Julianna Yau’s blog

I heart Postalicious

For several months, I have been looking for something (anything) which can post a digest of my Ma.gnolia bookmarks to this blog.

My first attempt was with Feedburner’s link splicer, which does that…but only integrates the content into the blog’s feed. Although that’s useful, it isn’t the functionality I want.

Then I tried Ma.gnolia’s own blog posting tool. Although it worked wonderfully, I stopped using it when my host upgraded to ModSecurity 2. This was a problem because modsecurity needs to be deactivated for the xmlrpc file so that Wordpress will accept remote posting, but ModSecurity 2 can only be disabled by the host and for my entire site. This posed a security risk I wasn’t willing to take just to get digest posting of my bookmarks.

I was manually creating digests for a while, but that couldn’t be a permanent solution.

And then I searched through the WordPress plugins again and found that Postalicious had been updated to handle not merely De.licio.us bookmarks, but others…including Ma.gnolia!

At this time, it looks like Postalicious only supports one account from De.licio.us, Ma.gnolia, Google Reader, Reddit or Yahoo Pipes.

You can select:

the WordPress user acount to attribute the post
the categories for the post
whether pingbacks are allowed
whether comments are allowed
the minimum number of links a post can have
the frequency of posting (no limit, max of x bookmarks per post, minimum of x hours between posts, or post once every x days after hh:mm)
whether to publish after the criteria are met, or keep in drafts
whether to edit an existing post or start a new one if the author publishes the draft
allow/disallow a custom list of html in bookmark descriptions
post only or no bookmarks with a custom list of tags (no spaces, comma separated)
whether to use bookmark tags as the tags for the post
whether to always use the same custom list of tags for the post
date format, based on PHP standards
post slug template
post title for single or multiple days
bookmark syntax (e.g. bookmark link - description - custom text)
tag syntax
customizable post template for single or multiple days

Overall, I would say the available options have been very thoroughly considered, and the plugin works wonderfully.

Tags: blogging, magnolia, postalicious, wordpress

A little over a week ago, a friend suggested that I watch Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, pitching it as a pet project of Joss Whedon’s. Deciding to watch it was a struggle for me, with pros and cons all over the place. In retrospect, I probably over-thought the decision:

Although I’m not a fan of the premise (or particularly interested in the storyline) of Buffy, I must grudgingly admit that I did find the writing to be witty in the few episodes I’ve been made to watch.
I hate loathe musicals, but Neil Patrick Harris’s insane level of coolness promised to negate that.
My primary operating system is OpenSUSE, but I kept Windows so I could still access things that aren’t available for Linux.

So, out of curiosity and boredom, I decided to pay the mere $6 for 43 minutes of entertainment, and it was worth it. Harris plays Dr. Horrible wonderfully, and it was nice to be able to enjoy Whedon’s writing without the supernatural (yes, I somewhat hypocritically make allowances for the world of superheros and supervillans).

The only horrible part was that the show is only [currently and legitimately] available in Apple’s DRM-protected m4v format. This means the $6 is more of a long-term rental fee than an outright purchase. Considering the price of a DVD or a rental from a brick-and-mortar store, it’s not a bad rate…but still leaves a bitter aftertaste.

Contrary to what some might think, I’m not a supporter of DRM. Although I support the right to use it as part of a business model, I don’t think it’s a good idea. I have yet to finish reading Wired Shut, but the chapter “Speed Bump” poses a solid argument against using architectural and technological measures to correct for social behaviour.

My personal opinion is that the use of Technical Protection Measures by individual creators in an attempt to protect their work is misguided and will be more detrimental (in terms of cost and promotional opportunities) than they are lead to believe. What is needed aren’t more barriers to the enjoyment of creative works, but educating people on the real cost of production and the value of a work. The situation, although more ignored, is more clear-cut for visual and media artists, who usually work alone or in small groups.

In the traditional model used by many visual artists, they bear the cost of creating their work and generate income from a variety of sources, including (but not limited to) grants (which are, in Canada, taxable income), teaching, exhibition fees (paid by galleries when the work is for display and not sale), second and third jobs, and the occassional sale. When work is sold through a gallery, the gallery typically takes 50% of the sale price to cover their overhead (rent, staff salaries, etc). In Canada, there is no legislated resale right which would help boost the income of artists when their growing careers increase the value of past work in the resale market.

