OSNews isn't OSNews

One of the tech sites I follow is OSNews. It was originally a website for...well, news about operating systems. Linux, Windows, OS X, etc.

A recent post was titled "Why OSNews Is No Longer OSNews." The editor outlines how OSNews shifted from news about operating systems into more general news about technology, Recent stories cover news about Adobe vs. Apple and H.265 developments and Microsoft Office changes, rather than developments about new kernel threading implementations in Linux or compatibility changes in Haiku.

The article was pretty good, and I'm not writing to rehash what Thom Holwerda wrote in the article. I am writing because as I read the article and ensuing comments, it actually dawned on me the scale to which computer technology has "standardized" and stagnated.

I became interested in computers and platforms in the dawn of home computing. I was born at the dawn of the birth of Apple Computer. I saw the introduction of the Macintosh. Okay, I didn't see it, but I was becoming aware of the world and computers in 1984 when the infamous ad debuted. The Internet was expensive, slow, and difficult for home users to get access to, so I relied on shopping in local department stores (remember when Sears mattered?) and magazines in bookstores to get news about computers, and Byte and Computer Shopper were chock-full of stories about AmigaDos and AmigaOS, OS/2, the fledgling pseudo-OS called Windows, various flavors of DOS, CP/M,...all sorts of technology goodness.

But gradually the stories about operating systems dwindled because companies closed down, markets dwindled, and eventually the biggest of the niche OS's like AmigaOS were relegated to hobbyist markets. Magazines started changing their focus into something more like Cosmo for geeks; "Win95 vs. OS/2 vs. NT! Which is Best For You?"

Fast forward to today and you have the situation that the OSNews article was discussing; hobbyist OS's are largely stagnant. Operating systems are basically, for practical purposes, down the the "big three" of OS X, Linux, and the Windows family.

Hobbyist OS's that I can name include MorphOS, FreeDOS, ReactOS, Plan 9, and Haiku. There are others, but for the most part, the number of installed systems are tiny. Really tiny.

The comments put the second part of the puzzle in place for me; people commented that in colleges, computer science majors didn't have to take compiler courses. Someone else said that more recently they went to a nearby college and the computer science majors weren't even taking courses on operating systems. I remember when I went to college that the debates focused on what the latest, most relevant computer languages were to teacher...Java? Python? Should we keep C++?

My daughter applied to the college I went to, so I was able to kind of revisit what was going on with their CS program. Basically, it's gone. The college is doing something more like an information technology track rather than a computer science degree that focused on data structures and how the system worked under the hood. This would be akin to people going to a vocational school for auto repair and learning more about body work and adding spoilers without going over how pistons or fuel injectors work.

Basically, we moved to a position in technology where the public has popularized particular platforms, and the focus has shifted into the more shallow but productive application of technology. We aren't teaching data structures or operating systems and more technology-oriented interest have nothing to do with the underpinnings of improving the computer platform, it's focused on applications and supporting Grandma so she can get her email.

I'd love the hobby OS's. I had an installation CD of BeOS when it was distributed to the public for the Intel platform. I disliked MacOS because it relied heavily on cooperative multitasking, and found it fascinating when Win95 introduced preemptive multitasking to the platform (except for the Win16 subsystem, and to a degree I guess the Win32 subsystem addon for Win3.11 had some elements of preemptive multitasking, but still...). End users just glazed over when told why these things mattered. They didn't care because they just wanted to play games and browse the web. While things under the hood improved with these features, they were quiet improvements and added largely because they improved the user experience without them knowing it.

What hobby OS's are out there are relegated to R&D departments (Plan 9) or are so hobby that they basically, for practical purposes, boot up and do little else unless you're using the machine exclusively as a platform for simple web browsing and email (if you're lucky). To get any actual work done you have to use one of the "big three" operating systems.

If OSNews only covered news for operating systems, they'd have new stories maybe once a month. There simply aren't too many people working on operating systems and those that are are working just on operating systems; I can't use it to accomplish things I use every day reliably, and without more development on applications the operating system is largely useless.

Basically one of the things that attracted me to computing as a career is dead. Commoditized. And it's a shame. My first computer was a Commodore 128, and my first PC was a 486sx 33 Mhz system with 4 meg of RAM. Today if you get a new computer to run Windows 7 you really need at least 2 gig of memory and a 100 gig hard disk. But I still remember running BeOS on an Intel system that was only a couple hundred Mhz and something on the order of 128 meg of RAM and it was able to render an animated OpenGL demo without any stutter or pausing. I was spinning a three-dimensional cube on the screen while each facet played a different movie file without stuttering. It was absolutely amazing that something with such a small amount of resources was able to pull this off.

