the circle is now complete

About a year ago, I started shopping around for a laptop to replace my Sharp MM20. This spring, the Sharp died on me, and I've been without a personal laptop for the intervening time. I borrowed a laptop from the pool at work for the last few months to go on travel, but it's just nice to have your own machine.

Friday, I bought an Asus Eee 1000HD. I tried out the 900 series, and the keyboard was too small to be comfortable, even for me. I bought the HD edition because franklly, I'd like to have the extra space and that's what the Best Buy had in the store.

The Ubuntu install took way longer than it should have; a good portion of yesterday afternoon and evening. I will write a very extensive post about that in the very near future. However, as of this morning, the new laptop is running Ubuntu:


and the wireless network is synched and working:


I'm typing this on it as we speak.

My impressions:
- The 1280x600 screen is slight cramped but not bad.
- The right shift key is annoying
- The mouse buttons are extremely stiff
- It's dead quiet
- It's fairly light; the Eee 1000HD is 3.3 pounds wheras the Sharp was 1.9. I think I will find it tolerable; however, I don't think I'd want anything heavier.
- The mouse is super-sensitive. I'll have to see if that's adjustable.

Overall, I'm liking it so far.

by the cut of his jib

I got to play with computer hardware. Whoo! Not professionally, just my own.

When I bought the HP machine that I play Flight Simulator on, I bought a nice new Geforce 6600 graphics card to go with it. For purely lazy reasons, I didn't install the graphics card. However, I decided that to go along with my updated real-world flight status, I want to be able to fly virtually without having the simulation bog down because it's trying to render too much detail.

So I finally bit the bullet and got the graphics card out:



In addition to increased 3-D graphics rendering capability, the card has outputs for two monitors and component video:


The other reason to do the upgrade is to have a computer hooked to the TV in the family room, to be able to watch things like Rifftrax.

To package for the card recommended at least a 350 watt power supply, and the machine came with just a 300, so when I bought the system and the card, I also bought a 430 watt power supply. So the first task was to install that.

The patient open for surgery:



The old power supply:


and the new


Interestingly, the higher power supply is rated for less output on 5V. However, it has a total rating of 32A of 12V, vs. 19A for the old one.

Here's the flight simulator rig for the moment. Not ideal placement of the monitor, but I'll give it a better layout when I have all the software stuff sorted out.



And here's Jasper contemplating the old power supply:

now available

The cheap laptop wars are heating up.

The new ASUS Eee is available from Amazon. The good version (with the bigger hard drive) is available with a Linux distribution.

Dell has joined the game. They now have a mini,super-light laptop. I definitely given them props for having a Linux distribution (Ubuntu even) but it's only available on the version with the small hard drive (4 GB).

I'm a bit cash-poor at the moment, so I'm not ready to buy just at the moment, but hopefully later this year I'll be back to having my own personal internal portal.

they should all be made like this

This post is going to sound like a country western song. Please bear with me.

My business trip to Scotland in April was very terrific, but it was long and took a lot out of me (our A/C failed while I was gone). Then I was home for a short while, then my wife went to her conference at the beginning of May. While she was gone I worked on the beetle in the garage, which was also cool, but I didn't get anything else done during that period.

She came back sick, and the following week, with every little break, we went to Missouri for a wedding and came back last weekend. This week has been not-very-productive because we had air conditioning/heat pumps being installed.

The status of things:
- we're mostly well
- the beetle is on its wheels, engine runs, rear break circuit works but leaks slightly, front circuit hasn't been filled yet
- We have A/C again, so I can go back to working in my office
- my laptop died last night. Fortunately, because it doesn't have an optical drive of any kind, but instead has a cradle that allows its hard drive to be mounted on a different computer, I am in the process of pulling a final backup

So...I need to go laptop shopping. Glad I spent time pre-shopping over the winter.

acoustic browser

One of my friends at UHACC pointed me to a neat Firefox plugin called UnPlug. It scans web pages for embedded video content and allows you to save the content files locally. Like if you wanted to download something from YouTube so that you could play it from your hard drive, this tool would do that.

