Since then I’ve owned a white 2002 model iBook which I bought second hand for 600 guilders. Again, performance wise, it was too slow to do anything serious. A few years ago I got another second hand one, a 2007 white Macbook, for 600 euro. This one performed a little better although the trackpad was shit and the keyboard was Belgian. I thought the quality of the casing was poor for something that cost around 1,000 euro, new. So the last time I thought I was due a new laptop I bought a new 15″ Asus machine running Windows 7. Quite clunky, I wouldn’t travel with it, or drag it to work much. It was my coffee table machine until I got an iPad after which the Asus was given ‘loan machine’ status for friends in need.

I’ve always bought budget desktops and they have served me well. It just always felt a little obscene to spend more than five, six or 700 euro on a computer. So I never did. For that reason, Macs fell outside of my budget too.

As my work situation has changed over the last couple of months and I now move from city to city, client to client, desk to desk and meeting to meeting more often than in the past, I got frustrated having to use a different company PC every day, which never ran the right software, or had the right permissions, yada yada yada. So a few weeks ago on a Saturday morning, I thought ‘fuck it’ and took my credit card to the nearest Apple iStore. Bought a 13″ Macbook Pro, which I’ll be paying for the next ten months or so.

This isn’t an Apple fangirlgasm. This is more about spending a little more, than about switching sides. I could just as easily have invested in some high end Windows machine. But… I love this thing. It’s powerful, it’s lightweight, it feels a lot better than the ordinary Macbooks, it travels well, it is my work machine, my play machine, my on the road recording studio, my video editing booth, my jukebox, my precious, my ‘look at me I’m a professional’ object of desire, my North, my South, my East and West, my working week and my Sunday rest… oops, sorry, I got a little carried away.

Made of WIN:

- The keyboard. Amazingly comfortable, fast typing
- The track pad. Don’t really need a mouse at all.
- Solid, quality build
- Battery life is phenomenal
- Very fast shutdown. (Start up beginning to slow down a bit, but still good.)
- It doesn’t smell. (God, the whiff off that 2002 keyboard glue when it warmed up!)
- Airport. It just works

DO NOT WANT:

- Really not keen on that silver and black panda look. Would prefer a solid colour other than silver.
- No separate line in on the 13″ model
- Where’s my window now? Where did it go? Why is it hiding behind that other program? Huh?
- Dashboard. Who needs it? Not me. Killed it
- Magic mouse magically loses connection
- iPhoto. Arrogant little tool

Full blown FAIL:
- Needing 3rd party software to record internal sound. What. the. fuck?

And now for my Top 10 favourite applications (Which is what I should have called this post, linkbait-wise.)

1. Snapz Pro X
You can make screenshots natively with OS X, but Snapz Pro X adds a feature that’s invaluable to me: the ability to capture/record streaming video, including audio the same way as you would a still image. Yes there are video stream rippers out there, but some streams, especially the Real ones, are well protected. Snapz Pro X isn’t particularly intuitive, but it works and now the RTE player is no longer protected from my archiving fetish. Muwahahaha.

Pro tip: Buy a license. Don’t try to crack it, it gets nasty on you.

2. Alfred (free)
Search my machine and launch my files/apps, yo. Lightning fast.

I paid for the powerpack option too. Not sure if I need it.

3. Soundflower (free)
Again, this system extension is not particularly user friendly, but invaluable if you want to use recording software (like Audacity) to record sound from the internet. OS X doesn’t support this, it assumes you want to record line in, or internal mic. I was recommended another tool, Audio Hijack, but it costs money.

4. Image capture
A native OSX tool. Excellent for importing your iPhone pictures.

5. iMovie
Video editing for dummies! Drag, drop, point, click, share to YouTube or Vimeo. Done.

6. Twitter for Mac
The official Twitter app for your Mac. It’s very basic, but of all the official Twitter apps it works best. I have Tweetdeck too, but don’t like its interface. I use Twittelator on my iPad which is just about perfect other than that it seems to have a limit on importing so you end up with half day gaps between tweets.

7. Pod to Mac (free)
Import music from your iPhone. Painless.

8. Mini Video Converter (cheap)
For all those video files iMovie doesn’t recognise (mpeg2 for example)

9. MAMP (Mac, Apache, MySQL, PHP) (free)
Easily run a web server on your Mac. I used this to install WordPress so I can test WordPress, plugin and theme updates locally before installing on a live machine.

