So in a little over an hour you go from full charge to nothing just by using the laptop the way it was intended to be used. So despite its small size, the 2133 was never really designed to be too far away from a charger for too long. It is almost like having a car like a Honda Jazz with a petrol tank the size of a coffee cup. “Yes it is frugal, sir, but it will only go for a half a kilometre no matter how you drive it.”

Recently I discovered the wonderful Linux Mint 8 (Helena), while searching for a desktop linux distro to install as a virtual machine on my MacBook Pro. Despite all the misgivings that I have had in the past for the various Linux distros, I must say that they have been improving all the time. The last time I tried to install Linux on the 2133 was when Ubuntu 9.10 came out. What a disaster that was. Wifi did not want to work, then I went back to 9.04 but found that I could just not get my Vodafone Prepaid Mobile Broadband stick to work (K3520). In the end, out of frustration and spite I decided to whack XP back on and because I needed a little mobile word processor.

Linux Mint seems to run with a little bit of lag sometimes, but overall the experience has made my faith in Linux desktop distro strong again. Using Helena I could use my Vodafone Prepaid Broadband to connect to the net and wifi worked right out of the box.

If you need a decent desktop distro that looks half decent (who like brown anyway?) and works well out of the box for your 2133, then I can recommend Linux Mint 8 (Helena).

For the sake of simplicity, I decided to just build around a motherboard from Foxconn with an Intel Atom processor 330 (dual core) built-in, or rather soldered onto the board. The model number for the board is 45CSX and it has 1 slot for DDR2 RAM with a 2GB ceiling. To house the board I also bought a Foxconn RS-338 case which comes with a 150W PSU and enough space for a 3.5″ HDD and a DVDRW drive. Since RAM is so cheap these days, I bought the maximum 2GB size for $40. All up, the rig cost a little under $300 and I decided to mate it to a 24″ widescreen 1920×1080  LCD from ViewSonic.

After installing Windows XP SP3 (yes, I know I should have installed Linux, but I wanted to test the performance of the CS3 suite on this rig), I installed the Adobe CS3 suite to test the machine and see how it performs. Upon running Photoshop CS3 and even together with AfterEffects CS3, I came to the conclusion that this machine is not as bad as it’s been cracked up to be. Photoshop launch seems to be quite snappy and AfterEffects seems to run just fine (takes just as long to launch on my MacBook).

Everything seems to work fine and yes, there was a performance difference compared to my MacBook with a C2D 2.16Ghz processor, but for something that costs a little over a quarter the price I think it is a quite acceptable trade off. So unless you work with Photoshop and AfterEffects in a heavy-duty production, I can recommend this setup as a secondary machine.

In case you are interested, I tested Photoshop on this machine with a file that has 134 layers, each with a mask of its own. AfterEffects was tested with a six layer 1:30:00 length animation.

One of the things that irks me about Web is when the screen goes blank after I click on a link. It first shows a text-only view of the web page, then it goes blank until the whole page and the majority of the graphics have loaded. This little habit of Web’s is quite annoying on its own. It might be fine if I am looking at the mobile version pages of the large internet sites like flickr and facebook and so on, but some sites do not have any mobile version and they regularly exceed 1MB in size, so on my E71, that means quite a few seconds (with a very good network connection) sitting idle waiting for something to load, staring at a blank screen. This is compounded by the fact that even when the same graphics are involved (eg the second page of a website with the exact same graphical elements), Web still makes you wait a few seconds (while it reads the local cache? How slow!). This is also true when you hit the back button to view a previously loaded page.

Having put up with Nokia’s little  browser for a year, I have decided that I have to find an alternative. I first looked at Opera Mobile, but it is only available for platforms such as Windows Mobile.  However, inspired by the good experience I had with Opera Mobile on my HTC phone (imate Jamin), I wanted to see if Opera made a browser for the Symbian platform. After looking around the Opera website, it turns out that they make Opera Mini, which is available for the Symbian phone, including my Nokia E71.

Download and installation was a snap and using the browser is such a joy. Pages load up so quickly and the zooming function works really well. Opera’s technology for the mobile browser has really created a nice user experience. Hitting the back button to view previous pages loads them in such a snappy fashion that I feel so compelled to write about it here. It seems that the use of server-side compression has really paid off for Opera in the mobile space.

So if you are on a symbian phone, make sure you give Opera Mini a try!

Annoying? Well what do you think? The waking up process, which is supposed to be quicker than starting it cold, takes a lot longer and then you have to force the notebook to reboot. This is unacceptably inefficient and not to mention scary. I keep thinking that there is something wrong with the hardware, but it does not get worse, it just seems to happen with any resource-intensive application.

