Category: Gadgets

Acer Aspire One – Initial Impressions

Well, despite my successful installation of a DIY solid state drive – the old laptop continued to develop new problems (the keyboard started to get sticky keys).  I did agonize over buying something new (or maybe a used ThinkPad) and finally settled on one of the new netbooks – the Acer Aspire One.

Now while it is primarily going to be Jenn’s machine, I will get to tinker with it.  Tonight I spent some time getting it on our network, downloading updates and then installing VNC so she can remote to her Mac.

Out of the gate the Aspire One is way more machine that the old clunky laptop we had.  Its fast, small, 11G wireless and has working sound.  It boots to the UI in about 20 seconds, but you’ve got to wait another 10 seconds or so for the wifi to connect.

One annoyance was the fact that the initial setup process doesn’t allow for passwords with punctuation in them – I fixed that by getting into the terminal and changing the initial password.

The process to do that is as follows: Go to Files > My Documents to open the File Manager. Then go to File > Terminal.  Its actually pretty trivial, but this is the gateway into adding more software.

Once in the terminal you can modify the XCFE settings by running the xfce-setting-show command: Click on Desktop to get to the Desktop Preferences and choose the Behavior tab. Now mark under Menus the Show desktop menu on right click option and close the window.  Once you’re done here, right click one the desktop background will bring up the Desktop Menu.

The Aspire One users call the above the “Advanced Mode” hack.  The primary reason to do it is to enable the Add/Remove Programs function (the Package Manager).

Now before you get going, you will want to fix the root password.  Thankfully this is trivial: Simply launch a terminal and sudo bash to get a root shell, then use passwd to fix things.

At this point you can run the package manager from the Desktop Menu, provide the root password and away you go.  As I mentioned, I chose to install a VNC viewer.  This worked fine, but the normal home screen menus did not pick up the new application (the Desktop Menu did).

To modify the home screen menus you need to edit /home/user/.config/xfce4/desktop/group-app.xml and add a line something like: 
<app sequence=”10″>/usr/share/applications/vncviewer.desktop</app>
You will need to reboot to get it to show up.

So far, its a very cool gadget for a fairly reasonable price.  Once we’ve had it a while, I’ll write up a proper review.

Slimdevices

A couple of years ago I broke down and bought a Squeezebox. This really gave me the incentive to digitize my entire audio library (I settled on 192kbps fixed MP3 via the LAME encoder).  The thing that makes the Squeezebox so cool, is the server software – which works with other networked MP3 players.  I’m still using the 6.5 version of Slimserver, but will eventually move up to the 7.0 Squeezecenter.

You still need to be a little bit handy in terms of setting up a server, but the slimdevices story really makes it pretty easy to get to where you need to be for a nice integrated story.  The UI on the device itself is relatively people friendly (ie: you don’t have to be a geek to use it), and the web UI that gives you the option to control your player from your PC totally rocks.  The setup is way easier than building a PVR, such as a MythTV box – which I have also done.  The server software is free, and you can try it out using some player simulation software.

The server software supports plugins.  This allows a wide range of customization of the base server software.  I like to have the weather displayed, and had selected the WeatherTime plugin.  This required a free account registration, and the careful avoidance of signing up for spam at weather.com.  Until recently this was working just fine, then I got an email indicating I was not using their service “correctly” and would have my feed terminated.  I quickly realized how much I missed having the weather available.

It turns out that the WeatherTime folk have updated the plugin to pull from the Weather Underground, so I’m back in business.  Simply grabbing the updated plugin (v1.9.5), restarting my slimserver, and configuring the city code (use the airport code) – was all I needed to do.

The squeezebox wasn’t my first networked player, the RIO was my first device.  Certainly something ahead of its time.  It was only recently that I was able to revive my old RIO and put it to use again, the slimrio project allows you to run an alternate firmware on the RIO and connect to the slimserver.  You will need to configure the slimserver to automatically convert the audio to lower bitrate MP3s, this is actually really easy to do – another testament to how cool the slimserver software is.

If I had a better story for syncing data to my iPod, I’d consider storing my entire audio collection in FLAC.  In the near term, I’ll continue to suffer using iTunes.  Hopefully one day soon, the idea that we will see media convergence (and have easily available software to glue it all together reasonably) will be realized.