Asus eeePC goodness

Yesterday my wife and I used the money from our tax returns to each purchase an Asus eeePC. Most geeks reading this will already by familiar with the eeePC, the ultra-portable and ultra-cheap Linux-powered notebook that caused a lot of fuss when it debuted last year for the astonishing price of AU$500. It's a very appealing unit for Linux/Unix geeks, not just because of its low price tag but also because its a very rare case of a notebook computer where all of the functionality - including the wireless networking, integrated webcam and ACPI features - can be enjoyed on a Linux system right out of the box. I've wanted one for a very long time.

I have been excited about the eeePC concept (to be fair, I really mean the "sub-notebook" or "netbook" concept, which is realised or soon to be realised by machines other than the eeePC) ever since I learned of it, because it is a step toward the vision of [ubiquitous computing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquitous_computing) and it makes possible a lot of household uses for a PC which are handy but utterly impractical with a desktop PC or full-sized laptop. For example, it has been possible to find databases of recipes on the web for years, but the eeePC, on account of its incredibly small size and mass, makes it practical for the first time to find a recipe and then carry the screen displaying it right into the kitchen. The eeePC eliminates the need to print out or rewrite Google map directions, at least for trips that will be shorter than the battery life, because it is small enough to easily just take in the car with you. Heck, it's possible that with a USB GPS receiver and a bit of technical skill you could use an eeePC as an improvised in-car navigation system. With a wireless internet connection it can sit on the lounge room coffee table and act as a TV guide or display console game walk-throughs. Furthermore, its cheap enough (with the 7 inch screened version now less than AU$400) that a middle class household can realistically aspire to own 2 or 3 or 4 of them, which can "live" in appropriate parts of the house or car for their respective functions. I believe intuitively that there are a lot more really useful uses for the eeePC than I could think of off the top of my head right here and right now.

I expect my first eeePC project to be a sort of intelligent alarm clock. I have a love/hate relationship with sleep. I hate it in the sense that I'm never ready to go to sleep at the time needed to stay in sync with most of the world's 24 hour cycle, but I love it in the sense that once I'm sleeping I'm reticent to stop. As such, I don't fare too well with conventional alarm clocks - that is, those in which snoozing the alarm and deactivating it are equally as easy. I'm liable to deactivate the alarm without any conscious thought and wake up hours later wondering what happened and if I missed anything important in the meeting I was supposed to be in at 10am. An alarm system where I can snooze easily but actual deactivation requires something difficult - say, physically getting out of bed and using my desktop computer to remove a small file which the alarm process on the eeePC periodically checks via HTTP over a wireless network connection. Not only would an eeePC facilitate this sort of alarm deactivation asymmetry, but it gives me much more control over the actual alarm sound thank could otherwise be obtained, and I'm thinking of writing a script which uses Flite (a small, fast, free speech synthesis engine) to read out pertinent things fetched from the web - the day's weather forecast, perhaps a list of news headlines, or the details of any emails I've received while asleep.

If I go ahead with this I'll make an entry and post the source. I hope that it will be only the first of a number of rewarding eeePC projects, a hope that I am sure will be helped toward fruition by the (seemingly, after 2 days exposure) solid eeeUser site.