Review: The Satchel laptop bag by Skooba Design (0)

Posted 29 April, 2009 in Product Review

Shortly after I got my new laptop, I decided I needed a new laptop bag to go with it. I’ve had a couple bags over the years — the Targus that everybody starts with (I got mine in 1996) and another bag or two. This time, though, I wanted to trade up a bit and get something that would really protect my System76 Pangolin from all the harm that can be dished out in a house with two young boys.

I was amazed at how many laptop bag makers there are. I started with a Google search and was quickly overwhelmed. One company I kept coming back to was Skooba Design, whose bags looked durable, intelligently designed (not by God, though), and attractive. Next I looked into companies whose gear I knew from cycling. The most obvious choice in this category was Timbuk2, maker of strong and stylish messenger bags for messengers and wannabes. I spent a lot of time looking at Timbuk2 bags and came close to buying one. Before I did, though, I decided to try asking around.

I posted a quick note to my Facebook account asking for recommendations. A few people made good suggestions, but I kept coming back to the Satchel by Skooba Design:

Outside

I bought the orange and grey version of the Satchel, and it’s a wonderful bag. First of all, it’s great to look at. Well designed, nice colors, and some snazzy touches such as the patented strap design and the color accents on the side zipper.

The outside is “ballistic nylon,” which I assume means it’s bulletproof, right? Whatever it is, it’s strong and resistant to pulls and tears, a fact one of our cats proved when he leapt on it recently and went to town before I could get it away.

The bag is also light. Really light. Without anything in it, it weighs just 44 oz. That’s nice because my laptop is a bit weighty, and I tend to also carry books and other goodies in the bag.

Inside

The lining of the various compartments is the same color orange as the highlight on the outside. I imagine that the other color combinations have different colors inside. I like the orange a lot.

The bag is divided into several compartments. The section for the laptop is lined with Skooba’s Air Square cushions, which you can see at Skooba’s site. These offer an impressive amount of protection for the computer without adding a ton of weight to the bag. (These same Air Squares are also on the underside of the shoulder strap, which is a nice touch.) The laptop pocket has an adjustable strap for a secure fit.

The middle compartment is where I put my books and papers. It’s roomy and no-nonsense. A panel with mesh webbing has a Velcro strap that can be opened to access a third compartment. I keep a set of headphones and the laptop power cord in these mesh pockets.

The outer zipper pocket is full of handy bits, including a hook for your keys, pen holders, a cell phone pocket with a Velcro cover, and another closeable pocket that will fit a CD or PDA. There’s also a mesh pocket inside, which is where I keep my cell phone charger and work ID. And did I mention the hidden water bottle holder? It’s tucked away behind a zipper on the side of the bag, so it’s there when you need it and not flopping around when you don’t. Nice.

On the back, the Satchel has a zipper pocket that would be useful for plane tickets or a thin folder of papers for a meeting. It also has a strap that will allow the bag to fit over the handle of a rolling suitcase at the airport.

Summmary

This is a very solid bag with great looks and great features. And as an added bonus, it’s made right here in upstate New York — in Rochester, to be exact. Cool, huh?

Highly recommended. For more information, visit Skooba Design.

UPDATE: I received a very nice message from Michael Hess, the president and CEO of Skooba Design. He added one point of clarification to the story:

“[I]n the interest of fairness and accuracy, the bags are designed and developed 100% here in Rochester, but manufactured offshore (an unfortunate competition-driven reality for most of our industry). We did used to make bags here, but nowadays the market has made that effectively impossible for products like ours.”

Another perspective on ‘Song of Myself’ (0)

Posted 29 April, 2009 in Poetry

I thought this was lovely and powerful.

Installing Linux on … everything (0)

Posted 29 April, 2009 in Free & Open Source Software, Linux & Ubuntu, Ubuntu Linux

Genius.

Review: Pangolin Performance laptop from System76 (3)

Posted 28 April, 2009 in Free & Open Source Software, Linux & Ubuntu, Product Review, Ubuntu Linux

I’ve now had my Pangolin Performance laptop from System76 for a month or so, and it’s time for a review. This won’t be one of those brilliant technical reviews that smart people write. This is just one guy’s experience with the Pangolin.

