Bag Musings

I’ve been meaning to put together a tech bag/urban assault bag/art bag for awhile now, and I found the perfect bag for it: a Swiss Gear small messenger bag. I can’t seem to find any pictures on the web for it, so I suspect that it’s a discontinued model, which is fine because I got it at Meijer for about $25.

This bag has padding in both of its sections, and the main compartment is expandable with a zipper to accommodate the extra room. I can easily carry my netbook, a regular book or my Nook, my sketchbook, and other things.

So, let’s see what I might carry for what applications.

Always Carried:

• cell phone
• pen
• wallet
• misc. bag (contains some meds, tissues, my dues cards for OES and Nile, chapstick, etc)
• my version of the “hipster PDA”: a moleskine calendar and a moleskine small lined book, held together with the stretchy cord of the calendar
• Walkman MP3 player
• keys
• book I’m reading

Art Bag:

• sketchbook
• pencils
• pastel crayons
• drawing ink pen
• small canvases if they fit

Tech Bag:

• netbook
• usb key (holds some of my most important files)
• charger for my netbook (if I’m going to be out or travelling)
• Ubuntu LiveCD (for fixing other people’s computers; happens more than you think!)
• moleskine cashier for notes, even though I use Tomboy Notes for most everything

Other Applications:

• library bag, with Nook and library books
• bag to hold my stuff for Nile; actually this will work; as it holds everything but the charitable giving notebook, but I can carry that in my hands

I don’t know. This bag is very versatile, and I’m hoping to use it for one of these applications. I’m almost keen on replacing my purse with it, but I feel that it’d be too heavy for regular purse use. Also, I have a tendency to load up my bags with too much stuff; this is why I carry a relatively small purse. If I didn’t have a small purse, I’d probably load it up with everything but the kitchen sink and have major back pain as a result.

System 76 Laptops: 1.5 Years

I’ve noticed a lot of posts in this thread on the Ubuntu forums so I decided to give a 1.5 year review as it were of both of my System76 computers.

Lets start with the Pangolian.

I have a PanP5, which is the fifth version of the Pangolian laptop. I ordered it in June of 2009, and it arrived at the tail end of the month. This laptop replaced my brother’s (at least) eight year old desktop (that’s now being used by my mother with Windows XP) that replaced a Dell Dimension (that ran Windows XP and various versions of Ubuntu). My old desktops ran well and for a long time, but I felt it was time for an upgrade.

I chose some upgrades (from my blog post on the subject):

It has a 15.4 screen (huge, IMHO) with 1680×1050 resolution (upgraded), Core 2 Duo P8700 2.53 GHz 1066 MHz FSB 3BM L2 (25 Watt) (upgrade also), 4 GB RAM (upgrade), 320 GB hard drive (upgrade), 1 DVD/CD burner drive, 512 MB DDR2 nVidia GeForce G105M graphics card, standard networking and wireless, 2.0 MP webcam (built-in), Bluetooth, and all the standard ports (including HDMI, VGA and 3 USB). Oh, and I forgot to mention; it comes with 64-bit Ubuntu 9.04.

Now, the laptop has a 500 GB drive in it, with Ubuntu 10.10, dual-booted with Windows 7. I had some repairs that needed to be done to it in November. Basically, I needed a new motherboard and hard drive. A year later, the replacement hard drive died, and I got the 500 GB from NewEgg.

I derive a great deal of pleasure from just booting this machine up. I like typing on it; the keyboard is amazing, the sound (out of speakers, through the headphone jack) is great, the DVD drive has no problems (knock on wood), and everything is working just fine. I’ve hooked up a second monitor to my laptop (my Westinghouse 1280×1024 LCD panel) so I have more screen real estate to work with.

I use it for the following:

• Podcasts
• Music
• Blogging
• Browsing
• Light gaming (stuff like Xmoto, Gweled, Mines, etc)
• Moderate gaming under Windows (some Sims2)
• Gimp
• Writing (penned [penning] two unfinished NaNo novels)
• Chat
• IRC
• Microblogging
• Flier creation (for OES and Nile)
• Making invitations
• Making programs (for events, not programming)
• Seti@home
• Ebooks (organizing and sending to my Nook)
• Picture organization (not much; mostly related to my blog)

Basically, the computer is a home office laptop. Now, how about a screenshot?

My Desktop Screenshot

I’m running Docky, Empathy, Gwibber, BOINC, Bloglio, Gpodder, Dropbox. Wakoopa, Radio Tray, and Tomboy Notes. This is Gnome, which I love. The wallpaper is from everydayishock’s Tumblr. This is Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron from An American in Paris, the ballet scene.

Again, I derive pleasure from starting this laptop up every day. I love the way the keyboard feels, the way the trackpad works, the sound through my external speakers, and the sheer speed of the laptop. I’ve seen virtually no slowdowns from the day I’ve bought it, and there are few changes I’ve made to the machine (the exception being a 500 GB 5400 RPM drive replacing my 320 GB drive).

