Computers

Does yours pop-up in the bottom right of your screen (just at that annoying moment where you need to get to the thing that’s hidden by it!?!?). If so take a look at J4mie’s GMail Notifier Lamp.

photo credit: greg westfall

I love my EEE, it’s fantastic - I’ll be taking it on holiday instead of the Philips X53 for the first time this year.

It does everything, bar one thing….. Manage my iPod. I used to be able to switch albums on the iPod at the end of every day, a quick sync and new music or podcasts for tomorrow - holidays are a great time for catching up on podcasts!

Alright I know that with the EEE the hard drive probably couldn’t hold all my music, but I’d be willing to invest in a light external USB hard drive (as recommended by), as I only have a 2GB Nano.

I’ve read about getting iTunes working under Crossover, or Wine. Both of these solutions seem to be frought with a problems trying to get something to run on a box that it was never designed for!

Whilst looking at possible random solutions this week, I stumbled across Songbird based on the Mozilla platform (like all things at Mozilla developers). As Mark O’Neill says, it’s always worth being interested in anything based on this platform that the Mozilla guys thing is worth linking to!

One of the major advantages I noted (apart from it being open source and having all the tabs and whistles you’d expect from Mozilla), is that you can choose to buy music from iTunes, Amazon’s MP3 store and eMusic.

Mark notes another problem:

One problem I have found is that you cannot run iTunes music files on both iTunes and Songbird at the same time. So if you want to run iTunes music on Songbird, you must first de-authorize and uninstall iTunes from your computer. This is the hated DRM copy protection at work, not the fault of Songbird.

Mark says it’s not an iTunes killer yet, but it does hold the same kind of promise that Firefox did when you started looking at it alongside Internet Explorer. This is a project I’ll be watching!

If/when I do get round to do thing, I’d definitely be following the guide that Ross wrote - “How to use Songbird to manage your iPod“

I’ve installed CommentLuv here today, to reward my comment authors more (particularly now the comment policy is in force and I feel perfectly happy about blowing away any comments that are spammy or I don’t like! )

We all love comments, but CommentLuv takes this one step further and places a direct link to the comment authors latest post - underneath the comment.

They promote both their site (using the URL field of the comment), and their latest post - now that is quite a reward for engaging with you!

It will automatically fetch your latest post from your feed to display it and in the latest version the comment author can specify their feed by putting their feed url in between [feed] and [/feed] at the end of their comment.

What are you waiting for? Try it now!

The ASUS eee PC 900 has been in the house (and out and about a bit!) for just over a week now, and as I’ve already pointed out the eee Desktop, it’s about time I talked about this device!

My other half thought I was barking mad taking photo’s of the box, but I wanted to be able to post some decent information here! I also didn’t want to get into the photo’s beacuse Lisa Bettany does far better at opening laptop boxes than me!

Opening the box you wonder how on earth it’s so light, but at around 1kg the eee weights nearly nothing, and it’s charger is largely the same - this is the device I need if I’m going to get my Nikon D40x in the hand luggage as well.

As I took it out of the box, I was thrilled to see a little blue sticker on the side of the box! Some Chinese characters followed by the letters 5800maH, a lot has been written about the eee 900 shipping with a smaller battery in the UK. Interestingly just this week Asus have agreed for a nominal fee of £10 to replace the small batteries for one this size - thankfully I won’t have to do that!

The system is lightning fast booting (one of the reasons I doubt I’ll put Windows XP on it!), and I’m into the setup wizard straight away. I selected a UK keyboard - only to realise once I’ve booted that
half my key mappings are all over the place, but if I take it out of UK - I won’t have a £ symbol. More on this later!

Thankfully it shipped with the battery 30% charged so I could have a quick play and make a Skype video call within the first five minutes!!!

More to come on the modifications I make on this!

photo credit: Keiron Skillett

A colleague asked me if this was possible the other day, to take photo stills from say a film  (in his case of diving) and have them to put on say Facebook.

I couldn’t find what I used last time I did it, but did find this and have been reliably informed that it works, it produced an image of about 1MB (I didn’t check the resolution) - I’ve got a few that I’d like to extract so will give it a go when I get a chance!

Jake Luddington’s Guide to extract still images from DVD video.

