HP Folio 13

When Intel and various industry partners started talking about “ultra-books” as competition against Apple and tablets, I was more than a little skeptical. Ultra-books are small and light weight – but not cheap (average price being around $1,000) and rather underpowered compared to what you can get for the same money with a more traditional laptop (they are basically MacBook Air knock-offs). I had written them off almost as soon as they were announced.

I really expected the ultra-book to be a fad, and a short-lived one at that.

Then came the HP Folio 13 – my desktop recently failed, and since then I’ve been using my 2-year-old ASUS G73 as my only machine. While the G73 is great – it’s also massive, hot, and heavy. After parting with my unused camera gear, I acquired a Folio 13 to act as my main laptop, leaving the G73 to play the role of desktop / development machine.

Within a couple of hours of getting the Folio 13 it was clear, I was in love.

It’s not quite the love I felt when I first found the iPad, but it’s an amazing machine. Fast, super-light, and the battery goes on forever – it’s the ideal laptop. With the power of my G73 available anytime via RDP, I think this combination is about as good as it gets.

Here’s a rough overview of the Folio:

Intel Core i3 / i5¹
128GB SSD
4GB RAM
13.3" 1366×768 display
9 hour battery (so far 7-8 hours seems to be the realistic number)
Brushed aluminum case
3.3lbs

Also included are the normal things you would expect, like a web cam, Bluetooth, etc..

I’ve been extremely impressed with what this little thing can do, from large compiles to generating Jekyll sites, it’s more capable than I expected. So far it’s handled everything I’ve thrown at it – and most taking around the same time as my G73 would (and some taking less, thanks to the Folio’s SSD).

I’ll be doing most of my writing and non-development work on the Folio, and the G73 will still be my go-to system anytime I need Visual Studio or other heavy-weight development tools (though I’d be willing to bet, it’ll be via RDP from the Folio more often than not).

Overall: I’m extremely pleased. It’s a great device – it has the battery life and portability of a tablet (i.e. an iPad), with the power and flexibility of a traditional laptop.

The Core i3 version is less expense, and thanks to the lower power consumption, it also stretches the battery life better than the i5 – making it a win-win. ↩︎

Adam Caudill

Thoughts on the iPad, from an Apple hater

Before I get started, let me make a couple of things clear: Apple is evil; pure and simple. I’m fully convinced that Steve Jobs has weekly planning meetings with Lucifer himself1. Apple’s policies are anti-everybody. From bloggers to developers2, Apple seems to make life as hard as possible for those that use their products for profit. With these facts in mind, I tend to shy away from their products when I have a choice (which isn’t always the case); though a while back I decided to buy an iPad for some reason.

From Outlook, to Gmail, to The Bat!

Back in March, I switched from The Bat! to Outlook as a result of being annoyed with using two different clients (work & home)*. So today, I’m running The Bat again, thanks to Gmail. Moving to Gmail I had been thinking about moving to Gmail for a while, the other day I decided to bite the bullet and do it. There was some pain involved, but not as bad as I expected.

UPEK Windows Password Decryption

On August 28th ElcomSoft announced that they had determined a method to extract Windows passwords from the registry for users of UPEK’s fingerprint readers and Protector Suite software (UPEK is now owned by AuthenTec, which is now owned by Apple). What they didn’t announce was the technical details of how they did it. Myself and Brandon Wilson have been working to recreate their research – and we have. We have not been in contact with ElcomSoft, so this is an independent re-discovery of this vulnerability.

A month with DuckDuckGo

It wasn’t long after Google went live that they became my search engine of choice – with the only other (somewhat) viable option being Yahoo, it was an easy choice. In the years since then, I’ve not questioned that choice, but now that Google is focusing on killing features and building little-used social features, the time seemed right to see if there are better options. So a month ago I began an experiment, I committed to using DuckDuckGo for a month – here’s what I’ve found.

Millions of Jobs

It has been 20 years since I first used machine learning to solve a complex business problem. The underlying problem was simple: the company was selling a new service and wanted to know who was most likely to buy it. We had millions of records, and each record had hundreds of fields. A vast amount of data, but no idea how to extract insight from it. Countless hours from various data analysts had been invested into finding a pattern, but none was forthcoming.