Blessed by the Potato

Though I do consider myself a techie and computer geek in many respects, I have to admit that as soon as I’m done buying a computer, I immediately stop following the latest developments in processors and graphics chipsets, etc. So I’m not really going to review my new laptop on the specs, because they’ve stopped meaning much to me, except to say that it does have a discrete video card on it so I can game if I want to. Though it was a xmas present from my dad, I picked out the model I wanted myself: a Dell XPS 15″ L501X. For reference, I’m moving up from a ~7 year old Toshiba A70.

Look and feel: the keyboard and trackpad both have a nice feel to them: the keys articulate with just a little bit of resistance, with a smooth, polished surface. I really do have to emphasize how pleasing the tactile elements are, even the non-functional parts where the heels of my hands rest while typing. The backlit keyboard option is nice, especially when typing in the dark. I like the feel of the trackpad, too, and it’s positioned nicely between my hands when I type, even though it’s slightly left-of-centre. Most importantly, the keys are where they’re supposed to be: no concessions to the French! The trackpad supports two(+)-finger touch, allowing for gestures like putting two fingers down and pinching them together/apart to zoom out/in on the screen.

The screen I’m a little mixed on: it looks nice, it’s bright with good contrast, and the coating is not so glossy as to make using it in the light impossible. However, it’s a TV resolution (720p: 1366 x 768) and aspect ratio, which is a little weirdly wide for me: I preferred the 1200×800 of my old laptop (a little taller), or better yet, 1680×1050 of my desktop (yes, I’m a 16:10-preferring troglodyte). The screen viewing angles are also backwards: there’s a large horizontal viewing angle where you can still see the screen really well (not great for privacy on a laptop), and very little vertical viewing angle: the screen noticeably darkens just from lowering my head due to slouching, and Wayfare, who’s about 6″ shorter than me (and the difference isn’t that much when sitting) can barely see the screen when sitting beside me. The screen doesn’t tilt back much beyond vertical, which could pose a problem if sitting high above the laptop, such as when sitting too close to a desk (or an airplane tray table). The fonts don’t quite look right, but I’m not sure if that’s a function of Windows 7, or the screen itself (they’re largely “too serify”, which looks a little like when you set an LCD monitor to a non-native resolution, but I am at the native resolution here!). Images/videos look fine though.

It came with a TV tuner, which I thought was a neat option, though a dongle is needed to plug in a regular antenna/cable coax. There’s no special software included, so one must resort to windows media centre, which has a very poor implementation for scanning for over-the-air channels (though it’s pretty straightforward to use your computer as a PVR once you do get the channels added). If anyone has any suggestions for TV tuner software, I’m all ears (esp. if free!).

The battery has to be the biggest disappointment, though not in the way you may think: I do 90% of my “mobile” computing plugged into the wall, and I could do with only ~2 hours of battery life for the rest. Yet since I opted for the package with the higher numbered video card (435M) and processor (i7), Dell would only let me configure the laptop with the larger 9-cell battery… and that battery is a bit of a travesty, adding weight to an already chunky computer (though still much lighter than my old one), but also sticking straight out from the bottom. That appendage is going to make it hard to carry the computer around in my backpack, though it does nicely elevate the rear of the computer when placed on a desk (conversely, it makes it hard to use on your lap, it seems to create pointy corners that dig at my knees). Though I do get ~5 hours of battery life with mild web-browsing and OTA TV watching. I can’t find a battery on their site to order (having it as a 2nd may be the best of both worlds – smaller form factor for travelling when I expect to be able to plug in, larger capacity option when I need to roam for a few hours), but it’s $150 for the previous generation. I thought that a second 6-cell battery was an option when I was checking out, at more like $40… I might just pay it to make putting it in my backpack easier, but not if it ends up being $150 (if anyone is ordering an XPS based off this review… want to shoot me a line before you finalize the sale and see if I can add a 6-cell battery to your order? :)

On a related note, the power adaptor has a three-prong plug, which is a disappointment: so many travel adapters (and extension cords) on the market are only for two-prong cables, and there’s no need for a laptop to have a grounding pin (Toshibas and Sonys don’t!). The cord is also fairly short, at about 6′ long (I believe my Toshiba is ~9′), and of course the 3-prong issue means it’s harder to find an extension cord! There’s a little blue light-up ring on the power cable, which on the one hand will let you know that the AC adapter has juice, but on the other will be annoying when trying to sleep in the same room the laptop is charging in (i.e.: hotel rooms). I don’t see any way of turning that light off. I really wish they hadn’t included that. Speaking of weird lights, there’s an LED to indicate hard drive activity, as with most laptops… but it’s behind the screen. That was a weird design decision.

