I have the power

On my recent trip to South Africa, I wanted to be able to power my laptop from the plane's power jacks during my flights if possible. I'd heard that there was such a type of power supply, but I didn't know what it was, and I didn't end up trying to get the right supply until right before I left.

The most common power jack on aircraft is called an "Empower Plug". It's a special jack that supplies up to 75W of 15V DC electricity to your portable device. Here's a photo of one of mine:



A common accessory for laptops is to have a power supply that runs on a cigarette lighter plug, so that you car run it from a car power jack. However, the Asus Eee doesn't seem to have one, so the only way to power it from a DC vehicle source is to have an inverter that takes DC power and produces AC wall power, and then you power the Eee from the normal wall power supply. Although this adds a step, I guess this is the only way to power my laptop on an airplane. So I went shopping, at the stores that I had available to me.

Wal-mart did have an inverter:


I tested it out on my battery pack; it ceased to work immediately without ever successfully powering my laptop.

I also ran across one at the local auto-parts store:


This one worked fine, but it had a really noisy fan in it. I took out the fan (another blog post), and it still worked Ok from my battery pack. I took it along on my trip. It did NOT work on the flight from Philadelphia to Heathrow. I'm not sure why; maybe the connector was the wrong shape (it seemed like it never did fit right).

After leaving South Africa again, I bought another inverter in Heathrow:


which worked on the flight back to the US. Yay! Having bought it in Heathrow, of course, it puts out 240V AC and has a UK/EU power jack, rather than a US power jack:


(I think that this is the US power jack equivalent).

Fortunately, I also have a Yung-Li power adapter from the old South Africa plug standard to a US outlet


which then converts the inverter to one that effectively has a US outlet:



By the way, before heading to South Africa, I did manage to get the right plug adapters to power my laptop and such:




These are of the very excellent Taiwaneese "Yung Li" adapter series. The South Africa adapter is the YL-8015. It's tough to find a place that sells them; I finally bought mine at Signal and Power Delivery Systems. (It's tough to find in their catalog, but they have them, and they will sell in small quantities.)

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.

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.

on a desert island

I have a function computer system on the main floor of the house:


It's my wife's old laptop running Knoppix 5.1.1. The wireless is working, and so far pretty much all the applications I want to run work. One thing to note--running this OS on a machine with 256MB of RAM and no swap is a challenge. The browser has dropped out me a few times and the whole OS died once. As long as I'm not opening twelve different tabs or trying to do stuff with photos, it works fine. (Have I mentioned how many times Knoppix has saved my bacon? Lots of times--this is one more.)

Speaking of which--I knew there was no way at all that I was going to be able to edit photos using, say, GIMP. I'd like to give a shout out to snipshot, a web-based image editing program that doesn't require flash. It has basic image editing stuff, and it seems to do relatively sensible things. When you go back to the site, it pops up the last image you edited there so that you can continue editing.

I spent 10 minutes typing on a Asus Eee yesterday at the Best Buy in Knoxville. I'm not sure that I entirely like the keyboard. It took me a couple of days to get used to what is now my old laptop, the Sharp MM-20. It's about a 70% keyboard. The Eee keyboard is even smaller. The number keys are farther left compared to the top row of letter keys than standard. They have a standard inverted "T" arrow key configuration, which I'm all about, but they did it by putting the up arrow key where the left half of the right shift key usually is. This means that the right shift key is REALLY short, and it's farther away than it would be otherwise. And it's pretty small--maybe too small for me.

So I'm being patient and waiting for the explosion of ultra-portable laptops that are supposed to happen this month. I have desktops in my office and in the basement, but it's nice to be able to be connected and spend time on the main floor. So I'll be coping with the Inspiron 2500 for a while yet. Maybe I'll order some more RAM for it. Until I do, fewer photos in the blog.

on-ramp

I miss having my on-ramp to the internet. Pathetic, huh? When I go to places like the Oshkosh show, I'm entirely without internet for days at a time, and I have lots of other stuff to do. It helps that I ususally have books to read.

It's been kind of annoying this time, not having a laptop. I just keep having things that I should make a note of, or send someone an e-mail about, or whatever. I can quit any time. :-)

I'll probably try to get one before the end of June. The one I've been looking at most is the Asus Eee. Interestingly, when I looked it up a few days ago, it was sold out at Amazon. Just now, when I looked up this link, it seems to be back in stock. Which is interesting because I heard about this new Dell laptop today.

Decisions, decisions.

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.

new kid on the block

There's a new laptop on the block.

Apparently, the "MacBook Air" was just announced at MacWorld. It's only 3 pounds, no spinning optical drive. It doesn't have a built-in ethernet port, if you need that feature, you use a USB ethernet adapter.

I have to say that this goes to my top 3 next laptops just because I always loved both of my iBooks. The reason that I got a PC laptop the last time I bought a new laptop was because I was tired of not having browser plugins because I was running PowerPC Linux. There are many companies that distribute binaries of their software products, like Flash players and Adobe pdf reader for Intel Linux, but not any other processor brand. But now that Apples run Intel CPUs, that's no longer a problem.

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.

(very small) light at the end of the tunnel

I lamented recently that I couldn't find an ultra-portable laptop as a potential replacement for my current one, assuming that it won't probably last another year. Well, there there may be light at the end of the tunnel.

Lenovo, the company that now makes the IBM Thinkpad, has just announced a new series of laptops that will include a small, ultra-portable with the option of a flash-memory hard drive. (Lenovo release page, geek.com article)

They say that the U110 will be out in March. I look forward to getting a chance to try out the keyboard.

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.

the currency of the realm

On the road in Manchester, England. Yung Li plug adapter is earning its keep:






On the way here, I travelled through the Atlanta airport, which I'd always heard bad things about. I found it Ok, if rather spartan. Now that pretty much everyone travels with cell phones and laptops, power plugs are something that one looks for in airports. The Atlanta airport puts a whole bunch of counters with rows of plugs in the food area, which seems like an emminently sensible thing to do to me. They also have free wireless in that area.

The gate area only had a few power plugs, one of which I grabbed. You had the pay for the wireless there, but the view was nice:

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.