When I run this information past my non-artist friends, they’re often shocked, particularly at the fact that a gallery gets a commission which is much higher than commissions in other industries. Suddenly, being an artist isn’t so glamorous, and “sticking it to the man” isn’t so chic.

Tags: art, artist fees, dr horrible, drm, sam trosow, wired shut

Recharging With Film

For the past few weeks, I’ve been drained and in dire need of a revival… and it turns out some fine films were all I needed. While stone is my favourite medium for creation, film is my favourite medium for “consumption” and I haven’t been exposing myself to enough fine film recently.

Tonight, I attended Double Vision, presented by The Images Festival, CFMDC and CAFKA. The films screened tonight were extremely fine and well-crafted.

Notes in Origin (Ellie Epp, 1987) was my favourite because of Epp’s playfulness and superb grasp of time and timing. At the end of each “note”, I hoped there was another, until I fell into Epp’s rhythm and understood how many notes there would be. The length of each note was perfect, and her punctuation of the end of the film was direct without taking the audience out of the film.

Christina Battle’s the distance between here and there was crafted with a brilliant crescendo and ended with a similar grace and firmness. With both Epp and Battle, I didn’t quite know where they were taking me or how they would resolve the film, but I knew for certain I was in good hands.

Kitchener-Berlin (Phil Hoffman, 1990) was an absolute feast for the eyes. The interlacing of images was done with immense purpose, and I had a distinct sense that Hoffman knew exactly what to show us and when. At the end of Part 1 was a short film-within-a-film which I absolutely adored. The film was The Highway of Tomorrow or, How One Makes Two, a self-proclaimed amateur film by Dent Harrison. It was wonderfully playful, and the R100 makes me yearn to see Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 1 to search for a connection which probably doesn’t exist.

There is another set of films tomorrow, starting at 8pm at The Gig.

Tags: cafka, cfmdc, christina battle, dent harrison, ellie epp, film, images festival, matthew barney, phil hoffman

Eee - Review after two weeks of usage

Like the XO, I needed to have my Eee exchanged for another due to a keyboard problem. But unlike the XO, the problem was mostly cosmetic (the left side of the space bar was slightly warped) and I was able to take the Eee to the retailer to be exchanged. Not being a consumer product, the XO naturally has a disadvantage because it has no retail store. That was to be expected. But the fact that I needed to pay a total of $32CAD in shipping and $48USD in brokerage and surety bond fees was a total surprise. That added another $80 to the price of the laptop, with no guarantee that the one I would get in exchange would be fully functional.

That’s not to say that the keyboard of the Eee is perfect. Like any keyboard, it requires a bit of time to become accustomed to it. Because of how cramped the keys are, I really notice any extra length on my fingernails because I’m typing with the very tips of my fingers on the main A to L row of keys. The placement of some keys is quite awkward, particularly the “1”, which is more easily accessible with my ring finger than my pinkie. The “e”, “i”, “c” and “m” keys are often missed due to how I need to curve my fingers and apply pressure to the keys. Surprisingly, this is more noticeable for single words than when typing entire sentences.

The touchpad, like any other, is a painful alternative to a mouse. Luckily, the Eee’s operating system (Xandros, a flavour of Linux) auto-recognizes the two Logitech mice I have. Linux does not have great support for more than just the scroll-wheel and left- and right-click buttons, but this is not something unique to Xandros and is something I don’t really need.

I did have some permissions issues when trying to install new dictionaries for OpenOffice.org…it seems that I could only get to the “super user” access through the terminal. This may be a strange glitch in the way I have customized my Eee, because I have not seen this problem reported by other users. Once I was able to install the Canadian dictionary, the spellcheck was an invaluable feature of OpenOffice.org. Because of the idiosyncrasies of the keyboard, it is invaluable to be able to correct many typos quickly.

Adding more software to the Eee is not always an easy task. From what I’ve seen, “Easy Mode” only allows for updates to the software, and any adding or removing of software needs to be done in “Advanced Mode” (i.e. full KDE desktop for Xandros). Because Xandros does not have the same market penetration as SUSE, Fedora or Debian, it doesn’t have quite as many pre-compiled applications available. Many users have reported that most Debian packages are compatible with Xandros, but those packages do not seem to be supported for Xandros by either the Xandros folks or the Debian folks.

When showing off the Eee to friends, they’re always struck firstly by how tiny and light it is, and then by what a familiar feeling they get from the “Advanced Mode” interface. When using the Eee in public with little fanfare on my part, I found that many onlookers were extremely curious, but stopped short of actually asking about it. The Eee received many glances which I assumed were intended to be discreet attempts at determining what the heck it is (and possibly who makes it).

