Farsong Blog-o-Matic

So, I've been planning to get an eeePC 901, right? It's a tiny computer, its form dictated by the 8.9" display. It's small and light, using a Solid State Disk made of flash memory instead of an HHD with a spinning disk platter. The SSD is less susceptible to shocks, and the read times are higher.

Of course, with a computer this small (and it is a full computer — don't let anyone tell you otherwise!), some compromises are made. One of these is that the computer lacks an internal optical drive. This doesn't worry me, as (like most of the most powerful features of my MacBook) I don't use the optical drive more than 10% of the time, and would just as soon remove it to save weight (I liked being able to remove the optical drive to reduce weight and power draw on my old G3 PowerBook).

The eee PC doesn't ship with an optical drive at all. All I really need is a CD-ROM drive, and that's for installing things like Ubuntu, backing up photos I've taken when I'm away from my main machine (though with the 8gb CF card, that's somewhat rare), and doing a little bit on the go — let's get this straight: the eee is not for video editing. Maybe watching some DVDs, but that's it. Fortunately, I have an external one of those. Unfortunately, it's a PCMCIA-based thing, meaning that it won't work on most laptops now. And booting from it is out of the question.

Meaning that I was intending to purchase one of these, as Apple's MacBook Air Superdrive*, while affordable and awesome, would only work with MacBook Airs. The LG model was the only one that was actually legitimately Bus-powered, besides the Apple drive.

Today while reading my feeds, I found an article about hacking a MacBook Air External SuperDrive to run on anything. I went into the article with the idea that I could do this instead of buying a drive from Newegg. Not that something like the LG drive was bad, but slot-load drives are both cooler and less prone to breakage as the pop-out-tray drives. Plus, they have a more satisfying disk-loading sound.

Then I saw how the hack was done: it used a $9 USB adapter for laptop drives. Swap that out for the PCB in the MacBook Air Superdrive (and with a little soldering, retain the original cable and casing). It's just a regular laptop drive with a little IDE-to-USB interface, and all the plugs of laptop drives are the same. A Mac drive will work in a PC just fine.



And then it all clicked.


I don't need the MacBook Air SuperDrive. I don't need a new $90 DVD drive from Newegg. I already have a DL Slot-load SuperDrive. It's from my old G3 PowerBook, and it works natively with OSX** (it was an up-grade for the G3 PowerBook — the system actually shipped with a tray-load DVD-ROM drive, 12gb HDD, and 128mb RAM). The G3 died, but I kept the drive. It's a nice little drive, and it has a wonderful sound when it "eats" the discs.

So, except for the IDE-USB bridge, I already have all the things i need for an external drive. Why pay more money when I already have a drive. Plus, it can be a dual-layer drive for my G5 as well (the machine has only a single-layer burner). And it has a glowing amber light. What's not to love?

Now, the only thing left to do would be to make a proper external case. Which sounds suspiciously like fun, especially considering the old laptop parts I have hanging around. And now to apply the $10.11 I got back from Idaho to this little USB device.



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* "Superdrive" is Apple's term for a DVD-Burner, these days being a DL DVD±RW. Originally the term was for the Double-sided high-density 1.4mb 2.5"

** And it's either OSX or Linux for me. If it works in OSX, chances are that I can get it to work in Linux, too. And those drives have pretty standard, known, and documented interfaces. Heck, the PCMCIA drive that's 12 years old still works great with Ubuntu, and I used to use that on a 486 with Win 95.

I've pointed to it a lot recently, but there's a great deal of moving and shaking happening in the realms of Mobile Computing. Namely, the eeePC and its ilk — this new group of “netbooks” or “sub-notebooks” that's taken the mobile market by storm.

Last year, the eeePC felt rather like a toy, with 2gb of SSD and a tiny screen. All that's changed, and the machines are powerful and efficient, not running 1.6ghz processors (designed by Intel for this purpose) and getting 5, 6, or 7.5 hours, easily. They're tiny, light, free of optical drives and moving parts, and are super-connected. They're smaller and lighter than the MacBook Air, significantly cheaper (even for the large-capacity, high-powered, feature-rich ones), and bristle with USB ports, card slots, connectors, and features. If you ask me, the Air sort of missed the mark; the Air feels like a luxury computer, while the eee and other netbooks feel more like true workhorses.

( It's not just the hardware that's revolutionary, but the entire small-computing paradigm shift — thoughts on OSes and netbooks )

I'm excited. Pleased. Thrilled. Want to know why?

I'm getting a new laptop. I have it all picked out and I'm already picturing myself using it and hauling it all over the place. I've even decided on a bus-powered optical drive for it, for the little I'll actually need it. I have already mentally moved from the MacBook and am biding my time.

It's an Asus eeePC, and it's perfect.

