Thursday, April 23, 2009

HAVE JOB! (also Elonex and Twitter fail)

Following on from my work placement I'm starting work on Tuesday.

I'm working at the place where BLAG grew and I expect I'll be spending half my time at least during the first three months in a Big Yellow storage unit going through about two thousand machines sorting those that will post from those that will not and generally inventorying....

I'll be a bit of an authority on the Dell Optiplex range in no time 

The other sides to the job should get real interesting once we get the incoming backlog under control....

The Elonex, now received after previous post) has turned out to ba a slight fail, but not in the way I expected.... Battery is fine and life is as expected for a netbook (around three hours casual use).  However wifi is a pain in the ass and reception is far weaker than I expected.  This is key for netbook technology.... Also the linux on there is locked down.... it's OK so far as it goes and can at least be used as a very low power way to check email, make casual internet queries, and leave an IM client up if I want one.... But I think I am going to have to invest again for my mobile computing requirments (luckily I can maybe afford to now!).

Also I removed Twitter from this blog 'cause it started asking for a log-in, pain in the ass and if you ask me Twitter is a bit up your ass anyway!  I'm only using it extremely occasionally (which is not what it's meant for)  Sometimes I like to browse the Jack Schofield twitters, so I'll probably keep the account on - though I suspect you do not need an account to browse others - must look into that...

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

bye bye HP2133 - hello ElonexT1!

OK - long time no post. But an update of sorts...

The HP netbook was let down by the SUSE on there - turned out that a KDE rollout when applying all updates broke the wi-fi! Being a netbook recovery was no simple matter - although I ordered the DVD from support when I saw them reduced another £20 in Curry's that was it - I returned it for a refund. At least I had something for three weeks.

Recently I won an eBay Elonex T1 netbook for under £100 and since that is half the price and older I shall not expect so much (esp. with 256 MB ram!). But we shall see when the delivery comes (I just paid).

The sony Ereader on the other hand is a great little gadget and even has an SD slot to go with the flash memory, so you can carry pictures and not exactly view them, but get a sketch idea of what is on there - this is very useful to me since my daughter has a digital camera and I have to manage her picture filing - I used the (stolen) laptop for an SD slot before but now use this.

I have taken my terrabyte Exchange server out of mothballs and am making good use of that to secore and archive now (after the theft). Only thing is I am worried about the electricity bill - so it is not on 24/7. Working on building a low power one or maybe using a G3 I could get... also on building a computer for my father - which will be a mammoth task as I want accessibility options for his limited vision...

More soon on that I hope!