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.

Only a handful of people had its – unlisted – number. I generally use my mobile to make the few calls I make and have done for the last decade or so. The KPN subscription was a waste of money.

I got an XS4ALL (my adsl provider) VOIP number at 5 euro per month instead. I don’t expect to use it much, but it’s nice to have anyway. I plugged my old phone into my modem yesterday, it was surprisingly easy. Had to fiddle around with the settings a little. Tested the old number. No answer. Good. Tested the new… yep, it worked.

Five minutes later the phone rang. Huh?

‘Hello, this is KPN, is this Ms Prolific? As a valued customer, we have an offer for you…’

‘I no longer am a KPN customer. I cancelled my number this week.’

‘OK, have a nice evening.’ *click*

How did they get through to me? Did they ring my old number? Or the new VOIP number? How would they even know my VOIP number?

I’m puzzled.

Whedonesque.com, the most succesful site I own, never did run smoothly on Pair once the site gained popularity. Every few weeks Pair’s reaper scripts would kill any slow processes on the server or the database. Our index page would be deactivated, or the database connection would be killed  Members of our site had to get used to getting a ‘grrr argh, we’re having some problems’ message on a regular basis. (It wasn’t just our home grown Whedonesque, my Movable Type installations frequently had similar problems.)

Pair eventually forced me to switch from ‘Developer’ to a ‘High Volume’ plan. But that didn’t make a difference, since their ‘High Volume’ plans seem to be more about bandwidth than actual CPU use or MySQL connections. So there I was suddenly paying twice as much for my account, with nothing much to show for it. Whedonesque was still crapping out ever few weeks. Whenever Google indexed us, for example, or someone was trying to syphon our site.

Why didn’t I get my own server? Well, Whedonesque is a popular site, but it’s not *that* huge and dedicated hosting would be overkill, if you ask me. It would also kill my bank account.

The last time we had problems with the site, we started using caching and everything was peachy for a while. But yesterday, when the first act of Joss Whedon’s Dr Horrible was released, the spike in traffic triggered Pair’s reaper scripts once again. This time, support told me they were not going to switch the the database back on again. Apparently we were using five times more than what their server could handle.

Pair suggested I upgrade to a dedicated server at 250 dollars per month. (For the record, we had  50,000 page views yesterday and our average is 26,000 page views per day.) I told them I’d be taking my business hobby elsewhere.

I’d been eyeing Media Temple for a long time. Really, ever since k10k (remember them?) started hosting their site there. But they were quite expensive then. A lot of designer sites moved there over the years and now big name tech blogs like Techcrunch are also in their portfolio. I’d even written to them to ask for advice before, but I didn’t think their response was particularly welcoming. Whedonesque may be well known in some geeky fandom circles, it’s probably not the kind of site they’d be willing to boast about in their client files. We’re not exactly Zeldman. And we always managed to patch things up at Pair, so we never actually made the switch. Until now.

Media Temple’s – surprisingly cheap – grid hosting plan is apparently being phased out for something else (better?), but for now we are going to try it out. From what I read in the documentation, the grid, in combination with a MySQL container, should be able to deal with our traffic spikes and they won’t pull the plug on our database when things get tricky. We’ll see.

Here’s hoping. If it works out, I’ll probably move all my sites over and downgrade or cancel my Pair account. I’ve always been loyal as a customer (in general, not just with Pair), but sometimes the grass is definitely greener elsewhere.

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.

I think the current iMac is ugly and the Mac Pro too expensive. I considered doing away with desktops completely and getting a really good laptop. The MacBooks are so tempting, but perhaps not powerful enough, the Pro’s… really, I’m not prepared to lay down that much cash. And since I already have two (old) laptops, getting a third seemed extravagant. I want the old ones to break down before I upgrade. So… Macs were out, laptop out, PCs were in. A new dilemma. Intel Pentium, or AMD Athlon? Brand or brandless?

In the end, money talks and practicality motivates. 1. I didn’t want to spend too much. 2. The only memory-sucking tasks I do are image editing in Photoshop and some audio encoding. 3. I don’t play games.

AMD is a little cheaper, but the Pentium chips out-perform Athlon when it comes to Photoshop (even the Pentium D apprently does better than Athlon’s dual cores), so I needed an Intel based machine with a card reader, a big harddisk, a run of the mill graphics card. No need for a sound card, I still have an unused Soundblaster Audigy 2.

After much agonising I decided I didn’t want Vista on the machine. I have been using it at work and the number of programs that failed to work on it was frightening. So the Acer machines I’d been looking at were off the list. In fact, all brand PC’s were off the list since they all come with Vista pre-installed.

I finally ended up with an offer from ‘Computerland’, next to ‘Paradigit’ and ‘MyCom’ and all the other hardware stores on Ceintuurbaan, Amsterdam’s own mini-Tottenham Court Road. Conveniently located  about three stops up the road, across the river, on the tram line that goes through my street. Yes, it did feature on the ‘ pro’s ‘ list when I bought the house.

Their ‘Advanced Power’ (made in China) machine offered a lot for its price, 499 euro. An Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2 GB of memory, a 320 GB HD, an NVIDIA GeForce graphics card (overkill for my purposes), the much needed card reader and a nice wireless keyboard. It comes without the monitor you see in the picture.

I remember (cue string quartet) when you’d get pistol whipped for
including a 50 kb attachment and extradited for allowing HTML mail. And I’d be the one dishing out the punishments. Now
I’m hoovering a couple of Gigabytes per day and nobody bats an eyelid, least of all myself.

Are torrents clogging up our pipes? They may be, but that’s probably not the reason why CRIA (Canadian recording industry association) shut down the popular Demonoid tracker today.

I tried but couldn’t find any links to support the theory. I do remember reading reports some years back about bittorrents killing bandwidth.