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I asked for and got a Matias half-keyboard for Christmas. I can type decently on it, but since half the keys require using the shift, and they're randomly distributed (more or less) interms of frequency, I've thought that re-mapping the keys might speed the process up.
Well...it turns out that someone's already done that. It's called a Frog Pad. It's a square keyboard that optimizes for the frequency of symbols. That should inherently make it faster to type on, but since it bears no relationship to the qwerty keyboard, it will be harder to learn.
I'm going to have to take the engine out of my beetle one day, probably this winter or early spring. I have a valve continuing to stretch on the right side, possbly due to an induction problem.
Getting the engine unmounted doesn't seem to present to much difficulty. However, getting the car high enough to get the engine out from under it has worried me, until now. I did a search this evening for "remove beetle engine" just to see what was out there, and I found this page on geocities. It suggests jacking the right rear of the car up, taking the wheel off, and then sliding the engine sideways so the top of the engine goes through the space left by the wheel, which seems like a very sensible thing to do. So I expect I'll try this.
May I just say that I f***ing hate Chicago? One would think that a construction project that totally messed up one of the main interchanges in your interstate system might merit a sign, say something like "The I-65/I-80 interchange is under construction. Please take alternate routes". That would keep it from being a complete logjam of all the people from out of town who don't know any better and take it, thus creating a zone of slowed traffic that made it take 1 1/2 hours to get 3 miles. Did I mention it was snowing during this time? May the fleas of a thousand camels nest in Richard Daley's underpants.
HOWEVER, the reason that I ended up driving through the festering construction-zone hell that is Chicago is that I'm attending the Sportair workshop on sheet metal, as pertains to aircraft construction, this weekend. Should be lots of fun, then back to the real world next week. That's right, I'm in Oshkosh...oh yes:
[WARNING: Technical content, which is then followed by pretty pictures]
I'm a gadget freak, and I tend to gravitate towards the gadgets that take up electricity. I can instantly think of dozens of electrical devices that I'd like to put in my beetle: radios, navigation gadgets, instruments, defrost blowers, lights, you name it. All of those things require power to work, and the 30 amp generator that came with the car in 1972 just isn't going to support too much extra load.
The solution is to install an alternator. They produce more electrical power, at lower engine RPM even. In the process of reading about alternators, I've become facinated with that technology. The automotive alternator, like a slingshot orbital maneuver, is one of those very rare cases where nature lets you have it both ways, seemingly defying physics. (The role of a generator or alternator is the same; the engine turns them and using the energy of rotation, they product direct-current electricity to power the electrical systems of the car.)
The principle of a generator is very simple and intuitive. A uniform magnetic field is created by coils of wire and soft iron cores, called "pole pieces". A bunch of coils of wire are rotated in the magnetic field. The coils cutting through the magnetic field create voltage in the coils which drives current. Now a single wire loop rotated in a magnetic field would product a sine wave AC current, so the rotating part of the generator is made up of a whole bunch of coils at different orientations. Brushes and contacts (together called a commutator) connect the one coil that's cutting through the field the most together with the generator output wires, so you get a more or less steady voltage out. The voltage of the generator is regulated by adjusting how much current is in the magnet coils (called field coils).
By the way, an interesting fact about generators is that if you apply electric current to what is normally the generator output, the generator will run like a motor.
Generators tend to be heavy because to increase their output, the rotating coils must be made of heavier wire, and the pole pieces tend to be heavy as well. The current to the field wires is supplied from the generator's output. The magnetic pole pieces retain some magnetism even when the generator isn't operating, so a generator is self-exciting; it can produce current if the rotor is spun from the outside.
An alternator is a slick way to do the same job that the generator does, more efficiently, but to create alternators it required good semiconductors. The general principle is the same, a coil of wire moving within a magnetic field produces a voltage in the wire. However, in an alternator, it's the magnetic field that moves and the coils stay still. The center part of a an alternator, called the "rotor", is two halves sandwiched together with coils in between the halves so that as it turns, each coil of wire in the outer portion of the alternator gets rapidly alternating magnetic fields. These coils are called the "stator". (There are good photos of a rotor and stator here, and a little farther down is an electrical schematic of the alternator.)
