42 wheels.

[reddragdiva]

• skud visited London a few weeks ago for copious pintage. Here, have an interview.

• My Wikimedia blog: Internet Brands sues people for forking under CC by-sa; A piece on corporate representatives and Wikipedia for iABC's CW Bulletin; Please do not email me an infographic to run in this blog.

• Rocknerd: Album cover cliches, 2012.

We are again reminded never to use Asda home delivery under any circumstances. Half an hour late (on a two-hour window), all frozen food melted and spoiled, and they got arsey about a credit for the frozen food (no, I'm not going to hold onto molten decaying slush for a day or two while you get around to fetching it, and if credits over £50 are a problem then I'd say the very first thing is not to deliver over £50 worth of spoilt food), though coughed up eventually. I would rather pay Sainsbury another £30 I can ill afford. Tell everyone you know. We certainly will be.

As well as being hideously underpowered, my netbook is pretty much clapped out. I remembered that if I do lots of work on a machine then work should pay for it, so I have a shiny new work Portege R830, an overpriced flimsy piece of crap übar-l33t ultrabookish thing. You can tell by the price tag and the shitty Macbook Air-like keyboard. It is too big and the keyboard annoys me. WANT A NETBOOK. (First world problems.) Goes like the clappers, but. Xubuntu 12.04 installed flawlessly and I should really try it with 12.10, which includes Xfce 4.10.

We appear to have the solution to the Wacom Bluetooth bug in Ubuntu 12.04: go to 12.10 beta, which doesn't have the problem and includes the wifi driver. arkady is most pleased. Cheers to vampwillow for the retrospectively obvious suggestion.

I have largely kept to last month's resolution to stop following links to Trolling Is Free but Clicks Are Sacred. The Guardian is increasingly aiming for the Daily Mail outrage-click market and should not be encouraged.

Hunters & Collectors The Fireman's Curse is woeful. Two songs make it even to half-good. At least they were ashamed enough to do much better next time. In deservedly lost albums, The Buggles Adventures In Modern Recording is prog wank in a silly voice with no songs ... immaculately recorded. Trevor Horn gave up writing songs after this.

So, I have a disused domain, dailypic.co.uk. It currently has an old random photoblog. Suggestions for things to do with it welcomed.

Comments

[ideological_cuddle]

Unless this is some other R830, it's a pretty nice machine. My boss has one and apart from the bit where it's running Windows and that screws up all the time (she has some sort of computer destruction field thing going on) she loves the thing.

Total overkill if all you want to do is terminals and web browsing though.

[reddragdiva]

The construction is better than the R600 (two models ago), which was severely flimsy. Unfortunately, the web is fat enough these days that it strains a netbook (dual-core Atom, 2GB). I'm just having first-world problems and wishing my laptop was a lot smaller but still this fast.

[ideological_cuddle]

Yow! How much smaller can it be while still being a useful laptop? The R830 is a 13" tiny thing.

Tablets have eaten the netbook segment.

[reddragdiva]

Feels really unwieldy after using a Dell Mini 9 for the last coupla years.

[ideological_cuddle]

For that kind of screen size you're pretty much stuck with a tablet these days.

Maybe one of the Transformer devices? Am assuming you wouldn't want to go anywhere near a Microsoft Surface...

[reddragdiva]

Still only about as much CPU power as a netbook. Sigh ...

[ideological_cuddle]

Yeah, but running software specifically built for a low-power platform. I'd expect better performance from one of those than from an Atom running what is basically desktop Linux with a different UI.

Main catch is that software is different -- was going to write "more limited" but it isn't really, it's just that you can't run random X11 applications. Instead you can run random Android applications...