[Cumbria] My Personal Agenda

[Michael Saunders]

On Fri, 10 Jan 2003, Schwuk wrote:

> and I refuse to use MS ICS, I have been using SSH and X forwarding to
> access the web from my WiFi'd laptop. You may remember I was having
> problems running Mozilla across the link - that's now working, but I
> started using pine just so I could get my mail and was very impressed by

Hurrah for networked X! As you've no doubt seen on Slashdot, arguments
keep popping up where people attack X and claim that such features as
network transparency are useless -- I think it'll become more important
over time, esp. for handhelds and PDAs etc.

> > Dillo and Links etc. Toshiba 400CS, mint condition for a ton, was
> > ideal.
> 
> Fair enough. What's the battery life like? Is it WiFi'd?

Battery is about 2 to 3 hours, depending on what it's being used for. No
wireless network at the mo -- can only get 56k modem dialups here so I'm
not too fussed about having a home network. It has 10m Ethernet which does
the job.

> Thanks for highlighting irssi - I was looking for a good console IRC
> client - I've tried BitchX and didn't like it. How good is dillo? I'm a
> real mozilla fan, and use it at home & work on Windows and Linux.

Yep, Irssi is marvellous and a real fave of IRC long-timers. Dillo is a
tiny GTK-based browser which is pretty limited on features but absolutely
zips along. It's fine for browsing the average graphical site like eBay,
Slashdot etc., Links does the rest.

One thing that becomes really apparent on older boxes is the benefit that
good GCC optimisations can bring. Case: after getting that laptop, I
looked into some lightweight MP3 players. Best I could find was
MP3Blaster, but it "skipped" regularly through overloading the CPU.

One compile later with -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer etc. and it's down to
50-70% CPU usage, which is much better!

> Ah yes, but you own yours - both of mine belong to my employers. When I
> do buy my own it will either be Apple (almost bought one of the new 12"
> Powerbooks the other day) or Dell.

Hopefully Chris will bring along his iBook to the next meeting so we can
all drool over it, and should help make up your mind!

Mike

-- 
Michael Saunders
www.aster.fsnet.co.uk