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A kernel update hosed wireless on my eeeXubuntu install. I'm going to have to take this very carefully. After finals, it looks like I'm going to have to build me up my own *buntu, like I did with the Thinkpad 570e.

So I've installed eeeXubuntu on my eee 701. EeeXubuntu, as far as I can tell, is Xubuntu with a few eee pc tweaks---Tuxradar recently named it the best distribution to run on an eee 701.

Good luck getting a hold of it though---it seems to have been abandoned in favor of eeebuntu. But as much as eeebuntu appealed to me, recent versions ship with the awful ath5k wireless driver--which, I'm sure, will be great one day, but currently, is shit: latency measured in whole seconds and 75% packet loss make it unusable for all practical purposes. Fortunately, I was able to find a more recent build, based on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex, here.

True to form, this is essentially Ubuntu with a few extra shell scripts to configure all the ASUS-specific gubbins. There's a catch, though: the build I've linked to labels the shell scripts in Japanese, so it was a bit of a leap in the dark to get that configured right. Fortunately the rest of the OS was properly localized in English.

Once up and running, I was relieved to see that it uses the older madwifi driver, and Wi-Fi was running trouble-free. That's more like it.

If this is all fine and dandy, I think I'm going to run this until Ubuntu Intrepid gets EOL'd in April 2010--that'll be enough time for the ath5k driver to improve to where I can take a second look at it. And if that's true, then the next install will be probably use Fluxbox and be based off a usable eeebuntu core.

I've been looking into LaTeX for legal documents. I already use LaTeX for personal things, such as generating study outlines:


My 1L CivPro outline.

The best part about LaTeX is that it makes the structure of the documents trivially easy. I can forget about formatting, and concentrate on the content.

Of course, this is hardly WYSIWYG:



The green-and-black terminal window is what I see when I create a document in LaTeX--the finished product is shown up top.

Of course, TeX is generally a science, mathematics, & engineering thing; humanities types don't use it very much, and lawyers don't use it at all.

One problem is that we're already too wedded to our working methods. We rely on word processors to generate our documents--even though we could benefit from the more predictable behavior of a typesetting language like TeX.

Our citation style doesn't help, either. The Bluebook is needlessly complex, and its conventions are so idiosyncratic as to make it nearly impossible to use existing bibliographic styles and software to manage citations in a complex document.

That means that we're left fly-specking documents for stray commas or spaces. Not only is it annoying, I figure it's a waste of time.

Unfortunately, all the work implementing legal citation styles for TeX seems to be overseas. Jurabib was developed for German legal style--close, but not quite. biblatex doesn't quite do law. The most promising implementation, Camel, seems to have ceased development, and its lead developerhas dropped off the face of the Earth.

What I wish I had was the ability to bang out legal documents in TeX, and then specify my citations on the fly, in a way that's familiar to me as lawyer--something like LyX, with Camel support.

Sigh.

I suppose I shall have to make it myself, if I'm to have it--but I wish I had time to learn how to do that.

How many Ubuntu flavors can I run at once?

This is Virtualbox-OSE running on top of Ubuntu Intrepid x64. Guest OSes are OpenGEU (a flavor of Ubuntu that uses the Enlightenment DR 17 window manager), eeebuntu (a flavor of ubuntu aimed at ASUS eee pc's), and Ubuntu Hardy Heron i386.

Next up: I need to find a legitimate Windows XP license to run XP in virtualbox's "seamless" mode.

Performance isn't too bad, actually.

I've been spending the last part of my vacation time sorting out various family IT projects. My dad's old laptop, a Sharp Actius MM20. The MM20 (and its predecessor, the MM10) was a couple of years ahead of the curve on what has since become the netbook trend-. It's thinner than a MacBook Air, has very humble hardware, and is meant to be a portable supplement to a more powerful "base" computer.

