I’ll probably sell my 15″ Macbook Pro. I just bought one of the new aluminum Macbooks and really don’t need two machines (rather, my iPhone has become my second machine).

Also selling my car (in order to buy a new/newer one). I will probably sell my motorcycle, too. I didn’t ride for a couple years and really felt like getting back into it. But I just don’t ride it enough. Part of that is the bike (not as fun as I thought it would be) and part of that is simply having a million other things to do.

So I bought an ASUS Eee PC 1000H a couple months ago. It has a 10″ screen and is way more portable than either of my previous laptops.

I thought I’d dual boot Windows and Linux for a while but ended up blowing away the Windows partition in frustration (I always end up doing that for some reason).

I’m really happy with the hardware. There are just a couple issues: the hard drive was a bit noisy, so I dropped in a 32 GB SSD (which is great), and the display resolution is a bit low at 1024×600. Bumping up to 1280×720 would help a lot with most apps and web pages.

When the kinks are worked out of this type of netbook, and the price drops even further, it is going to have a huge impact on the industry. Apparently it already is.

1. OmniFocus $19.99
2. GuitarToolkit $9.99
3. Remote FREE
4. Twittelator FREE
5. AOL Radio FREE

OmniFocus is a GTD app. GuitarToolkit is a very precise guitar tuner, metronome, and chord dictionary. Remote is a program from Apple that allows you to control any iTunes or Apple TV from your iPhone – can’t wait to setup the house with Airport Expresses and use this.

(just playing with the Flickr “blog this” feature)

Not long until Ubuntu 7.10 comes out, supposedly with some nice new features. I’m excited, even though all I ever do is download the latest, install it in Parallels, play with it for a few hours, and forget about it until I’m looking to free up some disk space and notice the 3gig disk image and trash it.

I’ve used Linux as my main OS at work for over 8 years, so it isn’t like I’ve given up on it. I’m just more comfortable with OS X these days. The weird thing is that I can’t figure out exactly why.

One big reason used to be iTunes and the iPod, but I rarely use my iPod(s) these days. And my new phone has an mp3 player and takes 4gig memory cards. And if I buy any music online it is from the new Amazon MP3 store, not ITMS.

The fact that my Macbook Pro always wakes up quickly when I open it is nice, though to be honest I don’t put it to sleep as much because I rarely take it anywhere these days.

Hmm.

I do watch a lot of DVDs on my laptop and I’m not sure if that is very smooth on Linux yet.

What if you were given a computer with infinite computing power? Or, to be a bit more realistic, you suddenly had all of the world’s computing power at your disposal. What software would you run? What new software would you write? What problem could you solve, and how?

Let’s imagine there is a way of measuring the importance or quality of the results of a computer program. Does the importance or quality of the results increase linearly with the increase of computing power?

It seems clear that in many cases, doubling the speed of your laptop’s CPU does not double the quality of a term paper, or cut the time it takes to write it in half. Instead, it might decrease the chance of a spelling or grammar error slightly, or make it possible to get the layout correct in less time. Difficult to quantify but most people would probably say it is less than a 100% increase in quality.

My NaNoWriMo novel from last year covers this topic a bit. A couple of the characters study AI in college and, after a few years working as programmers, they start a project to integrate various AI mechanisms to solve some difficult problems. Eventually they enhance the system until it can teach itself, creating a feedback loop of improvement and learning. The idea is that, at this point, any increase in computing resources does result in a corresponding increase in the quality of the results. They use the software to create new hardware for itself to run on and soon they have unimaginable computing power.

Note: the system in the novel does NOT suddenly wish to exterminate humanity. Much like we are bound to our bodies and our instincts (to eat, sleep, stay alive, have sex) the software is bound to its hardware and its “instincts” (solve the given problem) which have been coded in the lower levels of the system.

On a related note, this book looks interesting: The Myths of Innovation

W. and I often talk about creativity and innovation, generally agreeing that most things are a product of their environment. It is extremely difficult to make any large jumps from the well traveled paths. Not because we are brainwashed by modern society, but because it is just difficult. How can we be sure there is an answer out there in the infinite number of possibilities? How do we know it will be better than current solutions? How do we search through the infinite possibilities in finite time?

Anyways, I find all of those issues fascinating and need to read more.