Moving on from the Eee

Our Eee PC701 SD travel computer has been truly useful.

I've taken it overseas to conferences, used it for travel in Europe and Asia and it has always been utterly reliable.

Latterly it's being showing its age, or more accurately its badge engineered Xandros linux version has, due to a lack of software updates. A lot of these don't matter for what is fundamentally a stateless machine. Stateless because we use it for web applications when we are away, gmail, google docs and accessing things like banks to move money around and check bills are paid, not to mention airline check ins. The only stand alone application used is skype.

And there's the rub - no more updates means that the version of Firefox it came with is way out of date. Gmail pushes us into HTML mode, Google Docs suggests we run away and hide, and our bank sternly warns us we're unsupported and some features of its website may not work.

Rather like when I powered up an old iMac - useful, but not that useful - the killer being that if you use cloud based services you do kind of need to keep up with their requirements as regards browser capability.

So what made the Eee useful?

• light and compact
• stateless - used cloud services so no data loss if its stolen
• rj 45 for the surprising number of Asian hotels that have wired ports in the rooms and wireless only in the lobby
• skype for calling home
• keyboard for writing/notetaking via google docs or a local editor

So what to replace it with?

• use the seven inch tablet

• light, good battery life
• keyboard
• skype
• android browser
• native gmail client
• supports bank's web app
• pretty near stateless
• no rj45 port

• use my windows netbook

• not stateless
• bulkier than the Eee
• up to date browsers
• keyboard
• skype
• rj45 port
• can support standard 3g dongles

On balance, for a trip to the back blocks of south east Asia the windows netbook wins, but for a weekend away or a short business trip the tablet would probably work just as well providing I knew there was decent wifi at the other end.

There are of course a couple of alternative solutions:

• upgrade the Eee 

• I really don't have time to do this and debug things before I go but installing Lubuntu or Puppy might well give the machine a second lease of life. This is something to be investigated at a later date.

• spend $300 on a chromebook. After all it is
  

• stateless
• relatively lightweight
• up to date browsers
• has some offline capability
• the acer model has an rj45
• no skype

The other solution would go buy an ipad and a keyboard. Probably a great solution for travel if I already had one, but subject to the same problem as the seven-incher - dependent on a decent wi-fi connection. If I didn't have an alternative already I'd probably go for the chromebook ...

So what do you actually use - quarterly update

Back on January 24 I posted an article summarising what tools I actually use and undertook to track and review my use throughout the year.

So far there's not much change in the applications used, it's more my adoption of markdown as a basic documentation format.

One of my common workflows now is to use a text editor, such as text edit on my tablet to take notes during a meeting in markdown format, sync them to dropbox, clean them up using either Kate (Linux) or TextWrangler (Mac), push them through pandoc to make an odt format file.

I then use Libre Office to apply a standard template and then email the documents as pdf's to evernote and any other relevant parties.

Other than that my only other addition is postbox as a lightweight email client for windows and GanntProject for gannt charts and nice pdf reports

My amended list now reads:


Dropbox – used mainly to sync files across computers irrespective of file format
Libre Office – platform agnostic document editor for off line writing. Often used in conjunction with Dropbox
Evernote – used as a notes and document management system (Nixnote is used on Linux to access my evernote files)
Wunderlist for 'to do' list management
Chrome – browser extraordinaire
Gmail – email solution
Postbox - lightweight email client for windows to cope with slow connections
Evolution - linux email client principly used in conjunction with Libre Office
Google docs – fast means to create quick and dirty documents irrespective of platform
Windows Live writer – offline blog post creation
TextEdit – android text editor for note taking and integrates nicely with evernote and Gmail
Kate - my favourite editor
TextWrangler - my secondmost favourite editor
Pandoc - converts markdown to a range of other formats
Microsoft Skydrive – used for document backup
Excel Web App – for these occasions when Google Spreadsheets or Libre Office Calc will not do
GanntProject for gannt chart generation
Google reader for rss feed management - but changing to Feed demon
Twitter for tracking interesting things – rarely for messaging
Hosted Wordpress and blogger for blogging, and wikidot for creating structured web pages

the way we live now (the fibre optic version)

the way we live now
Originally uploaded by moncur_d.

if anyone has ever wondered about how technology and bandwidth changes lives, take a look at this picture of my niece preparing dinner.

She's not a techo. She doesn't care about bandwidth or protocols, but because her house has a reliable highspeed fibre optic network connection she finds it normal to store recipes as bookmarks and stick a laptop on the kitchen bench and expect everything to just work ....

