Happy New Year !

[N.P. Andrew Zimmern - Chile]
Happy New Year, everyone. This is now officially "twenty-ten" - not "two thousand and ten", according to the BBC! Over the last month I've loaded up a permanent Linux machine and acquired another to replace a (very) old laptop. I've also enrolled in a SQL Server DBA course, which should be fun (I hope!).

The End of an Era!
Yes - the end of a PC! Back in September 2000 I found that I needed a new laptop to take on a weekend trip to a client to do some programming. My old Sager machine (Pentium 1, your-thighs-are-the-heatsink) was dying fast, so I rang Sony (in CA) on a Thursday morning and begged, pleaded, and even suggested bribery. Friday lunchtime (in work) a guy arrived at my desk with a very big box with Sony written on it. This (right) was the content, a PCG FX540K with 512 MB of RAM, a 15 GB hard drive, and a 14" diagonal screen. It wasn't light - the shell is made of metal! - but it was a beautiful blue machine.

At the end of 2006 I finally bought a new laptop - a 17" Acer - which actually weighs a little less! However, the VAIO wouldn't die - its been used as a sofa-side machine for the last two years, and has had an almost permanent connection to the TV. Yes! a 950 MHz Intel machine running Windows 2000 is perfectly capable of capturing live TV through a USB 1.1 port! I never thought that it would be possible, but it has always worked fine, so I have lots of DVDs of things captured off TV. The hardware I use is an Adaptec "VideOh!" box, but Grabbee do the same thing for Windows XP.

Well, one of the video sync components has finally died, so its getting replaced. Sometime in 2010 I hope I'll be able to get it fixed, as the rest of the machine is perfect, and the hard drive has been replaced with larger versions several times. When that's all done it'll be resurrected, but, for now, it's going into retirement.

The Start of an Era!
Well, the better half can't live without a sofa-side machine, so this is what we're replaced the VAIO with. This is how an Asus EeeBox B202 arrives out of the box. We got a Linux version, instead of a Windows XP version, which costs a little less than $300. It has a DVI video socket (with a VGA converter supplied), an ethernet socket, alittle antenna for WiFi, a card socket for your camera cards, an audio-out socket for your headphones, and four USB sockets. How sweet is that?! And the stand is so simple and effective that it might have come from Apple! Watch out Jonathan Ive!

I plugged it into one of my Hanns-G 19" monitors and it lit up immediately, asked me a few questions, and we were online and googling. Wicked cool!

Asus' EZ-Linux really is very easy - it has all the stuff you need, although not the latest versions, which is a shame. The one thing that nobody will mention to you, which is crazy, because it's a big selling point with a lot of people, is that using an iPod with Linux - even this basic version - is dead easy and safe! I plugged the AG's 1G Shuffle into a USB port and it lit and then started blinking. I started the music program, told it to look for all devices, and it found the iPod. I dragged some MP3 files from the File Manager to the music program and then told it to save them there. Finally I un-mounted the iPod and, after a little while, it stopped blinking. Its light stayed orange until it had finished charging and then we just pulled it, plugged in earbuds, and enjoyed. Problems? none!

The next neat thing to find out is that the Hanns-G has a VESA mount on the back. Normally this is provided in order for you to mount the monitor on a wall, or on an arm that allows you to swing it out of your way ... or whatever. However, Asus twigged that this was about the same size as its whole EeeBox, so it provides a little shelf. You screw the shelf onto the back of the monitor and then the EeeBox onto the shelf. I did all this with the EeeBox still running (I live dangerously, but WTH!) and it all works fine - suddenly all we have is a nice 19" monitor with a mouse and keyboard and a couple of USB socket extenders sitting in front. One power cable provides a pair of sockets for the EeeBox and the Hanns-G, and that's all the cabling. A simple as a laptop.

I can only say that this has to be the simplest, easiest, and downright-coolest computer I have ever met - it really is a personal computer. I give it four thumbs up!

That's all for this New Year's Eve: more soon - probably tomorrow.

TTFN

New Toys - Where Will It End ?

sic transit gloria mundi

which might describe me. I'm writing this as the first piece of English (or anything else, for that matter) that I've composed on my new Acer 9300 laptop. A birthday / Christmas / New Year's present to the Man of the House from Himself (via TigerDirect and UPS), of course, as nobody else would dare do such a thing :)

I'll only bore you a moment with stats (2 GHz 64-bit AMD cpu, 2 GB DDE2 DRAM, 17" screen) before going on to complain that the keyboard is, of course, one of those chiclet types with about 2mm travel but so what ? It's quiet, no heavier that the one it replaces (a Sony Vaio from 2000) and easier to type on. It has a built-in wireless network card, which is convenient for scribbling in one places, like standing one-legged in airports (I'm lousy as a stork, so I never do that), but it'll be too big for the tables in Starbucks (I hope), giving me an excuse to find somewhere else !

I can see that sitting in aeroplanes is going to be fun, as the thing is only about 2" narrower than my hips, and that's got to be too wide for the little fold-down tablettes. Still, maybe I'll ust fly Virgin from now on and play all their in-flight games instead.

I've been wandering the internet in search of tidbits, as is my wont, and landed on Bill Thompson's article today in the Telegraph. When, in what seems not to have been a previous lifetime, I worked in a web company help produce a tool to make web pages, the problem of finding out just how many people were visiting the sites was quite a problem.Revenue comes from advertising the cost of advertising space is determined by "eyeballs", the estimated number of individuals who would look at the space. Many of our customers built sites that got you to identify yourself in some way (at least once) so that subsequent visits could be discounted (or not, depending on many things).

However, Bill points out that many of the younger generation discard identities with reckless abandon - sometimes because they're forgotten the password and can't be bothered to really think to remember it, and other times because they really deliberately want many identities (to trade amongst, for instance). This is probably going on in large amount - now that he mentions it I realise that I've seen it myself, and not taken any notice, but Bill is a more astute watcher of humans than I - and it rather makes a mockery of all the executives counting heads and asking for money based on that !

Have a fun weekend everyone. I've some programming to do.