…and I had trashed it! Never happy unless I am tinkering I made one change too many last night. I am not sure whether it was the script to shut down the device when the lid is closed or a new tool to manage the simple interface but either way it caused the EEE to constantly reboot on startup. If this had been Windows I might have been able to unpick the damage I had done but it quickly became obvious that this was not going to be possible for me under Linux. So I needed to rebuild the whole … Read the rest

So I have had my EEE PC for a week now and thought that it would be a good opportunity to let you have my initial thoughts. For those that aren’t familiar with it the EEE is a Linux based, fully featured, high portable laptop for around £200. It is also tiny being just slightly larger than a hardback book.

At this price point you could reasonably expect the spec to be cut price but it’s not the case. I have the 2gb "Surf" edition which comes with wifi, 3xusb 2.0 ports, Ethernet, vga out, headphone and microphone sockets and … Read the rest

Well almost. If you have an Orange mobile phone SIM then it seems that you can send up to 30 texts per month for free from their website. Why would you bother? Well my main phone is on t-mobile but I keep a phone with an Orange SIM so that I can take advantage of the 2-for-1 cinema tickets offer on Wednesdays. Occasionally I leave my phone at home and could do with sending a text and now I can. It’s also easier to send longer texts using a full keyboard than using t9.

Log into your account at the … Read the rest

So I received my Asus EEE PC yesterday and immediately set about playing with it and changing the interface. The device itself is just great and I’ll blog about it later but I wanted to share my thoughts on Linux first.

The EEE uses a customised version of the Debian distribution and out of the box has what is called the simple interface (shown left). I initially eschewed this in favour of the advanced version which is basically a Windows XP look-alike. I quickly realised that this was adding little value as it just gave huge areas of empty space … Read the rest

One of my biggest gripes about eBay has always been the feedback system and how it works – in fact I have written about it previously and often refer sellers to this post when they write to me asking for feed back. So I was interested to see on the BBC website today that eBay are due to bring in some changes to the system from May. However,  the change seems to be to simply not allow anything but positive feedback. It seems that people were reluctant to leave negative feedback for a seller in case they retaliated by similarly … Read the rest

So it is all over the web today that Microsoft are making a bid to purchase Yahoo no doubt in an effort to regain some of the ground lost to Google in the search space. How different it could have all been though. Microsoft were late in realising the power of the web and seem to now be paying dearly ($44.bn) for their lack of foresight. However, whether they would have ever had the flexibility to match the agility of Google is another matter.

It is difficult to image two more different business than Microsoft and Yahoo and so knitting … Read the rest

My younger son got a new PC for Christmas and this was blessed with some flavour of Microsoft Vista which apart from requiring a new wireless card as Vista drivers weren’t available for the old one, was reasonably painless. Well that is apart from having to relearn where everything is that you have become so used to finding. The real problems began, however, when we went to access the network storage (NAS) device we have on the home network. Vista was able to see the device but whenever Mat went to open a folder on the device a green progress … Read the rest

As I migrate away more and more from desktop applications I have been trying a number of online services, the latest of which is Google Reader. As an RSS reader this web based solution is functional rather than easy to use. For example, there are no pop-ups to tell you when a feed has been updated and I find it difficult to keep track of what has been updated without having to positively look – which seems to defeat the object a bit.

One of the things that attracted me to Reader in the first place was that it had … Read the rest

Since my post yesterday about the iPod Touch update that add new applications and features to the device I have discovered that it also takes some things away. A couple of the existing applications were Calendar and Contacts which you could sync with Microsoft Outlook – not any more. It seems that this ability has been”lost” and Outlook no longer appears as an option – in fact there are no options listed at all! A quick search of the Apple support forum reveals that I am not alone in having this problem. I suspect that this is a bug … Read the rest

So the picture on the left is what my iPod Touch looked like after I had applied the software update announced at Macworld earlier in the week. The big question is, however, is it worth the £12 price tag that Apple have cheekily applied to it? I think the short answer is no, it’s not and only serves to highlight the differences between the Touch and the iPhone. It also raises questions as to whether the Touch is trying to be a music player or a fully featured PDA.

The update itself adds five new applications: Google Mail, Google Maps, … Read the rest