Bye and Hi

It's hard to leave someone whom you are so close to behind.. Especially those who served as your closest companion for the pass 6 years.

I hate to accept the truth that he's gone. Everything happened so fast, by the time I realized, tears' started to shed unconsciously.

Good bye to my 6-year-old+ laptop. His life and vitality is comparatively stronger than the others, I know. Sincere salute to my Acer Travelmate 230 whom I named as Tauhu Chai.



He pulled through when the lighting stroke the telephone cable when i was surfing the Internet last 2 years. The impact was dreadful enough to burst the telephone cable box that consequently wiped out the other 3 computers in the house. How could I not be grateful to such an indomitable laptop.



He's my entertainment and working partner. Movies, songs, tons of assignments and projects that required heavy processing, he never failed me. Eventhough dad has offered to get a new laptop for numerous times, I'd never have the heart of changing it.. not until last week when he's diagnosed as motherboard failure.



To end this moaning session, let me introduce my new laptop, the tauhu chai Jr. Like father like son, it's from Acer of course, with 2.53GHz, 2GB DDR3, 320GB HDD, and 512MB GeForce graphic card. Good enough for a computer student like me.



It too has a built-in fingerprint reader since biometric technology is so commonly used today for the security purposes. Certainly it's nothing new to embed the technology in laptop, but it is to me (sounds outdated I know). Still remember that I was so surprised when a friend bought a fingerprint protection laptop few years back. Was super impressed with the idea that building in bio-security in just a laptop.

With 'FingerLauch', just pick any of your fingers and swap it on the fingerprint reader for few times letting the software to store into the system, then it's done. And next time when logging in the windows, what you need to do is just swapping your finger tip. It's easy, but so far, I have to at least swap 2 times in order to log in successfully. Not sure it's because of my incorrect swapping technique or because of the device flaw itself.



I'm curious on how actually does the reader work since we are not required to press the finger hardly on a flat surface in order to acquire the fingerprint. Googled about it a little, yet to discover the answer, but this is what I found ->
Hitachi shrinks fingerprint readers to just 3mm thick .



So there are micro-lens, image sensor and etc. Thus, I presume it is optical scanning that is sensitive to light which can differentiate the ridges and valleys of the finger.

I accidentally cut my finger yesterday, out of curiosity I removed the hansaplast and let the wrinkle-up tip to swap on the reader.



It's failed no doubt. That further proves that it's optical-based. A micro+insignificant experiment that satisfied my curiosity :)