First of all, let me say that I like the laptop and I’m very happy to support a company such as System76 that’s committed to Open Source software. My laptop came with Ubuntu (Linux) 8.10 installed. I upgraded to the beta of Ubuntu 9.04 shortly thereafter. The upgrade worked like a charm.

Right from the beginning, the Pangolin and Ubuntu found the wifi network at my house. It also found and controlled my HP all-in-one printer with no problem. I was able to start surfing the Web right away, although I had to install a few extra things to make videos work on the Web. This is fairly normal for Ubuntu, and not difficult even for a non-geek like me.

The Pangolin has a nice screen. Bright, clear and easy to read. I do a lot of word processing and blogging and enjoy being able to see things. I give the Pangolin high marks in that regard. The keyboard is also responsive and easy to use, although I’ve noticed some clacking in the arrow keys and a (rarely) non-responsive “c” key. Obviously the “c” key works most of the time, or I wouldn’t be typing this.

The Pangolin’s case is solid. I’m not an enormous fan of the black finish on the lid, which shows more fingerprints than an episode of CSI. And the keyboard and surrounding plastic are much more white than they appear in the photo above, where they look a bit silver to my eye. So maybe 7 out of 10 for looks.

I ordered my Pangolin with the Core Duo T3400 2.16 GHz 667 MHz FSB 1 MB L2 (35 Watt). If I had it to do over again, I would have spent the extra $55 and upgraded to the Core2 Duo. That said, the build I have is plenty fast, as I’ll detail later. I have 2GB of RAM, a 250GB SATA II hard drive, a CD-RW/DVD-RW optical drive, and the Intel Wi-Fi Link 5300. Of all those components, the only one that feels a little cheap is the optical drive. It works just fine, but feels like very light plastic that wobbles a little in its slot.

One issue I have with the Pangolin is temperature. I have nothing technical or smart to say about it, but it seems to get pretty hot. I think, though, that I have more to learn about the fan management system in Ubuntu, so there may be more I can do to help with the temperature control.

I produce a weekly jazz interview show called The Jazz Session. Even when I made the show on a Mac, I used Audacity, so there wasn’t much of a switch to move to Ubuntu. The Pangolin is plenty fast enough to do all the multi-tracked audio editing I need to do. So much so, in fact, that it’s replaced my Mac completely. I do have one issue — there’s a lot of noise in the audio system. When I add the Pangolin to my mixer setup, I can hear a distinct buzz, which never happened with the Mac. I know it’s coming from the laptop because I can cause an attack in the buzz by hitting any key. I’m going to try to address this issue with a USB audio hub.

All in all, it’s a solid machine with everything I need to be productive and happy. I’d recommend System76 to others.

The Jazz Session #55: The Wee Trio (0)

Posted 27 April, 2009 in Jazz, Music, The Jazz Session

Jason Crane interviews vibraphonist James Westfall, bassist Dan Loomis and drummer Jared Schonig, known collectively as The Wee Trio. Their first record, Capitol Diner Vol. 1 (Bionic Records, 2008) features original music, jazz standards … and Nirvana. The trio explores the music they love through the lens of collective improvisation, and the results are fresh, fun and worth repeated listening. Find out more at theweetrio.com.

Listen to the show.

Full Circle Magazine – partially edited by yours truly (0)

Posted 26 April, 2009 in Free & Open Source Software, Linux & Ubuntu, Ubuntu Linux

Full Circle Magazine is a free magazine for the Ubuntu community, available in PDF format. I helped edit Issue #24, which is now available for download in PDF format.

Free software in the Finger Lakes (0)

Posted 26 April, 2009 in Free & Open Source Software, Ubuntu Linux

This weekend was the Ubuntu release party in the Finger Lakes, held in Waterloo, NY. You can read about it here. All in all, a very professional session.

As an added bonus, here’s all 700 lbs. of me in a seersucker shirt showing off my Linux laptop from System76 to a soon-to-be Linux user:

Bigotry and plain language (1)

Posted 24 April, 2009 in Family, Politics & Activism

Yesterday I posted this uncharacteristic message as my Facebook status:

“Hey, all you opponents of gay marriage: F*CK YOU! (What? That’s not helpful? Oh, sorry. But, uh, f*ck you bigots anyway, OK?)”

