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I promised a post about my Dell Mini months ago, but didn’t write it up. OK, my bad, here you go!

Back in July I posted about my Asus netbook, and how great that had worked out on a roadtrip I took in March. Although the Asus was great, Windows XP wasn’t. I’ve used Windows machines for work, but occasionally, not on a day-to-day basis as my primary machine, having mostly used Macs and Linux machines. As a day-to-day OS, I found XP clunky, and frankly not very visually appealing.

I tried Windows 7 and I quite liked it. Between it’s visual and functional workover, and the free Virus protection from Microsoft, Windows 7 addressed all my day-to-day complaints, but although it worked great on my Asus,  it wasn’t technically supported, and I had to decide if I was going to shell out 1/2 the price of the Netbook for a new OS. The Asus had a feature to restore back to a fresh version of XP, I didn’t want to loose that. So, I decided the Asus was best left an XP machine, if I wanted to keep it the cheap functional tool that it was.

But, I wasn’t going to use it daily if I had to use XP, and Windows 7 wasn’t shipping on any other netbooks yet. What to do. Well, I’d read an article on how to get MacOS running on a Dell Mini 9. Apparently, all the devices in the Mini were supported under MacOS, although Apple doesn’t really approve of installing MacOS onto non-Apple devices, but I was going to make sure everyone was paid for their work, and that I accepted I’d be on my own support-wise.

Dell had just stopped making the Mini 9, replacing it with very nice netbooks, but that used components MacOS didn’t support. I picked up a very reasonably priced refurb for $199, with wireless and bluetooth, bought a RunCore 64GB SSD which reviews said was very fast, and a new shrink-wrapped copy of MacOS Leopard.

I followed the easy online instructions (Note that this method has been replaced with a new, universal method of creating a bootable OSX for netbooks) and in short order had a Dell Mini 9 running MacOS. I quite understand why Apple isn’t making a netbook. They’re a big compromise in many ways, and Apple wants all their products to have a minimum amount of compromise vs. functionality. The Air was as much as they were willing to compromise. I had an air for a while at a prior job, and really did love it, but it was frankly too expensive to carry with me as a "rough and ready" personal device.

They Dell keyboard on the Mini 9 is a huge compromise. It’s not nearly as nice as the Asus. The biggest mistake, they not only squeezed a bunch of keys to be very, very small, they moved some. In a huge tactical error, they messed with the "home row" on they keyboard, and they did it by moving the apostrophe key down in a group of keys by the right of the space bar, and left the semi-colon. Think about this for a second. When did you last use an apostrophe or quote? OK, now when’s the last time you used a semi-colon? Yes, exactly. In the world of quick notes and 140 character micro-blogging, you use an apostrophe over and over and over again. Then, to make it worse, the return key is nice and big. And you hit it every single time you are going for an apostrophe. Toss touch typing out the window. I used Ukelele to remap the apostrophe/semicolon keys, and that helped a little, but you’re not going to be typing full speed on this keyboard, where I could get a pretty good clip going on the Asus.

The touchpad isn’t perfect either. Although the touchpad can handle multitouch, it just doesn’t work well with the Mini9 in my setup. No scrolling with the touchpad, which is a bit of a pain. I sometimes use a wireless mouse just to have a scroll wheel if I’m going to be doing a lot of browsing.

The verdict? This is a GREAT little machine! Even with the issues with touch typing, if you go in knowing you’ll have to type slowly, or use an external keyboard, its small and light, battery lasts for at least 3 hours with wireless on, has an SD card slot for importing photos/videos without cables. I use this as a portable blogging machine, a way to archive/post photos on the road, a great microblogging platform, and a great web browser and email machine, and a way to follow my recipes on kencooking in the kitchen without taking up all the counter space! It can also be used to play movies, and works passably there. With the SD card slot, you can load up movies on a card, and bring them with you, not sucking up precious SSD space. I also have a copy of my iTunes library on an external drive, so I can use this netbook, or my big MacBook to play anything in the library. And the 64GB SSD is a lot more space than I had on my 40GB 12" MacBook! Also, the SSD is FAST. Disk operations usually take much less time than on my big Intel MacBook Pro with its spinning rust.

