Feckoff.net

I’m a longtime Firefox user, and Firefox 3 is my browser of choice on my desktop PC (Windows Vista) and on a regular laptop (Ubuntu 8.04), but it seems a bit inadequate for low-powered small-screen devices like my Asus Eee 901, which is also running Ubuntu 8.04.
Firefox seems very slow on this system. It seems to freeze and pause a lot while its doing stuff in the background which I never experience on my faster systems. Because of this, I went looking for a suitable replacement for use on the netbook. I would have liked to try Google Chrome on it, since I liked it on Windows, but it is not yet available for any other platforms. I ended up choosing Opera 9, which feels much, much faster on the little Eee. Its also readily available from the Ubuntu repositories. I wasn’t a big fan of Opera on Windows, preferring the “feel” of Firefox, but I’m sold on it for this kind of machine.

Read more »

At least in US shops anyway! I got my hands on one with the 18-105mm VR lens in Best Buy this morning. The body-only version apparently won’t be available for another month.

\o/

Fare ye well humble D50, you served me well.

Read more »

Since I got my Asus Eee 901 last week, I’ve been fiddling around with Ubuntu 8.04.1 on it, as the preinstalled Xandros OS on it was a bit too restrictive for my liking. Installing Ubuntu was easy enough, as there are tools out there to make bootable USB flash drives that you can use to run the installer from.

When Ubuntu finished installing there was still a lot of work to do, with both the ethernet card and wireless card not working, as well as some other less important components like the integrated webcam and keyboard hotkeys. There are some pretty comprehensive instructions on how to get everything working here.

That got me a working Ubuntu desktop, which is nice but it doesn’t do anything special to cater for machines with limited screen real estate like today’s sub-notebooks/netbooks. That’s where the Ubuntu Netbook Remix comes in. Netbook Remix is a project at Canonical to build proper support for these machines in co-operation with OEMs, so that you will eventually see Ubuntu available as a preinstalled option in the future.

There are some fairly quick-and-dirty instructions on what you need to do to get netbook remix installed here. This is still in beta with no release date announced, but I would expect something to ship around October, when Ubuntu 8.10 comes out.

Despite being beta software, I’m finding it very smooth and polished. The only problems I have encountered are when I run it with Compiz visual effects enabled.

Here are some screenshots. Click them for full size in the Eee 901’s native resolution of 1024×600.

The wallpaper image you can see in the background is one of my own photos.

Update: Uh-oh, found a bug already! It doesn’t seem to return from standby very well. When I just had basic Ubuntu installed with the various steps taken to get the Eee hardware all working standby/resume worked fine.

Read more »

I just got my shiny new Asus Eee 901 delivered at lunch time today. Its the 20GB Linux model. I am most impressed with the fact that it worked with my Huawei E270 3G device out-of-the-box! That’s not a familiar experience for me with Linux and these devices.
This thing is tiny and very light. The battery is a bit heavier and bulkier than the one in the older Eee models but the extra weight brings with it much longer battery life. Apparently 6 hours should be easy to achieve on this, and 7+ if you turn lots of stuff (wifi, bluetooth, screen brightness etc) off.
Oddly, both the onboard bluetooth and webcam were disabled by default in the BIOS but both have been functioning perfectly since I enabled them.

I haven’t had much time to play with it yet as I am in work. It’ll get a decent go when I get home this evening

Read more »

I saw this linked on boards.ie today:

Stephen Fry is a legend.

Read more »

I don’t hate America or anything but some pretty stupid things come out of court cases there. Such as this.

Google must divulge the viewing habits of every user who has ever watched any video on YouTube, a US court has ruled.

wtf?
Read more »

Not content with making europeans wait for months after Rock Band was released in the US, the game’s distributor, Electronic Arts has decided to give us all a good hard shafting too.

Rock Band retails for $169 in the US. This includes the game and all of the peripheral instruments. Here in europe you can have it for €240. Yes. Lets do some currency conversion, shall we? At today’s rates, $169 will get you €106.65. Even when you take the difference in VAT over here and US sales taxes over there into account we’re still getting ripped right the fuck off. We’ve accepted the dodgy $1 = €1 style european RRPs for a long time now, but this is taking the piss.

