Review Of The Asus Eee PC

The new Asus Eee PC, which was released recently, is a tiny, and I mean tiny mobile computer. It sports a 7 inch screen, 4 GB internal flash storage (which can be expanded via an SD card), 512 MB of RAM, and no optical drive. The Eee PC also touts its own customized version of Xandros Linux, which is based off Debian. Ars Technica has a full review of this small critter from top to bottom.

Eeextremely Eenticing: a review of the Asus Eee PC

Leopard And The Missing Hard Drive

I decided to put Leopard on one of my Mac mini computers that I plan to eventually use as a web server, and I ran into the same problem as when I installed Leopard on my MacBook: the internal hard drive wouldn’t show up in the list of places to install Leopard to.

To solve that problem, I kept clicking in the white space because I had read somewhere that by clicking, you refresh the view. There was a lot of clicking, but the hard drive did eventually show up. So, when I went to install Leopard on my Mac mini, I decided to just let it sit there.It took around 20 minutes or so, but the hard drive did eventually show up in the list of places to install to, and I was able to continue the install with no problems.

So, if you’re having the same problem, don’t panic. Just wait and the hard drive will show up. What’s happening is that Leopard is scanning the hard drive to make sure that it can be used. In some ways this is frustrating because you don’t know exactly what’s going on, but on the other hand it’s a good thing because you don’t want to install Leopard and then have problems after you boot into your new system.

So far I’ve been impressed with Leopard. It’s been smoothing sailing so far.

Blog Update: New Theme

I was getting kind of tired of the old red and black theme I chose for the blog. The layout was nice, and it was exactly what I was looking for layout wise, but the color just didn’t do it for me. I prefer to have a white background where the text is. I think just makes the entries easier to read. I’m not 100% sure I like this theme, but to me it is an improvement. One thing I lost was the page links at the top. I wanted to keep them at the top, but that’s not how this theme is setup. This is a pre-made theme from WordPress. 

 

Unfortunately, I can’t go in and edit this theme… well, I if I can I haven’t figured out how to yet. I also don’t think I can upload a theme of my choosing. I’ve found a few that I like, but the free WordPress blogs are somewhat limited when it comes to customizing the blog theme. So, I’ll go with this theme for a while and see how it goes.   

 

Edit:

I changed the theme once again. I think I like this one a lot more. The grey and white one was just too plan, and the text seemed to be a little too small to me. We’ll see how this one does. It’s blue…lots of blue… 

Time Machine

Time Machine is one of several new features that was introduced with Mac OS X Leopard. Time Machine has been talked about a lot as it’s a huge feature to be built into an operating system. Time Machine is a backup program, but it’s not just any old backup program. Time Machine does its job extremely well, and the program itself is very simple to understand, and can literally be setup and working in under a minute. 

Time Machine does require and external ha drive to backup to, but that’s it. When I got Leopard installed, Time Machine was sitting in the dock waiting. When I plugged in my external Maxtor hard drive, it mounted and I was asked if I wanted to use this hard drive with TIme Machine. I hit yes, and everything was setup. No further configuration was needed. 

Time Machine appears to just do a straight copy to the external hard drive, then just update it with what has changed. The first backup took about 10 minutes because 9 GB worth of data was being moved over to the external hard drive. The next backup was much smaller because I hadn’t added any huge files to my computer.

 

Time Machine does hourly backups for the past 24 hours, a daily backup for the past month, and weekly backups until the external hard drive is full. 

I mainly use a laptop, so I was a bit concerned about how TIme Machine would act once the external hard drive was removed. Much to my surprise, nothing happened. TIme Machine saw that the hard drive had been removed, and just stopped doing the backups. Once I attached the hard drive again, TIme Machine switched back on and continued to backup my data.

One thing I have noticed is that TIme Machine will not backup while the computer is running on battery, even if the hard drive is currently attached to the computer. I’m guessing this is to preserve as much power as possible so that the computer can stay on longer while using the battery.

When you wish to retrieve a file, all you have to do is click the TIme Machine icon in the dock. You’ll then be taken to a screen with a Finder window and a time line. You can then look for your missing file. Once you’ve found it, you simply click Restore to restore the file back to your machine. That’s it. Quick and easy data recovery with just one click.  You can also access the files straight from the hard drive if you wish. 

I am completely impressed with TIme Machine. I will still do a backup to DVD every now and then to just be on the safe side, but with this new OS X feature I don’t have to worry about backups nearly as much as I use to.