The compromises aren’t for everyone. If you’re a power-blogger or a writer, the keyboard is a deal breaker. Carrying the netbook AND an external keyboard destroys any portability you gained. But, if you’re looking for a tiny, silent, rugged occasional use machine, especially if you’re out and about, it’s worth a look.

References:

mydellmini
OSX | mechdrew

A history on the RSS Cloud inception and implementation can be read at rsscloud.org. Another one of those great bits of infrastructure technology that gets created, and then sits for years without catching on. In this case, it’s also a brilliantly simple change on the publishers side of just adding a trivial <cloud> tag to the RSS feed’s XML, and voila, the feed is "Cloud Enabled".

I’m surmising the reason this caught on was the word "Cloud", but what seems to have kickstarted it in the last 2 days was Wordpress announcing all their blogs were now RSS Cloud enabled. A really trivial change for them, but one that immediately made the blogs now realtime.

This was followed by CNN publishing a couple feeds with the new tag, and I predict a host of other people soon, since it’s a hot topic, and the change is so minor and simple. I even "cloud enabled" my blogs by simply adding a plugin to wordpress.

There’s also a very exciting fallout from this technology, that Dave Winer (his company invented the RSS Cloud concept) first hinted at, and now is making fairly clear. That’s actually what has me quite interested in it.

My twitter rant

I was a big fan of Twitter. Not because of what it did, it was a terribly simple concept, rather poorly implemented. Not that the poor implementation is surprising, it’s the cornerstone of today’s "new web app". Slap something together, get it out there, something working is far more important than scalability. There were other microblogging platforms like Jaiku, that had more functionality and were arguably as simple, but they didn’t catch on. If your friends weren’t there, the functionality didn’t really matter. If the twitter folk had waited until they got their concept fully functional and scalable, they never would have become "the big thing". identi.ca is functionally equivalent to twitter, but most of my friends aren’t there, so although I publish to it, it’s not my main tool.

But, like many big things, the big challenge is how to grow and scale once you’re "it". There, twitter dropped the ball. Not just the very long period of being unable to even stay up, but in not actually growing along with it’s users at the rate they changed. It tried, users created the "@reply" concept of conversations, twitter didn’t, the userbase needed a way to have conversations, twitter was too simplistic to provide that ability, so users created their own hack. 3rd party tools soon supported the concept, but it would be a very long time before Twitter itself recognized and supported it. The entire concept of conversations within the stream is what made it interesting to me, and kept my interest (and gained me many new real-world friends). Think about it, how quickly does twitter change and adapt? How often do they add a new feature or enhance functionality in a subtle but game-changing way?

Twitter also chose to simply go it’s own way, rather than adapt the system to how users wanted to use it. They changed the entire system by removing the ability to see replies of people you don’t also follow, claiming their architecture couldn’t support it. I think that’s a crock, and if it is the architecture, it needs to be fixed, rather than removing the functionality. I can get around the limitation by simply not using "@" as the first character of a tweet. In fact, the ".@reply" is the communities home grown work around. @TheKevinSmith just did a 24hour tweet-a-thon, he used "Via" as the first part of his replies to get around the sillyness. However, they were changing the system to meet how they saw the majority of people using it. Now twitter also has a retention problem, so a great question is, what number of retained users are using features in what way. I don’t believe the folks at twitter have the advanced statistical gathering functionality to derive that, nor do I think it’s of particular interest. They’re going to "go with the growth", and leave their traditional user-base behind. And that’s as it should be, companies grow and change, and twitter’s no exception.

Really my point here is, it’s become time for many of us to move on, we need to adopt other as-yet-to-be-created platforms, without loosing our twitter connections.

