Having tried different version of linux on my netbook i had notice meego had been released for netbooks so thought i would give it a try,  here is my experience with the operating system.

Here is a quick breakdown of the layout of Meego v1, upon booting you are presented with a screen with a menu bar across the top each one is classed as a zone, they are My Zones – This has thumbnails of recent web-pages,images,tweets etc, Zones – Show your running programs, Applications – Sows all installed programs, Status – shows social website updates, People – show your contacts online chat,  Internet – with a thumbnails of your most visted sites, Media for access to your music, but not videos or photos, Devices – shows connect devices and hard drive, docs etc, you can also add the gadgets zone for google gadgets.

My netbook is a acer one 150 with 8gb ssd drive and 1.5gb ram. The image download is 800mb,  and using Win32Diskimager on my windows pc was easily transferred to a 1gb usb stick, when you boot from the live image usb you are given 3 choices including running from usb or installing to hard drive,  i would recommend you boot from usb to have a play around with the system first,  which i did and i was really happy with the way it ran.

Installation to the hard drive only took around 10mins or so,  so very quick on installing,  upon first reboot after installing I got an error saying INIT Id “x” respawning to fast: disabled for 5 minutes, I left for over 5mins but nothing, I rebooted and then booted up great with no problems, this does seem to be a common problem upon install. once installed i tried to install some programs from the garage (this is like the app store, market etc) there are only a few applications within there,  there is no openoffice at the moment (though you can get it but i haven’t tried yet to install as bit complicated at the moment)  but you do have abiwork & Gnumeric When i tried to install any program i got the error “there was a error resolving (ie abiword) click to try again. I then did a system update that is under the applications zone then system tools This took an age to install around 1hr 30mins and was only a few updates.

Setting up the wifi was very easy just click the wifi icon on the top bar, you can see your wifi networks and then just connect, it remembers you wifi key once put in, also if you connect through a network cable connects straight away, the one good thing for me as even though a basic operating system you can still get access to see your ip address, gateway address and status etc.

Doing the update solved the problem with installing programs, and i happily installed abiword, gimp, Gnumeric And tuxpaint (great drawing program for kids) to play mp3 music files and divx etc this isn’t supported direct, you have to install different components to get them to play, I found this website(  http://setupguides.blogspot.com/2010/06/playing-avi-mp3-divx-and-mp4-in-meego.html )to download & install the whole lot in one go (I take no responsibility for the link provided) this took around 2hrs to download and install all the components, so make sure your netbook is plugged into the mains. Once this was done all mp3′s and divx files I tried player perfect, to be honest videos played even better than either ubuntu or kubuntu that I had installed before. The media player uses a modified version of the banshee music player.

The version that I installed was with the google chrome web browser, this works perfectly and support all the extensions available. I love google chrome as a web browser anyway, i now use as my my browser on my windows 7 pc instead of firefox as default now, as really quick on loading webpages especially if the site is using alot of javascript. Flash support is built in so sites like youtube etc work perfect, again youtube on the video seemed to played better than the ubuntu i had installed before. The Empathy instant message client work flawlessly easily setup my facebook & msn live chat.

The only problem I have had is if you setup the gadgets page / screen, you can install a selection of gadgets but I had problems with some ie the weather app, there was no way to configure your location, and the facebook gadget you cannot login. Not sure wy these not working as meego uses the google gadgets desktop, though this maybe solved with a future update.

The status page only supports twitter & last.fm. I configured my twitter with no problems @kswebdesign, though there is no support for your facebook status and updates, which does seem unusual as facebook is as popular as twitter and really should be on there, not sure if facebook support will be added in the future.

Viewing photo’s and images is great, if you go to the devices zone, and you can then access your pictures directory, once you go into each directory you see the thumbnails of your images, the supplied images viewer is good and in full screen, now makes my netbook great for showing off my photos to friends etc. As I use my netbook for viewing my photos that are stored on a SD card in a reduced resolution, so makes a great portable digital photo frame.

All in all considering this is the first release for netbooks this operating system is great for what I need it for, ie boots and connects to the internet within 20 seconds, I have got basic word processing and spreadsheets, and the internet access through chrome is great. So I am sticking with meego for the moment on my acer one, as good enough for what I need, and hope the future releases do fix some of the problems and support facebook on the status page as this would make it perfect.

Just noticed this from datel design, it is a module that plugs into the bottom of your psp and adds motion control to a lot of psp games, looks like it uses a special menu to load the games. There are a lot of games that it seems to be compatible with. The manufacturer seems to do software updates from their website, so new games should work with it also.

www.tiltfx.com

So its like turning your psp into a ipod touch / iphone control system for psp games with does look cool.

As one of my favorite games on the psp is the locoroco series and does work with that, and as well some of the racing games that I play, so I have just ordered one they are £14.99 plus shipping.  Hopefully this may make me use my psp again So when I have received it will do a full review soon.

Below is the promo video

Some one today asked me about these penny auctions sites that are out there, so just thought would share my information about them.

Now we all know about the popular auction sites, these are where the item is on a set time auction you bid and if your the highest bidder at time of auction end then you win the auction at that price.

The penny auction sites work in a slightly different way, im not going to mention any individual site names, but these basics are mostly the same for all of them. You see a item that is listed the price starts from zero pence, you place bids at just a penny and the price just keeps going up by 1pence at a time, the auctions are normally for just 1 minute, but as a new bid goes on that item it then starts again for 1 minute, so if you have placed a bid and no one else bids in within that minute you win the auction at that price.

