Month: September 2011

10 World’s Most Expensive Laptops

The other day I got into an interesting discussion with dad about laptops.  Specifically, about expensive laptops.  Using Linux, enjoying a greater utilization of any resource, and being constantly broke, I am not very versed in expensive hardware, laptop or not.  So I did a couple of Google searches to educate myself.  Here is a good lineup of the world’s most expensive laptops for the year of 2011:

  1. Luvaglio. $1,000,000.  Yeah, right.
  2. Tulip E-go Diamond. $355,000.  Girly fashion thing.
  3. Ego for Bentley. $20,000. Another girly fashion thing.
  4. Voodoo Envy H-171. $8,500. This is where the list starts getting real.
  5. Rock Xtreme SL8. $5,000.  The specs for this machine look nice.
  6. Alienware Area 51. $5,000. If I had to choose a laptop from that list, this would be the one.
  7. Lenovo Thinkpad W700DS. $4,500.  Yey! for a dual screen laptop.
  8. Toshiba Qosmio G-35-AV660. $3,500.  If I had that much money to spend on a laptop, I’d get myself a Lenovo or HP with a few extra options.
  9. Dell M6400. $3,000.  They tried to put as much as stuff in it as would fit.
  10. Acer Ferrari 1100.  $3,000. The only reason this is here, because a list of 10 items sounds better than a list of 9 items.

ifttt – if this then that is awesome

If you are somehow involved with online tools, publishing, or social networks, then you should definitely check out ifttt.  It is an abbreviation for “if this then that” and it is the best thing since the invention of sliced bread. ifttt is an extremely easy, or perhaps even trivial, tool that helps you to connect and integrate web services.  Say, for example, that you use Google Reader and you want to publish your shared items to Twitter and Facebook and save starred items to Evernote or Delicious.  Can you do it? Sure, the solutions are out there.  But you will be solving each problem separately.  And good luck with technical support.  How about email or SMS integration?  Or Foursquare check-ins to Google Calendar?  You probably haven’t even thought of that…

iffft has a tonne of ready made solutions.  And even if there is something that you need which is not there, you have super easy tools to make it.  All you need to do is basically choose a trigger, like a new post in the blog, a new check-in, or a new shared item, and then choose an action like publish to Twitter or Facebook.  iffft will handle the gory technical details on its own.  If there is a need to authenticate a service, you don’t have to worry about it – it is already implemented.  If you don’t like some of the defaults, you can almost always change them – for example, how the descriptions of the Google Calendar events are formed from the Foursquare check-ins.

Emails, voice calls, and SMS are supported with loads of web services and notification systems.  The interface is very clean and simple.  And everything just works.  It’s been a long while since I saw something so well designed and implemented.  Give it a try, if not for the specific functionality, then just to have more experience with good systems.

Day in brief – 2011-09-14

Which game will you buy next?

The summer is over and the time for big game releases is coming soon.  Coupled with the upcoming Christmas holidays and long, dark, winter evenings, it is a good time to think of the next game you will buy for you Playstation, Xbox or PC.  Given that you won’t probably limit yourself to the only title, I want to see which game is your priority.  Feel free to use comments for sharing your reasons and other games that haven’t made the poll.

Google+ Search

Andrew Shen of Chrome Fans fame notified me of the new, very handy project – Search for Google+.  I’ve tried it out and it, being Google’s own Custom Search Engine, works super well.  The beauty of the whole thing is that it is available via web, Google Chrome and Firefox addons, as well as an Android app.  The search can be limited to Google+ posts and profiles, Google Buzz, Google Reader, or a combined everything.  Try it out – you won’t regret it, I promise.