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I picked up the ASUS EeePC 901 Windows 12G edition in black from Ascent about a week ago and I don’t think I’ve gone anywhere without it since.

I’m getting between 5 - 7 hours battery life pretty consistently and it runs cool to the touch. I’m unconvinced about the chrome touches, but there’s no doubt the glossy black finish and rounded edges make the Eee 901 look like a far more expensive gadget than it is. The touchpad is nicely improved over both the 701 and the 900, and the slight extra weight from it’s more solid construction and larger battery balances the machine far better on the lap. The keyboard is exactly the same, but I’ve gotten fairly used to it by now.

It’s been drawing comments everywhere I go. Everyone seems to want to hold it, and I’ve had many conversations over the last few days explaining where to get them and how much they cost.

I’m running Windows XP on it until Ubuntu Intrepid is released, which is slated to have 100% EeePC compatibility. I’m looking forward to it. Now for the mods! I’ve ordered a 30GB 1.8″ ZIF hard disk from trademe, and I intend to swap out the second SSD for it, and see what that does to heat/performance/battery life.

I’ll be blogging the process for anyone else who wants to do a similar mod - all I’m waiting on is ZIF cables to arrive from dealextreme =)

I spent a very enjoyable two hours today at the Ingram Micro Showcase. I had a pretty good look at the ASUS Eee 1000, the HP Mini Note and what was for me the star of the show, the Acer Aspire One. Sadly the only camera I had on me was my cell phone so the pictures are woeful.

The ASUS Eee stand had only Windows XP models on display, at which more than one attendee expressed disappointment. The 901 was conspicuously absent, but I was able to get a close look at the 1000. I’m not sure how I feel about the new styling choices – the original EeePC did look particularly cheap, but the glossy finish on the 1000 is a dreadful fingerprint magnet and the chrome highlights look a little overdone. The keyboard is very reasonable size, and would make an appreciable difference to those who found the original Eee too cramped. Unfortunately it still feels dreadfully thin and plasticky to type on. All around though I think ASUS have gently evolved throughout the Eee series to a very solid and capable machine.

The HP Mini Note was definitely the most stylish of the trio. With brushed metal casing and a minimum of frills, it conveys professionalism and class. It’s a real shame they made it completely unusable by loading up a sluggish VIA C7 with Windows Vista. I was surprised though that the performance wasn’t worse – it does seem like it would be usable for light productivity work as long as you were patient with it. While I only had about 15 minutes to fiddle with the device I also noticed that it a lot warmer to the touch than either of the Atom based models. Again, HP had no Linux based models on display which was a disappointment – I’d been hoping to get a glimpse at their SUSE based model. It was also lurking in a dark corner, and even photoshop can’t save that picture. Note to self: You *always* want to bring a real camera.

Then, across the crowded hall, I saw the Acer Aspire One.

It’s very slightly wider than my ASUS Eee900, to accommodate a larger and more usable keyboard. This gives it some quite chunky screen bezels, but the overall weight and size of the unit is still among the smallest of the netbooks. I think the Acer staff were a little bemused when I popped up a terminal and started digging around under the hood.

I was very impressed with the Linpus Lite distribution it was running. The interface draws heavy similarities with the ASUS Easy Launcher found on the EeePC Linux models, but I believe looks even smoother and more appealing. It looks just as hackable, but with more modern underlying libraries which hopefully means it’s easier to add software from a Fedora repository without risking incompatibilities with Acer’s customizations.

I’m trying to arrange reviewing this unit, and I look forward to seeing exactly how hackable it is while still maintaining the Acer drivers and software. An ASUS product manager spotted me shortly afterwards lurking in a corner taking advantage of the free wifi. He was very excited I was using an Eee900, and we discussed the decal I used to decorate it and where to get them from. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I was using it to email my editor about the Acer Aspire One.

I also scored a jar of jellybeans for knowing Lenovo’s product line so well. Yay me!

The netbook is fast finding a comfortable niche as a second or even third computer. The majority of consumers seem to be buying them to supplement the systems they already own. I certainly saw the Eee that way when I first got my hands on one to review for Linux Journal. I already owned a 15” laptop for ‘serious’ use, and saw the Eee as a secondary internet device – much like a PDA or smartphone, but actually usable for light productivity and content creation.

The circumstances described by Moore’s law have ensured that our computers today are vastly powerful, with more memory on my graphics card than was in my entire computer only 2 years ago. Outside of gaming though, how much have my needs really changed? As an experiment, I decided to use my Asus EeePC for a day at work. I’m a Linux specialist supporting a large number of Linux servers as part of an exceptional team of Linux administrators. Most of my day is spent head first in a terminal window and processing requests that come in through email.

I used an Asus EeePC 701, with a 2GB SD card for extra storage and 2GB of memory running Windows XP Professional SP3. Yes, that’s the 701. With the 800×480 screen.

