Archive for October, 2013

New laptop (MS, wherefore art thou so fat?)

Sunday, October 27th, 2013

I bought a new laptop (cool thingy, it’s a Toshiba Z930 with mem upgraded to 10 Gb, ghi ghi). The specs are really cool: it’s the lightest ultrabook out there (at the time of writing), and while it doesn’t have 1080p resolution, it does do 1366 x 768. Moreover, it’s the only ultrabook which also offers VGA and Ethernet ports. Yeah, these might become obsolete, but I’m an academic, and given the expected upgrade cycle in most universities (“if it ain’t broke, don’t replace it” sums it up nicely), I need that stuff.

I haven’t had time to play with it, I hardly had time to start it up myself. I read that Win 8.1 came out, so I figured to start it up and try to get that on my system – yes, I’ll go for dual boot with Ubuntu (or something else like Mint). Now I have a really cool SSD drive in there – which is not that big. More specifically, it’s 128 GB. Currently, the unusued windows partition is leaving me with 50 GB usable space of that. I started doing windows update, which kept repeating and repeating, every time ending with a reboot and more updates to install. The first update required me to download over 1 Gb of updates. And that was nowhere near the end of it. I was down to 50 GB out of 128 GB (unformatted) before I started this, and your updates are eating away gigabytes of that???

Seriously, Microsoft, go jogging. You’re becoming too fat to sit on my disk.

Firefox tiny tip

Sunday, October 27th, 2013

Firefox logoI recently had occasion to reset my Firefox install – meaning all settings reverted to default. One annoying thing is that if you have a few tabs (a few > 6), Firefox does not show a close button on them.

While researching that issue, I found this tidbit: you can middleclick a tab to close it. Holy cow!!! I wish someone had mentioned this to me sooner! :)

Crystal ball gazing

Sunday, October 13th, 2013

You wouldn't download a car - Fuck you! I would if I couldI was chatting with Matt. Fantastic discussion on all sorts of things, including… “The Future”! I’m sharing some of the things we touched upon below.

The future of 3D printing

The discussion meandered it’s way to 3D printing. Our conclusion in a nutshell: Ikea will move to a pay-for-downloading-your-model model.
If things ever get to this point, yeah, then 3D printing will really work – and it will really have changed society. Of course, maybe not everyone will have a 3D printer – maybe there will be dedicated 3D printshops with bigger, high-quality printers. But this would even work to Ikea’s advantage: higher quality printers + materials equals more happy customers. And they’d save a fortune on not having to build stores, transport the stuff, etc.

So how realistic is this vision from the crystal ball? My guts say a 6 on a scale from 1 (no way, eg. teleportation) to 10 (will eventually happen, eg. moonbase).

The future of music and artists

A few bends further in the conversation, we were noting what many others have noted before: for centuries, musicians earned their living by performing. For a brief 80-100 years, musicians could earn money by performing once and selling the records. In this period, live performances (concerts) were advertisements for the recording. But currently, the trend is shifting back. Most musicians make their living by performing, and recordings (CDs) are nowadays more ads for the concerts than vice versa.

However, the advent of better and more affordable recording equipment means that your current-day home recording enthusiast is on par (if not above) in quality with recording studios from the 80s. In fact, home recording is becoming so affordable, and its quality is becoming sufficiently acceptable – renting a studio can produce better results, but it’s no longer clear it’s worth it.

This, coupled together with the insanity that is the recording “industry” (that is, the folks who do not make music, yet make the most money off of CDs) will lead to a shift in how musicians will earn a living. And yes, the recording industry’s financial model is insane. So any shift away from that is likely for the better.