This, as you might imagined, generated quite a few comments:

Dean Bowman at 1:36pm April 23: What about opponents of marriage?

Heather Dingman-Glenn at 1:40pm April 23: The majority of students at my school feel that all rights should be equal and are open to all kinds of relationships. However, I would say the boys have it worse than the girls. This is a high school where the majority of the parents are military.

Jason Crane at 2:48pm April 23: @Dean: I’m with you, man. State recognition of unions for legal purposes, and then let folks follow religious practices if they choose, with no state sanction or recognition whatsoever. (Unless, of course, you were just being funny.)

Wendy Ramsay at 2:59pm April 23: Snaps to that!

Julie White at 3:23pm April 23: Ideally, I think that the majority of the rights that come with marriage should just be given to people as basic human rights–you know, like health care, adoption for anyone who’s a fit parent and wants to make a family with anyone else–but as long as we live in a state that thinks that monogamous committed relationships should be rewarded, then … Read Morelet’s at least be equal about that. But in Julie’s utopia, no one kind of human relationship (as long as it’s consensual and doesn’t infringe on anyone else’s rights)would be privileged over another (I know, dream on)… off my soapbox…but this is why I actually have a hard time with the gay marriage issue…a lot of ambivalence.

Jason Crane at 4:07pm April 23: @Julie: Right on! Although I don’t think any of those rights should be given. We’ve already got them. I think we need to stop letting the corporate state take them away. But that’s just me being a punk. And shamelessly stealing from Utah Phillips.

Brenda Yarger Abel at 4:27pm April 23: Wow! Way to promote tolerance.

Jennifer Cornish at 4:59pm April 23
I’m strongly opposed to asshole marriage. Letting assholes get legally married just sullies it for the rest of us. It’s just sick. I mean, there are all kinds of statistics showing that assholes are behind the majority of domestic violence attacks, robberies, burglaries, bombings, wars and crappy BSG season finales. And I’m pretty sure that being … Read Morean asshole is very strongly correlated with being a pedophile. I mean, how can we let these people get married and (GOD FORBID) have kids? It’s like they ruin marriage for us decent people who just want to raise our non-asshole kids to be non-assholes. I’m not saying they should be discriminated against for being assholes. I mean, people can be however they want to be in the privacy of their own homes, but when public schools teach that it’s ok to be an asshole, that’s where I draw the line. Once we let them get married, they’re going to turn the rest of us into assholes too.

Jason Crane at 5:14pm April 23: Amen!

Jason Crane at 5:59pm April 23: @Brenda: It’s always hard to tell if someone’s kidding or not on this here Facebook. But in any case, I’m kinda over being tolerant of intolerance.

Jennifer Cornish at 7:57pm April 23: Is tolerance of bigotry ‘tolerance’? Interesting question.

Brenda Yarger Abel at 10:12pm April 23: Is it not possible to oppose gay marriage, without being intolerant of those who support it? Since bigotry, by definition, is intolerance of anothers beliefs religion or opinion, it would appear that the one F-bombing those who disagree would be a better example of the bigot.

Jennifer Cornish at 2:30am April 24: I think that by saying ‘Fuck You’ to gay-marriage opponents, Jason is being less of a bigot than those people fighting to take away the right for responsible, consenting citizens to get married and live their own lives in peace. I wouldn’t try to actively take away a bigot’s right to be a bigot.

Jason Crane at 7:13am April 24: Thanks, Jenn. You’ve said it better than I could have. I’m just tired of having people’s religious views imposed on my supposedly secular government. Discrimination and bigotry in the name of religious opinion are still discrimination and bigotry. No excuses.

Many people who are smarter than I have made the following point more intelligently, but here goes: You don’t get to shout “intolerance” when people oppose your bigotry. If you try to deny people their civil rights based on your religious preferences, then you are a bigot, and no one — absolutely no one — is bound to respect your point of view or shy away from denigrating it.

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