Nature notes

[hypatia]

Yesterday I contrived to blink my way unto the great outdoors, complete with "He who still smiles inanely". Well, I say outdoors but after the brief shock of natural daylight the reality was a field trip to the hell that is the land of Blue and Yellow during the school hols. This was necessitated by the failure of a raid on the home

Comments

[megabitch]

*giggle* I have that joy yet to come - K, having changed subjects at the end of 1st year As, has another year at college now.

On netbooks, I have an Acer Aspire One (in shiny dark blue), it runs a cut down version of Linux but you can get them with Windows. It came loaded with firefox, openoffice, googlemaps, media player, a few trial games, a messenger app, etc. It has an ethernet port, several usb slots, an SD chip slot, and another for various other chips, a vga socket, headphone and mic sockets (has a built-in mic), a "lock slot" and a webcam. Oh, and wireless too. It's about as heavy as I can cope with for extended periods of time. The kbd suits me, I have small hands, but I'd recommend an extra full-size kbd that plugs in via usb for any extended writing periods. It was around £250 in about Feb this year.

Good Luck :)

[hypatia]

the acer gets quite good reviews. I suspect the Windows version would be more useful to him because of the document formats etc however he is fairly agnostic on that. Price is a factor - not least because I don't want something flashy and stealable (or more than laptops are already).

I don't recall taking quite as much junk with me as I saw in some of those trolleys but I'm sure scented candles and black quilt covers enhance the academic experience :^)

[julesjones]

I am clearly middle-aged, because I sniggered my way through that in spite of not having my own Students.

[rmc28]

I have a Dell mini with Ubuntu installed out of the box, bought from Tesco in February this year for £200. The Windows version cost about £350 at the time. I am typing on it now. It is light, easy to use, battery life of 4 hours, has inbuilt wireless, ethernet socket, several USB sockets and a card reader for various memory cards.

I love it and keep maliciously lending it to people as the first hit is free.

[liasbluestone]

I seem to recall happydisciple trying at some length to persuade sierrakim's EEE to talk to our WiFi, and in the end giving up in disgust.

That is the extent of my knowledge of netbooks.

[liasbluestone]

I mean sierra_le_oli, of course. Is she "sierrakim" somewhere else?

[hypatia]

Not merging the names somewhere? The grey cells struggling somewhat.

Do you recall if that was on Ubuntu? I remember reading various people's problems with the EEE and wifi but I was never clear as to whether it was an Asus issue or an OS issue.

[liasbluestone]

She's "sierrakim" on Twitter, in fact.

I suspect it was Linux of some flavour - if you're lucky one of them will notice this...