The film is one of many ‘quota quickies’, B-featurettes shown in cinemas, an unintended side-effect of the Cinematograph Film Act of 1927.

Director Harold Baim seems to have had a real suburballardian fascination for motorways, multi-storey car parks and tower blocks.

Discovered thanks to a wonderful documentary by Laurie Taylor, which just finished. (I’ll upload it tomorrow after it appears on Listen Again.)

Update: The good people at Speechification, an excellent weblog that posts highlights from Radio 4 and other ‘intelligent speech’ stations, have archived the documentary.

So, here are the steps I took to turn a stock Eee into the perfect machine for writing on the move.

1. Enable Advanced Desktop Mode, because Easy Mode is just silly.
2. Add extra repositories, from which to download applications not provided by Asus.
3. Install SSH server, so you can connect your Eee from other computers: sudo apt-get install openssh-server
4. Install Subversion, to keep all your files in sync: sudo apt-get install subversion (setting up a Subversion repository is left as an exercise for the reader).
5. Install AbiWord, because OpenOffice is too slow on the Eee: sudo apt-get install abiword.
6. Install VLC, for playing telly programmes on the train when you can’t be arsed working: sudo apt-get install vlc
7. Tweak Firefox to make it more Eee-friendly:
   1. Install the MiniFox theme.
   2. Install the Fullerscreen add-on.
   3. Install the Google Browser Sync add-on, to keep your bookmarks, passwords and history synchronised with your main computer (optional, but well handy).
8. Remember to keep all your stuff on a removable SDHC card, not on the Eee’s internal memory card.

That’s it. The whole procedure takes under ten minutes, most of which is spent waiting for the list of repositories to update and the 15MB AbiWord to download.

I’ve been running the Eee like this for ten days now, and haven’t missed any of the gizmos I’d installed over the last few months. More importantly, the Eee is now as fast as crikey, and I haven’t had a single application crash on me yet.

Just in case anyone thinks I’ve lost the will to tinker, I feel moved to point out that I wrote the above while waiting for a Puppy Linux CD to burn.

[Click through to the site to listen to the audio]

See also: this previous post, again inspired by an item on You And Yours¹, on Birkenhead Park, complete with lively debate in the comments about its claim to be the first public park in the world.

1. Yeah, I listen to You And Yours quite a lot: proof, if proof be need be, that my Radio 4 addiction is completely out of hand. Just be thankful that I’m not posting excerpts from The Archers (which has been quite exciting lately, what with Owen’s rape trial).↩