10. VirtualBox (free)
Open source virtualisation software. This is what I use to run Windows XP as a virtual machine, which I need for some work related software, like MindManager and Axure.

I have to mention DropBox. Have had it for years and never used it, until I had a use for it. Now I can’t live without it.

I’ve yet to find a text editor for OS X that I like as much as I like the Windows only NoteTab. Don’t like the TextWrangler and TextMate interface. May have to give BBedit another go.

So there you go, my thoughts on my Macbook and the software I use on it. What are your favourite applications?

I got myself an iPhone 3Gs recently. It’s a lovely toy, but t-mobile’s network isn’t very reliable. I have no range at all anywhere in my office which makes the phone pretty useless to me for a large part of the day. This means I have to keep carrying my N95 around. I am not someone who makes a lot of phone calls, so I’m not that badly affected, but I do need to be contactable for the people that do ring me.

Texting people using a QWERTY keyboard takes getting used to and it doesn’t feel like texting anymore. More like sending an e-mail. It’s a different experience.

So far I have mostly used the iPhone for live blogging / twittering U2 shows, and – surprisingly – to play games. Pool and snooker in particular.

The camera is fun especially in combination with the photographic apps available from the iTunes store. Putting the release button on the screen however not very practical. It makes it especially hard to take pictures of yourself, which is what a lot of people do with their mobiles.

Apple seems to be hell bent on ‘rethinking’ mobile use, ignoring 15 or so years of advancing mobile technology as developed by leading mobile companies. No file transfer via Bluetooth? Why the hell not? Why do we have to rely on wifi or network to share files among eachother? This is especially tiresome while travelling abroad when you are dealing with exorbitant roaming costs. Perhaps Apple’s developers have never travelled abroad.

Entertainment value: 10
Business usefulness: 0

I tried to sell my Asus 701 (4g surf) a few months ago, because I wanted to upgrade to a model with a better battery life and larger screen. I put it up on Marktplaats (Dutch equivalent of eBay), but couldn’t get the price I wanted for it. So I left it at that.

At our office Christmas party on Friday, our CEO (and lead singer of the office band…) made a brief speech in which he announced (among other things) that everybody under contract would receive a laptop. What he held in his hand looked like a white Asus to me. First of all, I was stunned. What a great pressie! Then I crossed fingers hoping it would be a different model from the one I already had. It was.

It isn’t quite the upgrade I’d originally planned (I’d had my eye on a 1000H), but an upgrade nevertheless. The laptop we got, a choice of a black or white model, is that odd fish in Asus’ product line, the 900A. It’s basically a 901 with less HD-space and no Bluetooth. It has a 16gb solid state disk, 1GB of RAM, and it has the webcam that I didn’t have on the 701 surf.

I’ve been playing with it and tweaking it since the minute I got home from the party. First of all, I added the advanced desktop mode (as explained in my older post about the Asus eeepc 701), which unlocks the eeepc from its default ‘dummy’ interface. Then I tried to change the OS language from Dutch to English. I don’t like localised software, translations are often awkward and it makes it harder to find solutions for your software related problems. Unfortunately, in advanced desktop mode changing the locale doesn’t work completely, the menu dialogs now show a mixture of Dutch and English. There are further instructions on the eeeuser wiki, but so far I’ve had no luck. I really should learn a bit more about Linux.

I am very happy with the machine. They keyboard is more responsive than the one on my 701, the wider (8′.9”) screen is perfect (the 701′s 8 inch screen was a bit sucky, horizontal scrolling’s no fun). The 900a has problems connecting to WPA-secured wifi, but 1. some of my neighbours have open networks and 2. I switched my own to WEP, I’m not that bothered. No problem connecting to WEP at all.

I haven’t given the battery life a real test yet. It came with the same 4400 mAh battery as my 701 (which lasts only an hour and a half on a full charge), but the 900a has a different processor (Intel Atom) which is supposed to be less draining. I may invest in a 6600 mAh anyway, I think they’re about 75 euro and last 5 or more hours on a charge.

Thanks to my employers for an inspired choice – I don’t want to say ‘Best. Pressie. Ever.’, but… oh what the hell: Best. Pressie. Ever.

