Single boot laptop – Ubuntu 11.10

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I bought a Dell Inspiron 1520 back in 2007 when my wife and I moved back to Canada. For much of its life it has been a dual boot machine – Windows Vista and whatever the latest version of Ubuntu was. It’s not really an old machine, but it has been around the world. Literally. From here to Kathmandu and many stops in between. Throughout these four years I have paid for virus protection (for Windows). But I don’t use the laptop so much these days, since I’m not on the road now, and because I’ve now got an iMac as my base desktop. And even when I do use the laptop, I tend to use it in Linux. So, with my most recent year’s licence for virus protection (for Windows) running out, and with a new version of my favourite Linux distribution released (Ubuntu 11.10), I finally made the move and turned this laptop into a single boot machine.

That’s no big deal for many Linux users, I’m sure. For me, though, there was always a barrier to such a move. Perhaps if my first Linux machine had not also been a dual-boot machine (with Windows), I might not have developed this psychological dependency on that other operating system. This, despite the fact that I almost never used it. But I knew that I could, if I needed to, right?

It is no surprise to learn that there is a cost to most software decisions. For me the cost of yet another year’s licence for virus protection (for Windows) when it wasn’t really being used was just too much.

And now here I am with a lovely “new” laptop. So far it seems to do everything I’ve always expected my Linux installs to do. (The fact that I can listen to the cricket on Test Match Special whilst typing this post is all the evidence I need.) It has been a long time coming, but I can now finally say that I have a Linux machine. Full stop.

Last game of the season

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The leaves on the linden tree that I can see out my window have mostly turned yellow-brown. A number have already fallen. We’ve had a series of very cool nights, as though to highlight the now surprisingly warm days. It won’t last. Soon enough the first snow will come. The signs are all there. The Blue Jays play their last game of the season today.

I didn’t play baseball as a boy other than a few pick-up games. But since their inaugural season (1977) I have more or less followed the Toronto Blue Jays. Before that my allegiance lay with the Detroit Tigers, which remains the closest team geographically to where my home town lies. In those early days with the Jays at Exhibition Stadium, I would get to a game once a year usually during The Ex. Toward the end of the summer the guys at the bakery would pile into a car early some Sunday morning and drive the near 3 hours to Toronto. But mostly I would listen to the games on my radio in my room as I drifted off to sleep.

A great many writers have noted that baseball is a sport that lends itself to radio (I would now add that cricket also shares this property). The play-by-play announcers seem to easily paint the scene. It has something to do with the structural nature of the field placements perhaps. Or the conversational pace of the game. Or the narrative drive for drama. Some of it, however, has to do with the familiarity one gains with the radio broadcast team. Over a 162 game season, their voices – the cadence and energy, the commiserations and excitements – take on the aura of friends. I still remember Tom Cheek with fondness and Jerry Howarth just sounds like the nicest gentleman imaginable.

It’s been another middling season for the Jays. They have stayed about .500 throughout the year. That’s not bad in baseball. But it’s not enough to seriously challenge within their division, possibly the most competitive in the league. That’s okay. I just like to listen to the games.

Today is the last game of the season. It will be a long winter.

iPad experiences

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I never wanted an iPad. When they first came out I thought they would be fun but not useful. It made sense to me that something that might be sitting in your lap ought to be touch friendly. But maybe that’s a guy thing. In any case, I never expected to have one fall into my lap. And then one did. So now, after a couple of months of use, I can offer some thoughts.

A lot of people will tell you that the iPad is not a laptop or desktop replacement. Those people are right. This is a product with some distinct limitations. So let’s get those out of the way off the top. Printing is pretty much a write-off. Storage is limited (if tens of gigabytes is limited). Editing MS Office documents in anything like a serious way is effectively a non-starter. Some websites built primarily with flash are effectively inaccessible. Okay, so those are the limitations. I say, let’s just set them aside and look at what the iPad actually does do, and do well.

First, connectivity to wireless is a breeze. That’s not surprising for a Mac; I’m just confirming it. Access to email (thought not necessarily full editing and storage manipulation) is straightforward. Websites (the ones that are not entirely built in flash) load quickly and look beautiful. Once you figure out that the idea of tabs in a browser is not really there, you can bounce around the web about as quickly as you can with any other browser. Oh, and when you get on a plane, switching to Airplane Mode is painlessly simple.

Second, there are lots of apps available for the iPad. For the most part I have only been using those apps that are free. But there are even lots of those. I like the iBook app, and the IMDB app, and the NFB (National Film Board of Canada) app, and BBC news app. Maps, which comes pre-installed, is really useful. And even the Skype app works satisfactorily.

Third, the display is beautiful. Photos, videos, and even movies look great. The latter beat the sad “personal entertainment” screen on the back of the airplane seat hands down. I also bought a splitter for the earphone jack, so my wife and I were able to watch a couple of films together on the plane – films I rented from iTunes for 30 days for 99 cents each.

It is light and (seemingly) sturdy and the battery goes and goes and goes.

The iPad doesn’t do everything. So if you want something that does everything, then you need to look elsewhere, and good luck to you. But within its limitations, I have found the iPad to be an excellent travelling companion during more than 4 weeks on the road in the past couple of months.

