“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.

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.

Photo taken this week by mike138. Used under licence. Photos for my Delicious postings like this will be taken from Flickr’s ‘interesting feed’ for the day concerned. Seemed like a good idea.

Postalicious
One of the reasons I stopped posting my Del.icio.us links to this blog was the unpleasant way that it rendered, and the lack of any control I had with regard to timing. This hopefully fixes this.

Meet Mr. TechCrunch UK - ScobleShow
In the latest of my “let’s mention Robert Scoble because he normally adds your mention to his linkblog”, a serious one - Robert interviews the excellent Mike Butcher, who’s looking very well in this video. I last saw Mike a good eight months ago.

Ubuntu
Recently added it to my normal workhorse laptop (an HP Compaq tc4200). I wouldn’t say it worked totally instantly out of the box, but after a little tinkering, it’s doing everything I want except print, which is a good start, and I’ve still Windows on the machine if I need it.

The UCC Journalism Society Conference 2008 (my speaking events)
Delighted to be speaking on “the place of traditional media in the Web 2.0 world” at this conference for University College Cork: under the auspices of my Media UK work.

An ego blog-search
I wanted to see who was blogging about me, but I had problems with Google Blog Search returning my own blog entries. I’ve worked out how to stop that with -blogurl, like so: “James Cridland” -blogurl:james.cridland.net -blogurl:www.flickr.com

v-moda “Vibe Duo” headphones for the iPhone
My Christmas present to myself was an iPhone: and these are just excellent headphones - way better sound than the original crappy ones, and with a headset mike, so I can still use it as a phone. Mind, damn expensive.

ShinyRed - 10 blogs to read in 2008
Nine blogs you might actually want to read; and one ridiculous suggestion. But it’s very nice of them, so thank you, ShinyRed.

Photo by Gabriel Saldana, used under licence

Ashley Highfield, my boss’s half-boss, has posted on the BBC Internet Blog that the BBC’s Linux userbase is around 0.3 to 0.8% of all BBC visitors.

Over the last month, Media UK, a mostly-used-at-work media website I run (583,000 visits a month, so a decent size), splits down like so:
Windows: 93.49% (95% in 2006)
Macintosh: 4.89% (4.02%)
Linux: 1.40% (0.28%)

My own website, james.cridland.net, has 4.56% Linux users, though that figure is much less accurate due to much lower traffic levels and a skew of subject matter. Media UK is closer to the ‘real world’, and reflects at-work usage as well as at-home usage - as reflected by a lower Firefox percentage of use too (just 14%). It contains nothing that would attract Linux users more than the average.

I’m quite interested about this. First, it shows that Linux users are still firmly in the minority - albeit a vocal minority. But it’s clear that Windows is in trouble: gains over the year by the premium Macintosh and the free GNU/Linux makes it clear that even with Vista, Windows is losing many users from all areas of its business. Yes, they still have a sizeable majority, but it seems more of us are happy to try something new.

But, of course, the most interesting thing is the stark fact that in just a year, Linux use has increased fivefold. This is no fluke - Google Analytics reports consistently increasing Linux use on mediauk.com (0.24% in December 2005, for example), and a similar increase, though more statistically noisy, is also shown on my personal website.

Fascinating. With the advent of the very cheap gOS machine, I’d see Linux use increasing in the future - possibly at an even faster speed. Now’s the time to move your software to the web, before your customers disappear…

Photo: Kevin Miller. Used under licence.

If you’ve ever thought for a minute about how to get your computer to run faster, one of the things you’ll have thought about is adding more memory. Doubling your memory normally means that your computer will run much faster - a far greater improvement than purchasing a brand new machine in many cases.

The reason why your computer is faster when it has more memory is that it can store much more information in its memory, and dip into the hard-drive much less often. Writing to the hard-drive is slow and clunky; writing to memory is very quick in comparison, so it stands to reason that the more you can sling into memory, the faster your computer will run.

Secondly, you need a pretty meaty computer to run Windows these days - or, indeed, many flavours of Linux. The $200 gOS computer is getting people excited right now because it’s a cheap, low-spec machine, but running a slimmed-down operating system which still appears fast.

But I’ve found something faster still - and this posting is coming courtesy of it.

Puppy Linux has a pretty ugly website, but it’s a really neat idea. Download the CD image, whack it into your machine, turn your machine on, and it boots off the CD. So far, no difference to many Linux distributions on CD. But here’s the clever idea - once it’s booted, everything is in memory. It never uses the CD again. Which means that everything’s blisteringly fast.

Hit the in-built web-browser (SeaMonkey, rather than Firefox) and it loads virtually instantly. In fact, everything loads virtually instantly - double-clicking on anything results in two of everything loading instantly (bless).

It comes with a huge array of extra programs; but here’s the even neater thing - if your BIOS copes with it, you can make a version of it to run off a USB stick. Just plug in the USB key, turn the computer on, and there’s your computer - complete with your preferences saved to the USB key. Of the time I’ve been running it (I had an abortive attempt a few weeks ago to install it, but I’ve been running it for much of the day), it’s not touched my hard-drive ONCE.

It’s not the prettiest UI you’ve ever seen; and nor is it entirely trouble-free. Networking is, as always with Linux, not perfect - this machine won’t apparently play with WPA wireless networks, so I’m using my open FON connection instead - but it appears to work, and work well. And damn fast.

This is definitely something clever - and a great way to reuse old computers which are nearing end-of-life - or even giving your old laptop to the kids.