Owning just one SSD is bad for you. Having added a Crucial M4 to my ThinkPad X220, I was constantly reminded how slow my MacBook Pro was. Fortunately, I still have a Mushkin 60GB SSD from a little while back.

With the X220, you have to remove just one normal sized philips head screw to access the hard disk. The MacBook Pro on the other hand has 10 screws of different lengths. Open the MacBook Pro's User Guide and turn to page 37 to learn the best technique to remove these little buggers.

That's how they look like, all in a bunch.

These are very small, so keep them in a safe place. Once you are done, remove the back plate and marvel at the MacBook Pro's unibody chassis. This is how a MacBook Pro's internals look like.

The hard disk resides in the bottom-left corner. I had to remove 2 more screws in an assembly of sorts and then detach the SATA connector to remove the drive.
This is the assembly that holds the drive in place. The 2 screws are at the top part and the orange-ish parts are where the protrusions from the hard disk fit in.

The next picture is of the 5400 rpm drive that I removed. It is a normal 2.5" SATA drive, except that it has 4 protrusions, 2 on each side, that hold the drive in place.

Now, the SSD that I have doesn't have protrusions like these, although it does have holes where they can be connected. Without attaching these, the SSD will not be held in place and will move when the laptop moves. It's okay since it is an SSD and not a mechanical disk, so there won't be any data loss, but the MacBook Pro's feeling of solidity will be lost. Hmm..I don't have the tools to remove them from the original drive.

What is an enterprising geek supposed to do? Voila.

I cut the stems of cotton ear-buds and put them in the 4 holes. A closer look:

I reconnected the SATA cable and the back plate, partitioned the drive and installed OS X Lion. This baby SCREAMS!

Do yourself a favour, get an SSD. Pronto.

I saw this at Walmart last year. The sticker says "Unbeatable". The cooker says otherwise. :P

TL;DR: The ThinkPad X220 is a svelte beast. Go buy it.

I own a ThinkPad T43. The T43 was the successor of the T42, which is considered by many to be the best laptop ever designed. The T43, according to the early reviews, didn't quite live up to the expectations set by its illustrious elder sibling. And yet, it blew me away: the compact chassis, the solid metal hinges, the rubberized lid, the latch at the top, the sheer ruggedness, the ThinkLight and the forward thinking choice of components. It was one of the first laptops to use DDR2 RAM and internally standardized on the SATA bus even though no 2.5" SATA drives were manufactured then.

Oh yes, and the legendary keyboard with the fabled TrackPoint. The X220 continues along the same lines - you can't go wrong with the tried and tested design.

The X220 is based on a single spindle chassis. It is designed to be compact and yet not skimp on power. It houses an Intel Sandy Bridge Core i5 CPU, can accommodate up to 8GB of PC3-10600 DDR3 RAM running at 1333MHz. RAM is very easy to upgrade - flip the laptop over, remove 2 very obviously marked screws, and replace the sticks. If you want a guide, look at ThinkPad X220's Hardware Maintenance Manual. It has detailed, graphical, step-by-step guidelines to replace each and every part of your laptop.

The X220 doesn't come with an optical drive as it is an ultra-portable. This keeps the weight low - the 4 cell battery version weighs 2.97 pounds and the 6 cell version that I have weighs 3.3 pounds. I have a USB based optical drive that I had put together 4 years ago, so I don't miss having a built-in optical drive at all.

There is an option to get an optional 6 cell slice battery. This fits below the laptop making it a little thicker but it provides enough juice to power the little monster for an additional 10 hours. There are tests where this slice battery was paired with a 9 cell battery for a total of 23 hours of uninterrupted usage. Unbelievable.

The 12.5" screen has good color reproduction. I sprung for a "premium panel" which means that I got an LED backlit IPS panel sporting a 720p resolution, 300 nits of brightness and an anti-glare coating with a very wide viewing angle.

The keyboard is pretty solid. It is comparable in quality to the T42 keyboard and is much much better than the SL412 keyboard. The T43 had a tiny trackpad. Even though I hardly used it, others who used my system and weren't comfortable with the TrackPoint had to connect an external mouse. The X220 fixes that. The buttonless trackpad is roomy and curves over the front of the laptop. It is textured with little bumps. It has good reviews, but I disabled mine immediately as I exclusively use the TrackPoint.

Along with a VGA connector, you also have a Display Port connector. I haven't used it so far. The webcam is a hi-res 720p camera and the videos are clear. It has dual microphones for noise cancellation.

The SSD that ships with the X220, at an extra cost, is the Intel X25-M. Although the Intel drive is still pretty solid, it was cutting edge 2 years ago. The laptop specs say that it supports SATA 3.0Gb/s, but the truth is that it also supports SATA 6.0Gb/s. This makes it an ideal candidate to try out the new generation of high speed SSDs. I chose the cheapest HDD option, the 320 GB 5400 RPM drive.

Fine, now which SSD do I buy? Your choice, as of July 2011, is quite limited. You see, normally 2.5" drives are 9.5mm thick. The X220, X220T and the T420s require 2.5" drives that are 7mm thick. So, you are left with the old Intel X25 series or the new Intel 320 series. Unfortunately, both are SATA II drives. Hmm, not cool.

Fortunately, I discovered the 128GB Crucial M4. Although it is 9.5mm thick, it conveniently has a 2.5 mm plastic spacer that prevents the chips from touching the inside top of the drive. The M4 has decent reviews and is quite speedy - 415MBps sequential read and 95 MBps sequential write speed with pretty high IOPS. I would have liked the write speed to be higher. I have a Mushkin 60GB SSD with Read and Write speeds of 285MBps and 275 MBps respectively. I'm not averse to a bit of hardware hacking, so off I went. I also added 8 GB RAM.