Refresh rate

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How often do you upgrade your operating system or your computer hardware at home? With me it depends. I like to keep my Ubuntu systems current, which means I will usually make a clean install every six months as the next release comes out. Since I am installing Ubuntu on dual-boot Windows machines, I am not typically refreshing the hardware at the same time.

I tend to only start using a new Windows operating system when I buy new hardware (if the hardware I am buying comes with Windows installed). I get the itch to move after about three years, but it may take four or sometimes five years before I have the spare cash to enable a hardware refresh. And even then I’m only talking about my principal machine, since I tend to keep the older machines running for other purposes. The oldest one I have at the moment is a 2005 Dell Dimension 9100 desktop – still running fine on Windows XP and the latest Ubuntu.

Now that I’ve made the move to an iMac as my principal machine at home, I thought I was done needing to learn new Windows operating systems. Not true.

My father is about to refresh his hardware and software. He has a ten year old Pentium 4 with 256 MB of RAM running, slowly, Windows XP. It is, for me, almost excruciatingly sluggish. And since his Internet connection was DSL “lite” (many times faster than a dial-up modem!) the combination could quite simply stop you in your tracks. I finally convinced him that it was time to make a change.

I argued that two factors impacted his current user experience. (There’s no point making your case if you aren’t going to take it seriously and do a thorough job.) One was his Internet connection and the other was the processing power and speed of his computer. To “change his game” he needed to address both factors at once. Somewhat to my surprise, he agreed.

He has already made the call to upgrade his DSL. He should now have a connection roughly comparable to what I’m getting through Bell. He tells me that he already notices the difference. Web pages only take a few seconds to load, as against the 30 or more seconds most pages used to take. When I visit him next, I will install a wireless router to his system. This will not improve his experience. But it will provide a more normal (dread word!) computing environment for his grandchildren who are used to taking their laptops with them when they visit their friends and having full Internet connectivity while they are there.

As for the hardware and operating system refresh, I put forward two recommendations. One was the iMac with which I have been completely satisfied. The other was a mid-range Dell, which of course would mean Windows 7.

Some people are change averse. My father is one of these people. Some people have little if any intuitive grasp of computers. Again he falls into this group. Some people also have little or no interest in learning anything new that has to do with computers (and consequently feel no excitement in the possibility of playing with a new system). Again, that’s him. So, no matter what, I will be absorbing a fair portion of the change cost of moving him to a new computing environment.

In the end he chose the less expensive option. Fair enough. He will still have a much, much better user experience than he does currently. It may even give him a taste of some of the fun that is possible with computers. (But I doubt it.) And meanwhile I have started reading this very large book on Windows 7. I’m looking forward to his new computer arriving next week.

Really.

No, really.

Shelf life

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The Kitchener-Waterloo branch of the Canadian Federation of University Women (CFUW) will be holding its annual book sale at the end of April. I’ve already got the dates in my calendar. This two-day sale of used books is tremendously popular. And since it takes place just around the block from where I live, I have easy access both to the sale itself and to carrying over a box or two of books for donation. The CFUW accepts only items in good condition and only for the two days prior to the sale. The cars, vans, and, yes, trucks pulling in to the sale site’s parking lot during those two days to drop off bags and boxes of books overwhelms the normal quiet flow of traffic on surrounding streets. So many people giving away books they have purchased or received as gifts. And on the days of the sale, even more people arriving to stock up on five or ten more books for their shelves.

I don’t know if anyone studies the migratory patterns of books. It would, I think, be a fascinating science, whether one specialized in non-fiction encyclopaedic sets or small-press literary fiction. Electronic tagging of individual books, common enough these days even in our public libraries, aided by radar or satellite tracking ought to make the seasonal or yearly migrations scientific child’s-play to follow. I wonder what it would reveal.

I have a box in my basement that has been there throughout the year. I have it labelled – book sale books. It is about half full at the moment, but it will be full when I walk it across to the CFUW book collection. What books make it into this box?

  • Duplicates. Yes, I periodically still find the odd duplicate in amongst our books. But fewer, ever fewer.
  • Duds. Some books I am so disappointed by that even after a single reading I am prepared to set them on their way to potentially more hospitable homes. I have mixed feelings about this. If I really felt some book was a bad book, could I in good conscience pass it on to others? Would I pass along a book that I couldn’t even bring myself to recommend to anyone? There will be sleepless nights ahead.
  • Deadwood. Some books just seem to take up space. I’ve read them, I’ve been mildly entertained, but our relationship seems to have come to an end. Time to move on. You would not believe how hard it is to decide that a book falls in to this category. Some that have entered the book sale books box mysteriously find their way back on to my shelves before the box leaves the house. I don’t know how that happens.

There is one further category of  books that make it into the book sale books box. These are placed in the box with regret. Casualties of expediency. It turns out that a book shelf will only hold a finite number of books, even if I stack them double. These are the hardest books to let go. But they go knowing that their place on the shelf will only be taken by a book I love at least as much and cannot yet bring myself to let go.

In a year, more than one-third of the books I read come from the public library. That includes electronic books which I sometimes read on my computer, not yet having given in to the eBook movement. That still leaves at least a box full of books that I will acquire over the course of a year. And another box that will be setting some books free on their continuing migration. Long may they wander.