For a long time, I've told people who are replacing their computer to do exactly what most companies do: plan for the next time you're going to need to do it.

While there's no "one-size-fits-all" cycle, if a computer is even a moderately important part of your life, you should just plan to replace it on a regular schedule. Nearly everyone has a similar idea in mind for how often they replace their car.

Some people get a new car every 10 years, some every 5 and, some people replace them more often than that. I'm not here to say which is better, be cause there *isn't* a "better" here.

At any rate, my recent experience reviving the Dell laptop that I like by installing Linux gave me a chance to think through my own policy on replacing laptops.

My general policy has been every 18 months or so to replace my main laptop. That would have actually put me in the market in a couple of months. However, my new policy is tied to features instead of dates and it's basically going to be up to the manufacturers when I buy my next one.

I thought through what features I really need in laptops and what determines the need to replace them instead of just upgrade or hold on.

• The CPU is the single most overrated piece of hardware. I'm typing this on a laptop that has a 1.6Ghz processor. I bought it 2 years ago, but the closest model from Dell today still only has a 1.8Ghz processor. So, processor is really eliminated from the criteria for when to buy. The other bits will dictate the need first.
• RAM and hard drive speed are where most impressions of speed are really derived. And, since RAM can added to after the fact, the real criteria here is the maximum that the motherboard supports and the fastest hard drives available. Again, this laptop has a max of 2GB, which is what most of the new ones today have.
• Hard drive capacity does show advancement, but can be replaced aftermarket. As I keep movies, music and images on file servers, my needs in this respect aren't as critical as other people's might be.
• Battery life is a big one. When you can get 4-6 hours out of a laptop battery, there's really no going back. That's usually going to require some sort of extended battery (it did this time).
• Lightweight and small. I've got desktop machines with big LCD's when I need them. However, my laptop is something I drag around the house and around town. So, I'm pretty much going to be after laptops with less than a 14" screen for the forseeable future.
• Widescreen. I like the docked toolbars in Firefox, Thunderbird, etc. which uses more horizontal than vertical space. While there may be less actual space, it's more *useful* to me this way.
• Media drive. The one place that this current laptop from 2 years ago is lacking is a DVD burner. Speed doesn't matter to me much, but new disc formats do.
• Operating system. Now that I'm primarily using Linux as my primary OS, this is less of an issue. As a developer, I usually need access to a current versions of Windows. I used to do that with my primary laptop (which would mean the current Vista release would dictate an upgrade), but am pretty much shifting the fulfillment of that need to desktops, where it can be met for less money.

What it basically all boils down to is whenever I replace a laptop, it's all about the maximum RAM, biggest hard drive and fastest hard drive I can get for the money. Then, wait until those 2 have advanced enough to be worthwhile replacing again.

That all points to watching the trends in those 2 components in the laptop market.

At the moment, 2GB of memory seems the general limit on maximum memory without going over the bang-for-the-buck edge. There are some 4GB models, but they're in the $2000-$3000 laptops, not in the <$1500 models, generally.

The hard drives are hanging out at 7200RPM for the high end speed (why, oh, why are they selling those 4200RPM drives to people?) and about 100-120GB.

At this point, I'm specifically watching mostly for the 4-8GB RAM number to slide into the price range. That would provide another couple of years out of the next one.

Until then, for $100 in RAM and $100 on the hard drive end of things, I can bring *this* laptop to the same level as the new ones. Spending $1400 on a new one to get essentially the same thing as what $200 will get me would be stupid.

So, it looks like it's going to be some time next year that I end up buying a replacement, which works out well. I've got time to build up the laptop fund and get what I really need.

I thought I had hit "publish" on this earlier in the week, but apparently not. I'm actually busting my but working this weekend on some stuff that just isn't cooperating, but wanted to make sure I posted this before Monday actually rolls around.

My good friend Aaron Westre will be presenting at the Emerging Digerati event/meeting this coming Monday, April 2. Aaron's working on his Master's degree in architecture and will be presenting on a topic that he and I have discussed at great length on many occasions: the intersection of computer science and architecture.

More specifically, he'll be talking about the use of code to generate and evolve architectural forms. He'll be showing some of his recent experiments in this area. I've seen some of this stuff come together as he's been working on it and it's definitely interesting stuff.

It also ties nicely into another topic that comes up a lot when we talk. There are a LOT of benefits to working, researching and experimenting in cross-disciplinary ways. When you spend all of your time in a single-disciplinary silo, you are losing out on tons of amazing ideas that you can only get when you bring in ideas from other fields.

Anyway, if you've got some time on Monday, the event is at 5:30pm at the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota.

I've been an advocate for a while of moving away from a single structure to organize data. The typical folder heirarchy of a computer filesystem bugs me. It's the same with bookmarks, categories for nearly anything, etc.

Basically, any time I'm forced to put something in a limited number of places, I find myself wanting to put it in at least n + 1 places. That's why I like views, in whatever form they take.