One thing you have to remember is that it must be invoked explicitly. It doesn't change anything in your normal browsing. It must be invoked either from Firefox's "Tools" menu or from the little icon that appears:

didn't get back to the beetle

I didn't get back to working on the beetle today, but I did have a successful day.

upstairs: I cleaned the TV room of my stuff and vacuumed.
basement: I didn't really do anything there
garage: I put in a can crusher:


Which works quite well, I'm very pleased.

cyberspace:I didn't get very far, but I worked a littel on conditioning photos for the beetle starter repair page. Here's my setup for doing this:


The black thing on the right is an external hard drive to use for backups and store stuff like our master photo archive. On the left, the blue thing is a USB hub that I picked up for travelling. The laptop only has two USB ports, and that allows me to use more than two devices at a time.

no laptop left behind

Slashdot had an article yesterday about the One Laptop Per Child CEO (who has a PhD in optical engineering and designed the OLPC's screen herself) founding a new company to build a $75 laptop.

I think the OLPC project was originally called "the $100 laptop". The idea was to create a computer that's so cheap that you can use it to bring computing infrastructure to poor countries or even places without any computing infrastructure at all. (And yeah, it runs Linux). It's small, cheap, low-power. After flipping through some of the linked articles, and my recent search for a small, light laptop, I thought to wonder if I could get one for myself.

Well...OLPC is designed as a charitable organization and is optimized to accept donations and to supply laptops to governments who wish to have them in large batches...so they're not really equipped for single retail sales. However, there was a program set up called "give one get one", which meant that for $400, you donated one laptop to the cause and got one yourself. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately for my discressionary spending budget) that program ended at the end of 2007. And, no surprise, searching ebay for "olpc" gives 49 for sale. :-) There's a black market for anything.

In any case, I'm not sure that I really would want one, but it's an interesting point in the parameter space of very low power computing.

it's not the same

I installed gtypist on my laptop. It has typing drills and will tell you how fast you type.

According to gtypist, I type about 60 WPM on a normal keyboard, which is quite a bit faster than I expected; I would have guessed about 40. On the half-keyboard, I get about 16, with quite a few errors and corrections.

Happy New Year!

you know that new sound you're looking for?

I'm being unfaithful to my laptop. I recently looked for a battery for my Sharp Actius MM-20 laptop. I don't think that there that many produced, and so I think the accessories are quickly becoming hard to find. (I did find a battery for it today.)

Since the batteries I have are getting weak, and given its age, I need to start thinking about getting another laptop. I probably won't get another MM20, because even now half a gigabyte of RAM is kind of aenimic. But the question is, what to replace it with? I've gotten really spoiled with the MM20 which is under two pounds, so I'm looking for something that's very very light.

Years ago I was interested in a colleague's Sony Vaio Picturebook. The last version I knew about didn't have built-in wireless, which is too bad. It's even smaller than my current one. As it turns out, that version was the last one produced, and so there is no version that has built-in wireless, nor in fact a reasonable RAM capability. Aaaaargh. So what was the perfect laptop, but no way to get a contemporary version. So in the last couple of days, I have been doing a bit of pre-shopping to see what might be a suitable replacement when the times come.

I'm interested by the HP Pavilion Tablet. If I had to get a new laptop today, it would probably be this one.

The Panasonic W7 is very nice, but it's pretty expensive.

The ASUS Eee is a great idea, but its screen is 800x480. Back in the day, I decided not to get another clamshell iBook because its screen was only 800x600.

keyboard requesition

I'm trying out a new type of keyboard for Christmas. My wife got it for me (at my request). Don't worry, it's not because of an anatomical change, it's because I wanted to try it out, for two reasons. 1) It would be interesting to be able to work with one hand on the keyboard and the other on the mouse. 2) It might be a way to type in an airplane seat while keeping my elbows in.