The engine of the car turns the rotor, and as the rapidly varying magnetic fields continually pass by the coils in the stator, they cause current to "slosh" back and forth. This sloshing would produce current that flowed in both directions (AC, or alternating current) except that the stator coils are then connected to a series of diodes set up as rectifier, which are arranged such that current can only flow out in one direction. There are typically three separate sets of coils and each one has a diode going in each direction so that each "push" from the magnetic field moves current out of the alternator in the correct direction, so none of the energy is lost.
Some of the current from each coil is tapped to provide current to the rotor magnet coils. The amount of current is controlled by the alternator "regulator", which adjusts the current to make the alternator output voltage as close as possible to a pre-determined value, typically 14.4V in a car. The alternator spinning produces output current which produces current in the magnet which produces current...which almost sounds like perpetual motion. It is a positive feedback system, except there is an external source of energy, the rotor which is being forcibly spun by the engine.
Interestingly, one disadvantage of an alternator is that the way the rotor is made, the alternator doesn't have any residual magnetism, so if you spin an alternator without an external source of current, there's no field coil to start generating output current. The way typical alternators work is when the ignition key is turned on, battery voltage is applied to the alternator warning light. The other side of the alternator light is connected to the positive side of the field coil in the alternator. (This can be clearly seen here, in a diagram on Speedy Jim's VW web site.) Since the field coils are essentially a short circuit at this point, the alternator light lights up this is when you turn the key to "on" but before you start the engine. The light lighting up pushes a small amount of current through the field coils in the rotor. When the engine starts, the (now energized) rotor spins, pushing current through the stator coils, producing voltage at the alternator output, which pushes more current through the rotor, which produces more current in the stator coils, et cetera. This continues until the voltage at D+ is at the same voltage as the battery, which means the alternator is now producing all the field current it needs. This also has the effect of making the alternator light go out, since B+ and D+ (the points on either side of the alternator light) are at the same voltage.
The story so far: Current through the alternator light provies a small start-up current to the rotor. The spinnning of the engine provides energy which initiates a positive feedback loop that raises the voltage in the alternator to a pre-determined level, after which the regulator starts limiting the rotor current to keep the output voltage at exactly that level.
On problem with this system is that while the alternator light will detect a catastrophic failure of the alternator, it won't necessarily detect that the alternator is producing not quite enough current to run the engine. This happened to me once, I was driving along fine and the first thing I noticed was the tachometer stopped working. Because of this problem with the warning light, that was, of course, after the battery was run most of the way down.
Now, back to the beetle. The generator (or alternator) in the beetle is driven by a pulley attached to the crankshaft, and at its other end drives the main engine cooling fan. Here's a by beetle's engine partially taken apart:
The top pulley of the belt is on the generator. The other end of the generator goes into the fan shroud where it drives the cooling fan.
To increase electrical output, in 1974 the volkswagen beetle went to an alternator rather than a generator for all of these reasons. To increase the electrical capacity of my car, I will be installing one at some point. To get some of the parts, not necessarily to buy an alternator to use, I bought a beetle alternator on ebay, shown here with the cooling fan but without the pulley:
You'll notice that unlike the generator shown above, the alternator is fatter at the pulley end than the generator is. The support pedestal for the alternator must provide space for this, and the carburetor and the fuel pump must provide for this extra required size.
You can sort of see the parts of the alternator here. Looking in the holes at the end of the alternator, around the edge you can see the copper-colored stator coils. Just inside of that is the rotor.
The alternator I have appears to not have a regulator installed:
I guess this is an externally regulated alternator? Or perhaps one where the regulator has been removed?
As far as buying an alternator to use, I probably will buy one new. California Import Parts has some nice alternators with install kits, including some 75 amp ones (all the late 1970s beetles came with a 55 amp alternator as stock. However, in the process of researching this post, I came across a company selling a 95-amp beetle alternator. Maybe a birthday present?
Working on my own exploded diagram of the beetle's right rear axle assembly:
From left to right along the top, the objects are the stub axle, inner spacer, spacer ring and roller bearing outer race together, roller bearing inner ring, and outer spacer. The bearing retainer is to the lower right with the bolts.
The items came today to finally hook up the Sirius radio to the Taurus radio.
Here's the Sirius Direct FM adapter and two cables to adapt the Ford connectors to normal and back to Ford-style that I got from Crutchfield:
Here they are, the radio finally connected:
You'll notice that you can't see the interface box for the adapter in this photo. That's because the people that designed the adapter assumed that the radion connection was in the front of the car too, so the cable that goes from the adapter to the Sirius radio cradle is only 6 feet long. The only place where all the wires reach is when the box is next to the back seat.