The power adaptor is both a blessing and a source of frustration. Because of its size, I was able to toss it into my purse along with the Eee itself. But the placement of the prongs relative to the bulk of the adaptor resulted in two instances where I thought I could use the adaptor…but couldn’t. In the first instance, there were two free ports on a powerbar, and the length of the adaptor was greater than the space available for two more compact plugs. In the second instance, the outlet was on a hub attached to a table at a lecture hall and the prongs were too far down on the adaptor for it to nestle into the L-shaped space allowed for the adaptor. In both instances, I was dearly missing the compactness of the actual connective parts of a standard laptop adaptor.

Because of the size of the screen I would not recommend the Eee as the only computer you own. It’s great as a portable second computer, but is less than ideal for extended use and extensive work (particularly anything involving graphics work). The operating temperature of the Eee is also a persistent concern. Although it seems to level out at a “hot-but-not-too-hot” temperature, I often worry about it overheating.

Overall, I love my Eee. I just need to find a way to make the adaptor …more adaptable.

Tags: computers, eee, reviews, xandros, xo laptop

A review of Google’s Reader

Oh, Google, how you disappoint me. First with YouTube’s unnavigable help pages, then with a product which, despite being in beta, fails to do what its help pages claims it does.

Now that I have two (and soon to be three) laptops (!), and after discovering that free WiFi is spotty at best, I thought I should look for a feed reader which will allow me to access feeds on several computers and offline. After a bit of research I narrowed my options to Liferea and Google’s Reader. Because I didn’t want to wrestle with figuring out how to synchronize Liferea on two computers (I suspect I would need to have the user files on an SD card and transfer the card from one computer to another), or getting Liferea onto Sugar, I decided to try Google’s Reader first.

The first frustration was that, unlike Thunderbird, Google’s Reader only imported posts as of the day the feed was added to Reader. After giving it some time to play catch-up, I found that (a) it will import older posts, (b) there is no option to permanently remove a post from Reader (only an option to mark it as being read), and (c) there is no option to mark a post as unread if it’s date is prior to the date you added the feed to Reader. This means if I am not reading a blog from the day it was created, I need to use one of Reader’s other features (like starring or tagging posts) to keep track of older posts which I have not yet read.

I did find that starring items is great for “bookmarking” posts I want to revisit later, particularly for the many posts to which I want to respond in my blog. The “add tags” option has potential, but seems cumbersome. I suspect it is meant to supplement Reader being alternative to social bookmarking sites like Ma.gnolia, when used alongside the option to “share” a post (and have it show in your public profile). This would be quite good for anyone who almost only reads blogs and doesn’t have the need to bookmark non-feed webpages… but I have yet to figure out if it’s possible to integrate Reader’s sharing feature with another Google bookmarking option to be a complete social bookmarking option.

Trying to get the offline feature to work was another exercise in frustration.

Installing Google Gears managed to send Firefox into a potentially infinite loop.

When you click on “offline” in Reader, Google explains how the offline mode works, tells you that you’ll need to install Google Gears, and warns:

This installation requires that you restart your browser, so we recommend you close all other windows before you begin.

After you confirm, a window opens with the splash page for the Google Gears installation. You again need to confirm that you want to proceed with the installation of Google Gears. After confirming again, there is are TOS to be accepted and the installation will then finally begin. The instructions are to allow the installation, and again:

Close and restart your web browser (be sure to close all browser windows).

What they fail to explain is that if you simply use Firefox’s built-in restart button for add-ons, and don’t close the Google Gears installation page prior to restarting, Firefox will try to install Google Gears again when you restart. Fun. I guess that’s why they keep trying to tell you to close all your browser windows.

The offline feature itself does not allow you to “even exit your browser and open it again later while you’re offline.” If it does, it totally wasn’t working for me. I was able to successfully go into offline mode in Reader, then in Firefox, and to be able to read posts in Reader. But no combination of going offline in Reader, Firefox and/or disconnecting from my internet connection allowed me to access Reader after closing Firefox and using it in offline mode after starting it again. Their help page simply indicates that I need to navigate to http://www.google.com/reader/ and it will magically work…but Firefox disagreed, telling me that “Firefox is currently in offline mode and can’t browse the Web. Uncheck “Work Offline” in the File menu, then try again.”. After trying one too many times, Reader now tells me that “synchronization has failed” when I go from offline mode to online mode.

