Technology

Acer Aspire One Review

/ Christopher Parsons / 2 Comments

I’ve recently become responsible for the upkeep of an Aspire One netbook. My thoughts, thus far: wait for a while, get another model than I did, and dump Linpus as quick as possible. First, I’ll provide the actual specs for the netbook in the house, and then outline my thoughts a bit more.

Acer Aspireone (AOA110-1531 (Refurbished))

  • Sapphire Blue
  • Intel Atom Processor N270 (512KB L2 cache, 1.60GHz, 533MHz FSB)
  • 512BM DDR2 533 SDRAM
  • 8GB SSD
  • Card Reader
  • 802.11b/g WLAN
  • 10/100 LAN
  • Webcam
  • 8.9″ WSVGA (1024X600)
  • 3 cell battery
  • Preload with Linux

The Good

I’ll start with the good points: it’s very light, was very affordable (~$290 Cnd after taxes), and the Linpus OS boots very quickly. The screen is gorgeous, and with decent battery management you can squeeze about 2.5 hours out of it. While I’m not the biggest fan of the keyboard (I’m now very used to the ‘chicklet’ style Apple keyboards) it’s not terrible – I can probably hit about 80% of my average wpm out of it.

The Not-So-Good

Now, let’s talk about what I dislike:

  1. It’s a locked box. Seriously – I’ve broken down my share of notebooks, and while I’ll likely have another go in a week or two, actually accessing the SODIMM slots is hard. Really hard. Hard enough that I’d say either wait until they make getting into the AAO more reasonable, or just buy one with more memory. These little guys are not meant to be opened and modified (you can, but it’s not easy).
  2. Linpus is terrible. There, I said it. It boots quickly, but they’re working off a modified version of Fedora, and when I try to use the add/remove programs I consistently get dependency errors. Is this fixable? Sure. Should I have to fight with the damn OS at the command line so that I can upgrade to Open Office 3.0? No.
  3. Support from other OSes is still in the infancy stages. I’ve worked with Linux before, and I get the ‘Linux is a learning experience, and you can’t expect things to just work.’ That said: I don’t want to be fiddling around with the command line for a few days to get my install working properly. At the moment, I’m just waiting for some bugs with Ubuntu to get ironed out and then Linpus is being replaced.
  4. Linpus doesn’t connect to wireless networks. Well, let me rephrase: it will connect to non-enterprise networks. Anything WPA2-Enterprise or newer, and you’re out of luck until you replace the network manager. When you *do* replace the manager, you run into problems with it not remembering wireless access passwords when you come out of hibernation.
  5. Card reader memory allocation is hit and miss. Apparently, when you don’t tinker with anything, you can insert an SD card and that SD card is dynamically added to the available flash memory available to the OS. This is cool – I got an 8GB SD card to slide into the AAO, which would give it a cool 16GB of total internal storage – more than enough for casual browsing and word processing. The catch: as soon as you make the needed modifications to access the OS proper, you have to manually mount the SD card each time you turn on the computer, or bring it out of hibernation. While this wouldn’t be an issue if I didn’t want to unlock the OS, I don’t think that using the computer as a computer should mean that this breaks.
  6. Ships with Firefox 2.0. I mean, really – FF3.0 has been out for a long time. Why the hell is it shipping with FF2.0?
  7. Terrible SSD HDD. I get a 7.x MB write to the disk. Enough said.

If you’re looking to buy one of these, get a version with a spinning disk drive. That said, if you want a netbook that is just going to rock out of the box, I’d suggesting getting the HP 2140 – it’ll be a bit more expensive, but I think you’ll be a lot happier. Maybe I’ll change my tune once Ubuntu is loaded on the netbook. In fairness, I should note that I’m being picky (because it’s what I do with these kinds of things), and the person actually using the computer doesn’t have these complaints – it does what it needs to (though not being able to access WPA2-Enterprise has caused them problems). This said, I think that items (1), (2), (4), (5), (6) and (7) really are showstoppers, though (2) and (4) will both be alleviated by changing OSes, (5) is resolvable by shifting where documents and such are saved to, and (6) is solved by hitting up the command line a bit.

My rating: 3/5

Questions of Digitizing Identity

/ Christopher Parsons

A common element of the (various) streams of thought that I’m usually engaged in surrounds the question of identity. What constitutes identity? How is this constitution being modulated (or is it?) in digital spaces? What can past and contemporary theorists offer us, in response to these questions? What are the strengths of these responses, and what are their weaknesses?

