EEEpc

EEEpc early "ultrabook" (which I'm still running as a self-UPS'ing server in 2014...)

eeepc: Thu Jun 25 23:35:00 2009

Thu Jun 25 23:35:00 2009

Since last writing here,

The 64G SSD is has the nice trick that it includes a USB port (with a mutant connector) so you can just bit-for-bit mirror your internal drive to the new one, then pop it in to the mini-PCIe slot and reboot. (Linux even handles growing a mounted ext3fs, once you've made the partition larger underneath it - not a big deal since you're swapping hardware, and could just do it while it's still external, but if you forget, it's a nice touch.)

(For now I'm still using the 16G SD card [carried in a stick-sized reader] for my captioning efforts; if I had an easy way to put the EEE into mac-style external disk mode, I might use that instead - I could just sshfs into it, I suppose. Alternatively I'd use the phone for the same thing, but it's only got an 8G microSD, fast 16G don't seem to be out yet and wouldn't really be an improvement given that I keep a lot of other stuff on the phone's own card... would allow some direct phone-to-flickr posting, though, especially now that I have ASE to work with...)

eeepc: Sat Aug 9 12:51:00 2008

Sat Aug 9 12:51:00 2008

Previously I mentioned frying a 16G SDHC card - since it was a Transcend, it had a lifetime replacement warrantee - so I got a new one to use, then they replaced the broken one - I threw USGS quads for most of New England on it, just to have handy in my pocket :-) xzgv is an acceptable TIFF-viewer (even used it to plan a trip to northern NH that I haven't taken yet) but what I should do instead is a local install of OpenLayers and store carved up tiles, instead of the maps themselves. (One of my coworkers is hacking on something like this, and I plan to borrow their work once they figure it out :-)

eeepc: Wed May 14 23:26:00 2008

Wed May 14 23:26:00 2008

Looking back on my notes here, I haven't written up a bunch of recent EEEpc hacking:

The EEEXXL hasn't shown up yet; I see the 8.9" EEEpc 900 has shown up on newegg and amazon - the bigger screen is tempting, given that it really looks like they've kept the rest consistent, and 20G of flash would be nice too (though it would probably make it worth finding a way to fake up a usb-based mac-style "target disk mode" to export it :-)

Footnotes:

eeepc: Sat May 3 22:54:00 2008

Sat May 3 22:54:00 2008

Turns out you can now by bigger batteries for the EEEpc:

(Compare to the stock 4 cell 5800mAh.) The additional height won't be a problem at all (might even be an advantage, what with the additional air circulation underneath.) Should be a win for day-to-day use, as well as travel...

eeepc: Sun Jan 6 01:09:00 2008

Sun Jan 6 01:09:00 2008

In the "tail wagging the dog" department - if get the Cirago Bluetooth dongle on amazon, it recommends you get an 8G EEEpc with it :-) (No, the 8G doesn't actually appear to be shipping...)

Footnotes:

eeepc: Mon Dec 31 19:28:00 2007

Mon Dec 31 19:28:00 2007

The "Cirago BTA-3210 MICRO Bluetooth USB Adapter" seems to Just Work, in that hcitool finds my phone, and rfcomm tries to talk to it (though I don't have something paired right, I get an error after giving the passcode - it's not the adaptor, it's just general linux bluetooth arcana.) The big remaining problem is carrying it in my bag without losing it, it is tiny... but it does fit in an old CF card case, which will do for now.

The aforementioned 2G upgrade has been fine, firefox and akregator coexist now. kphotoalbum is pretty happy as well. Of course, it's well in to winter, which is both reducing the available bird-photographing opportunities, and reducing my motivation to drive long distances for fun - you really don't want the convertible top down when it's 45F, let alone 35F :-) But the discipline of (mostly) using the ThinkPad for Work and the EEE for Me has been very useful in reducing distractions at work and in keeping the stress-reduction effectiveness of my non-work time up as well (I'm not in operations, after all.)