The Actius had one other thing in common with many of today's netbooks: it ran Linux pretty well-- well enough to be sold by Emperor Linux as their most portable system (the Meteor).

I had installed Ubuntu 6.10 "Edgy Eft" on it, and Dad had been using it as a Linux machine for a while now, dual-booting with Windows XP. He has a new XP laptop (amusingly, its' an ASUS eeePC 1000, running Windows XP). Since now he has a whole new box running Windows, he asked me to wipe his old PC to run Ubuntu exclusively.

I decided to take the opportunity to install a more up-to-date version of Ubuntu. An install of Ubuntu 8.10 "Intrepid Ibex" failed--well, the textmode installer ran, but then on first boot, the machine just went black and did nothing--I couldn't even bring up a text console.

I burned through a bunch of CDs before it occurred to me to try to boot into a recovery mode session and see what was up. Turns out that the Ubuntu installer wasn't configuring Xorg properly.

Fortunately, it seems that novalugger David Cafaro has already solved this problem. I edited /etc/X11/xorg.conf along his lines. The relevant stanzas go like this:


Section “Device”

Identifier “Videocard0″
Driver “radeon”
Option “AGPMode” “4″
Option “XAANoOffscreenPixmaps” “true”
Option “RenderAccel” “true”

EndSection

Section “Screen”

Identifier “Screen0″
Device “Videocard0″
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection “Display”

Viewport 0 0
Depth 24

EndSubSection

EndSection


Fix that, reboot, and X should start.

I ended up installing Ubuntu 8.04.1 LTS "Hardy Heron" instead--figuring that Dad should probably get a stabler Long-term support release rather than having to update every six months like I do.

N.B.: Regular readers will know/remember that I'm an Ubuntu user. In the spirit of Linux install reports, I'm offering this post, trying to compare and contrast my experiences installing Ubuntu and Windows Vista Home Basic.

I am pleased to report that "Project Wintendo"--my Windows Vista Home Basic installation--was a success. A few impresions, scribbled down during the installation process:

This was my first "real" Windows installation. All my previous Windows machines were OEM preinstalled, and I never bothered wiping & reinstalling.

The first challenge was getting the goddamn box open. Microsoft's new "packaging system"--presumably designed to thwart thieves--was aggravating to open. Sure, not as vicious as those hated clamshell packages, but still plenty annyoing.

It occurred to me as I was opening the package that the package was the physical manifestation of the type of DRM: designed to protect the producer, and succeding mostly in annoying the consumer.

Once I'd managed to get the box open, I popped the installation DVD into sputnik and booted it up. I was pleasantly surprised to be greeted with an Ubuntu-type installation splash screen. The installer didn't pick the right video mode for my graphics card right off the bat, though. The result was pretty enough, but the bad graphics mode was a bit of a letdown, given that most modern Linux distributions manage to handle this sort of thing pretty well. White text, for isntance, looked terrible--I was reminded of an Apple ][ from the '80s.

I bothered to read the whole EULA through once. For someone accustomed to free software, it's quite an eye-opener. I'm not a big fan of software with remote killswitches--nor of a document that permits Microsoft, theoretically, to go rooting about my system.

Also, I was dismayed to discover that Windows still needs to reboot a few times before the installation is complete. When I install Ubuntu, I can carry on using the LiveCD as the system is installed in the background. Definite advantage to Ubuntu there.

Post-install housekeeping included an installation of a current version of Kaspersky's security suite--a step I nearly forgot. Luckly, my Dad's Kaspersky license was good for three concurrent installations, so he let me use an unused installation.

All told, however, the installation process was pretty drama-free. No BSODs, or RSODs, no major breakage. I'm guessing most Vista nightmare stories come from people attempting to upgrade. Here, I was installing onto a fresh hard drive-- so there really wasn't anything to go wrong.

