Following the demise of my Novatech n1410, I have now taken delivery of a shiny (actually “shiny” is one thing it isn’t!) new Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 3. This is not a review of the X1 Carbon - there are plenty of those available already, but merely my experience of the first few days of ownership.
So why did I choose the X1 Carbon?
I received a surprising amount of interest in my Novatech n1410 review and my subsequent nine-months on review.
Over the past 32 months I have continued to be fairly happy with my Novatech n1410. It has generally been fast enough, reliable enough, light enough and with a decent battery life. The downsides over the long term proved to be the keyboard and trackpad which have never been enjoyable to use and the lack of audio volume. Overall though I would say that it has lived up to my expectations for a budget Ultrabook.
I was surprised to learn that Ubuntu 14.04 can talk to Skype for Business AKA Lync 2013 using the Pidgin Instant Messaging client. The general steps were:
# apt-get install pidgin pidgin-sipe
And then restart Pidgin and add a new Account. The Office Communicator is the relevant plugin, with the following parameters:
When we moved into our new house one irritation was that the kitchen was not really bad enough to warrant replacing, but the laminate worktop was looking tired and was really dragging the kitchen down. We decided to see if we could replace our worktop with a new granite one.
Upgrading Ubuntu at work can make you rather unpopular, as the Internet bandwidth is fully utilised downloading all the updates to packages you have long since forgotten that you installed.
It also takes time, time that you should be working rather than upgrading your computer.
For these reasons I like to trickle download the upgrade over a day and only perform the actual upgrade once all the packages are ready, typically the following morning.
I thought I loved markdown. I thought Dillinger (an HTML5 Markdown editor) looked remarkable. So I downloaded and installed it on an Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS server:
This page explains how to set up spelling in Irssi on Debian Lenny. It assumes that you have already installed irssi.
# apt-get install aspell-en libaspell-dev aspell libtext-aspell-perl
Don’t forget to change the localisation to match your own locale.
At work I needed a cheap laptop for a computer-illiterate user. Giving them Windows, would have meant that they would have had to keep up-to-date with Windows Updates, with all the potential issues that would cause, along with the need for malware protection. It would also have pushed up the cost, a laptop capable of pushing Windows along reasonably decently, would have cost a few hundred pounds at least.
At a dinner party a few months ago, the host asked if I could repair their go-kart, using my RepRap 3D Printer. Apparently the steering wheel had broken off and the Chinese supplier refused to supply only the steering wheel. I accepted the challenge, but did warn that PLA was not the ideal plastic for such a repair, being somewhat brittle.
I’ve been looking into the best method for attaching sheets to the foresail. Metal shackles are dangerous and can rip holes in sails, bowlines are unreliable knots when not under pressure, and a continuous line looped in the middle through the clew is likely to compress the clew over time.