[P1] platform for iBook

[david]

On Friday, June 13, 2003, at 06:53  PM, Mary Keene wrote:

> You reminded me of a very compelling reason to use and external 
> keybooad and mouse if the portable is your primary computer or if you 
> are using the keyboard alot—hand safety and ergonomics.
>
> The ibook has a short palm rest area and a sharp edge. Prolonged 
> contact with the sharp edge can contribute to pain in the short term 
> and more severe problems in the long term. The larger G4 pb's have 
> more palm and wrist area but still have the hard, sharp edge with the 
> same results  eventually. The greatest feature in the clamshells was 
> th ergonomic hand and palm area and I, for one, mourn it each time I 
> use my icebook..

Yep - as much as I like my iceBook the one area where it is inferior to 
my tangerine is the palm rest area. After coding or writing for about 
30 minutes my palms begin to hurt. I got a new computer desk at work 
last year and lost my monitor shelf so I started looking for a notebook 
rest. My wife beat me to it, getting me one of those fancy white round 
ones. A ridiculous price but the iBook looks awesome on it. I use the 
white Apple keyboard that came with my server and a (gasp) MS mouse. 
People who come into my office are always impressed by the setup - even 
PC users.

> I forgot the specs on the questioner's new icebook but if it has a 
> cdrw, another option would be to burn a cdrw for each location or to 
> simply carry some cdrws with him. Personally, I would prefer to 
> "waste" cd-rs due to the greater data integrity they provide.
>
> With the cdrws,AFAIK, you would have to copy the entire cdrw to the 
> hd, erase the cdrw and re-record with the new data. Does anyone know 
> of a way whereby you could add directly or erase a single file?

This is what I do. I used a CDRW nearly every day all this school year 
and it is still going strong. I also have a 64 Mb flash drive I got as 
a freebie at a conference. I use it for small files. Love it. I was an 
early adopter of zip drives and got burnt early too. I had three drives 
die by click of death. I stopped trusting them after the second death 
but kept one for students until it also died. At that point I stopped 
using them. Don't get me started about Jaz - wouldn't take one if given 
to me along with a C note.

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Good qualities are easier to destroy than bad ones, and therefore
uniformity is most easily achieved by lowering all standards.
  ~~ Bertrand Russell

David