There are many other failings of twitter as the place to put all your eggs. There’s no history, to speak of. You can only get your last couple thousand tweets. When I was in Europe last year, I tweeted every place I went. Later in the year, when I went to grab all that information? Gone. I learned then that twitter’s fine for the last day’s worth of information, but it is temporary and fleeting. That’s fine, as long as you realize that’s what your getting, and don’t try to use it as a general purpose information storage tool, like I did. That’s not twitter’s fault, it was mine for trying to use twitter for something it was not.

There’s no way to look at or organize conversations. Oh, you say, there are #hashtags. Yes, another user-created way of hacking around Twitter’s lack of conversations. Remember those? Yeah, what made the whole thing interesting to me to begin with. If that concept isn’t supported as a core concept to the platform, it probably isn’t the right platform to use for it.

Speaking of celebrities, their descending on twitter was the sign of the end of it’s being useful to me, in the long run. @ev and @biz don’t use twitter like the primary initial user base did. They have always had a lot of followers, but followed very few, and didn’t engage in conversations. However, the influx of celebrities, and people with a million followers now means the majority of twitter users are Observers not Participants.

That is the crux of my argument. When a system that gained interest because it was participatory turns into a system where the majority observe the minority who generate anything of interest, it’s mostly of interest to those who like to promote, not interact. That’s something @ev and @biz can understand, it’s how they use twitter, it’s how twitter became a household word, and is now why millions of people join.

So, that’s what twitter will become. What of the rest of us who have a hundred or two hundred people we like to actually interact with? Well, we’ll have to wait for the next thing that makes that easy. That’s difficult to do, when a single company, and one who now has no interest or need to be interested in how you want to do things, gains a monopoly.

Back to the cloud

Which brings us back to the RSS Cloud. Using this, Dave has pointed out that real-time updates, of information, be it blogs, microblogs, news feeds, celebrity announcements, or what you’re having for breakfast, can exist without Twitter being in the middle. Twitter can/will still exist, it’ll be another feed into the cloud, but as soon as "twitter clients" start becoming "cloud clients", you won’t need to depend on twitter for all that information.

Following CNN on twitter? You can follow them here instead. A Cloud RSS, real time feed from CNN. So, Cloud Readers will be Cloud RSS aggregators, showing you multiple sources of interest in real time. The trick will be, as always, making the subscribing easier than RSS. If some clients can solve that problem, we will have a system in which twitter will simply be one form of real-time information. That’ll make Google happy, given their purchase of Jaiku and FriendFeed, they’re obviously interested in the microblogging/real time/searchable world.

This is very exciting. The total tip of the iceberg, I think. The beginning of a move away from twitter defining how microblogging is done, and how you need to participate to something new and different. That’s great for twitter, actually. They can become THE celebrity broadcast channel where a small number of famous people talk about their breakfast, and millions of fans now feel even closer to those celebrities without having to actually stalk them.

The rest of us will have options on where to have our online conversations we don’t mind sharing with everyone else, since sharing with everyone else was how we found other kindred spirits, and made new friends.

At least that’s my optimistic prediction, we’re heading into new and better ways to connect to people, by having open methods of sharing real-time information.

This last weekend, we had a group of people at our house in Mendocino. Altogether, there were 8 guests, we had a lot of fun, cooked and ate amazing food, enjoyed good wine, great conversation. A pretty typical party. The difference was, we’d only met 3 of these people in person before. Of the other 5, one came from Ohio, one New York, two from Maryland one from Texas They were all friends of my wife and/or I on twitter.

Friends we knew, @Ann_Steckel @CreativeSage and @MarantzGuy we’d met a while ago, and all of them had been over to the house before on several occasion. They were close to the area, and so were friends we knew we got along well with. Of the "new friends", one of the guests @PreppyDude, was the reason for the far-and-wide turnout. He’s wanted to visit California, and especially Mendocino county, for a long time, and he finally had the opportunity to come. We scheduled it to coincide with @geosteph and @fireton’s visit to California for the NASA 40th anniversary festivities surrounding the moon landing. @ChazFrench was about to start culinary school, and was able to arrange to come out and surprise folks at the last minute, in particular @PreppyDude, and @AnnOhio who popped up to complete the roster.

