A couple of months ago, I realized that the battery in my Palm Treo 755p would only last about a day. I had installed a few new programs on it at the time, but didn’t think much about it. The strange thing was it would be fine for a few days, then the battery would drain in what seems like a few hours.

Finally, I figured out what it was… I had installed Chatter email because the default email client that came with my Treo wouldn’t work with Gmail. Chatter will run in the background and frequently ping your email server checking for new messages.

The fix was easy; in Chatter, go to the Sys menu and select ‘Shutdown ChatterEmail’ This shuts the program all the way down and so it isn’t running in the background. Yay! I have my battery life back!

If I could have a “do over” on my laptop purchase from last November, I would have gotten one of these Asus Eee laptops.

Here’s why:

1. I don’t need a totally powerful machine - 98% of my work is done in a command line, firefox or thunderbird. If I’m going to do work in Photoshop, I’ll borrow my wife’s laptop (I can’t afford more than one copy of it anyway!)
2. I want my laptop to be portable - I’m willing to sacrifice a faster processor for a small laptop. When it comes to laptops, my opinion is smaller is better. If I could have multiple command line windows open on my Treo, I’d just use that as my portable computer. At 6.3 x 8.9 x 0.8 inches & 2 pounds, the Asus Eee laptop seems pretty sweet.
3. I put Linux on all my computers anyway (my wife’s MacBook doesn’t qualify as one of my computers)

I’m pleased about how many reviewers of this laptop on Amazon are happy with Linux on this laptop and never install Windows.

Well, our last laptop lasted 6 years, so I’ll probably be shopping around again in 2014 for another laptop.

Lately, my wife’s been doing a lot of stuff in photoshop on her MacBook which only has 1GB of RAM which gets eaten up so quickly and the system starts getting quite slow. I decided it was time to break down and buy some more RAM for her MacBook.

So, I’m shopping for a memory upgrade for my wife’s MacBook and as I look around…WOAH…$300 from the Apple store. I don’t really want to pay that much. It seems quite expensive. I figure it’s gotta be cheaper than that so I start looking around.

I found this, the same memory upgrade (2GB) for $65. I can’t believe Apple charges so much for it. And I can’t believe they get away with either.

I often have people ask me if I know of any good deals on computers and it seems like they change so frequently that I rarely have an answer.

Today I have an answer:
Save $250! Get the VOSTRO™ 200 MINI TOWER for $399!

I recommend bumping up to at least a 160GB hard drive and getting a DVD burner (16X DVD+/-RW Drive) so the real total would be $459. Not too bad for a computer with a 19″ flat panel screen.

You probably can’t get it in time for Christmas, but it might make a good New Year’s gift for your family.

I just released another Ubuntu public AMI for Amazon EC2. This one is nearly identical to the first one I released except it can be used with large and extra large instances.

Here are the current tech specs and costs for the different instance sizes:

Small Instance (Default) - $0.10/hr
1.7 GB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit), 160 GB of instance storage, 32-bit platform
Large Instance - $0.40/hr
7.5 GB of memory, 4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 850 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform
Extra Large Instance - $0.80/hr
15 GB of memory, 8 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform