Yesterday’s post brought me two toys:

The ‘brella is mine. The laptop I’m setting up for a friend. But this is no ordinary laptop, this is an eee pc. Alice of the wonderful Wonderland got one a while back, and her initial possible-typo thought has been ringing around my head for 48hrs, because it sums the thing up perfectly: IT TITCHY! Here’s a better picture, actual size¹:

See? It titchy! I’m in love. It’s 23 x 17cm and in its case weighs 976g, which isn’t much more than a large book, or my camera. It has wifi, 512mb RAM, three USB slots, a 3hr battery, a VGA port, an SD-card slot, two speakers and a webcam. It runs linux, boots in 15 seconds, shuts down in 5 and comes with OpenOffice.org, Firefox and Skype. Best of all, it only cost a shade over £220 - brand new.

Clearly there’s a compromise somewhere, and it’s mainly in power and disk space. It’s not at all fast - 630Mhz - and the hard drive is only 4gb². Plus, the screen resolution is only 800×480, being as how it’s only 7″ on the diagonal. But if all you want to do is surf, type and chat, you don’t need any more than that. Couple this thing with an apparently-compatible Huawei PAYG Mobile Broadband stick and you’ve got 1mbps internet access you can throw into your bag just in case. Is brilliant.

The keyboard is obviously tiny tiny tiny, and takes some getting used to. But it’s at least a standard layout, and I adapted pretty quickly. The mouse ‘buttons’, it has to be said, are godawful, but thankfully the trackpad supports tapping. The machine recognised my USB drive straight away and I was able to transfer files from my XP machine without issue³. The screen is just large enough that text is readable without straining, but it’s close.

The menu system is fairly unexceptional, and buries the good stuff in with a load of less-than-useful programs, but does the job. It’s not officially editable, but activate the ‘advanced mode’ and you’ve got the full configurability⁴ of linux. About which I know nothing, but I had a crack anyway. The machine is popular enough that the eee wiki has many, many guides on unlocking advanced features without screwing everything up, and I went through a few step-by-step. The instructions suffer from the usual crowd-sourced documentation problems in that they can veer from incredibly useful to ‘oh, and before you do the next step you’ll need to rebuild the kernel - once you’ve done that…’, but are on the whole good. It has a problem out-of-the-box that prevents it from connecting to wireless networks that have WPA keys containing spaces; I was able to fix this by overwriting a couple of system files. I also tidied up the default layout, upgraded to OpenOffice.org 2.3, and enabled the option to boot into KDE. You can do much more - and for £40 you can upgrade it to a touchscreen(!) - but as it’s not mine I stopped there.

I’d be saving up for one, but it’s no use at all for anything photographic. Sure I could probably shove the GIMP on there, or even try XP and Photoshop if I thought I could handle the speed, but the 4gb drive is just too small. My camera’s memory card is twice that, so it’d be no use for backing up ‘in the field’, and I can’t imagine that editing a 3888×2592 file on that screen would be much fun. The eee has inspired a whole host of other micro-laptops, but they all seem to be coming in far more expensive, sadly.

My friend spends 4hrs on a wifi-enabled bus every day, but gets fed up of lugging a full-size laptop around. This should be a perfect solution, and I have to hand it over tomorrow. I am sad. I’ve named it and everything. Still, at least I have a ‘brella.

1. not true [↩]
2. although it’s a blindingly-quick solid-state drive [↩]
3. although god only knows how you find the drive in the xandros open/save menus if you don’t click ‘open in file manager’ immediately [↩]
4. is this a word? [↩]

I just finished a book called Shooter, by photojournalist David Hume Kennerly. I picked it up after seeing it recommended by Mr Hobby, and it’s one of those rare books that never gets boring.

This is because Kennerly has had quite the life. Assuming it’s all true, I’m astonished he’s not long dead. He started out photographing fires for his local paper, then became a general news photographer in Los Angeles, hairing to the scene of any and every crisis and somehow talking his way into its centre. Then it was some years in Vietnam, where he had countless close shaves involving bullets, from all sides, and eventually won the Pulitzer Prize. After Vietnam he became close friends with Gerald Ford, resulting in his being appointed official White House Photographer, with pretty much unfettered access to the administration. Then…well, it continues.

The guy must have the charm of the devil. Many of his stories involve him cajoling someone into helping him, or running into an old colleague/friend who gets him through the door. An introduction The Digital Journalist says Kennerly makes it seem effortless, but it’s actually extremely hard work:

In his address book he carries not only contact numbers, but birthdays, and will religiously send cards to the people he has photographed from locations all over the world.

And this is all very he-did-what?! But then comes the biggest surprise of all, when, during his time with President Ford, he turns 28. Bastard.

I imagine every reader finds themselves daydreaming about dropping it all and following in Kennerly’s footsteps. It’s the life you want to have had - not necessarily before you’re, you know, thirty, that’s just taking the piss - but reality seems to suggest could never happen. I don’t think I’m suited to photojournalism - 25 and I still get nervous making phone calls, baby - but I found myself thinking of local papers I could apply to.

