I’d like to say I chose my new phone after long, careful deliberation. But the truth is that I picked this one because it works on Cingular, has most of the features I wanted, and Amazon was able to ship it next-day. My old phone was freaking out multiple times a day, and I wasn’t willing to wait. Call me impatient.

The Nokia E70 is a great device. It’s just slightly larger than my last one, and about the same weight. The form factor is superb, and the Symbian operating system is just so much more robust than Windows Mobile. I remember being impressed when I got a Nokia 6682, and I remain so now.

That said, there are two features I wish they’d picked up in the last 18 months:

1. Number every menu. There’s a lot more scrolling involved in navigating the Nokia than with WM5, just because I can’t press “2″ to choose the second item in a menu.
2. Smart dialing. I can’t believe Nokia hasn’t caught up on this feature yet. It’s like Predictive Typing for your phone book. If you press “268″, it will pull up any names containing “ANU”, “BOT”, “COU”, etc. I feel like I’m using technology from the 90’s when I go pecking through the Contacts list.

Since I’ve opened the thing up, I probably can’t return it for a refund unless the device turns out defective in some way. So I’m jumping into the learning curve. First thing on my list is to get it set up with email push (either GoodLink or BlackBerry).

I’m struggling with the buyer’s dilemma again. As much as I’d hoped my current phone would last for the two years it took for my contract to expire, it’s dying. I won’t begin to expound on the various ways that it’s crashed (or just failed to connect to the network), but it’s high time for a replacement.

This time, though, I’m getting a phone unlocked from Amazon. I’m willing to pay the extra money if it means I can walk to T-Mobile on a moment’s notice (and that none of the features are disabled).

So now it’s down to a few of them:

• Nokia E70, with a flip-up keyboard
• HTC S710, with a slide-over keyboard
• Nokia E65, with a nicer form factor
• Nokia N80, with tons of gadgetry

Along my search for reviews and feedback, I found a neat site: Sizeasy. The idea is that you upload dimensions of things you want to compare, and it gives you a chart. Here’s my comparison of my current phone, HTC 2125, versus the E70, E65, N80, and S710.

I’m ordering through Amazon Prime, so I can get it by Friday. Any recommendations? Anyone out there own any of these phones already?

I can’t say enough good things about Linode. I’ve been with them for years, and I’ve watched them go through some incredible growth. When I signed up, I was on host machine #7; now (after being moved around the data center a couple times) my host machine is numbered with triple-digits. If you need hosting, check it out.

Lately they’ve just been treating us very well. I logged in today to find that my storage capacity had doubled (there was an extra 6GB of unused disk space waiting for me) and I’d received an extra 128MB of RAM. Economies of scale are a wonderful thing, especially when your vendor shares them with you.

So I decided to take advantage of the new disk space to do something I’ve wanted to do for a while: a ground-up reinstall of Linux. I’ve wanted to switch to using Ubuntu for all of my servers for a long time. Now it’s happened. So if you’re reading this, it means you’ve been served by a brand-new server, thanks to Linode’s generosity.

So I finally got my white MacBook to do almost all the things I wanted it to, all at once.

• Suspend
• Hibernate
• Wireless

I tried nearly everything suggested in the forums online, to no avail. It got to the point where I decided to reformat my system, install Ubuntu all over again, and take a methodical approach. It worked, but with many hours.

So in the interest of encouraging others to run out, buy a brand new MacBook, and install Ubuntu onto it, here’s what I did.

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Like Glyph when he got the black one, I really haven’t gone through any buyer’s remorse. The MacBook is a great machine. I couldn’t bring myself to pay extra for a DVD burner or a black paint job, though, so I spent the money bumping it up to 2GB of RAM.

OS X is really nice. The setup process is so much better than when you get a new Windows machine. One of the first things you see (now that every one comes with iSight) is your own face, when it asks you to take a photo for the login page. I still recommend a Mac for anyone looking for a new computer, especially now that Vista is out.

It’s also been a long time since I installed Linux on a personal machine. I picked up a Dell Inspiron 1100 about four years ago, and it was a challenge just getting X working properly. This time I just searched for MacBook Ubuntu and found everything I needed. Canonical has definitely done a lot to make Ubuntu a worthwhile desktop.

A few thoughts so far:

• The keyboard isn’t as annoying as I thought it might be. I’ve had a Thinkpad from work for a few years, and I grew to really love the “full” keyboard (by which I mean Insert, Delete, Home, End, PageUp, PageDown). But I’m quickly getting used to not having them.
• Getting the wireless to work still requires NDISwrapper, which is annoying.
• Suspend and hibernate won’t work. I’ve been tracking several related threads (92635, 117864, 398391) and so far nothing’s solved the problem. I can’t tell if this is because I’m doing something wrong, or whether the newest line of MacBooks introduced some new variable that nobody’s aware of.
• MacBook support, in general, feels “almost there” in Feisty. A lot of the function keys work, but it doesn’t automatically install 915resolution or support the iSight camera.

No remorse, though. It’s great to have a personal laptop. I have long had a philosophical objection to keeping large amounts of personal data and settings on my Thinkpad. Now I can let my work computers truly stay work computers.

It’s also great to be using Linux again; it’s made hacking for Twisted a lot easier, and helped me fix this site’s broken links. There’s also an intangible feeling of control — of knowing your operating system really will do whatever you want it to — that you just don’t get on a Windows machine.

It’s good to be back.

I’ve resolved the very significant problem that was preventing people from reading post pages or leaving comments. (Thank you to Gábor Bernáth, who provided some third-party TCP captures.)

I’m not quite sure what this has cost me in terms of regular readership. (I know there weren’t many of you to begin with.) But I’m hoping this is the last time it’ll happen. Read on if you care about the details.

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