Riding the Flow

  Well, I’ve took a plunge and went ahead with my original plans for new laptop . Its finally there, took only 2 days to arrive from US. Yep, it’s an import – first of all, I want US keyboard, second, UK models are not being released for another month, and thirdly – even with shipping costs and duty its significantly cheaper. First impressions of the screen: DPI is alright (18.1”, 1680x945), no need to zoom up anymore. Brightness is about 2x times more than of my old one (Satellite X200). Viewing angles are wider (mainly due to bigger pixel size). White level is very uniform – but, black is not uniform and it’s not very black. Guess you can not have everything (at least until AMOLED laptop screens will arrive ;) ) I guess brightness is more important though – to diminish visible reflections from glossy screen. i7 quad core is a total beast – 8 CPUs in Task Manager ;). I plan to keep my old hard drive (WD Scorpio Black), it’s same 320Gb, but faster than preinstalled Hitachi one. Its...

Just have finished treatment of all glass surfaces on my car with water-repellent finish. It really works and I find it quite useful. The idea is to cover car windscreen/windows with invisible oily Teflon-like layer – to which water will not adhere, so it will just roll off. It greatly reduces the need to use wipers – usually water droplets just roll off due to vibration of the car. And when you go at motorway speed – no need for wipers at all – water just literally flies away blown by the wind! It just that application procedure is kind of tedious: wash the glass with glass washer to make sure it clean wipe it dry, not allowing water drying spots smear it with water repellent let it dry – it will make windows foggy and greasy polish with paper towels to shininess Good thing there are next-gen repellents already that supposed to last up to a year (!) from single application. Pity I still have to finish the bottle of previous generation repellent that needs r...

Have an accumulated mini-mountain of unneeded stuff to go in eBay. Yet again ;) I wish there was an automagic way to put articles on eBay, without the need to photo, host and write articles for every item. Oh well, back to work :) Edit: Make this - photo, host, check item weight and write articles for every item ;)

Personally I think pocket multi-tools (as a superset of more well-known Swiss Army knives) are very useful. You never know when during the course of day you’ll need to cut a package or envelope open, snip a loose thread, open a bottle or unscrew/screw down something. It’s bad when you don’t have proper tools nearby (but even when you do, it’s often a hassle to fetch/put them back). That’s why it’s extremely good to always have multi-tool in your pocket, especially when it’s small and light enough to be unnoticeable. Obviously compactness comes at the price of less features, it’s always a compromise.