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Acer Aspire One
I have a new toy. I've been lusting after one of the so called 'netbooks' for a while, but as I couldn't justify it, I've been holding off, knowing that the price will drop of the older models and drawing up a selection criteria.
When the supermarkets started stocking them I knew I'd be able to get a good deal, and this thursday, as we did our weekly shop at ASDA, they were selling the Acer Aspire One for £215. This was the one I had my eye on too, with a 120GB hard disk. The only thing it doesn't have is bluetooth, and I only use that for Blackberry connectivity these days, and have a usb adaptor or two hanging around. Plus there's this cute almost-flush usb adaptor doing the rounds for £15 or so, so why pay more for a Lenovo or Asus 'top of the line' netbook for just that?
I never thought I would, but I succumbed to walking around ASDA, shopping, with my iPhone checking out the excellent Ubuntu documentation (yes, I'm switching from Debian to Ubuntu. Don't hate me. I'll still run vanilla Deb on a server..) to make sure I could get it working, before purchasing it. At least it wasn't the Blackberry. Of course, a busy week at work means I didn't get to play with it properly until the weekend.
The Linux it comes with is OK, but I can see how people might be underwhelmed. Rather than learn another *nix variant, I used the USBstick method of live booting Ubuntu 8.10 to install it. A hint for those trying - the Ubuntu 8.10 program appears to be slightly b0rked - it created the image on the 4GB Kingston Data Traveller stick I had, but it wouldn't boot, with a 'invalid boot partition' image. This is apparently a reported bug on Launchpad, and the workaround is to use a different tool - the distro agnostic unetbootin. Interestingly, everyone reporting it had a Kingston 4GB stick..
Ubuntu then installed fine, no wireless. As the docs said, I did a full update and installed the backports Atheros driver. No joy. Much rebooting and checking of /var/log/messages and dmesg and swearing. Then I tried turning it on with the soft switch. Success! Ahem.. Rebooted after some other changes and... no wireless. More swearing, more pressing switches. Eventually discovered via Ubuntu forums that problems with the WPA authentication being fixed by shutting down and leaving it for a few mins prompted me to try that, and success! No idea what that's about, but so far (touch wood) its worked fine. Oh, and the 120GB hard disk? 160GB in mine. Splendid!
I'm documenting what I install for a followup 'what to add after installing Ubuntu' meme thats doing the rounds on the Ubuntu Planet blog aggregator.

I've used the word Ubuntu a lot, but this experience, and that of my MacBook has really shown me how far the distro is ahead of the others in terms of documentation and thinking about what people want to do with it. Very impressed so far.
Of course, Fedora Core 10 ('Cambridge' heh.) is out on Tuesday, so I'll be trialling that at work. It may win me over, you never now.

It looks like I'm not the only one buying one of these. And blogging about it..

Posted at: 23:31:01 23 Nov 2008 [/gadgets] permanent link

Twittering.
People seem to, and I don't seem to get to my blog as much as I'd like (unlike this weekend, perhaps). Do you? Should I?

Posted at: 23:27:19 23 Nov 2008 [/blogstuff] permanent link

Survivors
on BBC tonight. Didn't suck. Colour me surprised!

Posted at: 23:26:02 23 Nov 2008 [/tv] permanent link

Patterson Joseph for Doctor Who!
I thus declare my allegiance. He would be great, in my opinion. BBC news article, if you don't know what I'm talking about

Posted at: 23:00:46 23 Nov 2008 [/tv] permanent link

Blackberry Bold
This was finally released by T-Mobile, so of course I got one to 'evaluate' for work. The first (working) 3G Blackberry from RIM definitely bears investigation..
Actually, I'm quite impressed. The 3G modem works easily under Linux using WVDial (you can figure it out, but a good set of instructions are here.
I'm also impressed how open it is - the internet memory and the microSD card show up as drives under Linux, and both Ubuntu 8.10 and Fedora Core 9 appear to charge the device just fine from the USB port. With the latest (1.4) version of Banshee the drives show up as mass storage devices so you can copy music files to and fro (no support for Ogg that I'm aware). Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to support playlist sync, but I might look into syncropated to provide playlist sync. If it supported smart playlist sync and remembering the position of files so marked, I'd be able to switch away from my iPhone. Alas, it doesn't seem to, but I might look to see if there are music players for the BB that do..
Almost forgot - its apparently possible to set-up two way syncing using Multisync with Evolution, so I could sync diary and address book, if I wanted.
Battery life is pretty good. I use BlueProximity at work to lock and unlock my screen when I walk away and back to my laptop, and the downside is that I haven't hit the sweet spot between pinging the bluetooth often enough to be responsive and draining the battery, so its hard on the phone. My old BB Pearl lasted just over a day, but it looks like the Bold will last two easy.
The downsides? Well, the web browsing experience is pretty crummy still - I installed Opera but that didn't help much, its still nowhere as nice as the iPhone.
I guess my next best hope is the T-Mobile Android G1. I can't get it via work, as its not on the business tariff, and it has enough issues (3.5 headphone adaptor? Hello?) that I don't intend getting one for me just yet, but its very promising. Interestingly, the Banshee 1.4 release brings native G1 support - smart playlists, everything. It is very tempting.. Perhaps I'll wait for some other phones to come out with the Android OS on (or an iPhone port! :-).