Now this seems great, but for you to put on a bid it costs you per bid, for example a site I was looking at, the bid price was 60p per bid, you can also txt in your bid but this works out at £1.50 per bid. I will now give you a few examples, prices below where at time of writing this article.

A macbook air at a rrp of £1149.00, had been bidded up to £108.57, but this means that 10879 bids have been placed, and at 60p per bid that means the auction site has made £6514.20, thats well over £5000 profit on rrp, but someone will have got a good bargain

Again a iphone 3GS 32gb rrp £549.00 had been bidded up to £33.92, so again with the maths that makes the auction site £2035.20, but again the winning bidder has got a good bargain.

Now as you can see from the above the auction sites do make a great deal of money, but they can loose out sometimes i.e. a canon SLR camera kit with a rrp £1290.00, when for a total of £8.37, so that just made the auction site £502.20, but as you can see from the previous examples they are making enough money off other items, that they can afford to let it go at that price.

You also had to pay a shipping fee and vat needs to be added ontop of the winning figure and shipping combined

So are they a scam, well no not really, as you can win at a very low price with just a little outlay, but you could still keep putting bids in at that nominal amount loads of times and not win anything, so these bids could amount up and you still have nothing to show for it, but on the other hand you may win a expensive item at a very cheap price. but again as you can see these sites are making possibly alot of money, and the person with the highest bid does get a very cheap.So just bear in mind if bidding on a item on these sites that it is costing you each time you put on a bid i.e. if you put on six bids that would be a total of £6.00.

In my opinion these sites are more like a lottery than a auction site. As its the same as playing the lotto, you pay your money and take a chance, and if you win anything that great, but if you dont was only a small outlay for a chance.

Now I know some people will disagree with what I have said, but this is just giving people the information of the way these sites work.

Noticed the other day on a news site about the most used passwords, not sure how many people were surveyed but the top ten was like this: Think the source was Imperva

1: 123456   2: 12345   3: 123456789   4: Password   5: iloveyou

6: princess   7: rockyou  8: 1234567   9: 12345678   10: abc123

Now I know from experience that some of these are really used by some people, even though I say not too, so this is just a few tips about passwords, First thing to do is not have the same password for all your secure Internet sites, always have different passwords for each site.

Also make sure your passwords are alpha numeric ie letters AND numbers, Don’t ever give your passwords to anyone else especially and emails you get through asking about your account or password for a particular site.

If you want to be fully secure with your passwords use a mixture of upper and lower case characters also most sites allow you to use other characters ie £$%^&, so mix them up, And sometimes is best to change your passwords on a regular basis ie every 6 months.

Now this is the basics of using passwords, this is the advice that I give, but you will find what is best for you just steer clear of very simple passwords

Today I had to help setup a cyberbike for the nintendo wii, so here’s my opinion on it.

The bike seems pretty study, the body is made of white plastic to as a guess match the wii, on the handlebars are thumb sticks and different buttons, these work as a gamecube controller. The bike connects with a cable from the front of the bike to the 1st gamecube controller connector on the wii.

The game itself that comes with it loaded up all ok, you then have to setup a profile, this is where some problems started, after you have setup your basic profile you have to set your pedaling strength, you have to pedal for 20+ secs, but we noticed pedaling wasn’t showing up on the screen, tried again but no luck, restarted game and set wii controller as main control, but still no joy, the manual for the game itself doesn’t even say anything about the bike as a controller, after a quick check in the photocopied bike manual, there is a switch on the handlebars that has gc or sb on, the bike was setup to gamecube controller mode, change the switch reset game and all ok.

The game itself has mainly to modes a story mode and exercise mode, the story mode gives you different challenges to do in the four separate worlds, they are submarine, normal bike, helicopter, and a mine cart, well these are my explanations of the worlds. the exercise mode you choose your type,time ,world, difficult and then play. You get a on screen display depending on mode of your time, distance, speed and calories burnt, we played around with a few modes over about 30mins and some did seem fun to play.

The different modes are pretty good using the bike handlebars to steer and the more faster you pedal the bike the faster you go on the screen. The bike to be honest is not that comfortable to sit on and if  you not wearing trainers or some footwear can hurt the bottom of your feet and because of no pedal straps you feet can easily come off the pedals.

Even with the problems with the setup of the bike and the slight problems with seat and pedal that could be over come with a cushion and some straps, think this is a fun exercise bike, as you get great interaction from the different on screen games, and at just under £100 from argos (home order only) not a bad buy if you have a wii and are looking for a fun exercise bike / game. But if you are just looking for a normal exercise bike there are probably better made ones out there. But because this uses fun games gives you more of an incentive to use it.

Someone asked me to recommend a cartoon animation software, and I had a playabout with this software late last year on ubuntu, so could recommend this. The software is called Pencil, it allows you do some great 2D animation either with bitmap or vector images and then can be saved in various formats.  It is available for linux, windows and macs, Ive been using it on ubuntu 9.10 unr and on windows 7 with no problems, if you download pc version it is a zip file just copy the files to a directory on your pc and run or create a shortcut from there.

And best of all this is free, though you can donate to the developer, I’m not associated with the software just thought would pass the information on.  Though if anyone can recommend any other cartoon animation software your comments are welcome

Goto the following website to download:  http://www.pencil-animation.org/