maebmij’s blog

My dad decided to replace our old, broken espresso machine the other day. So he researched what to get, and – as is inevitable with product research – discovered a whole bunch of reasons why the normal machines aren’t good enough . So we ended up with a Nemox “Caffe Dell’Opera”. And it’s nice! I’m not much of a discriminating coffee drinker, but the coffee it makes tastes good.

On the subject of coffee geekery, I discovered that coffee beans are not created equal. Lavazza Qualita D’Oro (or whatever it’s called) from the supermarket behaves completely differently from the beans we bought from the Don Adan cafe in Cremorne. So far Lavazza beans have behaved very poorly, and Don Adan beans beautifully (with lots of crema, which I’m told is a sign of good things in coffee).

(The title of this post is from someone’s signature on slashdot years ago. I’m not quite lame enough to have thought it up myself.)



A couple of weeks ago, I put Debian on my Powerbook. Since my desktop machine died a while ago, I’d been living in OSX and it was starting to feel a bit cramped, and I missed Linux. Plus, emotionally, the ‘welcome to the product’ non-free-ness of OSX was brought home to me a little more by the release of Tiger. So, I got irrational and installed Debian .

How is it? Well…

• Good: It’s faster. “Feels snappier” in general responsiveness, but I also benchmarked the two systems using some ImageMagick tasks I do frequently, and Linux is roughly 30% faster for those. Memory footprint is smaller, but I never really ran out of memory before. Mpeg4 movies that chugged a bit in MacOS breeze along nicely without pausing occasionally.
• Bad: Unsupported hardware. Lots of unsupported hardware. Wireless is a Broadcom chip, hence no drivers and no support. Graphics by Nvidia, my new least-favourite company, means no sleep mode, so it’s software-suspend (suspend-to-disk) only. And firewire seems reluctant to work without careful massaging of the kernel modules every time you want to use it (this may be my setup though).

Would I recommend something like this to anyone else? Hard to say. I think a big issue is the Nvidia chip – many powerbooks and ibooks come with ATI chips, and most setups with those support sleep mode as usual, so that would make things significantly more comfortable.

The problem is that while many PC laptops are better supported, the Apple hardware is much nicer and better built… I’m reminded every time I use an HP or Dell laptop around the place of how spoiled I am by Apple hardware.