There are a few downers, of course. My logitech mouse wasn't fully supported, so I don't get multibutton support or high mouse resolutions. Fooey. (For the record, Ubuntu gives me proper multibutton support on the live CD, even if high mouse resolutions seem to be broken in the current AMD64 kernel)

As far as performance? I'm not going to lie--I'm pleasantly surprised. I'd read that Vista was a complete resource pig. Officially, Vista Home Basic's system requirements are pretty reasonable: 1 GHz processor, 512 MB RAM, 20GB hard drive, a DirectX 9-compatible graphics card. sputnik Has an AMD Athlon 3800+ (the "Manchester" core) running at 2 GHz, 2GB RAM, gobs of hard drive space, and an appropriate video card.

The installed system actually runs pretty snappily. Granted, the only thing I've really been using it for has been playing Civ4, and it's been perfectly adequate for that purpose.

Home Basic doesn't come with any of spiffy Aero user interface effects. My guess is that the real resource pig in most "premium" Vista installs is really Aero. Home Basic--without Aero--actually runs just fine. Of course, it's not as pretty as the desktop effects that I can get on Linux or OSX--but I dont' really care about how my interface looks if I see so little of it anyway. (To tell you the truth, I'd really be happy if Microsoft let me use fluxbox as a user interface, but that's not gonna happen.)

Final verdict? I installed Vista and lived. In fact, I'm pretty pleased with the result. But I'm using that partition only as a glorified games console--so I don't much care if that OS install goes kaput, since I've got all the important stuff elsewhere.

If you're running Windows XP now, and can't or won't migrate to a more sane operating system, I'd recommend that you go to XP Service Pack 3 and not bother with a full Vista upgrade.

If you're running Linux or OSX and have no particular need of Windows-specific software, there's really no compelling reason to switch.

If you built your own computer like I did, and you would like to put a Microsoft OS on it, then you'd best be served getting a retail box of Vista Home Basic. The "System Builder" packages are cheaper, but the license is bound to only one set of hardware--so if you build a new machine and wipe the old one, you don't get to use the media you bought to install the OS onto the new hardware. Given the cost of the OS, going with the OEM "system builder" pack is a false economy.

I'm waiting for rsync to cook through another backup of my /home directory, then I'll power down and install Vista Home Basic.

Not gonna lie: I am filled with a great sense of foreboding.

I never thought I would be writing this.

I think I'm going to install Windows Vista on sputnik, my current box.

I have been a pretty satisified Ubuntu user for four years now. I have gotten to the point where I don't feel particularly tied to Windows as an operating system--at least not for work.

So why go to Vista?

Simple. I love playing Civ 4. Some people have been able to get it running on Linux. But there are always all kinds of hiccups running in WINE. Fortunately, sputnik's hardware is good enough to run Civ4 quite capably.

Why Vista Home Basic? I don't really care for the visual chrome that is Microsoft's Aero desktop. Linux desktop chrome is nicer and more useful. Nor do I have any real need for the incremental-backup features that the "premium" flavors of Vista offer me--for a price. Since the Windows partition will be used mostly as a light-duty gaming rig, I don't anticipate any real problems in that department.

Does this mean I'm going to switch back to MSFT? Not really. I'm treating this like a gaming-console purchase.

OpenOffice 2.3 takes somewhere near forever to load for me. A bit of google-fu uncovered this guide to speeding up OpenOffice load times in Ubuntu.

I can say that this certainly did it. OpenOffice Writer starts almost instantly now. YAY.

OpenOffice.org is not ready for the desktop. There, I said it. Flame me, O my Free Software-using comrades.

I've managed a semester and a half so far without having to resort to proprietary software. I use Firefox for all my browsing--even for WestLaw and LexisNexis. I use vim and LaTeX to prepare my outlines. My ASUS eee PC runs Xandros. My home computer runs Ubuntu.

And, yes, up until now, I have used OpenOffice.org for my word-processing needs. OpenOffice Writer is a decent word processor--at least as good for most users as Microsoft Word or WordPerfect. OpenOffice Writer has served me well thus far in Legal Writing class: several drafts each of two memoranda, pleadings, and a motion. But the upcoming appellate brief spells the end of its usefulness.

