My colleague Johan brought in a new UMPC to the office today. He’s helping the distributor (a friend of his) getting an Ubuntu based linux distribution working on it as a private project, so he has it for testing purposes.

The name of the unit is “Posh-Book” (view link in IE…) and I must say it’s a bit out there. Remember me bragging about being able to handle a pink sleeve for my A1, well, I’m not sure I could carry something described as “posh”. Hehe

In all other aspects it seems to be quite competent both in hardware and design. It ships with a 10″ screen, VIA C7®-M 1.6GHz Processor (NaNo), 1 GB memory and a 2.5″ 120GB SATA drive. One cool thing is that it’s operating system specification read “GNU Linux operating systems (MS Windows Compatible)”, that is GNU first and MS second

For me, the processor being a VIA is a plus as I love everything that’s not entirely standard. On the downside it has been described as a bit hungrier for power and therefor shortening battery life.

Even though it carries a 10″ screen it’s resolution is set to 1024×600, same as Aspire One (9″ screen) and others. It’s weight is estimated by the manufacturer to around 1.3kg, including a three cell li-on battery which is estimated to deliver 2.5 hours of power. No HSDPA/3G module is built-in, so if you’re in need of such solutions you’ll still have to carry your 3G-dongle.

Something I liked was the color of the keyboard that broke of cleanly from the white shell. They orange notations on the keys looked ok IRL as well.

The unit will ship in two different versions, and the number of available USB ports is one of the thing that differs. This is the P102 model I’m guessing as it only had 2 USB ports. See the full spec. for more info.

The keyboard worked quite OK and it passed the “I can write ‘Daniel’ without breaking any fingers”-test. Not a very scientific test, but it worked out OK for me in the past when selecting a netbook

And finally some pics comparing my A1 to the Posh:

New toys are fun to look at… Too bad I didn’t get to break it open, that would have made my day complete

Cheers,

“Till alla kunder!

PRQs verksamhet har nu avyttrats till en grupp utländska investerare. Verksamheten kommer fortsätta precis som tidigare men den dagliga driften kommer ej hanteras av samma personer förutom under en övergångsperiod. Den största skillnaden kommer vara att företaget nu har betydligt bättre resurser. Mer information följer inom kort. Har du några frågor så är du väkommen att kontakta oss.”

In english (my translation):

“To all customers!

PRQ’s operations has now been sold to a group of foreign investors. The business will continue as usual but the daily operations will not be handled by the same people except for a limited period during the transition. The biggest change will be that the company now has much better resources. More information will follow shortly. If you have any questions you are welcome to contact us.”

What is special about this then? PRQ AB is owned (and up until now operated) by the same guys that run The Pirate Bay and hosts some of the worlds most attacked and controversial sites.

Some of the organizations that utilize their services are Wikileaks, The Piracy Bureau, and Kavkaz Center.

More news later on, as their website says.

UPDATE: Previous swedish blog entries on this: Free and thinking, Fajaf. Regular media articles: ComputerSweden

To use some internet acronyms;

OMG.

WTF.

LOL.

It might be that the commercial is so US that makes it so absurdly funny. At the same time it makes me pity two of the worlds best paid people. Strange feeling

Got tired of the standard wallpaper and made my own. Feel free to download it in 1024×600 and use it on your A1.

Also, found out how to remove the ugly search bar from the desktop:

* Press Alt+F2 and type “xterm”.

* Write “su -” and type your root password.

* Edit the file “/usr/share/search-bar/start-search_bar.sh” with your tool of choice.

* Comment out all lines that start with “acer-search-desktop”. That is, place a # in front of them, save the file and exit the editor you’re using.

This is how your file should look when you are done:

#!/bin/sh
#resolution=`xrandr |grep \*|awk ‘{print $1}’`
resolution=`xrandr |grep current|awk -F”current” ‘{print $2}’|awk -F”,” ‘{print $1}’|sed ’s/\ //g’`

if [ $resolution = "1280x800" ];then
# acer-search-desktop –x=650 –y=90 –width=490 –height=31
elif [ $resolution = "1024x600" ];then
# acer-search-desktop –x=510 –y=65 –width=490 –height=31
elif [ $resolution = "1024x768" ];then
# acer-search-desktop –x=510 –y=80 –width=490 –height=35
else
# acer-search-desktop
fi

Cheers to Heretic Studios for the original instruction!

If the “Large Hadron Collider” at CERN will cause us all to be sucked into a black hole and die, at least we got killed by a beautiful machine

Nice (and large) pictures of the monster here (thanks Stationsvakt for posting the link) !

The most scary thing about it is how Half-Life-like it looks.. Almost spooky. Even the people in the images look like the HL models… Scary stuff

Hello there

Got a tip from my co-worker on a very lightweight and portable “clone” of the Asus EEE PC 701 from a Hong Kong based company named Jointech.

It’s called JL1700 and it looks quite alright if you disregard the fact that it is running Windows CE. And a plus goes to the wonderful choice of CPU, an ARM 9 (Samsung chipset) that makes me think of simpler days. Hehe

The Windows CE minus might be mitigated by just installing Debian or any Linux distribution that supports ARM processors.

It deals for 99$ which is extremely cheap, but as my fingers can’t even fit on a 901 this really would not have been a very suitable choice for me

Google Chrome really is a nice peice of software, even though it is still in BETA-phase. Quick response, nice UI and it has a really nice architecture for a fault tolerant browser.

I enjoyed trying it. However, it seems that they (Google) is now stepping away from their previous motto “Do no evil”, as the EULA that ships with Chrome is quite nasty.

Seems like they want you to hand over all IP-rights to whatever you create or publish using the browser. This is the same thing that Microsoft and AOL has tried with their IM applications a couple of years back, and of course it backfired directly and those terms got removed quickly.

From TapTheHive:

In other words, by posting anything (via Chrome) to your blog(s), any forum, video site, myspace, itunes, or any other site that might happen to be supporting you, Google can use your work without paying you a dime. They can go and edit it all they want. Even further, you’re claiming that you have the power to grant these rights.

More information here, here and here.

The Telecoms Package that has so far been pushed very hard through the European Parliament is now very close to the vote and the time is high for action.

If you haven’t been following the debate, visit the following places and get updated:

IPTegrity.com - The Telecoms Package - (about this organization)

La Quadrature Du Net - The Telecoms Package: Out of the shadows, into the light - (about this organization)

FFII.ORG - Call for action on the Telecom package - (about this organization)

What we all need to do now is to show the MEPs that the citizens of the European Union does not want this kind of legislation.

The best and fastest way to do this is to (1) send an e-mail to your own countrys MEP in your own language and then (2) send one to the other MEPs either in english or their own language if your skills are sufficient.

Do not send mass e-mails over and over again. Those get deleted and is not going to get read!

What we need to do is bring forth our concern over this legislation (the Telecoms package) and our concern that it might mean arbitrary filtering of the internet, abrupt disconnection of alleged file-sharers and restrictions of the information freedom on the internet.

The contact details of all the MEPs can be found HERE!

Another thing that you can do is to sign this petition: Throttle The Package!

So get moving people, let’s keep our internet free and unfiltered!

And always remember,   Your voice counts!

PS. This post was inspired by, and large parts copied from, HAXs call for action (swedish) .DS