I've typed this entire post with the new keyboard; it's not too bad. I'm probably about 1/10 as fast as with a normal keyboard, not counting having to correct all the time. It's an interesting challenge. Hey, maybe this is the next big revolution in computer interface, and I'm ahead of the curve!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everyone!

P.S. I'm happy to report that my laptop (which runs ubuntu) picked up and used the new keyboard without any problems:

Dec 26 14:30:53 traal kernel: [19784792.036000] usb 3-3.2: new low speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 31
Dec 26 14:30:54 traal kernel: [19784792.140000] usb 3-3.2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
Dec 26 14:30:54 traal kernel: [19784792.156000] input: Code Mercenaries Half Keyboard as /class/input/input18
Dec 26 14:30:54 traal kernel: [19784792.156000] input: USB HID v1.10 Keyboard [Code Mercenaries Half Keyboard] on usb-0000:00:0f.3-3.2

keys to the kingdom

I'm lazy in a lot of (most) ways. A lot of times I don't bother to set things up on my computers in a sensible fashion that ends up costing me time, but I never quite have the time to do the job right.

My phone, my Treo 650, is a very bad example of this. I've had the thing for a year, and I still haven't updated the firmware which I hope will fix a bunch of the problems I have with it. Ah, my naive optimism.

So finally, today, I'm getting my Ubuntu 6.10 laptop set up to sync to the Treo so that I can back things up, and install software, and so on. There are a few tricks involved.

The kernel that I currently have installed grabs the Treo out of the box. That's nice. When I plug usb sych cable into the laptop and hit the synch button, the Treo is mounted as /dev/ttyUSB0 and /dev/ttyUSB1.

I've always been a big fan of the JPilot software, which provides a syncing facility to some Palm-based PDAs. JPilot can connect to the Treo with no problem, you have to set the serial port to be /dev/ttyUSB1.

However, Palm devices apparently have a "username" and "user id", I suppose to prevent you from accidentally saving the information from one PDA onto another one. The Treo 650 apparently has a NULL username by default, which JPilot doesn't like. To install a non-NULL username and ID (the ID is just a random number), you must use the install-user command which is part of the pilot-link package. The command line goes like this:

craig@traal 16:13 ~ > install-user -p /dev/ttyUSB1 -u "craigtreo" -i 99521

Listening for incoming connection on /dev/ttyUSB1... connected!

Installed User Name: craigtreo
Installed User ID: 99521

craig@traal 16:14 ~ > install-user -p /dev/ttyUSB1 -l

Listening for incoming connection on /dev/ttyUSB1... connected!

Palm user: craigtreo
UserID: 99521

The second command reads the username that's currently on the device.

Apparently the proper way to have more than one Palm device sync to the same user account on your machine is to have a different directory for each one to save the JPilot status files. By default it uses .jpilot in your home directory, but the environmeht variable JPILOT_HOME overrides that. So now my .jpilot directory has the files to sync to the Treo and .jpilot_old has the files to synch to my old PDA.

I went ahead and installed my favorite application, an RPN calculator on the Treo. Now I'll have a good calculator application to carry with me again.

Now to go figure out how to update the firmware on the Treo.

all that and a bag of GSM?

I finally got back yesterday from the UK after 2 days of travel and for 8 days before that no Cell phone and crappy internet access.

I got a Cingular phone last summer because it was simpler. However, now maybe I wish I'd bought a GSM phone. Anyone have any experiences with taking a GSM phone to the UK/Europe and using it for internet access? Under Linux, preferably? If you have, please drop me a line with "GSM" in the subject.

Thanks.

that old time religion

At my hotel in Manchester, the only wireless available is bought separately from the room.

It's not quite what I'm used to, but it does Ok. I can't hold an ssh session open reliably from here to the states, but that has nothing to do with their company. There's enough latency on trans-Atlantic internet routes that there's probably not a lot to be done about it.