In other words, the these hobby and research (and niche) OS's can do some really amazing things, but if they don't have anything to edit home videos or play podcasts, what am I going to do with it? How many half-rendered or unreadable web pages will I have to work around before it just annoys me too much to use it?

And without users, these projects stagnate and die off. There's very little variety.

This isn't necessarily bad; as technology has become more popular (i.e., dumbed down until the average teenager could waste an entire day playing flash games and sending pointless text messages to one another) variety becomes a detriment for support and usability. It's horrible, but the more choice you give people, the more confusing it is for people who don't love the platform itself. I can relate. I don't really give a damn about who and how my tires are manufactured or what kind of configuration my engine is in my car. I just want to get to the store and run errands without a huge cost. Same for computers. As the userbase shifted away from technology geeks and educated, savvy users to more general Mom and Pop users the operating system platform became more bland and general, and feature lists were focused more on eye candy than on multitasking and memory protection.


Computer technology is going the way of the wild west. When I first became interested in the tech I was voraciously digesting articles that explored the nitty gritty of memory protection and multitasking algorithms and what additional specialized hardware made the Amiga computer from Commodore rock the special effects industry. Today, computers are migrating into appliances that are supposed to be as easy to use as VCR's and microwave ovens and are cheap enough that if they break, the cost to repair them is often higher than simply buying a new one at Wal-Mart. They're becoming civilized and boring.

I'll continue to read what news articles emerge regarding Haiku or ReactOS or a new project that still shows signs of life. I would love to try out an operating system that is niche enough to address problems with my operating system platform of choice or introduce cool and useful features without having to sacrifice my ability to "get stuff done." And I hope that these mini-projects can inject some excitement to the profession (Plan 9 has some really really interesting concepts in it...now if only I could edit video or use it to enhance our IT infrastructure without users crying and whining that it doesn't run Internet Explorer, I'd love to play with it more.)

Otherwise I guess I'll have to either move with the times or seriously look at shifting careers. The excitement simply isn't there anymore. I guess that's one of the side effects of not inventing the future but rather moving with the passage of time.

MacBook Pros (or, Surprise, Honey!)

I recently emailed a friend of mine about an unrelated item in life but alluding to self imposed stresses that I'd blog about in the near future. Well, here it is!

I've been going through both a technology crisis and a crossroads with technology. I've been working on trimming costs around the house and trimming my computer taxes (i.e., shutting off home servers because of the electricity they suck down) while evaluating how much I really need for using technology. By that, I mean, do I really need a desktop computer? I've been finding myself more often than not trying to work on my novel from a notebook or netbook at Barnes and Noble or in the bedroom, or having to remotely edit things to my desktop from another room.

So I began testing whether I could use a netbook for my computer needs. That was a mixed success for another blog entry.

At the same time, I had my "podcast" computer, a lowly Windows computer used pretty much for Skype for my son and podcast syncing to my iPod in the morning, die on me.

On top of that, my wife's MacBook had Applecare die. Again, topic for another blog post so I won't dive into it, but as a tech person who wants minimal hassle in supporting his own gear, any notebook that has gone out of warranty is a pain since the hassle in replacing anything beyond the most basic component is probably going to cost you more in time and parts than a whole new laptop would cost.

My wife's computer was going out of warranty. My netbook was adequate, but barely, for anything beyond basic web browsing, email, and working in OpenOffice.org on my manuscript. My multimedia computer was toasted, so I had to improvise another system that used to be my primary server/workstation but the CPU cooler was loose from the motherboard and thus rather unreliable (at least enough that I don't leave it alone for long periods while it's running).

So I formulated a plan.

And despite my constant debt worries, I purchased two new MacBook Pro's. One for me, one for my wife. With hardshell cases (one blue, one pink) to protect them.

And my wife knows that I constantly stress over bills and income, so she wasn't expecting it.

But I didn't just give it to her. That would be too simple.

When I was younger, my mother would (rarely) play this game to entertain me where she would hide clues around the house and give me the first clue, which would lead me to the next clue, and the next, etc. until I arrived at the final prize, usually some small toy or food or something. I don't remember the prize. I remember the fun of running around the house looking for hidden notes and the rush of figuring out her clues.

So the day FedEx finally delivered the notebooks I enlisted the help of one of my wife's coworkers and hid a number of clues around the campus of her workplace after hours (she usually hangs around with work after 90% of the other people have run home).

I had come up with clues and taped them to cut out foam letters spelling the word "apple". I also took an empty MacBook box from a friend and stuck a Fuji apple in it along with a "congratulations, you found the final clue!" note. I then messaged her to Skype me and I chatted for a few minutes before reminding her about my clue game as a kid, and said that now it was her turn. Then I gave her the first clue and told her she was on the clock.

