I used to work out of my house all the time, but in recent weeks I’ve moved to Cubespace over in the East Side Industrial area. This move meant my primary work machine became my laptop. The laptop I was using was fine for say, music production or occasional programming work. I never intended it to be my primary machine. The screen, while 15″, was only 1024 by 768. Hardly enough real estate to do development on a routine basis. Plus, I really wanted to put this laptop back into use as a music production machine, which was the reason I bought it in the first place.

HP was running a deal on the bafflingly named Compaq 6715b, which was reasonably fast, reasonably priced and had plenty of screen real estate. It was capable of running Linux without issue. It was also butt-ugly. I mean, Apple figured out years ago that the way to make a pretty laptop was to make it as clean and streamlined as possible. Why do PC manufacturers insist on making laptops so encumbered with bevels and recesses and bits of molded plastic that they look like they were ripped from a Borg cube? I will never understand.

This particular laptop had a bunch of textured black plastic on it that really reminded me of late 70s/early 80s home electronics. It dawned on me that if I just added some woodgrain contact paper, I could make it look kind of like an Atari 2600. It would still be ugly, to be sure, but it would be ugly in a lovable, nostalgic sort of way.

Thus was born the Laptop 2600. It’s just barely a “case mod” in that it took me about ten minutes and a dollar’s worth of materials, but it makes me happy.

As long as PC companies keep making ugly ass laptops, contact paper is actually a really easy way to make your laptop your own without modifying it permanently. It also has the added benefit of protecting the covered portions from scratches and wear. When you’re ready to sell your laptop, it can just be peeled off. A little spray cleaner should remove any residual gunk. It comes in all kinds of colors and patterns ranging from subtle to awesome to freaking garish. You could even combine a few solid colors in layers and make your own design, then cover it with clear contact paper to protect it. If anyone tries this, let me know because I bet you could do something freaking awesome there.

A few tips on applying contact paper:

1. Clean and dry everything before you start.
2. It’s easier to measure accurately if you use millimeters instead of inches.
3. Use a metal straight edge, a cutting mat and a really, really sharp (new would be best) x-acto blade.
4. Measure the area you’re planning to cover, then draw lines on the backing paper. Cut by running your blade against the metal straight edge. Press fairly hard so you can do it in one pass. Multiple passes will result in messy edges.
5. If you have to work around a bevel or a badge (like the lid on mine) just measure the square you want to cover and apply right over it. Once it’s on, burnish around the whatever with something like the back of the x-acto knife handle, making sure you get into the nooks and crannies. Once you’ve got it in there pretty good, you should be able to trace the blade around the grove of the logo or badge and get a clean line.
6. It’s way easier to apply contact paper if you only remove part of the backing paper (maybe an inch or two from the edge) and fold it over, line up and stick on one side, then remove the paper. If you take the paper off all at once it’s a nightmare to align.
7. Stick the paper on lightly at first, them push out any air bubbles. After they’re gone, then really press hard to get a good seal. Use a pin to puncture any remaining air bubbles you can’t press out.

Here’s some additional images. Let’s start with a “before” picture from HP’s site:

My inspiration, the original Atari:

Here’s what the lid looks like. Granted, it would be a little more Atari-tastic if the lid were black, but I just didn’t have the time or energy or desire to lower the resale value that spray painting requires.

Here you can see the keyboard surface a little more clearly. All it needs is a round, red LED. I’d really like to find some atari badges to put over those HP logos, but alas I have yet to find any. If you have any ideas, please let me know.

Last week, I needed to get an aging PHP app running on my laptop for a project. It uses a lot of hard includes and requires and is pretty finicky about where it lives and where other things live in relation to it. I tried working directly off the server, but that’s pretty painful if you’ve fallen head over heels in love with Eclipse and PDT the way I have.

I tried very, very hard to get the app working under windows using Apache Friends XAMPP, which I use to develop Zend Framework apps. No dice. It would have required rewriting half the app to get it to work. What I really needed was some way to mirror the server’s environment but still have a usable computer. I thought about using VMWare Server and all, but then we’re back to essentially non-local development and transferring files around and such. I don’t need a server, I need a desktop that can pretend to be one.

Being an avid Slashdot reader, I knew that the fine folks over at Ubuntu were readying their next release. Before I go any further, I should tell you that I am no stranger to linux or unix in general. I was loading mp3s on to my Diamond Rio using Slackware before iTunes was a brushed metal twinkle in the eye of Steve Jobs. I’ve been using BSD variants on web servers since I knew what web servers were. When OSX came out, it became really hard to justify continued desktop Linux use, as I could have a stable usable unix development platform AND run Photoshop and Reason. It was also around that time that I realized I would rather spend my time using computers to do useful things instead of say…recompiling the kernel so my wireless network card would work.

When I needed to edit video faster than I could on the fastest mac around, I switched from Final Cut Pro to Avid and from mac to Windows. While I’ve got no love for The Empire, XP is…well…okay. It’s not great, but it’s fast and stable enough that I can deal with it, and I know its flaws well enough to keep it in check. The problem now is that XP is really starting to show it’s age and I am not, under any circumstances, installing Vista. F@#k that thing.

But I digress. The point of this story is that I decided to give Ubuntu 7.10 a whirl on my laptop. The first (and very nice) thing I noticed is that if you pop the CD in a windows machine, it gives you the option to boot off of it and see how it works on your particular hardware. I was pretty shocked at how easily it determined what hardware I had and grabbed all the drivers for it right out of the box. I decided to back up my Windows XP install and go for broke.

The install took hardly any time at all, and before long I was up and running. If you’ve got a machine with nothing on it, installation is a literal no brainer, it’s like twelve clicks and you’re done. No drive partitioning, no compiling video card drivers into your kernel, nothing. It just works. The interface is very OSX like, in that things are in sensible places and work like you’d think they would.

Pretty much every time I tried to do something that I was sure wasn’t going to work, it did. Burn a DVD? Check. Connect to my Exchange server? Not a problem. (Evolution Mail can see Exchange through OWA.) I could even connect to my office VPN using a GUI that was actually better than the one Cisco gives you. What started as something I was doing because I needed to get a squirrely PHP app working had turned into something else entirely. I had installed desktop linux, and other than the fact that it worked really well, I hardly noticed the difference.

There’s a few things I still need Windows for, like games, music production, etc. My Windows XP desktop isn’t going anywhere until I can do those things under linux. That would be a great day, but I think we all know that’s not going to happen. It doesn’t matter, though. I don’t have any problem working on one machine and doing fun stuff on another. The one PC app I really needed and couldn’t live without was Photoshop, but I had that running under Wine in five minutes.

As for the actual development setup, which was ostensibly the point of all this, that could not be better. I installed Zend Core as my LAMP stack, which despite popular perception (and the perception given to you by the Zend people) is free. Sure, you can pay for updates and such, but if you just want to use it, go to town. It’s way easier than installing Apache, MySQL and PHP separately, plus it comes with a nice little web based GUI and a debugger that hooks right into Eclipse PDT. I was doing Visual Studio style debugging withing five minutes of having the software installed.

I was originally thinking that the next time I could afford to, I’d buy one of those new MacBooks to develop on. I don’t think I’ll be doing that any more.