Appellate briefs need Tables of Authorities. For the non-lawyers out there, a ToA is a kind of sectioned bibliography for lawyers: it indexes all the various citations used in a document by type of authority (constitutions, statutes, regulations, case law, secondary authorities, etc.).

MS Word and WordPerfect have table-of-authority builders built right into the program. Essentially, the ToA builder goes through the whole document, looking for anything that might look like it's a citation. Once it finds a possible citation, it stops: the user can then mark the citation and add it to an index. In the end, you end up with something that looks like this:


TABLE OF AUTHORITIES

BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION, 273 U.S. 177, 93 F.2d 14
(1953)...................1, 2



There, you see Brown, its full citation in Blue Book format, and the pages where it's cited.

Now, OpenOffice and LaTeX should be able to do a simple trick like this--and do it better. But they're structurally different programs. Instead of treating the document like one long stream of text, they use a "structured document" model.

Theoretically, the structured document should be better: you define the logical parts of your document and let the program deal with all the fiddly character-by-character design issues. To make this work, you need to have a separate bibliographic database, and then insert tagged references into the document as you go. Sounds good, right?

Wrong. In OpenOffice, as in TeX, it's the bibliographic package (bibtex or some such) that generates the formatted citation. And, wouldn't you know it--there aren't any style files out there for legal citations.

Sure, TeXheads, tell me about jurabib or biblatex. But all the style files kicking around are mathematics, sciences, or engineering. I'm lucky if I find a regular humanities style file--never mind actually find anything useful for us lawyers.

And I really don't have the time or the inclination these days to break down and really learn any of the bibliographic systems in *nix to make them work for lawyers.

So this is what I'm reduced to. I'm going to have to crawl back to Microsoft Office for an appellate brief. Luckily, Word 97 runs very well in WINE.

Still, I feel a bit annoyed at having to go back to Microsoft for this. What do I have to do to get decent ToA support out there in OO.o or TeX? Where do I post the bounty?

I have seen the end of 32-bit addressing, my friends, and let me tell you, it's not pretty.

My default e-mail client, Evolution, is great, but it keeps my incoming mail in a single mbox file. (for you *nix nerds, by default this is at ~/.evolution/mail/local/).

Over the years, as I've migrated from computer to computer, I have brought my archived e-mails with me in various mbox files. As of last night, that represented a little under six years' of e-mail correspondence. I'd simply folded the mbox files into each other, allowing me to have a single mbox file that I could search--not that I did all that much grepping through my old logs, but I do go poking into my old correspondence every so often.

But there was a problem lurking here. On IA32, the Linux kernel can only handle files smaller than two gigabytes. It simply can't address anything bigger. After years of folding mboxes into each other, my Inbox file finally got so huge that the kernel just couldn't deal with it any more--Evolution spat an error about the file being too large, and there I was.

Now I know what the Paleolithic inhabitants of the cave at Zhoukoudian/Choukoutien felt like, as they were slowly squeezed out by the ashes of their continuously-tended fires.

I spent most of late last night/early this morning installing the AMD64 build of Ubuntu. Just as expected, the 64-bit kernel addressed the huge 2 GB file with no problem, and I set to work moving older files in the mbox to a series of archives (by year).

Sadly, this hasn't yet shrunk the file by nearly enough to make it addressable by my 32-bit Ubuntu install. Evo spits out a "file too large for data type" error--and, sure enough, the software reports an mbox file over two gigabytes big.

Most of the prolbem comes from my ISP: about a year ago, their POP3 server started acting weird; occasionally resetting the "read" status on messages. Since I download local copies of all the data on the remote server, this could be bad news: every time the ISP hiccups, I'm obliged to download the past however many months of messages all at once. I've tried to deal with it as best I can, but I probably have a metric shitload of redundant copies in that mbox file alone. Thanks, guys. I'll need to install a plugin or run a script to get rid of the redundancies.

