Category: technology & science

My Review of the Google Chrome CR-48 Netbook

Posted onCategoriesreviews, technology & science

A mysterious box showed up on my doorstep a few weeks ago.

Inside?

A CR-48 Google Chrome netbook.

Little excited?  You bet.

Here are a few observations after giving it a work-out.

Hardware

  • The CR-48 is just the right size.  It’s very lightweight and sleek.  It feels cool.  The black matte finish shows every greasy fingerprint, but that’s OK.
  • Google took some liberties with the keyboard.  There are no Fn, Home, Delete, PgUp and PgDn keys.  It wasn’t really apparent right out of the box what all of the keyboard shortcuts were.  Here is the best list I found.  Ctrl-Alt-/ is your friend.
  • The clickable touchpad is a real bummer.  Two-finger scrolling is often slow and the sensitivity gets wonky some times.  Right and middle clicking required some Googling to figure out. (Ctrl-Click/Tap is middle click and Alt-Click/Tap is right-click if you’re curious)
  • Other than the touchpad, the only moving part is a small cooling fan.  I’ve only heard it once.
  • This bad-boy boots in under 20 seconds.  There’s no real “shutting down” either.  It‘s more of a log-out-and-go-to-sleep deal.
  • The battery life is amazing.  It will last a full 8 hours of continuous use.
  • There’s a webcam for Google Chat.  There’s also a light sensor that will adjust the screen brightness depending on the ambient light in the room.  Slick.
  • I did hook it up to a large LCD TV and it handled it surprisingly well.  Seemed to be mirror mode only.
  • If you’re wondering about the processor, memory, etc, here’s a good summary of all the technical specs.

Software

  • The New Tab window is the desktop.  That’s it.  There are some windows that float up from the bottom of the page.  Other than that, it’s all Chrome tabs and web apps.
  • There is some media browsing functionality.  The media browser window appears as a window from the bottom of the screen when you insert a device or hit Ctrl-O. It allows you to view certain media files in local storage, on some USB flash drives and SD cards.  You can attach or upload files from all of those places.
  • There are two OS update channels available: Beta and Development.  The Development channel is the sandbox for the bleeding-edge new stuff.  It’s pretty slow and unstable and gets updated frequently. The Beta channel is more refined and definitely faster.  It has been updated once since I’ve had the device.  The release included a slew of noticeable improvements.
  • Yes, you can install Ubuntu on the CR-48 and make it into a traditional machine if you want.  It’s complicated but nicely documented by the Chromium folks.

Options for doing web development

Hitting Ctrl-Alt-T will get you to the limited command-line interface called “crosh”.  From there you can use ssh to connect to another box.  If you’re comfortable coding from command-line with vim or emacs, this will work.

However, if you need the brawn of an IDE, some FTP tools, etc, then things get a little more complicated and tedious.  There are some cloud-based IDEs/editors like ShiftEdit, PHPAnywhere.net, and SourceKit that will work…if you can massage your workflow into them.

If you need more options, then flipping the developer switch switch is the way to go.  The switch is behind a sticker inside the battery compartment.   Enabling developer mode will provide more unrestricted shell access.  This is the starting point for installing another OS on the machine if you decide to go that route.

I did switch to the Chrome OS Development channel and flip the developer switch. I ran it like that for about a week.  Eventually, I restored it back to the Beta channel with an image on a flash drive.  It was just a little too unstable for the simple browsing and note-taking that I was doing.

Conclusions

  • The CR-48 is really more like an iPad (minus the touchscreen, plus a keyboard) than it is a traditional netbook.
  • How the ChromeOS works with files in local storage is definitely a work in progress.  The video is mostly slow and choppy.  I don’t see Chrome OS making a lot of mainstream headway until these two things get ironed out.
  • If ChromeOS and Android converge as Google’s Eric Schmidt suggested then I guess I’ll install Ubuntu on it.
  • The CR-48 is a nice and uncomfortably simple device.  It’s made me think a lot about how reliant I am on local storage.
  • I’m still excited and humbled that I even have one of these devices.  Thank you, Google.

Helpful Links

 

Sweet Linux Media Apps For Vacation

Posted onCategoriestechnology & science

So I just got back from a nice vacation with my family. I borrowed the department Asus Eee Pc 900 for the trip. It had CrunchBang Linux on it, which wouldn’t update anymore. I reformatted it with Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook Edition in about 45 minutes. Everything worked with the base install.  Sweet.

On my Dell Inspirion lappy running Ubuntu 10.04, I installed and tried several DVD ripping utilities.  I settled on Thoggen which was much simpler than the others.  I ripped several DVDs into .ogv format, copied them to the netbook with my 2GB USB flash drive.  Boom.

Then I installed VLC on the netbook to play them.  “F” for full-screen mode is your friend.  Awesome.

The default screen saver and power management settings were not conducive to watching a 2-hour video.  I found Caffeine, which allowed me to override the power management settings for a specific period.  Perfect.

Not long after we got on the road, I noticed my wife’s iPod Nano is missing all of its playlists.  GTKPod to the rescue.  I plugged in the iPod, specified the model, mounted it, re-created a few playlists, and wrote them right back to the iPod. All without iTunes.  Easy-peasy.

Spriglet #16: Simple HTML signatures in Gmail

Posted onCategoriesspriglets, technology & science

sign

  1. Create your signature in HTML in a text file named temp.html.  Here’s mine:
    Adam Spriggs //
    sprignaturemoves.com //
    twitter.com/wvpv //
    816-555-1212
    "what others do with talent, I do with obstinate fixation"

  2. Open temp.html in your browser — in another window
  3. Enable Labs in Gmail
  4. Enable the Canned Response feature
  5. Compose a new email
  6. Highlight your signature in the other browser window
  7. Drag it into the body of your e-mail
  8. In the Canned responses drop-down, choose new canned response.
  9. Name it “html sig”
  10. Click Settings turn off the signature
  11. From now on when you compose an e-mail, simply choose “html sig” from the canned response drop-down.
  12. Voilà