I have yet to try to stress it out with a game, but for just web browsing, it runs cool and quiet, which is a huge improvement over my last computer. The main heat exhaust is out the left side, and it looks like there are several intakes on the bottom (which I know from experience with the Toshiba, can be easily blocked and lead to an overheat shutdown).

The speakers are “JBL certified” which means nothing to me per se, but I do have to say the sound quality is excellent for a laptop. There’s even a “subwoofer” on the bottom of the computer — and heck, even without the “for a laptop” qualification, the sound is very decent. There are two headphone jacks, which allows you to plug in two sets of headphones (to share sound with a friend) — I haven’t tested it with 5.1 sound yet, but a popup did ask if I plugged in headphones to the jacks, with the option to instead pick front/rear/centre/subwoofer, so I’m pretty sure that’s a possibility, and one port says S/P DIF, though all I know about those letters is that it’s something for audiophiles. 3 USB ports are spread around the computer, one on each side and the back, making it easy to avoid physical size conflicts with large USB keys, and allowing you to always plug into your preferred side of the computer. One of the ports doubles as an eSATA port in a clever bit of workmanship. I was a little disappointed to see that there was no VGA port for video (all of our conference room projectors connect via VGA), just HDMI and mini display port. Another dongle to get and keep somewhere… Oh, and it can output full 1080p over the HDMI, and even use that as a second monitor while you’re using the main screen on 720p mode (sound will go out over the HDMI connection by default, but that can be toggled).

Though I’ve only used it for a day, I actually haven’t been too annoyed by Windows 7 — some of the new features I’ve turned off (gone is that annoying “dock” at the top of the screen!), and some settings I’ve put into “classic” mode. Keep in mind that’s high praise from me: I thought XP was the very pinnacle of Microsoft OS design, and took Vista as a personal insult. One thing I haven’t yet figured out how to do is to make the control panel list contents “normally”: that is, down by column first, then across by row, but otherwise everything is just simply working, which is the point.

So, all in all I’m quite pleased with the Dell XPS. I’m particularly impressed with the build quality, just the tactile feel of it and some of the little features. The power packed in here is good according to the specs, but like I said, I haven’t really stress tested it yet, so I can’t comment first hand. The only real downsides are the screen (I’d prefer a 1680 resolution, and the vertical viewing angle is poor) and the lack of choice in batteries — if I want a smaller form factor Dell, why not let me downgrade the battery and just deal with the reduced life?

Here are some pictures of how the 9-cell battery sticks out of the bottom:

And here’s a pair showing how the screen darkens when you’re off on the vertical viewing angle. The camera settings are the same for both shots, just the second has the camera lowered by about 4″, and you can see that the screen is noticeably darker. So you’d have to adjust the position of the screen every time you go for a good slouch…

Not too much to report from this year’s round of holiday shopping. I managed to do about half of my shopping online, which was fantastic given the amount of snow we had in London, and how sick I was for a week there, both leading to a state of not wanting to leave the house.

A quick hiss at Toys Toys Toys in Fairview Mall (Toronto): they wouldn’t accept a manufacturer’s coupon for a boardgame, and they have a no returns policy. I may be a spoiled, decadent consumer for feeling entitled to a decent return policy, but right before xmas at a toy store? Toys may not be as hard to buy for someone as clothes, but it’s so easy to get the wrong thing for kids (or for a kid to end up with two of something), and have to take it back that a no-returns policy is just mean. On top of that, there was no warning from the cashier, just a sign posted at the check-out. (And to top it off, we do indeed find ourselves with a surplus Scrabble set – anyone know of any toy drives still accepting donations?)

A much longer fuck you goes out to EB games. Wayfare bought me a copy of Fallout New Vegas for the Xbox, which, unbeknownst to her, I played months ago on the PC. So back it goes. While they do have a return policy, the reality was that it failed. We got quite the run-around, which I’ll try to detail below, but the end result is that a full refund was not provided — Wayfare lost $5.50 just for the privilege of shopping at EB Games, and they were skeevy to boot. Fuck ’em.