The solution is apparently very simple: just open terminal and type sudo rm /var/vm/sleepimage, then enter your password and then if there is no error, you have just deleted the sleepimage file, which is where the content of your RAM gets dumped when the computer goes to sleep. When done, just reboot the machine and all should be fine. I even tried running Photoshop and then putting the Macbook to sleep and it wakes up fine.

So if your MacBook has a crash on wake up (that’s what happens to me in the mornings), then just delete that sleepimage file in /var/rm and it should be recreated afterwards and everything should be fine. It is particularly wise to do this after upgrading your RAM. I upgraded mine from 1GB to 3GB and did not know that I had to do this.

Soon after i Acquired the I-mate Jamin, to make the experience even worse, I ended up buying a MacBook. The first thing I wanted to do was install Thunderbird (my favorite email client on all platform) on it and to my disappointment, I discovered that I could not do a sync between Mac and Windows Mobile without either using Parallels and Windows (and then only with that beast called Outlook) or buying some third party software. It seems that neither Apple or Microsoft wanted to know about people in my situation who did not want to subscribe to either one of the platforms (aka platform agnostic) for everything. The only thing that came close to being a solution was to use a Funambol Server installed on one of my servers, which was not only clumsy to use, but also difficult to manage. In the end I settled with using Schedule World so I could do sync between my Windows XP, Linux and OS X notebooks and my Windows Mobile 5.0 phone. This approach, while it works, is not really ideal since I have to rely on an external server to manage the synchronisation and the data.

The I-mate Jamin was a reasonably good phone, but its shortcomings were mainly caused by the Windows Mobile platform it was built on. While it works almost seamlessly in a Windows world, when you start venturing outside that walled garden the problems become unbearable. The minute you don’t want to use Outlook anymore (did I mention that an early version of Microsoft anti-virus product ate my entire Outlook database because of a single infected email?) you start seeing the ugly brick walls and quickly hitting your head against it. This gets a lot worse when you decide to try working on another platform such as Mac OS X. While there is Microsoft Office for Mac, there is no activesync for Mac. Entourage which was supposed to resemble Outlook on the Mac does not have support for syncing with Windows Mobile.

The only way you could access the files on your Windows Mobile was to use the Acitvesync software which was not a good thing when Activesync decides to play up. In the end I basically had had enough of the “closed” way in which Windows Mobile was working, so this time around I decided to look around for a phone built on a platform which supports open standards.

My first choice would have been the iphone from Apple. It is a beautifully-designed piece of technology with a very nice and intuitive interface, based on a platform which originated from a Unix world. I was quite sure about getting the iphone, until I discovered that despite its appeal, it does not really support open standards that well and I just could not understand why they would limit the bluetooth profile to headset-only. So the iphone is out.

The next on my list was the Nokia E71. Ever since my partner acquired the E65 phone from Nokia I was always a little partial to the Symbian platform, so when the Nokia E71 was released I was itching to get my hands on one to try it out. However, when I read more about the specs it soon looked like a very good candidate for my next phone. It supports 3G HSDPA, most of the common bluetooth profiles, SyncML synchronisation standard, Wifi, Assisted GPS, Flash Lite 3.0, push email  and the list goes on. It even has IRDA support.

The day I went to a Three shop in Sydney, I just wanted to check it out and hold it in my hands. The phone feels very nice to hold. Its thin and wide frame sits well in my hand and having a qwerty keyboard definitely makes things a lot easier when it comes to hammering an email or a text message. The screen looks nice and smooth and the phone is suprisingly large. It definitely amazes me what Nokia engineers manage to fit into such a thin and small device.

I liked the device so much that I decided to sign up for a plan right away. What I ended up getting was the E71 on a $29 cap plus $10 handset repayment a month on a 24-month contract. This was cheaper than getting the E71 on a $69 cap plan with no repayment. To quench my thirst for mobile data, I added $20 X-series (1GB/month) to the plan which brought the total to $59 per month including 1GB of data. This is definitely in my ball park and having 1GB of mobile data to play with means I will not hesitate to use the phone as a modem with either my Nokia N800 tablet or a notebook when needed.

From coffee I went to my teaching job at the college to give my students more exercises for animation and other digital stuff. Somehow I was not really motivated today, but we all got through all the usual routine of starting the class and then losing some students due to various dramas and then finishing the class. For some reason when the class finishes usually one or two students have to be almost kicked out from the classroom since they don’t want to leave.

