Asus Eee PC mini review

I've just spent a full day using the new Asus Eee PC as my main desktop computer. It was a surprisingly smooth experience.

This tiny laptop, with just a 4Gb solid state drive and 512Mb of RAM is amazingly snappy to use.

The built-in screen and keyboard are tiny but usable if necessary - today I plugged in an external USB keyboard, mouse and screen. The video output goes up to 1280x1024 and looks just fine.

All the applications I need are built right in, including:

• Firefox web browser
• Thunderbird email client
• OpenOffice word processor, spreadsheet, presentation package.
• Pidgeon instant messenger client
• Skype telephone
• KDE's excellent file manager
• KDE's nice terminal

The Xandros linux distribution browsed my network well and found printers and samba shares with ease. Sometimes finding the local WiFi network was a little slow but worked in the end.

While there is only 1.3Gb of disk space free for documents, it was easy to mount a shared file system (included NFS) or plug in an SD card for document storage.

As a command line user, I welcome all the standard utilities such as ssh, wget, python (regrettably only 2.2.4), nano, java, and about 1600 others.

Criticisms

It's hard to complain about a highly portable notebook that costs just AU$500. Of course it would be nice if the screen was bigger and took up the available space, you can't make the keyboard larger without increasing over all size, the trackpad defaulted to a very insensitive setting but that was soon fixed.

Scanning for wireless networks seems a little slow, but gets there in the end. There are rather a lot of icons in the system tray and the overall look of the KDE based desktop looks unnervingly like Windows XP.

I'd like to leave a large SD card in the slot all the time, but each time I start up it pops up a dialog asking what I want to open it with - probably a work around involving fstab but this needs a gui solution

The single click button below the track pad seems very stiff and I've just realised that it's because it's actually a rocker switch with a left and right button part. Perhaps a little clue such as a line in the middle would avoid this mistake.

Conclusion

I'm writing this post on the device right now, still getting used to the keyboard, but certainly very usable. The only moving part is a small fan so it's very quiet, strange not to hear any disk activity at all.

I think these low cost but feature packed Linux based devices represent a new category of consumer devices. Cheap enough to give to the kids without taking out extra insurance, powerful enough for real work.

Degen DE1103 shortwave radio mini review

Can a low-cost digitally controlled radio have the same feel as an analog receiver?

The audio/touch combined feeling that you get while tuning across short wave in the evening on a true analog radio is much more usable than the chop/chop/chop effect experienced on low cost digital radios - until now.

The benefits of a digital radio, accurate frequency read out, full band coverage, and memories are great, but if it's painful to tune around it's just not worth it.

I picked up a Degen DE1103 for AU$159 from the very friendly AV-Comm here in Sydney. Significantly more expensive than I've seen them on eBay, but it came with a local power adapter and a smile on a Saturday morning.

The good:

• Very sensitive, in fact it overloads on the AM broadcast band (there's a switch for local which must be used).
• Comes with re-chargeable AA batteries which can be charged in the unit with the supplied power adapter. It has a timed charge system built in.
• Includes a generous long wire antenna and cloth pouch.
• Tuning up and down the dial is really smooth, you would think it was an analog system.
• Direct input of frequencies using the row of number buttons.
• Remarkably good on single side band.
• 0xFF memories (255)
• Short wave broadcast bands for easy finding of the big broadcasters.
  

The bad:

• Audio volume is adjusted by pushing a button and then using the tuning knob.
• Mine doesn't sit flat, there is a pop out stand, otherwise it rocks when laying flat
• The big digital simulation of a short wave band dial is pretty funny really, tuning is actually continuous.
• A little cryptic to operate, eg: memories are recalled by pushing a button and spinning the dial. I'd like to store frequencies in those buttons on the front but they just seem to do direct frequency input.
  

In summary, it's a good little radio. Perfect for travel, with decent sound and great sensitivity. I wish manufacturers would make appliances easy enough to use that you don't need a manual at all - you do with this one.

I wish we had an iPod short wave radio.