Posted at: 11:38:27 22 Nov 2008 [/gadgets] permanent link

Portico Quartet
Are coming back to the Junction on the 30th. We've booked tickets, anyone fancy joining us?

Posted at: 11:34:52 22 Nov 2008 [/live] permanent link

OMG WTF?
There's no pine or mutt in the Ubuntu repositories!!

Posted at: 11:31:16 22 Nov 2008 [] permanent link

The Graveyard Book
By Neil Gaiman
This being his latest young adult book, featuring Nobody 'Bod' Owens, and growing up in a graveyard, after his parents were murdered by a serial killer, this is in no way a morbid book!
Capsule Review: Wow.
Probably his best book to date - wonderfully written, incorporating all kinds of legends and fantasies and real world facts that combine beautifully. I bought it in hardback as part of a recent book splurge (I was getting low, OK?), and I'm very glad I did. Looking forward to rereading it!

Posted at: 11:11:57 22 Nov 2008 [/books] permanent link

Arabesk
By Jon Courtenay Grimwood
A three volume book made up of Pashazade, Effendi and Felaheen.
Madhatter loaned me this. Combining the three books into one makes for a joined up narrative, but I suspect I'd have enjoyed it more if I had read it as three separate books. Nothing to stop me doing that, but once I've started...
The books were very evocative of the Arab world I've holidayed in - Grimwood has done a good job of bringing the culture and experience to life, as far as I can tell, anyway. This would be a great series to read while in Tunisia, or Marrakech, or even one of the Gulf states. The story weaves near future sci-fi believably, with genetic technology being an underlying theme, as well, as the use and abuse of power and how people adapt to the future. The protagonist is a little *too* competent for me - genetically engineered or not, he was just a little too capable. Grimwood did a good job of making him believably, but there were still points in the book where the only reason he failed was to further the narrative. He did a good job of weaving most of the threads together, however.
I think I've figured out the ending, but I'm not sure!

Posted at: 07:38:45 13 Nov 2008 [/books] permanent link

Ubuntu on my Macbook
So a few weeks previous, running low on space on the 120GB drive I'd got with my core 2 duo black macbook, I bought a larger hard disk for it (first from Dabs, which was a mistake, because apparently there are two types of 2.5" disk, one larger than the other. and the Macbook takes the smaller, naturally. I then went to macupgrades.co.uk, and got a 320GB drive for not much more, which fitted perfectly. Restore was easy with Superduper!. A week or so later, I was reading about the Ubuntu 8.10 release, and came across the Ubuntu Community page for installing on Macbooks.
It showed that using BootCamp, I could partition my drive without losing data, and install Ubuntu. So I did. The page also covered the setup for the hardware, which, apart from the iSight, worked out of the box. I even got multi touch button clicking working, which is needed on the Macbooks, and damn cool!
I can't honestly say what I did to get the iSight working, but the instructions were most of it. I think the issue is that you need to power cycle, not just reboot, after copying over the firmware, otherwise it doesn't detect the camera properly. Took me til 2am sat night to discover that, though.. The things I'll do to get Cheese working..

I'm impressed with the hardware detection - the Ubuntu article is pretty comprehensive, but I could have used 90% of the kit out of the box.
I liked the fact that it mounted the HFS+ partition (albeit read-only) so I could copy files over.
In fact, with the aid of the iTunes and Rhythmbox Ratings script and site, I was able to import all the items in my iTunes library into RhythmBox, and then import all the ratings. As I've spent hours rating most of my library, and have playlists that select on ratings, last played etc, all of which I can replicate in RhythmBox, being able to import all of this was very helpful and rather cool. A tip for anyone else trying this, as mentioned in the comments on the site, you need to make sure that the songs have a rating first before running the script, or it can't adjust the ratings correctly. I simply marked all my songs as 1 star, then reran the script. Power saving works flawlessly, not something I've had good experiences with on Linux.

On the downside, I've noticed the laptop runs hotter, although I suspect I can adjust the fan speeds until I get the coolness I'm used to. Also, Network Manager, while being fine and all that, does still lose its mind from time to time and not connect the wireless networks I use.

I'm very tempted to move over. I've ported my RSS feeds from NetNewsWire to Google Reader, and bought an app for the iPhone that syncs with it. Google reader, using Gears, can be used offline, so I've not lost any functionality, and have found it faster than NNW, although not quite as much of a pleasure to use. The iPhone. Therein lies the sticking point. I can reformat my iPod to FAT32 and use it with RhythmBox - I can even install RocketBox and play Ogg files, but the iPhone itself I may not be abe to manage or sync. I've jailbroken it, and I know people have got it working, but its flaky.
Will I keep booting into MacosX to sync the iPhone, or will I change it to another device? I'm not sure. Podcast syncing and tethering are 'just around the corner' for the iPhone, which would greatly reduce the need to sync it, as that's what I listen to the most. Also, what alternatives are there? The N95/6 is a great phone, Symbian etc, but reportedly hard to get to work with Linux. I had high hopes for the Android phone, but I don't like the hardware - at least I can change the headphones on the iPhone!

Posted at: 22:40:42 6 Nov 2008 [/gadgets] permanent link