Showing posts with label tech. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tech. Show all posts

Rebuilding my Asus eeePC

Wednesday, September 23, 2009 4:36 pm By BigLig , In ,

My tiny blue Asus eeePc has been sadly neglected lately, but I recently decided to start making better use of it, because my 17" Macbook Pro is rather bulky to keep carrying from the kitchen table, to my office, to bed.

However, the copy of Ubuntu NBR I'd installed before was a bit out of date, and using a bit too much disk space to update itself, and having a networking issue that my Linux skills aren't up to solving, so I thought I'd switch to XP.
First, I replaced the 512Mb memory with 1Gb, so as to be sure the machine wouldn't be sluggish.
Next, I copied a Windows XP CD to my Windows 7 laptop, and ran nLite over it. This impressive software takes the XP install media and alters it in many ways. In this case, I was stripping everything I don't need out. There's only a 4Gb SSD in the eeePC, so no room to leave the Hungarian keyboard settings file around "just in case".
nLite did an impressive job - even after adding in all the Asus drivers (another cool feature of nLite), the resulting XP installer was about half the regular size. I burnt this to a CD-R, popped it into a USB CD-ROM drive, went into the eeePC BIOS and told it to install an OS, and boot from the CD) and started it going.
After a couple of false starts (which turned out to be a bad USB CD-ROM drive!!) I was able to install XP. Very plain looking (I have all the eye candy either removed or turned off) but perfectly functional, fast, and with plenty of space left on the SSD hard drive for some software. The main use of this device will be Web Browsing, and I decided to install Chrome on it. Google are eyeing up the Netbook market for Chrome OS, so the Chrome browser is heavily optimised for these devices, and indeed it runs a treat. Very fast, and the maximised and full screen settings make good use of the tiny 800x480 screen on the EEEPC.
What else? Rocketdock and Launchy put a little bit of eye candy back, mostly to make it easier to launch applications with the Start menu hidden to save space. As usual, Evernote, Spotify, and DropBox clients give me access to (and local copies of) my data from the cloud. Picassa so I can upload photos when travelling using the built-in card reader.
A new thing I'm trying is a copy of AbiWord in case I want to write some blog posts etc. while offline. My local Starbucks doesn't have WiFi, darn it. I don't need a full office suite, and I remember I liked AbiWord back in the early days of dabbling in Linux, so I thought I'd give it a go. I might put VPN software and Office communicator on so I can make work calls from it in an emergency. And I suppose a couple of games might end up on there too.
On the whole, I'm pretty pleased so far with how this rebuild has turned out. Now to stress test it and see how useful I find it.

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Moving to Snow Leopard Part 1 - Backup

Friday, September 18, 2009 1:27 pm By BigLig , In , , ,

So, I got my shiny new Snow Leopard DVD last weekend, and now it's time to upgrade.
First Cardinal Virtue of the sysadmin being Paranoia, I begin with some backups.

Backup #1
I already have Time Machine backing me up to one half of my 512Gb External USB hard disk, so I make sure that is up to date.
Backup #2
I use the essential Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my Mac's Hard drive to the other half of my 512Gb USB disk. This has the advantage of being bootable, so in the event of any trouble I can just boot my Mac with the apple key held down and I'm back to Leopard with everything in place.
Backup #3
I use Carbon Copy Cloner to make a second clone of my Mac to a Disk Image saved on my other external USB hard disk, the mostly empty 1Tb I'm planning to use to store Media backups on.
Backup #4
I copy my User folder to the 1Tb disk as well. Since I plan to build a new clean Snow Leopard install, rather than upgrade in place, this will be where I go and get my data from to copy it back.
Backup #5
More a theoretical backup than an actual action, but all my really critical data (apart from media) has copies in the cloud, via Google, Evernote, and DropBox.

I'm pausing now to think if there's any way I can make a sixth backup. What can I say - I'm very virtuous.

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My history with pocket computers

Sunday, August 30, 2009 5:58 pm By BigLig , In ,

I thought it might be an opportune moment, as my latest toy gets it’s first charge, to recount my history with that strange, now forgotten, genre of electronic device, the PDA.


The first PDA I spent any time with was a borrowed Palm III. A work colleague had one - having just came to us from 3COM, who owned Palm at the time - so I borrowed it for a week to see if I liked it. Alas for my wallet, I loved it, and pretty soon I had bought my own.


That must have been about 20 years ago... Strangely enough, it wasn't my first mobile device. While I was still at school, my incredibly cool parents had bough me a Casio fx-702p. It had 2K of RAM, a single line display, and ran BASIC programs. I've still got it in a drawer somewhere.


Over time I rapidly progressed thru a series of devices. The Psion 5mx was an astounding machine, still the best keyboard in a mobile device, but just too darn big - I needed something that would fit in a shirt pocket.


The best was probably the Palm m500, my last monochrome device until, not long ago, I bought a Sony eBook reader. When I read my first book on the Sony, I suddenly realized why I had stopped reading eBooks at the same time as I stopped using the m500 - color screens were never as pleasant on the eyes as they were with a non-backlit mono screen. Tempted as Amazon no doubt are to make a color Kindle, they should bear this fact in mind.


It was the Sony Ericsson P900 that made me realize the PDA was doomed to be replaced by the smartphone. The P900 had enormous flaws, but I could take (awful!) photos, and post them to flickr (slowly and expensively!) all with a single device. And it made phone calls too.


My last true PDA was a Dell Axim X50. Like every Windows Mobile, it made me nostalgic for the days when Windows Mobiles had crappy hardware, because now they have great hardware, you realize how truly crappy the software is.


And then it was an endless series of Blackberries for mobile data, and an endless series of iPods for media playback. As soon as the iPhone came out, I knew I would end up with one. My brief time with the P900 had made me realize that carrying two devices about was only worth doing if you couldn’t get one device that did everything you needed.


Following Stephen Fry’s advice (as all geeks should), I exerted all my will power and waited until the third iteration, and in a couple of hours it will be charged enough for me to turn it on for the first time.


Someone tried to make a Palm III emulator for iPhone a while back, but it never came to anything. It ran at 450% of normal speed, you see, so it wasn’t the same.

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Back to the grind

Wednesday, November 26, 2008 9:38 am By BigLig , In ,

Back at work, and pretty swamped. Not even really had time to get some photos uploaded yet. (but don't get me started on the latest woes regarding my broken camera)
Still, one bit of good news: while I still can't get TubeTV fixed (I used it use all the time to get YouTube videos onto my iPod but for a month now it has refused to convert the downloaded FLV files) the new version of Handbrake will convert those FLVs to M4V effortlessly. It's a kludge, but it works.

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