Confused, she started following the clues until she arrived at a backpack that I normally use for my work equipment, but unbeknownst to her I had switched everything out of it and instead had her notebook and equipment inside. The MacBook box hinted that the Fuji apple inside was the prize, but there was a hint that it was the "final clue", meaning there was one more thing. In the hint, the words "under" and "me" were capitalised, so she had to figure out that she needed to look under the plastic insert in the box to find a printed picture of my bag that in turn had the MacBook Pro in it.

It took her about twenty or thirty minutes to figure everything out and get all the clues, but in the end I think she was rather surprised. I had spent, literally, weeks going over specs and finances and talking myself into doing this, since you can imagine these are not overly cheap computers. These are 13" MacBook Pros with iWork installed. I have been saving money whenever I could to help offset the cost. I also spent weeks coming up with the clues, the props, and the plans to pull this off on my wife, without her stumbling onto the equipment (the hard shell cases came days ahead of time).

So when I told my literary friend that I had some self-imposed stress on the docket, this was it. Weeks of planning culminating into this big surprise. I think she kind of liked it.

My biggest regret is that I am far enough in debt that I couldn't justify the expense of getting SSD drives, despite the added durability they offer. I juggled the numbers and figured that these were investments for the next three years, and over that time I would be using this almost every day. My wife uses her system almost every day as well, although I can't comment on how important her computer is to her. I know how vital it is to me, considering how much I work with computers at work, how much I work on my manuscript, online research, etc. and the computer I was using before the MacBook Pro was nice in some way, woefully underpowered in others.


So now I go back to worrying about paying bills. The fact that I'm using these laptops all the time probably means I made an okay decision this time around and probably  won't regret it. Yeah, it's more debt. But I know that unlike many frivolous purchases, these will be heavily used for the next several years, and I'll make a small amount of money back in saved electricity. Oh, and did I mention that my wife and I aren't buying anything for our birthdays and Christmas? Yeah, this was our gift for this year, so that also factored in to the cost.

With some luck, I'll manage to finish, and perhaps (dare I dream it?) sell a manuscript that is finished and polished on the new laptop...

Well, there's that, and I think my wife really liked her present. But I can't speak for her...

EEE PC: The Great Experiment

I've decided to try something more...interesting...with my technology lifestyle.

I used to keep my primary workstation online 24/7. It's a big monster for a desktop...dual core 2.13 Ghz processor, 2 gig of memory, 3Ware raid card mirroring 2 250 gig hard drives, CD/DVD burner and separate DVD drive (so I could easily copy disks to another blank without hogging the data bus), a slot card reader for reading SD cards and other media cards, nice fast video card driving a 22 inch samsung monitor...overkill for the vast vast majority of home users, but I did occasionally use the system for other things that average home users didn't (virtualization, for one, took a toll on the processor and memory...). It has Ubuntu installed on it, so it was virtually crash proof and was wonderful for most tasks I threw at it. Even three years old it's still above and beyond what most people use in their home, so it's aged quite nicely. I can't recommend the staff at Puget Systems enough for their help and guidance in assembling an affordable Linux machine.

I would connect to the system using secure shell, so I could easily access things like my journal application or files remotely. I could use the remote camera on the system to check on the house when I was away (did the daughter remember to let the dog in? Let's see...).

The thing is that keeping that thing running 24/7 sucks electricity. It also went largely unused most of the time. Sure, handy when I needed it, but otherwise, was it worth having it sit there, sucking up dust and pennies in power?

I've been experimenting with Ubuntu Netbook Remix on a very old EEE PC (the 701/4G unit). It's tiny. It's lightweight. And for specs, just about the only thing it has going for it is that it's really portable and probably takes weather changes and rough handling a lot better than most notebooks (how my daughter managed to still break it...twice...is !@#$ beyond me...).

I sat and thought about this for awhile. Here's what I've been doing lately...
1) edit my novel.
2) email
3) web browsing
4) diving into learning a programming language
5) blogging/filling in my nearly daily journal
6) transfer images from my camera to my hard disk and backing up my digital memories I have hundreds and hundreds of pictures of my 4 year old.

That kind of sums up what I've done with the computer lately.

So I've decided to go for a "grand experiment." I wanted to simplify my life and see if I could turn my computing life into a more mobile life. It wasn't easy. I had a lot of conversations with myself.

What if I needed to use virtualization to use Windows or a clean Ubuntu install? Guess I'll have to use the work-issued Mac.

What if I needed to burn an ISO disc, or create a CD??
Again...use the work-issued Mac. Dude, how often have you been doing that lately anyway?