That was my "garage" work for today. Upstairs work consisted of putting shelves in the closet so that we don't have a giant pile of random hats/scarves/gloves and can't find any that match.
Sunday I put cardboard flaps on the doors in the garage to help block cold air from coming in.
I'm finally back working on the beetle again; of course, the coldest day of the winter.
Workbench before cleaning it off:
Ready to begin work:
The axle tied up to the frame of the car to get it out of the way:
I was able to push the stub axle out this far:
Here's the stub axle on the work bench. This is what the drive axle bolts to, so when grinding out the bolt, what I was trying to save was this part.
The whole assembly without the axle. The silver ring around the hole is the outer spacer.
On the left is the center race of the roller bearing (which is the outer bearing). On the right is the outer spacer.
The housing where you can see the rollers of the roller bearing. The tube you can see past the middle of the bearing is the inner spacer sleeve.
Now that I know where the radio connection is, I ordered the hardware to patch the Sirius radio into the car. Principly I need the direct FM adampter from Sirius, but also two adapters to adapt Ford's non-standard antenna connector to it. Both pieces of hardware should arrive next week.
For now, I disconnected the cable from the car's normal antenna and I taped the transmitter wire from the Siriuc car kit across the antenna jack on the radio box in the trunk. It works really well; we haven't heard any static at all on it. However, we can't listen to terrestrial radio with the current setup.
At the bottom right corner of the radio box is the antenna input connector. Just to the left of it is a long, multi-pin connector with no cord connected to it. That's where an optional trunk CD changer plugs in when it's installed.
Real progress on the Sirus radio thing today. It occured to me today that perhaps there is a pre-made piece of wiring harness that interfaces to the wiring in the Taurus to connect the Sirius radio the way I want. So while we were in Knoxville today, I stopped by some stores to try to find such a thing. The only really helpful visit was to Circuit City, who had that general kind of thing, but not for our year of car. One piece of information I took away from that store was a brand name of car stero connection equipment, Axxess.
That didn't quite get me what I want, so I started looking first for our model, and then for the piece of equipment that we needed. I came across installer.com, which didn't have something that said it was for a 2006 Taurus, but did have a widget for a 2005 Taurus, called a FRDR-AUX. That page seems like it's for our car, but the diagram of the radio shows an antenna jack, which our radio doesn't have in the dash unit, which is why I'm looking for this product in the first place. I'm also suspicious, because the instructions talk about 13 and 14 pin connectors, and the connector on the back of the radio that I saw looked like 20 pins to me.
Logjamelectronics.com also has a FRDR-AUX available, which actually mentions the 2006 Taurus, so we're in luck! No more diagrams and no more information, though.
The problem with these two advertisements is that they say their adapter plugs into the data connector on the radio that would normally go to an auxilliary CD changer. We don't have a CD changer, but there's also no empty connectors on the back of the radio. Something doesn't add up.
Still thrashing around, I finally find it available at the manufacturer's web site. It's more expensive there, no surprise. They have an installation diagram, which contains a crucial piece of information that I hadn't found anywhere else: REAR MOUNTED TUNER AMPLIFIER PACK.
So the heart of the radio is in the trunk, which is why the radio in the dash board didn't have the right connectors and didn't make any sense--it's just the head unit.
And here are the connectors:
Now that I know where the bloody radio is, this job will be much more straightforward.
One of my friends at UHACC pointed me to a neat Firefox plugin called UnPlug. It scans web pages for embedded video content and allows you to save the content files locally. Like if you wanted to download something from YouTube so that you could play it from your hard drive, this tool would do that.
One thing you have to remember is that it must be invoked explicitly. It doesn't change anything in your normal browsing. It must be invoked either from Firefox's "Tools" menu or from the little icon that appears:
yesterday: cyberspace: I uploaded latest version of the work I did on the beetle during the fall of 2006. It's still under construction, and it's too long; I need to split it up so it doesn't take so long to load. It now has over 70 photos.
garage: I tried to get behind the radio in the car, but I failed.
Today: garage: I managed to get the radio out, but I didn't find what I expected. I have perhaps an interim plan.
basement: I consolidate mice, moved NeXT monitors, and moved bicyles.
cyberspace: This morning I finished sorting my browser bookmarks. For the first time in years, they're fairly carefully sorted into categories.
