An evening of little updates is quite rewarding. Things like sorting the cert on my IMAP server so it’s not expired and now works properly on my iPhone, plus moving this here blog to WP 2.7(.1). You’d think as a techie type I’d keep my own box up to date..
The little Advent 4211 is chugging along nicely. Its never going to be a day-to-day usable machine, but for a small, light, portable thingie its fine. I chucked another gigabyte of RAM in it ‘cos it was 8quid, can’t say I have noticed any difference to be honest. Maybe I will if I Hackintosh it, which I am tempted to do at some point.
The trackpad has been made usable by a new driver I found on some forum somewhere, that enables you to disable tap-to-click. I still do not like the one button for two buttons thing and I see that someone has hacked it into two butons now which is cool. I’m not sure I can be arsed to replace the trackpad itself with an aftermarket Synaptics one, though it is tempting.
Overall, I’m quite happy with it 
(but I need tethering for my iPhone to go with it…)
I’d been thinking about getting a “netbook” since the original Asus 701 was released, but having tried that there was no way my fat fingers were going to manage using it. The whole market has expanded recently and I tried the Merida thingie (another MSI Wind clone) in Sainsburys the other day and it seemed pretty good. Sadly though, it had no bluetooth so I didn’t buy it. Looking online threw up that PC World sold the Advent 4211, same thing but with bluetooth and a higher spec webcam, for 20quid less – 70quid less than the equivalent MSI Wind. I happened to be driving past a PC World on Wednesday afternoon so I stopped in and bought one (that experience is worth a posting of its own…).
I have no idea what the ULCPC bit means but it comes with XP, which works much like XP does. Its been bastardised by “The Tech Guys” but I’ve not really seen how other than the restore partition and the pointless Advent manual that is for desktop PCs and so was swiftly deleted.
The hardware itself is pretty nice. Its a full spec MSI Wind (bluetooth, 802.11n, Atom 1.6Ghz, 1GB RAM, 80GB HD, 10.1 LED screen) but with Advent written on the hood and in silver and black. The first thing that I noticed though, and so have others by the looks of Google, is that the trackpad sucks. You can not disable tap clicking (which I always do on laptops ‘cos I hate it) and consequently I keep mis-clicking and often find the curser darting about. The buttons too are a but poor, smal and because its one bar, pivoted in the middle, hard to click. Its better with time, but I feel a mod is needed.
Otherwise the little netbook rocks. Its pretty nippy for general internet browsing and Putty work (which is all I do when out and about). The bluetooth talks to my N95 so I can dial-up with 3G. The battery (a titchy 2200mA thing) seems to last for about 2 hours and the charger is pretty small for carrying about too. The keyboard, though small, is quite usable and is better after a few days use (the , . and / keys are really to small, but hey). The screen is gorgeous and despite being small is really nice to use.
If I was picking fault, aside from the trackpad, I’d say it is weghted badly so tends to rock back when the screen is open and that the power cord connector could be higher up the side (sit the 4211 on your lap and you find it pushing the cord up, which isn’t good for it).
I may stick Ubuntu on it too, but to be honest XP is behaving pretty well for me. All in all, I’m pretty pleased thus far with Advent 4211 and hopefully time will be favourable to it. We’ll see.
So, in the US an AppleTV got its price cut from 299USD to 229USD. With your new AppleTV you can, in the US, rent movies and such. Here in the UK though we don’t get movie rentals and nor do we get a price cut, an AppleTV still costs 199GBP. Rip-off. Thanks Apple.
I had not seen any real world power consumption figures for the new Dell R200 1U servers, so as I have a paid sat behind me I thought I’d stick a power meter on and see what they draw.
Power factor 0.90, Voltage 247V.
(Spec: Quad core Xeon X3220 @ 2.4GHz, 4x1GB RAM, 2x146GB SAS)
ATM I have two keyboards and mice on my desk. One pair for the G4 and one pair for the Macbook. The monitor allows me to switch between two inputs, so thats easy, but I had thought I’d be stuck with two sets of input devices. However, whilst looking at USB hubs in Maplin on Saturday I came across this little device, http://www.acrox.com.tw/productdetial_specifications.asp?id=124 which lets you switch 4 devices between 2 computers. Now I know USB is hot pluggable, but I can’t help but wonder how this will cope in real life. I’m thinking now that for 25quid I should just have bought it, but I figured I could get one for less that 25quid online, seemingly not though since I can only find this device, or anything like it, at Maplin.