No much, I guess. But what about editing pictures and movies?
You forgot that you've been doing that with iMovie? That was on the Mac too. And picture editing can be done on the netbook. It's just slower.

What about the keyboard? I can use it, but for everyday work? It'll get frustrating!
That's what you'll use the USB hub for, dummy.

Oh, yeah. I guess so.
Look, most of your utilities...OpenOffice, Adobe Reader, Firefox, Almanah Diary...the stuff on your desktop are also on the netbook. Don't worry.

What about...well, the display?
Plug in your monitor when the netbook is on the desk. We'll see how it works.

And remotely accessing files? If I need something while at Barnes and Noble, or at work?
Um...put the files you normally need on your netbook's SD card. You have a spare 2 gig card sitting in your drawer. You won't need to copy the data if it's with you.

It won't fit all the data, though. My files on the external drives are nearly 100 gig. The netbook has 4 gig of storage, plus 2 from an SD card? That won't be enough.
Calm down. You don't need that stuff. You keep it for reference or access later. The stuff you regularly use is tiny. It'll fit. And when you "dock" it with the USB hub, you have access to that data. I think we can do it.

I sighed, synced my data from the desktop machine to the 2 external hard disks I use for backups, then disconnected my computer completely, moving the mouse and keyboard to the USB hub on the desk. Then I took the CPU to another room where it'll sit undisturbed for awhile, and I'll not have the temptation of taking the easy way out of my experiment.

And now I am using my netbook as my primary machine.

It's not easy...I'm nervous to see how it works. The machine is really tight on space, around 300 meg free on the primary storage drive (and 2 gig on the SD card). The problem is that the system drive is filled from basic applications installed, so it's not easy to try trimming things out.

For my personal data, though, things should work out. I think.

I have a script I run that copies data from my computer to the backup drives; should anything fail, I can take my Western Digital "books" to another Linux computer and access my data (or restore to another machine if I need to replace a computer). I modified that script for its new home on my netbook, adding a metric ton of actual checks so that if a drive isn't mounted it won't run that backup routine (like the media computer; I mount it over the network and copy my podcasts and iTunes purchases to the drives in case the media computer dies (again)). Since my netbook may be out and about or not have the drives plugged in...hey, I forget things a lot, after all...I needed to add checks to the script so it won't delete an entire tree of data just because I forgot to mount something. It was long overdue anyway.

And now I am using the netbook. I'm taking my primary computer with me. I took it to Barnes and Noble last night. I brought it downstairs with me now for exercising while blogging. I dusted most of my desk for the first time in years, which I'm sure the desk appreciated.

So that's my great experiment. I'm approaching it with great trepidation, but I'm taking the plunge...can I, a computer geek, survive using a sub-par computer, placing emphasis on portability over power?

More later...stay tuned!

More on the EEE PC

I had previously posted that I was confiscating my teenage daughter's EEE PC (the 4G model, also known as the 701) because:
A) she abuses technology in ways I didn't think was possible
B) she never uses it
C) she broke the keyboard, after having it sent back for a factory repair on a power/motherboard issue
D) she consistently had it falling on the floor and it was never her fault, it was always her little brother's fault that the power cable was strung across the room and the hyperactive 4 year old would stumble over said power cable.

So I thought I'd take it and try using it. The new keyboard came in (remarkably affordable off an Amazon third-party reseller, only $15). I also had said that I erased the Asus-supplied Linux version in favor of the Ubuntu Netbook Remix from Canonical; essentially Ubuntu with a graphical shell better suited to netbook desktop real estate. That means it's actually kept up to date (boo Asus!) and it was in parity with my desktop Ubuntu system in regards to updates and fixes and applications that can be installed.

I've been using it on and off for a few days and thought I'd do a quick revisit.

First, the keyboard install wasn't that bad. There are three tiny meal clips that you have to push back, located along the top of the keyboard (near the pause, f6, and ~ keys). They kind of felt chincy in the quality, and I think I managed to scratch them, is they don't look like they're holding the keyboard very securely but the keyboard hasn't fallen off yet so...I'm going with it.

Once the clips are pushed back you lift the keyboard and slide it out of the tray slightly. There's a ribbon that is held in with two slider clips; you push the clips back towards the display (parallel to the motherboard) to release the plastic ribbon and the keyboard comes right off. Slide the new ribbon in, lock it, slide the keyboard in place, and pry the clips back over the keyboard and it's done.

Now the bigger challenge. I haven't used it to edit my novel yet, but I have done some web browsing and watching movie clips (avi, mpg, flv...) to see what it can do. The 701 has only 512 meg of RAM and a ~900 Mhz processor, and storage is a premium, so how did it handle things?