Footnotes:

eeepc: Sat Dec 15 03:58:00 2007

Sat Dec 15 03:58:00 2007

Asus put out a press release indicating that they understood the Magnuson-Moss act after all, and that simply upgrading the memory was not a warrantee-voiding operation (but that of course "screwing it up" was :-)

Newegg carried a 2G SODIMM for $40 (part number 20-208-323, "Transcend 2GB 200-Pin DDR2 SO-DIMM DDR2 667 (PC2 5300) Notebook Memory - Retail"); a little quality time with a screwdriver, and I've got 1G available under linux (the Xandros kernel isn't built with CONFIG_HIGHMEM, which seems terribly retro, but I'll rebuild it some time, and getting the first 1G is a win anyway.)

As with any memory upgrade, run memtest86+ beforehand (to convince yourself it "plays well" with your chipset) and after (to actually test the new RAM.) Pointing your sources.list at Debian Stable is enough to get the binary, but actually running it requires some grub mucking. The basic technique is

While you're in there, I'd also

Looks like a full memtest86+ pass will take a couple of hours, but I was happy with it running clean for half an hour (though I'll probably do a complete run later.) Now I should be able to run akregator and firefox at the same time, and kphotoalbum should be a bit happier too.

Next project: Amazon had (via the TigerDirect store) the "Cirago BTA-3210 MICRO Bluetooth USB Adapter" - sticks out about 2mm from the USB port when plugged in - if that works, I'll have to wonder off somewhere and post pictures "from the field" via my cellphone :-)

Footnotes:

eeepc: Mon Dec 10 21:56:00 2007

Mon Dec 10 21:56:00 2007

As of this weekend, I've demonstrated my complete "captioning at lunch" workflow with the EEEpc. This was made a little more complicated because my preferred tool is kphotoalbum, which is a complex KDE application with many dependencies - which is normally not a problem, but the one thing Xandros appears to have done for themselves is a creatively stripped down KDE distribution, to reduce the OS footprint... which mostly means that KDE binaries from Debian etch don't work. I tried building it, but building the dependencies was getting tedious (and the Asus source release still seems to be missing a few changed packages, like libkexif1.)

After having the SDHC card fail on me after about 3 weeks heavy use -- losing nothing of value, but getting rid of the rathole of KDE-related build trees, which cleared my mind as well -- I suddenly realized that I had a much easier, even familiar, shortcut at hand -- debootstrap. I built a minimal Ubuntu Gutsy install on the new flash card, chrooted into it and ran {{{aptitude install kphotoalbum}}}... which installed 392 new packages, without any particular effort on my part :-) I ended up doing a little tweaking (which I'll document later) but that was sufficient to get me the same kphotoalbum that I was running on the big machine, and with a few symlinks, have my flickr tools Just Work.

So I'm up to the point of doing all of my "social" computing on the EEEpc as conveniently as I did on the T60p. It's even got better support for an external monitor. I'm now reminded, though, that one thing I actually did with the Oqo (a model 01+ that I used before getting the thinkpad) that I haven't done since is upload pictures to flickr, "in the field" as it were, through my phone. Since it's a GPRS phone, in practice my attention span will limit me to one or two really interesting pictures, but it should still Just Work, if I have all the pieces.

(Also, as sort of a "freebie", I have akregator (the KDE RSS reader) installed in the chroot as well. With the reader set to keep basically everything, I have plenty of tech blogs to look at even when I'm offline.)

eeepc: Fri Nov 30 02:10:00 2007

Fri Nov 30 02:10:00 2007

Picked up an EEEpc (4G, white) just before Thanksgiving, and have been beating it into the shape of what I consider a normal laptop. This involves getting lots of little things working...

There are still some not-quite-right things:

The one important end-to-end thing I haven't done yet is to spend a day taking pictures, upload them to the EEE, caption them, and post the best-of to flickr... like I already do with the T60p, but without lugging the extra hardware. That will be what makes it "real" in my mind, and not just an experiment with a cheap toy :-)