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…Or how I have come to think that Stephen Fry is in fact a living God.

So.  I too (like Doug and Adrian and many many more) have succumbed to the joys of an eee.  I agree with pretty much everything that Doug has to say, so won’t bother repeating - instead I’ll just add a little if I may…

I got it on Friday 21st of December (a full 8 days ago) and haven’t used another computer since.  The first couple of days I thought it was a novelty and was a little disappointed, to be honest.  However, I’m still using it now and have rather fallen in love with it.  It is extremely capable, and after a while the apparent limitation of the tiny screen sort of fades away and you stop noticing it.

I’ve just upgraded the RAM to 2GB and the change in performance is quite spectacular.  It was already nippy, but now applications open in the blink of an eye and it no longer slows with multiple applications open (as you would expect).  For £45 and the thrill of excitement of removing the ‘void if removed’ sticker it’s definitely worth it.

I’ve also just bought an 8GB SDHC card (this one, recommended to work with the eee) and suddenly I’m not worried about photos, music and video in the way that I was.  With 2GB working space on the on board drive and an essentially infinite number of SD cards it’s actually got all the space you need.  Clearly the new 16GB models will be a whole lot easier, but this sure will do.

Gripes?  A couple…  I really really want bluetooth.  Really.  The space bar is crap for right handed users (not just lefties, Doug), and once you’ve got used to the teeny tiny keyboard it’s really quite hard to use a full sized keyboard again.  And finally the terminal on my system seems to have some weird DNS glitch, such that occasionally everything resolves to 1.0.0.0; which has made getting extra software on it a right pain in the arse.

All in all, for the £300 it cost (including the RAM upgrade and the SD card) I’m amazed.

I’ve been mildly obsessed with mini ITX motherboards for a few years now. The possibilities of fitting a proper computer inside almost anything is intriguing (and useful… for something… that I haven’t quite identified yet).

This one, however, is just gorgeous - and Steam Punk to boot. The Underwood No 5:

Robert X. Cringely on the death of Google.

I’m sure you’ve already seen it, but just in case… Go have a look at Flickr Vision. If you have the screen real estate (and hey, who hasn’t got 3 monitors?) just leave it running. It’s awesome.

Never never ever ever alter your apt-sources.list to a new distribution and then sudo aptitude update; sudo aptitude upgrade. The smart among you will have noticed the *upgrade* rather than *dist-upgrade*. It really really breaks your computer. To the point of needing a reinstall. Which, given it was the laptop that I had such trouble installing the first place is a real pain in the arse.

Just don’t do it kids.

Interesting blog post from Evan Davies of the BBC about Value Engineering (if you like that sort of thing, of course). That’s not the point of this post, however. What caught my eye was this comment. When did Panorama become Tonight With Trevor MacDonald? I mean really.

I’m going to Hack Day London, which is rather exciting. Given the number of applicants it’s rather flattering to have made it in to the chosen 500. Not that I’m feeling smug or anything. Oh no.

You sue us, we sue you. The OIN threatens Microsoft with the nuclear option.

Apparently 409 people have clicked that ad in the last 6 months. Um. I’m hoping they were all security researchers wondering what was going on, but I’m guessing not. Crikey.