Web browsing; it's running Ubuntu, so it has the latest Firefox available (with the flash blocker to stop ads; helps with processor power too). Because of the slower processor, you shouldn't try watching more than one video at a time. You shouldn't even scroll while a flash-based player is playing or the video stutters and starts caching a bit. It's not like I'm doing high-end HD video crunching and the performance was something I found to be acceptable. There is a bit of juggling to get multiple tabs to work well and some videos don't scale properly to the oddly proportioned display resolution. Overall, web browsing is acceptable, but I'd not be beyond trying an iPad as a web browsing tool primarily due to screen real estate.

The video watching was a test in seeing what it could handle with codecs. I stuck some movies of different formats on a 2 gig SD card and tried playing them. The built-in movie player application threw up a huge number of "plugin needed" errors, then would try to download new plugins to handle various codecs. I then opened a terminal and ran "sudo apt-get install vlc" to install the VLC movie player, which handled a larger array of formats and handled them well. I had one case where the plugin installer hung on the display (movie player, not VLC related). I couldn't move it and even though the interface was responding in the background I didn't know how to get a process list up to kill the offending application or how to bring up a terminal to kill the process or how to bring up another desktop to get to a process manager from there, so my options were limited to logging in from another computer using SSH or use Control-Alt-Delete to restart the EEE. I restarted it. Not that it takes that long, but it was annoying. I need to figure out how to use a shortcut to get to another desktop or bring up a terminal session.

Other than that movies played half-decently. Surprising.

And the most obvious: keyboard evaluation. The keyboard is indeed something to get used to. Especially when you're built like a fridge, like I am. I had quite a bit of trouble not hitting the right-arrow key instead of shift, which was a pain when I tried using a spreadsheet I created in OpenOffice. But I knew this would take some work to get used to, and I'm trying to give it time (like editing my novel on it...can I get used to the annoyance?)

Any other surprises? I'm continually surprised at the software this little thing can run. I may have already mentioned that I installed SSH and SSHD, so I can use secure shell to log into it from another Unix machine (or Windows using PuTTY). It's weird to think I'm remotely logging into this thing the size of a paperback book and then install software or alter files from a remote system. I can also use the FUSE filesystem with the SSHFS module to mount other filesystems (or the EEE's filesystem) using secure shell, so I can edit and manipulate remote files as if they were local.

I also installed Synergy. If you're not familiar with it, it's a GREAT application for people with multiple computers in the same area. I wrote about it before but here's a quick overview: it's a software KVM without the V.

Scenario: as I type this I'm using my desktop computer to enter text on the blog. Sitting next to my keyboard is the EEE. I'm bouncing between the blog and the EEE to do updates as well as configure a few things on the EEE. Rather than stopping what I'm doing and task switching to the tiny keyboard and touchpad of the EEE, I am using Synergy on the netbook and the Synergy Server on my desktop to link the two computers. I just slide the mouse off the left side off my desktop computer and the mouse "appears" on the EEE display, meaning now my keyboard and mouse are focused on the EEE. I type and the characters are on the EEE. I move the mouse, the pointer moves on the EEE. I slide the mouse off the right hand side of the EEE's display, and my mouse reappears on my desktop computer's display.

Neat, huh? Neater still is I can have four computers do this off the "Synergy Server" computer: top, bottom, left and right. And thanks to secure shell, I can encrypt the connection so the connection links are cryptographically secure.

It's a neat way to do work on the desktop and laptops at the same time, and the software (ssh, synergy, etc.) are all in the Ubuntu repos (and synergy itself is cross platform, so you can mix and match Linux, Windows and OS X clients and servers).

The keyboard is definitely annoying at times; I'm working to adapt to it, so I'm going to reserve judgment for the moment. In the meantime I'll note that the EEE has managed to recognize and use a USB keyboard without problem, just as it has recognized a USB CD burner (how I installed Ubuntu NR in the first place) and the SD card and a USB memory stick without issues.

The thing that is simultaneously neat and a bullet in the foot is that this is, for all practical purposes, Ubuntu Linux on a miniature PC. It can do a huge number of things, but it sometimes takes some stretching and bending to accomplish them.

For example, installing Synergy, VLC, and SSH were straight from the repos, no real work necessary (if you're used to Ubuntu, anyway). Just select and install. Or from the terminal, issue the apropos apt-get command. But the new interface tries to hide the ability to access multiple desktop workspaces (kind of like virtual desktops). Hitting control-alt- will select a new desktop so I can organize my applications, or in the case of the one app getting "stuck" I might have been able to switch to another desktop to pull up the terminal and regain practical control of my EEE. When I tried it, it wouldn't let me. Just kept telling me I had one workspace.

