So I got mine! Actually, I am typing this post on it. It’s not available in Norway yet, but a traveling colleague got one for me in the Netherlands. Damn this thing is tiny, and oh so sexy. Of course I got the 20GB Linux version, running a custom Xandros Linux.

This machine really is a beauty. Weighing in at under a kilogram, it’s so tiny it’ll almost fit in your coat pockets. Working with the tiny keyboard takes some getting used to but once you get the hang of it it’s really quite refreshing. You don’t have to move your hands at all while typing for one…

Of course, leaving this thing in it’s pristine factory default setup would be a complete waste, so the first thing I did when I had unpacked it was to tweak the hell out of it. Read on for some of the things you may want to do to yours when you get one, as you should!!

The Desktop

Well the default fisher-price desktop with big colorful icons kinda annoyed me. Fortunately, there is a very easy way to enable a full KDE desktop instead, the so called “Advanced Mode“. Once that was done, I had to tweak some themes and config files to free up some screen realestate. The Eee has a tiny 9″ screen, so you’ll need all the space you can get. And of course, with the advanced mode you will also get access to virtual desktops! Even more space.

KDE

There aren’t really all that many packages in the default repositories. Adding Xandros or Debian Etch repos to your sources.list will expand your selection somewhat, but at the risk of completely hosing your system since there will be conflicts. My solution was to grab individual .debs from the etch repos, creating a few dummy packages to satisfy some unnecessary dependencies.

Now I have some of my favourite tools such as Yakuake (the console), and the kde bluetooth utilities etc.

…and more!!

I’ll update here if I find some other nuggets to share. For now I am too busy having fun with this baby!

As of December 1st, the entire IS (Information Services) department at my current employer is getting outsourced to an alliance between Hewlett-Packard and British Telecom. As a part of that project, I’ll be transferring to HP this December. Went to Oslo this weekend for the HP 2008 Kickoff and had a good time with some of my future colleagues. More as events unfold!

Ever heard of The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry - or IFPI? Somehow, through a donation from a third party, The Pirate Bay has gotten hold of the domain, ifpi.com. The original owners probably let the domain expire and someone snagged it before they could correct the mistake.

Torrentfreak has a brief interview with Brokep, of The Piratebay fame. Well played, mateys!

Working on a plugin to display recent Flixster reviews in a Worpress widget. Flixster doesn’t publish any RSS feeds, but the backend for their Flash applet thingy does suck down an XML-based feed which can be easily parsed. The first beta version of the plugin is displayed in the sidebar on this site (scroll down, muppet!). Currently it’s not configurable without editing the code, and there are some ugly hacks in there. Once I get that all sorted I might release it for public consumption.

Oh and there’s no caching of feeds nor images - better get that sorted too…

So I was going to make this innuendo-laden post about what I do with my stick, but decided against it. This is a family blog after all. Anyway, USB sticks are cheap these days, so I always carry a couple of them with me. The latest acquisition is a 4GB Cruzer which I bought the other day for around €20.

Of course, the first thing you need to do when you buy a Cruzer is to remove the god-awful U3 software that comes with it. Fortunately they do provide a removal tool (it’s on a hidden partition on the drive or something). But once that’s done it’s a very useful drive in a very practical form factor. Now, here’s what I did with my 2 drives.

Portable Apps

The first one is a general purpose storage disk, FAT formatted, containing a collection of drivers and tools that I use a lot at work and when fixing computers for friends and family. Putting installers for useful tools on the USB drive is nothing new of course, and to be honest, not really all that useful. That’s where PortableApps comes in.

PortableApps is a framework and toolset that installs itself on a flash drive, and gives you a portable “Start Menu” type thing that launches and sits in your systray when you insert the USB stick (provided you have Autorun enabled). But that’s not all, there are quite a few useful applications and tools that will install in the PortableApps framework, and run straight off your USB stick without installing it on the computer, saving all settings back to the USB stick.

You can download portable versions of popular freeware and opensource applications such as Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, The Gimp, OpenOffice.org, Putty, Winscp, Notepad++ and so on. They all launch and run straight off the USB stick, so for the larger apps you will want a stick with fast read access.

