I seem to be going through a process of off-loading the various gadgets I have been carrying around to others recently. I thought it might be interesting to go through a few of the things I no longer carry around…
iPod Nano
The iPod Nano has gone to W - who now carries it in her handbag when she remembers, plugs into a speaker in the kitchen, or is brought to bear with episodes of Peppa Pig when waiting with our youngest (who has the patience of a gnat). For what it’s worth, I think the 5th gen Nano (pictured above) is infinitely superior to the new Nano - Apple got it wrong big style this time, as they did with the shuffle last time - you know, the idiotic tie-clip design.
ASUS EEE 1000H
The little ASUS netbook has migrated to our eldest. She was using an EEE 701 (the first generation netbook that lots of people had a few years ago) - which was fine for messing around with, but really didn’t work well enough for her to do school work on. I will miss having it in my bag when I travel with work, but at least I know it will be helping somebody learn Windows, and help with school work.
For the last several months it has had Ubuntu Linux installed on it, which was fantastic - we have a couple of 3G dongles, and it worked with them without any drivers. Anybody who has used a 3G card with Windows knows the hell I am speaking of. Needless to say - children need to learn the same system that everybody else is using, so a quick swap of hard drives last night booted it back into Windows.
ASUS EEE 701
Regularly referred to in our house as “The Little Computer that Could”, I now have it back in my bag, ready to do battle with trains, hotels, and far flung client sites. It’s half the size of the EEE 1000H that I have been using, so weighs considerably less too. I’ve wiped it’s pathetically small 4 gigabyte interal storage, and thrown Ubuntu Netbook Remix onto it - which will give me a passable blogging solution (if you’ve never seen it, check out PyRoom - it’s a clone of DarkRoom, and WriteRoom).