Canllaith.org

The very day the EeePC 701 was available in stores in New Zealand, swept up in the internet hype, I bought one.

The hype was well deserved. The original Eee has been credited with turning the notebook market on it’s head. While the concept of the netbook has been tried before, this time, we were ready for it.

I had a lot of fun putting my EeePC through its paces for Linux Journal. I regularly tested its limitations, carrying it around for internet access and writing while out at cafes and travelling. It’s spent quite a few hours perched on racks in server rooms displaying build documentation or providing me internet access over HSDPA modem. I loved my EeePC, but I did find myself wishing Asus would market a premium model. I was willing to pay a little more to get a little more.

When the EeePC 900 was announced it felt like they were reading my mind.

The Linux version of the Eee900 has a 9” screen at 1024×600, a 1.3MP webcam and 1GB of memory as standard. It has two flash disks, one 4GB and a second 16GB. The second SSD is noticeably slower than the first, making it unsuitable for OS install but at least providing a lot more storage for your data. The touchpad has been tweaked, adding multitouch support and a larger surface area. The notebook itself is also slightly larger, the thickness and width remaining the same but the depth being increased by an inch or so.

Of course, the price tag has gone up, from $600 NZD for the 701 to $750 NZD for the 900. While some couldn’t justify the increased cost, to me it’s well worth it for a computer I can use more seriously. The display is certainly not overgenerous but has at least improved from downright frustrating to reasonable for many tasks. The aesthetics of the notebook are also vastly improved without the large black speakers either side of the panel.

It’s not all roses, however. The battery life is still a miserly 2 – 3 hours, and I find both models of Eee to get uncomfortably warm. I’m also less than pleased at Asus choosing to use a much slower SSD for the larger disk. The announced Eee901 should remedy all of the remaining issues stopping the Eee from being quite the most perfect computer I could envision, with 5 hours battery life, an Intel Atom CPU and the addition of bluetooth.

I’m very excited about where Asus is going with the EeePC line. I see the Eee900 and 901 not as competing for your upgrade dollars against the 701, but threatening $4000 ultraportables from the like of Sony and Fujitsu. They’re cute, they’re fun, they’re portable and the featureset is creeping closer and closer. All for a quarter of the price.

I’m unashamed about being on the netbook bandwagon. The 900 is the first thing I pick up in the morning and the last thing I put down at night. The EeePC has cemented itself a solid place in my heart by being easy to learn, work, and play – and even easier to love.

I decided to spice up my EeePC with a pretty decal:

It was very easy to apply and looks great. My Eee already draws a lot of comments when I take it out and about, I imagine I’ll attract more people interested in this itty bitty computer.

The decal is from GroovyLids

I have the most ridiculous hat in the world.

That is all.

I struggled to get through Bill Bryson’s journal of his travels through Australia, so his general primer on science - ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’ - sat unread for my bookshelf for the better part of a year. I recently acquired the illustrated edition and used that as my impetus to start reading. In a word?

Wow.

While at some junctures Bryson generalises to the point of inaccuracy, A Short History of Nearly Everything is a commendable effort to answering the question “How did we get here?” while giving the reader a whirlwind tour through classical and modern science along the way.

Bryson’s whimsical and leisurely style is well suited to the contact, and his ability to so clearly and simply express complex ideas makes this work accessible to those who studied no further than high-school science. It’s fascinating to read at the outset that the book came out of Bryson’s dissatisfaction with his ignorance of natural sciences. It’s a testament to his extraordinary skills at researching and presenting materials that this work is so comprehensive and so well laid out.

The book traces the history of science by the stories of the scientists who furthered it, with engaging tid-bits about them as people that provide levity without allowing the narrative to flounder in an excess of trivial detail. A picture emerges of the women and men who’s names I’d seen only in passing in textbooks as interesting, complicated, and above all human, beings.

The gentle pacing of this work belies the amount of ground it covers and I finished it feeling I’d learned at least as much as I’d been entertained. This is not a book for science buffs, but those of us with an interest in the world around us who haven’t studied much science will find a gentle but rich experience here.

I wish my early high-school general science had presented material a little more like this. Seeing those who so indelibly marked themselves on the history of science as flawed and human might have made me a little more likely to see it as a possible career for myself. As it was, it was an interesting experience having my childish faith in Einstein, Newton, and Curie being infallible slowly fade away to an understanding of great people being still people too.

Sometimes I wonder - if I spent the time I usually spend browsing http://www.43folders.com/ and http://www.lifehack.org/ getting work done, would I have less need for productivity tips? ;)

Oh yes, and if anyone would like the rss feed of the tech-only posts that doesn’t include music, cats, or photography, the feed they should be using is

http://canllaith.org/?feed=rss2&cat=2

planetkde and linuxchix.org.nz already have the right feeds =)

I read a pretty neat article today from http://www.43folders.com/2004/11/18/hack-your-way-out-of-writers-block about how to get past writer’s block. A lot of the comments to the article are really excellent as well.

One of the tips in particular that really resonated with me was:

“Write crap - Accept that your first draft will suck, and just go with it. Finish something.”

That’s something I’ve struggled with for a long time, and for me at least it really is the key to being a productive writer. It’s far too easy to fall into the trap of wanting what I have to say to be absolutely perfectly formed in my head before I commit it to paper. I end up staring into space endlessly polishing sentences and lining up paragraphs, marching in lines all in my head, before I’ve even touched pen to paper.