Or I could just bite the bullet and migrate to a 64-bit kernel. But I'm so dependent on WINE and various non-free codecs that are avalable only on IA32 that migrating to the new architecture would be a real pain in the ass.

Following on from yesterday's quick look at WebMynd, I've had another chat with WebMyndMaster Amir, who tells me:

• Work is in progress on a Linux version. I've had a chance to test-drive an early beta build; it seems to work, and indexes fine, but I'll give it a more detailed write-up when I get time.
  
• Sharing and Tagging functions are in the works. The WebMynd team are trying to get some sharing and tagging functions into later versions of the extension. This would definitely make the extension more useful. Many initial blog reactions have speculated about possible tagging/social features in the future, and I can now confirm that these are on the way.
  

Sharing-and-tagging--I'll call it 'shagging'--has been great fun for me on flickr. It'd be interesting to see how it works on the Web.

Yeah, I know, I could just use del.icio.us, but this is slicker--if I can get it to work.

Firefoxes everywhere. Over on the right: Firefox for Windows, running in WINE, which is in turn displaying WebMynd's nifty "reel" feature for locally-cached pages. On the left, regular, garden-variety Firefox 2.0.0.11, as shipped with Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon", displaying the homepage for the Beagle Project. Below them, an actual Beagle Desktop Search window open.

[INITIAL DISCLOSURES: I'm very close personal friends with Amir, who heads up WebMynd. So I was pleased to see that his project had made TechCrunch. Amir asked me to give the extension a test run.]

The WebMynd guys bill their project as "TiVo for the web," and they're not too far wrong. Essentialy, WebMynd is a Firefox extension that sits back, quietly saving every site you visit on the internet locally--so that you can browse and search through them at your leisure.

What makes this different from Beagle is the extremely nifty graphical representation of your visited pages--nice thumbnails of each page that you've navigated, which are arranged either as a sequential, scrollable, "reel" or in a grid.

For the graphically-inclined, this could be pretty nifty. WebMynd's starter service lets you keep a week's worth of pages cached. A bigger cache will mean more cash.

There are some kinks. The software works on Windows and is reported to work well on OSX; but I wasn't able to get it up and running natively on Ubuntu. I ended up having to run Firefox for Windows in WINE and installing it there. Once there, it ran just fine.

It's a slick-looking tool, but there are still some questions. On an individual-user basis, I'm wondering who would pay the money to cache web content locally. One of the TechCrunch comments put it succinctly:

If this saves the pages to my own HD and not to the web, then why do I have to pay them more to be allowed to store a greater amount of history? It’s not their storage that’s being used, it’s mine.

Update: A quick chat with Amir confirms the following:

WebMynd actually does all the database/index work on their servers, on their end--but the actual data are stored locally, on your computer. The "upgrade" services allow you to keep your index on their machines longer than the week you get gratis on the basic plan.

Essentially, all the nifty search functions (and potentially nifty stuff, like, oh, tagging, if they should decide to add that later) are only availble for as long as your data remains indexed on their servers. Otherwise, you have a local cache that you can "rewind." That is, you can access your data seriatim at an time--but for long-term, random-access searching, you'd need to trade up.

It might be a good idea to note here that if you're running this in Linux, you had better be sure that you have plenty of room in /home, particularly ~/.wine, where the extension will keep its cache file.

Another concern for certain users might be privacy. WebMynd currently implements this as a "stealth" mode, but that simply kills all recording and indexing whatsoever. If you want to have WebMynd's benefits (slick local caching plus remote database indexing) you'd need to be aware that that data is being indexed remotely. If that worries you--well, you already know what you're going to do (or not).