Over the next six months or so, I want to begin taking up these questions more seriously. I plan to begin constructing an account in order to gain a better appreciation for both how granularly we often attempt to separate identities, and how at the same time those are often shared, surveyed, or otherwise modified without our ever being aware. My thoughts are that a core difference between ‘analogue’ and ‘digital’ identities follows from the (relative) ease of surveying and modifying digital identities without the source of that identity ever being made aware. While unobtrusive surveillance is possible in an analogue space, there is an emphasis in the West on the development of homogeneous protocols that are intended to facilitate the diffusion of data across digital pathways, and this carries with it new ways of collating and modulating available dataflows. Continue reading →

Technology: CBC’s Search Engine and Traffic Shaping

/ Christopher Parsons

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The CBC’s Jesse Brown has a nice piece that tries to respond to the question, “Is Throttling Necessary?” I won’t spoil the answer (or possible lack of an answer), but I will note that Jesse incorporated a few pieces of information that I’ve posted about here. If you’re not already subscribed to his Search Engine podcast, you should – it’s amongst the best Canadian tech journalism (that is accessible to non-tech people).

Review: Access Denied

/ Christopher Parsons

The OpenNet Initiative’s (ONI) mission is to “identify and document Internet filtering and surveillance, and to promote and inform wider public dialogs about such practices.” Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering is one of their texts that effectively draws together years of their research, and presents it in an accessible and useful manner for researchers, activists, and individuals who are simply interested in how the Internet is shaped by state governments.

The text is separated into two broad parts – the first is a series of essays that situate the data that has been collected into a quickly accessible framework. The authors of each essay manage to retain a reasonable level of technical acumen, even when presenting their findings and the techniques of filtering to a presumably non-technical audience. It should be noted that the data collected includes up to 2007 – if you’re reading the text in the hopes that the authors are going to directly address filtering technologies that have recently been in the new, such as Deep Packet Inspection, you’re going to be a disappointed (though they do allude to Deep Packet technologies, without explicitly focusing on it, in a few areas). Throughout the text there are references to human rights and, while I’m personally a proponent of them, I wish that the authors had endeavored to lay out some more of the complexities of human rights discourse – while they don’t present these rights as unproblematic, I felt that more depth would have been rewarding both for their analysis, and for the benefit of the reader. This having been said, I can’t begrudge the authors of the essays for drawing on human rights at various points in their respective pieces – doing so fits perfectly within ONI’s mandate, and their arguments surrounding the use of human rights are sound.

Continue reading →

Technology Fix: Pocket Mac and Blackberry Devices

/ Christopher Parsons

I don’t have a lot of time (term is coming crashing to an end, and I don’t want to get crushed!), but I thought I should probably post how to get a Blackberry to actually work with OS X once Pocket Mac stops working (and it will…trust me). But first, I want to have a bit of a preamble…

I love my Blackberry. It goes where I go – it’s rarely more than a few meters away from me. It has truly reacquainted me with email, and that’s great. I also love my MacBook. I’m rarely away from it for more than 12 hours at a time, and it’s a delight to use. I like the OS, the craftsmanship, and so forth.

I really hate how poorly RIM has decided to treat Blackberry owners who use Macs. RIM’s syncing ‘solution’ is Pocket Mac, which is a load of junk. In Windows, I could upgrade my OS, could configure my BB, could install applications, and so forth using the BB sync client. I can’t do that on a Mac – it’s been almost 2 years since they released Pocket Mac, and I still can’t do these basic operations, which means that I need to have a Windows virtual machine. On top of that, Pocket Mac will, fairly regularly, just stop syncing my contacts and calendar (it can’t actually sync anything else with any reliability). For a few months I’ve been trying to get this resolved, and progressively getting more and more annoyed. Annoyed to the point that I’m tempted to just move to an iPhone (I won’t because of security issues, and I can’t just get an email plan without a data plan, but it’s tempting).

Today I figured out how to resolve my issues with Pocket Mac not syncing properly anymore.

Continue reading →

Shaping your Identity

/ Christopher Parsons

It’s been a while since I’ve been updating this blog regularly – since I last wrote, I’ve completed my Master’s thesis, traveled to Brasil, sent out applications to Doctoral programs, found (temporary) full-time employment, and rested my brain a bit. Now, I feel rejuvenated, and ready to get back into the swing of things.

Setting the Stage

We are increasingly living in a hybrid world, one where our lives are being digitized. We eat food (analogue) but order it online (digital); we use our voices to talk with one another (analogue) using cell phones (digital); we read cooking recipes (analogue) from recipe websites (digital). In addition to what we actually do, what happens around us, and shapes how we are capable of interacting, often occurs within digital spaces – banking institutions are networked, government documents are send across departments by email, and major corporate executives that make (oftentimes) global decisions seem to have Blackberries surgically attached to themselves.

Continue reading →