I’m afraid I was mercilessly mocked by everyone who saw me with my ‘toy’ computer. We’re all issued a certain brand of big, black, serious business laptop at my office and while my fondness for gadgets is already well known, it seems the EeePC was considered just too much of a toy for real work. It was absurdly dwarfed by the 20” monitor I had it plugged into while sitting at my desk.

What workedl:

Processing email was relatively painless, although I had to disable the preview pane on the 480px high screen and open emails in a new window to read them. My job doesn’t require much in the way of content creation, but I get sent a steady stream of relatively complicated Microsoft Office documents to read. The EeePC handled 30 page design documents heavy with images and tables with aplomb.

Accessing intranet sites was a little frustrating. If you want to find some of the least usable web design ever to be rendered, the internal tools used by a large corporate are pretty fair game. I spent a lot of time scrolling around, and sometimes discovering certain frame layouts just completely broke on such a low resolution.

When it came to what I think of as Real Work, things got a lot better. I don’t think the system requirements for PuTTY have changed in the last decade or so, and even a 7” screen can display an adequately sized console. I found I was maximizing console windows and alt-tabbing between them, but that this wasn’t anywhere near as frustrating as it looks when I watch the people in marketing use their computers in the same way.

I spent a few hours in the afternoon sitting at a customer site, and here I really enjoyed the Eee. I found myself perched on the corner of someone else’s desk, working through configuring systems with them. One terminal window open with many panes in gnu screen (<3) and I barely noticed the screen resolution.

What didn’t:

Using Citrix/rdesktop was about the most painful experience of my life so far, and that includes breaking bones and military service. By the time I’d nested multiple Citrix sessions (don’t ask) I was left with a postage stamp of window at around 600×300 pixels. Ouch.

The battery life really wasn’t great. I had to go hunting for a power supply only 2 hours into work on site. My work laptop might be a brick, but it’s a brick that can be fitted with dual batteries. I also found that while the screen resolution wasn’t unworkable, it was just that little slower and more frustrating and the multitasking penalty was a lot higher when I had to sort through windows trying to find where I’d left off.

At the end of the day though, I’d managed 8 hours of solid work without once needing to fetch my Regulation Issue Brick. I did however cheat. There are two applications I use in my daily grind that require Microsoft Windows – on the brick I run Ubuntu Hardy, and have a Windows VMWare session running when I need to use those applications. VMWare just wasn’t going to be an option on the Eee, so I installed Windows on it natively. Had I tried to replicate my actual working environment instead of the nearest equivalent the Eee was capable of, it all would have gone pear shaped a lot faster.

I’m still impressed at exactly how close the Eee comes to replacing a full-sized laptop for tasks that don’t require a lot of storage. With cloud computing as implemented by Google becoming the norm, the EeePC becomes far less of a toy and more a serious productivity tool.

I enjoy reading Stepcase Lifehack, although I tend to skim it lightly. Many of the posts can seem a little trite and obvious at times.

Some are so obvious I wonder how, when I feel them shock me like electricity and trigger my mind’s resonant frequency, I never thought to apply this concept to my life before. Others on the surface can seem fairly ordinary, but have me thinking along tangents to the original premise for days.

8 Good Reasons to be a Lousy Musician

A lifehack I’ve always felt the strength of but had forgotten a little recently is developing creative space. As children many of us had the ability to get so lost in our art that we would reach an almost zen state. I found it all too easy to pick up a pen or pencil and be so absorbed in my task that I’d come to myself with a shock hours later realizing it was too dark to see my page and that I’d had no sense of the time passing at all.

I never lost the ability to reach that state of concentration, but as an adult a trap I often fall into is to focus on the performance rather than the art. There’s a certain pleasure to be taken in being good at something, but there are times it’s more enriching to seek the creative space rather than a polished end result. The art itself is just the means to reaching this place. When I focus too hard on the quality of the execution, this transforms the creative pursuit into just another activity to make time for. When I let go of caring whether it’s good and instead focus on whether it’s affirming, I take an almost spiritual calm and centeredness away with me when I come back to the mundane world.

As a writer and photographer, it’s a given that I make room for creative space in my life. Even if I hadn’t found avenues of employment for some of my more artistic passions, I’d still consider it a priority to set aside time to pursue them. Music, drawing, and writing give me ways to stop the world for a few hours every now and then and find some kind of serenity.

If serenity sounds appealing, I can wholeheartedly recommend giving creative space a chance. It’s easy to be so busy that you forget to make time to centre yourself. Some of us have almost forgotten how to.For those who have, reaching that state might take a lot more than just sitting down with a sketchbook. Even if you don’t find yourself reaching a zen-like calm every time you pick up your paintbrush, the abiding joy taken in creation is almost a defining characteristic of humanity and I at least can’t imagine ever feeling my life has too much of it.