Honestly, if I had known how the netbook craze would blow up, I probably would have held off on the Eee 701 to see what else was introduced before I threw down the cash.  It’s not that I am really unhappy with my Eee, but as the newer netbooks have been introduced, it quickly became apparent that maybe it wasn’t the best fit for me.  The size is perfect–it’s really the kind of laptop I can just toss in my bag and go.  But for a power user like me, it’s a bit underpowered and the screen is too small.  If I relegate it to just surfing the web or writing the occasional post or bit of my novel while I’m out and about, it’s great…but now that I’ve seen what some of the newer netbooks can do, I want more.  I’d also like more storage, a slightly bigger keyboard, and better screen resolution.  Oh, and having a hackintosh netbook wouldn’t be so bad…I want my MacBook Tiny!

I feel a little disloyal to my pretty pink Eee PC, but I am hoping it will be going to a good home very soon where someone can appreciate it.  Next week, I will be ordering a Dell Mini 9 and I cannot WAIT to receive it.  Eee PC, you’ve been great, but it’s time for us to go our separate ways.

Here are my daily drivers:
- iPhone 3G
- iBook G4
- Seagate FreeAgent 500GB
- iPod nano 3G 8GB
- Canon SD750
- Eee PC 701
- Western Digital Passport 250GB

iPhone 3G: I absolutely love my 16GB white iPhone 3G.  My iPhone is my lifeline, my entertainment, and my productivity wrapped up into a sleek, small package.  It’s my most recent tech purchase and is already one of my absolute favorite pieces of gear.  I use my iPhone for email, light web surfing, reading my RSS feeds, jotting a quick idea into Evernote, keeping up with my busy calendar, communicating on Twitter, reading eBooks, listening to music, and of course making phone calls.  The 2.1 firmware upgrade has given me a great boost in battery life and I have never had a problem with 3G coverage and call clarity.  It’s the best phone I’ve ever owned.  I’ll talk about my favorite apps and iPhone features in another upcoming post.

iBook G4: I am still rocking my trusty and beloved iBook G4, which I purchased in March of 2006.  I’ve maxed out the RAM and it runs Leopard quite happily.  Right now, the iBook has a hinge issue which makes opening and closing the laptop very precarious, so it’s being utilized as a desktop rather than a laptop.  I have a 19″ HP LCD monitor and a Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse hooked up to it, while it is stowed out of sight on the small set of drawers that slide under my desk.  I also have my all-in-one HP Printer, external DVD burner, and external hard drive hooked up to the iBook via a USB hub.  I am looking to eventually replace it on the desktop with an iMac, and I plan on getting a MacBook Pro hopefully sometime this winter, but the iBook is still a solid machine for my needs at home.  I use it for work (Microsoft Office and email), converting videos to watch on my iPhone, web surfing, writing, and some web design.

Seagate FreeAgent 500GB: This is a recent purchase that replaced a 250GB external drive that went out on me.  Because the iBook only has a 40GB hard drive, having an external drive is essential for me.  My husband and I have a large music collection that lives solely on the external drive, as does our iPhoto library.  I have the Seagate partitioned in half–one partition for Time Machine backups, and one partition for music, photos, movies and other things.  I am setting everything to back up to my Amazon S3 account so that if the external ever goes out again, it will not be an emergency!  One of the things I like about the Seagate is its power-saving function–when the laptop goes to sleep, so does the external drive.  That will really help lower wear and tear and increase the longevity of the drive.  It has excellent read/write speeds and looks kind of like a menacing orange Cylon.  Who doesn’t love having a Cylon on their desk?

iPod nano 3G 8GB: My “nano fatty” is one of my all-time favorite iPods.  After seeing the leaked specs, I was prepared not to like it when it was introduced last fall, but after seeing it in person, I fell in love.  It’s so small and sleek that sometimes I lose it in my bigger bags!  It has an incredibly long battery life, and the solid-state hard drive makes it perfect for working out with.  I’ve been using my iPhone a lot lately, but my iPod will not be tossed into some dusty drawer and not used any longer.  I keep it in my purse loaded up with music and audiobooks for my workout and my commute.  I like to keep different music on my iPhone and my nano so that I’m getting more leverage out of both devices.  It’s working great so far, I just need to build my music collection back up after a major hard drive crash!

Canon SD750: I really enjoy using this camera–it has a large, crisp LCD screen, uses SD cards, has a rechargable battery, and takes great photos!  My old camera, the Canon A510, was bulkier and difficult to fit in a smaller purse or a pocket.  The SD750 fits easily in my pocket or purse, which makes it handy for capturing moments on the go.  I’m still playing with the custom CHDK firmware that I loaded on it a while back, so watch the blog for an SD750 update!

