Hello again.

Since I’ve lost the use of my MacBook Pro for a week or two, I’ve had to fall back to the NC10 for every evening use. Before now, whilst having used it for an hour here or there, but usually a lot less, I’d not really built up a great picture of how good this little laptop really is.

Yes, it’s been a bit of a wait for drivers to be written to support the NC10 specifics, but that really is the last 2%. I’ve been doing some web design front end work, running TextMate, Espresso, CSSEdit, Safari, Transmi, Firefox, iTunes (natch) and even Photoshop in the mix with great success.

Yes, the little laptop would be sweating it’s nuts off at times, having only 2GB and all those apps open. And yes, the screen is a little short (for a stormtrooper) but it wasn’t enough to *not* do any work. I’ve not even tried the virtual desktops of Spaces yet, as I like my workspace cluttered. If you could see my real desk right now you’d understand…

Since the drivers for the audio hardware and the new trackpad drivers have come out, the Samsung NC10 has become a very usable pretender to the Apple throne. For £300, I have a system I can work on if needed, listen to music, watch movies, wardrive with, email, socialise and surf with very few drawbacks.

No. No I won’t be using this for an extended period of time. I’ll get my MacBook Pro back and enjoy the screen real estate, as it usually sits on the desk and doesn’t move too far. But the NC10 has done brilliantly to step up to the plate. I’ll be taking it to Canada with me next week.

The long battery life means I can watch at least 2 films on the plane if the inflight ones are crap, plus I can wardrive from the airport to Guelph, then have a small laptop on hand should I need to do more while there. It’s turning into an essential little piece of kit!

After Christmas, I spent two and a half weeks in Spain with my wife’s family. Having done this many a time, and having taken many different laptops with me, I generally know what I need from a laptop to keep me semi-sane.

One of the best laptops I’d taken in the past was the 12″ PowerBook, and believe me, if Apple made an Intel netbook approaching this small footprint form factor, I’d have one. But alas, that’s a different blog post waiting to happen. However, the 15″ MacBook Pro was a pain in the ass. No desk space to keep it on, unwieldly in size (even fearing warping it when bending over with it in a rucksack) and a battery boasting about 2 hrs, it was a little too much.

In the summer of 2008 I took my Asus EEE 701, running Linux Mint. The little machine was great. Durable, good battery etc, but after a week or so of it being my only computer, the small 7″ screen and cramped keyboard were starting to tell.

This Christmas, I took the Samsung NC10 with OSX installed. I did have a Linux Mint install on a 20GB partition, as a fall back in case I found some weirdness with the OSX86 install, but I’m really happy to report the NC10 was near perfect.

Battery life is incredible. When the battery menu bar indicator turned red, it meant I had over an hour left…whu!? The screen was big enough to play games and watch movies on, and the keyboard, while having one or two keys in odd positions, was really good, no cramping or anything.

Being a long time user of OSX, since the public beta, I know a mac inside out, and feel more at ease than using Linux of any flavour, despite how good Ubuntu/Linux Mint have become. OS X ran sweetly on the NC10, starting up in about 40 seconds and shutting down in less than 5, quicker than my MacBook Pro can wake and sleep, made power management a non-issue.

The only thing still missing is the ability to switch audio output to headphones, but that is very close to being completed apparently… which will make the little NC10 an absolute must for any OSX fans after a netbook.

wEEEdriving? Anyway, with Mac OS X on the Asus, Kismac was next. While I waited for the Dell mini pci-e card to arrive, I dug out the old D-Link DWL-G122 USB stick and the GlobalSat USB GPS and hooked it all up.

After remembering where all the relevant drivers were, Kismac worked fine, found my two SSIDs at home, and the GPS was getting a signal and put me roughly in the right place. I say roughly as the dot to show where you are covers about 70% of the UK on the default map!

The Asus is so light weight, and OS X gets roughly 2.5 hrs on the battery (this will drop with it powering USB devices, but certainly long enough to go for a cycle or walk with the EEE in a backpack. Gets a bit warm, but nothing too alarming. We’ll see how it fares on holiday in Spain!

Really enjoying my Asus EEE, and have tried a few linux distros (mostly Ubuntu based) but I’m a mac boy, and once I started reading about the Uphuck and JaS hacks, well… it’s was only a couple of gig away!

I’m sure Nathan will be relieved that I’m no longer asking n00b linux questions, ad the next step is to get Kismac and the GPS on the Asus EEE.

I know I’m late in mentioning this, but I’ve been very busy in both professional and personal life, so things like spewing bile on a blog have to wait.

Anyway, Kismac has been moved away from it’s German roots, due to draconian and rather pathetic laws that have been passed there, from the Kismac team;

“As you may well be aware, we have moved this part of the site offshore to Switzerland. The German politicians have shown their lack of understanding of security matters by deciding to ban anything that can be used to breach security.”

The new site is located at http://kismac.macpirate.ch/ so drop by there, and if you can program, get involved!

There’s a neat bit of software that you can use in conjunction with your GPS unit and Google Earth to show your position in realtime while Stumblin’.

Using gps2geX, the software generates an “on the fly” KML file which is loaded in Google Earth. The co-ordinates for gps2geX are updated from the gpsdX daemon, which is also being used by KisMac, so no one app is taking sole control of the GPS unit.

The results are pretty cool. You can see your exact position on Google Earth, updated as per your settings in gps2geX, Google Earth even tilts and pans the camera around based on what direction and speed you’re moving in.

So if you’re driving around looking for wireless networks, how are you streaming images in Google Earth? Ahh, good question. I use my Sony Ericcson K800i as a bluetooth modem. I’m on T-Mobile’s Web’n'Walk Plus service plan, an unlimited (yeah, with the usual cavaets) internet access plan. A drive around my home town worked well, probably because I had a lot of imagery cached already, but it all seemed to work just fine.