The longer version starts at purchase: the clerk offered Wayfare some variety of store membership card, which she declined. The clerk said it wouldn’t cost her anything, and she still declined, but the clerk put it on anyway. Then we go to return the game, and the new clerk mumbles and fumbles for a bit about having to manually alter the price — we assume because it’s now boxing week and the current price is lower than the price she paid before. But no, as he processes the credit card for the return, we see that it’s not for the full amount, and not for the new sale price, either. He starts to explain how the card was non-refundable, and we’re confused — what card? He explains the card, and how it was rung up originally so that the end price for buying the game was the same if we kept it, but for the return the game came out cheaper with an added charge for the membership, which is non-refundable. Wayfare explains how she said she didn’t want it, that she never goes for memberships you have to pay for, so there must be a mistake and why can’t we return that too? He’s adamant that there’s nothing he can do about returning the membership, and that we’re out $5.50.

He says one reason why it’s not refundable is that we could have bought it, then run out to another EB games and used it to save 10% on used games, then tried to return it… I’m like wait, the membership gives you 10% off used games? Yes, just used games. So why, I ask, was the discount applied to this purchase, of a new game? “Oh,” he says, “that was a used copy of Fallout New Vegas.”

This is where it goes from being a rip-off story to a major skeeve-out. He’s already put the returned game away behind the counter so we can’t double-check, but no, Wayfare is sure she bought a new game. I swear there was nothing on the packaging to indicate it was used when I opened it — it was even shrink-wrapped (usually the used games have open cases with just a sticker to seal them). Two sets of eyes saw this game and believed it to be new, and EB is saying that it was actually a used game they sold her. Plus, it was at the same price all the other stores were selling the new copy for.

To sum up: rip-off return policy with a bizarre mandatory membership fee, and passing off used merchandise as new. Avoid EB Games.

I’m pretty miserably sick here. Sore throat, cough, fever, and vile fluids being produced all over the place. I think the combination of thesis stress and digging out from over a meter of snow just did me in.

My cache of drugs was pretty low to be heading in to a major illness. In particular, I was just about out of advil; I had to ration them yesterday so that I’d still have one to take this morning to get me out the door to the pharmacy.

On the bright side, I was going through the Pharma Plus flyer, and just about everything I wanted was on sale. Advil, vitamins, mouthwash, nyquil, and cold-fx all had pretty substantial sales on. Plus, it was a big bonus airmiles promotion if I spent $50 or more (which wouldn’t be hard to hit with all the stuff on my list). There was even a 1-day sale on 7-up ($2.22 per 6-pack of bottles! awesome!) today. I didn’t feel like driving, especially since we got another dusting of snow last night, and that would involve sweeping the car off. The Pharma Plus is only like 3 blocks away, so I walked.

And when I got there, there was no sale tag out for the Advil, just one of the “switch to the store brand and save X” tags. I figured I must have remembered the flyer wrong, put some store brand ibuprofen in the cart, and moved on… but the vitamins had no sale tag either. Nor did the mouthwash. The toblerone did, but not the door-crasher one-day sale price, and the 7-up wasn’t even available in the bottles. Something was definitely wrong, so I went to the front of the store where the flyers usually are to double-check (maybe I had the effective day wrong? Maybe I dreamed it all in my fever?), and there were no flyers. There wasn’t even that tray where they usually sit. I asked the cashier for a flyer, and he said they’re not a flyer store.

What? I know they were a flyer store just a few months ago, the last time I was there. How can they not be a flyer store? Can they do that, opt to use the Pharma Plus name and everything but then not follow their flyer? And also, if they’re not a flyer store, why is Pharma Plus sending a flyer to my house? The next closest store is 4 km away, and I have to pass by three Shoppers Drug Marts (and this Pharma Plus) to get there. Not a very effective use of the advertising budget…

I have to say though that given the amount of snow that was dumped on London, the city has done a decent job at cleaning up the sidewalks. This is particularly remarkable because the city usually does a terrible job at keeping the sidewalks free of snow — the sidewalk ploughs seem to take a day or two before they come around, and by that time the snow has been packed down into an irregular icy surface by the passage of what pedestrians there are, and that’s nigh-impossible to walk on. The one issue is that at many intersections the sidewalk ploughs went by first, and now the street ploughs have put up an icy barrier for pedestrians to hop over. Nothing new to anyone out there, I’m sure, but with the amount of snow we have, those ice dams mean that we’re going to have some epic meltwater ponds forming soon…

Wayfare got me this cute little USB-powered Peltier cooler single-can “fridge” for our anniversary (aside: thanks to Amazon, I got her a big pile of late).