Eee PC 701: “Netbooks” are becoming increasingly popular, with new ones popping up on the horizon every day or two.  I am happily rocking the one that started the craze, the Asus Eee PC 701.  I’ve got the 4GB version in Blush Pink, which makes it not only the smallest laptop I’ve ever owned, but also the cutest.  I have upgraded the RAM to 2GB, supplemented the 4GB SSD drive with an 8GB SD card, and added a Kensington USB Micro Bluetooth Adapter.  I am able to carry it almost anywhere in almost any bag I own because it’s so light and small.  I bought it with the intention of using it as a lightweight writing and blogging tool, but it’s so much more than that.  I have gone for days without using the iBook because I just don’t need to–I can do almost any computer task that I need to do on my little pink powerhouse.  I’m running Ubuntu Hardy Heron and it works fantastically well on the Eee PC.  I’ve become a big Linux fan because of this little laptop.

Western Digital Passport 250GB: Since the Eee PC only has 4GB (12GB if you count the SD card!) of storage on board, I thought it’d be nice to get a small external drive for bigger files and backup storage.  So, I picked up a 250GB Western Digital Passport drive (also in pink) that is not much bigger than a deck of cards.  It runs completely off USB power, eliminating the need for a separate power source, and it’s so quiet you can hardly hear it run.  My entire mobile computing setup weighs less than 3 pounds and fits in my purse–how cool is that?

A lot of people have a tech bag or two that they use to cart all their stuff around in, but I stick mainly to purses.  Just because I like electronics doesn’t mean I can’t carry them fashionably!  I favor Coach leather bags for my every day and professional use, but I do have a great Manhattan Portage bag that I use for travel, the gym, or places I just don’t want to carry a nice, expensive leather bag.  I have the Mini Map Bag in pink, which is essentially a vertical messenger.  It’s great for weekend jaunts to the lake or a trip to the coffee shop to write–it easily fits my Eee PC and accessories, plus my wallet, iPhone and other essentials.  It is also big enough to stash my current knitting project, a book, and my DS Lite.

What are your daily drivers and how do you carry them?  If you’re interested in being featured in My Daily Tech, send me an email at jessicafritsche at gmail dot com.

It is frustrating, considering the only place I run Windows is at the office. At home I run nothing but OS X and Ubuntu. So, as an experiment, I installed Windows XP on my Asus eeePC 701 about a month ago to see if it made it any more useful to me.

I did a custom nLite installation of XP so that I could get rid of absolutely anything I didn’t need–this took my installation size wayyy down to just at a gig. When you’re dealing with a 4GB SSD drive, you have to make sure that Windows doesn’t eat up your entire partition! It took a while to install, but when I booted–it was FAST. It booted faster than any normal Windows installation I have ever worked with. I barely had time to blink before I was already on my desktop.

I installed a handful of programs–Firefox, Skype, Microsoft Office (on the SD card to save some space), iTunes (just because), Foxit Reader, and a ClearType utility (a must for making text on the small screen sharp!). At first I was impressed by the performance…but after a week or so with XP on the machine, I started to change my tune.

In my opinion, Windows is not meant for the sub-notebook. Some of the things that have turned me off:

1. Windows and Windows programs can be giant resource hogs. I’ve never had trouble with Skype, not even with video calls, on the eeePC running Ubuntu. But last night I was testing Skype video calling in Windows, and my processor was maxing out at 100%. I’ve also noticed that other programs are not very snappy if I’ve had the computer on for awhile. It’s really zippy after a reboot, but I don’t want to have to constantly reboot my machine to get good performance. I’ve even noticed that my wireless signal is not as solid under Windows–watching anything on hulu.com causes massive amounts of buffering, and I had an utterly crappy voice connection on Skype.
2. Windows is not as smart as Ubuntu. Ubuntu Hardy Heron knows enough to resize many screens for the smaller eeePC. I had trouble with lots of programs trailing off the screen in Windows, with no handy key+mouse combination to move them around. The Move command just flat wouldn’t work because Windows didn’t want to put the screen where I wanted it to go. It has made using the eeePC frustrating for anything more than checking my email and the occasional IM conversation.
3. I just don’t feel good about using Windows anymore. I use it at work because I have to, but I find myself pining for some of the programs on OS X or Ubuntu. I wish I could use the same nice shortcuts and time-saving programs (Oh Quicksilver, I love you so! You, too, Gnome-Do.), and I just think Windows is visually unappealing, even when it’s skinned. Plus, I got a little addicted to the giant treasure trove of open-source software for Linux. It’s like Christmas!

It’s great to be able to watch Netflix streaming or have iTunes on my eeePC, but I’ve discovered that I don’t think it’s worth it. XP is dragging my little laptop down. Maybe if Windows came out with an OS specifically tailored to the sub-notebook or UMPC, I’d bite. I know that Origami is supposed to take the Windows OS and “optimize” it for use on a UMPC, but that’s not the same thing as having an OS JUST for the UMPC and sub-notebook devices.

It’s back to Ubuntu for me as soon as I can install it!

