Maria the Witch
23 September 2017 | st marys, ga
Capn Andy/post hurricane
I was patiently waiting for UPS to deliver the computer that I had ordered so long ago, during the hurricane. It arrived in Georgia, but was diverted from the Atlanta area down to Tifton, then up to Brunswick, GA, where it sat for about a week. It arrived today.
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It is another Panasonic Toughbook CF-C1. I am very happy with the one I am using now, it has a touchscreen, and now two batteries, so it can run all day on them, good to have on a boat that might lose power, it has an i5 processor which is fairly quick, and 320 gigs of hard drive, so I can accumulate blog pix, music, well, not too much.
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This second CF-C1 has a smaller quicker hard drive, a 128 gig solid state drive. I've never had one before, so I guess I will learn first hand how much faster it goes. It has a web cam built in and came with a second battery, so I don't have to go through the battery ordering process again. It came with an AC adapter. I installed Navigatrix, then put it aside to charge up its batteries.
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I ordered the computer because someone in the boatyard liked my current CF-C1, and when I took a look on eBay, there it was, $99, buy it now, so I did.
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I do a lot of my daytime internet work with the Getac B300, because I can read the screen when it's sunny. Some websites, probably engineered by geeks who live in the dark, use dark backgrounds for a "dramatic" effect. Us outdoor people can't make heads or tails of these sites, but the Getac has a button that increases the brightness about 10X, then you can read anything in the sunlight. When the Georgia boys come around looking for hurricane updates, they need amplification of the images. My snapshots taken in dim surroundings also need some amplification, so anytime I have a dim shot, I hit the button.
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The Getac is a panzer of laptops, when you hold it or have it actually in your lap, it feels like a chunk of heavy metal. It has no fans to cool it, it uses an intricate system of copper, heavy copper, to dissipate heat, and carry it to your lap. Yes, it seems to run hot, but it is impervious to desert heat, I could picture a military tank driver, sweating, climbing up into the sun and using his Getac to make that decisive blow to the enemy, who haven't been reading this blog and don't have that all conquering laptop computer. Woe to them. But here, in the peculiar Georgia heat, even the Getac hits its limit.
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The Getac's case is dark, so it absorbs heat. Even the CF-C1, which is silver, has a black cover when it is closed. In the heat here in St. Marys, both computers lose their marbles if they are left out in the sun. Keep them inside. The Getac begins to move its cursor erratically. The Toughbook acts dumb, nothing happens. Get them inside out of the sun. If they are sitting on a shelf with the sun on them, they get fried. It's like the dashboard of a car in the sun. Fry an egg.
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I was surprised that the Getac would be affected by the heat, but now I realize their most important customers are the police and fire departments, not the military, but I'm sure there are many deployed with the military. The waterproof feature is hard to meet if you also have to have ports and connectors to the outside world. If you close all the watertight doors on the Getac, there is no way to connect, except bluetooth.
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I may get a chance to take one of these computers out to sea in about a week or so. Capn Ford asked me to crew on a delivery of a Lagoon catamaran from the Carolinas to Ft. Lauderdale. We've done this before, just last year, along with my trips down the coast in Kaimu and Trillium. The time of year is important, this is the middle of the hurricane season, so we have to be sensitive to any developing tropical depressions off Africa and also have to research availability of marine services on the coast, affected by the recent hurricanes. Some have had high rip currents and waves, others were hit by Maria or Irma.
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The image is a painting, The Witch's Lagoon, by Elysia Byrd of the UK, it is available for purchase at saatchiart.com