Asus n550jk review

I use the laptop for both work and gaming. The important detail is that I use Linux as primary OS.

After my previous laptop started dying I started looking for replacement. The requirements were simple:

1. Good screen, Full HD, preferably matte
2. 16Gb of RAM (or ability to increase it to 16Gb)
3. Good GPU. In my case this must be nVidia (because Radeon support for Linux is terrible).
4. 13"-15"

The funny thing is that there were only 3 possibilities matching the above criteria: asus n550jk, gigabyte p34g and gigabyte p35g. p34g is 14" the remaining two are 15". asus has a better GPU (gtx 850m) comparing to gygabite models (gtx 760m). On the other hand gigabyte offered up to 2 drives (hdd/ssd) in p34g and up to 3 (three!!!) drives in p35g. And asus had a single drive + DVD (asus, who is using DVD in our days?!!!). However, both gigabyte models had a show stopper - fun noise. So, I had to give up on multiple drives and choose n550jk.

After using n550jk I clearly see its good and bad sides.

Good:

1. Build qualit.
2. Screen - matte, resolution (Full HD), IPS.
3. CPU
4. GPU
5. Drive space (1Tb in my case).
6. Very silent (no fan noise).

 Bad (any OS):

1. 3 USB ports (4 is better)
2. The USB port on the right side it too close to the front. For right-handed person this make this port usable only for wireless mouse connector. Asus engineers should put that port to back and move DVD to front.
3. Wide screen (16:9). This is a crappy aspect ratio, suitable only for watching movies (which in turn are optimized for cinemas). 4:3 is much better aspect ratio.
4. Connecting headphones to audio port often results in a noise. Maybe this is caused by connecting to metal case. Maybe this happens just for me.

Bad (Linux):

1. UEFI
2. Optimus
3. Tachpad. For unknown reasons Asus engineers used ps2 mouse interface for tachpad. So, you can't enable-disable it in a normal way.

Java 8 presentation

I had shown one more presentation at N-iX. This one was about Java 8.
It is also available on google drive.
Feel free to give me your feedback in comment :)

Android L presentation

I had shown a little presentation about Android L at N-iX few days ago.
It is available on google drive.
If you like it (or don't like it) you can let me know below in comments :)

Windows 8

Few days ago AMD drop support for Microsoft’s Windows 8 in Catalyst. From now on they will support 8.1, but not 8.
The funny part is that according to resent report the shares of 8 and 8.1 are approximately equal:

Silence caused by Agenda

As you probably noticed there in no activity on this blog for a long time. 

That's because I've spent almost all my free time working on a little startup - All-in-One Agenda. This is a handy widget for Android devices which displays your agenda (currently events and birthdays) on the home screen. Obviously it has additional paid features which fund further development.

Working on this startup is a great adventure and results in a lot of new experience.

I plan to blog about some interesting things I've learn.

yoni 1.0.0

Finally it's here: yoni 1.0.0

This is final release. No much changes here. I just added verbose mode, just in case you like too look at lots of messages running though your console ;)

From now on I'm going to do only bug fixes.

P.S. This release is so much delayed because this project consumes almost all my non-working, non-sleeping and non-family time :)

Google steals photos from your Android phone

Yesterday Google invaded my privacy. The search giant added new spayware function - Instant Upload - to their social network Google+. They enabled that spyware by default. And Instant Upload silently uploaded photos from my android phone to Google+ without asking my permission!!! Google had stolen my photos!!! I realized that something evil is going on due to small notification on my phone (which many people probably will ignore or dismiss without reading).

All uploaded photos become private and not shared to general public. But still Google took them from me and can now share with their big corporate friends or US government which is unacceptable!

Obviously I deleted all those photos from Google+ and turned Instant Upload off immediately. But how can I be sure that Google did not left the copies on their servers?

What if the photos Google had stolen were intimate?

I hope that EU commission will investigate this issue and fine Google appropriately.

P.S. To turn off Instant Upload launch your "Goggle Settings" app (not "Settings"!), go to "Google+" there and uncheck "Instant Upload".