Holy crap!!! Did that just happen??? Did your stuff really just get stolen?! Um yeah, it did. Join the club.

Recently, I was the victim of a home robbery. Not going to lie, the whole situation just straight up sucked. I was pissed. There was anger and swearing and strange guttural noises for days. But my head has now cleared a little bit and I know that I’ve learned some valuable lessons as a result of the less-than-ideal ordeal. I hope no one else has to go through this, but for whatever it’s worth I’d like to offer some advice on what to do if you find yourself the victim of a crime. You’re still probably going to be a mess, but the extent of the shit-show may be reduced if you follow some basic procedures.

First step: yell. Doesn’t matter if the person has just mugged you on the street and there is a chance of someone stopping him or if you are walking into your sickeningly bare apartment. Yell with everything you’ve got. And none of that crappy, "Oh my gosh, Kim Kardashian and Reggie Bush are back together" kind of squeal." I mean a full out, from the gut, let them hear it in from the top of the Prudential building kind of scream. Because even if the person is long gone, the screaming will help with the frustration. And there will be plenty of frustration to deal with ("Yeah, I just spoke with a guy who said my insurance covers the stuff that was just stolen from me so I want to submit a claim. What do you mean he was wrong?? No, I won’t hold. Gahhhh have a great *$&*!#$ day too!").

Call the cops. This may seem obvious, but when you’re pissed as shit, you’re not thinking straight. Your first instinct may be to call a friend or parent ("OMG you are NEVER going to believe what JUST happened!!!") so you can tell someone the news. Hold off on that for a moment and call the guys with the badges. The quicker you call, the better your chances are of anything good happening for you.

Once the guys in blue have made their way to wherever you are and done their thing, call everyone you know to tell them. It’s therapeutic to talk about it. It also just makes a damn good story. "You chased the guy up the street??!!" "Yeah, I was screaming the whole time, it was crazy." Who doesn’t want to hear that story? No one. So feel free to share.

Find out if you have renter’s insurance. If you’re a stupid grad student (like the writer), you don’t. Have insurance on your cell phone? If you’re a stupid grad student (like the writer), you don’t. Same thing for the brand new beautiful MacBook computer. Yeah, that one still hurts.

Oh and those phone calls you have to make to friends and family? Well, your phone was stolen too so you’re quickly going to have to get over the guilt of borrowing someone’s phone. Hey, you’re shit just got stolen — they’ll be okay with you using 20 minutes of their airtime.

Throughout all this, make sure to breathe. Do this repeatedly.

Once all the paperwork is taken care of, the next step is a little simpler: get drunk. On multiple nights, in multiple establishments, with multiple types of alcohol if need be. Just get drunk. If you have stellar friends (as the writer does), they will buy your beverages of choice for you. Other perks include lots of hugs and expressions of love and perhaps a new nickname if your situation calls for it (I now answer to Sparkplug).

I’m not going to beat around the bush with this next part. It honestly pains me to say this, but if your shit gets stolen, you’re going to have to go out and replace all of your stuff. That means spending a lot of money. On the bright side, you have been saving money on groceries and holiday shopping. So you should have a little bit of money for your purchases. It sucks, but it’s necessary. Just take a deep breath and swipe your card through.

You’re going to want to keep busy. I mean, you’re going to be busy rewriting all those assignments you never emailed to yourself or backed up on a flash drive (stupid, STUPID grad student). Yeah it sucks, but it’s also kind of a good thing. You want to stay busy so you won’t be thinking about what you just went through. Because it’s pretty damn scary to think about. Also, stay busy working on your assignments so you don’t give in to the urge to repeatedly bang your head against the wall. Yeah, my Advil bottle took a big hit that week…

Buy more pepper spray. And a whistle. And actually start carrying them in your hand when you’re walking, instead of just telling your parents that you are doing this. Doesn’t matter if you were a victim of a home robbery or a street mugging. If you take precautions to be safer, you will feel, and be, safer.

So yeah, being the victim of a break-in definitely sucks, not going to lie. But chin up, it’s just stuff. Papers can be rewritten, computers and cell phones can be bought again. But get your locks changed, will ya? Peace of mind and all.

When our MacBook Pro was new, we assumed that while a 120 GB hard drive wasn’t exactly the largest Apple offered the max was 250 GB, by the way it was plenty roomy enough to last us. Fast forward to two years later, where it seems that every few days our computer is constantly barking at us that the startup disk is almost full, Parallels runs the computer to a halt, and iPhoto was slow enough before we had to move all of our photos to our Time Capsule. Plus we hate toting around an external. There’s got to be a better solution, right?

