grep.ro

For the past year and a half my main machine has been a MacBook. It has everything on it: email, news, all-important todo lists, passwords, a few virtual machines (one still needs windows from time to time), current projects, etc. At home it's always connected to a 24" external display with a keyboard and mouse, so it feels like a desktop; on the move, it's a smaller-than-average laptop, a good compromise between size and functionality. Great combination, right?

Well, not really. I used to carry the MacBook around, just for the heck of it. Sometimes I found a wireless hotspot or needed to look something up, so having a computer with me did have some value. But it's heavy and my lower back really hates that, so nowadays I'm usually leaving it at home. But then I have a problem: I'm used to having computer access anywhere, anytime, so what do I do?

Obvious solution: get a lighter laptop. The MacBook Air isn't an option: it's too bloody expensive, and too small to use as my main machine. So I figured I'd go for something really small, really cheap: an Asus Eee PC, exclusively for the basics (mailing, news, as an organizer, stuff like that). Plus, I'd be running Linux as a desktop, so I'd have near-limitless tinkering power. It would be a great mobile machine, right?

Well, yes and no. The portability angle is good, the thing is hardly noticeable in my backpack. Linux is good enough (I'm running Debian testing), it has no trouble with wireless networks, but it does have plenty of rough edges, like flaky standby/hibernate. I'm dissapointed in the keyboard: obviously it's crammed, but it's also kind of cheap – the keypresses don't always register. Pixels are in short supply: the native resolution is 800x480, 1/7 the surface of my home display. There's not much computer in it either - 900MHz Pentium M with 512M RAM and 4GB of storage. After trying to use it for mail and planning for a few days I decided it doesn't work.

Currently I'm using a mixed solution: at home there's the MacBook desktop setup, at work there's a cozy Linux machine, and for the (rare) mobile use there's the Eee. They all have access to my home server where I have a git repository for my organizer folder; I'm also in the process of setting up an IMAP mailbox with some filtering and sorting scripts. I still need to figure out a good way to read my news feeds (no, I don't want to use google reader) and some kind of automatic backup (probably rsync-based).