With Wings As Eagles: Craig P. Steffen's Blog

on a desert island

2008 June 06 22:23

I have a function computer system on the main floor of the house:

It's my wife's old laptop running Knoppix 5.1.1. The wireless is working, and so far pretty much all the applications I want to run work. One thing to note--running this OS on a machine with 256MB of RAM and no swap is a challenge. The browser has dropped out me a few times and the whole OS died once. As long as I'm not opening twelve different tabs or trying to do stuff with photos, it works fine. (Have I mentioned how many times Knoppix has saved my bacon? Lots of times--this is one more.)

Speaking of which--I knew there was no way at all that I was going to be able to edit photos using, say, GIMP. I'd like to give a shout out to snipshot, a web-based image editing program that doesn't require flash. It has basic image editing stuff, and it seems to do relatively sensible things. When you go back to the site, it pops up the last image you edited there so that you can continue editing.

I spent 10 minutes typing on a Asus Eee yesterday at the Best Buy in Knoxville. I'm not sure that I entirely like the keyboard. It took me a couple of days to get used to what is now my old laptop, the Sharp MM-20. It's about a 70% keyboard. The Eee keyboard is even smaller. The number keys are farther left compared to the top row of letter keys than standard. They have a standard inverted "T" arrow key configuration, which I'm all about, but they did it by putting the up arrow key where the left half of the right shift key usually is. This means that the right shift key is REALLY short, and it's farther away than it would be otherwise. And it's pretty small--maybe too small for me.

So I'm being patient and waiting for the explosion of ultra-portable laptops that are supposed to happen this month. I have desktops in my office and in the basement, but it's nice to be able to be connected and spend time on the main floor. So I'll be coping with the Inspiron 2500 for a while yet. Maybe I'll order some more RAM for it. Until I do, fewer photos in the blog.