My first mini laptop, Asus EeePC 1000HE

I commute on a daily basis by bus. The travelling time is roughly 45 minutes in the morning and 50 minutes in the evening. I don’t need to change bus, its a direct route from my home door to the office door (lucky me!). So there’s long enough sitting in one spot to actually do something useful.

So far, I have been reading books or playing with my Nokia N95 – ie. listening music, reading daily news, playing games etc. However, after 2 years all this feels quite passive – instead of reading/listening/playing/otherwise consuming some form of entertainment made by others, I would like to be able to create something myself and really make use of that time. A family man never has that much time for himself, so every bit counts.

I’ve been carrying my bulky work laptop occasionally with me, but I don’t really want to use that for my personal stuff. Besides, that old windows installation boots in 5+ minutes… so I bought my first mini laptop. The idea is that I can easily slip it inside my backbag, boot fast, and then do much more than I can with a mobile phone.

I ended up to choose Asus Eee PC 1000HE (black). It’s a typical mini laptop with Intel Atom processor, 1 GB of memory and 160 GB hard drive. However, this one’s got a battery with some extra juice: advertisments claim 9.5 hour usage time! In practise it is likely closer to 7 or 8 hours, but hey -  that triples the usage time I get with my HP workhorse.

I have just finished installing some basic stuff and configured Windows XP to my taste (well, up to the limit where you can tailor any Microsoft product). Of course, I will install Ubuntu on this machine and use primarily that. However, I made an exception and decided to let Windows stay for now too, as occasionally one cannot avoid using it (for example, to update new firmware to my Nokia phone).

So far my experience of this little machine have been very nice. It turned out to be a bit heavier than I thought, but that doesn’t really matter in the bus. Keyboard is nice (to write with), and although I was a bit skeptical about the display size, 10″ and 1024×600 resolution seems to be good enough for basic computing things – like writing this blog.

So perhaps there will be more updates to the blog in the future… I’ve already got a lot of material from my hacking projects that I’m planning to put here, it just needs to be edited and published. Stay tuned.

Hello World!

I have just switched from my old Drupal based blog to WordPress. For keeping a simple blog Drupal turned out to be too complicated system.

However, the thing that eventually made me ditch it was the need for frequent manual updates due to security issues. I cannot understand  why a web service won’t update itself whenever a new release/patch becomes available. In Drupal community they give you the answer that it is insecure. Then how Windows and Linux desktops do this? And if I type the commands required for updating the site instead of an automated script, how does that increase security? I don’t read the code. It does not seem a technical but a human issue.

I decided to look around. After googling a bit, I learned that WordPress supports some kind of one-click update. That’s the attitude I am looking for, so I decided to give it a try. So far (2 hours after installation!) I’m very satisfied. With Drupal I had to spend so much time for non-productive work, and this site is all about hobby projects. Now, with WordPress, everything seems much more like it should be, and I can already feel that I can concentrate on the content from now on. Let’s see if that feeling lasts.

Already looking forward to get posting all the almost-finished articles…