Trying to get help from Google was, not surprisingly, as good as impossible. Their help page for offline mode maintains that:

You can even exit your browser and open it again later while you’re offline. Just enter http://www.google.com/reader/ in your address bar the same way you do when you’re online. (Note, however, that the http://reader.google.com/ form of the address will not work when you’re offline. You may want to check your bookmarks to make sure you have the correct address there.)

If I try to provide feedback that the information was not helpful, I have a maximum of 100 characters to tell Google “how [they] can make this better”. Although it’s an interesting challenge to summarize all of this in 100 characters or less, I don’t think it’s worth the work effort.

Hopefully, testing Liferea will be a less frustrating experience.

Tags: blogging, feeds, google, liferea, magnolia

Blog updates & review of Ma.gnolia

You may have noticed some changes to my blog yesterday/today.

Last night, I installed the In-Series plug-in for Wordpress so that I can organize my posts on deconstructing copyright. This works very well, and I have since moved the table of contents to the bottom of the posts to reduce clutter. Now, you can navigate to the previous or next post in addition to any other post in the series. I have also expanded the post titles because I found “part x” was not very helpful in finding an old post for reference.

I have been itching to use Ma.gnolia’s blog posting job feature, which is currently in beta. They had a bit of a system glitch with it over the holidays, but it seems to be up and running again.

The blog posting job allows Ma.gnolia users to send their bookmarks to their blogs as a single post. You do need to link your blog via its API, and Ma.gnolia provides easy-to-follow instructions on how to do that.

Here are the user-definable options for the postings:

frequency: daily, every three days, weekly or every two weeks
blog: which blog to post to (currently, only one blog is linked, but it looks like they’re planning to allow for multiple blogs)
post category: choose a category from your blog which will be assigned to the posts of links (currently, only one category can be assigned to the links)
post title: whatever you want the post title to be, with the option to add the date of the post
date format: several options for the format of the date (to be used in the post title)
leading text: the option to preface the links with some text
include link to your Ma.gnolia bookmarks (a yes/no option)
remove CSS styles (a yes/no option)
the option to include only posts with a specific tag, up to a combination of 3 tags
the option to include or exclude: descriptions, tags, thumbnails and/or ratings

Because it’s in beta, there are still a few kinks. Overall, I find that it works very well and I’m loving the feature. I was using FeedBurner’s link splicer for a while, but it was problematic because it only shows in the feeds and any email subscriptions sent by FeedBurner. Ma.gnolia, on the other hand, posts the links directly to my blog and the different customization options allow me to control what gets published to my blog and how it shows.

For example, I have started using the tag “blog it” for any bookmarks I want to show on my blog. This means I can bookmark all of the weird and wonderful things I find, but the readers of my blog only see what’s related to my regular blog topics because I setup the job to only send bookmarks tagged with “blog it” to my blog. By having the option of what to include in the blog postings, I can keep the clutter to a minimum by not including a thumbnail of the bookmark or the rating.

Tags: blogging, magnolia, wordpress

Update on my XO

After much feedback from fellow XO users, I reluctantly called OLPC for an RMA so that I can get a non-defective keyboard.

A 45-minute wait and a 10-minute call later, I’m set with an RMA number and am extremely sad to need to part with the XO so soon.

The good thing is I’ll probably be able to write a much less negative review of the XO once I get a properly-functioning one. It’ll take 2-4 weeks for them to ship me a new/fixed one after they receive it, so I think I should have a new one by March.

Tags: computers, olpc, xo laptop

XO Laptop - First Impressions

Note (added after some feedback): This post is based on the fact that I received a unit with a defective keyboard. I’m hoping my second first impressions will be much better. Also, I have edited the shutdown time to reflect a soft shutdown.

Original post follows:

Before I start, I need to let you know that I’m a little disappointed.Not even from the fact that this machine is not as sleek as the Eee, because what it lacks in sleekness it makes up for in cuteness. But some aspects of the design are puzzling, regardless of the fact that it is meant to be an educational tool.

First, and most frustratingly, the keyboard requires MUCH pressure for the keys to register. I don’t mean that I simply can’t touch-type, but I actually have to press down on many of the keys, and sometimes pound down on them. It reminds me of the days of yore when typewriters were still being used. Seriously, my arms are tired and I’ve barely written three paragraphs (ed note: this post was drafted in the Write program in the XO, but the final edit was done on my Toshiba M300). I can’t imagine how difficult this would be for a child who conceivably has less developed muscular strength. And remember—I’m a stone-sculptress!