The idea is neat: using the power from your computer’s USB hub, you can cool a plate down to a respectably cool temperature, and use that to cool your pop. Then, encase the whole thing in retro-styled plastic. It’s a great gift idea for me, as I’ve been known to drink a half dozen or more caffeine-laced beverages through the course of a stressful work day. Because I’m cheap, I keep a case of Coke bought from the grocery store under my desk rather than go down to the vending machine or caf to spend waste $2.25 a pop. However, I then have to go to various lengths to make them cold, such as stealing ice from various hospital ice dispensers (the caf used to have a free ice dispenser for this purpose, but they took it out during the last renovation and never put it back in), or putting my Coke outside on the window ledge in the winter. After all: a One that is not cold, is scarcely a One at all.

Unfortunately, the cooler doesn’t look to be quite powerful enough to get the job done. After several hours on the plate, my Coke was barely any cooler than the ones that had been sitting on my desk at room temperature. However, the plate itself does get nicely cool, so I figured it maybe just needed more time to bring the temperature of the Coke down. However, even after sitting there overnight, the Coke is at best “not warm”. The air inside the fridge is also not particularly cold.

So, time to hack!

I can immediately identify two issues with the design. The first is that though the plate gets cold, only a small ring of aluminum from the can actually contacts the plate to transfer heat. So, I grabbed a handful of copper wool sitting around to see if I could increase the surface area for conduction.

The other issue is insulation: the little plastic fridge isn’t insulated. I figured it would at least limit convection and so should work better than the similar pop chillers that consist of just the cooler plate alone… however, remember in thermodynamics there is no free lunch. Though the top half of the plate gets cold, the bottom half gets hot, and in the system as a whole there is a net increase in heat. There’s no insulation break in the plastic around the heat dissipating area on the bottom and the chilled area on the top — the plastic may be serving as a route for the heat to get back up to the can, working against the chiller’s job. Though the fridge is very nearly perfectly sized for a single can, there is a tiny bit of wiggle room for insulation. Though I do actually have some syrofoam here, it’s way to messy to try to cut down to the right size, so I’m going to start by testing some bunched up tissues.

Unfortunately, even after leaving it on with the new mods in place overnight, my Coke was still no cooler than before. The copper wool turns out to not be a particularly good thermal conductor, despite being made of copper (I guess it’s all those air pockets). So, I grabbed some aluminum foil and tried to pack the bottom hollow of the Coke can to get better conduction, but still no joy. Then I did a bit more reading:

The Wikipedia entry on the thermoelectric coolers mentions that these USB drink chillers may not be very useful, providing milliWatts of effective cooling. For a quick calculation, the specific heat of water is about 4.2 J/°C/g. So, it would take 4.2 * 355 = 1.5 kJ of energy to lower the temperature of my pop by 1 °C. If 0.1 W of effective cooling were getting into the can, it would take over 4 hours to lower the temperature by 1 °C. Yikes!

Now I know why it says “keep your drink cold” on the box and not “cool your drink down” — it looks like the chiller is only powerful enough to slow down the warming up of an already cold drink. The answer may be more power!!!!!11one!111!! I’m pretty sure there are some DC power supplies not being used around here, though I’ll need to check with some of the more electrically-intelligent people around here if feeding more power to this thing could blow it up (or even help at all).

Other oddities: even though it only takes power from the USB (it doesn’t seem to try to load any drivers or work with the software in any way), it has system requirements, including 100 MB of free disk space…

The geeky hilarity starts right with the Universal logo scroll, re-rendered in faux 8-bit style, complete with midi synth music.

It’s sweet, funny, entertaining, witty, makes plenty of gamer references, and of course, is full of fighting. To steal the best part of someone else’s review: You know how in musicals, people will just break out into song for no reason at all, just because it’s a musical and that’s what you do? This movie is like that, but with cartoon fights.

What’s not to love? Stop reading this and go see it already.

Rating: Awesome.
Favourite line: Jetpacks.
Fun fact: the coins are indeed Canadian coins.
Lesson learned: geeks do consider themselves in an exclusive relationship even when they’re not allowed out after dark and have only held hands. This was news to some of the “cool kids” who saw it.