I’ve been to plenty of gatherings at neutral public locations, but having people to your home is a bit different. Being a bit paranoid, we’d gone to some measure to invite folks, but only send out directions to people who someone we trusted in the group knew. That worked out well, we were comfortable that we weren’t inviting anyone we’d rather not have know where we live!

We had @ChazFrench come into town on Wednesday, had a great time with him, while keeping is arrival a secret. Picked up @PreppyDude on Thursday, and headed up to Mendo. @geosteph and @fireton stopped by Thursday with super tasty Racer 5 beer, and we had a great Salmon dinner. Then @Ann_Steckel stopped by Friday bearing wine and snacks galore. We had a dinner on Friday night at one of our favorite local restaurants (the Albion River Inn) with the whole gang. People got to meet each other, and have a great local meal, and those interested got to do vertical scotch tasting’s as well!

It had been foggy Thursday and Friday, weather is very unpredictable on the coast, and it’s often foggy in the summer (as it gets hot inland, fog forms on the coast creating natural air conditioning. Tourists who go to the coast are often surprised by this). We hoped for, and got sun all day Saturday. The fog would start to come in, burn off, and it stayed lovely all day, so we were able to hang out on the deck together and enjoy the day.

People began arriving in the early afternoon, and the appetizers started flowing. Spiced snack mix, baked brie in puff pastry, pesto and tomato on pastry, cheese-stuffed roasted jalapenos,  goat cheese and raspberry on toast, spicy chicken wings, Caribbean marinated chicken with mango chutney, light cake with fruit. We only took pictures of some of it, since we were having such a good time eating it all!

Had a great time meeting everyone, and a fun time hosting them as well. Thanks everyone for such a nice weekend!

In March, I did a month long road trip (see the Road Trip category for a play-by-play), and I wanted to blog as I went, incorporating pictures and sharing photos on Flickr. My iPhone is a wonderful Internet device, but it doesn’t do everything.

I could bring my 15" MacBook Pro, but it’s large, heavy, and most of all, expensive. A wonderful machine, great keyboard, big bright screen, I’m using it to write this entry because it’s such a nice computer. But, being on a road trip means leaving your car a lot of places while you explore, you either want to take your most valuable possessions with you, or not worry much about them. Few small-town inexpensive hotels have safes, so you’ll leave gear in your room.

But, I’m also working on some self-employed freelance projects, playing with iPhone app writing, some server-side cloud computing ideas, and building kinetic wind-art, while taking a break from my traditional engineering management work, I don’t want to spend much money since I’m living off some savings for a while. What to do?

Netbooks seem to be all the buzz with the cool kids. They’re small, cheap, have good battery life. They also have crappy keyboards, slow processors, and limited space for memory and storage.

I really want a 12" Macbook replacement, having given mine to my wife as her primary computer, but Apple doesn’t have one of those right now. I end up finding a solution for that, but it’s the focus of part two of this blog entry.

A week before the trip, I read the reviews, figure out what’s in stock given my procrastination, and end up with an ASUS EeePC 900HA  (8.9" screen), and order an 2GB memory upgrade. It quickly arrives, and I start the process of getting it set up for a trip.

I know I’ll have sporadic Internet access, so I need some apps to work disconnected, but I also want to also keep personal information in "the cloud" just in case I loose the netbook on the road, I don’t want it to be full of personal information.

I’ve used Windows on occasion in the past, I can navigate around and use it just fine, but I’m a UNIX and Mac guy, primarily. That just means I’m not instantly conversant on the new top cool Windows apps. I spend an evening hunting around for software that’ll fit the bill.

