XZIST.org Blog

Note about this “review”: I started writing this review several months ago, but since it’s a rather boring thing to write I never finished it. So please excuse the rambling.

Second note: This is a review of the Linux version, not the Windows one. A lot of my complaints will not exist on the Windows version.

…

My Acer Aspire One – after 10 months of usage

I bought my aspire one sometime in summer/autumn 2008.

I’ve used it mostly for programming, writing and web browsing.

Looks
Most important first. It looks very nice in my humble opinion. I got the shiny blue version.

Speed
The Firefox 2 web browser slows when initially loading Google Docs, and also freezes for a second or two when saving a large document. Also freezes up when loading a video on the BBC news website, but I guess that is more the fault of the BBC’s resource hogging player, as YouTube works fine. The fan kicks in when browsing more intense sites like YouTube mind. But in general it is still perfectly usable.

Battery
Supplied battery is rubbish. Lasts about 2 hours on low power settings. If you want serious mobility like me you will have to shell out on the bigger battery, which cost me about £70.
The bigger battery has at least 5 hours of life, and if you carry the smaller battery along with you you have some very respectable hourage going on.
The larger battery does stick out a bit, making the aspire one look not quite as sleek and compact (plus increasing the weight a little). But it’s not too bad. When it is on a desk with the screen opened you don’t really notice.

Linux
I got the Linux version, as it was cheaper. I am however somewhat familiar with Linux. It uses “Linpus” Linux, which is based on some old version of Red Hat/Fedora.

Linux – unified drive
The unification of the expandable memory is nice in theory. Probably for the average user it will be fine. But there are some niggles… one I keep coming up against is that I have a shell script in my home directory set to executable… but somehow this manages to reset itself to non-executable after every boot. A little irritating, but not the end of the world.
Probably an advanced Linux user might want to install their own favourite Linux flavour anyway – the average user won’t be using shell scripts.

Some apps will occasionally ignore the unified drive and only access the original drive…. e.g. /a is the original drive, /b is expansion memory, and /c is the “unified” drive. Sometimes OpenOffice will open to /a instead of /c as it should. Hmmm, I don’t really know how to explain that better.

In summary I think the unified drive, while a nice idea, really fails in practice.

Linux – MP3 playback
Getting the thing to play MP3s was a bitch. After trying many and varied different things, and scouring various repositories I finally managed to get Audacious to play MP3s. Amarok I couldn’t get to play them.

Also, could not get some DIVX videos to play. Tried installing various things for mplayer, xine and co. but gave up eventually. I never really intended to watch video on this so it’s no great loss for me.

So unless you are really tenacious you won’t be listening to MP3s or watching videos on the Linpus Linux Acer One.

Wireless Network
I’ve seen some issues on the forums and complaints about it dropping the connection, but this is not something I’ve experienced.
Using it on my university network, it did not support the required authorisation (some kind of wireless VPN network or something) which required a username and password to log on (as opposed to simple a key for everyone). Took a lot of hunting to get this to work. Finally found some nice tutorial on the aspire one user forums. This required updating network manager. And since that, I have been too afraid to run the automated updates in case it gets rid of these hacks. So maybe there are some updates I am missing, who knows?
This non-support of VPNs and other advanced authentication methods is very unfortunate. Support is lacking only because the preinstalled network manager is an outdated version. This is something they could easily remedy (and maybe they have in updates, but I really do not want to risk breaking my network connection to find out).

other stuff
Occasionally (maybe 5 times in the time I’ve owned it) it’s completely frozen up. Nothing to do but restart. 2 of those times I’ve lost stuff I’ve been writing. This should not happen. In this day and age, even the notorious Windows never freezes up completely. Maybe it is the fault of the old version of red hat linux. You never expect a complete system freeze when working in a text editor. Anyway. This is bad, but fortunately happens so rarely that it is not a major concern. Normal behaviour is to save regularly when working on an important document anyway…

Sometimes the wireless icon in the task bar fails to appear on system start. Maybe this is the fault of me upgrading the NetworkManager. Who knows. Generally it will appear on the next reboot.

OVERALL
Overall there are a lot of niggles. But appearance and keyboard are very good. I have a suspicion that most of these niggles are the fault of an old and badly configured version of Linux and might not be present in the Windows version.

Reading all the above, I realise this is more of a list of complaints than a review. There are good points, but you can read other reviews to find them out :)

I’m happy with my Acer One. It is a rather pretty little thing.