There's a new laptop on the block.
Apparently, the "MacBook Air" was just announced at MacWorld. It's only 3 pounds, no spinning optical drive. It doesn't have a built-in ethernet port, if you need that feature, you use a USB ethernet adapter.
I have to say that this goes to my top 3 next laptops just because I always loved both of my iBooks. The reason that I got a PC laptop the last time I bought a new laptop was because I was tired of not having browser plugins because I was running PowerPC Linux. There are many companies that distribute binaries of their software products, like Flash players and Adobe pdf reader for Intel Linux, but not any other processor brand. But now that Apples run Intel CPUs, that's no longer a problem.
I had another grumpy old man moment this evening.
I got the radio extracting tools to work on our Ford. The trick is to slide the tools in until they engage, then push the handle parts to the outside. This evening I managed to get the radio/environmental control assembly out of the car:
The way that radios used to be made was the back had separate connectors for power in, speakers, standby power (for the clock), and the antenna connection was a separate coaxial connection, sort of like this one that I got off of an old radio:
That's what the Sirius FM adapter is designed to work with.
Well, the Ford Motor Company doesn't want to make this process easy. The connector for the radio is a proprietary pin connector with no separated antenna connection:
So I'm going to have to be clever.
12-stepping not going well on football playoff days when we have people over. For Sunday:
cyberspace: One thing I did accomplish yesterday was I edited I think the last of the photos for the writeup of my major beetle repair last fall.
upstairs: I suppose I also bought a set of radio removal tools so as to get Sirius radio set up in the car we take on long trips.
That was all for yesterday. I just really couldn't summon much enthusiasm after the Colts melted down early yesterday afternoon.
We have Sirius Satellite Radio, which we very much like. It's nice to be able to take long-distance trips and not have to switch radio stations all the time. The setups in one of our cars looks like this:
There are two ways for the Sirius radio get a signal the car's sound system. One is if there's a direct "auxiliary" input on the front, then you just plug it directly into the radio; that's most likely to be an option if you have a really nice radio (we don't have one). The other way is that the Sirius radio has an FM transmitter to connect to the car's FM radio. That can work by just putting the Sirius radio near the radio in the car. That doesn't work so well with ours. It was very easy for a terrestrial radio station to overpower the Sirius transmitter. I came up with taping the Sirius FM transmitting antenna to the car's radio antenna:
which works passably well. But driving cross-country, you still have to re-tune the radio for at least once every metropolitan area you go through.
Sirius does make a way to get around this. They makes a "Direct FM Adapter" that goes between the car's antenna and the radio that interrupts the outside radio signal. That eliminates interference from outside. However, to insert that, you need to get to the back of the radio. I tried to get to the antenna connection from underneath the dash, but I couldn't seem to get to it.
This morning I did a google search and found this web site about car stereos, which shows the tools to remove the radios in that car.
So today, I went out and picked up a set:
For size comparison:
Here are the holes in the radio where the removal tools go:
So I'll try this out.
I didn't get back to working on the beetle today, but I did have a successful day.
upstairs: I cleaned the TV room of my stuff and vacuumed.
basement: I didn't really do anything there
garage: I put in a can crusher:
Which works quite well, I'm very pleased.
cyberspace:I didn't get very far, but I worked a littel on conditioning photos for the beetle starter repair page. Here's my setup for doing this:
The black thing on the right is an external hard drive to use for backups and store stuff like our master photo archive. On the left, the blue thing is a USB hub that I picked up for travelling. The laptop only has two USB ports, and that allows me to use more than two devices at a time.
today's stuff: basement: bought another shelf unit at Wal-mart (5-shelves, $27, set up in just a few minutes, they're terrific), set them up, and started setting them up as the computer supply shelves. upstairs: sorted and removed most of my clothes in the bedroom garage: removed last drive shaft bolt from beetle cyberspace: worked on organizing browser bookmarks this morning and this evening
The bolt is off, finally! So I can resume work on the bearings and breaks. Oy.
I put liquid wrench on both ends of the bolt and let it soak for a few hours this evening. I don't know how much help that did, but I finally got it to budge by using the pressure plate as a lever to turn the bolt back and forth a couple of times, to free the threads. Then I was able to turn it out with a screwdriver.