But...it could do it. It does support multiple workspaces. It just wouldn't let me because it was configured for one, which is a sensible default when the screen is this tiny, I suppose. I couldn't use the workspace manager to configure a new desktop the way I do on my desktop because that "useless" interface was removed for the streamlined Netbook Remix interface.

So the fix is to open a terminal and enter the command "gconftool-2 -s /apps/metacity/
general/num_workspaces 4 --type int" where the 4 is the number of workspaces I want. Intuitive? Heck no. It was a total Google job to find this solution.

And now I have 4 workspaces. But here's the thing; I'm mixed on this feature. The fact is that a tiny device like this is kind of stretching the computer metaphor. Now small can you make a computer before the desktop paradigms become stretched too thin? I'm multitasking desktop applications on something I can barely type on because the keyboard's too small, with a processor that is being pushed to it's limits if I have OpenOffice open and a web browser playing YouTube videos at the same time, with RAM that is furiously juggled because it's only 512 meg. The graphics subsystem can barely handle itself let alone adding the 3-D candy of Compiz (which is turned off, but seems to be available as an option).

In short there are a number of features on the EEE that are probably inappropriate for the platform but are available, taking up memory space or storage space (which is a premium on this little thing), just as they are available on my desktop. Is it really necessary to have the same features on a 512 meg 900Mhz system with 4 gig of storage and a all-in-one design the size of a paperback book as my dual-core 2.13 Ghz desktop with 2 gig of RAM and 200+ gig of storage?

Probably not, at least not for the average user. Still, I can connect a USB hub to the EEE, and from that have a printer, keyboard and mouse, and I can hook up an external monitor, even if the resolution isn't all that great due to limitations of the graphics processor. In other words, the EEE can be a really portable computer for going between work and home with emergency access to my data stored on it when I'm in between "docks".

That's the only reason I could see for using netbooks like this with features that don't really scale down this small; portable desktops where you can dock it for convenient access, while still having access to your data while out at the coffee shop.

I'm still using it and adapting to it. I find myself leaning on the Mac laptop still for things because while it's not as small or light, it does just work, and I'm not fighting frustration with the keyboard.

But I did swear I was going to give the mini-keyboard a shot...so look forward to another installment of triple-EEE info in the near future!

Playing With an Asus EEE PC

Way back when we first started getting the house situated, we worked on a way to get everyone online.

My wife got a Mac laptop, a white MacBook, now about three years old or so.

I bought a desktop, a really killer Linux system with RAID and the whole shebang. I also have a belongs-to-the-day-job black MacBook.

My toddler son got a destined-to-be-scrapped Mac G5, which was top of the line before Apple moved to Intel processors but today was adequate for playing DVD's and playing online flash games, which are the two things he pretty much limits himself to doing.

My daughter, a teenager, klutzy and at times rather irresponsible (she's destroyed somewhere between three and five phones in a year and a half and she's responsible for replacing them herself...and she still doesn't take better care of them) got an EEE PC. A netbook. I thought it would be perfect as a starter laptop for her; it has USB ports so she could use a USB keyboard and mouse to work on papers, it's tiny so she could curl up in a corner somewhere to work on whatever she's working on, works on the wireless network, runs Linux so it's nearly immune to most of the crud out there targeting Windows, and it has a solid state disk, making storage a premium but for what she does it shouldn't matter. The tradeoff was no moving parts so it could take a little more rough handling without the heads of the drive crashing since an SSD drive doesn't have heads or platters to crash.

I was wrong. She managed to damage it once, killing the power supply, necessitating a trip back to the factory. Then months later we notice that she's using her brother's computer more and more; what's wrong with your triple-E?

"The keyboard doesn't work right..."

sigh

I look at the thing. She's dropped it so many times that I feel bad for it. Of course, it's her brother's fault, the four year old tripped over the power cable that she would string across a room; I can see it happening once, maybe twice, but there comes a point where you learn to not string things at ankle level lest electronics go flying, wouldn't you think?

True enough, some of the keys are dead. IThe function keys for the fake number pad function isn't causing it. A reinstall of the software (she hardly did anything to customize the thing) didn't affect it, so it wasn't a software setting. I disassembled the keyboard to reseat the ribbon connecting it to the motherboard. Nothing. I also found that a USB keyboard works fine, so the keys on the keyboard itself aren't sticking.

She just managed to kill certain keys on the keyboard. "It just stopped working," she said.

I've been considering attempting to find something more portable for my computing needs. Mainly for things like going to Barnes and Noble for editing my first draft of a novel in OpenOffice, or doing light web browsing. I'm not sure about the size of the keyboard, but something with the form factor of the EEE PC might fit the bill otherwise, so I take it.

"But I'm using it!"

