MacBook Air: Too many cons, doesn't compare well to competition

So Apple announced the MacBook Air this week. They got some things right, but imho a lot wrong.

The good. Of course, the small/thin form factor is fantastic. I recently switched to similar small/thin form factor laptop, the ThinkPad X61, and love it. I doubt I'll ever go back to the full-sized (15"+ screen) laptop again. Apple also did nice innovation with multi-touch support. Using LED for the screen is great for increased viewability outdoors and lower power consumption, and the option of a solid-state drive (SSD) is something every laptop should have.

The bad. One of the biggest improvements in responsiveness comes from having a fast hard drive - often times this can make a bigger difference in perceived performance than CPU. And the Air's drive is dog slow. It is a 1.8-in, very low RPM el-crapo drive -- unless you get the SSD option, you will be unhappy (general rule: always spring for the 7000+ RPM drive option in any PC, laptop included). And Apple decided to not allow physical access to the hard drive or RAM. With other laptops, you could purchase a nice spacious/speedy 2.5" HDD now and then replace it with an SSD a year or two later when the prices drop and capacity increases. That will not be an option with the Air.

Also, the battery is not user replaceable! That's right, you cannot swap-out your spent battery for a fresh one, you need to find a plug and recharge. Furthermore, when the battery wears out in 1.5 years like they all do, you cannot just purchase a new one online - you need to send your laptop back to Apple for surgery. What, is this thing an iPod? How am I supposed to do my work while my laptop is off at the factory?

Finally, I noticed the Air has a grand total of ONE USB port. Unreal. Guess Mr Jobs doesn't think anyone will need a mouse and a DVD drive attached at the same time.

I'd take my Thinkpad X61, or perhaps the new X300, over the Air any day.

A better way to get rid of ads and spyware while browsing

I have used lots of ad blockers over the years. Unfortunately, many of them are tied to a specific browser or a specific operating system. Life is further complicated on Windows because so many applications use browser "widgets" behind the scenes. For example, if you use the popular Adblock Plus extension in Firefox, it doesn't help when you are using an application like TurboTax or Media Player that fires up an IE behind the scenes.

So nowadays I replace my system's hosts file with one that effectively gives a bogus IP address for any site associated with advertising, cookie tracking, and other nefarious incursions on your privacy. The beauty of this approach is:

1. It blocks access to these ad/spyware servers from any/all programs on your machine.
2. It isn't specific to a specific program or operating system. It is equally effective on Windows, MacOS, Linux, Solaris, whatever.
3. Simple - no proxy servers to maintain, no utilities to update.
4. Doesn't consume any resources on my machine - no ram, cpu, nothin.
5. Also blocks cookies from creepy money-grubbing spy/spam oriented companies.
   

Give it a try; complete instructions and an excellent blocking hosts file to use can be found here.

In addition to installing the above hosts file, I do recommend that you use FireFox over Internet Explorer as your default day-to-day browser. Your Windows machine will thank you, trust me. Assuming you do, I suggest a couple of small extra steps to get rid of error messages and "server not available" popups when creepy javascripts discover they cannot communicate with ad spamming servers. In the FireFox Address Bar enter about:config, then scroll down to browser.xul.error_pages.enabled and set change it to False. Next, scroll down to the setting dom.max_script_run_time, and set this one to 1800.

Enjoy, and as always please post a comment to let me know your thoughts.

Easy spell checking with LaTeX

I love LaTeX. For those of you who have never heard of it, LaTeX is a program used to typeset documents, such as letters, papers, or books. Think of it like a word processor, but different (and imho better, being the geek i am). To use LaTeX, you write up a document with any editor you choose and place mark-up tags to specify things like bold, center, or start of a new section. If you have ever written even dirt-simple HTML, you will feel very comfortable with LaTeX. Once you have written your document, you run the LaTeX program on it and viola - a beautifully formatted document in PDF or Postscript is produced. LaTeX is free, open source, and runs on every operating system ever invented. If you are using Unix/Linux, it is probably already installed. If you are using Windows, grab a great distribution of LaTeX from http://www.miktex.org.

When it comes time to spell check your work, however, you have a problem. Similar to spell checking HTML source, you need a program that can spell check your document contents but not the document mark-up tags. Most LaTeX aficionados suggest using ispell or aspell. While these tools indeed work, they are old, cruddy, and don't work well on Windows. I have found a few better alternatives:

• Use the spell checker built into Vim. If you are already using the popular Vim editor, did you realize that Vim versions 7.x and above can check your spelling in LaTeX as you write? Just like MS Word, Vim will place a red line under misspelled words. You can then write click for suggestions, or add the word to your custom dictionary. Use gvim (the Vim GUI) for best ease of use. Assuming you already have vim performing syntax highlighting of your LaTeX document, just add the following to your ~/.vimrc (on Unix) or your ~/_vimrc (on Windows) :

autocmd FileType tex setlocal spell spelllang=en_us

Now whenever you open a .tex file, Vim will real-time check your content and ignore your mark-up tags, just like you want.

• Use the spell checker built into Emacs. So, you are an Emacs weenie, eh? Real men use vi, ya know. Eh, no worries, you Emacs sissies can activate LaTeX spell checking by adding the following to your .emacs file:

(add-hook 'tex-mode-hook (lambda()(flyspell-mode 1)))

• Use 4spell on Windows. If you are working on Windows, yet another option is to use the free Windows program 4spell. It understands plain ASCII, TeX, RTF, HTML and BibTeX. While I certainly wouldn't call it modern, it is a hell of a lot nicer than ispell - see the screenshot on the right.