The Rescue Stick

When everything goes south, and you’re left with a smoking pile of debris that will not boot, any number of useful tools and drivers won’t save you. What you need is a rescue cd to boot from. Now a CD is not very practical to carry around with you (unless you’re into really big and flashy bling or something), so why not make a rescue stick?

Using the System Rescue CD, you can do just that. Copying the contents of the CD to your USB drive and running the Syslinux utility will create a bootable USB stick with everything you need to salvage that wrecked PC. Contents include memtest86 and aida for hardware diagnostics, ntfs-3g and ntfstools for salvaging a borked NTFS file system, ntpass to recover lost passwords, partition utilities and boot managers to fiddle with the partition layout and boot unbootable partitions and restore deleted ones, and a stripped down Gentoo Linux system with lots and lots of tools to salvage what’s left.

Those are just some of the many tools provided on this CD. It’s an indispensable tool for any system admin or support tech, provided you primarily work with newish hardware that supports booting from USB devices.

Did an upgrade today to the new 2.3 version of Wordpress. Didn’t go so smoothly, mostly due to plugins barfing at the new database layout. Got most of it sorted now though, even imported my UTW tags to the new builtin tag system. All good now!

As foreseen, interesting things are happening in the wake of the recent MediaDefender email leak. Based on information gathered from said email messages, The Pirate Bay is now going after several huge media conglomerates, filing police reports alleging “infrastructural sabotage, denial of service attacks, hacking and spamming, all of these on a commercial level.”

While the chances of any charges actually going to criminal court are minuscule, I can’t help but love these guys.

I don’t trade stocks, and couldn’t care less about most of them really. But lately there is one particular technology company I’ve found some pleasure in keeping an eye on - SCOX. When I’m bored I just watch the little desktop widget showing SCO’s freefall.

No idea what I’m on about? Check Groklaw for the entire SCO saga in all it’s glory!

A while ago, I invested in a Nokia N95 Smartphone running the Symbian S60 3rd ed. operating system. It’s a great phone, with all the features you expect from a high-end smartphone: 3.5G, A-GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, 5 megapixel camera, MP3 player, up to 2GB of storage.

Never the less, there are much more interesting things on the horizon, particularly in the Linux based smartphone arena. I’ve been looking at two of the most promising projects, the OpenMoko Neo1973 and the Qtopia Greenphone unit.

The Qtopia Greenphone

Norwegian technology innovator Trolltech is probably best known in the Linux community for it’s QT C++ toolkit, which is the foundation upon which the popular KDE desktop environment is built. They also provide a platform for portable computing called QTopia, which runs on a variety of hardware platforms, mostly PDAs and tablet PCs.

Trolltech has also launched QTopia Phone Edition, a version of the QTopia mobile platform tailored for use in mobile smartphones. The reference- and development platform for QTopia Mobile Edition is the QTopia Greenphone. The device itself sports features such as a QVGA touchscreen (and keypad), onboard 312MHz ARM processor, MiniSD slot, tri-band GSM/GPRS, bluetooth and a camera.

More important than the hardware though, is the onboard operating system - QTopia Mobile Edition. This piece of software, combined with the community software development kit available from qtopia.net, makes the Greenphone into a powerful, complete open (and closed) source mobile development platform.

According to a recent Trolltech announcement, QTopia Mobile Edition will now also run on the other interesting opensource phone project available, the OpenMoko Neo1973.

OpenMoko Neo1973

OpenMoko is a Linux based mobile platform designed from the ground up, and works on a few phone models from Treo, Palm, HTC and Motorola. The reference platform for OpenMoko is the Neo1973, manufactured by FIC (the initiators of the OpenMoko project). The final, consumer version is slated for release December 2007.

The current (GTA01) version of the phone lacks some key features (such as WiFi and Bluetooth) that will be present in the final product. The OpenMoko software itself is also currently in a “barely usable” state (pre-alpha) and is not recommended for end users. Otherwise, this looks like a very promising project, and a very sleek looking phone.

There are already a lot of applications and developer resources available for OpenMoko, as well as access to mailing lists and Subversion repositories. You can find active OpenMoko projects here.