2009-11-16

Safari books

I was reminded how much I like having a Safari Books Online subscription this morning.

I read this Slashdot review of Becoming Agile: In An Imperfect World and then was able to open the Safare web page, paste in the title, and start reading. Instant gratification!

2009-10-30

Asus EEE PC useful at last!

We purchased one of these to evaluate, and it fell into disuse for the usual reasons (mainly the display is too small to be useful for much).

However, I needed to use Skype to conference with a colleague while at the summit for a engineering run, and could not get the microphone to work on my T61p laptop. So I fired up Skype on the EEE and it worked "out of the box".

However, the version that comes with it is too old to have video support. Some Googling found this article

Unfortunately, the link in the article takes you to the current version, 2.1, for Debian, not built for Xandros. Rather than get into dependency hell, I dug around, and found the previous version for Xandros here: http://download.skype.com/linux/skype-debian_2.0.0.72-1_i386.deb

Everything else worked as described, and I had two-way video, using the little built-in webcam.

So now I have a handy little video-phone!