Living with eee: tips and tricks
I have used my eee PC for a few months already, and here are a few tips I gathered along the way.
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Remove Xandros, get *Ubuntu on it
Yes, it boots a bit slower, but everything still works (I admit, with some manual tweaks), and you will use less disk space, and be generally happier.
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If you use KDE, check the advanced window menu.
Did you know that any app can be fullscreen? Yes it can. However, I prefer the "No Border" option. Yes, your windows will have no borders,buuuuut:
You are probably not going to use windows side by side on a 800x480 screen, are you?
You can still move and resize windows: Alt+LMB and Alt+RMB are your friends.
Yes you can play games on the eee: get psx, the psx emulator. I had a bunch of CDs for my long-dead PS1. Need for Speed looks pretty good, and Tekken 3 is a lot of fun :-D
There's enough streaming music to avoid carrying your MP3 around. Last.FM and all the shoutcast radios on Amarok do the trick for me.
Get SD cards.
The black model seems to be pretty scratch resistant.
Yes, you can throw it on the sofa when you arrive at home. No, nothing will break (at least nothing broke on mine). SSDs are nice.
A 1yo boy with clean hands can slap at the keyboard for a minute or two and it may live.
JEC: Just Enough Computer
Since I am the guy that "works with computers" everyone asks me the same things over and over. So here's at least one answer.
Question: What computer should I buy?
Answer:
If you never need a computer outside your home/office, a eee PC will suck for you, but maybe a Shuttle KPC will do the trick.
But suppose you are a "Office+Web+Mail+IM+Youtube" guy, as are about 90% of teenage girls and maybe 95% of the over-50.
Then the KPC will work wonderfully for you, if you don't need to travel with it.
And the eee could work great for you if you travel a lot, or prefer your internet access on a cafe [1], although you could be happier with a light-ish, ordinary 13" or 14" notebook with a large disk (you know the size of your data, right?)
Do you use it for work on the road, only? Then the eee is awesome. I dare anyone to need over 3GB of data for work, outside of some specific data-intensive niches.
Do you see a pattern here? I never tell you to buy a 4-core 4GB RAM box. You do not need it.
If you needed it, you would not haveto ask, you would know you need it.
If you are a gamer, you need a gaming rig. But you knew that, so you were not asking me.
If you edit video, you need what you need. But you knew that too.
If you build KDE from sources daily, well, you know you need more than one computer anyway ;-)
A Celeron 900 (what's on the eee, probably the slowest non-VIA CPU sold today) is enough to play any video, except full-HD (which makes no sense, since it has higher resolution than your screen anyway ;-).
A 240GB disk can hold everything you own. Everything you may need on the road probably fits on 8GB, or 40GB if you want a huge music collection.
So, your data can fit in one external disk (buy 2, do backups) , and what you use often will fit on any notebook you buy, even a eee PC, modulo a few SD cards.
So, if it's not about the CPU, it's not about storage, it's not about the video board, why would you need a very fast computer?
Buy cheap. Buy last year's model. Are you willing to spend some extra money? Then spend it onnicer peripherals for your desktop computer, or spend it on a quiet computer, orspend it on a little RAM, but do NOT spend it on CPU.
Here's my current hardware:
Main traveling notebook: Asus eee PC 4G. Can't be happier about it.
Main desktop computer: A HP Pavillion zd7000. Got it for nothing, used.
Rosario's desktop computer: a Intel box with no fans, a 600Mhz P3, got it as surplus from a client for free.
Also: a couple of monitors, a bunch of external IDE disks (with el-cheapo USB-IDE adapters) for backups.
Total cost: probably U$S 500. You will probably pay U$S 800 for it, since you probably have less people willing to dump their old computers on you ;-)
If I were to buy all new today, I would probably get two KPC's along with a 9" eee.
Expected responses:
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I need a faster computer
Then buy one ;-)
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The eee/P3/KPC would be too slow!
For what? Tell me something specific, I'll try it on my eee andlet you know how it goes.
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You manage with that hardware because you are a low-end user.
Maybe I am! But maybe you are, too. Let me know why you are high end.
Wine kinda works nowadays
I had stopped trying to run stuff in WINE a few years ago,because pretty much nothing worked.
You know what? They areright about approaching 1.0, I had to try a few windowsy things lately, and each one has worked just fine.
Kudos wine people!
PS: can you make the widgets look less ugly, though? I heard rumours of a theming engine, but have no clue as to where one would look. Even something like GTK's clearlooks would be bearable.
My first impressions of Google App Engine
Since I got my invitation and am tired of Haloscan not being reachable from home (not their fault, probably), I decided that my first project would be a comment hosting app.
In other words, something a bit HaloScan-like.
Since I have very limited resources, it will probably not be useful for many people, but I am learning about App Engine, and at the same time probably making my blog a wee bit more comfortable.
Some random thoughts:
Can I put Google ads in app engine apps?
Does anyone else need this kind of app? I intend to make it open, so anyone can register its blog in it and use it. 500MB (the max DB size) are a lot of comments. Like a million of them.
I intend to use Yahoo's YUI RTE for editing. So my app will be hosted in Yahoo and Google. Cool :-D
It's basically just Django. Sure, no UNIQUE, no CRUD (ok, there is Google's, which is kinda lame... hire one of the Django guys and mke him work on it ;-), but it's the same thing, give or take a few bytes, specially using djangoforms.
webapp is... ok, it's rather ugly. Routing the requests is annoying, you can't do things like passing parts of the URL as parameters...
The User/DataStore APIs are ok, they feel a bit limited but they have a lot of scope in other ways (as in, there are a few million registered users and many TB of data stored ;-)
All things considered, a nice thing to use, specially at the cost.