I looked him up on Wikipedia this afternoon, and was a bit nervous. The book was published in 1979. There have been a lot of wars since then, and someone’s luck can only last so long - had he made it? I was happy to discover he’s still going, and his website has images of Rumsfeld touring Abu Ghraib, so he’s clearly still in the thick of it. Amazing.

I can’t recommend Shooter enough. It’s nicely written, totally inspiring if you’re into that kind of thing (but light on the technical aspects if you’re not) and generally enthralling. I defy you not to finish it liking the guy.

The blue suggests it’s owned by British Waterways, which would make it very annoying but not too much of a disaster. But the speaker, bike and, I think, owners make me think it’s a family boat, which would really, really suck.

My parents’ old boat ’sank’ twice, although not like this - it was just too low in the water, and never touched the ground. That was bad enough, though.

We’ve had a lot of rain recently, but I can’t immediately see how this could have happened. Maybe it was set adrift and got slammed head-on into the bank?

Obama is clearly going for my specific vote. Unfortunately I am not eligible, but points for trying.

New rule: never recommend anything to anyone. There is no point, as whatever you’re recommending will, by dint of entropic machinations as yet unexplained by science, descend into suckage.

Case in point: I recently discovered BBC Radio 4’s Friday Night Comedy podcast. It’s essentially Have I Got News For You on the radio, and is great. The panelists are usually excellent, but Sandi Toksvig and Jeremy Hardy so regularly reduce me to hysterics that it’s dangerous to listen while driving. So after a few weeks of enjoyment I emailed a couple of close friends with a recommendation. I felt quite pleased about this - here was a New Thing we could all enjoy. Then I listened to this week’s show.

One of the panelists was Mark Steel, who acts as the always-inexplicable boor in the corner, shouting obvious insults and generally sucking the warmth, charm and humour from the immediate area. As ever. I guess some people must find him entertaining, although it’s possible he gets invited onto these programmes to make everyone else sound better, but the show was awful as a result.

Guys! It is usually good! I promise!

I can’t help feeling sorry for Hillary Clinton. She’s at the point in a political career where the vitriol is non-stop, and while I’m aware politicians have to be thick-skinned, the media scrum to kick someone while they’re down is always unpleasant. I’m sure she can cope ok, but I don’t see the virtue. I also find it galling that people are still bringing up the infamous sniper-fire comment. On Sunday Norm said “she was either lying or deceiving herself bigtime”, and the general media attitude seems to be she’s either a liar or stupid. Thing is, memory doesn’t work like that. Events merge and stories change with the retelling, all without deliberate intent.

Steve Novella explains properly. It’s entirely possible she genuinely remembers landing under sniper fire - even if it didn’t happen, people can still have entirely convincing memories - and this whole mess came as a complete surprise. And memory failures aren’t stupid, they’re normal. I’m amazed this doesn’t happen to politicians all the time - how many people and events do heads of state deal with in a given amount of time? I need to make notes on someone’s network layout before leaving the building or I’ll have forgotten it by the next time they call. I’d expect a politician to have a better memory than me, but they’re not super-human. When you’re making who-knows-how-many speeches per week on a non-stop campaign trail, something’s going to slip. Probably lots did, but most of it wasn’t intended to demonstrate a personal virtue, so nobody cared. Dr. Novella sensibly doesn’t take a position on the truth of the matter, but come on. What are the odds that an experienced politician deliberately lied over something so easy to check? I tend to think this was something that should have been double-checked, wasn’t, and blew up way out of proportion to the mistake.

I’m personally happy Obama has the nomination - refusing campaign donations from lobbyists is quite the stand - but the schadenfreude at Clinton’s defeat is ugly. I’d personally like to see her picked as running mate, but I get the impression there’s not a hope in hell. I’m sure there’ll be plenty of analysis of where she went wrong - abruptly becoming a gun-toting, hard-drinking non-’elitist’ was particularly transparent, if you ask me - but the sniper-fire comment deserves to be let go.

I’ve upgraded to the latest Wordpress. It’s quite different behind the scenes, but there shouldn’t be any differences up front. Please let me know if anything’s broken…

For other Wordpress admins, the Remove Max Width plugin puts the Write page back to its former full-screen glory. Much nicer if you’re using a widescreen monitor.

This has probably been doing the rounds for years, but it’s a new one on me:

A snoot is anything that funnels light. Put one over a camera flash and you can accurately direct light into a particular area of a photo. I’d never really tried the technique until last week, when I assembled one at great expense by rolling up a card-dealing tablemat from my magician days. I’ve just got around to editing the results, and they’ve turned out better than I expected…I altered the contrast and exposure, but there’s no other Photoshopping on these:

These are the best of over 350 shots¹ and were more by chance than any vision in my head, but I’m pleased nonetheless. I’d only thrown the ’snoot’ into my bag as an afterthought, but I’ll certainly be taking it with me from now on. Next time I’ll try to properly take control of background by using the ambient light as fill.

I’m coming up with a plan for improving my portraits. I have some more kit (hopefully) arriving tomorrow that should be Fun Times…More on that when I’ve had a chance to play.

1. two very nice people bought me an 8gig memory card for my birthday, and it’s coming in very handy [↩]