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New netbook habits – wardriving from the loo

Now that the computer industry has delivered what the users wanted – less capacity and less size at a lower price – the popularity of miniature laptops, netbooks, just keeps on growing.

Their minuscule size may actually cause us to regard our laptops as stationary and our netbooks as our main companions. We checked out some nifty new netbook habits (as actually exercised by an IT-professional friend of ours) in the:

Toilet: Forget about your toilet tabloid – with the cool small netbook you follow any news from just about anywhere without burning any body parts.

Shop: A killer application for cost-effective shopping – never forget to take five minutes outside the shop and check for cheaper alternatives nearby once you’ve found something you want to buy.

Kitchen: So you want to duplicate a divine dish offered by a relative or friend? Easy, take photographs and bring your netbook to the shop and the kitchen with pictures of the ingredients and the dish in different stages.

Office: So your company has issues with you chatting, emailing or browsing at the office. The solution is easy, just bring your inconspicuous netbook and be the only one in the organization to have access to your private email.

Café: Skype, surf, chat and take notes anywhere. With several netbooks offering a fair and improving battery life, you can keep them in sleep mode for instant start-up.

One thing you shouldn’t do, however, is to go mountain climbing above 10,000 ft with a netbook unless you have a solid-state drive. In a hard drive, the heads do not touch the recording surface. They float above the surface on a small cushion of air, produced by the spinning platters. If the air is too thin to create this cushion, the heads will connect to the surface, possibly damaging it.

Do you have any innovative notebook habits to share? Let us know.

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6 Comments

hahaha, I make all that things.

Andrew from Vancouver

April 7th, 2009 at 10:03 am


My netbook is an even better flashlight than my cellphone.

It’s great for finding my way upstairs in the dark after my wife abandons me in the living room late at night while I pore over my uptime statistics.

I actually love the idea for a kitchen computer. I’m also thinking these are great for use on the road when you just need basic RDP and e-mail access.

Kitchen computer is one thing but a toilet computer is quite another. Ah well, at least they do not have smellivision yet! :)

They are still not powerful enough for a full application suite that you need. Give it another 18 months and we will have both minis but they will have max computing power.

No news is good news for the Super Bowl website

The New England Patriots held what seemed to be a commanding lead (17-15) with five minutes left of Super Bowl XLVI last night. But the New York Giants came back and managed to win with 21-17.

As exciting as the game sounds, we missed the whole thing, instead spending our time watching the Superbowl.com website.

It turned out to be a rather dull thing to do because the site held up well and there was no downtime at all. The response time also didn’t give away anything significant in terms of online Super Bowl traffic.

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As Super Bowl 46 is approaching, fans will flock to the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, and to TV sets around the world to follow the New York Giants battle it out with the New England Patriots.

Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30EST on Sunday, February 5, and we’re already monitoring Superbowl.com to see how the site will handle the event.

What team will win Super Bowl 46? How will the site cope? We can only wait to find out.

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Weekend must-read articles #2

Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.h

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on cloud, with a few other topics thrown in to boot.

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Out of the 59 US-based e-commerce sites we monitored during the holiday season last year 28 scored a perfect 100% uptime for December.

Whether this helped spur on the booming sales in the US, we don’t know, but retail e-commerce spending in the US reached $37.2 billion for the November to December 2011 period. That was an increase of 15% from the same period in 2010.

We decided to dig into the numbers for these e-commerce sites to see how well they did in terms of uptime and performance. After massaging the data coming from our Pingdom probes, it turns out that the sites overall performed well during December 2011 in terms of uptime, but response time was an issue for several sites.

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Pingdom Podcast #5

Pingdom’s Mobile Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, and mobile stuff.

In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending submission of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We’re also joined by Mario Lurig, who talks about using Amazon S3 and Cloudfront to speed up a website.

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