Ubuntu Robots

Eeep, I got up to level 16 on the Robots game on my wee Ubuntu netbook.

Its an old game, there was a Doctor Who version of it on the Amstrad CPC 464, from an Amstrad Action cover tape/disk. The basic premise of the Ubuntu version is you start at the centre of a 45 x 30 square playing field, upon which are a two types of killer robots, you take it in turns to move. You can move one square in any direction, the robots move either one or two square towards you. If they touch you you die, if they crash into each other they blow up and leave a pile of debris.

One each level there are 10 additional robots, so on level 16, that I arrived at last night, there are 160 robots, that is, one for every eight and a bit squares. It was pretty crowded.

I died after four moves.

There's not much of a strategy really, after a while it all comes down to chance, and to get to level 16 I was just very lucky.

Asp

I've been sat here for about twenty minutes trying to think of something optimistic to write about. Just something to point at when people complain my blog is boring or depressing, so I can say no its not, besides no one reads the happy stuff.

'Here' is the cafe in Borders, with a cappucino whilst I wait for my on street parking to be free.

Why twenty minutes? Well, I blame this damned Acer Aspire One laptop running linpus, cos its just taken twenty minutes to boot up. It just sits on this blue Aspire screen, the wee hard disk light flickering away. I tried rebooting, I tried opening and closing and pinging the battery, but not it just sits at its blue Aspire screen.

I hate this netbook so much. Usually I'd chuck the thinking out of a window or lose it in a cupboard, but no, its just about functional enough for my needs so I keep it in my bag, whip it out in Borders and get frustrated.

Why not take it back to the shop and complain and swap it for a different brand? You seem to have me confused with someone else, who do you have confused with? Someone who takes things back to shops?

No, I'm going to complain right here, and to anyone who mentions Acer netbooks, and on any online forum I stumble across where the discourse covers 'what netbook should I buy?'

What's wrong with it? What's it doing? Booting up shouldn't take this long. Is it in some kind of sleep mode? With the screen fully on and burning up blue pixels. Is it defragmenting itself or other untangling its nether regions? Virus scanning maybe? God knows.

I'm supposed to be an expert in this sort of thing, computers. I had a CPC at age five and a B20 to play rats on. I was putting together PCs in the eighties and never had this hassle with MS DOS. I still know my way through autoexec.bat and config.sys files, but what the hell is wrong with this netbook?

Oh, its sorted itself.

Sent using BlackBerry® from Orange

Acer Aspire One - review after a few hours

It was the cheapest one in the shop. I tried PC World (spit) first but despite doing the eye thing on about a dozen of the milling around serving folk, none of them asked if they could help me, so I wandered into Currys next door, and got about three folk flocking to my side when I'd identified my required aisle.

So I just wanted a cheap laptop, something I could check email, surf the net, run open office and write the great British novel. They had Advent netbooks, Acer netbooks and Asus netbooks, all below £350. The Advent one had a bad looking keyboard, all flat with indistinct buttons. I'd been fantasising about owning an EEEPC for a long time, but when it came to it, the 12Gb hard disc seemed a little weedy compared to the Acer's 120Gb, hmm maybe that was a typo.

My budget didn't quite stretch into getting a Windows machine, or at a pinch the machine would be too low specced to run it as well as I'd like, and no way, no way was I going to get a Vista machine, that way lies madness.

So here I have an Acer Aspire One, half a gig of ram, 120Gb disc space, some version of linux, its not Ubuntu, some mysterious file structure.

Its pretty neat, its surf the web okay, but there's lots of wee things that need tightening up.

Like if I was some secret agent like Jason Bourne and needed to buy a wee netbook to slip into a passer-by's pocket for some convoluted reason, this wouldn't do the job.

• Unable to do MSN messenger on the wee built in messenger thing.
• The pre-installed MP3 player is crap and takes forever to clock my external hard-drive's MP3 archive
• The pre-installed OpenOffice suite doesn't have open office base
• Its an old version of OpenOffice version 2.3 when they're up to version 3.0 even 2.4 would be nice, but its not intuitive to update
• No built in audio software to use the mic
• The built in photo software is a bit crap and its not intuitive how to install gimp
• It doesn't want to update Firefox to the latest version
• Didn't recognise my usb graphics table thing when I plugged it in.
• When the battery runs low it just switches off rather than tells you you're running low
• Wait, my ipod isn't going to work with this, is it?
• The SD memory card slots don't lock the cards in, there's some kind of spring mechanism, but you can just pull them out.
• Does the fan really need to be on all the time?