Julianna Yau’s blog

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.

Between technical difficulties, a cold and life in general, I’m way behind on blog reading and writing. So rather than desperately trying to write several cohesive posts, I’m simply going to summarize some things of interest [to me].

After I returned my XO due to a defective keyboard (with hopes of getting one that works), I also ended up exchanging my Eee for another one because it had a warped spacebar. The new one also has a warped spacebar, but it’s not as bad. Neither had any performance issues, and the problem seems to be widespread.

jkkmobile and EeeUser.com are reporting that Asus is planning to make an Eee with a touchscreen.

Apple released the MacBook Air, and entrepreneurial laptop sleeves and minimalistic ones are already making their rounds in blogs, reminding me of the case I “made” for my Eee last week (798 views on Instructables as of the writing of this post!). So far, thinking of an uber-creative case for the XO has been quite daunting… and the OLPC laptop strap idea will be difficult to outwit.

Crave and BBC reports that NASA is thinking of creating a virtual world.

The MAKE blog has some articles about 3D printing:

• Kiosk – Sci-Fi tale of 3D printing, fabbing and more
• Fabaroni: a homemade 3D printer
• Sci-Fi objects and more made with a Spectrum Z510 3D printer (photo gallery)

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.

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:

1. The CTRL key is where the CAPS key normally lives, and there is no CAPS key.
2. The space bar is difficult to use.
3. The backspace button is labeled “erase”
4. 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:

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:

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:

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).

Since I discovered the Eee, I have been thinking that it would fit perfectly into a zippered binder. Although I thought I could get one in the right size from Five Star, I ended up with a Day-Timer instead. The binder clip was ridiculously easy to remove, and it works wonderfully.

Read the Instructable I created for “making” a simple carrying case for the Eee with a zippered binder.

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.

EeeUser.com picked up on the announcement of the Cloudbook by Everex. It looks like the XO laptop has been successful in creating market demand for ultracompact laptops/notebooks/whateveryouwantocallthems and I need to face the fact that whatever I buy now will become obsolete next year.

One Laptop Per Child has posted their projected delivery dates for the Give 1 Get 1 program. I’m not actually sure when the dates were posted, but it seems quite recent. The dates are currently for the US, and the Canadian dates will follow. Donated laptops are targeted to arrive in early 2008.

The Give 1 Get 1 window for one Laptop Per Child has been extended until December 31.