Recently I purchased a new notebook: a Sony Vaio VGN-FZ21E. FZ series come with 15.4″ wide displays. VGN-FZ21E features: Intel Core 2 Duo T7250 2Ghz processor, 2GB DDR2 SDRAM, 160GB DD, WiFi (802.11 a/b/g), DVD RW and a Nvidia GeForce 8400M GT GPU with 64MB RAM. Its operating system is Windows Vista Home Premium.

The package contains the notebook, a rechargable battery, the power cords and the guides. That means that there is no Windows Vista recovery disk. In case of operatin system crash or if you want to format your notebook, there is a hidden partition containing the operating system and sony vaio’s preinstalled programs. The hidden partition makes the HDD looks smaller (around 140GB) in Windows Vista.

The design is minimal with the big vaio logo on the back. The keyboard is black except the media buttons on the top as long as the on/of button which are silver. Built-in speakers offer medium quality sound, but loud enough (except if you use the battery life profile). The fans cooling the gpu and the cpu are quiet and even under high cpu load, the notebook remains cool which makes it a great and quiet portable solution, especially if you usually use your laptop on your knees.

FZ Vaio series offer wide connectivity solutions. The built in WiFi offers stable and fast data transfers. The are audio outputs, a card reader (reads sd cards and memory sticks), iLink port for camcoders and digital cameras, 3 usb 2.0 ports, ethernet, modem, and an HDMI port for full High Definition (1080p) output.

The keyboard is elegant and provides great feeling when typing. Charging the notebook takes about 45 minutes with the vaio turned off and 1 hour and 30 minutes with the vaio turned on. Although battery lasts only for 1 hour and 20 minutes with medium use (WiFi enabled, internet surfing). With hard use (3d graphics, gaming) the battery lasts for 40 minutes, which makes it necessary to buy a second battery if you need your laptop on whenever you are.

The display is one of the best I’ve seen on laptops of tha price range. Colors are vivid and bright and watching HD videos (720p) is exciting. The built-in motion camera offers only the basics. The picture quality is low and pixelates but it will cover your needs for basic video chat.

Vaio VGN-FZ21E costs 1100 euros (around $1500). There are more expensive laptops in the FZ series, which offer blu ray drives instead of the DVD-combo and graphics cards with more memory. In general this Vaio will cover everyone needs. Its not ideal for hardcore gamers though. People who travel a lot should consider buying a second battery. Its weight is 2.7kg, so this laptop can be called portable for its display category.

Justsayhi is for many users a dating site. But if you visit justsayhi.com/bb you will find a great and funny resource for blog widgets and quizzes for geeks. You can try out to see how many html elements can you type in five minutes or how many css properties you can type in 7 minutes. If you do not like web development you can test how much do you know about the internet or find out how much electricity does yout body produce.

Apart from the quizzes there are several quality badges to stick on your blog (most of them funny, like “the blogger is coffee addicted”) or find out how many germs live in your keyboard or whether you are an apple addicted or not! Geek quiz is nice too! There is also some crazy stuff there, like “take this quiz to find out your possibilities of surviving in a zombie apocalypse”!
The design of the site and its chicklets is cool and thats makes it different from such sites for me. I tend not to review web sites except when they are special or original and justsayhi is! Quizzes use AJAX which makes the pages fast-responding and professional-looking.

The badges you get after completing a quiz looks like this one below (and yeah the code given for sticking them on your blog validates as XHTML 1.0 transitional).

Mozilla Sunbird™ is a standalone calendar application. Sunbird is being developed for some years. The latest version is 0.7 (far away from the milestone 1.0 which means that some bugs should probably be expected) which you can download here. Sunbird has small system requirments and runs smoothly without consuming much memory.

The interface is simple but usefull. You can view your calendar in day, week, multiweek or month mode. Toolbar is customisable as well (like in Firefox). Adding events is easy: Just click the “New Event” button on the upper left corner, fill in the details (duration, start time, end time), choose wether or not you want to be notified (Sunbird should be running for notifications to work) and click Save and Close. There is an option for repeating events too.

Next to the “New Event” button there is the “New Task” button. Pop-up window for task adding is the same with the event add, but after saving, tasks are listed in the lower left corner, giving you the ability to give them priority, fill the fullfilment percentage and tick the fullfiled ones.

For social people, Sunbird gives the option for exporting your calendar (or importing a calendar) and publishing your Calendar so it can be shared with others. Calendars can be password protected for more security.

In general Mozilla Sunbird™ offers the basics of a Calendar application and is suitable for the home user or users that do not need advanced features from their calendar app. I’ve been using Sunbird 0.7 for two weeks now and it is really stable (has never crashed) which should be considered to pros.