To start with, our new GPS has arrived and now that it has seen a bit of use around town, I can say that it does a fine job. While our Sony NV-U44 is certainly not the navigation and multimedia powerhouse that some units are, the frugal side of me says "Hey, you got a LOT of features for your $70!!"
And I think it's true. It features Text-to-Speech, lane guidance (as seen in the picture on the left), fast satellite acquisition, and gesture recognition, which allows you to wipe your finger across the screen to activate some features instead of needing to divert your eyes from the road. There are many features missing from the unit, my favorite of which is traffic updates and internet connected features, but we don't live in an area where we are all that likely to benefit from them either. Despite being made fun of by my wife, I'm going to continue to use it as we drive around town, just to familiarize myself with it more.
The second event of note is a continuation from my last post, about the resurrected Acer 2010 laptop. The one remaining weakness the system had was a broken right-side lid hinge, which would pop out of the plastic cover when someone would try to adjust the screen angle. I was trying to adjust it back to a usable angle and squeezed the screen a bit too hard. The glass cracked, rendering about 80% of the screen unreadable, but still very colorful. I set about disassembling the lid, which came apart without too much drama. The Sony Vaio laptop, whose screen I was hoping to steal, was not giving in so easily. I was afraid that if I pried too hard I might end up doing similar damage to the one remaining usable part from the Sony.
After sharing my work laptop with my sister for a week and a half, Allison said she wanted to give it a try last night, and while she did crack the bezel around the screen a little bit, it really wasn't anything to worry about. I was very happy that the two laptops we had gotten for her were so similar that they could share so many parts. The new screen went in, and I got it all put back together without the misbehaving hinge. Now it works the same, but we can close the lid again (woohoo!!!), and it has a glossier and brighter screen.
Now Allie can get back to her Ubuntu lessons. Maybe she'll want to work on importing some of her old blog posts to
our new blog, as well.
The next bit came as a bit of a surprise to me last week, as I received an email at work indicating that I am scheduled to get my laptop replaced at the end of THIS WEEK!!!! I'm pretty stoked, as it will be my first laptop that wasn't WAY outdated by the time it got to me. The one I'm using now, is the third shell replacement and second hard drive image of the IBM T42 I received new a few years ago. While it is a well-built machine, and not too heavy to carry around, I have longed for a wider screen for some time (especially now that I use
Flock).
My new system will be an HP Compaq 8510p, which has a high resolution screen, updated processor and chipset (Centrino Pro, even), and a SATA hard drive! I'm looking forward to burying Windows on another machine.
You may have heard that I love the Flock web browser. You may not have heard that Flock has changed the browser their product is based on from Mozilla's (for 2.x) to Google's (for 3.x).
