Trying to not post a picture of food every now and then. Heh, still taking public transport to and from work, so I decided to bring my camera out just to grab some photos. Put on the 85mm f/1.8 to try as I seldom venture further than 55mm these days.

The flowers were sticking out of the fence, and the 85mm gives the back of the fence that nice shallow depth of field. Also played around with the white balance to impart a blueish hue on it. I think it works pretty well with the picture. Trying something different as I usually try to make the colours naturally white.

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Geek rambling ahead. You have been warned.

Since I bought in Eee PC in late 2008, I’ve always wanted to replace the internal SSD as it’s been pretty slow. That plus the fact that I only had less than 450MB of space left on the SSD made it difficult for me to install more programs (poor program design, forcing me to install stuff on the C:/ drive).

Managed to snag one off eBay at a reasonable price. The SSD came with an external USB case/connector but the computer did not want to detect it so I just pulled out the older SSD and installed the new one. After fiddling around with Clonezilla and GParted, I managed to transplant the Windows partition on the older, slower 4GB SSD to the newer, faster 32GB SSD. Took me a while to figure some of the bits out, but eventually got everything working.

The SSD upgrade is like buying a new computer. My Eee PC feels as snappy as my desktop for most tasks (other than running Flash related media, where it slows to a crawl, hence the reason why Apple shuns it from their iPhone and iPad). Startup to Windows felt the same (although it was already reasonably quick to begin with, under 30 seconds). After that you could see the new SSD shine, as the previous one would take a while to load up all the startup processes before I could do anything with it. I tried Firefox initially, and there wasn’t that noticeable lag when starting up the program, or when opening new tabs and switching between sites. The most exciting part came when I tried Google Chrome. Startup was instant, and everything just loaded in a zip.

I feel now that my Eee PC can keep up with me and it’s one of those machines that seems to cater for only 2% of the market masses, as Asus has phased out my model and have not replaced it. None of the other manufacturers produce anything similar as well.

The 8.9″ screen is too small for most people and it makes people squint. It is however, exactly the kind of size I want as it keeps the form factor tiny enough and this is still the lightest netbook with a decent screen resolution at 1.1kg. Everything else is about 1.5kg, and every little bit of weight counts when you are travelling.

When they can manufacture another laptop at that weight with more performance, I might consider upgrading. There is the iPad at 700gm, but it has no USB ports (for me to backup photos when travelling) and I don’t think I can type nearly as fast on it as I can with a physical keyboard (and as with the screen, the keyboard is too small for most people to type comfortably on,which makes me special, heh). The last bit is that I can’t service the iPad the same way I service my Eee PC. Parts are available on eBay and I’ve replaced a keyboard, upgraded an SSD and if the battery dies on me one day, I can easily procure a replacement on eBay. I don’t have to send it back to Apple and wait for them to replace the battery for me.

Having said all that, I am a geek and the iPad will appeal to the other 98% of people who would rather not have to do any manual repairs/upgrades on their own devices. So in general, what works for me usually does not work for everyone else. Heh.

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Heh, and I had to post a picture of food. My friend’s mum makes the best kind of laksa from the northern parts of Malaysia. The soup base is hot, with lots of chilli, fish and coconut. You top up the noodles with bean sprouts, lettuce, red onions and cucumbers before ladling in the hot, tasty soup.

I never fail to have more than one bowl of it everytime I get the opportunity to eat it.