“Do you use that as your main work computer?” asked a slightly quizzical Erik Huggers, looking at my little Asus Eee PC.

When I’m over in the BBC’s Media Village, I have discovered something called the FM&T HQ Hot-Desk Area, which consists of four desks with keyboard, monitor, a network cable, and a few extra plug points (actually, no extra plug points, but let’s not spoil it). This means that I can bring a laptop over, log in to Reith, the internal BBC network, and get on with some work.

Except I rarely carry my BBC-issue “ultra-light” HP around. I’ll not bore you with the specifics, other than to mention that the BBC appears to have virtually no business wifi, that I have to carry the power adaptor around which is almost as heavy as the laptop, that the desktop is crippled to not connect to open wifi connections with anything like ease, that it appears to have little power management, and, finally, it uses… Windows. Which I’m surprising myself by beginning to actively hate as an OS.

So instead, I carry my little Asus Eee PC around with me. Which, you’ll recall, has virtually no storage space whatsoever - mine’s the 4G model, which, after an install of Ubuntu Hardy Heron, has about half that spare. Not only that, but it can’t connect to Reith at all (not being a BBC machine), so the documents on my fileshare are unavailable. No wonder Erik gave me a quizzical look. How could I do any work on the thing?

Well, part of it is that I’ve discovered quite a few “dirty” internet connections (ADSL lines connected directly out, via wifi, to the internet), and partly it’s because I run my life in the cloud, with most of what I need either on a 4G USB stick that I carry around with me, or on my own Amazon S3 storage through JungleDisk. (Indeed, so far, this entry is the abortive beginning of that post).

I’m a big fan of my little Asus Eee. I found Xandros, the Linux distro that the unit shipped with, quite confusing: I’ve only really been using Linux for a year or so now, and I’ve only just got to grips with Ubuntu, so I popped Ubuntu 8.04 onto the device, and got the thing working quite well. So well, indeed, that I’ve written a wiki page on how to do it (which many others, gratifyingly, have added to).

The one thing I did notice was that Ubuntu used a lot more battery power than Xandros. The Eee’s battery power isn’t particularly magical, so to have even less battery power was disappointing. I guessed it might be something with processor scaling, that magical bit of running a computer where your machine thinks “ah, I’m having it easy now, I’ll stop running the processor quite so fast”.

I was right; Ubuntu as it’s initially configured on the Asus doesn’t enable processor scaling at all. Yet the little Intel processor inside my Asus Eee does cope with it quite happily: it’s just that the OS doesn’t allow it.

So, after a few hours’ research, I’m happy to mention that I’m now running a better, processor-scaled, version of Ubuntu Hardy Heron on the Asus Eee. Naturally, this information is now on the wiki, and it’s a quick, less-than-ten-step process. The machine’s running less hot, and the battery should last significantly longer. And, interestingly, the top speed has changed from 650MHz to 900MHz - that’s quite a potential speed increase.

What else of the Asus Eee? Well, the screen on my 710 is a little too small; the just-released 900 fixes that, but at a massive price premium. The keyboard appears to have the numbers in the wrong place, which gets a bit of getting used to (though the size is just fine). However, the machine’s really rather well-built: solid and reassuring-feeling, rather than cheap and tacky. I was lucky enough to buy the black version instead of the “looks cute but shows the dirt” white version so it looks halfway decent; and it has many more connections than, say, the Apple MacBook Air.

And unlike one of my colleagues, who uses his MacBook Air to take notes using nothing more than TextEditor (ha!), I’ve quite a sensible note-taking system, thanks to the wonderful world of Tiddlywiki: a perfectly usable and brilliant offline note-taking system. Just power up Firefox, open the local Tiddlywiki on my system, and there are all my notes, all interlinked, with full backup files and (if I set it up) online backup. It’s really quite excellent.

Anyway, after showing him, Erik’s impressed at the Asus. So should you be. At about £220, it’s really not the worst machine you could ever buy.

At home, I’ve three computers that I use regularly: my Asus Eee PC, a really rather heavy HP laptop, and an even heavier and larger (and much more ancient) Sony Vaio. All run Ubuntu, though the HP has Windows XP on it for the times when I have to boot up in that flavour.

But, if the hard-drive broke on any of these machines, I’d lose absolutely nothing.

All my photos, and increasingly videos, are held at Flickr (I buy a DVD once a year of all the photos I have there, just for safety’s sake). All my documents are with the increasingly-good Google Docs. My code is held on my website, though backed-up daily. All my email, back to 2004, is held on my Google Apps for Your Domain. My list of passwords? I don’t have one, using my own password generator.

Of course, I do have some files held locally. The other machine in my house is a fairly old Mac Mini, which sits under the telly. I use it to play DVDs and sync my iPhone, but it also contains my music collection. Indeed, after an Amazon.co.uk “sell your stuff” spree, I have about five CDs left in the house. But, once more, if the hard-drive broke on this machine, I’d lose absolutely nothing.