The X220 also has an mSATA port. You can connect one of these little SSDs to that port and have 2 SSDs in your system! I'll definitely try that in the future when more high speed mSATA devices make an appearance.

The tabook is an excellent source of reference material on every model of ThinkPad currently being sold.

On receiving the laptop and the hard disk, I first opened up the drive bay. Remove a helpfully marked screw and remove the cover. Find the plastic tab attached to the hard disk and slide it out. The image shows the opened bay.

I then removed 4 screws on the SSD in order to remove the plastic spacer. This is how the Crucial M4 looks with its guts on display.

The part on the left is the bottom cover of the drive. The black plastic part in the center is the spacer. The 4 screws are in the middle of the picture. The PCB on the right is the actual SSD sitting snug within the top cover. Now we need to put the drive back together again, this time without the plastic spacer. I stuck a bit of electrical tape on the chip of every exposed chip to insulate it from the metallic top cover that it might now touch. Of course, the 4 screws were meant to hold together a 9.5mm drive, and now you have a 7mm drive. You can either get new screws, or use scotch-tape (as shown in the image below). A colleague suggested not doing using scotch-tape as it might have static electricity. I used electrical tape to hold the drive together.

The original drive comes in a small metallic cage. The cage has a plastic tab to easily pull out the drive. Remove the screws to take out the original drive and replace it with the SSD. What a world of difference! The mechanical drive felt very heavy and primitive. :)

The ThinkPad X220 is a fantastic piece of hardware. If you are in the market for a 12" powerful ultra-portable, look no further. If you absolutely want a larger screen, do consider the T420s or its slightly larger sibling, the T420. Hope this helped.

I saw this poster in a movie theater a few days before ThoughtWorks' founder, Roy Singham, was scheduled to visit the Gurgaon office. For a brief second I wondered if this was a recruiting ploy :P

I've got tonnes of external drives lying around. Now that I've assembled a desktop with 6 SATA slots, its time to put them back inside a cabinet where they rightfully belong. The first one to be popped in is a 2TB WD Elements. Follow along with the blurry pics if you want to do the same.

A great movie's budget needn't equal the GNP of a medium-sized country. It also doesn't need to be shot in New Zealand; or Switzerland for that matter. Dr. Strangelove is set in four principal locations: An office with nondescript furniture, a "war room" with a big circular table and a world map on the wall with some lights, the cramped interior of a B-52 bomber and the perimeter of an air force base. Yet with these rudimentary settings and facial close ups, Stanley Kubrick turned a cold-war play called 'Red Alert' into the greatest political movie ever.

In the process he made a seriously funny satire.

Most of the comedy comes from situations that aren't 'ha ha' funny. There is no forced laughter here; that isn't funny.

USAF's Brigadier General Jack Ripper's (Sterling Hayden) paranoia about communist conspiracies to "sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids" goads him to put his air-force base under lock-down and use all 34 nuclear equipped B-52s under his command to strike targets within Soviet Russia. One man stands between him and nuclear holocaust, Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers), who can't get out of the room where he is locked with the general, doesn't have the recall codes for the planes and doesn't have enough change to notify his superiors from a pay phone because the Pentagon doesn't accept collect calls. The news finally reaches the American President Muffley (again, Peter Sellers) who gathers his advisors, including a sinister scientist called Dr. Strangelove (Peter Sellers yet again) and the Russian ambassador in the war room for consultation. Here they learn that the Soviets have a Doomsday Machine that will get activated as soon as Soviet soil is attacked and will then destroy the world. Horrified, the President works with the Soviet Premier to shoot down 33 B-52s before they reach their targets. This angers General 'Buck' Turgidson (George C. Scott) who wants nothing but American military superiority and he starts fighting with the Soviet ambassador. The President chides them both saying "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room." The last B-52, barreling in low to evade Soviet radar with its big wings outstretched accomplishes it's mission in one of the most iconic scenes in movie history.

I'm not that unhinged to find nuclear holocaust and world-wide devastation lol-able. What then makes this movie sublime? Is it Stanley Kubrick's perfectionist style of direction that makes every little scene crisp and outstanding? Is it Peter Sellers' understated sense of timing and the ability to fit into different roles like a snug black glove*? Or is it the satirical commentary on the mind-set of politicians of that era (and this one as well) and their illogical reasoning to logically destroy our world?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

* You'll have to see the movie to get the reference.

Attached is the PDF version of the slides.

Tikona provides broadband internet over wireless. They have access points setup in a few places close to where I stay and they provided me with a wireless router. The catch is that only "supported" operating systems can connect to this router.

My personal Thinkpad (trusty old T43) runs Linux and Windows 7. My work laptop is a Macbook Pro. And all these OSs are "unsupported". Try as they might, but their bumbling (but well intentioned) "engineers" couldn't solve the problem of getting wireless to work on my Linux and Mac system. Heck, the "engineer" actually called their customer support, had a talk with the CSR, which turned into a mini-argument that I had to intervene in. The CSR politely informed me that all my OS's are "unsupported". I asked him to explain what that word meant and he couldn't.

So I decided to fix this myself.

First, install their crappy dialler on your Windows system. Yes, it works. Enter your username and password and get connected via wireless. Once the connection has been established, goto Control Panel and go into Wireless Network configuration. When you find TDN-Home (the SSID of their router) you will see that it uses the WPA2-Personal protocol with your key encrypted by AES. This involves a shared-key that is provided to you. Hunt for the settings and decrypt to see your key.

Now boot into your "unsupported" OS. Start your wireless networking utility. You know the SSID, the protocol and your key. Enjoy!