On a more macro-level, I'm just waiting for the copyright fight to start. I imagine the battle lines being drawn rather like they were on GooglePrint, with the likes of Lawrence Lessig comparing this type of indexing to airplane overflights (q.v. United States v. Causby 328 U.S. 256 (1946)), while copyright holders scream bloody murder.

Overall, quite a slick app. It would really be slick if there were a way to tag your own cache and generate a tag cloud for easier back-reference. The ability to share a tag cloud (or the equivalent "thumbnail collage," with thumbnail size corresponding to frequency of visit) would make for some interesting data.

My iRiver H340 battery has been dying for a while now. So, as a birthday present, I went ahead and bought a replacement battery.

Fortunately, licketysplitauctions on ebay carries batteries for the H340. I ordered a 2200 mAh battery for the princely sum of $15.99, plus $4.49 shipping. The battery arrived quickly, but I only got around to installing it this weekend.

Happily, there are plenty of instructions available for DIY battery replacement on the H340. The whole process took maybe an hour--most of that was my fiddling around, afraid of breaking stuff. If I had to do it again, I could probably do the job in about twenty minutes. The Cameron Sino battery pack was a perfect fit--really a drop-in replacement. Added bonus: no need to do any nerd-fu on the Molex connectors, since the battery shipped with the wires the "right" way around for iRivers. (First-generation iPod batteries will also work, but the wires are reversed, and the 2200 mAh cells are juuuust a bit too thick for the case, which requires some sandpaper-fu on the interior--not something I wanted to do with my weekend).

The battery took about two hours to charge. I decided to let the player run constantly until it discharged so I could get a sense of how much battery life I can get out of the player. The thing kept going...and going....and going.... I measured a runtime of 19 hours, 54 minutes, 12 seconds--impressive, considering that the H340 used to give me 9 or 10 hours before the stock 1300 mAh battery went flat.

For those of you interested, here's a graph:


Voltage (mV) over Time (seconds): Cameron Sino 2200 mAh Battery, iRiver H340, Rockbox

I might be the last person on the series of tubes to catch on to this. But as I was shopping for next semester's textbooks, I noticed that Amazon.com has begun offering mp3 downloads!.

OK, go ahead. Be smug. I know that you've all been using the iTunes Music Store for ages and ages. And you know that I've been resisting iTMS and similar services because of my opposition to Digital Restrictions Management (DRM).

Amazon at last has begun to compete with Apple--not just on price, but on the terms offered. The Amazon mp3 store gives me pretty much what I've been missing at much more favorable licensing terms than what Apple has been insisting on for iTMS. This vindicates Judge Easterbrook's opinion in ProCD, Inc. v. Zeidenberg:

Terms of use are no less a part of "the product" than are the size of the database and the speed with which the software compiles listings. Competition among vendors, not judicial revision of a package's contents, is how consumers are protected in a market economy

ProCD, Inc. v. Zeidenberg, 86 F.3d 1447, 1453 (7th Cir. 1996).

There is still one annoying hurdle. In order to complete your purchase, you must install Amazon's MP3 Downloader. All well and good if you run Windows or OSK--not so much for Linux. Linux users can still purchase individual tracks, but are shut out of purchasing albums at the "album discount" price--

Or at least they were, until mad-scientist took a crack at the problem. He has cleverly figured out a way of using the Amazon MP3 Downloader in Linux with WINE with the help of a bit of bash script-fu.

I've tried it out and it works. This is extremely useful--and possibly ruinous to my budget. But there you have it.
http://mad-scientist.us/amazon.html

I'm carrying my eee pc in a U.S. Army surplus gasmask bag, which I picked up on sale for four bucks at Ranger Surplus in Fairfax.

My particular bag used to carry an M25A1 gas mask. This type of mask was issued to tankers, and apparently hooked up to an air supply system inside the tank. Consequently, there's a hole in the bag (reinforced by a very sturdy grommet) where the gas mask's hose would have protruded from. This would have been handy in a gas attack, since the tank crew could simply don their masks and plug in without necessarily having to remove the mask from the bag entirely.

