Like many developers, I get
my money's worth out of the laptops I buy. Sometimes it seems I use them every
minute of the day. And, over the years, I've accumulated quite a collection of
physical machines in addition to the various VMs I have carrying out miscellaneous
tasks around the house.
I secretly love the
obviously-marketed-at-women ones that have cases made of pink brushed aluminium and the like.
But, also being a professional developer, I have to say that almost always that
fancy case comes accompanied by last year's technology (or older.) It simply
isn't a good business decision to buy them when you review the spec.
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| As a wise philosopher once said, I'm a Barbie Girl in a Barbie World. |
So, I often end up buying
machines that have phenomenally-fast dual/quad processors with acres of RAM capable of running lots of memory-intensive applications concurrently. And
I switch out the standard platter drive for a 1 TB SSD. (I usually also swap out
the optical drive for a second 1TB SSD. And 2TB SSDs that I've not yet had a chance
to get my hands on have also now become available, so my next dev machine will have 4TB total, but that's really a
different review.)
Anyway, for some reason the
most performant laptops always seem to come in boring black boxes. When you
acquire a few of these over the years, it becomes difficult to tell them apart.
So for a few years now I've been putting decals on the back and naming the
machine according to which decal adorns it. I also make the login screen and
desktop background of these machines match the decal. This all helps keep you
oriented when you're navigating around, RDP-ing from one machine to another.
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| TaylorHe Decals |
Up to now, my go-to decal
manufacturer has been TaylorHe. They do some very nice pre-made patterns that
suit almost every taste. With my new work laptop, however, I fancied doing
something a bit more bespoke. I'm a huge Breaking Bad fan, so I wanted a
machine that had a theme related to that.
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| Since the device that I usually take pictures with is in this photo, my friend Ian O'Friel kindly helped me take this. Which made it a much better photo than it would otherwise have been as he has a real eye for photography. (You can see more of Ian's fab photos here. I particularly like the one of the old rusty gate and the South Side At Night.) |
Looking around, I found a
company called Wrappz that provides exactly this type of product. Not only do
they produce decals with custom designs, but they also print them on a
custom-sized sheet. So you don't have to trim them to fit your machine. This may seem like a
small advantage, but it was nice just to be able to use them out of the box
like that rather than messing around with a scalpel or scissors.
Like TaylorHe, Wrappz also do
custom phone cases. So I got one of those to match the decal. (Not that I actually own a
phone, incidentally - I'm one of the few people I know that doesn't use one,
and doesn't miss it. I have a Samsung Galaxy S2 'phone', but it acts as a personal
organiser rather than as a communication device. I only put a temporary SIM in
it when I have a reason to, which is almost never.)
If you want to order some of
these decals / phone cases for yourself, here are some discount codes you can use to get them more
cheaply. NB: I've got no commercial relationship with Wrappz, and I haven't benefitted in
any way from this review. Also, I won't know whether anyone has used these codes:
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| Wrappz discount codes |
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| More Wrappz discount codes |
Last small tip for those who,
like me, have multiple laptops in their network to access. You can place the
name of each machine in the Task Bar by creating a new Toolbar, and calling it
"\\%computername%", as described here. It makes it amazingly easy to
see which machine you're on, even if you have a full-screen program running,
and even if you're accessing it from another physical device.
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| Computer Name on Task Bar |