Before turning:
Here's the bolt out with the presure plate:
Here's the end of the drive shaft:
The bearing assembly that you see here is the end of the drive shaft, which allows the wheel to go up and down which changes the effective length of the shaft, all while transmitting the rotating motion from the transmission to the rear wheels. There is such a joint at both ends of the driveshaft, called "constant velocity joints". The black goupy stuff is at least as greasy as it looks; it's a special constant-velocity grease just for this application. Judging by this joint, I would say that it's well lubricated and I don't necessarily need to worry about re-lubing them in the near future.
With luck, I'll be dis-assembling the rear axle assemblies in the near future.
Slashdot had an article yesterday about the One Laptop Per Child CEO (who has a PhD in optical engineering and designed the OLPC's screen herself) founding a new company to build a $75 laptop.
I think the OLPC project was originally called "the $100 laptop". The idea was to create a computer that's so cheap that you can use it to bring computing infrastructure to poor countries or even places without any computing infrastructure at all. (And yeah, it runs Linux). It's small, cheap, low-power. After flipping through some of the linked articles, and my recent search for a small, light laptop, I thought to wonder if I could get one for myself.
Well...OLPC is designed as a charitable organization and is optimized to accept donations and to supply laptops to governments who wish to have them in large batches...so they're not really equipped for single retail sales. However, there was a program set up called "give one get one", which meant that for $400, you donated one laptop to the cause and got one yourself. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately for my discressionary spending budget) that program ended at the end of 2007. And, no surprise, searching ebay for "olpc" gives 49 for sale. :-) There's a black market for anything.
In any case, I'm not sure that I really would want one, but it's an interesting point in the parameter space of very low power computing.
I made it today. I did something in all four target areas this evening.
upstairs: paid bills basement: cleared a table and dug up old computers garage: spent an hour more trying to get the driveshaft bolt out cyberspace: I imported my bookmarks file from my old laptop (2+ years ago) and worked a little on organizing my bookmarks
I cleared off a table in the basement and started my vintage computer display with the first two computers I ever owned. First a Radio Shack Color Computer 2:
And later on, a Tany 1000 EX:
Well, I continue to remove metal from the drive shaft bolt in the beetle, but it still won't budge.
Here's the bolt as I started this evening:
I tried to grind a deeper slot in the bolt for a screwdriver, and grind some of the washer that the head sits on away:
And last I spent some time trying to grind away the pressure pad under the bolt head:
Nothing so far, it still won't budge.
basement Over the weekend I got a good start on the basement, making boxes such as "USB cables".
For the past 3 months, we've had one stall of a two-stall garage, because our old kitchen cabinets are taking up one stall. I think I'm going to give up and just move the old cabinets into the basement because I never seem to get to getting rid of them.
basement: Tuesday evening I also got good stuff done in the basement; I made a serious effort to start collecting computer game CDs together, and creating boxes to store stuff as I come to it. I'm still not to the point that I can clean efficiently.
upstairs: The dining room table is cleared off so that I can pay bills. Yay.
computer stuff: Over the weekend, I went through and fixed two mis-spellings of words that were causing artificial google hits. I hate it when I look at the statistics for my site, see that I have a high page rank for that term, but then realize that's because that term is mis-spelled. Baikonur and wikipedia are now spelled correctly on my web pages.
I got two vintage VW alternators last and this week, mostly for the spare parts. I will be posting about them soon.
I ran across a great web site last night, a web essay on "Information Display Systems for Russian Spacecraft: An Overview", which has lots of photos of instrument panels of Soviet/Russian spacecraft, which I think are fun to look at.
Looking at Some of these panel diagrams led me down an interesting line of thought. I can't read the button labels, because they're in Russian. It occured to me that that might be a reason to learn to read Russian. Since from 2010 to 2014, the only viable person-rated spacecraft will be the Soviet Soyuz and whatever succeeds it. I would be able to read stuff in the original language. I've always wanted to learn a foreign language. I've thought that Japanese would be neat, and I took some in college, but I just haven't had any reason to pursue it. Maybe this could be a reason to get that second language.
Here's a Soyuz-T panel photo from Astronautix.com:
this photo is © Mark Wade and used according to their use terms.
I've always been facinated by the globe instrument in the panel. I presume it indicates current position in orbit and maybe where you'd land if you fired the retro-rockets right now. Is this an actual, active navigation device? Is it a clockwork globe that just turns? Is it controlled by computer, or something else?