Through the joy of blog comments (see here) the Junipers Network connect VPN client is now working for me on Leopard. This is good, as I can now switch my MacBook over to Leopard. Sadly that is not as easy as I had hoped, because Apple’s Migration Assistant can’t copy my user’s data again to refresh the Leopard system data from the Tiger install. I could probably hack it with rsync but I figured I’d just reinstall Leopard… I don’t remember it taking this long last time.
I am looking forward to little things like using Spotlight as a calculator, To-Do’s in Map.app 3 and tabs in Terminal. Thankfully since I last ventured into Leopard many of the things I didn’t like have been (or can be) fixed, like the transparent taskbar and Stacks icons (I kinda wish you could remove stacks altogether TBH).
Whilst I wait for my MacBook to finish installing I shall sort my pics from Paris at the weekend.
I’m still pondering desktop setups, but I have had what I think is a genius idea (like all my ideas, obviously 
). If I get a monitor with dual selectable inputs, and better yet one with picture-in-picture and picture-by-picture, I can connect up both the Desktop and the Laptop to one monitor and switch between them as I need. I can have the best of both worlds… but still have a sync’s issue. Hmm. Further thought needed.
So I’m still pondering the best desktop set up for me, work-wise. At the moment I run an old G4 (1.2Ghz, 2GB) as a desktop and VNC my MacBook (orig 1.83 CoreDuo) so I don’t have to mix up my two Mail.App installs and because I want (need ) dual displays. I’m not unhappy but nor am I happy with this, so I am pondering how best to move on.
Thought 1 was to by an iMac and hang my exiting screen off it, then somehow sort my Mail.App mess out, freeing up my MacBook to be a laptop infront of the sofa and ‘lugabout’. Then Apple brought out Santa Rosa on the MacBook and, you know me, I started thinking again. Thought 2 then was to upgrade the MacBook and keep the G4, though I am unsure how this helps! Ho-hum. So then I saw these Asus eee PCs, leading to thought 3… all I need for sitting about is a web browser, a terminal client and the ability to connect with Juniper’s Network Connect VPN client. So, buy an Asus thing and an iMac. This means that I’d have my MacBook for meetings etc. I don’t need so many machines though, so sell the MacBook and swap the iMac for a MacBook Pro, which is thought 4. I wouldn’t have to sync Macs, I could take the MBP to meetings etc and have the eee PC for quick browsing etc on the sofa, or indeed round and about.
This leads to my wondering though, what the heck, other than .2GHz more CPU and 128MB more Graphics RAM, does the 250quid difference (HD size excluded) get me between the two 15″ MBP models? I am puzzled.
So being the Mac fanboy I am, my Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) family pack arrived yesterday morning. Amusingly the courier delivered to my sisters work about an hour later and said to her “I know what you’ve got for Christmas, its one of them new iPods I’ve been delivering all day.”. My sister put him straight; that there isn’t a new iPod, its a new operating system. Apparently TNT had loads to deliver on Friday, which is nice.
Being busy with work during Friday day I didn’t get round to installing (onto an external drive on my MacBook) until about midnight – surely the best time of day to upgrade an OS, no? Unsurprisingly it installed fine, it booted fine, it worked fine. So this morning I swapped the internal and external drives over, which is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while as I was low on free space. Lovely then, all sorted.
Sadly though, in a bit, later today, I’ll be swapping the hard disks back over and going back to Tiger. This isn’t because Spaces isn’t as good as VirtuDesktops, of because the Finder isn’t all jazzy or because of anything like that, no, it is because the Juniper SSL VPN software I need for work at the moment plum doesn’t work on Leopard. Juniper acknowledge the issue and say it will be fixed, in Q2 2008. Suck.
Its a shame, 10.5 seems nice (well, TBH it seems like Tiger with the addons I used added in.).