Video stores dead... again (Quickflix review)

I've long assumed that the days of the local video store are numbered, but the reason I thought was direct rental with download over the internet. It seems there's another competitor that is very compelling - the online DVD rental businesses.

When Ingmar Bergaman died (actually a week before, which is weird) I felt a desire to watch some of those beautifully lit black and white movies. A visit to the two local video stores proved fruitless. The nicer, more disorganised store couldn't even search their database for anything except titles!

I looked for an online DVD rental service and stumbled across Quickflix. They have a 14 day free trial with unlimited rentals during that time (with 3 out at a time). You can keep a DVD as long as you like with no penalty, (except your monthly fee), but of course they don't send you more until you return some. Sound too good to be true!

They have a catalog of 25,000 titles, you create a queue of what you want, in order, and they send them out with a pre-paid return post envelope and a nice stiff DVD holder. As a new member, I've been a very efficient viewer. When a disk arrives, I watch it and post it back the very next day.

Here's what I like about this vendor:

• Good web site, quick, good searching, queue management a bit clunky but functional.
• Reviews by David Strattan and Megan Spencer are a good thing, I'd like more lists to prompt me as well
• Email notification of what they've just posted and what they've just received back from me is great and clear.

Here's my pretty minor grumbles:

• The limiting factor is the postal turnaround time. I work in North Sydney and they are in North Sydney, even so it takes three (or mostly four) business days for the posting of one disk back before the next one is sent.
• They don't send items from the top of my queue. Perhaps they only have a few copies, but I generally get things from number four or more from my queue. It might be good to give some idea of the stock and demand.
• After your free trial, you go on to the $40/month plan "unlimited" with three DVDs out at a time. Given the turnaround time, this doesn't seem like the best value - I've dropped back to the $20 plan which is a maximum of 5 DVDs per month.

And why is the local DVD store dead? $4 per DVD with a post paid return envelope and a catalog probably 100 times larger beats $6 per DVD and the waste of time going to the store when they are open - hands down.

How about downloading? I hear that a DVD converted to H.264 video takes up about 700Mb. For most of us on current "unlimited" broadband plans (ha!), five movies would be 3.5Gb which is a fair proportion of "unlimited". For this to be really attractive, it would need to be unchargeable download of some sort. Pretty soon, we'll all be renting HD/DVD or BlueRay and these will be much bigger to download so I predict that delivering data by disk through the post will remain pretty attractive for some time, at least in this country...

Belkin TuneTalk mini review

From time to time I record stories for radio and these need to be recorded in the field in "HiFi" quality. Currently I use a Marantz PMD660 digital recorder, which is fantastic quality, but rather large.

I was excited by the idea of using my Video iPod to record "CD Quality" audio in the field and so rushed out to get a Belkin Tunetalk.

It's physically a neat little unit that clips on to dock connector on a Video iPod as shown above.

The recording quality is good, using the built in microphone, and on "High" quality setting is recorded in WAV format at 44,100 Hz sampling.

There is no way to see the audio level on the iPod and you only have the choice of turning "Autogain" on or off. Basically, on means mic level and off means line level. The recording for me is rather low in level but I guess that's needed to avoid clipping. It's here.

I tried an external mic, a high quality Sony mic, and it sounded rather thin and low level compared to the built in mic.

Apple must have changed the software since the manual was printed as recordings now seem to be automatically transferred into your iTunes library rather than needing to be dragged or respond to a prompt to get them over. This mystified me for a while and I thought it was not saving my recordings.

High quality recordings are going to be big. My 12 second test is already 2.2Mb so this is not a dictation machine. I guess the application is recording interviews for podcasts or radio, which suits me but I find the lack of a VU meter and any way to monitor the recording a bit worrying.

Summary

Yes, it works and the internal mics sound really great. iPod user interface for recording is not great, it needs a VU meter, monitoring of the recording in the headphones, and it seems to take a long time to "Save" the recording when you stop.

Oddly the Belkin device includes one of those mini USB sockets (why can't they standardise these) and a cable so you can charge your iPod while recording. Wouldn't it have been better to repeat the dock connector on the device?

Note that this product only works with the iPod with video.