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

I upgrade my Flickr to Flickr Pro today and I've decided to move all my photos and artwork over to Flickr from my previous image gallery backbone which has been Gallery.

After attempting to upgrade my Gallery with no success and getting repetitively spammed in the comments section of the Gallery, I've deicided to just ditch the whole thing. I'm also pretty certain based on what I have on Flickr already that more people will see my art and photos on Flickr.

Unfortunately, it's going to be a long and tedious project but I'm in need of a project like this to kill some time.

Labels: Art, day to day, tech stuff

If a server is a sever, a mainframe is a mainframe, a PC is a personal computer, what's a mac supposed to be?

I recall back in computer class in the 80s, a Mac was a Macintosh Personal Computer. This has bothered me ever since Apple started pushing ads with the whole Mac vs PC campaign.

Are Apple's new target market supposed to be idiots or is Apple unhappy with the fact that personal computer makes people think they own their computer as opposed to Apple owning their customers?

Notice the old cover of Macworld identifies Macintosh as "Apple's Remarkable New Personal Computer".

I guess nobody really knows what Goofy is either.

Here's to you Mac, whatever you are.

Labels: tech stuff

So yea, the installer from Xplornet came to hook us up with internet via a dish pointed at a tower about five kms away. He's on the roof and pointed out where the tower was. Somewhere through the dense woods was the tower in question. Unfortunately those dense woods were in the way of the signal. This was where the chainsaw came into play. We discussed which trees would have to come down. I went at it the next morning sawing open a cut line through the trees. I'll have to cut even more in the spring when the leaves come out but those can wait.

Happy Tenth Birthday Hackcanada!

Labels: day to day, tech stuff

So the installer came this morning and attempted an install. He lined the antenna up with the tower to the west of us and pointed out the trees that were in the way. There was genuine disappointment in my wife's face at that news. Of course I do own a chainsaw. This afternoon I was out there cutting a 6 foot gap in the trees to make way for the feed from the tower. By tomorrow afternoon the project should be done. My wife already called and booked an appointment even before I started cutting. She wants that connection more than I do but I have a good DSL connection at work to use. She's got nothing for the time being unless she comes to work with me.

Labels: day to day, tech stuff

In other news, the installer is coming Tuesday from Xplornet to test and hopefully install wireless rf broadband. I hope to god it works. The ISP contact seems confident it will but I'll remain skeptical as she was also a salesperson. I know never to believe anything a salesperson ever has to say. At the same time, Google doesn't always offer the 100% truth either but it's always good to research an ISP or any company ahead of time before doing business with them.
This brings me to Xplornetsucks which is more about the satellite service but still an interesting read. A lot of it is just crying over the same thing everyone cries about with any ISP. That being the ever coveted bandwidth.

Labels: day to day, tech stuff

Adblock

I don't really mean to block as with this tool. I realize that advertisers pay the bills for a lot of web designers. I do however use it to block other annoyances.
case in point...
Futureshop.ca has this incredibly annoying bald black guy on the left hand side. If you block the following file with adblock, he will go away and never be seen again.
http://www.futureshop.ca/javascript/avatar/callout_en.swf

Stumble Upon

This particular extension is pretty freaking addictive. You tell it what kinds of websites you're interested in and it's feeds them to you. Just click the button. It's a fantastic time waster.

NoScript

NoScript does what it says it does. It blocks javascript unless I decide that I want to unblock a particular script. I recommend this one when using stumble upon because you're constantly being led into new websites and you never know what scripts some sites are trying to push on your system. Of course this does block a lot of ads but there's nothing I can do about that.

Stylish

This one turns pages like boring old white igoogle to sleek sexy black igoogle with a sleep silver logo. You can import any styles you like. I prefer black. I guess I'm just emo that way.

iGoogle

Which brings us to iGoogle. I'm one of those people who if it's not right there in front of me I'll forget about it until I abandon it completely. iGoogle keeps things right in front of me. There are hundreds of addons. I use to view google calendar, gmail, my to-do list, currency converter, imperial to metric converter and an ip lookup. I really depend on this one.

Stop Autoplay

This extension blocks websites like youtube from automatically playing audio and video streams to you until you tell it to.

Fasterfox

Claims to speed up Firefox page load times. Nothing to lose by installing this one.

del.icio.us

There's several extensions to use with the del.icio.us bookmarking tool. I sometimes install different ones but they all pretty much do the same thing. I use several computers so this one's essential to keeping all my bookmarks in one place and in some kind of order.

Labels: tech stuff

For no particular reason which is usually the case, I've been drawn into the forums at CyberpunkReview.com. I hope it's interesting. I'm just testing the waters but so far so good.

Labels: tech stuff

Cyberpunk as a genre, to me, is the consequence of technology that is not your friend. It's when the "can do" part of invention overshadows the "should do". A Cyberpunk character is not unlike a drug addict. They are the victims of technology.

The reason I'm writing this is because more and more I'm hearing about cutting edge technology that really should have been science fiction in that bygone cyberpunk genre.

I'm sure this will be a recurring theme in this blog so I wanted to make solid statement of what I'm talking about when I'm talking about Cyberpunk.

Labels: tech stuff

I've finally had it with websites that try to create some kind of magical otherworldly experience by blasting whatever music or sound effect out of my computer speakers. Up to now it's simply resulted in me quickly hitting the back button to silence the annoyance. I stumbled upon a website tonight with music (yes with the stumbler extension) and finally had enough. The test subject is this Living With War website. There's no mute button that I can find on the page. I shouldn't have to find the stupid mute button though. Neil Young you're great but come-on!
Attempt #1
To begin with, I'm going to try this Stop Autoplay extension and see how it goes.
Results:
FAIL!
Explanation: I cleared the cache and reloaded the website. I even restarted the browser and the music kept on playing.
Attempt #2
Modified Firefox itself.
Tools-> Options-> Content-> Manage
I found anything in the list that looked like it might be an audio file and switched it from using a plugin like quicktime to simply saving it to disc.
Results:
SO FAR SO GOOD

Labels: tech stuff

For later viewing tonight

Labels: social commentary, tech stuff