about 2 days ago - No comments
The ASUS Eee PC 701 is back yet again with yet another slate tablet mod purposely made for those occasions where the modder wanted to verify actor roles at IMBD in front of the TV. He bought a used Eee PC 701 and touchscreen kit off of Ebay and proceeded to hack the More >
about 1 month ago - No comments
Asus have revealed that their new Eee PC T91MT multi-touch netbook will feature the 32GB pSSD Gen2 drive from SanDisk. Asus chose this model from SanDisk’s offerings as it suits the netbooks low power needs and small form factor requirements.
As many readers would already be aware, this means enhanced durability for the T91MT because the More >
about 4 months ago - No comments
During the last few months, Asus has started selling the “eeePC 1000H GO” with internal 3G/HSDPA card for easy everywhere connectivity. So far so good, but what about all those thousands of customers that already bought an eeePC 1000H before? Are they doomed to use one of those ugly external USB 3G modems – a threat to your eeePCs health if you drop it accidentally and the USB stick destroys the USB port it was sticking in (if not even more)…
about 4 months ago - No comments
For all those users without free USB ports on their smartphones, PDAs, MIDs and other devices, or those with an aversion against cables in general, there are also bluetooth versions of those full-sized foldable keyboards I mentioned already on this blog few days ago – namely I’d like to make mention here of the “Freedom Universal Keyboard²” (from a company called Freedom Input Ltd) with its own two AAA sized batteries and – most important – bluetooth! The manufacturer claims that due to support for both HID mode (used and recognized by all PCs, most PDAs, UMPCs and smartphones) and SPP mode, a bluetooth serial port emulation protocol utilized by the blackberry family of smartphones for example, this gadget enjoys comaptibility to > 200 different devices. Sure is that every device with bluetooth and either Blackberry OS 4.0 and upwards, symbian OS v9, or windows mobile 5 & 6 ( both PPC and smartphone edition), as well as Windows 2000 and WinXP is supported without need to install any drivers. No mention of linux though, and what about windows CE??
about 4 months ago - No comments
Its nice to see that during the past year, the number of linux distributions custom tailored to fit the needs of netbooks has increased dramatically. While this is a great advancement, it cannot be denied that this is mainly the merit of one linux distribution – ubuntu linux, on which most of nowadays “netbook linux” are based (ubuntu in turn is debian-based, btw). While these custom netbook linux flavors usually come equipped with all the device drivers you’ll need for your netbook, there’s one thing that is missing (at least in Ubuntu 8.04 or “Ubuntu eee”): an easy possibility of formatting SD memory cards with the usual FAT16 (or the faster FAT32) file system with the card reader that is built into all eeePC models – but sometimes you just need an empty and freshly formatted SD card, for example to “burn” the newest ubuntu ISO image onto and install right from the SD card (which is quite handy if you don’t have a DVD/CD drive).
about 4 months ago - No comments
Although generally speaking I’m all pro linux and use it whereever possible – and consider it the best OS for networking encountered by me so far – I was not able to make my internal 3G modem work properly with Ubuntu yet. Of course I managed to have it load the right device drivers and I’m able to establish connections and to surf the internet – but unlike windows, ubuntu refuses to crank up the speed to HSDPA, and despite my patching (and recompiling) of the “usbserial.ko” and “sierra.ko” driver modules I was only able to get a downlink speed of 800KBit/sec at most. The same modem with WindowsXP though achieved between 2.2 and 2.8 MBit/s at the same daytime, causing me quite some frustration (I had bought the modem card because it was claimed as being fully compatible with linux, even with linux drivers supplied by manufacturer, mind you) and I started using WinXP more frequently again due to this issue.
about 4 months ago - No comments
Now it has been over a week since I installed Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope” on my netbook, and in the meantime I’ve been working on customizing things to my needs. One main tweak consisted of replacing the default “2.6.28-8-generic” kernel with the more appropriate “2.6.28-12-netbook-eeepc” kernel compiled by Adam McDaniel over at array.org , main reason was merely the unpleasant sound of the word “generic” to me, since this “generic” kernel was working quite well – there was no obvious need to replace it. But I still thought it would be nice to have the core of the operating system customized to my hardware.
about 4 months ago - No comments
Now Viliv is jumping on the UMPC train too: since several weeks the long-announced “VILIV S5 MID” is available in several configurations. The “Premium Air” version sports a 16GB SSD, 4.8″ touchscreen LCD with a resolution of 1024×600 pixels, and full 3G/HSDPA functionality – whereas the “normal” versions come equipped with 30 or 60 GByte 1.8″ HDD instead, 800×480 LCD only, and no wireless broadband at all. Both models have the same 24Wh battery, allowing for 5-6 hours of continuous use, and are available with either WinXP, Vista or Linux (unspecified distro) preinstalled, both weigh around 380 grams and have 802.11 b/g wifi, bluetooth 2.0 and external video connectors (for VGA, S-Video and Composite-video cables!), the whole controlled by a “Silverthorne” Intel Atom clocked at 1.33GHz and supported by 1GB RAM.
about 4 months ago - No comments
During the last days I’ve been quite excited about a certain idea I want to report about here, and which I think is quite an entertaining project. During one of my web journeys I recently happened to stumble upon this link over at instructables.com and was fascinated: I was looking at a 5×5 LED matrix that initially blinked its LEDs randomly, but somehow “magically” (with the support of 25 light-dependent resistors) synchronized them very slowly, to finally reach a state of absolute synchronicity – and all this with 25 totally independent control circuits, all based on 25 single atTiny13 microprocessors!! The whole thing should be considered as being a model of large swarms of thousands of male fireflies in sout-eastern asia, which are capable of synchronizing their blinking to attract more female fireflies over a greater distance. For more detailed explanations about the background (and how to set up a physical logic model using AtTiny13 chips and C coding) I want to forward you to the instructables link above as well as to this scientific paper explaining the underlying mathematical theory behind this..
about 4 months ago - No comments
I guess after my last articles bearing somewhat randomized topics it is time for a real “eeeGadget” again.. So, what about having multi-color LED signaling incoming email (and ICQ instant messages) for you, visually with various blinking colors for assorted message types, even when your netbook’s lid is closed, for example