More keyboard woes:

The CTRL key is where the CAPS key normally lives, and there is no CAPS key.
The space bar is difficult to use.
The backspace button is labeled “erase”
The keyboard is off-center, with the bulk to the left.

Perhaps I have a defective unit, because the right-click button for the touchpad doesn’t do anything. Neither does tapping the touchpad. I do think it’s cute for the left-click button to be marked with an X and the right-click to be marked with an “O”…but the cuteness doesn’t really help the functionality problem.

The SD card slot is in a very odd space below the monitor. It can only be accessed by swivelling the monitor counter-clockwise. Although my Sandisk 512MB SD card was recognized by the XO, my Sandisk 512MB Cruzer Micro (USB drive) was not.

The “ears” are very secure in their homes, and I was a little worried I might break them while trying to unfold them. One is more secure than the other, and I scratched a finger the last time I tried to get it open.

Power, RAM usage and wireless activity indicator lights are on both sides of the monitor/top. I have not yet tested all of the buttons, but the Neighbourhood View/Group View/Home View/Activity View buttons on the keyboard are handy, and the screen rotation button works well.

If I hadn’t spent time on the OLPC News Forum, I wouldn’t have known to look for expandable media in the Journal. I suppose that’s something which would be taught to students and educators, but it just seems like a strange place for them.

The word processor does the job, and I’ll be looking forwards to the next Sugar release which fixes the file format problem. Again, I would need to visit the OLPC News Forum to figure out how to save files to removable storage, because it doesn’t seem very intuitive.

The paint program was quite basic and mimics paint programs. I could not figure out how to resize or save images (I clicked the “Keep” icon, but don’t really know what it did because I was afraid to make any changes to my original).

The built-in browser had positive and negative aspects. Positive: to maximize screen space, the address bar shows the page title when the cursor is not in that field. Negative: many functions do not work (for example, I tried to upload a photo into Photobucket, but the “Browse” button did nothing). Many users have switched to Opera, but the flimsy built-in browser is a disappointment, especially when it’s supposed to be a version of Firefox.

The Sugar interface needs some work, because it isn’t entirely intuitive. When hovering the cursor above an icon, the text which appears is sometimes a tooltip/label and sometimes a menu option. There is no visual clue indicating the difference. The bar of Activities along the bottom are bookended by scroll icons for the left and right. When you are at the leftmost bar of Activities, the left scroll icon does not change and does not loop you back to the next bar of Activities. The same goes for the right side.

A startup/shutdown time comparison (building off my post about the Eee’s UI)~~. Note that the shutdown time of the XO is based on a hard shutdown using the power button. I have not yet been able to find a shutdown option through Sugar~~:

	Startup	Shutdown
Eee - Easy Mode	approx 29s	approx 9s
Eee - KDE	approx 41s	approx 17s
XO - Sugar	approx 1m 37s	approx 5s 39s
Toshiba M300 - openSUSE	approx 1m 39s (but 1m 48s for the hourglass to disappear)	approx 55s
Toshiba M300 - Windows XP	approx 1m (but 2m 15s for the hourglass to disappear)	approx 34s

Nicholas Negroponte has been quoted as saying “It’s an education project, not a laptop project.”

What I’m having difficulty understanding is how a keyboard which requires the same amount of pressure as a typewriter, a right-click button which doesn’t do anything, a touchpad which doesn’t respond to taps, a browser which doesn’t respond to websites the same way as the rest of the world and a user interface which doesn’t have visual cues for info-only/event-option icons is acceptable for and/or helps education.

Perhaps the resulting frustration is supposed to give students an incentive to make things better… but there are plenty of other problems for them to be solving, I think.

I’m hoping my faith will be restored after I spend some more time with the device, and when I how kids react to it compared to me. But, for now, I’m glad I bought the Asus Eee.

The XO is damned cute, though! Here are a bunch of pictures:

Tags: computers, education, eee, olpc, sugar, technology, xo laptop

Xandros on Asus Eee - “Easy mode” vs “Advanced mode”

The Asus Eee runs on Xandros, which is a Linux-based operating system which branched off from Debian.

“Huh?”, you say?

In layman’s terms, the Asus runs on something that isn’t Windows or a Mac interface.