Well, I have SPF set up on my domains, or thought I did, but I found GMail was giving the error

Received-SPF: softfail (google.com: domain of transitioning X@X.com does not designate X.X.X.X as permitted sender

(my domain and IP removed…)

The problem being, the IP shown was an older IP I used to have and not my current IP…

Turns out, I still had some old IPs set in /etc/network/interfaces (Ubuntu server) and it seems only the last one was being used by Google mail for SPF purposes. So, the solution was to purge all unused IPs from there, and also set all IPs that I do use within the SPF record…

Giving something like, as I had two IPs remaining -

v=spf1 a ip4:X.X.X.X ip4:X.X.X.X include:aspmx.googlemail.com ~all

(the include is for Google Apps)

DENKEN SIE INTERNATIONAL!

Wussten Sie schon, dass ca. 287 Millionen Internet-Nutzer englischsprachig sind?

Würden Sie gerne Ihren Werbeertrag maximieren und Millionen potentieller Neukunden nahezu von einem Tag auf den anderen erreichen?

Lassen Sie mich Ihre Webseite oder Ihr Werbematerial nach Englisch übersetzen, und dann machen Sie genau das.

Sie müssen mir lediglich Ihren Text als Word- oder PDF-Dokument zusenden und können sich dann zurücklehnen -und freudig warten, während ich die schwere Arbeit mache.

P.S Oder vielleicht willst du nur ein wenig Hilfe bei der Übersetzung deiner Liebesbriefe…

Ganz gleich, um welche Aufgabe es sich handelt — ich übertreffe Ihre Erwartungen.

http://www.sylvantranslation.moonfruit.com

Email: sylvantranslation@googlemail.com

SYLVAN TRANSLATION SERVICES

Sylvan Translation Services ist eine kleine, engagierte Firma in Cornwall, Vereinigtes Königreich, und als Gründer bin ich einer erstklassigen Dienstleistung verpflichtet.

Ich werde die Qualität größere Firmen erreichen oder übertreffen, und das zu einem unschlagbaren Preis.

Die Bandbreite meiner Übersetzungen reicht von persönlichen Briefen und kreativen Arbeiten über Zeitungartikel und Aufsätzen bis hin zu Geschäftsberichten. Ich bin ein Fachmann auf dem Gebiet der Werbung, und Ich bin besonders stolz darauf, auf dem neuesten Stand der Marketing-Techniken geblieben zu sein. Falls Sie also einer breiteren Zielgruppe ein Produkt oder eine Dienstleistung anbieten wollen, sind Sie genau an der richtigen Stelle.

Normalerweise erhalten Sie Ihre Übersetzungen innerhalb von 2 bis 4 Tagen per Email – aber es geht auch schneller, wenn es wichtig ist. Fragen Sie einfach nach!

Schauen Sie sich bitte meine Muster und meine vernünftigen Preise an.

Ich freue mich darauf mit Ihnen zusammenzuarbeiten!

MEINE ZEUGNISSE:

Professionelle Übersetzungen Ihrer Texte. Von Deutsch nach Englisch.

Deutschen-englische Übersetzungen von Englisch-Muttersprachler und eine veröffentlichte Autorin .

Sylvan hat das Studium in den Fächern Deutsch und Kreatives Schreiben mit einer überdurchschnittlich guten Note (“Upper Second Class Honours”) abgeschlossen, womit sicher gestellt ist, dass sie nicht nur der deutschen Sprache mächtig ist, sondern auch hervorragendes Englisch beherrscht und ausdrucksstark schreiben kann. Als freischaffende Autorin hat sie bereits Artikel in “Greenworld”, und in den Zeitungen ihrer Region veröffentlicht.

Da sie sowohl in Deutschland als auch in Österreich gelebt hat, ist sie sehr wohl in der Lage, genaue Übersetzungen zu erstellen, und es gibt kaum etwas, was ihr mehr Freude macht als an einem Text so lange herumzufeilen bis er ganz korrekt ist.

SYLVAN TRANSLATION SERVICES: Die Vorteile-

Mit dem Internet als globalem Marktplatz erreichen Sie mehr Kunden, wenn Ihre Website auch in Englisch verfügbar ist.

Die Wahlmöglichkeit zwischen britischer oder amerikanischer Schreibweise.

Ein kleines Geschäft mit der persönlichen Note. Sie kann es sich nicht leisten, Sie zu enttäuschen, und darum tut sie es nicht

Ich freue mich darauf mit Ihnen zusammenzuarbeiten!