There's only one problem: I'm not getting it yet. In fact, I'll probably have my MacBook for the rest of the term. I'm going to get rid of it, though — I already have a capable desktop, and I don't need more computers (despite the fact that I seem to collect them).

In the past week, I've pretty much convinced myself that the eee is the machine I need. I've talked about it. I've spent hours reading reviews of it and talking excitedly about it at people. I've written and rewritten this entry at least three times from scratch (including once on a cell phone) and have sat on it for the better part of a week.

I might be one of few people in this world who would trade a large, fast laptop (one that is actually more powerful than my desktop) for a tiny, slow one.

This is because it's not about the power of the machine, though — it's about the functionality. Most of the time, the MacBook is more computer than I need. I do most of my big projects on my desktop, keeping the laptop around for portability — as a console I can grab and go. I have it for writing and taking with me.

In fact, that's why I got the laptop: so I'd have a machine to take with me whenever I wanted to go. It was smallish and lightish and portable. However, about a month and a half after getting it, I realised that it was too large. It's wide and heavy, and unlike my old PowerBook G3, I can't remove the optical drive (I also can't put in two batteries at a time for extra battery life). I'm stuck with the configuration, and it's a huge, heavy laptop, weighing in at about 6 pounds. It's great, and has always worked well, easily doing all the tasks I throw at it, but I would have been happier with a 12" PowerBook. The MacBook is just too wide.

I was disappointed when the 12" line was cancelled, as the computer was the right, portable size — but the MacBook was far more powerful than a used 12" PowerBook. I was doubly disappointed when the MacBook Air was released. It was thin, yes, but it was still the same length and depth as my MacBook, and the Solid State Disk (flash memory) version was an outrageous price.

Enter the eeePC. Barely 2 pounds and the size of a hardback book, replete with a SSD, 3 USB ports, a VGA-out, a 10/100 ethernet port, and a webcam. More ports than the Air. Even better, it's a fraction of the price of even the MacBook. It's tiny. It's light. It's cheap. With the flash-based SSD, it's almost instantly on. And the processor is more than powerful enough for web-based things (even in the age of YouTube, no one needs more than a 533mhz machine, especially when using linux. More RAM only makes these things faster) What's not to love?

When if first came out last November, the eeePC was cool, but didn't really have enough space or screen size for me (2gb and 4gb built-in SSD and a 7" 800x400 screen). It still seemed like a toy to me. But this past week, Asus released a new model, now with a larger screen (8.9" 1024x600) and more storage (12gb or 20gb, for the same price).

In fact, it's exactly what I wanted when I got the MacBook: no more computer than I really need on the go. I have a desktop for the heavy-duty work; all I need is a small, light computer for text-input, web-browsing, e-mail, and chat. Plus, being so small, I wouldn't think twice about sliding it in my bag before heading off to class.

“I weep, I cry, I shed a single glorious tear that contains the sum total of my linux music frustrations. I listen to The Pillows in linux after downloading an album from my media box at home. SongBird is awesome.”

So says my friend Chris — a fellow CS major (more advanced than I) and friend from back in high school. We'd gotten to chatting about GUIs and how it's hard to switch from a familiar one to a new one, and how he'd just forced himself to learn Ubuntu linux (first KDE then Gnome), but was still having a hard time switching completely away from Windows (and somewhat dreaded switching to OSX*).

Anyway, my friend Chris expressed his dissatisfaction to me at the state of Linux media players and libraries — the last reason that he still had XP as the main OS on his desktop, and the last hurdle in his switch to Linux. He'd tried Amarok and several others, but none did what he needed. He vastly preferred iTunes to anything else out there, and there was nothing he was aware of that did the job adequately — he used iTunes for everything except syncing his MP3-player, which required Windows Media Player to snyc.

So I mentioned Songbird (it also works with OSX and Windows, though it's still a beta). It was precisely what we were both looking for. One of the last hurdles for Linux as Main Machine for him has been taken down; taken away. And from what I understand, he's elated.


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* As an aside, my dad switched from a klunky old HP to a svelte MacBook Pro this past Christmas. He deserved a new machine. I helped him propagate his files from Windows to OSX 10.5 seamlessly as part of my Christmas gift to him. (For reference, I used a 2.5" IDE-to-Firewire/USB 2.0 external drive enclosure to transfer files, and a Gmail account to transfer e-mails from Outlook, archiving them in the process).

I've been especially impressed by how easily he grasps the functioning of OSX — actually understanding the underlying paradigm of the OS, rather than simply a blind set of procedural steps. This is essential, as OSX doesn't do things in the same series of steps that Windows does, though one can achieve the same end result (arguably in a more-elegant way on a Mac). He switched and hasn't looked back; he hasn't needed to.