I wanted to make sure that I always had access to my schedule and tasks on the eeePC, and that any changes or additions I made on my calendar there would be reflected across all my devices. So I set out in search of the perfect Ubuntu solution for my eeePC, and this is what I ended up with:

1) Thunderbird + Lightning – I already used Mozilla Thunderbird for my email needs, and had tried its partner Sunbird (the separate calendar tool) with little luck. I just can’t stand having separate programs on such a small device. I don’t want to have to move to another window or virtual desktop to go between my mail, calendar and tasks. So, I decided to try the Thunderbird calendar plugin Lightning to bring the calendar functionality of Sunbird right to Thunderbird.

Right away, I liked Lightning better than Sunbird. Sunbird never seemed to work quite right for me–the views were all off and it froze up on me a lot. I really liked having it integrated into Thunderbird, which I always have open on my second virtual desktop.

However, due to the limitations of the eeePC’s smaller screen, I had to adjust things so that I would have the best possible layout. Thankfully, one of my favorite extensions for Firefox on the eeePC is also available for Thunderbird–Tiny Menu consolidates the menu bar into one small drop-down menu. Once I had Tiny Menu installed, I re-arranged the toolbars until I had all the icons I needed for email, calendar, and tasks on one row. That freed up a lot of visual space and made Lightning much more usable for me.

2) Google Calendar – GCal is the syncing conduit for all my devices. There is no “perfect” solution, but thanks to GCal I feel like my system comes pretty close. I really appreciate that they open up their API so that people can create syncing solutions that make it simple to keep everything updated.

3) Provider for Google Calendar – Once I had Lightning all set up, I had to figure out a way to get it to sync with GCal. The expandability of Thunderbird and Lightning once again saved the day, and I installed the Thunderbird add-on Provider for Google Calendar. It requires Sunbird or Lightning to be installed, and enables bi-directional sync between the calendar program and GCal. It works effortlessly for me.

4) Provider for Remember the Milk – The one fault with Google Calendar is that it doesn’t have an integrated task list. However, there is a fabulous web-based task manager called Remember the Milk that fills the gap nicely. It has also offered up its API so that people can create great applications that interface with the web tool. Thunderbird add-on Provider for Remember the Milk allows you to sync tasks in Lightning with your task list in Remember the Milk. It’s not perfect–things like tags don’t carry over, for instance, but it is more than functional for what I need. I look forward to further development that will hopefully do things like sync tags in the future.

So far the only problem I’ve had is a recurring appointment not showing up correctly. Otherwise, it’s worked flawlessly with GCal and my other devices. How do you keep your life in sync? Talk back in the comments.

Sadly, I’ve been unable to run it on the eeePC because turning on Compiz turns OFF my ability to drag windows off the top of the screen. This is a big deal on the eeePC’s small screen, because sometimes dialog windows are too long to fit on the screen, and I will have to alt+drag them up so that I can get to all of the choices.

Thankfully, the eeeuser wiki has come to my rescue once again.  Someone posted a very simple line of code that you can pop in the terminal and voila! Dragging windows beyond the top of the screen is enabled in Compiz.

gconftool-2 –set /apps/compiz/plugins/move/allscreens/options/constrain_y –type bool 0

It is important to NOT issue the command as a root user (sudo), but that is the only caveat I’ve found. I am so happy to be able to show off the amazing Compiz effects on my eeePC, and now I can finally use Emerald Theme Manager to make my desktop look awesome!

However, in my work life, I can’t help but be as organized as I can. I rely heavily on email, because often times it drives my daily tasks as well as provides a clear documented line of communication between me and my clients. I think it’s that way at almost every company in the modern age–live and die by email. I also use the Outlook Calendar a lot for scheduling client meetings, internal kickoffs, and more.

We have a documented project process that we follow for every client project, and I have the elements in place on my computer at work to get those things set up and completed. However, I am forever writing new to-do lists in the margins of my Levenger Circa notebook (my best analog tool at the office!) and I really hate trying to keep a paper datebook because my timelines for projects tend to be very fluid when there are delays, hiccups, or changes in scope.  I also hate having to change all my Outlook calendar entries when a project’s timeline changes, because somehow it never seems to sync up right to my PDA phone or iCal on my Mac at home.

I know I’m not the only one who has sat down with their various daily driver gadgets and thought, “Surely there has to be a way to make it all talk to each other!” There doesn’t seem to be one outstanding solution that will handle all needs for all platforms–yet. I think it’s coming, I HOPE it’s coming soon, but I can’t wait for it to arrive. I need a solution NOW.

I use the following devices every day:

• Windows Mobile Pocket PC phone running WM 5.0
• PC at work running Windows XP
• Power PC Mac at home running Leopard
• eeePC running Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04

I think I am slowly but surely figuring out the way that I can get everything to connect and sync together without trying to sync the PDA phone with any computer (a nightmare on Mac and Linux, annoying even on Windows) and across the multiple software platforms.

I have the first three “phases” of my calendaring setup completed and working, which I’ll document in more depth tomorrow.  So far, I have the eeePC, the work PC, and the Windows Mobile phone all communicating to the same central hub that I have set up in Google Calendars.

Up next, part one–tweaking out Thunderbird on the eeePC to be a robust calendar and task solution!