It turns out that there are a couple ingenious hackers out there who have realized that the space your optical drive sits in is some very valuable real estate space which could easily be repurposed and filled with another hard drive. One intrepid blogger, Reid, has decided to throw his MacBook warranty out the window, removed the optical drive and replaced it with a 256 solid-state hard drive, seeing as they both run via a SATA connector. Check out his blog to see the nitty-gritty of what he did.

While Reid could have just as easily replaced the optical drive with a standard drive did you know they make 1 TB laptop drives now? solid state drives have many advantages over your standard drives. The flash memory inside a solid state hard drive has no moving parts, so they are more durable and last longer than your standard hard drives. Oh, and they’re FAST. How fast do you say? Reid found a seven-fold increase in speed in benchmark tests he ran.

The best part of all these shenanigans is that in the interest of bettering the human race, Reid is offering to help you trick out your laptop too. He’s posted all the instructions be warned, there’s some soldering required and a list of the $10 of parts you need to purchase from Amazon.com. Or for the slightly more adventurous, he’ll ship you the connector for $30. Or, if the whole performing surgery on your laptop makes you feel a bit queasy, you can ship your laptop to him with the hard drive you want installed, and for $35 plus $14 shipping, he’ll do everything for you.

We haven’t handed our laptop over to Reid €¦yet so remember these caveats: we don’t know Reid, though we’re sure he’s a stand-up guy, so you’re shipping your precious laptop to a blogger while simultaneously voiding your warranty. That being said, comparable services on other sites run $150 plus shipping for an install alone. Granted, MCE will perform a similar service and install a brace that keeps the hard drive from banging around, which might be important if you’re not installing a SSD, but it’s still quite a bit steeper than what Reid is promising.

Either way, with optical drives in notebooks going the way of the dodo, this just may be the life saving hack that will convince us to keep our notebook around for a little while more.

Docking stations are nice if you use the laptop primarily at one location or have lots of things to plug into it that don’t move — input devices, webcam, monitor. This leaves the BookEndz with a good chance to market third party docking stations. This is a hard thing for the company to manufacture since the laptops don’t just have a docking port like most laptops that have first party docking stations. They are left with plugging into the external ports and then just moving them to the outside their device.

BookEndz still have some options that users can work with, though. With their MacBook docking station, they have a USB hub inside, so you can have 6 devices plugged in, while the MacBook only has two USB ports on the side.

The docking station has all the original laptop ports plus the mini DVI is converted to either a DVI or a VGA. You can only use one at a time. If you plug in both only the VGA is recognized.

The BookEndz also use a sliding switch on the side to plug in the speaker/headphone port. This is important since the MacBook enables the port based on a sensor that detects something plugged into the port. When the headphones or speakers are plugged in the laptops speakers are disabled.

The switch on the Bookendz unit I was given was a very sticky. It is hard to move from plugged in and unplugged. This will loosen over time with usage. The company said that the one I was sent may be an early model and the new ones are looser and easier to switch to plugged in, or unplugged. They do make it easy enough to just plug everything in at once.

I like that when I use a BookEndz I can go from standard laptop to having a big monitor, and normal keyboard. Using a USB video card, it’s possible for a Macbook to now have two large monitors plugged in, and then it’s easy take it away when you need to go.

One part that makes it hard with the newer Apple laptops is the much toted power plug. Apple does not appear to let any third party companies make Mag-Safe adapters. BookEndz have a space for the original power bricks to be used. This could have been done better. They seemed to have decided to make it easy for the user to unplug the power brick to take with the laptop, instead of leaving the power brick in the docking station. This means every time you go to unplug the docking station, not only do you unplug the docking station, but also the power adapter. This also requires sitting the docking station on top of the wire so it will all sit flat. I think they should have made the docking station hold the power adapters more snugly. That way you can just plug everything in at once.

The design of the plastic casing is fairly smooth and flowing like the MacBooks, but the devices have touches here and there that look more hobbyist.

Overall I think it’s a very good and useful product for what it does. I think it beats just plugging in each port separately every time I get to work. For what they had to work with I think they did a great job. I just wish Apple thought of this sooner.

By the way: Because of a reporting error, we removed the line “Apple hasn’t ever produced a docking station for their laptops.” It was incorrect.

There’s been a lot of talk about Apple’s latest laptop the MacBook Air, and a lot of this talk seems to be by people who aren’t quite clear on the concept and target market segment. First announced in the middle of January, the Air is ultra-thin, lightweight, and has a seeming dearth of standard features- a move that’s generated no small amount of controversy.