On Thunderbird, they're actually called views. On the Mac, they're "smart folders". In iTunes, they're called "smart playlists". Regardless of name, I dig 'em.

What's helped them get moving is that we're finally starting to capture attention gestures better. The less recording of metadata that users have to do, the better the whole "view" thing works. A prime example is what I'm doing with iTunes this week.

This year, like last year, SXSW released a giant torrent of songs from the bands performing for the music side of the conference. And, like last year, Garrick is weeding through them to pick and share his favorites. I thought it might be interesting to do the same. It also offered an opportunity to mess with the iTunes smart playlist functionality that I've been dabbling with a bit lately.

I downloaded the torrent's 700+ songs and imported them into the iTunes library. I added a folder for the smart playlists for this and created the first one. I set it for all songs with "SXSW" in the album (all of the songs in the torrent are in the same "album"), that hadn't been listened to or skipped 1 or more times and made it random.

When I saw "skipped" in the available metadata, I was pretty happy. That's the kind of implicit, easy to capture gesture that has been ignored for a long time. First, I can just hit a button on my multimedia keyboard and skip the current song. It's the natural thing I'm going to do if I don't like it (to move on to the next song) and it means I wasn't willing to listen to it all the way through, even once.

That's entirely different from rating songs. I'm not very likely to take the time to rate a song as having one star if I am ready to bail on it 10-15 seconds into it. Rating a song requires bringing iTunes to the foreground, finding the song in the interface, and making a couple of mouse clicks. Given that listening to music on the computer is *always* a secondary activity, that's just not going to happen for songs I don't like.

All of that makes this first smart playlist a good way to get my first pass through the list. The next smart playlist is the songs that have been listened to at least once and never been skipped. After I've gone through the entire original list of songs, I'll move on to this playlist, which is, at the very least, the songs that didn't bug me. If any do, and I skip them, they drop out of the list.

Now, already, there are a few that I caught myself really digging and wanting to hear again. They rose above the background to be really likeable. In those cases, I *did* go and rate them. I tried to be really honest about the star scale and found myself only bothering to rate stuff that was at least 4-5 stars. That's telling.

There was recently a story about how useless Netflix ratings are because, say a fan of Jet Li's movies is going to rate Fearless and other movies highly, but is not likely to go into the romantic comedy section and rate those poorly. The net result is that *everything* is rated highly and the star system doesn't work. So far, this experiment indicates that if I use "skipping" as my "thumbs down", then the presence of a rating *at all* is the only really useful indicator of my "thumbs up".

Regardless, for the final playlist, I did make the criteria a rating of at least 3 stars, in case I do eventually rate something on the low end. That final list, listened to at least once, never skipped and highly rated, will be a list of favorites that I can easily share.

For the most part, it required no more thinking about building a list of favorites than just listening for the heck of it would. The majority of the process is handled by just capturing my implicit attention actions. The little bit of action I *am* taking is to just note down what's already being brought to the foreground of my mind by enjoying the song enough to consciously think about liking the song.

In iTunes, this kind of thing works really well, because much of the metadata comes from backend databases (like a 1980's playlist just reading the ID3 tags for release date) and much of the rest can come from just paying attention to your existing actions. At the operating system level, they're starting to pay attention as well.

If you're on Windows, you might be jealous of the Mac's smart folders. Well, things are finally getting going over there.

Windows Desktop Search brings rudimentary smart folders to Windows. You can save searches as links (not the same as being able to map folders, but a start). After doing a search, you drag the magnifying glass of the address bar to where you want the link and there you go.

You do have to tell Windows Desktop Search to index anything other than the "My Documents" tree, which may or may not matter to you. If you tell it to index everything (like I did), it will take a while, but once it's done, you finally have a quick search for the files, emails, appointments, etc. on your Windows computer.

And, if you're a bit geeky and looking for very specific kinds of searches, you might want to look at the search query reference document. It covers all of the nitty gritty like how to get all of the emails you sent for a given day, etc.

Every implementation I see that essentially puts your files and data into a big pile, letting you define views to pull out exactly what you want is a step in the right direction.

I *like* being able to search specifically through all of my PHP files as a subset of my files *and* being able to bring up PHP files by project. The fact that I could also bring up all of my PHP projects that use PEAR libraries or all of my C# code that uses the TortugaNET library without having to store things that way in folders is fantastic and, eventually, will be seen as the only sensible way to do things.

Is there some way to fast forward to that time and skip the crap we're stuck with now?

After messing with the new Feisty version of Ubuntu on my laptop for a few days, I made the mistake of giving it a shot on my home office desktop as an upgrade.

It was a mistake because, while pretty much everything else works, VMWare Server doesn't get along at ALL with the kernel modules that come with Feisty.

This was a problem because my personal email server is a virtual server sitting on that desktop machine.

