Blog.Treo

Coffee and Queercamp

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This is a Starbucks in the Merchandise Mart in Chicago. A few times a month, if I’m early enough, I’ll stop in on my way to work. The staff was nice enough to let me post some queercamp low-source media.

Amazing Value – Maxell Peanutz

I don’t own an iPod…I felt that needed to be said first. Matter of fact, I’ll say it again. I do not own an iPod, have never owned an iPod. My first .mp3 player was a Palm Tungsten E.  I’m a B-boy at heart and have a long, storied relationship with choices in headphones. Now that I’m all grown up, I use headphones very differently than as a teen. Used to be, my headphones were for the bus ride on school trips, (to and from track meets or marching band engagements,) the ride to and from school, and a few other select situations. It was all about volume then, mostly bass. I had no appreciation for a soundstage experience, midranges, clarity…none of that. I wanted the person two seats over to hear the bass from my headphones. If they could, (and made that irritated face) then I considered those headphones a success.

Nowadays things are very different. My ear for music has matured quite a bit, in genres and sound. But, the role music plays in my life has changed quite a bit as well. A good harbinger of this is my first .mp3 player. Not a dedicated sound device at all, instead a PDA. Music to me now is one of several timelines or streams in my day. Sometimes that stream is muted or empty, but it’s always present, concurrent to the other streams in my life. When I moved from the Tungsten to my first Treo (650) this concept of life streams really took shape. In fact, the framework of my day-to-day experience hasn’t changed much since then.

You say, “I thought this post was about some amazing value?” I say: Who’s blog is this? Look up if you’re confused…go ahead, I’ll wait. –

Right, it says TreoBenny 2009, which means the posts here go like I want, being TreoBenny and all. Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to continue for those that like to read my writing…all four of them.

While still carrying the 650, I made the jump to Bluetooth audio. Mostly because my wired solution was killed do to a drop, but that’s another story. While there is reduction in sound quality, it’s a price I pay readily for scrapping wires. As I eluded to earlier, the role digital music has in my life is one of support. It goes alongside all of my other activities and needs to be extremely mobile. Bluetooth accomplishes this famously. I use my BT headphones at home as well, thanks to a class 1 USB dongle. So, for a long time I had no use for wired headphones at all. Then I re-entered the mobile PC world with a netbook and notebook purchase. Because I spend significantly more time on the notebook than netbook, I realized I’d need some kind of personal audio solution. I was damn tempted to get a mobile Bluetooth adapter (c’mon, it’s cute as hell) but I fought off the urge. Besides, this model of notebook has only 2 USB ports (I know, crazy) one for the air card, one for the mobile HDD. I have a hub but…ok I’m getting off topic again.  So, I decided I need some headphones. I wanted earbuds, small as possible. I wasn’t too concerned with quality, just as long as I could hear the music in something no louder than a coffee shop or restaurant. And dear.God.not.white!

Enter Peanutz

I decided to give Walgreen’s a try after looking online for decent earbuds. $40? Really? I was prepared to sacrifice quality and comfort, I just wanted something small and inexpensive. Low and behold, i come across these gems.

New Toys and Their Joys: Netbook Pt. I

You know #ACTB by now right?…no? Ok, for the last time, visit angrycamp.tracysbasement.com to see what I’m talking about. Anywho…I made the trip to #ACTB with only a second hand BB Pearl to keep me connected with the rest of the Internet. (Cause about 25% of the Internet was in Tracy’s Basement…LOL!) It was time to procure some new hardware of a mobile persuasion…

Enter netbook…

Constraints on cash and the rising Geek popularity of netbooks met, had dinner, had a great time, and hooked up on the living room couch to conceive my netbook purchase. An Asus Eee PC 900A. 4GB SSD, Xandros Linux distro, no Webcam. At $199, I was comfortably under-budget and I added an 8GB SD card to supplement the otherwise tiny SSD (solid-state drive.) I did a fair amount of research on this particular model, only the price surprised me. When I first started looking around at netbooks, Best Buy still had the Linux models online. About 2 weeks into my search, all the Linux models disappeared from the Web site. I was a little nervous that maybe the Linux models weren’t being sold at all. Part of the netbook charm to me was returning to Linux. (Inspired by a class, I installed Fedora 8 on a box I bought on Craigslist, but had to abandon it.) I decided to go into the store to see what I could find, rather than my typical buy-online-pickup-in-store. Once in the store the choice was clear, the price had me sold.

During my research of this particular model I saw that some people had issues with wi-fi. I didn’t have wi-fi issues however. I opened it up, browsed to my router, put in the key and there I was, in the familiar online place. The biggest dig against this machine was its distro. Every account of Xandros described it as clunky, bloated (leaving just a few MBs after updates) and unpleasant overall. Alongside of these negative reviews was often mentioned an ubuntu distro specifically optimized for the Eee PC, originally titled ubuntu-eee. I assumed I could install ubuntu-eee onto the 8GB SD card and boot from it, so the cramped 4GB SSD never really worried me. However, I made a few discoveries once I had my netbook in hand. First was that booting from the SD card was not an easy undertaking, like simply changing the boot order in the BIOS. From what I found, it can be done, but it was more of an undertaking than I expected, and honestly, well beyond my familiarity of Linux. So, I decided to go ahead and install ubuntu-eee over Xandros. I would need to create a USB install stick. The first few forums I found said very clearly that this install stick had to be created in ubuntu. Having had enough experience with Linux to know there is live media (runs entirely from an optical disc or USB stick,) I downloaded the latest ubuntu to my desktop and then followed the instructions from a couple forums to create the bootable media.

Much to my surprise, the tool itself, unetbootin, suggests creating the bootable media using Windows, not ubuntu as the forums said. Oh well, I had already installed ubuntu inside Windows, which was easy and although I don’t use it on my Pavilion desktop to date, I’m glad I did. Ok, back to topic. I don’t have a small capacity USB drive anymore, just a 120GB mobile drive. So, what I did was use one of my 2GB SD cards in a USB adapter. (I bought a 2 X 2GB pack and have always kinda had an extra one.) It worked just fine.

Worthy of note, ubuntu-eee was the pre-1.0 version. Once the distro debuted in earnest, at 1.0, it took on the name Easy Peasy. To compare Xandros on the Eee PC to Easy Peasy is not a comparison at all. Xandros required some acrobatics just to get repositories configured and updates proper. Easy Peasy just.works.

At Home	On the Train	At Work

I’ve included my Curve in a couple of the pics to show the relationship in size. I consider the two related in a way. I’ll get to that later.

That’s a screenshot of my machine in the Favorites tab. (Didn’t know I was on Skype did you?) I’d like to draw your attention to the Tweetdeck icon. Yes, it and Adobe AIR run in Linux. Takes just a little Googling to get them running. I later on had a tough run-in with AIR on my x64 notebook. But that’s for later in this ‘Toys and Their Joys’ series. Oh yeah, it’s a series

Well, there you have my initial netbook experience. Pt. II of this to come soon, well, yeah, soon. I’ll bring you up to speed on the current state of my Eee PC, and how I’ve been using it.