First though, the raw specs:

Thickness: 0.76in max, tapering down to 0.16
Width: 12.8in
Depth: 8.94in
Weight: 3 lbs

CPU: special micro Core2 Duo running at 1.6 or 1.8ghz
Ram: 2 gb
HD: either an 80 GB PATA, or 64 GB SSD, both 1.8in size.
Screen: 13.3 @ 1280×800

Wifi: b/g/n
Bluetooth: 2 + EDR

… and, most notably, the only ports it has are a single USB, headphone jack, and a micro-DVI, in addition to not having any form of internal optical drive (although an external usb DVD+/-DL is available).

The other big innovation is Remote Disc, a software solution that enables the Air to read (via wifi) discs mounted on another Mac or Windows machine, even to the point of being able to boot off them and install an OS (most likely through some implementation of PXE, although the details are unclear).

Reading the sheet, it seems to me that the Air is intended not as a primary machine or desktop replacement, but as a compliment to an existing workstation or server for people who want to be able to do a few things around the house with said machines without being tied to their desk (a niche known as a ‘fat-client’), and for business execs who need something lightweight they can take with them to meetings to show demos and presentations.

However, having browsed around several forums and listened in on a number of conversations, it seems that most of those with a lot of negative opinions are trying to shoehorn it into the category of ‘submicro roadwarrior’ and then complaining when it doesn’t fit:

“It’s too big/wide/etc. It should be 12/9/5 inches, etc”

People who, say, have a server downstairs that contains all of their movies and want a lightweight laptop with a decent screen that they can watch stuff on while lying around on the couch or cooking dinner in the kitchen, and 13″ gives a good compromise between portability and watchability.

Likewise, for someone trying to present a demo in a meeting without a projector, smaller screens aren’t really a plus.

Also, in relative terms of volume, a thinner laptop gives you more room for carrying extra books or marketing material or a few small packages side by side, whereas lopping off an inch or so from the edge of the machine gives you a long narrow area that rarely translates into usable storage space for anything other than some toothpaste.

Regardless of anything Steve Jobs might say about style, a thinner 13″ is generally more effective than a thick 10″.

“It doesn’t have a replaceable battery”

This isn’t as big a deal as people make it out to be.

The vast majority of laptop owners don’t have multiple batteries for their laptop(s) anyway, and these days it’s rare to be in a location without a power outlet somewhere nearby. On top of that, carrying around spare batteries largely defeats the purpose of having such a lightweight laptop in the first place.

Unless you’re doing a lot of transcontinental flying on a cheap airline with no power sockets, a single battery is plenty.

Apple has already confirmed that the onboard battery is not permanently attached to the motherboard and can be replaced easily by removing a few screws and the bottom panel of the machine (a process that any reasonably skilled technician can perform in a few minutes), and that they’ll be providing and supporting replacement batteries for some time into the future.

“The ram is not upgradable”

The Air comes with 2GB, which is more than enough for the sorts of things this machine is meant for.

For the most part, all the things that really eat up ram (3D gaming, scientific processing, multimedia creation, etc) are not things you’d be doing on a laptop, and even if you had to run Windows in virtualization (via Parallels or VMware) because of a specific application, you’d have enough to do what you needed to.

Sure 4GB would be nice, but if you need to be editing HDTV movies or running a financial database server on the road, the Air is probably not for you anyway.

“It doesn’t have any ports”

Are you really going to be connecting a non-Bluetooth external mouse and a keyboard (with no ports of its own) on the road?

Several external hard drives at the same time?

One usb port really isn’t that much of a limitation for a laptop that doesn’t sit around all the time with a lot of devices plugged into it, and people seem to forget that you can buy a pocket usb hub if you really need it.

The lack of an ethernet port doesn’t phase me either as it’s far more likely I’ll encounter a wifi hotspot in my travels than an wall jack, and if I really need it I can always buy a usb-to-ethernet dongle.

As far as video goes, Apple includes in the box adapters that enable hookup to dvi/vga, anticipating that business folks who do a lot of presentation work will probably be a large part of the core market, moreso than people who need to run a bittorrent server in range of several microwave ovens.

I realize this may come off as sounding defensive, but one thing that’s always bugged me is when people rag on a product when they don’t understand what it’s meant for.

Like when the iPod first came out, the Air is getting bad press from people who don’t understand why it’s so much better than what’s already available.

That having been said, I personally am probably never going to own an Air, precisely because I need neither a fat-client (my primary machine is a MacBook Pro, not a wall-bound tower) nor am I a business exec, but that doesn’t stop me from recommending it strongly to anyone who does fit into those categories.

The Air nicely fills a hole that’s been open in Apple’s laptop lineup for about a decade since the Duo 2300c disappeared in the late 90′s, and is very probably the best laptop on the market within this class.

For more, check out BLAST staffer Mike Preble’s take on it.