However, the use of VMWare Server cuts both ways in this case. While it's their incompatibility that caused the problem (though I shouldn't have expected it to work on a beta version of Ubuntu), it's also the great portability that had my email back up in 15 minutes.

I just grabbed the virtual machines off of the hard drive, moved them over to another machine (the HTPC at the moment) and booted them up. They've got full IP addresses, so they showed up like nothing changed with no problems.

I can now fix the desktop and move them back. If I had messed up a real machine, the problem would have been much worse.

I like a setup that can protect me from myself.

Back in the early days of MP3s, if you had a large CD collection, you found yourself debating whether it was worth it to buy one of those monster 40GB drives and ripping all of your music to it.

At the time, the appeal of just having all of your music in one place on your computer was really strong. No more digging through all of those discs, no changing them out and you could create playlists for whatever you wanted.

Over time, it pretty much became a no brainer and those 40GB drives are in the refurbished iPods and I carry a 60GB as my "sneakernet".

We're sitting on the edge of a similar threshold for movies. With a decent quality XVID or Divx weighing in between 750MB and 1.5GB, you can get 300+ movies onto a 500GB drive . . . which is exactly the project I started a couple of weeks ago.

I've got big, long shelves full of DVD's: just like I had with CD's in 1996. And, when I was laying on the couch after surgery, the benefit of not having to get up to change the DVD became abundantly clear. I had a few on the HTPC already, but discovered the bounds of that variety about a day into the ordeal.

Then came the email offering a 500GB drive for $125. I would have easily paid 3x that to have someone get up and swap movies, so I picked one up and added it to the 300GB I already had in there (for the few movies and TV shows I had on the machine).

I've been ripping my DVD's just like I did my CD's 10 years ago. Of course, just like those days, it's not yet entirely easy, but it's probably easier than you think.

As my HTPC is running Windows XP Pro, that's what I'm using to do the ripping and encoding.

First, I use DVDFabDecrypter to strip off all of the copy-protection crap and extract just the movie. Over the last couple of years, the original CSS encryption has become just one of the things that mess with the DVD's content.

They have been putting 99 "fake" tracks that look like the real movie, invalid DVD navigation and intentionally putting corrupted data on the disc just to mess with people who are doing exactly what I'm doing.

They say they're doing it to "prevent piracy". However, like all methods of fighting piracy, you usually inconvenience people who are not breaking the law rather than the "pirates". If you think that these mechanisms actually stop anyone who is serious about copying, you're dreadfully naive.

I want to make it clear that I am ripping DVD's that I *bought*. I own a copy of the disc and can make a backup copy of it (as has been established on the MP3 front for a long time). The MPAA likes to counter that argument by saying that I only bought a "license" to the content. If that's the case (meaning the disc was provided free when I bought the license), then I should be able to have the movie companies provide me with a replacement for a disc that gets scratched when I move a crappy laptop and the drive scrapes it beyond repair.

After all, just because the "included" disc was destroyed doesn't mean I don't still own the license, right MPAA? Since they can't have it both ways, I'm going to go ahead with this, 100% confident that I'm morally and legally in the right for doing so.

Fortunately, DVDFabDecrypter cleans that protection crap off and gives you a clean copy of the video data on the disc. It doesn't do any recompression or changing the movie, so you can end up with something like 6-7GB per movie, which I'm dumping onto the 300GB drive for the temporary time during the encoding.

I just pick "Main Movie" and clear out all but the main audio and video. Depending on the movie, I may grab the English subtitles, but it's pretty much stripped down.

I have been able to run through 5-6 discs in an evening (though not every night), ripping them to the temp space. I then queue them up for encoding overnight and while I'm at work. Again, just like the early MP3 days, encoding takes some time.

There are plenty of really complicated ways to completely control every possible setting when encoding movies. And, if you are looking for that, Google is your friend along with the 10,000 sites you're likely to find.

Personally, I've got other things I want to do. Enter Auto Gordian Knot. You just need to point it at the .IFO file, tell it where to put the output .avi and a couple of other simple settings and add the encoding job to the queue. I have been aiming for 75%-80% quality, rather than a specific size. That's because I'm not looking to put them on CD's or anything, just archiving them on my home theater PC. I'm also doing XVID as it's a bit more standardized.

When it's time to go to bed, I tell it to start processing and check in on it every once in a while until it's done. The output movies get dumped into a directory that my MediaPortal installation is mapped to pick up. I just use the remote to open the "Movies" directory and it has all of the movies sitting right there.

MediaPortal also has integration with IMDB, so I can have it look each movie up and grab all of the information about it, including the DVD cover. That particular feature makes it a win for Shelly. She usually wants more information about the movie than the title in order to choose. Now the HTPC has a nice virtual shelf of DVD's full of descriptive information.

With the current falling price of hard drives, by the time I fill this one up, another $100 will double the capacity or better, making this viable for the long term. Now I think it's time to watch Shaun of the Dead again.

You've got red on you.