I feel that this computer will last several more years, and that’s why I bought it. If I’d wanted something to last one year, I would have gone to Best Buy and gotten a $500 Gateway or something. Not to diss Gateway (the desktop that went from my brother, to me, to my mother is a Gateway), but I don’t feel their laptops are as of the quality they used to be. Also, Best Buy didn’t have exactly what I wanted. What I wanted was something with a discreet video card, and nothing at my local Best Buy fit that bill. Still doesn’t.

Now, I’ll cover my Starling.

I have a Star1 which is the first version of the Starling. There is now a refresh of my netbook (the Star3, I think) and a Starling Edubook.

I didn’t have any upgrades, really. For simplicity, I’ll take the specs from my last blog post on the subject.

The screen is 10.1 inches, the memory is 1 GB of RAM, the hard drive is 160 gigs, and it has standard wifi and lan networking.  The graphics aren’t anything to really write home about, but this is a netbook: a portable device for browsing, blogging, writing and reading.

I’ve made no changes to this netbook, as there is nothing to change. I’ve updated to 10.10, and I’m now using the Unity desktop. It’s quite different from anything I’m used to, but I’m interested in how this will work out. I’m taking a “wait and see” approach to the whole Unity interface.

How about a screenshot?

Netbook Screenshot

I’ve got Wakoopa, Dropbox, Tomboy Notes, and Unity running here. The wallpaper is the same as my laptop. I like to keep things consistent.

This netbook has been with me all over the house, outside for computing in the backyard, down to Indianapolis for Supreme Session, Battle Creek for Grand Chapter, and the coffee shop. It’s perfect for couch surfing while I’m watching TV. It stays very cool, even when running YouTube videos. I’ve had to replace the battery at $99, so that wasn’t cheap, but it was still cheaper than buying a new netbook. I’m taking care of the battery better now (ie, not using it when I’m on the couch but plugging it in) and trying to conserve its cycles for when I need it.

The only real complaints? The battery issue (a battery should last longer than a year) and the wireless (slightly flaky; I hope Natty will resolve this for good). This is a first generation machine, so if those are the only issues, then I’m not too peeved.

For the Pangolian, I give a 5/5 for everything. This machine is a workhorse, and I’m very pleased with it, even at a year-and-a-half-in. The Starling gets a 4/5, only because of the wireless and battery issues. I’d really like to have a larger range for the wireless card; it’d be much more useful to me when I go out. Unfortunately, there’s not ubiquitous wireless internet; and I don’t have the money for a 3 or 4G connection.

System76 gets a 5/5 for service, speed, help, and just all around good products. Depending on what they have when I’m in the market again, I’ll definitely go with them.

Standard Ubuntu on the Netbook

I’ve reinstalled standard Ubuntu on my netbook.

Why?

Because I’m not sure about the new UNE layout, and I don’t necessarily want or need desktop effects.  Also, I like having more than one desktop, and I found that to be a huge disadvantage to UNE.

So, how do I manage my windows, you ask?  Well, alt-tab works well, but there’s a window menu switcher for your panel; I use that to switch between windows with the mouse.  Simple.

As you can see, I have the standard menu, the window manager menu, deskbar, a quick-access terminal, workspace switcher, tray, applets, etc.

This takes up less room than the setup of the Maverick UNE. Not that I mind that, but I’d rather have more screen space.

I also seem to get more battery power out of standard Ubuntu than I do UNE.  Strange, but I guess that’s fine.  I have a large enough screen (10.1″) so it’s not a big deal to lose a few pixels up top.  I’d rather have the pixels to the left; I hate horizontal scrolling.

I might give UNE another shot in the next LTS version.  The new setup is kind of beta, in my opinion.  We’ll see how it matures.

Edit for punctuation fixes.

Ubuntu Netbook Remix: Lucid Lynx

I’ve recently reinstalled Ubuntu on my netbook.  I went with the netbook remix because the full desktop seemed sluggish.

The updated netbook remix is very speedy and I’m quite happy with it. It comes with many of the same programs that standard Ubuntu comes with. It comes with OpenOffice, which I don’t feel is an appropriate addition to UNR; the devs should think about adding AbiWord and Gnumeric and removing OpenOffice.  I removed the whole OpenOffice suite and added AbiWord and Gnumeric.  I also did a install of Dropbox (yes, I know UbuntuOne is standard, but my Dropbox allows me to share with Windows as well, and also I’ve increased to almost 3gb through referrals) and Chromium.

Above, you can see the standard “Favorites” screen.  Not much has changed from Karmic, but it seems like the UNR team has done some updates with software (removing Gimp and the like) and increasing speed and startup time.  My nebook starts very quickly.

I mentioned Chromium above; here is a screenshot of it on UNR:

Simple, clean, fast.  It’s Chromium.