For my purposes, however, it means there's a 40mm hole in the bag. That will be fixed soon with a trip to the hardware store: hot glue plus a drain plug should do the trick.

Other than that, this is a brilliant way to carry the computer. It's a gas mask bag, so it was meant to be carried close to the body at all times. It's a good size for the eee pc plus its power cord. And, come on, let's face it, it's pretty bad-ass.

Other patterns of gas mask bags might work just as well, if not a little better. All the infantry ones I could find, though, looked like they were intended to be clipped to an infantryman's load-bearing harness--not something I wear every day.

Old Swiss-pattern gas mask bags might work as well, dimensionwise, but they tend to be more cylindrical than rectangular in shape.

I'll be using this for a while--at least until I can score some surplus East German gear in their "rain" pattern.

Took the eee pc to school today. The network-wallahs were very impressed.

I came in this morning to get myself connected to the university network. The first tech who saw me was suitably impressed. By the afternoon, I had accidentally messed with the network settings, so I brought it in to the techs again.

The second tech I talked to was so surprised to see an actual eee pc he jumped up out of his seat, shook my hand, fixed my networking issues, then talked with me animatedly about Linux and the eee pc and how he really wanted one for diagnosing network problems--no sense lugging a huge computer for that job.

He led e back into his cubicle--a space crammed with manuals and hardware--gave me his card, and told me to keep him aprised of how I was getting along with the eee pc.

Then he took me aside. "Don't publicize this. We don't really support Linux. I run Linux, and you run Linux. You look like a guy who knows what he's doing. I don't want to have anyone else coming in here who has no clue expecting us to get his Linux laptop up and running--at least not until we're ready."

The form factor is great. I was able to work on a crowded Metro (hacking up a text file). The nearly instant powerup makes it an ideal commuter. I'm carrying it in an old (small) padded laptop case. The machine is just big enough to fit inside a large ziplock bag--so that's how I carry it, to give myself a measure of weather protection. A smaller ziplock for the power cord, and I'm good to go.

More reaction, from other users:

"Aw, cute!"

"Laptop? On you, that's more like a LEG top, buddy."

"What is that thing?"

Just as I predicted I now have a brand-new Asus eee pc just in time for the joys of exam week! As a matter of fact, I'm typing this update on it right now.

First impressions are VERY favorable. It runs right out of the box. The startup time is ridiculously fast. The system is remarkably responsive.

The keyboard, as you might expect, is miniscule. My hands, as you might know, are not miniscule. The small size of the keyboard does cut down on my maximum typing speed. But otherwise, it isn't too bad; I just have to remember to curl my fingers to get the tips right up on the keys--kind of like playing Bach on the piano.

This is pretty much what I want in a portable device. If this can work with the university wireless, then I'll be in hog heaven.

I'm thinking about getting a new battery for my iriver H340. I like the player, and rockbox is working really well. The stock 1700 mAh battery isn't holding much of a charge any more, and I know of places that'll sell me a suitable 2200 mAh battery for not a lot of money. The additional capacity would be more than welcome, and it would give me a "better-than-new" H340. All I'd need to do is be handy with a screwdriver.

Since the information on this little black art seems to be fading into the Internets, I'm reposting the relevant links here, as much for my own reference as to feed Google.

Funny, I end up using this blog as a kind of public bookmark list. . .

There are video howtos for this sort of thing, naturally. It doesn't seem like it's going to be that much of a challenge.

There used to be an excellent non-video howto on the Misticriver.net forums, but it appears that there has been some kind of catastrophe over at Misticriver--all Google references to their old forums are dead. Luckily, someone made a backup PDF of the relevant thread.

find . -name "*Lectures.pdb" -print0 | xargs -i -0 txt2pdbdoc -d "{}" "{}".txt && mv *txt ~/foo


More on that line of cryptic bash later.