brainsnorkel.com

In a previous post I had talked about the rate of decay and the usefulness of a fairly shiny new X61 tablet. Now three years later it’s time for a quick update on how it’s travelling.

As you can see, the tablet is pretty much the same as it was at 3 months old. There are legends about how hard-wearing ThinkPads are. After lugging it back and forth from work, and on vacations, for three years it’s looking like a role model for laptop longevity.

The screen is a bit blotchy with grease now, I haven’t found a good cleaner that I trust to not melt or damage the surface, so I put up with a dirty screen. The screen is also pulled away at the bottom exposing some glue that picks up dust and won’t let it go, but the problem is just aesthetic.

The pen is still held together by sticky tape.

The hard disk is now a 500GB Seagate 7200rpm drive, and I have added 4GB of RAM. The battery is now a non-Lenovo battery that works fine except that the Lenovo power management software courteously questions my commitment to safety and morality every time I log in. The original battery went stone cold dead with error messages from the power management system along the lines of “Get this battery thing outta me NOW! Stat!” when it was just over 2 years old.

None of the keys have come off the keyboard. The marvellous screen-rotating and reversing hinge feels as firm as the day it came out of the box.

The biggest problem is still Vista and the load of Lenovo crapware required to keep it alive. It has always taken a long while to boot and get settled (5-10 minutes), so I’m tempted to start from scratch with Windows 7, but haven’t made the investment in time yet.

After checking the PHP options and benchmarking hosting & database speeds at spry.com’s dirt cheap hosting against options at the dirt cheap hosting I have at GoDaddy.com I decided to move Brainsnorkel to the garish world of GoDaddy.

While moving I found a couple of things of interest.

1. That the Freshy2 theme I use has been bequeathed to the open source community by its creator, so I will move to a newer theme when I find one and modify it to taste. (Ignore the WordPress 2.9 incompatibilities for now, ok?)
2. That exporting MySQL defaults to latin character encoding, and phpMyAdmin defaults to utf8 for import.
3. That TPG has one of the slowest to update DNS servers in the world:
   

   sh-3.2$ nslookup brainsnorkel.com 203.12.160.35
Non-authoritative answer:
Server: dns1.tpgi.com.au
Address: 203.12.160.35
Name: brainsnorkel.com
Address: 64.79.220.169
sh-3.2$ nslookup brainsnorkel.com 203.12.160.36
Non-authoritative answer:
Server: dns2.tpgi.com.au
Address: 203.12.160.36
Name: brainsnorkel.com
Address: 97.74.215.189