I made the visit to Trickie Dickies that I needed to make and while I was there spied something that I had read about on Boing Boing last week. Cyber Clean is an amazing yellow goop that claims to be able to clean all the germ ridden goop from all of your keyboards, phones and other electrical gear. I don’t know if it’s as anti-bacterial as they claim, but it’s great fun. And set the boy and I off on another non-Newtonian fluid side-track again. The joys of being in a family of geeks.

My car needed a wheel alignment so after dropping my car into the lovely guys at Beaurepaires Henderson (they are always so cheerful) I walked around the corner and parked myself at a small lunchbar. Armed with a decent cup of coffee I pulled out my eee PC and my phone and set myself up to get on the net.

My eee PC is getting a lot of use. I don’t like being without an internet connection so I use a bluetooth connection to my Windows Mobile phone’s internet sharing application. It takes a few minutes (and a bit of command line tweaking) to get it all set up but it’s definitely worth it.

My next move with the eee PC will be to look at some different operating systems. At the moment this version of Ubuntu is the one that I am most interested in looking at.

That will have to wait for another catch up day though.

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Of interest I can’t play any Muxtapes in Firefox on either my laptop (Vista) or the eee PC. I think it might be something to do with the extensions that I have installed. I need to rouse myself and troubleshoot it further.

I realised that it probably wasn’t my extensions that were causing the problem when I discovered that YouTube videos weren’t playing in FireFox. I’ve had this problem before – only in Vista – that the video appears to load, plays for two seconds and then stops. If I drag the slder along it starts briefly but without sound. It’s an issue with Macromedia Flash.

Fortunately I found the answer a couple of weeks ago (it happens regularly) in the Mozilla Forums. Sure enough, navigating through to My C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\Macromed\Flash folder finds two files with “FlashUtil” as part of the name, FlashUtil9e.exe and NPSWF32_FlashUtil.exe. I clicked on the second file, ran the installer, rebooted and YouTube works again. Even better, my new Muxtape works too!

Of course I still want to sort out the eee PC’s Muxtape problem as well. In this case YouTubes are playing?

EDIT: It was a Flash problem as well. Thanks to the friendly guys at the Eee PC forum at http://wiki.eeeuser.com I was directed to upgrade my Flash Player to the latest version…

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• I upgraded the eee PC by adding a 2GB memory stick. Although the stock standard installation of Xandros only recognises the first gigabite of that memory, I think it was a worthwhile upgrade in anticipation of further “upgrades” to come. I have been able to simultaneously open a couple of documents in Open Office, several tabs in a couple of Firefox windows and play some MP3s without too much difficultly. I’m interested in going further though and looking at putting Ubuntu on the machine to have a look at how it handles things.

• I applied Vista SP1 to my laptop (HP 6710). I have 4GB of ram in there and finally it all shows up in the Syem Properties. Whether it’s being used is a different matter of course! This is the best installation of Vista that I have done (out of about 25) and I was a bit aprehensive about applying all of the “updates” but in the end it has all worked out OK. And yes, again I did backup first.

• Last night I gave in and upgraded this site to WordPress 2.5 RC1. I backed up first – I have an automatic backup of all the sites that I look after happen every weekend – and uploaded the files. The upgrade was smooth and, so far, everything appears to be cooperating. I like the look of the new dashboard, and am particularly happy with the new addition of the full screen button – less clutter! I am looking forward to testing the new “Add Media” component of the “Write” page. More about that at the end of this post.

• This afternoon I got a tad side-tracked by the latest fad. Muxtape is a 21st century way of sharing your favourite music with your friends aka the old fashioned mixtape. It’s super simple – upload 12 MP3s, sort out the order and share the URL. My Muxtape is here – today it’s a mellow late afternoon playlist taken from the first twelve songs from my favourite iPod playlist. I could change things tomorrow by uploading some different songs. It’s simplicity is its strength – although I’d love to see a few stats. Who else likes Cordova from the Indigo Girls? And how many other people have played my Muxtape? I’m sure it will all come. Of interest I can’t play any Muxtapes in Firefox on either my laptop (Vista) or the eee PC. I think it might be something to do with the extensions that I have installed. I need to rouse myself and troubleshoot it further.

• The other job that I’ve been doing over the last few days is putting together a P4 2.8GHz machine for my daughter and her family. Their old Celery is dreadfully slow so I have put together some old parts and got a nice machine for them to use. It’s a nice solid P4, 1.5GB ram, DVD RW and has 180GB of hard drive space for them to collect photos of my grandchildren. It’s running Xp but after that I loaded Open Office and a whole lot of other free and open source programmes. Hopefully it will suit them for a little while.

