I ran into Alan Robertson at Linux World in August, at a keynote given by an IBM executive. Alan works for IBM, where his title is Senior Software Engineer, Business Resilience. That's biz-speak for Alan's leading work on HighAvailability Linux. It was while talking about the latter that Alan let slip that he uses an Asus EeePC.
I was fascinated by the extreme polarity in scale between Linux-HA -- with its heartbeat-enabled death-of-node detection, cluster management and other mission-critical industrial-grade uses -- and the hot little portable. When we got to a table where he could show off the machine, Alan pulled out of his knapsack what looked like a colorful striped purse. It was an accessory bag Alan had hacked to hold the Eee PC as if it were nothing more than an extra battery. It was way cool.
"The deal is... it's supposed to be just for cables that you carry with your regular laptop, but it happens to fit the Eee PC", he said. That's because the bag comes with three pockets on each side, and Alan removed the two lines of stitching on one side, giving it one pocket for the Eee PC and three for its accessories. The result is an all-in-one case that's custom-hacked for the Eee PC, which fits snugly inside the de-stitched side, across from its relatively tiny AC power supply and whatever other small stuff you'd like to carry with it.
Alan's Eee PC has the new 9-inch screen, 20Gb of solid state storage and stock Xandros distro. Beyond its dimensional virtues, Alan likes the wi-fi signal-finding utility, because "it shows you the DHCP negotiation" and "all that stuff you need to know" if something isn't working -- which it too often doesn't with wi-fi. He also showed off the EeePC's multi-touch, which I hadn't seen working before outside of an iPhone. And he noted how well Skype is integrated with Linux. "Skype already knows about the webcam ... so if I were video-conferencing you, it would just come up and work."
Alan's main laptop for work is still a Lenovo Thinkpad 360p. He notes that the airline seat power supply for that one weighs more than the EeePC does by itself. Meanwhile, his EeePC is a nice little all-in-four (pockets) portability solution.
If you're interested in Alan's bag hack, you want BuiltNY's "charger bag". It comes in four color themes: brown/mint green, wood grain back/slate, black/powder blue, and Alan's version, called stripe #7/lava. BuiltNY retails the bag on their website for $25, but at this writing Amazon sells it for $13.97. Either way it's in alignment with the EeePC's own downscale cost.
- Doc Searls
Note to Jill and Garrick: The images above are for suggestion only. They're lo-res and are actually video frames; but if we scale them down that may not be a problem. The full image bank is here.