• BNP member proximity search
  Enter your Post Code to see if there are any fascists in the vicinity.
• Why Were Still Looking At You (from The Herald )
  Alternate headline: Why do the Herlad keep crediting me with James Mottram's work, and he with mine?
• Publishing Google docs to your blog
• On the Death and 441-Year Life of the Pixel
• russell davies: speculative modeling
  Modifying Hornby model buildings to look like they might in 2050. I can't wait to see what people come up with (I'm too cack-handed to participate, sadly).
• Jonestown 30 Years Later
• Run Mac OS X on an Eee PC - Wired How-To Wiki
  I'm pretty happy with Ubuntu Eee, really, but this remains very tempting.
• Aquarium Drunkard: MP3 Blog, Music Blog » Bob Dylan/Johnny Cash :: 1969 Sessions
• Europa Film Treasures

<— http://www.fishmech.net/bnp/ —>

I haven’t had a system like this in place for years, and was quite surprised this morning by the stats. Many more people visit the site than I thought, and certain posts — the one about casuals, the one about collapsed lungs, and anything about how to do stuff on a computer — actually get a decent number of hits each day, from real live humans, as best as I can tell.

So, I thought I’d try a little experiment and… add some advertisements to the site. You know, so I can profit from football hooligans arranging fights and unwell Americans without health insurance. Might as well go the whole hog, eh?

Of course, this is wrong and bad and I should kill myself at the first available opportunity, so, to salve the terrible guilt, if I make more money than it takes to pay my hosting and domain registration fees (around £60 a year, I think), I’ll give it to charity.

I don’t want folk who actively read the site to be troubled by these ever-so-discreet textual intrusions of Mammon, so, just in case you’re not already blocking them, adverts will only appear below entries a week after they’ve been posted, and will never appear in RSS feeds or on the home page.

Here’s what they look like:

What do you reckon, then? Sensible plan, or revolting act?

Using The Eee PC

• Writing on the Eee PC is do-able, but impractical when it comes to longer pieces. When writing anything over a few hundred words, I tend to have two text files open and visible on screen, one full of notes, half-formed paragraphs jotted down as they pop into my head and a rough outline, the other for the actual business of writing the piece. This is impossible on the Eee PC’s little screen, and I found it very hard to adapt to flitting between two fullscreen documents, rather than having both available for reading and writing simultaneously. When it comes to the final pass, which for me tends to involve a fair bit of cutting, pasting and rewriting of the first draft, the Eee PC’s small display is even more bothersome: I had no idea how important it is for me to be able to read large chunks of text in their entirety on screen, but it turns out that all the to and fro of scrolling required, even when using AbiWord in fullscreen mode with a display font set at the limits of legibility, really gets in the way of finishing a piece of work.

• That said, it’s amazing how quickly one can adapt to writing on the Eee PC: I now type almost as quickly on the dinky keyboard as I do on my MacBook Pro, though with many more errors, and have absorbed a huge number of keyboard commands. This is a problem as much as a positive, though - every time I switch between the Mac and the Eee PC I spend five minutes or so adrift, stumbling over the Command and Control keys, and some things are so ingrained (triggering Textexpander macros or launching Quicksilver for example) that I suspect my brain will never override my muscle memory.

• Web browsing is just fine. The overwhelming majority of sites I visit render perfectly on the dinky display, and the scrolling side of the trackpad makes navigating pages a cinch. I have noticed one big difference in my browsing habits, though. On the Eee PC, if I come across a page of interest, I’ll print it to a PDF file for later reading, rather than leave the tab open. On the Mac, I would routinely have 20 or more tabs open, something the underpowered Eee just can’t handle, but I’ve now ported the habit over: it’s better to have an easily searchable folder of PDF print-outs than grub around for that tab I opened last Tuesday. Flash-heavy sites, and too many open tabs bearing YouTube videos will cause Firefox to choke on the Eee PC, but since I avoid the former, and could do with watching less of the latter, this hasn’t proved to be a problem.

• Managing images is tricky. I had thought that the Eee PC would be ideal as a photographer’s companion, so to speak, but the small screen makes even light editing - croppping, resizing, etc. - a chore, and the tendency of Firefox to have a fit when uploading more than a couple of full-size images to Flickr is frustrating. Still, for dumping images off your camera’s SD card for later processing or quick uploading, the Eee PC is a lot easier to lug around than your average laptop (it fits in the front pocket of my camera bag, with room to spare).

• Everything else is on the web. As I mentioned before, using the Eee PC often feels like using a client to Google’s various services (or other web services and hosted applications, like Backpack and its sister apps). This feels like the realisation of a long-predicted trend: the iPhone, the Eee PC, the Newton and the better UMPC type things really are a new class of networked portable device, I think, capable of changing the way we use computers and the web. If only the network was ubiquitous, and if only I were willing to trust all my data to third parties.

Hardware

• Wireless networking is solid, but not perfect. When out and about, the Eee PC picks up more available networks than my MacBook Pro, but sometimes has trouble connecting and maintaining connections, especially to those with a weak signal. (After an annoying afternoon in windswept Leeds trying to get online, getting the Eee PC to dial up via my Nokia N95, or even investing in one of those pay-as-you-go USB 3G modem thingys has become a priority.)