Keep in mind we've not seen her use it for months, and the power cable was upstairs not even plugged in. When I got it from her the battery was dead. Stone dead.

First things first. After failing to revive the keyboard, I scrounge around a bit and find a possible replacement keyboard on Amazon (of all things) for $15. I put in the order for 3-5 day shipping (overnight was $20!), seeing as the USB keyboard will suffice for a little while as a makeshift replacement.

Second, I do updates, seeing as she's not touched the software updates. I get a bad taste in my mouth when I realize that Asus looks to have pretty much abandoned the plucky little 4G Surf (no webcam, 512 meg of RAM, 4 gig storage). OpenOffice is stuck at version 2. Ugh.

I again scrape the webbertubes for some advice and find that Ubuntu, the Linux distro I run on my desktop now, has a Netbook Remix available. It's a modern distro meant specifically for netbooks (big surprise from the name, I know). Download, burn the CD, boot and install, run the updates, and now the netbook is running essentially Ubuntu 9.10 with the latest kernel and security updates (and OpenOffice 3!).

I even get Skype installed. I plugged in a USB Quickcam, and found that it worked with Cheese, the camera booth app. Skype, unfortunately, refuses to work with it. Why? No clue. But it does appear that it will receive video, and I can do audio (and text) chat. So that much works.

I get SSH installed, and the SSH Server. If you know what secure shell is, then you know how cool this can be. After getting that installed, I logged into the EEE from my desktop computer with X forwarded and ran the rest of my updates and changes from my desktop console while the EEE sat on a stand charging up with the LCD sleeping.

Can it play online movies like YouTube? Barely. The thing has 512 meg of RAM and is a Celeron 900 Mhz processor. It strains and grunts and groans, but if you're not taxing the little dude it'll play them.

It can also record in MP3 format now that I installed Audacity.

Storage? It won't store movies well. At the moment it is running with about 300 meg free on storage. I could stick in an SD card to add a couple gig, though.

What are my initial impressions? It's impressive what it can do. I can't take it out as a road warrior device yet because of the lack of a functioning onboard keyboard; that'll have to wait until the new one comes in, and then I have to hope it's the right kind and will fit. I also don't know what shape the battery is in. My daughter swore it won't hold a charge; I haven't tested it yet, really.

I also don't like the way the trackpad buttons work. It's like a rocker bar to left and right click. Seems...weird. And of course the keys are tiny and take some getting used to in order to use (a task that's pretty impossible when 1/4 of the keys don't work).

For its size, it's impressive, and when I'm in my home network range it can get a boost from the fact that I can secure shell into my home computer and tap into some of the applications and files from there. Out on the road I could probably secure shell into a remote system, but speed would be an issue. Could it function on it's own?

It would probably be better if I had dainty feminine hands, but again, the jury will have to hold out on that until I get a better chance to test it when and if it gets a functional keyboard. I have enough trouble typing properly with a full size keyboard (although the tiny keys may force me to take my time and not make as many mistakes in the first place...)

So that's my new project. The daughter is computerless and at the mercy of her four year old brother; it's been made clear to her that that computer was made for him and she had one free computer and she broke it and stopped using it, so it's been appropriated. She's free to save her money from her job to get a cheap laptop, and instead she opts to play Pogo and Facebook games on her brother's Mac. If he tells her to get off it, she does. Which gives a four year old much joy to have power over someone, it seems (to be fair he rarely kicks her off his computer though).

I'll have to see how things play out. Maybe I'll update this more after the keyboard comes in, supposedly this upcoming week!

Building a "Media PC"

I decided to undertake a new mini-project. The goal was to eliminate our satellite television service, and thus save a decent but not huge amount of money each year.

I had taken a half-day from work because of crap weather; I figured that was a good time to try working on this back-burner project. I pieced together a system from old spare parts and installed Windows XP on it (I had a number of systems that I had removed Windows from and installed Linux, so licensing shouldn't be a problem).

We have a Vizio LCD television that had an RGB PC connector and an audio input jack...plugged in all the cables, and it actually worked fairly well as a computer with a giant monitor. I was fairly surprised at this!

Now...TV. The name that came to my mind for streaming television shows was Hulu.com. My son is absolutely in love with the cartoon Voltron now thanks to streaming Hulu to the TV.

The results weren't fantastic, but they weren't totally horrible. We have a 1 megabit download speed over DSL, which is the bottom rung of what Hulu said is needed for streaming their content. What this means in practical terms is that any sustained download...that is, anything that takes more than a minute or two...causes the Hulu stream to pause. Ouch!

