Amusing flowchart from The Register, is it a netbook or a notebook!
If a tree falls in the woods….
This cartoon from the Washington Post amused me.
Found it via Frances Bell’s amusing blog article which takes this cartoon five stages further! Have a read and a smile.
Leopard running on a Dell 9 minibook
Andy Ihnatko (who I regularly listen to on MacBreak Weekly) in his column this week in the Chicago Sun-Times talks about his efforts to run OS X on a netbook.
Questions like “If a computer that isn’t made by Apple is nonetheless running the Macintosh operating system and Macintosh software…can we still call it a Mac?” are more up my street, and it’s been much on my mind lately.
No wonder. For nearly a week, I’ve been running Mac software on a Dell Mini 9 netbook.
It’s an interesting article and does demonstrate how much easier it is these days to install OS X on a non-Mac computer.
I do like the netbook concept and having used a fair few they certainly have their place in the world (generally as a second or traveling computer). Problem is that these netbooks either run Windows XP or Linux. Not that I don’t know how to use XP, and I can even get by in Linux, but both lack the familiarity that I now have with OS X.
Am I interested, yes I am.
‘Negative’ attitude to Robin Hood
BBC reports on new findings that show that not everyone thought highly of Robin Hood.
A Scottish expert has uncovered a medieval document suggesting negative attitudes towards Robin Hood.
The story of how Robin and his men stole from the rich to give to the poor has long been part of English folklore.
However, Julian Luxford of St Andrews University found a dissenting voice in a Latin inscription from about 1460 in a manuscript owned by Eton College.
The previously unknown chronicle entry says Robin “infested” parts of England with “continuous robberies”.
SSD Awesomeness
Great marketing video from Samsung.
BBC iPlayer on Linux
Recently I have been playing about with a couple of those little netbooks which are so popular now.
Though I have had an Xandros based Asus EeePC for a while now, I realised that I had never really tried to use it to watch Flash based video. I had used it to watch DivX and MP4 video files which it did fine with, however when using the Asus to try and watch BBC iPlayer, well the results were less than satisfactory.
I also tried BBC iPlayer on a SUSE based HP 2133 netbook and got similar results.
After a bit of Google searching the verdict appears to be that the Flash Player for Linux is not that capable when it comes to playing video, rather than the chips on these low powered netbooks aren’t capable of playing Flash video.
I am now going to try the BBC iPlayer Desktop once I have re-charged the HP 2133 (well the battery doesn’t last very long).
Reached my bandwidth limit
Reached my bandwidth limit on my ADSL account with a day to spare!
I don’t normally get anywhere close to the cap on my ADSL connection, but some months I do get close.
The main culprit these days is the iTunes Store and BBC iPlayer. I seem to watch more video using these two services than anything else at the moment.
I do get a “free” window between midnight and 8am and I do try and schedule my video downloading during these times, otherwise I do find I use up all of my allocated bandwidth. Though sometimes you don’t want to wait!
Updated Airport Extreme Base Station
Apple have updated the AirPort Extreme Base Station and Time Capsule, which are now offering simultaneous 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz dual-band networking “for optimal performance, range and compatibility.” The new models also offer the ability to set up a secondary Internet-only Wi-Fi network to allow family and friends to access the Internet without giving them the password to the primary network or allowing them access to networked drives and other peripherals. Finally, Time Capsule offers MobileMe members the ability to access files on their device’s hard drive over the Internet from anywhere.
A197XP Issues
I mentioned back in July that I was having problems with my (quite old now) Sony VAIO A197X. Back then I considered re-installing Windows, but never got round to it.
I don’t really want to abandon it, as it does have a lovely 17″ screen, 1920 x 1080 resolution, which makes it great for watching video.
Sometimes the DVD player does not work as expected sometimes.
Tonight I was watching BBC iPlayer, I watched Doctor Who and that worked fine, but trying to watch Being Human and it decided that was too much…
I think it may have got too hot.
The video froze, despite restarting the browser, I couldn’t get the video working.
In the end I turned it off and watching iPlayer on my Mac.
I think I will now need to reinstall Windows.
Facebook offers control to users
BBC reports on changes underway at Facebook following recent criticism.
Facebook has responded to criticism over the way it handles user data by handing over control to its users.
Members of the social network will have comment and voting rights over the firm’s future policies regarding how the site is governed.
Founder Mark Zuckerberg said the aim was to “open up Facebook so that users can participate meaningfully in our policies and our future”.