mdlbear | Entries tagged with eee

One of Colleen's little pleasures in life is Nethack. She never bothered to learn the cursor-movement keys, though, which are based on vi. She's always used the arrows. They work on the PC version, and they've always worked for her on the Linux version, too. So it was a little surprising that they didn't work on her EeePC.

Odd that there didn't seem to be a config-file option to enable them.

I finally looked at the example config file for nethack-x11. All the way through it. And found a familiar-looking key-translation table. Oh.

As it turns out, I had encountered this problem a dozen years ago, and fixed it by putting exactly that four-line key-translation table into the household's shared Xdefaults file. And forgotten that I'd done it.

Dumb bear. Was a smart bear, once upon the time.

Stayed home from work yesterday because we had our annual termite inspection scheduled for sometime in the 11am-1pm, and because it seemed as though there was some serious ~~puttering~~ catching up to do. Good call -- it turned out to be a pretty productive day.

Spent much of the day working on uploading the Tres Gique Concert from Baycon. This was a lot more work than I expected; since the last time I did it, I've made major changes in both the organization of the various websites, and the way uploading is done. (I'll get into that sometime upwhen.)

Squeezed in a trip to Fry's with selkit to investigate trading in the Fujitsu laptop that he bought back in March, and which has been giving him considerable trouble. That will work; we'll go in again today sometime with laptop and paperwork in hand.

Took a walk (Rose Garden) between the Fry's trip and dinner; cool and pleasant.

There were two background tasks: ripping CDs and uploading. At some point this week, the flower_cat decided that we really needed to not only get the entire CD collection ripped to disk, but correctly organized; she's started listening to the entire collection, starting with the A's, and handing them off to me for ripping. I got a package of little sticky dots a couple of weeks ago and have been putting them on the jewelcase spine to mark the ones that have been ripped. We're somewhere in the middle of Joan Baez (filed under B) now, plus a bunch ripped from before. (Last week she listened through, and I ripped, all of the piles of unsorted CDs in the living room.) There are 281 CDs ripped at this point.

The other background task is uploading. I believe I mentioned that I have less upstream bandwidth than a carrier pigeon, but I have rsync and nobody needs much bandwidth late at night.

I also finally got the KDE desktop installed on Colleen's EeePC. She'd been finding the dumbed-down desktop extremely limiting. I did the one I was borrowing from work first; using the manual method in the instructions on the wiki. Then I discovered that Asus has taken KDE out of the repository for the 900! !@#$% Idiots!!!@#$ But I found a review article that said that the "easy way" (installing via a Debian package from an alternate repository) worked, and indeed it did. Still have to get mail working for her, which will involve making sure IMAP works on the server and that she has spamassassin properly set up.

Also spent some time just talking and snuggling with Colleen. Somehow sitting in separate chairs with separate laptops didn't seem sufficient, and we discovered last night that a drive wasn't really sufficient either. The living-room couch, which I made years ago, isn't really comfortable and in any case is covered with stuff, so we ended up on our bed, fully-clothed but with the door closed. (Not that the closed door stopped the Younger Daughter from coming in for hugs.) Have to do that more often. (Content also upwhen, under the River filter.)

Sometime in the evening I also pulled out one of the 400GB SATA drives, stuck it in a USB enclosure, and started formatting it with low-level checking. It's about half done now. The plan is to use it for data transfer between home and work, where I have a lot more upload bandwidth.

Mood: productive

Since I've been at home all day, it seemed reasonable to do a little puttering. So far, I've:

Handed Colleen her new EeePC. It does everything she wants except play live365, the screen is significantly larger, and it has a multi-touch trackpad. Win. Happy (slightly belated) Mother's Day, Love!
Reconfigured the old EeePC (borrowed from work) with something resembling my own browser bookmarks and preferences. Verified that Pidgin works, though the keyboard is way too small for comfortable IMing.
Brought the other Fry's Windows box (Seymore) down from the attic, got it running, (the RAM had been cannibalized) and upgraded it from DeMuDi to Etch. Still don't know what was wrong -- even Windows seems to be working. This makes the third (and last) box I've upgraded this way; it's a little tricky but manageable.

(Of course, now that the Wolfling is "borrowing" the monitor that used to be in the office, I don't really have any place to put either of the two Fry's boxen.)

Still have a noticable fever -- Colleen was right to keep me home. Took a nap instead of a walk; slept at most a couple of minutes, but even lying down and being quiet for half an hour was a big help.

OK, I haven't been very productive, but at least the day hasn't been a total bust.

Mood: productive

$mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)$

Been fighting all day with the new EeePC 900 trying to make the bloody thing play streams from live365, which is the only thing Colleen listens to. No joy. Mplayer and the corresponding Firefox plugin play MP3's just fine; neither smplayer nor amarok will play live365. They work fine on the older one she's been using. Suggestions? (Ubuntu will be considered.)

Made the call to my aunt; she sounded resigned, tired, sad. Not surprising. Making the call was incredibly difficult. Not surprising; I don't like making calls even when they're happy ones.

I'm feeling tired and ill. Dinner didn't help much. Have a headache. Brain feels like it's made of mush. Will take my drugs and get some hugs. They won't help much, but any improvement will be welcome.

It was a pretty good day at work, but that didn't help much either.

Damned time machine. Rewind button is stuck.

Mood: defeated

$mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)$

Liliputing: Comprehensive list of low-cost ultraportables

Over the past six months or so, Asus, Everex, and HP have managed to bring low-cost ultraportable notebooks to market. But dozens of other computer makers have promised to bring out their own mini-notebooks. Some will run Linux, while others will be preloaded with Windows XP or Vista. Some will have flash memory, while others will have hard drives. But every one will be smaller, lighter, and cheaper than most existing laptop computers. Here's a roundup of some of the computers that have been announced or are already available.

(From engadget.)

Got email from OLPC this morning saying my XO won't be here for Christmas -- which I'd already suspected. Supposed to be arriving by Jan. 15, but we'll see.

Meanwhile, here are a couple of comparison articles: XO vs. Kindle on O'Reilly, and XO vs. Eee on sdorn.

Of course, what I really want is the XO's hardware in the Eee's case, with an IBM laptop keyboard. Hmm - I can buy one of those...

(Update 9:51: ordered. Lenovo's web shop sucks.)

Mood: disappointed

No, but maybe on the laptop! according to this article in Engadget,

Arriving late and at twice its original touted price of $199, the Asus Eee has succeeded in the muscle-driven PC market with modest screen size, processor, RAM and storage specifications and solid (but not outstanding) battery life. Its name and design philosophy take unabashed cues from Nintendo's Wii. And like its inspiration, it's been a budget-conscious blockbuster.

Reuters reports that Asus is now shipping 20,000 of the 2 lb. mobile computing quasi-appliances every month. The Tawianese manufacturer has been so encouraged that it has raised its global forecast to five million Eees by the end of 2008 as it aims at becoming the fifth largest notebook PC company by 2010. Those are the kind of numbers that could make the top four take notice, setting off a frenzy of melodramatic pound-shedding to rival The Biggest Loser.

This is, of course, very encouraging. We have one at work; I'm currently debating whether to replace the stock Linux install with Ubuntu.

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But... it works on my machine!

Friday at home

Puttering.

@!#$#% hopeless !$@!#$%

Low-cost ultraportable computing roundup

Got the waiting-for-XO blues

Linux gaining traction on the desktop?

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