I back up the 30G of data I hold within iTunes automatically every night, thanks to a piece of software called JungleDisk. This simply watches for changes within my iTunes folder, and uploads those changes to Amazon’s servers somewhere. I pay £1.89 a month for the storage (and like JungleDisk so much, I also spent a one-off £10.10 for the software). So, while undoubtedly it would be a hassle and a lengthy download if this disk broke, I’d again not lose anything; and JungleDisk also ensures that my music collection is available to me wherever I am in the world.

With the advent of services like Amazon S3, Flickr, Gmail and Google Docs, it strikes me that we don’t really need computers to have great big hard drives any more - certainly not on a laptop. Asus appear to be the first computer manufacturer to really understand this.

By leaving all my data on the cloud, am I ahead of the curve, I wonder? Or simply too trusting of Google/Flickr et al?

Uploaded on 13 February 2008, this is a viewing platform in the war museum in Salford Quays. Photo by Mike Willshaw. Used under licence.

All this online sharing has to stop
It's ruining the motor mechanic industry. (No, really)

Flickr CC search
A quick page whipped up to help me find nice pictures for this blog - it searches all Flickr CC images together (which the Flickr UI won’t let me do).

Aussies Head to SXSW
A website using one of my photos, albeit only credited in the ALT tag (which isn’t cricket, by the way).

Oceanworld Manly
Another spotting of one of my photographs, complete with a link to my own website. How splendid.

Living on Earth: Swedish Body Heat
Sounds exciting, but actually it’s a radio feature about trains, aired on WBUR and other stations. They used one of my photographs to illustrate it on the web. Cool.

When statistics speak volumes
Good piece by Paul Smith on the press releases radio stations send out on figures day. Paul still owes me a fiver, by the way.

MMS For O2 iPhone
Just the thing I was looking for. Brilliant - now I can receive MMS on the iPhone. (Bizarre that it doesn’t support it…)

Twitter on the iPhone: Hahlo
While I’m on an iPhone theme, I use this for Twitter (it’s much prettier than it looks on this page). For this, and for the MMS thing, I’ve donated.

Keeping the conversation going
Nic Price activates a magic Wordpress plugin. So have I. Good idea.

Do We Have The Backup?
‘how it can be legitimate for a government to build roads but not to lay fibre is a mystery to me, and one that deserves to be questioned.’ Good point.

Big name #4
Hello, ladies. Contacting me has never been easier. Etc.

What HD-2s Don’t Stream And Should?
A rant about streaming. But included in this is interesting: WRXK’s HD2 channel (a new one only for HD radios) is entirely themed around their breakfast presenter. Neat idea. (Course, I was behind the ‘Virgin Radio Party Classics’ channel on Sky, voiced by Suggs.)

Interactivity: A lost opportunity for your station?
Some “isn’t the US behind the rest of us” type thoughts from Mark Ramsey; but some useful and interesting figures he quotes.

This is a tidied and edited list of my del.icio.us postings from January 26th to February 14th. You can subscribe to this list, live, via rss.

Those of you who follow my Twitter feed will have noticed occasional pained tweets from me about my trials and tribulations on finding an Asus Eee PC.

Helpfully, Adam Bowie was able to point me in the direction of Eee User’s stock availability forum, and, on coming home, I was able to discover that if I jumped in the car now, I could pick one up at PC World in Staples Corner, whereupon I did, listening to the podcast from Iain Lee’s Virgin Radio show as I did.

What an astounding machine. I’ve got the black one (the one in the picture above, though it’s not mine) and it’s stunningly well put together.

It contains just 512M of memory. The hard-drive is flash-based, and is just 4G large. It uses a form of Linux - actually, a commercial form, from what I can tell. All of which might fill you with foreboding.

But turning it on, it just works (and takes 15 seconds to boot from cold). Going to the BBC iPlayer website (which needs Flash), it just works. Using it to write this blog entry, it just works. It’s astoundingly good. It actually feels expensive, too - yet it was £219.

The unit’s tiny; the keyboard is tiddly and a trifle hard to get on with, and the build quality isn’t great (though this one appears to have a halfway decent trackpad, unlike the one that Stephen Fry got his hands on. But it’s a splendid machine.

After a quick update to the internal software (which hardy souls can replace with anything from Windows XP to Ubuntu), the version of Skype does full video chat, thanks to the internal webcam.

The Eee User wiki is full of handy hints and tips to get this thing working just the way you want it. A quick upgrade of Pidgin later to get it working correctly with my new james@cridland.net GoogleTalk/XMPP address, and all is well there, too. I’ve also contributed some information there, as I discovered how to control my Mac Mini from it using VNC (the program’s installed but hidden from sight); and how to connect to a remote drive (so I can edit my websites using it). This is community help at its best; and perhaps shows Linux’s coming of age as a consumer desktop.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering: the title of this posting is how you pronounce Asus. I always thought it was ‘AY-suss’, but then, what do I know?

Photo: Steve Keys. Used under licence.