Crunchgear reports Canon is releasing the Powershot E1, a camera for women. It comes in ‘vanilla white’, ‘aqua blue’ and ‘cotton pink’ (i.e. baby colours), and has fewer ‘unnecessary’ buttons… ’cause the little lady gets confused easily, yes?

The company created the E1 using ‘relaxation, positive feelings and friendliness as the main guidelines for the design of the camera’. It’s ‘soft’ and ’rounded’. Like a tampon.

There’s a thought. Stick it up your own hole, Canon.

The EEE pc is one of the most satisfying buys ever. It weighs nothing. I don’t even feel I’m carrying it. Despite that, it doesn’t look cheap or feel like a toy. (I can’t vouch for the other colours, but the black version looks like an ordinary laptop. Just a lot smaller.) There’s no reason not to pop it into my bag and take it everywhere I go.

It works (after plugging it in and/or charging it) out of the box, starts up in 10 to 15 seconds, has a preinstalled interface that anyone can understand, comes with oodles of software including games, an open source office suite, Firefox, Thunderbird, excellent WiFi, a photo viewer/slideshow, screen capture, a news reader, IM client, Skype, etc, etc.

While I’m not completely new to Linux, I’m not that familiar with it either. I use *nix commands on the server that hosts my sites, but my home and work desktop PCs have always run Windows or a Mac OS. So I don’t know much about the various incarnations of Linux.

The EEE runs a custom Asus version of Xandros by default. Once I switched from the ‘Easy’ desktop environment to Advanced it looks a lot like a rip off of Windows XP – which is almost disappointing. It’s not the most exciting look. But I didn’t know Linux GUI’s were this advanced. I thought there’d be more command line stuff to get to grips with, but you get lots of menus and right click options, just like in XP. Again… that’s almost disappointing. I guess that’s why they called it “EEE, Easy to learn, work and play”.

The trackpad does the job, but isn’t great for prolonged usage. It is small and the left and right click button feels a little stiff. I plugged in an old mouse which worked really well, so I bought a nice small notebook mouse from Microsoft which works even better. The keyboard could have been better too. I have to hit the space bar pretty hard to make it work and I find touch typing difficult in any other position than seated at a desk.

I mentioned switching to the Advanced desktop. Out of the box, the EEE starts up with an ‘Easy’ interface, which is just a couple of tabs with large icons on it. If you want to get the most out of the machine, use the Advanced desktop. It used to be an option on the menu, but Asus decided to market the machine as an appliance rather than a pc, so they took the option out. You have to put it back in. It’s pretty easy to do, following these instructions: ‘Enable Advanced Desktop mode‘ from the eeeuser.com wiki. Note that personalising the EEE environment almost always involves opening a terminal window and doing some command line stuff. So stick to Easy mode if that scares you.

The EEE can play quite a few different video formats, even .mkv files, although there were some synch problems with the file I tried. What the EEE can’t do is play the ipod compatible formats, mp4/quicktime h.264. But no worries, if you downgrade the supplied mplayer, it will play those as well.

Firefox is preinstalled but the browser’s chrome will dominate a large part of the tiny screen. You’ll have to fiddle with settings a bit to make better use of your real estate. In fact, Opera seems to be the better choice, especially if you use that browser’s fit-to-width option. You’ll have to install Opera and then customise it following instructions from the the eeeuser.com wiki to make the most of the space you have.

To make your EEE a portable jukebox, ideally you’d want to install a bittorrent client, but I haven’t got round to that. I tried a Firefox torrent extension, but could not get it to work. For now I’ve settled for a Limewire clone called Frostwire. I’m not a big fan of the Gnutella protocol, since I prefer the high quality rips found elsewhere, but it will have to do for now.

Wrapping up this review, the Asus EEE is a fantastic little computer. If you get one, spend some time customising it with help from the EEE user community. Buy a small mouse. You’ll need at least some extra storage so one or two SD cards will come in handy, and/or a USB flash stick. And remember, if your system dies while you’re customising it, you can easily revert to factory settings by hitting F9 during start up.

Photographers should consider this set up for a great portable storage and post-processing solution.

Tokina AT-X 12-24mm f4 or Asus EEE?

Help me, Obi Wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope.

• Cool comparison of Digital Wide Zooms (Damn, Rockwell says get the Canon 10-22 if you shoot Canon!)