I bought this thumb drive to go with my new Asus EEE PC. It does the trick. 16GB is a phenomenal size for a thumb drive. There's also a 32gb model too. I paid something like $50 for my 16GB model after lame mail in rebate.

For what it is and what it does it works great. No annoying software preinstalled like on the Verbatim for example.

There's a rubbery coating on my Patriot thumb drive which is sort of neat but it makes it really big and sort of annoying too. I'll probably remove the coating eventually as it will probably loosen over time anyway. The cap is made of the same material and it's terrible. I'm not even sure where the cap is right now. They really need to attach the cap to the body somehow on these things.

If the OCZ Rally 2 16GB wasn't sold out I would have bought that instead.

Labels: tech stuff

The Trouble with Traditional Laptops:
Modern consumer laptops are just too damn big to actually be realistically portable. Secondly, they're just too expensive to take anywhere without feeling like you're babysitting it all the time.

Why did I buy an EEE PC instead of a traditional laptop?

The Good

Size matters. Only having to carry around 2 lbs of laptop is a huge selling point. Not to mention that it's only 125cm wide 90cm long and 15cm thick. It's just tiny. The trade off is that the screen is even smaller and the keyboard takes some getting used to as well. The 900 model has a slightly larger screen but the jump in price wasn't worth it. The other nice thing about size is that I can use it in public without everyone gawking at me and my screen. Even at work people will give me that "OMFG U got A Laptopzor! Dya got any games!?". Nobody will even notice the EEE PC. I can even comfortably turn it on it's side and read it like a book.

The price. The performance of the EEE PC benchmarks about about half of what a normal consumer grade $1000 laptop can do. The 4G surfer model retails at around $350. The other advantage is that if disintegrates or simply walks away I'm not out a grand or more.

There's no hard drive. Hard drives are mechanical spinning discs that don't appreciate being shaken or knocked around. Logic dictates it might be a bad idea to carry such a hard drive around in a laptop. The EEE PC uses static memory like that of an SD card in a digital camera. There isn't a lot of memory but it won't crash on you if you slip on the ice while carrying it. Secondly, going back to the disintegration slash walk away factor, if the EEE PC does do this, you won't be out half a terabyte of your most precious data. I picked up a 16GB usb drive for portable storage I use my desktop at home for primary storage.

I also bought it to plug my gps into but I haven't gotten that far with it yet. I only bought it a couple days ago. Apparently it works quite well and fits nicely on the dash of my car. I expect it'll make an excellent mp3 player for the car too. It plays movies well but I still think drivers who watch movies while driving are suicidal.

The Bad

The one thing I don't trust about reviews by consumers for consumers is that nobody wants to admit that they paid too much money for a piece of crap because that's just admitting to their own stupidity. As a result, you get all these rave reviews for crap. So to counter that, I'll should point out the negatives I found about the EEE PC thus far.

The screen resolution is pretty hard to deal with. It's native resolution is 800x480 but I keep mine at 800x600 and just accept a tiny bit of distortion.

The touch pad is ok but the button attached is really hard to press. It's just one button where you press the right side for the right mouse button and the left side for the left button. I generally just tap the touch pad for a left click but I'm still stuck using this really stiff button for the right. Before long, I just grabbed a USB mouse and used that instead. I personally miss those eraserheads from old think pads but I'm probably in a minority there.

I realize that Linux Ubuntu helped keep the price low and it's great and wonderful to use linux like it's a free range chicken but I'm fairly new to linux myself. I'm not very eager to try and navigate a whole new operating system via this little machine. I confess that I threw Windows XP on it nearly right away. You can buy a slightly more expensive model with windows preinstalled. I recommend that route for novice users. Installing windows via a USB thumb drive is tricky.

The Summary

So in summary, I love this little machine and most of the negatives can be worked around with some tweaking. Even the small screen can be worked around by just plugging it into a normal PC screen. For the price, what do you have to lose? If you don't like it, give it away as a gift or just return it.