However, ebay totally fails to load here. I tried turning off loading images, same result. I tried a couple of different browsers, no dice. What I finally ended up doing is logging into a server I have in the US and then using elinks, a text-mode browser. This is what ebay will look like for me until I get back to the states:


I'm not sure how viewing photos works in elinks, so I don't know that I'd want to do any shopping that way, but it's quite adequate for checking on auctions that are under way. Sometimes, those old arrow-key and tabbing skills come in handy. :-)

a voice in the wilderness

During the discussion about Linux in the past couple of days at Wil Wheaton's blog, I posted with an offer to send anyone a set of install CDs if they want to try Linux out but for some reason don't want to burn the disks themselves.

I'm re-iterating that offer on a new page on my web site. The more the merrier!

Why use Linux again?

A couple of posts and some lively (but civilized) discussion about why people use Linux and how to get started over at Wil Wheaton's blog. Judging by the response, he may continue this series in his column over at Suicide Girls.

back up more often

After 7 months of living here, I finally have a computer set up in the basement to do basic utility things like burn DVDs and back up files:


The thing sitting on top of the tower case is my Sharp MM-20 laptop in its backup/configuration cradle:



When you turn the cradle on, the laptop's hard drive appears to the host computer like a USB storage device. It makes up for the fact that the MM-20 doesn't have an optical drive. During the process of pulling all the files off the laptop to be burned on disks, I was appalled to realized that I haven't really backed up in a year. That's really quite bad, I know better.

The machine I'm using to do the backups was one that I bought just before leaving Champaign, and so I'm running Knoppix on it. Knoppix is a Linux distribution that runs purely off of a CD. IN other words, you can run it on a machine without installing or altering the contents of the hard drives at all. There are things that I like to tweak about an installation and so it's unlikely that I'd ever go entirely to that for my desktop needs, but it comes loaded with almost all the software that you could think of to include, and so it's a really useful tool. When I've had an install fail for some reason, Knoppix enabled me to get back running without having to resort to going to a Windows machine and getting new install media set up. After pulling a year's worth of photos off my laptop hard drive, I burned them to DVD+R disks using their nifty graphical CD burner application:


So, the moral of the story today: back up often, and a Knoppix CD is a really great tool in a pinch...or any other time.

of COURSE it's an AND-gate

I thought about a game I've not thought about in ages yesterday, called Robot Odyssey. It was a game I had for my Tandy 1000 EX made by the Learning Company. It was a very involved puzzle game where the central theme was circuit logic. You had three (later four) robots (moving boxes) that you wired to do certain things in the game, like retrive objects or push buttons to open doors. I played the game through a couple of times in junior high and high school, and so learning a bunch of basic circuit logic stuff. To the point that when I got to electronics class my junior year at Gustavus, I already knew the basic symbols of circuit logic and the basics of how to use them.

Some links for Robot Odyssey, past and present:

• Wikipedia article
• a page on AOL that includes solutions and web maps
• Thomas Foote's page about creating a Java port of the game

I played this game...well, an apallingly long time ago, during my formative years. It was a lot of fun, and I learned stuff, but I don't think I can underestimate its effect on my personality. It, along with Starflight, were very important in training me to be able to take on long tasks and persevere to the end.

I recently started to get enough furniture in the basement that I can start to set up some of my vintage computers. When I've set up the Tandy, I will see about getting some screen shots of Robot Odyssey.

would you like some popcorn with that

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy movie opens everywhere in theaters today. As a life-long Douglas Adams fan, I'm definitely going, but at this point, I have mixed feelings. I want so very much to like it, but I'm afraid of getting my hopes up. I think the best thing is to is to go into it hoping to see a neat, quirky movie that might bear some resemblance to the original Hitchhiker's.

I posted a while back about things in aviation being finally modernized on the web. I'm very pleased about finding the movie tickets web site. By zip code, you can find movie theaters near you, and find out what movies are playing there. Neat.

