Capricious Me

Ok. I’ve finally done something with the cr-48. I’ve installed ubuntu on it. Why do I do this? It’s not as if I don’t already have a laptop and computer running linux. Well – here comes the exciting bit: In april, I shall be going to India for my friend Balaji’s wedding. To minimize the weight that I’ll be carrying, I’m going to bring the cr-48 instead of one of the macbooks. Because I still need to work on my dissertation, I don’t want to use the shell that comes with Chrome OS in case I don’t have reliable or trustworthy internet sources.

There are about ten bajillion posts out there commenting on how easy it is to do this and it is indeed incredibly easy, especially if you already have a linux machine running ubuntu. If you don’t, just get a live CD or use something like portable ubuntu or andlinux or use a virtual machine. (Which leads to a very Inception-like situation of a virtual machine within a virtual machine.)

Me, I SSHed into my workstation in lab and used remote x to handle all of this. The advantage of this method, as opposed to only using the linux partition, is that I can download the ubuntu ISO much much faster, and the processing power on that machine is way better than my laptop.

I followed Google’s instructions. And then I used this guide to help make the trackpad and keyboard more usable.

And voila – a tiny, light ubuntu laptop with built in SD-card reader (to upload the many photos that I’ll take) with great battery power!

There’s a shell, albeit a rather limited one, from which I can use SSH, so yay – a whole new world of wonder and excitement!

Google’s pretty awesome in that they’ve actually provided instructions on how to get into developer mode, from which you can flash your own custom OS, if you choose to do so. Of course I chose to do so.

Ok, so what else can I do with this thing? Suggestions so far include:
1. Connect my android phone to this thing. Not sure what I’ll do yet.
2. Get bluetooth mouse working because the trackpad is somewhat painful to use if you’re trying to do anything beside point and click.
3. Install Android OS. I’ll try this luigi tool that other blogs have mentioned.

What else should I try with this thing?

Editted to add: Oh My God. I really need to just google “cr-48″ more often. Just found a page that taught me how to enable a media player and file browser that will let me use an SD card or USB drive to either save stuff, or to play mp3s and maybe movies. :) Not everything has to be streamed after all!

I know these notebooks aren’t exactly meant to be developer machines, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still want to be able to do SOMETHING. For the most part, the online IDEs I’ve tried (codepad, ideone) are ok, but I miss the comfort of having an IDE that does AUTO-INDENT in which I don’t need to use the spacebar to produce tabbing… so this sounds like a trivial request until you remember that Python is a language in which whitespace has great significance. Sigh. And I do most of my scripting in python. I wish Google Docs had a programming language syntax mode…

In other areas… my fat fingers are finally getting used to typing on such a little keyboard (when I use my macbook the keys feel ginormous and seem to have vast expanses between each little chiclet). The trackpad, however, still sucks. This, sadly, is out of the Chrome OS team’s power to change and the least of their problems since there will no doubt be a bajillion different shiny, beautiful devices once this guinea pig phase is complete.

First off, specs as requested. It’s a nice little machine.

Google’s really trying to push their web app and cloud computing vision, so that’s why I’d imagine they devoted an entire device to it. It’s a proof of concept that you can do pretty much everything you need to from a web browser, especially by using Google provided products.

My new favorite thing on this notebook (it’s far too big to be a netbook, as I called it in my previous post) is the NYTimes chrome app. I had to get used to the idea of chrome apps being nothing more than just glorified links… They’re web apps… so it makes sense to link them to a URL where before you might be linking to some executable in your computer. Anyway, the nytimes chrome version is lovely. I think of all the NYTimes apps I’ve tried, chrome site is my favorite, then iPhone version is 2nd, and Android app is 3rd.

Second useful thing: Read Later Fast. This extension caches copies of webpages so you can read it later. I have grand plans of caching a lot of wikipedia and wikibooks pages…

Oh, I’ve also installed a python shell – where there’s a python shell, I’ll definitely try it out.