• Storage is a big problem. There’s just no room on the Eee PC for many media files, unless you want to muck about removing applications and files the Eee would rather you left alone. The answer? Get a for a 16GB SD card for Christmas!

• Battery life is nothing to be sniffed at, especially if you turn off WiFi and dim the backlight as much as you can stand. I got the train from Liverpool to Glasgow on Monday, and watched two and a half hours of downloaded telly, listened to a bunch of Radio 4 stuff gleaned from Speechification, and read a week’s worth of RSS feeds in Google Reader’s offline mode. The Eee PC had enough juice left for me to check my mail and footle about on the web for half an hour when I got home.

The operating system

• Linux is ugly, and hard to use. I don’t think I’ll ever be comfortable with the inconsistencies of the user interface. On a Mac, I know where certain menu items will be found, and can count on standard command key combos doing what I expect, regardless of the application I’m using. Under Xandros, there are no such certainties, and you have to learn a distinct set of commands, and a new menu layout for pretty much every application you run. Even something as basic as quitting an app is completely inconsistent across applications - Control + Q will work a lot of the time, admittedly, but you can’t count on it. Talking of which, who thought it was a good idea to have applications up and quit when you close a window? That’s just incredibly stupid behaviour (if you’ve been using Macs exclusively for more than a decade). I’ve even found myself abandoning the GUI of some applications in favour of the command line, which is fine by me, but pretty bloody ridiculous.

• Linux also has its strengths, of course! Package management is just the absolute business, a brilliant model for installing, updating and uninstalling applications. Updating all my applications on the Mac to the latest version would take a good deal of Googling, downloading, deleting and installing. Typing apt-get upgrade is a cinch in comparison.

• The twin OS that ships with the Eee PC is a good thing. Kate, James and I got my Dad an Eee PC for Christmas: he’s sticking with the default Easy Mode interface and, so far, the default applications. Admittedly, he’s a geeky pensioner, sorry Silver Surfer — Flickr account, nascent weblog and all — but I’d guess that someone with next to no computing experience would be comfortable with it. In other words, Asus have made a desktop Linux distro that anyone can use out of the box, without even having to look at a terminal window. This does not match my experience with other Linux distros, and that’s putting it mildly. (Of course, they have the ‘Apple advantage’ here, matching their hardware with a bespoke OS.)

So, is it any good?

Yup! In the end, the Eee PC has far exceeded my expectations. Sure, it has its flaws - small screen and keyboard, the lack of polish and limitations of Xandros when compared to a ‘proper’ OS - but it’s a more than capable laptop, ultra-portable and eminently usable. It has completely replaced my MacBook Pro as a laptop, which is now installed in the office as a desktop replacement. At a push, I could even see someone with relatively modest computing needs making the Eee PC their main machine: add an external DVD drive, full-size keyboard and monitor, and it would more than meet the needs of anyone who uses a PC primarily to write, surf the web and manage mail.

See also: Eee PC Setup.

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Good, eh?

As far as Google is concerned, the only Jacks more famous than me are Mr. Daniel and his sickly ‘whiskey’, popular singing sensation Mr. Johnson, and the perma-grinning leather-faced star of such films as One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

How very peculiar. I can only assume it’s some sort of temporary glitch in the system (I’m nowhere to be found in the first 50 results for ‘jack’ on Yahoo! or MSN search).

Note: I wasn’t on a deranged egosurf when I spotted this, honest—I just checked the logs for this site, and noticed an awful lot of folk finding their way here after searching for ‘jack’.

Rather than read out an URL at the close of a discussion about the American Society of Magazine Editors recent list of the top forty magazine covers of the past forty years, he said, “…and there’s a link to the American Editors Association on our website. If you Google ‘BBC Saturday Review’, you’ll get there.”

Not ideal perhaps - future listeners may be puzzled if Google ceases to exist, and present listeners new to the web might have trouble - but it beats the John Humphrys method (reading an URL three or four times, always incorrectly, before giving up).

So, if you want an invitation, just mail me at this address and I’ll invite you, no strings attached, until the invitations run out (I have 10 left).

For the record, between us we raised a total of £321.50 for Amnesty International, Cancer Research, the Motor Neurone Disease Association, the Pakistan Foundation Fighting Blindness and the Red Cross.

I think that’s pretty good going for sending a few emails, so many thanks to everyone who donated so generously!

Anyway, I now have a further five Gmail invitations to give away.

This time all you have to do to get an invitation is provide proof that you’ve donated to charity.

The amount is up to you and I don’t really mind which one, but reserve the right to withold invitations from anyone donating to a cause I find dubious or distasteful (such as animal charities, evangelical religous charities, ‘pro-life’ charities, etc.). Just to add to the spreading of goodness, for every £1 you donate, I’ll donate 25p to your cause.

If you’re stuck, here’s a few charities that do good work:

• Amnesty International
• Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
• The Howard League For Penal Reform
• Intermediate Technology Development Group
• Refuge
• Shelter

So, if you’d like a Gmail account, please send an email promising to donate. The first five folk to email will get their invites as soon as they provide proof of donation.

Good luck!