The factory default settings use what they call “Easy Mode”, which is a tabbed view of the desktop space with easy access to common applications:

I actually quite liked the Easy Mode because it did everything I needed it to do… which was basically launch Firefox and OpenOffice. But I was curious about what this “Advanced Mode” was all about, so I followed some instructions on enabling Advanced Mode on the Eee. The result? I unlocked the KDE interface, which is what I’m using for openSUSE in my full-sized laptop:

For someone who is used to the KDE or Windows desktop, this is much less frustrating. I was able to get rid of some of the stuff I never intend to use, like the games and the somewhat puzzling CD and DVD writing programs (the Eee does not come with an optical drive, but I suppose it can accept external ones).

With the full KDE desktop, the startup and shutdown times are a bit slower, but still much better than a traditional laptop:

	Startup	Shutdown
Eee - Easy Mode	approx 29s	approx 9s
Eee - KDE	approx 41s	approx 17s
Toshiba M300 - openSUSE	approx 1m 39s (but 1m 48s for the hourglass to disappear)	approx 55s
Toshiba M300 - Windows XP	approx 1m (but 2m 15s for the hourglass to disappear)	approx 34s

The time comparisons are actually quite surprising because I didn’t expect Windows to be faster than openSUSE (the first time for Windows and openSUSE mark when the start menus became accessible).

Tags: asus eee, computers, xandros

Asus Eee - first impressions

Yesterday, I picked up an Asus Eee, despite the news that the XO laptop will be crossing the border this weekend. So why did I get the Asus Eee anyway?

I went to look at the Eee last weekend, and it’s much smaller than my Toshiba M300, which is about the same size as the XO.
I’m sick and can’t sculpt, so this is a great time for me to play with computers instead
I want to give myself time to become accustomed to the keyboard before next week, when I plan to take it with me when I go to Toronto for work later this month.
I want to try manipulating, or at least neutralizing, Murphy’s Law on the delivery of my XO by buying an Eee.
I want one!

The Asus Eee is tiny…about the size of a hardcover book or paper notebook (pictures below). It comes with a carrying sleeve into which it fits very snuggly, and an AC adapter which is about the size of a cell phone adapter (and even has folding prongs!). The startup and shutdown times are amazing. Including the time it takes me to input the BIOS password which I had set for it, I clocked the startup time to be 29 seconds. I didn’t even bother to clock the shutdown time, but I would say it took less than 5 seconds.

The keyboard is small, but manageable. Like any keyboard on a computer, it takes a while to get used to where the non-character keys have been placed. To conserve space, many of the keys serve dual purposes via the Fn key. I’m composing this post on the Eee and it took a while to become accustomed to how close the apostrophe is to the Enter key, and how hard I have to hit the period and “c” keys to get them to register.

Connecting to my wireless LAN was painless, and the Eee auto-detects the WEP type and saves the key (I can’t get OpenSUSE to remember the WEP key for my connection, so it’s a relief to not need to enter that every time for the Eee). The screen size is usable, but obviously no match for a full-sized laptop. Photos can be viewed easily in the Eee, but I wouldn’t bother trying to edit them on the Eee because of the screen size. There are also merely paint programs pre-loaded, and nothing like GIMP or Photoshop, although I’m sure I can install GIMP onto this if I cared to.

The Eee recognized my Logitech Revolution X-somethingorother immediately, and didn’t require me to configure it. The only downfall is not all of the buttons are usable. I couldn’t get them all to work in OpenSUSE either, so I don’t miss the non-standard ones. USB drives and SD cards took a moment longer on the Eee than on OpenSUSE to be recognized. Once recognized, I am presented with what now seems to be a standard window across several OSs which gives me different options for how I want to view the files.

The one thing which concerns me is the heat of the device. Many other users have reported that it becomes warmer than other laptops, and many of those reports came from bloggers who viewed the Eee in a showroom and assumed the temperature was a result of the computer being on all day. After about a half hour of use, the temperature became noticeably warm, although I have not heard of any overheating and/or exploding.

I have not yet tested the webcam feature, or had time to mess around with the OS very much. I’m too dazzled by how small it is and how well it performs regular functions.

There were two odd things I noticed. The first is the Eee does not have an external control for the speakers’ volume. Luckily, there is no startup chime. The other is the Eee comes with the standard port for laptop locks. I don’t know who would actually use it, because it would be much safer to take the laptop with you when you consider the size.

Now I’m going to work on a slightly crazy and what I think to be a very cool idea for a laptop case for the Eee.