After waiting a really long time my new Asus Transformer finally arrived on Monday. At the bottom are some unboxing pictures.

There are many nice things to say about the tablet. It is light weight, the screen has really nice colors, the resolution is good enough to read comics and books. It is however a (very) glossy screen so it is only really useful inside.

The Android 3.1 interface seems very responsive and the few apps that take advantage of the screen size are a joy to work with – and regular apps work just fine for the most part.

A very bad thing in my mind is that it uses a proprietary connector (presumably to make it easier to dock with the keyboard (which I have not bought)). On top of that it does not present itself as a USB mass storage device but as an MTP device – thus making it difficult to transfer files. The easiest solution so far has been to install an FTP server on the tablet..

All that being said I am so far really pleased with my purchase – but I may still be a bit high from simply getting a new gadget. Time will tell if it turns out to be as useful and entertaining as I imagine.

The on-screen keyboard is quite useful (I have used it to write this blog post) however I have so far been unable to find a way to write for a longer period of time without hurting my wrists as there is no natural place to rest them without pushing all kinds of random things on the touch screen – so in that respect the keyboard dock might make sense (but then again so would a small laptop if the plan was to do a lot of writing).

In conclusion I am a happy customer and if you are looking to buy a new gadget make it an Asus Transformer.

One of the kids’ bouncing ball toys deflated and naturally I had to cut it open – it had blinky lights inside!. And how do you go about making a light blink whenever the ball smashes into something? Really, really cheap? You make a simple switch using a spring. When it hits the ground the spring bends thus closing the circuit. Pure genius in all its simplicity.

He stood like that for several minutes completely oblivious to what was going on around him.

CPU Fan by eddie.welker. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic.

For quite a while I have been thinking about a new fileserver and wondering why a basic NAS server had to be so expensive and still only have room for one or two disks. So here is my attempt a putting together a nice, quiet machine that could act as a fileserver and possibly also webserver and TV recording server (with a hardware accelerated TV tuner of course).

Intel Desktop Board D510MO: 575,00 DKK

2GB RAM: 369,00 DKK

AeroCool ExtremEngine 3T: 543,00 DKK

LC Power Super Silent LC6420 V1.3: 290,00 DKK

This all adds up to a price of 1777,00 DKK. This is about twice as much as the cheapest NAS solutions but they are limited to 2 disks while this solution has a lot more room for expansion.

Some of these parts may be found cheaper and some of them may not even be compatible with each other. But if I were to build a new machine something like this would be my starting point.

Then throw in 3 or 4 Samsung SpinPoint 1.5TB disks (at 574,00 DKK per disk) and you have a neat little server.

One thing I haven’t been able to find is a nice and simple way to boot from an SD card. I would love to be able to keep the actual hard disks as pure data disk – and being able to perform system upgrades (and rollbacks) by simply swapping in a new SD card would be really sweet.

The daughter is turning six on Thursday so I think it is about time she got her own computer. These days it makes a lot of sense to buy a netbook for the kids since they are relatively cheap, lightweight, and small.

So she will be getting a Compaq Mini 700. A pretty standard 10″ netbook with 80GB harddrive and 1GB RAM.

I have it all up and running Fedora 11 now – I just need to transfer her settings and bookmarks from the wife’s computer. I decided to start her out using Gnome with a one-panel layout on the left hand side of the screen. She is used to it being a the bottom, but on a screen this small you can afford to waste pixels vertically. When Fedora 12 goes gold I will probably play around with Moblin since it is better suited for netbooks.

I faced two problems in getting things to work. First of all the wired network adapter didn’t work. The solution is to specify acpi_os_name=Linux on the kernel line in /etc/grub.conf. Next up was getting the wireless to work. It is a Broadcom chipset, and requires some proprietary bits to work. So enable the rpmfusion repository and install the broadcom-wl and kernel-devel packages. On the next reboot a new kernel module will be compiled and the wireless should work.

Now I just need to develop a small, easy to use media browser so she can watch all her movies that are stored on the media server.

