If the Asus T91/T101 series touch screen netbooks show even half the promise shown in this video, you are looking at my next Netbook. As long, of course, as it has at least 5 hours of battery life as well 
Monthly Archives: January 2009
Online Backup – Jungledisk
One part of your roaming backup strategy should include offsite/Internet based backup services. The one I use is Jungledisk which has recently updated its software to version 2.5b. Jungledisk makes use of the Amazon S3 storage service as a destination (and soon to be Rackspace after its acquisition by them).
When I upgraded I found that my main NAS storage was not being backed up, showing zero files present and a message saying that the username and password was incorrect/not present. Before the upgrade it all worked well, and after the upgrade nothing was doing for the network share based locations.
The problem was simple and related to a new feature introduced in this version of Jungledisk – the ability to backup without being logged in. Jungledisk runs as a service to provide this feature, and it does so using its own credentials which did not have access to the NAS drive. The solution is to change the logon credentials of the new JungleDiskService to an account that actually has both access to the local machine (for the local file storage backups) and to the network share from which you are also backing up. Changing the credentials of a service in Windows is well documented on the internet, so I will not go into it here.
After the change (and an exit and restart of the client), backups continued in their normal effective way.
A major lesson learned here also is… make sure that you test the software upgrade first when it is software that your business depends on.
Evernote – Your External Brain
Evernote is a feature packed note taking application that synchronises it’s data into the cloud, allowing access from a variety of devices and software clients, such as iPhone, Windows Mobile, Windows XP and Vista, Mac OS X, Sandisk U3 USB Flash Drives and a web interface.
Evernote allows for a variety of different types of notes to be saved in Notebooks, including text, freehand drawings, voice or audio recordings, and photos with searchable text. Notes can be tagged with keywords or put into separate notebooks to aid organisation and searching of stored notes.
A great example of the power of Evernote is taking a photo of a business card from a mobile device, uploading the image of the card and then being able to search on information such as names and contact details from that business card to be searched upon, no more having big piles of business cards lying around or manual data entry.
For all but the heaviest of users, the free account proves more than adequate allowing a maximum of 40Mb of data transfer into the cloud per month, you can however, upgrade to a premium account at $5 (approx £3.50) per month or $45 (approx £33) per year which increases your transfer limit to 500MB per month and gives additional features such as SSL encrypted data transfer. Each account also comes with an email address so that you can forward email messages with useful information to be stored within the Evernote system for future reference.
The only drawback I can find is when using the application on a mobile device, your note data is not stored locally as well as in the cloud as it is on a non-mobile device, requiring a connection to the Internet to upload newly created notes and view previously created ones.
New author on The Long Distance Worker Tech
I would like to welcome Ross Bale to this blog. Ross will be making his first post today and making many other contributions from this point onwards, covering more of a corporate vein. Ross and I worked together back when we were much younger, although some younger than others, back when Tech knew no downturns – pre Downturn I. Now we are in Downturn II, we await his contributions with interest.
Brief Intro to Netbooks
CNET does some very nice podcasts and other info about technology and gadgets. The latest Real Deal (144) podcast covers Netbooks and discusses the relative merits/use of different features of netbooks. Have a listen.
Obviously their are country specifics particularly about wireless internet (3G), as you can get 3G embedded versions in the UK without a contract – something that I can recommend, and the whole cost of 3G is very different here particularly with some of the new Pay as you go options, but it is a pretty good overview.
Netbook Screen Optimisation
One of the annoyances for me about many netbooks is the choice of the 1024×600 pixel screen. When you are around the office you can make use external monitors as I have already discussed, but when you are actually mobile there is simply not enough pixels. There are a couple of things you can do beyond using the F11 fullscreen view in Firefox.
1. Task bar to hide
You do not need the task bar all the time, and just making it hide gives you the equivalent of 768 pixels in the vertical. You can make this much easier to manage by making use of software such as ObjectDock as well – a pure steal from the Mac of course.
2. Play with the DPI
You can make the font size of all applications (well almost all) reduce in size, by playing with the DPI (Dots Per Inch) settings in the Settings area of the screen properties. By default, this is 96DPI (at least on all my machines) and the settings give you some movement in this value by using the custom option. Now, if you have a real big screen on a computer, some people also actually increase the DPI with the 120DPI setting already being built in. You can see the display steps to the setting here:
Now doing this does require a reboot, and you have to read the dialogue boxes very carefully to select the right answer.
Now with the DPI setting, the actual amount you choose depends on what you feel comfortable with, but I find that 80% is the lowest you can reasonably go, with 90% being even more comfortable.
So what is the downside? Well some applications do not scale and some dialogue boxes can be a bit screwy – but not to the extent that I have had problems when set to 80% DPI. The only additional problem you can have is that some windows do not display anything, which is very rare – hey Microsoft can you fix Live Messenger please!
You can always change it back to 100% if it is that important, but the gain is good as shown in this screenshot – click to see it full size.
This optimisation works on any of the netbooks, including those not-made by Sony
Password Management – Epilogue
It has been a little over a week now since the Twitter password hack, which we now know to have been hack allowed by a system design flaw in the authentication system used by them, combined with human factors. A standard dictionary attack was used with a list of known words (combined with single or double numbers) to gain access blindly to a system administrator account on Twitter. This was a further confirmation that having a password strategy as I described last week is a damned fine idea, particularly with online services which unknown to you may have the same flaw – a susceptibility to dictionary password attack. Remember, not words…
Dual Screen Mobile PCs/Netbooks
I have seen small screens like this starting to appear but they do not fully answer what I want… Take a netbook and then have an attached second screen of the same or higher resolution giving a portable dual (or more) monitor setup for those people who are mobile workers but set up offices where they go… You just have to make the screens attachable in a stack formation. It must be of the same or higher resolution though.
Originally posted as a comment by Ian D. Nock on Liliputing using Disqus.
Ok.. I had to post about this – LG Watchphone
Now, I am not live blogging CES but I did see one thing that overloaded my geek… The LG Watchphone. CNET gives a great video view here.
A little big maybe, but then that is today’s watch fashion. The question I have is more about real world battery life.
Palm Pre and HTC Touch Dual – Separated at Birth
With regard to the software and specifics of the specification like OS, Software, UI, screen resolution and camera, the Palm Pre and the HTC Touch Dual are so related to each other that they would not be allowed to get married. See what you think?
Palm Pre with keyboard extended
Palm Pre with closed keyboard
HTC Touch Dual with open and closed keyboard