• Web Browsing: Firefox
• Email: Thunderbird
• Blogging: ScribeFire
• Microblogging: Tweetdeck
• Password management: LastPass

I grab a couple WAP scanning programs to help me find working wireless connectivity on the road, throw iTunes on it so I can play the music I loaded on the second partition, and I’m set.

They keyboard on the ASUS is pretty good. Everything where it should be, I can nearly touch type (I’m 6′4" and have hands to match), screen is mediocre, but I expected that. XP runs fine, I’m not pushing it very hard.

My summary, I’m really happy with the ASUS. I loaded Windows 7 on a second partition which makes the experience even better, it runs for 3-4 hours on the (removable) battery, and as a portable photo/blogging/browsing/twittering machine, it worked great! My only real complaint living with windows is that the required virus blockers are nearly as annoying as clearing my daily email spam. I think Windows 7 with Microsoft’s new virus blocking software makes an even better ultraportable computer. If only I could get such an affordable and portable platform with OSX running on it, I’d be ecstatic. Humm…

Geotagging photos, putting the GPS position information where the photo was taken in the EXIF metadata, has been around for years. Until recently, it was a process reserved for geeks who found some way to grab and store GPS location (a laptop hooked to a GPS or a GPS data logger), then take that information, generally run it through a software program that would match time information from the GPS and from the photo, and put the GPS info into the metadata.

Recently, some cameras have come with the ability to attach a GPS, and even have built in GPS’s, but not very many people are buying a camera just to geotag photos. However, a very large number of people are using their phone’s camera to take and share pictures now. For instance, the iPhone.

What many may not know, all iPhone photos are geotagged. You can turn that off, but it’s not something you’d do ordinarily. To turn it off, you need to go into settings, and turn off "Location Services". That’ll turn off the GPS and the mobile triangulation, but otherwise, every photo you take will have the last known GPS coordinates stamped on it.

This came to light again today when one of my favorite gadget stores, thinkgeek, posted a Top Secret photo of their new office. Just a simple interior shot. But, they posted it directly to Flickr, and it had the location right there in the photo. Oops, so much for that Top Secret new location!

Why would you care? Well, you’re taking pictures at your house, or your friends house, and posting them to Flickr. Do you really want everyone knowing where you live, or where your friends live? Within 20 feet? For some people, it’s no big deal, but for others, well, some amount of privacy is a good thing.

I’d been thinking about this for a while. I take a lot of pictures at my house, but don’t generally want people knowing where I live, you just never know who’ll use that information, or just "come visit". I try hard to remember to turn off location services before taking pictures with my phone at home, but I’m likely to slip up eventually. That’s when another service comes in handy. When posting to Flickr or other public sites, I user services like TwitPic or Posterous, (and even the cool iPhone app ShakeItPhoto) where your EXIF is stripped before posting. Some might find that annoying, but it has the side benefit of removing the photos location. It might be nice to have that as an option eventually, but right now it’s a great way to go for me. I don’t send photos directly to Flickr from my iPhone, only through one of these services. Of course, Flickr just announced a new feature to tweet about uploaded photos. That’s great, but be careful out there if you want your location information private!

Now another bit of party etiquette I’ll need to have to work on with guests, if you want to take pictures with your phone, that’s fine but please turn off location services first.

Thinking about upgrading to 3.0 for the iPhone, but being concerned about app compatability, I went on a hunt to see what I could see about the apps I use, then decided to post it so I’d have a reference. Here’s what I’ve found so far from my top used apps (I’ll update as I find more, and if I upgrade, I’ll update based on personal testing). Feel free to contact me via twitter (@kaydub) if you have any specific info.

• Evernote: OK
• TweetDeck: OK
• Peggle: OK
• Yelp: OK
• ShakeItPhoto: OK, with minor issues
• Brightkite: Unknown
• Doodlejump: Unknown
• HP41CX+: Unknown
• Darkroom: broken

UPDATE: Only Darkroom failed to work on 3.0, the update was remarkably uneventful (in a good way), and everything just worked.

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