At the end of the teaching session I had to make a dash to the Art Gallery of NSW to listen to a public talk about the Art Express exhibition. The exhibits this year look quite good and promising. There were many works that seek to branch out beyond the traditional forms and that is a really good thing to see. There were more than just a few animations, displayed on four plasma screens deep inside the exhibition space. While the traditional works looked pretty average to good, the animations were quite engaging. I would definitely like to see more high school art animations showed somewhere because they seemed to have some really good ideas.

The talk, on the other hand, was quite boring. They had someone introduce the discussion and then there was a panel made up of a few high school students doing the talking. Now I do not like to put the said students down, but because of their age and their relative lack of experience, a few students can articulate well what their artwork is about. Listening or reading their explanations seem to be a really tedious exercise as a lot seem to like using words and terms that seem to be mandatory and I suspect their teachers probably directed them to write these things. Honest and simple explanations usually work best.

While getting really bored with the talk I wandered down to the contemporary art section of the gallery and lo and behold a friend from my art school days who was exhibiting, was having his works photographed with his friends sitting in front of them. He asked me if I wanted to be in the photoshoot, but I declined as I would have to stay there for half an hour.

For quite a while I was pondering the reason why these directors decided to make these movies and what was so significant about having a sex scene that is not simulated. I thought it could be a sign of a new interesting radical trend in film-making, but after watching them I am not so sure if that is the case.

What was interesting about these movies is that there seems to be a really strong emphasis on the sex scenes. The directors seem to be obsessed with making the sex scenes as “real” as possible but they are happy to leave other parts of the movie in the traditional realm of “simulation for the screen”. The question, then, is why? Why are these sex scenes so important to these directors? Is it to gain notoriety or is it an attempt to create something that cannot be emulated by the Holywood studios (an attempt at differentiation)? Well, in the case of the latter they have certainly emulated the San Fernando Valley crowd.

Another question that must be asked is why they tried to create real sex scenes when the medium of cinema itself is just a simulation of reality. Does this mean that we are not allowed to use our imagination anymore or are we supposed to believe that a real sex scene is more erotic than a simulated one?

In the case of 9 Songs, the sex scenes in the movie certainly appears to be gratuitous and superficial. There seems to be no passion in the actors even though they are having real sex and if Michael Winterbottom asked why real sex could not be in a movie then I guess we are very lucky that Larry Clark still believes in simulating the murder scene in Ken Park.

At the moment there is no definite answer or some sort of conspiracy by the networks (not that they never conspire), but it is definitely looking like they are up to something. In all the series the police are only always interested in getting down to the truth and that their main concern is to solve criminal cases and protect the innocents. Those of us who know the police force either through direct contact or through their spotless reputation(:)) will laugh and say that there is absolutely no truth in that.

Considering the current context of today’s society, especially American society it is really of no surprise that the TV networks broadcast cop-related shows everynight on virtually every channel. One only needs to look at the dismantling of many of the public facilities and social services in America in the last decade. Virtually all the social services that are available to the public have had their funding cut and consequently have had to scale back the provision of services to the people that need them.

This situation has been replicated in many, many different countries. The governments around the world have been running down facilities such as hospitals and schools and at the same time increasing spending on instruments of oppression and suppression. Maybe this is why the TV shows are aired continuously: to put a spin on the role of the police and to blur the real picture of why violent crimes are increasingly prevalent?

Tonight is the first night I have had some time to write. It is the first time in a while that I do not feel burdened by the need to do other work and worry about time-management issues. While writing and photography have been really important to me, they sometimes have to take the back seat while other things occupy my time.

Since I last wrote, the Retiform website has been undergoing some major changes. It is now in the process of a transformation from an online art gallery-type website into a personal website. This is a welcome change and I hope the site will become more dynamic and see more regular updates.

I can relate quite a lot to what the Retiform website is undergoing at the moment. A few years ago I considered agit8.org to be some kind of a place for collaboration. For a long while the focus of the site was not very clear and after two years of very little activity from the part of the other users, I realised that what I wanted was basically a blog, hence the current format of this site.

While the scope has become somewhat more limited, I feel that limit in this case is a good thing. It allows for more focus and therefore a more productive life of the site. It means there is less time spent on doing administrative tasks on the website itself and more time to write and upload photographs/pictures.

Now that the focus of the agit8.org website is clearly to run as a personal blog, I feel much more freedom in adding content to the site without the added temptation to modify php scripts and to play around with different designs. I feel that the site is ready to be filled with content and I just have to write and upload pictures into it.

I sincerely hope that these benefits will be considered by the administrator of the Retiform website.