Labels: tech stuff

Labels: Art, comics

10,000 BC

Crazy cave-people tribes hunting giant woolly mammoths. It's something like Pathfinder and 300 combined but not in a good way. It just made it predictable. You can probably skip this one.

The Strangers

Really good back to basics horror slasher flick. I found myself grasping at a reason the three strangers were terrorizing this couple but really the creepy part is that there was no real motive. Some very spooky scenes. This movie made me happy that I own a chainsaw and an axe but uneasy about the fact that I don't keep both under my bed. This movie very much worth watching at home alone with all the lights out.

Night of the Living Dead 2007 3D

I rented this one last night and much to my surprise they actually had the 3D glasses behind the counter and I get to keep them too! Unfortunately, like all 3D outside of IMAX, I found is very distracting and eventually just took the glasses off.
The movie itself was alright. I kind of hoped is wasn't just another carbon copy of the last remake of Night of the Living Dead and I got my wish. This one's more like a combination of Return of the Living Dead and Night of the Living Dead. Both movies I love. Throw in Sid Haig and you've got a pretty sweet zombie movie.

I'll review more movies as I think of them.

Labels: Movie Review

This latest George Romero zombie flick is another of the many fictional documentary style films that dot the horror genre. The style is becoming a genre unto itself which is fine by me. I love the gritty simplicity of this style. It's nice to see them getting back to basics.

I was initially suspicious about this film when I first heard about it before I knew Romero was behind it. I'd just seen the Zombie Diaries which is also a combination of the two genres as well but still the two are quite different. Where the Zombie Diaries is primaries focused on scaring the crap out of the viewer, Romero's Diary seeks to make a statement about violence, greed, racism, and humanity in general. Don't worry, it's still pretty frightening and a welcome recovery from Land of the Dead which I felt was a little too over the top for me.

I don't know if it was just me but I was getting this vibe from watching Diary that Romero had read the Robert Kirkman's "The Walking Dead" which is a comic book series that I can't say enough good things about. The RV is Diary was very similar to the RV in the Walking Dead. Both stories share the idea that loved ones of the deceased (now zombie) may try to keep the zombie close in a kind of denial of what their loved one has become or in hopes that there might be a cure. Either way I thought it was just awesome.

In short, I loved this movie.

Labels: Movie Review

I don't think it's called Rambo 4. I thought it was called John Rambo but the DVD just says Rambo on the cover. Either way, this movie is really good for what it is.

Looking back on the series, First Blood was an amazing movie. It was one of those rare action movies where you really cared about the main character. At least I did. He's a deadly combination of military conditioning, intense torture, and a whole lot of post traumatic stress. The result is one hell of a killing machine whether he wants to be or not. What makes Rambo interesting is that he'd rather just be left alone.

Rambo 2 and 3 were pretty exploitative but at the same time the writers made that perfectly clear in the storyline. I always found Rambo 3 to be interesting in light of the current war in Afghanistan. Was Rambo teamed up with the Taliban to fight off those Russians?

Rambo 4 is by far the most violent. It's 2008 though. Movies in the action and horror genre are exponentially more violent than they ever used to be. There's no hiding anything anymore when it comes to violence other than sexual violence of course.

Without giving the story away which is again what I loath about movie reviews, Rambo 4 is better than 2 and 3 but still doesn't top the original First Blood. I enjoy watching all of them from time to time which is unusual for me since I generally skip over action movies. I think I'm going to go watch Rambo 4 again right now.

Cheers

Labels: Movie Review

Season 4 has come out to a pretty slow start but that's good because I know that this is the last season and I want it to last forever. Most of what's making it feel so slow is the anticipation of what's coming next.

I can't say enough good things about this show but there is one bad thing...
I hate how they give away the whole show in a subliminal blipvert montage right after the opening credits. I sometimes manage to look away but the odd time it sneaks up on me.

Labels: Movie Review