BTW, because all this is for Chrome, these apps and extensions work with and are synced to my desktop version of the Chrome browser as well. Pretty neat, because it’s so nice being able to switch to a new computer and still keep the same browser environment.

For Christmas this year, Google sent me a cr-48 chrome netbook. I didn’t get to do the unboxing (which is definitely one of my favorite parts of the whole thing) because it was sent to my parents’ house and they opened it up to play with it before I arrived home.

The netbook pilot program provides its users with a two year verizon data plan with 100mb free per month. Haven’t tried it out yet…

It’s a true netbook in the sense that the only UI you see is a browser – Chrome. Since I use google sync, all my bookmarks, extensions, and chrome apps were already waiting for me when I signed in. Oh yeah, to add a user account, all you do is sign in with your google account. Quick, easy, painless… unless you don’t have an internet connection.

Battery life is wonderful. Hours and hours and hours!

The hardware is not as great… The macbook style trackpad with no buttons is not the most responsive. And language input, though it exists, is kind of annoying in that when you press the key sequence to switch, sometimes it doesn’t switch.

I’m having fun with it so far. More updates to come, because I’m supposed to be giving detailed feedback as part of the pilot program… so I’m going to try to record things that annoy me and things that make me happy here.

Thanks to my awesome friends, I’m the proud owner of a 3G Kindle (grey). I’m extremely happy with it – I’ve been using the kindle app on my Android for some time now to read. Using the kindle itself is soo much nicer because there’s no glare and it’s about the size of a book. I got the lit cover, so my kindle is protected and is able to power its own reading light. :)

What I love especially are the screensavers. It seems to be an automatic thing – because the kindle doesn’t actually use power once it displays a page (oh the magic of e-ink!), it’s extremely battery efficient and so after a certain time of no activity detected, the kindle will automatically put itself to “sleep” by displaying an illustration. Usually it’s a picture of an author, but there’s old timey illustrations as well. It’s quite fun.

I’m currently reading “Wives and Daughters” by Elizabeth Gaskell and “Pillars of the Earth” by Ken Follett. In the old fashioned paper book world, I’m rereading “I, Claudius.” I would be reading it on kindle, but amazon.com apparently doesn’t think Americans are cultured enough to warrant electronic versions, though they have no such reservations for the amazon.co.uk.

The majority of the books I have are from the public domain – I am a poor grad student after all, so why would I pay for books when there are so many good old classics out there? Among my ambitions are to pick up my French reading skills again. I’m going to reread Candide. I did it in high school, so let’s see how much I can remember.

Just last night, I was enlightened to the existence of some unusual products and the hilarious reviews garnered. I believe it is my duty to the world to archive the links here on this blog, as I find myself increasingly less motivated to write about personal stuff.

We’ll start with the Cloverdale Fresh Rabbit. I’m sure you’ll find reviews that are near and dear to your heart, but here’s a few of my favorites.
» Read the rest of this entry «

It’s at the dealership. My dad will drive it around for a week before I retrieve it and make the drive back home to Davis… YAY!!!!

placed a deposit for a 2010 winter grey metallic prius II with misty grey interior this weekend.

No more, hopefully, dealing with car salesmen! I can’t stand it when they blatantly lie. Come on dude, don’t you think I know how to google and look things up??

Ooooook. It’s getting closer to the time when I have to make my final decision on a color for the 2010 Prius. The color I had in mind initially was dark metallic gray, but on further consideration, the red and blue don’t look too shabby either. The prob. with the red is that I can’t remember if it’s a darker, richer red or if it’s closer to primary red (which I would not want.) The blue is nice, but somehow it doesn’t seem like… me. It’s just too sports-car-wanna-be.

The nicest thing with the dark metallic gray is that it hides dirt well. Living in Davis, one thing you realize is that your car collects a LOT of dirt.

Decisions, decisions, decisions.