Saturday 30 August 2008

The smell of FIRE

Today turned out to be rather a nice day, so I celebrated by lugging a load of old crap outside and burning it. Great fun. After that let the dog out for a run around in the sun. Smell of smoke now so need a shower.

Found a baby ash tree outside which is about four feet tall. It seems healthy but is in a bit of an inconvenient place so might look into relocating it somewhere more suitable.

Typing this on the Eee with Ubuntu. While it ran XP nicely enough, Ubuntu seems a better fit for it. I installed the specally adapted version of Ubuntu 8.04 which has all the right drivers and things.

My Dad has picked up one of the new Acer Aspire One Eee-like laptops. It looks like it has a better keyboard than the Eee to be honest and the design seems a bit nicer. Also it has the Atom processor as do most of the newer Netbooks. It'll be interesting to check that out the next time I'm over there. I have to admit that while I love my Eee to bits, I think I may have purchased a month or so too early, given that all these newer models are out.

I just tried the Linux version of Defcon on the Eee. It started up with about one frame a second, but once the smooth lines and shaded oceans were turned off, it ran pretty well.

The success of the Eee has got to be one of the most unexpected events in computing history. Who would have thought a tiny laptop with a 7" screen, minuscule storage and Linux would have such an impact? Small laptops were around before (like the Toshiba Libretto) but it took the Eee to make them mainstream. Everyone is making them now, even Dell. I'd be surprised if Apple wasn't working on one too.

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