Fuck you, EA.

Unless you’re able to shit gold bricks you should join me in boycotting this game. Show them that we’re not a bunch of saps that will bend over and take it in the ass just because we don’t live in the US.

There’s loads of flames being thrown on various Eurogamer comment threads about Rock Band. Feel free to throw your tuppenceworth in there too.

Read more »

I got a free upgrade from 3 last week after being a bill pay customer for a year. Whatever about their rubbish mobile broadband products, I am very happy with their phone service. I got a text message last Thursday telling me I’m now entitled to an upgrade. Off I went to their website to check out what was on offer. I ended up selecting a Nokia 6120 classic as it was one of the handsets that was a totally free* upgrade. The phone arrived the following day, which was impressive considering that I placed the order at 4 in the afternoon and the next day happened to be Good Friday!

Its a nice piece of kit. The built in camera isn’t up to much but I don’t really care about that as all mobile phone cameras are pretty rubbish, Sony Ericsson K850i notwithstanding. It is a slim, light device that runs a proper Symbian S60 R3 multitasking operating system so there’s plenty of scope there for installation of your own applications. I’ve tried Google maps and the GMail app on it, as well as Fring and an S60 PuTTY client. Apparently you can get S60 version of ScummVM and some old console emulators. Nice.

Here’s the bad bit. 3 seem to be traffic shaping the crap out of VoIP stuff that goes outside their walled garden. There’s a Skype client bundled with the phone that works perfectly but can only call other Skype users, not SkypeOut. If you try to use Fring or any of the other alternatives to make SkypeOut calls, the call will either be instantly disconnected or there’ll be such ridiculous latency and jitter that its completely useless. Bastards.

Moving swiftly on, the 6120 has a decent email client built in, with proper support for SSL-secured IMAP, making it perfect for GMail. It took me a bit of Googling to figure out how the hell you get it to use IMAP in a push mail fashion, but I eventually hit paydirt and it now works flawlessly :).

This phone looks like a pretty decent media player too, with support for a load of different audio formats like MP3, AAC, AAC+, M4A, etc. There’s a built in FM radio too, which as usual requires you to use the Nokia headset as it uses that as an antenna. It also has a slot for MicroSD cards, meaning you can load it up with lots of dirt cheap storage. I have a 2GB MicroSD on its way to me for less than €20 including VAT and postage.

Here’s what’s in the box:

• 6120 classic phone
• USB cable (which won’t bloody charge it)
• Battery
• Mains charger
• Radio headset/wired handsfree
• Manual
• Nokia PC Suite CD

For a freebie upgrade I can’t fault this phone at all.

* free but requiring a further 12 month contract, standard fare in any mobile upgrade scenario.

Read more »

I thought I got a fantastic deal a few months ago when I got 2GB of DDR2 RAM for €50. Komplett are now selling a 4GB pack of OCZ PC6400 RAM with fancy heatspreaders for €85, including VAT! MemoryC have 4GB of fancy G.Skill stuff for a few euros more.

I can’t remember memory ever being cheaper. I CAN remember paying about £200 for 32MB of RAM for my old 486 back in the day though
Read more »

Eircom, the telco everyone loves to hate, has announced that they are upgrading their bitstream broadband products all round… unless you’re on a 1Mb deal, in which case it sucks to be you.

Press release

If you’re on a 2Mb product you’ll be going to 3Mb.
If you’re on 3Mb you’ll be going to 7.6Mb.
If you’re on 4Mb you’ll be going to 10Mb.
If you’re on 6Mb you’ll be going to 12Mb.

All of the above depends on the poxy Eircom copper between you and the exchange being up to the task. They haven’t mentioned if there will be any change in upstream speeds yet. Upgrades are being rolled out between now and June. Apparently this is all part of Eircom’s ADSL2+ rollout.

Read more »