Jul 8
2015
I finally got a chance to play with a chromebook today! In this case, a friend allowed me to use his Acer C720 (1.4ghz celeron, 2gb ram, 16gb ssd) for an hour or so. I was particularly impressed with it’s speed and responsiveness. The GUI was a bit utilitarian, but all of the controls seemed to work very smoothly and ergonomically. There was never a moment of “how the heck do I do xyz” with the default operation of chrome os which is really just the chrome web browser and some wrappers to allow people to connect and disconnect to the networking options and directly launch chrome based apps. Overall, this was the same chrome I know and love from every other operating system, but somehow google made it super memory efficient (even with 2gb I had at one point a very large number of tabs open to different websites and it responded quickly and was easy to manage windows and tabs and such just as i do on my pc notebook where i have 16gb ram and a quad core 3.2ghz i7). In fact, with the same number of tabs open, the chromebook was able to hold it’s own for the most part side by side my high powered pc notebook when it comes to web browsing. Read More >>
Jun 24
2015
After a short hiatus while I took some time to rebuild my VPS and the software stack that runs on it, cpgeek.org is back online! I’ve also taken some time to do quite a few website loading optimizations from re-compressing theme elements to setting up a minify and caching system. The cpgeek.org homepage should now load super fast! Now that I have everything tuned again, I’m hoping to make more posts on a regular basis.
Stay tuned for tutorials as to how to set up a LEMP stack, wordpress optimization, as well as mundane things such as my ranting about how you can’t get a decent fountain pen at a brick and mortar shop on the same day if you’ve misplaced yours…
Apr 28
2015
I know this is a bit of a slow-ball compared to my usual discussion topics of more advanced things, but it’s something that should be at the back of everyone’s mind who uses a windows computer. The first version of this was a response to a question I was asked at work from someone who was being prompted to purchase a subscription to McAfee antivirus on her new laptop and wanted to know if she needed antivirus software (because the use case only required internet access to transmit data that was created on it back to the office), and whether she should purchase the antivirus her computer was prompting her to buy.
My response to her is as follows: Read More >>
Jan 14
2015
WTF – the MacBook Air’s default memory configuration on the highest end model is 4gb, is not user upgradable (soldered to the board, no slots), and even the max custom configuration is only 8gb (and that takes about a week to build and ship!). These machines are super popular and they should have revised the memory spec to 8gb (8gb, 16gb configurable) at least a year ago!
Come on, Apple!
