Omar’s Blog

We finally got the netbooks we’ll be deploying to our sales team at the company. I’ve been using one of them daily now, and I must say I love the little thing.

What we wanted for our company was a way to connect our sales team to a web application that we have developed in-house, so we basically wanted nothing more than mobile and functional web browser. We decided on the cheapest of the Acer Aspire One netbooks we could find on Amazon.

The model features an 8.9 inch screen, 1GB of ram a 1.6 Atom Procesor and 8GB of SSD and 8GB of external storage (in form of a removable SD card). The first thing I did to the machines was remove Windows XP, which was practically useless because of the slow read-write times to the SSD. For some reason XP is constantly reading and writing to the hard drive, and that just bogged the netbook down.

I downloaded Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR), and suddenly the machine became useful. I’ve now been using UNR and the Acer netbook everyday and even at home, where I have my main desktop system, it’s just too convenient to turn on the little netbook anywhere I am in the house, and get things done. UNR boots up in about 20 seconds.

Negatives: The only two things that I’ve found to be annoying or that could be improved are: Battery Life and Adobe Flash support for Linux webcams.

Battery is simple to explain, the computer putters out after only 2 hours of use. There are battery upgrades out there, but they add to the weight of the machine. I’ve ordered the 6 cell battery which should double the current battery life for this particular unit. There is a 9 cell replacement pack as well, but the weigh increase made it very unattractive.

Adobe Flash support for Linux. The built-in webcam works great for Linux-native apps, Skype recognizes and uses it, Gnome Cheese (a photobooth clone) uses it, and mostly all other webcam-enabled software uses it well. Adobe Flash, on the other hand, does not recognize it and even though I have been reading up on it and trying hack after hack to make it work. I’ve yet to be successful. It drives me up the wall too, because it SHOULD work… but I’m hoping in a future release of Adobe Flash for Linux, this issue will be resolved.

In the coming weeks I should get a 3G wireless option for the netbook, that will make it practically connected to the internet all-the-time, which I think is THE SINGLE most appealing feature of the whole category of netbook computers. I’ll report on that later.

Gadgets, Review

see more Fail Blog

Just another example of why it’s important to have a good Visual Merchandising team!

HAHAFunny

I had the joy of using an Acer Aspire One (16GB edition) for a couple of days, and here is my review:

The version we bought came with Windows XP Home, and I decided to give it a try. After maybe two hours I gave up on waiting for the machine. Windows Xp, just wasn’t going to cut it on the limited hardware. It was VEEERY slow, I mean even boot-up took something like 5 minutes before you could actually start to use the machine. So I downloaded Ubuntu Netbook Remix, made a boot USB stick and tried it out.

I was blown away. It was fast (booted up in 15 – 30 seconds from the USB stick even). The interface is lovely, designed specifically for small screens. It had nice big icons, a very cool way of organizing the icons, and the text was nice and big and legible. Best of all, everything worked right off the bat. No driver problems at all.

I highly recommend you get your hands on one of these little machines, the price is very good, Ubuntu is incredible on it, and you’ll find yourself prefering to use the Netbook over your desktop and/or laptops because it’s just faster to whip out the Netbook, and get the job done.

I’ll write up more as soon as I have it again with me, because there are a bunch of nice tidbits and tips I want to pass along.

Gadgets, Review

Today I took an hour out of my afternoon to watch my son Marco at his karate class. I must say it’s the must fun I’ve watched him have. he was smiling all through the class, and I think he was a little extra happy that he saw me there watching him.

It’s a real treat to watch him, not because he’s good or anything, quite the opposite, he’s the smallest kid in the class, so it’s very funny to watch him getting knocked down and get right back up with a huuuge smile on his face. He genuinely tries very hard to do everything his teachers tell him to do even though there are a lot of times when his attention drifts off to what is going on in other parts of the Karate studio. Here’s a picture of him taking on his Sensei in personal protection class.

I’m so proud of him.

Family, Marco

HAHAFunny, video

Estoy en este momento hablando acerca de Blogging con mi primo y le estoy enseñando a usar el Wordpress. Vamos a poner un video de mi hija para demostrar youtube:

Y en esta parte podemos comentar el video, o podemos hablar de otras cosas. Por cierto lean este interesante articulo acerca de World of Warcraft que est’a en Comic Geekos.

Family

Marco’s 1st bungee experience, originally uploaded by oegan72.

Uncategorized

I’ve been living, building, and working in Second Life since for over three years now, often I’ve been asked what is so appealing about a “game” where there’s no apparent plot or point to. This movie kind of sums it up for me… the power of creating is what is so appealing to me. The fact that very creative people spend a lot of time there just making things that are awesome and cool.

World Builder from Bruce Branit on Vimeo.

I wonder if whomever made this video has had any experience in Second Life, because for an SL citizen, it sure feels very natural to watch something like that on screen. (even the prim creation part is dead on)!

Second Life, video

This site is a true testament to the power of Creative Commons. Kutiman has created a masterpiece of musical delight with clips that he mashed together from YouTube Videos. It’s the ultimate Creative Commons masterpiece. On his site he has posted 8 tracks all mashed up from unrelated videos he found on Youtube… a task that took him 3 months to complete, adn all area available for your listening and viewing pleasure. Here’s one of my favorites, but all are incredible, make sure you check them all out:

Review, music, video

Thanks to my buddy Britoman from Comic Geekos, who sent along this great picture of Darth Vader personal R2 droid.

Hmmm, Other Cool Sites, Photo Album