Mini-Laptop Roundup

It's a crappy pic, but this is the first Asus Eee PC sighting in the wild for me, today at Best Buy, and I was inspired. I also seemed to be about the only one who was paying attention to it. This one must be the 901 series - it had a 16 gig flash drive, 1 gig of memory, and was running XP. The thing wasn't booted or anything, but it was there, for $449. I have been wanting to see one of these things for coming up on a year now. Hmmm...

And next to it was:

An Acer Aspire N270 which was about the same size, had an Atom processor, a 120 gig hard drive, 1 gig of memory, and looked totally SWEET! This one was fired up and running and priced at $349, so I played until the "Can I help you?" - which I asked if they had them in stock. Of course, the standard response came out - "I just sold the last one. Can I order one for you?" Impulse buys (should be the name of the store, if you ask me) are no longer impulse buys if you ORDER anything.

Whatever. It was fun... I don't need it, but boy, do I want it.

Mepis

Trying Mepis Linux 7.0 - no wifi and wired ethernet took a bit to get going. Firefox 2.0. Has Shisen-Sho and Solitaire. Ehhh... Ubuntu will be awesome once the wifi gets recognized. At that point, I will dual boot like a mofo.

Got an RSS reader for the Touch - and I am not that into RSS shit. Have to snag the Wifi Finder tools and the like, but I am getting more and more into the Touch.

Big Geek

I have been playing with the iPod Touch a bunch for the last little while. I paid about $10 for a textfile reader app called Bookshelf, and it does pretty good, but it still has a way to go. Occasionally the app just shuts down. No idea why. There is a desktop app that you use to get the textfiles onto the iPod that works well for me. I use it still, but am looking at more text readers.

Anyway, I started playing with another called Stanza - at first I just downloaded things from the online library, but I am now using the desktop app to send other files to the iPod. I like! It's also free at the moment. There seem to be hints that eventually there will be a non-beta release that might cost a few $$$ - fine by me - I'd pay for it now. Supposedly, it will do MANY formats, including Kindle. Don't know how that works because I don't have one.

I have not been keeping up with more than the buzz of the Olympics - the swim guy, the swim lady who is 41, the really young looking Chinese gymnasts. As far as I am concerned, if you can do well enough to win, who cares how old you are?

Mandriva

Managed to get wifi to work on my Aspire 5315-2153 laptop while using a live boot Mandriva Linux bootable cd (summer 2008). It was a bit weird, but it happened.

edit - tried to get it to go a second time and have a "cpu(0)" error and it sticks there on boot. Hmmm...

iPod Stuff

They finally came out with Apps for the iPod Touch, so I upgraded my Touch to version 2 (cost me $10) and then proceeded to load up the one thing I wanted - a textfile reader.

Bookshelf is a text reader app that allows you to read text files - like those that you get from Project Gutenberg, and the like. It took awhile to get everything working for me - most of it my fault. I had canceled out of a "restore my files" and the iPod wanted to get that done before it would install any apps.

From there, this thing uses a Java-based wifi server to broadcast a folder or file for you to "pick up" on the Touch. Took me a few minutes to get comfortable with the way this works, but after it got going, man, I like!

I love text files - I have read them on Palm Pilots, Pocket PC's, Game Boy's, laptops - I just love being able to tote text and bust into it wherever and whenever you want to.

I also nailed the New York Times app - it downloads the text of most (if not all) of the NYT and you can then read it (even if you are away from a wifi source). Has ads on the bottom of the page, but it still gives you the whole thing for free, so not a bad trade off.

Geeking Hard

Today I used my boy's MacLap for a bit - and it was WEIRD. No tapping the pad to get a mouse click (at least if you can, he doesn't have it set up like that), no page up & down buttons (or home or end, either). All my basic ways of getting around scrolling pages are MOOT.

The daughter is having wifi issues, and it is starting to look like all software possibilities are exhausted (hardware, mang), which means she will probably have to send it off to the HP warehouse and see whats up. I have done that once, and it worked out in my favor (broken screen) in a reasonable amount of time, but it still bites to be without.

Played with my iPod Touch a bit, as well - tried to play with books on it again, but the interface sucks and no bookmarks. Yuk. I can't wait till they hook up the apps store.

Puter Puter Puter

The old XP desktop got SLOW - so we virus scanned and busted spyware and the like - and promptly had a "startup" problem. It was the original install (5 years old) so I decided to format and install fresh. Unfortunately, the recovery partition must be "compromised" as after the fresh install, I had a "hal.dll" corrupt or missing error. Argh! Took awhile to get it worked out, but we are now sporting a fresh XP Home install on the desktop.

The Max Media Dock that I use on the Nintendo DS to read textfiles and the like had an upgrade in the last little while - well, Moonshell had an upgrade, and now it will read Western Text Encoding (was having to convert to UTF-8, which sometimes looked ok, and most of the time was a big pain in the @ss). I can now read my text (links to text sites on the right =====>>) much more comfortably. I also caught onto a concept that helps me deal with text files that might not be formatted well or as pristine as I would like - bit-rot. I love electronic reading!

Peter and the Wolf

Peter and the Wolf is a children's story with full orchestra accompaniment. You can find the version of the story digitized from the records by the Boston Symphony Orchestra here. My dad used to play this for us when we were little. From KiddieRecords.com.