Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
150 pounds from Comet in White City, Manchester. The box was opened so I got a discount. Otherwise the machine is brand new. Its the basic model with Linux, 8gig Solid state drive and only 512meg of Ram. I'm expecting once I do the 4gig upgrade on my Dell to pass on the memory to this machine, then maybe stick in a small bluetooth dongle. I'm also checking out how to get ubuntu or xubuntu on it. But generally I'm planning to use this device for im, rss reading, ebooks and general web use.
So I've been thinking about getting a Netbook (or cloud terminal as I like to call them). Mainly because of weight and portability. The Acer Inspire really grabs me with its cheap price and solid state memory drive. But I started thinking I should invest in something a little more solid like the Dell Mini 9. But after some time I've come around to the fact my Dell XPS M1210, although one of the most heavy 12 inch laptops you can get, still has a lot of life inside of it.
Currently the 9 Cell battery is 2 years old and lasts 2.25 hours on usual operation. If I turn off Bluetooth and Wifi it can go up to 3 hours. But looking on ebay, replacement 9 cell batteries are about 50 pounds. Which means I can go back to enjoying 6-7 hour battery times again.
I choose the 120gig SATA harddrive and to be honest, only fill it up when I'm going somewhere and I pile on podcasts and films. Generally I gave 20gigs left at anytime. I also use to use my laptop for transfering stuff, but now I got the pacemaker with also 120gig of space and I'm only using 15% of that. So I usually have mass storage on me and don't need to use the laptop. But whats also weird is the way Dell partitioned the drive. The first partition is a FAT drive of less that a gig with Dell utils on it. Second partition use to be my data drive for Windows which I recently converted from NTFS to EXT3 and is about 100gigs big. Third partition is EXT3 and is where the root ubuntu install exists, its also about 10gig big. The last partition is 4.5gig and is currently where my swap file sits. Yes thats crazy, I hear your saying. I've only got 2gig of memory and to be fair the swap never gets used even with all the applications I have open at once. The problem with the last partition is it was where Dell MediaDirect use to be. Media direct is a media player which will start if you press the correct button on startup. Its useful if you want to just play a dvd or listen to music without booting up the operating system. Well as you can imagine I've used this option all of twice over 2 years. So what I need really is somehting like partition magic to shift everything around a little. Gpart and a couple other open source utils don't seem to be able to shift around stuff so easily. If anyone knows of something different which will please shout.
I've also been thinking it would be a good idea to replace the dell utils with xbmc, so I could boot into something actually useful even if my ubuntu was broken. I'm not totally sure how to do this yet but I'll have a try.
The last thing I think I need to do to my machine is give it 4gig of memory. Its fine with 2gig but I do sometimes wonder if ubuntu is living within that tight limit. 4gig means things like RSSOwl & Snackr which currently loads 400+ RSS feeds each can be stored in memory rather that cache surely? Eitherway, 4gig is now as low as 40 pounds for the 667mhz type, I opted for the 533mhz version when i was in the states last. Hopefully the extra bandwidth will also help with speed, although I got to say the dual core 2 processors are fast enough for most things I do on it. Even High-def encoding isn't out of the question. I was thinking also if I did get a acer ainspire one I could stick the old memory from the dell into the ainspire to boost its standard 512meg of memory.
Someone was saying to me, I should also clean install Ubuntu on the machine because I've upgrade it since Ubuntu 7.04 and although ubuntu and linux generally is good at cleaning up after its self. I could make all the changes I want and get rid of legacy config files, etc.
So in total the upgrades will be less that 100 pounds and quite a bit of my time. Seems worth it to me.
I upgraded on my laptop with no problem using the network update. Since the upgrade I've noticed a couple of things. One the memory usage is much lower, things seem to be hovering around 1.2gig and I have Firefox 3.03 (28tabs), Evolution, Hamachi, Gossip, Specto, RSSOwl (400+ feeds), Gwibber, dropbox, rescuetime, etc all open and active.
Secondly 3g and phone support is much better. I plugged in the Nokia N80 today on the train and it picked it up and suggested using it as a 3g modem. The windows mobile phone is once again simply plug in and go. No settings needed. I've tried to do both over bluetooth but the Nokia ran out of battery (tipical) and Ubuntu for some reason does not see my Windows mobile phone.
Thridly things seem just faster and smoother. I'm using compiz-fusion and the community have added some nice effects which flow along smoothly using Open GL 2.0. But everything seems more responsive that before.
Its not only the upgrade which has made my laptop happy recently. I found a really good twitter client called Gwibber. It works with almost everything including Twitter, Jaiku, Indent.ca, Pownce, Digg, Flickr, etc. No Plurk, friendfeed or Ping.fm support however. But I was thinking if I look into it, I might be able to alter the flickr or digg option to support RSS feeds generally. Or alter one of the others to match the friendfeed api.
Glyn, sent me a email to finally solve my problem with there being no RSS screensaver. This Ubuntu forum has everything you need to get going, but basiclly you install xscreensaver then configure it for fliptext with the url option enable a rss feed. Its like the Tiger screensaver but with less style.
I've also just discovered Pidgin has tons of plugins including a Skype and Facebook one. The skype one only works if skype is also running and the facebook one does odd things to your contact list. For example if you have requests to be a friend it will throw up a alert for each one for you to accept or deny. This is painful when you Its a nice idea but very buggy in practice.
I picked up a cheap little USB charger while waiting in the Airport for the Virgin Coach to Milton Keynes (follow the twittes going forward). And I noticed it actually contains a sensor with a private API so you can monitor the recharging progress in a application. This is cool but the application only runs on Windows and Mac so no chance of a gnu/Linux version anytime soon then. But it got me thinking, how interesting would it be if the sensor did have a open API which you could query? I could tie that into a screenlet/widget instead of a crazy separate application. Anyway dreaming over, this device makes a good addition to the Moxia USB Cell batteries I already own. Only my work Nokia N80 is the only item I carry with me when traveling which doesn't charge off USB. Everything else is USB powered.