Noch Fragen? Meine Email-Adresse lautet : sylvantranslation@googlemail.com

http://www.sylvantranslation.moonfruit.com

I just watched TURBO. It’s an awesome short about futuristic videogamers. It made me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

It seems they want to make a feature film of it and need support. So, go and buy it or something. Now.

I recently watched a youtube video where Derren Brown debunks psychics and such by explaining “cold reading”.

He expresses disgust at these techniques, calling psychics and mediums charlatans.

However, I believe his explanations for his own tricks are also nonsense. He is forgoing mysticism, which is more or less unbelievable, and instead creating a much more believable wrapping of psychobabble. He claims people’s reactions and body language reveal things to him. He makes mistakes, increasing the realism.

He’s replacing psychics with psychobabble. Both are false; he is an illusionist, and no less of a charlatan than purveyors of the supernatural.

He’s still great entertainment though. And seems a nice person. But I found that video more than a little hypocritical.

[/rant by someone who read something about cold reading on the internets]

Disclaimer: I have no actual evidence that he is an illusionist. However most of his stunts could be duplicated with the use of stooges or sleight of hand or technical trickery. It seems the simplest explanation, but requires forgoing the longing for real superpowers to consider it.

If you have a link to download a file (e.g. a piece of software), you may want to redirect to another page after the user clicks the link, perhaps to gather download statistics or display a message to the user. Setting the window.location in an onclick event for that link does not work, as the opening “download” dialog seems to cancel that action.

Instead use a delay:

<script type=”text/javascript”>

function RedirectAfterDownload()
{
window.location = “http://google.com”;
}

function OnDownloadClick()
{
// redirects after 1 second
setTimeout(‘RedirectAfterDownload()’, 1000);
}

</script>

Then to use: <a href=”myfile.exe” onclick=”OnDownloadClick();”>Download File!</a>

This is a small app for sending voice messages using your default email client (i.e. Outlook Express, Windows Mail, etc…). I guess it’s still in beta… but please give it a try!

Click here for more info

Features:

• Simple to use. Click to record, click to stop, and click to send!
• Send voice messages as an attachment using your Windows email client.
• Use the email software and address book you are are comfortable with.
• All recordings are saved on disk for backup and later listening.
• Help messages guide you each step of the way (all three of them!).
• A rather fetching green and purple colour scheme.

It should work with any MAPI compatible email client and all versions of Windows. Some obvious “features” such as SMTP server support have been left out for the sake of simplicity (this app needs to be something your mother can use!). However you can always set your own SMTP server as an account in Outlook Express so that functionality is not really needed.

It does of course require you have a microphone.

Download now!

…is not possible, sorry :(

Wordpress.com blogs don’t seem to allow the embedding of any flash media except from a few big companies such as YouTube, who they must have some kind of agreement with…

The power of printf reveals all. Hmm.

It doesn’t crash though. Weird graphical excitations occur instead. Bugs which cause crashes are the *nice* ones. This is far more insidious.

What with all the news of web and media restrictions currently in Iran I have temporarily unblocked my Web Proxies in solidarity. (Usually I block Iranian IP addresses as they eat up resources and there is no ad revenue to be had). It’s always possible my proxies are now blocked by their government, but we’ll see.

In other thoughts, some kind of peer to peer wireless network is needed to prevent Iran and other countries (who knows what idiocy will be thought up by the British government and other so called “free” countries in the name of counter-terrorism) from censoring information. Complete decentralisation is required. Terranet were in the news at one point, but they haven’t really taken off, and I’m not sure what their goals really are.

Such a network would undoubtedly be slow as treacle (have you ever used Freenet?), but provided the main content is pure text, and nodes do plenty of caching, something should be possible. And anything is better than nothing! Heck, even if messages and text pages took a few hours to trickle through and download, it’s still uncensored information.

Maybe currently existing tech can be subverted. A new mobile phone firmware, perhaps, if they are capable of phone-to-phone communications. Maybe some kind of long range wifi.

Having said that, for widespread adoption, you really want something incredibly simply to use, a dedicated gadget, not a hacked mobile that only a geek can set up. Mass production of self contained hardware nodes is required.

I guess too, if these devices had a use in the western world, and become indispensable here, they would eventually trickle through to other countries too. The obvious selling point would be the absence of a subscription fee – no cabling, no satellite, no nothing required. Free information, information for free.