A tiny laptop and a huge Transformer

The thriftiness is being dispelled somewhat by the Christmas influence. I think I mentioned the Masterpiece Optimus Prime recently. Well, I found a cheap second hand one on Ebay. Cheap because it is used and is missing a finger, it's also the US version which has battle damage and the cut-off smokestacks. Despite that, it's undeniably impressive. It stands a foot tall in robot mode and is amazingly detailed, making it a bitch to transform. It kind of makes up for never actually having the original Optimus Prime as a child. I did have Ultra Magnus, which was actually identical except it was white, but it wasn't quite the same. There's even a Masterpiece Ultra Magnus, which is just a repaint of the Optimus Prime one, and is just as cool. There is a fairly similar sized model of the new Movie Optimus Prime, which looks quite cool. But it just lacks the style of the original.

I spent some time today playing with my Toshiba Libretto 50CT. It's a very old laptop, being only a Pentium 75mhz with 32mb RAM. But the appealing thing is that it is very, very small, only just larger than a VHS tape. When it came out in about 1996 (I think), it was very expensive. But being a computer, of course, it depreciated reasonably quickly and I got this rather beat up one a couple of years ago and dig it out every now and again to play with. Originally it ran Windows 95 but now it runs a stripped down Debian Linux install, and runs it quite well. Discovered it can run an RDP session to my XP machine with acceptable performance which was a slightly surreal sight. It's nice to go back to a bare minimum machine - my new phone has a faster processor and more memory than the Libretto, which is quite worrying.

Weird thing you can get in Sainsbury's - dark chocolate with chilli in it. It's a Mexican thing and is actually really nice. It's not spicy as such when you reach the chilli, rather you get a curious sensation of warmth. Very intriguing.

One thing I'm trying to summon up the energy to do is get rid of my Compaq Proliant 5500 server. I bought it a couple of years ago and pimped it out with quad Pentium Pro 200mhz CPUs, 640mb RAM and blue LEDs in the SCSI drive trays. It ran pretty nicely for something so old.

Sadly something in it has died and it won't power up any more. It is enormous and heavy and takes up a LOT of room. I need to strip out all the useful parts (basically the blue LEDs...) and scrap it. It's just one of the many things that I don't need or want any more.