RIP Waffle

So I was using my laptop this week when it randomly died. Just out right shut off. It’s done this for a while, over a year. I’ve learned not to disturb it, but something must have pushed it over the edge. I tried for a long time that night to try and breathe new life back into it, but eventually I had to call it quits. Sometimes it would make it past the BIOS screen, but sometimes not. Consistently though it would shut itself off pretty quickly.

Lets be honest here, the laptop is 4 years old, and has been pretty roughly used. It’s come with me every day to class, and has travelled back and forth from Ottawa and school, as my parents said, it owes me nothing. While it’d be nice to get it working again (not hopeful), it’s likely time for it to move on. I had hoped it was going to last 5 years, but 4 years isn’t bad.

I unplugged it and took out the battery and let it sit over night, but still no dice. I started searching for a new laptop quickly that suited my needs. For a long time I’ve been forced to deal with a crappy resolution – 1280×800 – which is pretty crappy for writing code. One of the requisites for a laptop is to have a NVidia graphics card and a high resolution display. After searching I eventually found a match, the Asus G51JX-A1, packed with everything that I was looking for. I’ll let you click the link for the specs, but in short it comes packed with a 1080p display, 15.6″, Intel i7, and 6GB of ram. It also seems to run Linux and OSX very well (in fact, it had the HIGHEST score Geekbench in late June of all the OSX machines. I’m a bit dubious of this, but it’s interesting.

I must say that I was infact looking at the MacBook Pro 17″ with i7, but the price was out of my budget at $2700. It’s also a dual core (vs the Asus quad core) and comes with less memory. The Asus checked out after shipping at a cool $2100.

I ordered it today, so I’m going to assume it’s going to ship Tuesday (as monday is a holiday in Canada), and arrive Wednesday. For the meantime, I’m using my roommate’s MacBook Pro. They’re pretty solid machines and I want one, just out of my price range. I’ll write another article soon as I’m up and running.

PS: Waffle incase you’re wondering is my laptop’s hostname.

Here’s some more waffle related posts:

• Random Freezups
• Struggle for More Pixels
• Ubuntu?
• Wrapping up Vista
• Continued Vista Testing
• Vista

Edit: Wow grammar fail.

New Toy!

My new Arduino Mega

Long time no see folks! I got a new toy this week, an Arduino Mega. Cute lil thing isn’t it? So what is it? The Arduino is a completely open source 8bit RISC controller and board package. Part of the Arduino package is it’s fairly easy to learn library. Since it’s in C++, it’s very easy (for me) to rapidly design little hardware projects. I’ve planned that my first project will be a fan controller for my hard drives. I have two external hard drives and at times, they get a little warm, so I want to write some code for this that communicates with my laptop over USB (serial interface) as to when to turn on the drive fan or not, with manual override of course.

But this is only the surface of what you could do. There are add-ons for the Arduino by a variety of different manufacturers for wifi, ethernet, GPS, bluetooth and even GSM. While the build in Arduino functions have lots of advanced things to play with, you get full control over the processor with the avr-libc library (such as sleep modes). I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of projects I can come up with. Currently, I have two LEDs hooked up via a breadboard that fade back and forth (it has both analog in and out, via PWM) every 30 seconds, or manually if you send it the correct command over serial.