Projects that want your loving; Laptop

Projects that want your loving

In the beginning of what is probably a highly intermittant series, two projects you could be writing for: Wikitravel and Open Guides. Wikitravel is a pretty regimented project: it’s meant to be a comprehensive free online tourist guide. It is fairly patchy at the moment: New York City has relatively poor coverage. Open Guides is a collection of wikis about particular cities and has a looser idea of what on-topic might be: you can write about local politics, by way of example.

Laptop

Yeah, got one. It’s a Fujitsu Lifebook S6210. Apparently these guys can be nasty little pieces of work to configure X on, but Andrew thinks that having a standard screen ratio might stand me in good stead, and that I won’t actually have to patch X to get a full sized display.

I’m still running Windows on it: as I am a Ubuntu beta-tester, I think I am obliged to download their newest CD release and test it. Andrew provided me with said advice.

I went to 5th Avenue (yeah, I know it’s the most expensive retail space in the world by square foot but it also was the most reliable place to find shops in New York I could think of off-hand) for it and accidentally spent four hours walking around fuelled only by fruit trying to avoid seedy computer vendors who called me "baby" and advised me that John Kerry is gay. My criterion was that I wanted to leave with the first sub-5.5lb laptop (imperial measures are like the US dollar — if everything is quoted in them, I might as well think in them) I could find in my price range. What a hunt that was. This baby is below 4. It is so light I could throw it at people.