Laptop musings

So, what does a Linuxhead do when his computer starts to go flaky? He rebuilds his kernel. Which is what I did today. And I'm rather pleased with the results. I upgraded from the 2.6.18-r6 to 2.6.22-r8 kernel, and so far haven't noticed any tics. The video driver is much more solid, the audio seems to work, I'm getting good responsiveness from the thinkpad controls, and I even have the infra-red drivers working again. W00t! So far the only thing odd about the kernel is that it seems to take forever (like, two minutes!) for the USB 2.0 driver to read the drive status off the iPod, but it's much faster and much more stable; there used to be a decay point, past which you could no longer eject the ipod without risking corrupting the iPod's filesystem but that problem seems to have been corrected.

Anyway, I seem to be heavily leaning toward a T60/2GB m/120GB hd/1.63GHz/WXGA 15.4". The ATI 1400-based systems seem to be very nice, but I don't know if I want to afford the extra $200 that they require. And the closed-source drivers make me itchy. The 120GB drive is a must, though.

Magazine distribution weirdness.

One of my biggest complaints about most science fiction is that the authors tend to be big fans of architecture; they love to describe building and starships in detail, but when it comes to the clothing they tend not to be quite so impressive. Compare and contrast the matte paintings and digital backdrops of the first three Star Wars films with the costuming, and you'll see what I mean. It's even more obvious in literary sources.

I try to correct that by paying attention to fashion, and learning the terminology, and laying it out for the readers. To do this, I read fashion magazines, and one of my favorites is Vogue Italia, one of the editions where I can't read a word but the fashions for both men and women are quite amazing. A few times a year, the Italian edition publishes Bambini, for kids' fashions. That's an especially useful edition: the bright colors and outlandish cuts of expensive euroclothes for kids and teens often has a strong SF feel to them, especially if you posit a culture with a lot of affluence and automated customization.

This morning, as I was walking from where my first bus drops me off to where I pick up the transfer to the office, I stopped by the magazine stand and spotted a copy of Bambini amongs all the other fashion magazines. And on the cover was a note: "For sale in the United States only."

The magazine is still entirely in Italian. A special printing of this Italian fashion magazine was done for the USA market. The publishers felt there's a big enough market in the US to justify the expense of a unique print run, but not big enough to justify doing any translation. I'm trying to figure out what editorial decision led to that.