TV/Sound sign by John Kannenberg. Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic.

The title of the post says it all, I guess. An upgrade of the kernel and pulseaudio packages means that I have working sound over HDMI.

Yay!

Now I “just” need to write a file browse plugin for Moovida, and I should be ready to use the new media center.

I have had the Dell Studio Hybrid up and running for some time now, but I haven’t put it into actual use because I am having trouble with the sound. Everything works just fine over S/PDIF, but that requires me to have my surround system turned on. And getting sound over HDMI to work has so far been a dead-end. Combine that with the fact that my TV refuses to use the sound from the mini-jack output (since it can probably sense that sound should be coming over HDMI) and it all adds up to me not having a new media center yet… Bummer. I even tried using the DVI output with a converter instead of HDMI directly, but that didn’t help. So it seems that for the foreseeable future I will have to use the surround system.

I have also gotten the new remote up and running, but hardware-wise I am not entirely please. The buttons that are mainly used with a media center are up/down/left/right, and on the iMON Pad remote they are – well a pad. And that just makes for a rather weird feel and responsiveness. It does have the ability to function as a mouse, though, but I don’t see myself using that.

Since everything is running in parallel with the existing setup I have had to throw in a switch to get network connectivity, and there is also an S/PDIF converter and the Dell’s power brick in there alongside the Wii – it is getting a bit cramped.

One thing I have found out is that when you have an existing solution that works (even if it does make a lot of noise) it is a slow process to replace it with something new. The main thing that is missing right now is getting all my music, movies, and pictures exposed remotely – and the symlink hell I have going on with the current media center (which will become tv recorder and file server) isn’t helping.

And I have to make a decision about whether to use Freevo (as I currently do) or use Moovida (and develop some code for a few missing features myself).

Why is it that cables (hdmi and the like) are so ridiculously expensive when buying them from a brick-and-mortar store? The price for a 1.8m hdmi cable was 450DKR (~$85), and for a bit less than that (425DKR) I was able to get the following (shipping included):

1 x Standard 230V angled power cord – 3m
1 x 1.3 gold plated angled HDMI cable – 3m
1 x Standard Coaxial digital audio cable – 1.5m
1 x Standard Optical toslink Digital cable – 0.5m
1 x Optical Digital to Coaxial digital converter

I know the online store doesn’t have to pay the rent for an actual store, but there shouldn’t be that big a difference…

My new Dell Studio Hybrid arrived on the same day I had to leave for the Ticer Summer School in Tilburg, so it wasn’t until Sunday I had the chance to unbox it. At the moment it hasn’t been powered on since I need to get an HDMI cable first.

But the initial impression is that the Studio Hybrid is a sweet little box. Unfortunately I don’t have room on the shelf for it to stand upright (like the Wii it will be placed next to) – but it looks quite nice anyway.

On Tuesday I (once again) searched the web for a new machine to use as my media center. When I got to dell.dk I saw they had a sale on the Dell Studio Hybrid ending on July 22. The savings were about 2800DKR.

So I spent a few hours Wednesday looking into whether or not the Studio Hybrid would make a nice media center – and my conclusion was that it should be quite nice, especially at the discounted price. The other machines I looked into were the ASUS Eee Box B206, Acer Aspire REVO R3600, Dell Studio Slim, and the Compaq CQ2100SC.

The Dell Studio Hybrid only comes with an Intel GMA 3100 graphics card, which pretty much excludes it from playing 1080p content, but on the other hand it does have a 2GHz dual core processor. Anyway, that wasn’t a priority to me, I mainly wanted a quiet system that would be well supported under Linux. There does appear to be some problems getting sound through the HDMI port, but it does have other options, so I can work around it.

To make a long story short, I placed an order yesterday, and now all I have to do is wait… And of course take the time to get the necessary cables, adapters, etc., and install something sensible on the machine (Fedora, most likely). And move the old media center to the office, as that machine will still be tasked with actually recording stuff.

Update: I went to the Dell site to get a link to put in this blog post, and it turns out they have extended the sale until July 29… Go figure.