Lazy Robot

Saturday, 18 February 2012

HP vs IBM Laptop Engineering

I have just had reason to open up two ageing laptops to retrieve their CMOS batteries. Here is a quick rundown of what I had to do to get to them.

HP Compaq Evo N115

What I had to remove:

Battery
Hard disk
CD-ROM drive
LED cover
Keyboard
Screen
Heat dissipator

Total screws: 19 T-8 head screws of varying sizes, including 4 sprung screws that have to be removed and replaced in a specific order to prevent the heat sink breaking.

Time to disassemble: 20 mins
Time to reassemble: 10 mins

IBM Thinkpad R30

What I had to remove:

Keyboard

Total of 2 Philips head screws.

Time to disassemble: 1 minute

Time to reassemble: 1 minute

Conclusion

I think the conclusion is fairly obvious. The R30 is a "consumer" level laptop, so doesn't have the shear awesome build of the T or X series Thinkpads, and yet even for something as simple as this it runs rings around the other "big brand" laptop I have the misfortune of owning.

Thinkpad. Because anything else is just a world of pain.

Tuesday, 7 February 2012

Lacklustre images of snow

It seems that some people have been complaining of late that the onset of snow will result in an onslaught of lacklustre amateur photographs of nothing much. Well, some of us like taking pictures of things. Even pictures you might not want to look at. So ... tough! ;)

Here are a handful of terribly dull pictures of why I didn't get the car out on Sunday.

Monday, 6 February 2012

Zombified

So I've not posted any pictures for a while. That's because I haven't taken any pictures for a while. Because I've been a zombie.

Why have I been a zombie? Because I've been seeing a lot of this sort of thing:

Yep. Trains. In the dark.

This is due to a rather significant job change that has resulted in me having to get up 2 hours earlier than before. This has paid off with a job that doesn't leave me as a stressed out ball of pent up hatred every evening, so that's good. Unfortunately, everything else has had to take a back seat for a little while so I could get used to the new routine and actually be awake of an evening. Just about getting there, I think.

Tuesday, 31 January 2012

Quick evaluation of complex properties in Xdebug within Vim

For those of us who still use Vim for PHP development, getting Xdebug to work nicely with complex properties is a pain. Most of the time we end up evaluating print_r to get any sort of complex structure or deeply nested value. Not any more! Use this remapping:

nnoremap ,p :python debugger_watch_input("property_get")<cr>A

This is similar to ,e for quick evaluation, but lets you quickly get any given property. Press ,p and type the property you want or, if you prefer, use yank and ^R to copy/paste the property into the debugger window. It works for objects and array subscripts, so you can type complicated things like: