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So I picked up a few more “toys” to take with me to Uganda tonight. I bought a cordless laptop mouse that makes it much easier to navigate around. I chose the particular model I did because the USB receiver is about the size of a dime, including the dongle! So far I like it but I need to remap the buttons to make it more usable. <5 min later> Ahh, much better now. I moved the forward and back controls from the awkwardly placed up and down buttons (now page up/page down) to the right and left clicks of the scroll wheel. That actually gives me something I haven’t had since I used the much underrated Opera browser. One of my favorite features of Opera was the ability to right click and drag to the left to go back or to the right to go forward. I have missed it ever since!
Anyway, the other thing I picked up at Office Max was a digital voice recorder. I plan on trying it out tonight. I decided that it will give me the ability to record testimonies or music performances we hear over in Uganda that I want to bring back with me. I had the opportunity to talk with Liz Cantu at Vintage yesterday and ask her about shooting in Africa and if she had any suggestions. She asked if I was going to do any video while there and I said I wasn’t planning on it (in a pinch I can use my Sony point-and-shoot to capture video) but I decided it would be nice to be able to capture audio if we get a chance to hear a music performance or hear someone’s testimony. It will be a nice thing to have going forward too if I want to move more into the journalism side of things. I don’t plan on learning short hand any time soon.
I’m just about ready to head out but I still have some projects to finish at work and some things online that I would like to finalize. I’m not sure if I will be able to post on this blog or to my flickr while I’m in Uganda but I’m hoping to find a way to make it possible. I set up my flickr the other day to take photo submissions via email but I need to try that out before I leave. Anyway, head over to flickr tonight and I’ll post up some shots of my new toys. 
If you are within shouting distance you probably already know that I have XP installed on my EEE now. It took three tries and a reluctant trip to Circuit City for an external DVD drive but I finally did it. I have to say, I am more impressed now with the EEE’s performance than when it was running Linux. This thing continues to defy my expectations for what it is capable of. I started doing a little photo editing of some pics I took today and I was able, without too much pain, to take the .CR2 raw files off of my CF card, transfer them to the USB HDD, export them to JPEG using Picasa2, tweak them in Gimp, and upload them to Flickr. Obviously this isn’t the greatest platform for photo editing but it is very usable and workable. Besides, it’s not like I have plans for anything better to do while spending 17 hours on a plane flying back from Africa.
After spending the better part of this afternoon battling with various cd’s, dvd’s, and flash drives, I am unfortunately no closer now to having XP on my EEE than I was this morning. Actually, in some ways I’m further from it. I’ve basically concluded that I’m going to need an external dvd drive and a fresh copy of XP Pro SP2 if I really want to get it done. 
That being the case, I’m now looking at doing EEEXbuntu. It is a build of the Ubuntu Linux distribution that has been optimized for the EEE. Part of why I want to get over to XP is that I have to either change to a different OS or upgrade the current Xandros kernal if I want to take full advantage of the 2gigs of ram I installed. As it ships, the EEE only recognizes 1 of the 2 gigs.
If neither of those OS changes is feasible, I’ve at least been able to tweak the Xandros desktop to the point that it better suits what I want it to do. After some digging around the internets I’ve cleared enough space off the taskbar that it is now useful. I just finished replacing the normal launch “start” button with a smaller one that clears more space too. I also got the clock switched over to 12 hour mode rather than military time. I think there are a couple other small tweaks that I’m forgetting. I’m still not happy with the current desktop themes and I wish I could find a better one but so far no luck. Anyway, that’s about it for now, I’ll be sure to post again if I get XP or EEEXbuntu up and running. Ciao!
I wanted to update my progress with the EEE PC since yesterday. Bad news first, I can’t get my jerry rigged external DVD drive to be recognized by the EEE so I haven’t yet gotten XP installed on it. I’ve got a few leads for how I might be able to do it with a USB flash drive, but I’d rather get a working dvd drive figured out. Another similar option would be to try EEEKubuntu, a build of the KDE version of Ubuntu designed for the EEE. Again though, I’d rather get a working dvd drive to install XP from.
Anyway, on to some good news. I was planning on waiting until I got my Amex rebate at Costco to get a new portable USB powered external hdd to pair with the EEE since it only has 8gigs of internal storage (4 on the ssd and 4 on the sdhc card). I stopped at Circuit City, to see if I could find a cheap solution to my external DVD drive issues, and found a 160gig western digital pocket drive on sale for $110, cheaper than at Costco. So I went ahead and bought that too since I was planning on getting it anyway. The best part is when I got home I discovered that the EEE does in fact put out enough juice through it’s USB ports to power the drive. I was afraid (after reading somewhere) that it didn’t put out the full 5v needed for powered USB devices but everything seemed to be working so I’m not going to complain! I also went ahead and used the photos from our VFC photo walk today as a trial for how long it would take to transfer images from my CF card to the external hdd. I transfered 660mb of data and it took about 10 minutes. Not going to set any speed records but nothing to be embarrassed about. It’s also worth noting that this was with my slower Ultra II CF card, my 4gig main card is almost twice as fast, definitely fast enough to serve that purpose. It would be nice if I can find a codec for linux that lets me view the .cr2 files so that I can at least get some idea of what I’ve got. Unless I’m able to get XP on this thing I don’t think I’m going to be doing much if anything as far as image editing but as someone mentioned earlier today in a piece I was reading, it would be nice to at least get a jump start on my workflow before getting back. If I can at least get Gimp on here that will let me play with the pics I take on my Sony since those are in JPG. Anyway, I think that’s about it for now, I’m going to do some more reading about the EEE and see if there are any other tweeks I can do if I can’t get XP figured out. Off to Geekland!
I’ve solved my laptop issues for the upcoming Uganda trip! After spending a good portion of a slow day of work checking it out online, I decided to go out and pick up the Asus EEE PC. First impressions? AMAZING! There are a few issues related to the form factor that I still need to figure out or get used too but I’m already learning to type on the small keyboard (one of the biggest complaints by some). Maybe that is just more of a generational thing with the current tech writers. Whatever. My first impressions of the screen are really good too. It’s just a 7″ widescreen but it doesn’t feel too cramped, at least not as much as you might think. While I don’t have any personal experience with the XO OLPC or the Classmate PC, I have to admit that Asus pretty much has me sold on the low cost ultraportable. I’ll see how it handles XP when I get that installed on here tonight but so far I’m hopeful!