And so to “Add Media”. Firstly an image:

Easy. The options are really clear and easy to follow. And, incidentally, checkout a whole gallery of Last Supper pictures (I know – Easter is over …).

And a link to a YouTube (make sure that you have your headphones on):

The Virtual Barber

or via the embed media button in the advanced options:

Which may or may not be something that Artichoke mentioned to me a couple of weeks ago? It’s definitely worth the five minutes it takes to watch / listen / think about.

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They hadn’t done the same with the nice shiney Mac Book Air sitting just a metre away. Surely if the eee PC needs Norton Internet Security when it runs Xandros (with it’s own rather redundant antivirus) then the MBA needs the same kind of attention.

Oh well. It provided me with material for my 70th.

EDIT: Slightly related – here’s a story about losing the Mac Book Air .

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Apologies for the poor video quality. It came from a zoomed in digital camera.

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The EeePc is a 7 inch screened laptop with a 900MHz processor, 512MB of ram and a 4GB (2GB available as well and an 8GB model is one the way) solid state hard drive. It has three USB ports, an SD card reader, a VGA port for an external LCD display (has anyone tried a projector? It’s on the task list for tomorrow), microphone and headphone sockets and an integrated webcam. It has wireless and ethernet connections and software to make the most of all of its features. It runs Xandros flavoured Linux (although Windows XP is a supported option) and comes in black or white (Asus are planning to offer other colours shortly) and I got the black one. It’s very cool.

I took the EeePc with me to Rotorua with the intention of trying it out for the few days that I was away from home. I would have dearly loved to have it as my only laptop whilst away, however something stopped me. Battery life. My super-duper pimped out HP6710b routinely gives me 2-3 hours of battery life. Add in the extended battery and turn doen every setting in sight and I can double that and get six hours of decent usage. My first forays into EeePc-dom weren’t looking good in the battery department. At first unplugged sessions gave me well under two hours battery life (admittedly with wireless on, SD and USB plugged in).

During the conference I discovered that I could use the EeePc quite easily with the screen brightness turned right down. I also discovered that I could survive without wireless when I was taking notes (actually there were moments when I was forced to cope without wireless but that was adifferent matter all together!). After a day I took my 4GB SD card out. I don’t know if that helped or not. Connecting via wireless is reasonably easy however it annoys me that I have to re-enter the WPA key everything I reconnect to my home network. I’ll have to look out for a fix for that. Potentially that could be difficult for some users.

When you first turn on the EeePc you are faced with a set of tabbed pages that offer easy access to many applications. These tabs are labelled Internet, Work, Learn, Play, Settings and Favourites and make it really easy to get your favourite applications. The Internet tab gives you Firefox, Thunderbird, Skype and Messenger (Pidgin for multiple accounts) and quick links to iGoogle, Google Docs, a world clock and Internet Radio. The Work tab offers OpenOffice2.0 applications and Adobe Reader. There is also a dictionary and a file manager. Learn has a variety of educational programmes and in Play you can access some games and the various media managers and webcam software. Settings allows you to customise the machine – but not much.

I found the tabbed interface to be a little restrictive. However, I think that the very thing that limited me could be powerful for children and their busy teachers. It’s really easy to find the applications that you want – although they are not labelled by their correct titles in all cases.

Shortly after I got my hands on the laptop I went searching around the web to find out more about it. There is a fantastic wiki and a host of user sites and pages with all sorts of useful tips and hacks. The first thing that I did was activate full desktop mode. In this mode you get a very useful desktop – but in miniature. And this is where the EeePC becomes really useful. In this mode you get more choices and are able to access some of the deeper stuff. For example, it’s possible to use any one of several terminal programmes instead of the default Konsole. And once inside terminal mode you can use some long forgotten DOS and Linux wizardry to find out and do more stuff.

The EeePc is very small and it’s a little difficult to balance it on your knee. I found that it is most comfortable to use on a table or on a platform on your knee. If you plug in an external drive (USB key or external drive) it all feels very precarious unless its sitting on a table. I can report that all of my USB keys and external hard drives were recognised and mounted by the file system. It’s also possible to plug in a USB mouse and keyboard and with an LCD monitor as well you have a fully fledged internet or word processing desktop.

Speaking of word processing – I couldn’t on the EeePc. I could take notes but if I went too fast my large clumsy fingers fumbled on the small keys and I made a lot of errors. Of course a week of continued effort could change that! On the other hand that could mean that the computer is ideal for a child to use. We’ll be trying that out shortly. I’ll report on the results.

Useful links

Asus Official Site

Wikipedia Link

EeeUser.com and Wiki

Eee Laptop

Educational software

Technorati Links 

Windows XP

Load Windows Server 2003

Load Leopard! on the EeePc

Finally, how this website renders under Firefox on the EeePc

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