Showing posts with label me. Show all posts
Showing posts with label me. Show all posts

Ended up buying an Apple...

I have an Acer laptop for about 5 years. It includes a generously 512MB of RAM, Intel Centrino 1.6Ghz (M730 processor to be more precise), ATI Mobility Radeon x600 64MB VRAM, 80GB HDD, yada yada yada. The battery is in an awesome shape if we consider the age and the usage I put on it during this time - previously 3 hours fully charged and now around 2 hours, so... I couldn't have asked for better. Nevertheless, the laptop has an 15.4" display and weighs 3Kg with battery plus the charger which I have to take always with me otherwise the battery would ran out quickly. All this factors led me to buy a new laptop with the main features to consider and give more priority on the weight, battery and size. I didn't want to buy again a new 15.4", up to 4 or 5 hours of battery, and weighed laptop. Basically the requirements were: 12" or 13" screen, up to 2Kg, battery that lasted at least 7 or 8 hours (wireless and reasonable screen brightness), 4GB of RAM or more, and obviously a "good" brand (Sony, Lenovo, Apple, Dell, and HP were on top of the list), not to mention a decent price I could afford. A few hours/days later I decided to pick an Apple Macbook Pro 13" 2.4GHz, not because of the Mac OS X as some might be imagining by now but because of the hardware itself.

The Apple Macbook Pro 13" I bought Tuesday includes an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz, 4GB of 1066MHz DDR3, battery up to 10 hours (wireless and 50% screen brightness), and weighs 2.04KG. It cost me 1.149€ but had an (indirect) discount of 5% plus 10€ on the FNAC client card (costs 5€ per year but worths it since it also gives you other discounts and benefits). Here is a short list of highlights regarding the hardware itself and the Mac OS X operating system which, by the way, I have to mention I have never used it until now:

Pros:
  • Laptop is solid rock and its aluminum unibody makes it truly fresh (I don't fell any heat, except in the fan area where the air flows out obviously, while the Acer laptop is more like a heater than a laptop (I bet I could fry an egg on it));
  • Touchpad pretty flexible e practical;
  • Battery lasts up to 10 hours, meaning I don't have to carry the charger wherever I go;
  • The charger has two cables: the charger with the cable to plug in the laptop and another one to extend the length of the cable to the wall socket. This means for, most of the cases, I can leave that extra cable aside or at home;
  • Auto brightness (think a little and you will find how useful it can be);
  • OS X is functional, intuitive, and has a clean UI overall.
Coins:
  • I'm used to have the Ctrl key switched with the Fn key (something I want to get used);
  • At least for the Portuguese keyboard, the square brackets as well as the curly brackets aren't shown in the keyboard and the key combination for the curly brackets isn't easy and convenient: alt+shift+8 for { and alt+shift+9 for } (keys 8 and 9 are where the parentheses are located at). Imagine how great will it to code, not!
  • No "Cut" on files?!
  • "exit" in the Terminal doesn't close the tab, but logs out and stays there opened;
  • If running the OS in Portuguese, cmd+w doesn't close the tab as expected since the shortcut isn't associated and seems there is no way to do so. If running in English, the shortcut is there and do the job;
  • Expected iChat to support the MSN protocol. Using Adium, which is way better;
  • The file (un-)compressor included by default lacks lots of features such has the capability to uncompress split files. Using BetterZip, but still missing Ark from KDE!
  • People advised me to use VLC instead of QuickTime for watching videos, specially those in HD since it seems the codecs used by QuickTime consumes more CPU than it should and that VLC consumes. I would have installed VLC anyway since I'm already used to it being the best video player out there in my opinion.

For those concerned about my devotion to the FOSS world and specially my openSUSE and KDE eccentricity, than there is nothing to you worry about! I'm still the very same guy you used to know. I just needed a laptop with the features I have stated above and that ended up to be an Apple Macbook. That's it, folks!

UA: I'm in!

Saturday night I blogged about the counting down to end of the impatient waiting of the latest months to know if I would gather University and if so to where would I. University of Aveiro (UA) was my first option and I made it!
I'm happy, but not fully happy though... My mate didn't gather UA so he gathered University of Coimbra (UC) which is about 60km from Aveiro. Not bad at all.

Yesterday I went to Aveiro to search for a room to rent but no rooms near to UA and/or without the needed conditions to live in. Today, I went back again to UA to make me as an official student, explored the campus and looked again for a room to rent. I had much luck because I met also two new students who were looking for a room to live in too. We all joint together and walked through the city. At the end of the day we discovered a nice flat near UA (north entrance) and liked it. Therefore we accepted the terms of the flat owner and agreed to stay there for, at least, this upcoming university year. Also, we met there a person who will be my colleague (same course) and lives next door from ours - yeah!

As I said, I can't say I'm entirely happy due to the non gathering of my (best) friend at the same university as mine, but at least I hopefully met student people and they seems to be good people so that's a nice step forward.


This week I will be preparing and packaging stuff to carry on into my new home where I will live for the next 5 years.

Tic Tac Tic Tac... less than 2h left!

Within less than 2 hours I will know to where will live for the next 5 years! Of course I'm talking about university life...

My first option was Computers and Telematics Engineering at University of Aveiro (UA), and the second was Computers Engineering at University of Coimbra (UC).
I really hope I have the chance to gather University of Aveiro. It has an awesome Linux group - Grupo Linux da Universidade de Aveiro (GLUA), a large campus, well know professors. Although, it is a bit far from my home, so I will have to rent a house/room and get used to it completely in a few days with no dads around to make my meal, clean my own stuff, etc :-P

Nevertheless, it's probably I gather the same university and the same course with a friend of mine so things become easier than gather without know anyone.



UA campus



Tic tac, tic tac...!!!!
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