Gwibber is also standard with UNR.  I love this program, and I’m using the standard version (not the dev version) on my netbook.  Screenshot:

Not much has changed in gwibber since the new UI debuted.  I still think it’s a brilliant program and it’s great to keep up with what’s going on with twitter, status.net, facebook, and others.

~~~~

This release of Ubuntu Netbook Remix is the best so far.  I think the team should replace Firefox with Chromium and OpenOffice with AbiWord and Gnumeric.  These changes would make UNR better and lighter, in my opinion.

We will see how long I keep this around; as my main beef with UNR is the fact that they only have one workspace.  I like to separate my tasks out by different workspaces, but a netbook is for internet use, not major work.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Jolicloud

Jolicloud is a netbook distribution based on Ubuntu Netbook Remix that takes the “netbook” concept to the extreme, encouraging you to use all webapps and cloud storage.

Overall, my impression is that this is a very good distro for a netbook (duh).

I’m testing Jolicloud right now on my Starling (which is on their list of “approved” computers). It’s very fast, with the sweet interface you can see below:

In the right corner, you can see the time, caps/num lock indicators, some sort of processor applet, wifi indicator, battery, the Jolicloud icon (which indicates that I’m signed into the Jolicloud system) and the Dropbox icon.

In the left corner, you can see the Home applet, which takes you to the menu; as well as the open programs.

It comes with a lot of the stock programs that come with UNR: Firefox, gedit, terminal, F-spot, Pidgin (though empathy is standard on Ubuntu now), Media Player and sound recorder. There is a HUGE repository of programs available, because Jolicloud uses the same repos as UNR. Also, the Jolicloud team has integrated Mozilla’s Prism concept to the OS so it’s very easy to immediately go to your email or facebook or other webapps.

Below you can see the Jolicloud dashboard.  It’s got all the programs you’ve installed and can install, as well as the people you follow.  I’m still new to this distro, so I really haven’t had a chance to add anyone as a friend.

This is a “pre-beta” release, and there are bugs (none that I’ve really uncovered so far; I’ve only run it for two days). I’d say, install at your own risk, and keep a good backup of your data. The advantage of Jolicloud is that you could easily save everything on the web and if your computer takes a suicide dive, you can reinstall and easily get all of your stuff back. I’d suggest Dropbox for this functionality, as it’s easily installed and works very well with the concept of Jolicloud.

Jolicloud would also be great for a very limited netbook (think an eeePC 4g surf) because of its online focus. In this way, it’s similar to the much talked about Google Chrome OS.

I’d give Jolicloud a 3/5. It seems stable, and there’s a very simple way to install any program you want that Jolicloud offers. I have not tried to add a PPA or do what I usually do with my normal Ubuntu install (add Flock, Chromium, Zim, Gwibber etc) because I wanted a complete Jolicloud experience. Either way, this would be a great distro to include as an OEM distro. It has the stability of UNR and the ease of use of online storage solutions. Overall? This is a distro to watch. It’s a very good contender to go against Google’s Chrome OS.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Starling Netbook

The second half of my laptop order from System76 arrived today.

I got the Starling Netbook.  At a price of about $360 and no mucking with operating systems, it’s a very good buy, in my opinion.

This is from the System76 website.  Cute little netbook!

The screen is 10.1 inches, the memory is 1 GB of RAM, the hard drive is 160 gigs, and it has standard wifi and lan networking.  The graphics aren’t anything to really write home about, but this is a netbook: a portable device for browsing, blogging, writing and reading.  There’s no DVD/CD drive, but that doesn’t bother me, as I have a very nice DVD/CD drive on my much higher powered laptop I wrote about in my last post.

I took some pictures when I unboxed it (not forgetting to grab the camera this time!).

Here’s the packaging.  It was well packaged with lots of paper and packing materials so the netbook didn’t move in transit.

More packaging.  It came with a power cord (duh) and some documentation relating to where the keys are (like for volume control and brightness).

Here it is set up on my desk.  Yes, that is a Microsoft wireless laptop mouse!  The computer is very small and convenient to carry around the house.

Battery life is longer than 3 hours.  I really haven’t tested it for full capacity yet, but I figure definitely longer than three hours.  I’d really like to test it from a full battery.

Onto the keyboard.  The keyboard is small.  I’ve got to adjust my hands to it every time I switch from my full-sized laptop to the netbook.  I wouldn’t recommend this netbook to someone with massive hands, as they wouldn’t be able to type very comfortably on it.  Although, if you have massive hands, you might look into a roll-up keyboard or something.

I would recommend this netbook to anyone who is fed up with the offerings from the other netbook manufacturers who are supplying mostly Windows-based netbooks.  Granted, it will run MS Office (a very good program in its own right) but it won’t run any of your games or other high-intensity programs.  The Starling runs Ubuntu Netbook Remix speedily and handles multiple programs easily.

I was up and running within an hour.  I had gwibber and flock installed and configured as well as flash working.  I also got firefox 3.5 working on this netbook with no problems.

If you want portability, style, and ease of use, I would recommend this netbook.  5/5 from System76!

Blogged with the Flock Browser