I unfortunately have an addictive personality. I tend to gravitate toward things that I like and are interesting vs. things that are important or that I need to do. Most of the time this isn't horrible, because I like my job, and to a certain extent I like doing things that accomplish tasks, but it means that things that I ought to do get put off for much longer than they should, until I make a major effort. (I say addictive because I believe that if I got into physically addictive substances, my tendencies would make it that much harder to quit; I basically have a built-in psychological addiction to things that make me feel happy. Thus far, the only binges brought on my these tendencies have been binges of buying things on ebay.)
When I lived in Champaign, Illinois, we had a neighbor across the street (named Richard) that removed his concrete driveway over a period of about a year, by hand, piece by piece, with a metal bar and a sledge hammer. Most every afternoon, he'd break off a piece of concrete, pry it up with the bar, break it into tiny chunks with the hammer and haul the chunks away. The second summer we lived there, the old driveway was gone, and he brought a bunch of people in and they poured a new driveway.
His stick-to-it-iveness has inspired me since then, and I told him so one day. He told me that the secret to finishing a project like that is to do something on it every day. Not necessarily anything big, nor to have a set schedule for what to do every day, but just to do something on it, each and every day.
Another issue I have with getting things done is option paralysis. I have lots of hobbies, and projects, and things going on that it's hard to pick one and concentrate on it. And I'm a great procrastinator.
So...as a way to move some projects in the house and in my life forward, I am going to pick four categories of things that I need to work on around the house and do something on each one of them every day, and blog about them. For the boring things, I will just put in one sentence. Some things will probably be more interesting, so I'll talk about them a little more. The net impact of forcing myself to do these things will definitely be positive for me and my life, and I think likely it will be good for the blog too; it will keep ideas (if not posts) flowing more freely.
The four categories are: upstairs/general house stuff [upstairs] basement stuff [basement] beetle/garage stuff [garage] computer/photo/IT stuff [cyberspace]
So for Friday January 4: upstairs: mostly unpacked form Christmas trip basement: got started in labelling boxes, designated box for USB cables (see, some of the things will be very small) cyberspace: got photos backed up from camera garage: nothing yesterday; I'll do two things today (Saturday)
And for the near future: I have some work stuff to finish up this weekend, but I really, truly will be working on the beetle within the next week, so there'll be stuff up about that.
I lamented recently that I couldn't find an ultra-portable laptop as a potential replacement for my current one, assuming that it won't probably last another year. Well, there there may be light at the end of the tunnel.
Lenovo, the company that now makes the IBM Thinkpad, has just announced a new series of laptops that will include a small, ultra-portable with the option of a flash-memory hard drive. (Lenovo release page, geek.com article)
They say that the U110 will be out in March. I look forward to getting a chance to try out the keyboard.
I installed gtypist on my laptop. It has typing drills and will tell you how fast you type.
According to gtypist, I type about 60 WPM on a normal keyboard, which is quite a bit faster than I expected; I would have guessed about 40. On the half-keyboard, I get about 16, with quite a few errors and corrections.
Happy New Year!
I'm being unfaithful to my laptop. I recently looked for a battery for my Sharp Actius MM-20 laptop. I don't think that there that many produced, and so I think the accessories are quickly becoming hard to find. (I did find a battery for it today.)
Since the batteries I have are getting weak, and given its age, I need to start thinking about getting another laptop. I probably won't get another MM20, because even now half a gigabyte of RAM is kind of aenimic. But the question is, what to replace it with? I've gotten really spoiled with the MM20 which is under two pounds, so I'm looking for something that's very very light.
Years ago I was interested in a colleague's Sony Vaio Picturebook. The last version I knew about didn't have built-in wireless, which is too bad. It's even smaller than my current one. As it turns out, that version was the last one produced, and so there is no version that has built-in wireless, nor in fact a reasonable RAM capability. Aaaaargh. So what was the perfect laptop, but no way to get a contemporary version. So in the last couple of days, I have been doing a bit of pre-shopping to see what might be a suitable replacement when the times come.
I'm interested by the HP Pavilion Tablet. If I had to get a new laptop today, it would probably be this one.
The Panasonic W7 is very nice, but it's pretty expensive.
The ASUS Eee is a great idea, but its screen is 800x480. Back in the day, I decided not to get another clamshell iBook because its screen was only 800x600.
