My famileee of eee pcs

I now have three Asus EEE PCs. It's not that I'm greedy or anything. Number 1 - a surprise present from a work colleague and friend, got trashed by a drunken eejut (I think he was enveeeous of the time I was spending with my eee). However, I think with the addition of a small monitor and some gaffer tape, it may be rescuable, so I am considering turning it into an Internet radio for the kitchen. Number 2 is a 2G - a way infeeerior model bought as a replacement, which sort of added insult to injureee, and number 3 was bought as a replacement for number 1 - another 4G.

They are my babeees. I am definitely involved in an eeefair, and I snapped up the 4G on eeeebay and it had an 8Gb memory card thrown in which has turned out to be the biz. I had debated buying an external hard drive but that sort of knackers the portability of the thing.

Enough poor EEE puns meeethinks.

The wifi is pretty canny, picking up signals where a variety of other devices (several mobiles, PCs and even the Mac Mini on occasion) seem to fail.

Now the girls want one to replace their laptops (given as presents at Xmas) because the glamour of those palled the moment the EEE came into their lives. Well, my life as I tend not to allow them near it except to play the Penguin game, or to watch TV in bed with me on it.

I have a couple of issues with it, but these are generally solved by moving onto either a PC in the office or the Mac Mini. However, one of them I am definitely going to have to solve soon. I have a very nice roll up keyboard from the Ipaq days, which is a doddle to type on, whereas the EEE keyboard does quite frequently catch me out. Thing is, the roll up keyboard has a mini USB connector. So, today's task is to find a convertor so I can plug the neat keyboard into the EEE. It also has the benefit of easily fitting into a pocket which means I can keep my space requirements and weight down.

The second problem which is going to take longer to solve is to learn something I am desperately need to know more about if I want the most out of my eee. And that's using the terminal window properly for Linux. Up to now, I have needed to learn very few commands: ping, ipconfig /all and a couple of others being the limit really! So, my personal project to do when I'm not working (see previous post about womble porn etc!) is to learn something useful about terminal commands instead of drifting round the Net looking at sites of interest but not much use!

In fact, a month and a bit late, I think that can be my New Year's resolution for 2008. Better add it to backpack or I'll never remember it tomorrow, let alone for the rest of the year!

If you are as disorganised as I tend to be, with an ever-growing problem of amnesia, and a huge pile of lists on my desk so I don't overlook any work, Backpack is pretty useful. And it emails you when you have a deadline to do something, which is proving fantastically useful in the middle of multiple campaigns etc, as well as an increasingly hectic social life, not mine, the kids.

Oh yes, and Guy helped me set up a great little window timer on the EEE that pops up every 15 mins and asks, "What are you doing?" and then enters your reply in a text file so you can look back and see how little you achieved today. Well, it doesn't yet pop up every 15 mins as I need to work out the 'cron' bit or remind Guy to pass on his notes for eeejuts about cron! Back to Backpack for another reminder on that.

I love the Mac Mini but every time I go anywhere, I have to take that stupid bulky power pack, and the convertors for the monitor I am likely to find at the other end, and I usually take keyboard and mouse as many people don't have spare USB keyboards etc knocking around their office or kitchen.

The other thing about the EEE of course is that if you take it to a client to work on whilst you are there, the first half hour is generally taken up with Oohs and Aahs etc as they fondle it all over, and then another however long trying to find someone who actually has one in stock. (Use the EEE stock checker and save yourself losing work time and pay!)