once per month or every 30/40 cycles you should do a calibration of the sensors by letting it fully discharge followed by a full charge.

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#!/usr/bin/env bash
low="Battery charge is to low, please charge it"
high="Battery charge is to high, please unplug it"
 
bat=`pmset -g ps | grep -o -e [0-9]*% | sed -e 's/%//g'`
 
if [ $bat -lt 40 ]; then
	say $low &
elif [ $bat -gt 80 ]; then
	say $high &
fi

On the other hand if you’re going to use the laptop always plugged to the power outlet, you might consider taking the battery off. To do this let it go to 40% before removing the battery. This will help the longevity of the charge and the health of the battery if you latter use it again.

My next computer will be a ThinkPad

This could be a rambling about Apple computers, the search for new CFO, or the just opened App Store for the Mac. Honestly? I don’t really care anymore. The business model of it might be great, but as I’m not a stock holder I don’t care either.

My next computer will be a Tank, something built with Chobam armour that I can lug around, throw away, an still be confident that it will work. And I want something that can run linux as my primary desktop full time (not part time as I’m doing now).

After much thought only one name came to mind: ThinkPad

Microsoft Kinect side projects

Microsoft Kinect might become one of the most interesting projects coming out from Redmond. This brilliant future for the kinect is probably due to the Open Source driver that already made Microsoft say that they welcome what people invent.  (That’s new, for a change). But let’s stop talking about politics and list some interesting cool things people are doing with Kinect (in no particular order):

I’ll updated this list with new projects and ideas. If you find one please put own in the comments so I’ll check them and update this list. (more…)

Cheating? and Speed Gains… Correlated?

Modern computers are fast but usually developers overload them with all the stuff they can find. I know I do that. And then they start to slow down again. On this topic I’ve found two interesting stories lately:

  • The first one is about Browser speeds. It seems that IE 9 might be “cheating” the SunSpider Javascript test. It could be that IE9 was only doing deadcode analysis before trying to run it a la Haskell, but some tests showed that it might not be the case. Go figure!
  • The other news has to do with speeding up the Linux Desktop, by a small change (~200 lines) in the kernel scheduler source code. The rationality behind this patch is that groups tasks according the TTY they are attached to. Some videos showed that this new approach can increase dramatically the perceived responsiveness of the system.

So, why have I put this two items in one post? The main reason is that both have to do with the PERCEIVED computational speed of pieces of software. In the first case, IE9 did some tweeking to it’s Javascript so it would look good in benchmarks (after all the reading this is my opinion), and in the second case the tweeking to the kernel scheduler was done to look good for the user. This two thing are at different morality levels, but in the end they show something:

(PERCEIVED) SPEED MATTERS! A LOT!

Dropbox: a nova disquete?

Dropbox - Home - Online backup, file sync and sharing made easy.

O Dropbox é uma das ferramentas que maior impacto teve nos últimos anos na forma de utilizar computadores. A informação deixou de estar centralizada num compartimento físico e passou a estar disponível em todos os computadores que se utiliza. Melhor ainda que utilizar disquetes (alguém se lembra disso?), ou flash pens, ou discos externos, ter os ficheiros sincronizados em todos os computadores que utilizamos sem esforço extra, é realmente único. A simplicidade de utilização, em que os ficheiros ficam numa pasta especial, tornam o Dropbox único. Se quiser ter os seus dados sempre sincronizados (e ao mesmo tempo com Backup de segurança) descarregue o cliente do Dropbox. O Dropbox dá-lhe 2GB de espaço online, mas pode aumentar com referals ou então pode pagar para ter mais espaço.

Quem precisa de pens usb?

4 Pequenos utilitários Mac

Podíamos viver sem eles? Sim, podiamos, mas a utilização de um Mac não teria tanta piada!

São os pequenos utilitários que se instalam e que se entranham de tal forma nos nossos hábitos que de repente é difícil viver sem eles. Esta é uma pequena lista dos meus “INSTALAÇÃO PRIORITÁRIA”. (more…)