Geoff Jones

Inveterate dabbler in business, travel, gadgets & life

Tag: iphone

The travellers computer

XP on Eee
XP Pro on the Eee

I finally managed to get my bargain 4GB Asus701 Eee to run with XP professional and for there to be still about 1GB of spare space after installing all my must have programmes for travelling and suffering the SP3 upgrade.

Various points of hard earned wisdom are:-

Use nLite to shrink your XP but be careful what you take out and leave in. I used substanially these notes from i64X

However, make sure you leave the Internet explorer box ticked at the compatability screen and to untick the window sound drivers in the Drivers option. (The windows default drivers seem to screw up the installation of the Asus sound stuff).

Asos Eee in Paramo Taiga fleece

Programmes I’ve installed so far are:-

So of the 3.71GB available I now have 722MB left (although I’m pretty certain Garmin will be getting deleted as its very bloatware like at 200MB).

Now to check out the battery life etc and to find WiFi connections.

And for you Linux geeks out there, I did so try to get GPSBabel running on the Asus Xandros OS but totally failed, although I did manage to get the full Linux desktop installed for a time.

All the above has probably taken about 3 solid days in time although the final nLite creation and installation was about 2 hours! Cold boot time is about 1minute.

Some of you may say what about the iPhone? My answers are:-
Its terribly fragile and as Euan knows not very water resistant!
You can only use its internal GPS / Camera.
Mine is still locked = hideous O2 roaming charges

So the trusty unlocked Treo680 will get another outing!

My Odd Job day

Today was repair Sally‘s bed day 🙂 Necessitated by her 6ft+ lad falling on her foot board when playing hide and seek 🙂 and cruelly snapping it in two.

Good excuse for me to try out my new Erbauer ERB800RL all purpose saw – worked fine although I think it may be to flimsy for the more severe pruning jobs that friends ask me to do!

After which Sally gave me a first rate Indian Head massage and then I installed the new Google Latitude (alas not fully functional for us second rate citizens in the UK) programme whilst Sally had a paying client for a Swedish massage.

We headed off to Kings Lynn for a short walk and tea with Sally’s friend who did the Inca trail a couple of years ago.

Here’s the walk using the very neat Everytrail application on the iPhone:-

Lynn stroll

Widget powered by EveryTrail: GPS Geotagging

Geoff and his Twitterings

After reading the history of Twitter over at @Dom‘s blog  140 characters and how it was conceived “We happened to be on top of the slide on the north end of South Park.
It was sunny and brisk. We were eating Mexican food. His idea made us
stop eating and start talking.”

Thought I would check out my Twitter stats on TweetStats since I joined in November 2006.


Interesting I’ve never gone above 209 tweets per month. Even though I can use it on the iPhone. My most used iPhone app. is gpstwit with 112 tweets. Least used is Twinkle at 43.

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Spam and overnight success

After reading the excellent post “Overnight success takes a long time” by Paul Buchheit on the history of gmail it stirred my memory into why I use gmail. The answer is this prominent  button:

Before gmail came along. Spam was a real problem for me, as you can see from the last  10 MINUTES worth hitting the gmail spam filter.


and its totally relentless, a 10 minute snapshot any time day or night is the same!

So full marks to Google for letting me use gmail on all my email accounts and also to be able to access them by IMAP and POP so I can read them on my iPhone and Thunderbird.

Oh and I’m sure FriendFeed will eventually be a huge success! Follow me there as geofones.

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