A few months ago I was pretty excited to have been given a top-of-the-line laptop at work. I quickly ran into problems with graphics card support. My previous 4-year-old linux laptop ran Compiz flawlessly. My new laptop was running like crap. I finally realized it was because of the Nvidia Optimus technology, which is supposed to save power by dynamically switching between discrete and integrated graphics chips. A lot of hacking away later, I finally got it working, although it still doesn't seem as snappy as my old laptop.

I also recently built a new Linux desktop with the intention of playing games on Steam through Wine. Again I hit problems with the graphics card support and finally gave up and installed Windows 8 dev preview.

In the future I'll do more research before buying hardware.

It's time to change the expression from curse like a sailor to curse like a 2-year old.

I also had to add

127.0.0.1 w1.tcr62.tynt.com

I'm guessing that they have a huge pool of *.*.tynt.com addresses.

The Kindle does display an image, usually of a famous author, when it's turned off. While displaying that image does use some power, it's a negligible amount considering how many page turns the thing gets on a single charge. And it looks pretty cool too.

I know they'll devise an alternative way of doing this, but I at least like to dream that this might kill off mail-in rebates.

No longer will I have to wait 3-6 months for a $5 check that never comes.