It’s a productivity killer because the longer I polish something that doesn’t exist yet, the longer it’s going to take me to actually get started. When I started actually meeting deadlines at least most of the time was when I learned to do what I called ‘Just write’. I would go away from my computer and away from the internet with a pen and some paper and just go and get any old thing down. I could check my facts later, research content I wasn’t sure of when I got back to my laptop. The most important thing was to separate writing from researching, and just write some crap down.

I found it was a lot easier to get into a zone where I just wrote and it flowed if I used pen and paper and got away from the computer. In the interests of not having a million notebooks around the house and never being sure which one has which article in it I’m after, I’m trying very hard to digitise this process. To save me from myself I’m in the process of doing up an apple e-mate. No network connectivity, long battery life, sunlight readable screen and an absolutely fabulous keyboard. I’m hoping it will help me learn how to spark that creative process sitting at a keyboard, while still providing me with the distraction free environment that paper does.

These are by far the two most effective tools in my arsenal against writer’s block. Just write some crap, and turn off the darn internet.

Now ironically, I should stop procrastinating from working through the writer’s block on my latest assignment and go and just write some crap.

I finally decided to mod my macbook, and ordered a bit of pre-made cellophane from icolors.ca to replace the white apple logo on the back of the screen with a retro style apple logo.

(Yeah, I’m a filthy mac user at times.)

It was surprisingly easy to get into the mac - there’s two screws deep in the hinge that are awkward to get at, and then the back just pops off with the help of a credit card or similar thin tool. The clips holding the back of the screen on very easily disengage without any fear of breaking them. Well, not much anyway.

Once the back is off, it’s just a matter of carefully removing the white plastic that’s already covering the logo, cutting the cellophane to size and then fitting it to a recess the white plastic is covering. The white plastic can be carefully pressed back down again afterwards, with enough residual adhesive left to keep it there. At least, I hope so.

I love the end result, it was definitely worth spending 20 minutes fighting with the hinge screws. Now I’m keen to find ways to mod my non-apple laptop.

I haven’t been a geek for long.

I discovered computers pretty late in life, spending most of my teenage years studying music. I came to a realisation in my late teens that it would require a lot more hard work than I was willing to put in to lift myself above mediocre, and with a teenager’s arrogance I decided if it didn’t come easily I wasn’t going to waste my time on it.

It’s been a long time since I really played more than once every few months, although I still sing incessantly. After selling my digital piano close to two years ago when I was strapped for cash, I haven’t had regular access to an instrument and stopped playing anything entirely. Recently I’d been thinking about taking up music again. In a small apartment I don’t really have room for a decent digital piano - I have a borrowed keyboard that I use occasionally but it’s difficult to find room to set it up and annoying to have to put it away again every time I use it.

My second strongest instrument was flute, and much to my neighbour’s dismay I ordered one from trademe and it arrived two days ago. It was extraordinarily cheap and I’ve been really impressed with it. It’s a very light metal and I suspect it wouldn’t stand up to the knocks my old Yamaha solid silver flute did, but I’m more careful with my toys these days. I love the bright red enamel finish and for 1/5th the price of even a student flute from a store, how can I go wrong? Sadly the same seller doesn’t have any piccolos, but there are some similarly cheap from other sellers I might try.

I remember more than I thought I would, given I haven’t played flute in close to 10 years. I keep having to consult a fingering chart, and for the life of me I can’t remember how to get strong low notes, but I’m having a lot of fun. I keep forgetting I’m not playing a clarinet or a recorder but I’ll get there eventually. Strangely I remember having trouble with very high notes when I played regularly - now they don’t seem to be an issue.

While looking around for sheet music for Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos (one movement in particular has a beautifully haunting flute part I’d like to learn) I discovered virtualsheetmusic.com. They have annoying DRM stopping you from copying and pasting any part of the PDF, but printing is allowed and their year’s membership with unlimited downloads is very reasonably priced. Not only did they have the complete concertos I was after, but a lot of other music of varying skill levels I’m keen to try.

10 years ago I don’t remember anything all that exciting on the internet for musicians - wow has that changed!

Monday I woke up when the sunlight and birdsong flooded through the window of my room at dawn. The campus grounds are simply beautiful, with green lawns, tall trees and lovely old buildings. The weather has been stunning, hot clear skies and a light cool breeze.

I fronted up to the registration desk on Monday morning to get my name tag and loot bag, and was amused to be asked whether I was here for the partners programme. Because obviously women at conferences are someone’s wife or girlfriend, naturally!

The loot bag is really quite nice this year - a nice large light-weight bag with a laptop sleeve and a lot of pockets, and some nice things inside:

I then ventured into the city in search of some ethernet cables and had some unintentional transport adventures. It turns out if you don’t have any coins, you can’t get a ticket on the tram. It also turns out that one gets on and off trams in the middle of the street, dodging cars to do so.

I finally tracked down Aaron who’d been MIA for 24 hours. We all went trooping off into the city in search of something vegetarian to eat and a store that sold alcohol. One thing I’ve noticed about Melbourne is that really great food and wine is really cheap here, and there’s a really large selection of great places to eat.

I hadn’t attended any talks on Monday - the miniconfs on the first day didn’t seem as interesting to me as those on the other days so I decided if I was going to go sightseeing and check out the city, Monday was the day to do it. So far LCA is a heck of a lot of fun, and seems to involve a lot of red wine.