The final nail in the coffin of my using non-Intel laptops may not be OS issues, or application software issues, it may be that some companies distribute binary-only, intel-Linux-only browser plugins. As web sites increasingly use such technologies to animate their pages and make them (which I think is dumb but that seems to be the way of things), it becomes increasingly difficult to browse new, cool sites using Firefox on PowerPC Linux. (I'm not complaining at these companies. I would do precisely the same thing in their position. I'm actually please that they are supporting Linux, given the current environment of OSs).

I'm 32 years old, and I'm getting crotchety already. Humph. :-) Need to get to work now.

we came, we saw...

Penguicon was a blast again this year. We saw the usual suspects. The network in the hotel wasn't as good as last years. A combination of that and ending up sort of volunteering for the con, I didn't get a chance to write any blog entries. I will be posting my photos sometime soon.

The Guest of Honor address Friday night was by Cory Doctorow, and was very good. Among other things, Cory has written a sci-fi novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom which he has provided for free download, and also published with Tor books. One of the formats is Palm OS .pdb file.
Interestingly, .pdb files (standing for Palm DataBase) aren't really database files, and the extension doesn't really tell you what's in it. The files also have an internal file format, which is part of the meta-data attached to the file. This being a text file, it's internally a ".doc" document. There is a freeware document reader for Palm OS called cspotrun. So now I have his novel and a reader on my Palm Zire, and I can read it on the bus and other places.

One interesting thing that I noticed. It's no problem to read the text on the screen. It's the first book that I've read that way, and it's not a problem. "Turning" the next page by pushing the down arrow button is just as easy as turning the page. However, I absolutely hate the scrolling mode. That makes the text scroll by, presumably at the pace that you'd be reading it. Which in principle I can do, but it drives me nuts. I guess the part of my brain that reads is very finely tuned to read and travel down the page at the same time, and just doesn't react well to the text travelling up the page while this is going on. If I ever have occasion to read a teleprompter, I'll have to sort that out.

I'm in the basement writing this to spend some time with Ripley. Sitting in the papasan chair with my laptop on one leg and the cat on the other works out pretty well.

Just got back from seeing Le Mis' this evening. It was very cool. Towards the end of the first act, when Jean Valjean is asking Javert to give him three days, and they're conflicting on identity, I couldn't help comparing it to Neo and Agent Smith conflicting on Neo's identity. Seeing this reminded me of evenings in college listening to that soundtrack with my friend Chrissy. I'm glad I've seen it live on stage after all this time.

my mind is my center

I fired up the front page of my blog to check something, and the thing tried to log a cookie. My own blog! There was a blogger-generated navigation bar at the top of my blog (probably a standard feature on blogger blogs). It's a neat idea; it allows you to search the blog's contents. However, it seems to have been setting cookies as well. I'm a fanatic about that kind of thing; needless tracking of my activity makes me cross. Grr...

So the navigation/search bar has been taken down; no more cookies. Sometime I'll figure out how to have a search function without it.

I got Xinerama set up again on my machine at work. It's so nice. Now I just need to get the window manager to allow me to move windows from screen to screen.

"My mind is my center and everything that happens there is my responsibility. Other people may believe what it pleases them to believe, but I will do nothing without I know the reason why and know it clearly."
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
by Douglas Adams

Houston, we have a problem

I spent the latter part of the evening burning DVD-Rs and listening to Ron Howard's commentary track on the Apollo 13 Special edition.

Early in the ascent to Earth orbit, one of the engines in the first stage of the Saturn 5 rocket shut down unexpectedly. The guidance experts on the ground said that the mission could continue, as long as the other four engines continued running. Jim Lovell (commander, played in the movie by Tom Hanks) says "Well that was the glitch for this mission".

I had assumed that line was added as dramatic irony. As it turns out, that was directly from a transcript of the flight tapes.

[I should probably admit here and now that in addition to spending way too much time thinking about airplanes, I'm a little bit of a space nut, particularly about the Apollo program. Be sure to watch this space for a long rambling post about the AGC, the guidance and control computer used in the Apollo spacecraft.]