I’d been debating one of these Asus EEE PC’s for a while, particularly after talking to Dan and him saying his was one of the best things since sliced bread. So once we’d booked our holiday and I knew I’d want to take the D-SLR and a laptop in the same bag, I was ready to order one.

I put it off a little bit I guess because I knew the new EEE PC 900 was coming out with a bigger hard drive capacity. So on release day I went hunting for one - I should have realised! I’d forgotten how annoying it can be to be an early adopter and not being able to get your hands on the technology!

I carefully watched sites for stock, at one point I rang a company to check they’d got stock - they had - by the time I walked back to my desk to order it online they’d sold out again!!!

Then finally on the evening of the 21st of May I managed to get my order in!

Now I’m used to dealing with huge e-commerce sites (Amazon etc), or even eBay sellers who don’t want negative feedback - invariably payment is taken and my goods are dispatched the following day, at a push the day after that is normally acceptable.

I know, I know the bank holiday weekend got in the way, and yes I know I’m an impatient so and so….

But here we are a week later - 28th May and I still don’t have my new toy!! I do however have their questionnaire about whether I’m enjoying my new product - I haven’t replied - YET! Payment was taken but I have been assured that my order is still undergoing “Processing…” and when it is dispatched I’ll get an email with tracking notification. I’ve had my suspicions about whether they really have the stock or are drop-shipping, but the company in question assure me they have the stock.

Today’s reply from them said:

I can confirm that your order was sent for packing and it is expected to be dispatch soon. Once the order has been dispatched, an email confirmation will be sent to you.

In the meantime, please feel free to contact us if you have any additional questions.

Just one, my friends, why is this taking so long!? Apparently my order has undergone various stages of processing including “Quality Control”, I can just see two guys sat at a desk examining my address:

“Do you think that sounds like a reputable area Jim?”

“I’m not sure Bill, let’s get it up on Google Maps”

“Hmmmm fields nearby, looks good - give it the rubber stamp and pass it on to see if his email address looks ok, they’ll check him out on Facebook”

More on this when EEE PC actually arrives!

UPDATE! UPDATE!
The status on the website no longer says “Processing…” It’s “Awaiting Courier Pick-Up”…. I just hope the courier doesn’t drop it!!!

I had a look at the EEE PC at the weekend, it looks kind of cool and weighs virtually nothing…

I know, I know, I know - it was designed for the younger market, but this laptop has infinite appeal for almost any IT professional, at sub 1kg with a solid state disk?

I quite liked the OS that was installed, but a friend suggested installing XP on it (and upping the disk to 4GB or buying a 4GB version) as then it will support everything XP supports, which means I can plug my phone in as a USB 3G modem - that’s the key thing. I could feasibly get away with this being what I take on holiday (sorry Em - no DVD’s anymore?!).

What are peoples thoughts, does anyone have one?

Some notes on websites I’ve found with info that may be considered useful going forward:

• Tnkgrl mods the Asus to have internal Bluetooth
• Ivancover’s guide to a variety of Asus upgrades (Bluetooth, USB, GPS, Flash etc).
• I found the PC Advisor review interesting, and agree with the weakness that it doesn’t have an internal modem just a phone socket, so I’d need to get a USB link to my phone working - under XP or the Linux built in OS. Tracey and Matt appear to have had the same concern, and found JKKMobile’s review of inserting a 3G modem, I think I’d be happier just knowing if it would support my HTC Trinity out of the box with the Linux OS, or whether I’d really need to install XP.

I was interested to read on The Register in the comments section:

Asus tells me the 3G upgrade’s coming by the end of the year and that it’ll be offered on its own, as an upgrade technical users can perform themselves.

There’s no word on price yet.

Anyone waiting the 8GB model isn’t likely to see one before the new year - Asus’ Eee PC production is current focused entirely on the 2GB and 4GB models, I’m told.

The other colours - pink, green and blue - will be coming in 2008 too.

Although an expansys thread suggest a utility I hadn’t heard of before , WMWifiRouter, which appears to work in WM6 and WM5 AKU 3.3 - looks like my WM5 has AKU 3.0. I installed the trial software and it ran, but wouldn’t work - I’ll try again later with some support advice they’ve given me!