And another one bites the dust…
My laptop finally had it’s last drink gracefully served by Zippy last weekend. It’s dodged many many close calls especially considering it’s spent countless hours behind the DJ booth at the club and late nights partying with friends. I’ve dropped the darn thing from over 3′ countless times and tried to serve it my beer three times that I can recall. Zippy’s accomplished watering the lil monster twice that I can remember. lol.
Any who. Back to the point. It’s finally dead after over a year of abuse so now I switched gears a little bit, at least for a little while to see how it goes. I’m downsizing a ton. Everywhere I actually get work done I have an extra monitor, keyboard and mouse setup with an extra PC utilizing Synergy so I’ve always walked in to work / home and set my laptop down, plugged it in, turned it on and it just extended my the existing PC. On that note I decided to get a little lifestyle-ish laptop netbook. It’s a hell of a lot nicer to carry around and thus far is proving to be an adequate replacement of my full sized laptop. I still have a couple full sized laptops I will use for hotel hopping and getting real work done on the road but for the daily grind I (so far) really like having a ton less baggage.
Now that it’s setup I don’t actually open the little thing when I get to work. I just plug it in or in other words ‘dock it’ on my desktop. It’s got it’s own monitor and automatically links up via synergy and has more than enough power to let me haxor the scripts. I have read a lot ’bout these things being good portable Linux machines. I’m going to toss an ubuntu livecd in it and see how it likes it. It’s bonded really well with Ubuntu.
One thing I wish it had (or maybe I’m overlooking) is the ability to instantly come out of standby when you open the lid. I’m jealous of Zippy’s laptop for that albiet her’s is a big tablet but that feature just seems extremely convenient. standby when the laptop lid closes and resume on open. But noooooo.. I still have to reach my grubby finger in there and press the power button.
I didn’t really need to run out and buy this thing since I have extra laptops specifically set aside to replace my last one but I figured it was time to test a change of pace. It definitely will not cut the cake for hotel hopping and getting real work done remotely for an extended period of time but that’s why I have a portable printer, writable optical media, two reams of paper and a 17″ portable workstation (laptop) in the trunk of my car in a small suitcase. It is however fun to buy new toys.
Posted in Hardware
November 19th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Great! Now I’ll know whose trunk to pop when I need a mobile rig!
-Q
November 20th, 2008 at 8:43 am
I knew someone would say that! hahaha. I guess I didn’t mention that the suitcase resides in my office unless I leave knowing I’m not just going home. ^_^
And if I’m on the road I park next to police cars since I spend most of my time at County Courthouses. It’s always entertaining watching officers inspect the crazy out of state car parked next to em. lol
November 21st, 2008 at 11:48 pm
I like the whole one-device thing. It was nice when I actually lugged my laptop around, but I got lazy fast.
At some point, I may start using my OpenMoko on the desktop as some do: using the USB network driver to the host PC, then running X11 over that. The end result is a “cell phone” that uses whichever keyboard/monitor/mouse I want. Running Debian, and sporting an 8GB microSD, it’s essentially a full-on PC. Never mind extra, extra slow.
Right this moment, I’m actually working on loading eeebuntu onto a coworker’s eeePC. Apparently this “eee” branch supports automatic suspend on lid close, at least on the Asus.
I would say “I want one so bad” but the keyboard on this model is impossibly small for me. Any particular reason you chose the Acer? How’s the keyboard?
November 25th, 2008 at 9:45 am
I bought the Acer because a friend had the EEEeee thing. The Acer was faster, bigger, nicer, etc. Insert “relatively inexpensive impulse buy” and then here it sits on my desk. The keyboard is still annoying but I’m getting used to it. I wouldn’t say it’s “impossibly” small but it is too small to get any real work done on it aside from email, etc.
Thinking about it… I would really like some kind of synergy/vnc/remote desktop action on my G1. That would be really handy. (Slow as hell but cool never the less)