Because of the way Hulu has licensed their content from studios they can't allow people to cache more than a few minutes' worth of the shows. They are using some wonderful Adobe Flash feature to prevent you from downloading the entire show for viewing all at once so it doesn't hiccup and burp in mid-viewing.

Because I have a computer, my wife has a computer, my son and daughter have a computer...if any of them are downloading updates, updating iTunes podcasts, or transferring a Pogo.com applet, the Hulu program pauses on us.

Annoying? Yes. I don't mind this inconvenience much because any shows we really liked we bought on DVD as a whole season, but for my family this could be a deal breaker.

I downloaded an alpha version of Boxee, an open source cross-platform video viewer program that apparently has a lot of features (including a free iPod/iPhone application to act as a remote!). It was so very promising...but I can't yet know if it is decent or not because it doesn't work on the media computer I cobbled together. The system has a Rage 128 Pro video card in it; okay enough to use as a basic workstation graphics card, but on launching Boxee all I got was a white screen from which I could only exit using the Windows task key, then telling Boxee to quit from task manager.

I looked around online and it seems that Boxee requires OpenGL 1.4 or higher. The Rage Pro supports, I believe, 1.3 or lower. Since it's a legacy card no longer supported that means no OpenGL updates. That leaves me with having to find a cheap video card to replace this one before I can test Boxee.

I installed iTunes on the old media system as well. I opened sharing on my personal iTunes system and enabled it on the media computer, and it played my music library without any problems and played an open source movie my son loves watching called Big Buck Bunny without any issues as well. So if I buy any TV shows, buy any movies, or download video podcasts then I should be able to see them just fine on the media computer.

I also connected an old webcam and inexpensive omnidirectional microphone to the media system and installed Skype. Our TV is now turned into a giant videophone. Pretty neat when the grandparents call in to talk to their grandson!

So where does that leave me? At the moment, I have to purchase a newer video card, and the streaming of TV programs only works "so so". Anything with iTunes, streamed from another system or on the computer itself, works well. We already have a DVD player so there's no incentive to rip my DVD's to the hard disk.

The computer itself is rather weak on the horsepower scale with a 1.7 GHz P4 and 1 gig of memory and a 40 gig hard disk, but as I mentioned the only problem I've had has been the fault of Hulu's crazy caching issues coupled with our "measly" 1 megabit download speed.

I'll have to see if Boxee improves things with cached downloads, otherwise I might only have a neat gadget for web browsing with a giant monitor. If anyone has suggestions for viewing ad-supported television content from the web I'm open to it!

Twitter as a Teeny Bit of Microblogging Fun

I finally did it. I broke down and created a Twitter account.

For those who have been hiding in the desert for the past couple years, Twitter is a microblogging site that lets you post quick messages, 140 characters or less, to legions of fans (or in my case, myself).

It's another social networking site; the kind I sort of blasted previously regarding Facebook. Twitter only has spambots, so far...I had three "girls" following me within two minutes (following means they're monitoring your "tweets", or updates) telling me how they loved hot guys. I blocked them right off the bat.

It's kind of neat in that it is convenient; I can send updates from my phone (unlimited texting to number 40404 after you register your phone), my iPod over wifi, my computer,...there's only about have a metric f***ton of applications dedicated to monitoring and updating your twitter account.

The truth is that I started monitoring several accounts from the web, and eventually it just got to be a pain in the butt. I had started checking in on a college student with a real knack for utilizing social media in ways most authors could probably take notes on (I don't know how she does it and still has a life to blog about!), a local journalist that gives some interesting insights to what people are like offscreen, Mur Lafferty (an author I have blogged about several times before), and a few others that are just really funny. I'm still expanding the number of people I'm following.

I wanted a way to consolidate them all from a simple interface; everything I installed, however, required me to register an account. So I registered. I set up my phone. I figured if I was going to have another account, I might as well give it an honest try before hating it.

I'm thinking of using it for notes, like web sites I want to make note of or notes to myself. I don't know yet. It might be a good tool for trying to get rid of my "wordiness" problem, since each tweet is limited to 140 characters.

The only thing I REALLY have to careful of is being too honest. It's too easy to want to spew some random brain fart that could land you in hot water, especially if it's about work or personal things. You can hide your tweets (make them "personal") so only friends can see them...but still, it's a risk that too many dippy teenagers (and a worrying number of adults) don't think about now. So basically I only post things that I wouldn't mind my mother seeing.

(Another issue is that with my brain's goofy wiring, I still say things that are inappropriate...so says my wife, anyway.)

Anyway it's an experiment. No, I can't share the link here since it can reveal a bit too much about my superhero identity. Some of you already may know who I am. Others, if you're really curious, feel free to leave a comment with info on how to contact you and if I am adequately removed from you professionally I'll let you know who I am.