I have been considering getting a netbook or as I'm starting to call them cloud terminals for a while now. I've always wanted a replacement for reading ebooks on without dragging my quite heavy Dell XPS M1210 around with me everywhere. So at BarCampLondon5 either Tom Morris or Cristiano Betta suggested a session titled “bring your gadgets.” So you can just imagine the things pulled out for the session.
Sam from Orange showed off his Acer Aspire One. When I asked him about the price he said he had got his for 199 pounds from the PC World sale a while back. Now it seems Tesco have jumped in on the same game. It needs more more memory as the default had 512meg of memory to be honest, what more would you change? Oh thanks to James Cridland for the tip on the price point.
I like the Dell mini-9 too but its the wrong end of the price bracket for me. I found this compare chart very useful, but there's nothing like feeling the keys of the machine its self. I learned I could use the Acer keys quickly without a problem unlike the Asus eeePC models.
Oh is it payday already… And I actually do need to order food for the flat, question is if I order today will I get it before going to Berlin?
I found this by listening to Security Now number 164, it sounds very dramatic and most of you will be thinking yeah yeah whatever but…this seems like the real deal. Rather than try and explain it, here's a subset from the notes of Security now. I did look at a couple other places, but Steve Gibson has the best non-packet hacker description of what's really going on.
“SockStress” (not publicly released) reportedly uses several new techniques to create a low-bandwidth (as low as ten packets per second) local resource depletion attack resulting in denial of service
oS) by TCP servers (www, ftp, smtp, pop, etc.) running Windows, Linux, BSD, undisclosed routers, and other Internet appliances.
Although the researchers plan to demonstrate their techniques on October 17th, at the end of the second day of the forthcoming T2'08 conference in Helsinki, Finland, their 44 minute interview on September 30th, 2008 for the De Beveiligingsupdate site (see original and edited audio links below) provided far too much detail — enough so that any informed packetsmith who understands the TCP protocol would be able to easily recreate their attacks.
As a consequence, they effectively “went public” with their discovery of these vulnerabilities after informing other vendors only a few weeks beforehand
So generally the Finnish guys have found a way to mess with the TCP stack to the extend that you can cause a deinal of service on ANY server which uses TCP including web, ftp, etc. Using a very low amount of hardware and bandwidth. Not even IPv6 escapes this problem.
Well after months of not using any VPN options at all. I found the ideal Hamachi client for Linux and got Hamachi working on everything including my old download machine and even my phone! Yes you heard me right, I have the same powerful VPN technology on my Windows Mobile phone too. There's not much you can do right now but its working in 0.30 beta form. I found it because I was thinking they've had a Nokia 770 version for ages but why not Windows Mobile? I imagine Android won't be long behind the Symbian and Windows Mobile versions if things go well. Iphone version? Nahh I can't see Steve Jobs allowing that in the Apps store.
Some of you may say why do you need VPN for phones? Well at least with Hamachi, its a direct connection to my machines, so I'm able to for example see how a download is going at home (although to be fair I've also got a XMPP/Jabber bot which does this too). You can't do it yet, but imagine, being able to pull files back and forth over the network, sync and print to the remote printer. Actually these are possible if you've got some web front end on the remote machine right now. I can't even imagine the possibilities if you turn it the other way around and added some core phone API support. VPN into your phone and flip the goodbye forever switch if its stolen? Who knows…
Microsoft just killed the Mac vs PC adverts. You'll never be able to look at those Mac adverts in the same way again. However I still can't work out if the earlier jerry seinfeld & bill gates adverts were super clever or simply advertising suicide? Either Microsoft are playing a amazing poker game or playing crazy?
HTC create the most advanced mobile devices in the world I would say. And i'm not the only one who would say this either thankfully. They've made Windows Mobile actually attractive and affordable enough. So if you replaced Windows Mobile with almost anything else and you will get one hell of a Geek phone. So great, a phone which the geeks and developers always wanted, but what's going to be the unique selling point for non-geeks? This is the question I pose to the Google's Mike Jennings at Google Developer Day last week.
His answer “Software” was less that satisfactory. I mean you got two phones which look exactly like, they do the same stuff, are priced about the same only one has windows on it and the other google. As a non-geek user which one which you pick? Seriously, which one? Google are going about this all too geek like. Yes developers and geeks will buy the Gphones but unless they put a bundle of goodies on the phone which you can't get anywhere else, there going to lose out. I mean simply putting Google maps, Gmail and Google Search on the device isn't going to cut it. My Windows mobile currently has all that plus thanks to the OpenGL drivers written by the community (no thanks to HTC for that) equalivent OpenGL support. Maybe a few years back when Windows Mobile weren't so open you could make the point that the Gphone software arguement would hold up. But recently I've seen everything including the dialer, mail client and gui replaced if required. For example PointUI's Home. It replaces most of windows mobile user interface with a custom one. I did show Mike Jennings the interface and he was very suprised how customised my windows mobile phone was. So I expect most of the apps which get built on the Gphone will be build on Windows Mobile too and vice-versa.
So what is the unique selling point going to be? I'm starting to think Google are happy with it just being a project thats on going – just an alternative. Never really going to be number one, but then again won't cost much to keep going. A bit like Chrome?
This little feature, submits the current song to last.fm and uses its unique database to recommend which tunes to play next. Its simple, effective and I've not seen anything like it anywhere else till itunes 8 introduced the genius feature.
This took me by surprise, I was sending a email and mentioning a attachment from a previous email but Evolution decided to ask me the above question. I got to say it was well received although it was wrong.