Postbox

one thing I’ve learned since we’ve taken to going to remoter places with network connections that resemble wet string, is that web mail is not that good an idea. The connection assumes that you have bandwidth at your disposal and that you can be reasonably chatty.
Not so. I’ve reverted to a desktop mail client that works well on a minimal netbook windows seven install and talks nicely to gmail. I did try the free windows live email client but that seemed clunky, and slow to start up.
I’ve moved over to PostBox, which is not special, just a nice simple lightweight three pane client that seems to work well, and what’s more, integrates nicely with libre office.
So, if you need a client that can work offline – try postbox – they're online at http://www.postbox-inc.com/ and you’ll be sure to find it and the supporting doco …

ipads as cash registers

So there we were at the Himalaya Bakery in Daylesford having a pretty nice lunch of soup and fresh baked bread, and of course there then came the moment when we had to pay.
Now I’m notorious for never having any money on me as most times all I do is use my card at a supermarket or servo for petrol, so not surprisingly I only had five bucks on me and the bill was more like twenty or twenty five.
No worries I thought, I’ll use my debit card as I could see that the cash register – really just an old Dell computer with some cash register software, had a card reader attached.
Ah, says the man, our card reader’s down. And before I could mumble something about going down the street to the ATM, he whips out an ipad from beneath the counter, hands it to me, asks me to type in my email address, takes my card, types in the number and the authorisation code and some magic number of my own and we’re done.
He’s got his money, I’ve got a receipt mailed to me and no one had to go down to the ATM.
Pretty good, and the first time I’d encountered that.
Strangely enough the NYT had an article recently about some cafes in Oregon using the same sort of system – wonder how long it’ll be the norm for your waitperson to whip out an ipad mini rather than these older windows ce tap and click units they use …

a little twitter observation

I have a twitter feed, and it usually trucks around with 200+ followers.

I actually started the feed as a way of archiving bookmarks rather than as a means of communication, but I reckoned that, if anyone wanted to follow it, so much the better, but it has stayed a fairly idiosyncratic personal feed.

I spent last week in Daylesford, in central Victoria, again by accident off then net. Not totally true, I had  my phone but I spent the time doing human things and not posting updates to twitter.

You'd expect the number of followers to go down, as anyone following me out of curiousity would have got pretty bored that past week. Likewise the spammers and os on would have gone away,

Nope, the follower count went up.

I don't have a rational explanation. It's not an invasion of robots or people trying to get me to click on links for dubious reasons. In fact most look fairly legitimate.

Just odd ...

Getting an old IMac G3 to be useful

Well of course I couldn’t resist.

Having got an old G3 to boot to the command prompt I had to try and get it running a desktop.

First of all I got myself some more memory for it. Everything I read suggested that even the lightweight versions of Lubuntu needed a bit more than the 256Mb Xubuntu 6.04 had been happy with and it was less than twenty bucks for 512Mb.

I had half hoped that the desktop would start working with the extra memory plus a decent xorg.conf to cope with the G3 display, but no such luck - I had the framebuffer problem. Reading the FAQ’s revealed that there was a known problem with framebuffers and 12.04 meaning that the video basically didn’t work.

The solution was to upgrade to 12.10. Easier said than done. The live CD was anything but, and the alternate install disk image for 12.10 didn’t want to play, so after failing to install an older different version of ppc linux, I reinstalled 12.04 and started painfully upgrading linux.

This was a painful exercise, as the old G3 was connected to the internet via a wireless bridge to our home network and then to the internet by our extremely flaky ADSL link - too attenuated, too much noise. Let’s just say that downloads and streaming media can cause our link to go and sulk severely, and trust me, it can sulk for Australia.

However, persistence does pay off and the command sudo apt-get upgrade --fix-missing is a wonder of resilience, and you get there eventually. 

Actually you don’t. I still can’t get a desktop manager to work despite upgrading everything fully. Currently sudo start lightdm bombs out just after saned starts. I suspect it's still not starting the video drivers correctly

I probably still need to spend a little more time with xorg.conf and tweak a few other things and hopefully it will burst into life.

The sensible question to ask about this exercise is why, why bother spending time trying to get a 12 year old machine running, when actually you secretly know it will sit in the garage and be used occasionally to check email and write the odd bit of text, something that could be done from the command prompt, for example by installing alpine and configuring it to work with gmail and creating markdown structured text with nano, and then mailing it to myself to then create decent quality odt by using pandoc, or indeed implementing a script to push it to dropbox.

And I have to agree, rationally there’s no sense. If I wanted or needed a linux machine at home I should have bought myself a refurbished thinkpad, or even an old ex government pc for less than a $100, after all if it will run XP it will run linux.

But then there’s the learning aspect. Under unix (or linux) I’ve always been a command line person when it comes to actual computing and while I’ve played with X Windows (and Dec Windows) I was actually a bit vague about the internals - my approach being to install an ubuntu or debian CD and go from there.

Doing this I’ve learned things, and had a had a little bit of fun along the way, which was really the whole point of the exercise …