When I replaced my MacBook with a Mac Mini setup I was always planning to invest some time into a netbook. I recently ordered a (RED) Dell Mini 10v with the plan to turn it into a hackintosh. After a few days (*cough* weeks) of tinkering I now have a machine I’m happy with.

In short: It’s a (RED), as in the charity sponsoring colour,  Dell Mini 10v that retails for about £250. It has a 1.6GHz Atom processor, 2GB ram (custom), a 1024×600 screen, and a 160GB hard drive. I installed Windows 7 and Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.1 on it and things are running smoothly. Here are some photos and some notes from my experience.

The cool

• I love the colour and form factor. I wish Apple would make a (RED) laptop with a 10 to 12 inch screen.
• I installed 2GB of ram (easier than I expected) and made some more changes to the hardware by installing a different wireless module and a bluetooth module.
• WiFi (802.11n) and Bluetooth work
• Sleeping works for the most parts
• Multi touch works including 2 finger scrolling, and 3 finger swiping
• It dual boot with Windows 7
• I managed to sync some parts of OS X through Dropbox, making this machine an almost virtual copy of my workstation when it comes to some of the every day tasks.
• I installed a few handy apps to make the most out of the small screen size and small trackpad.
  • Quicksilver: Most of you will know this app, but for those of you who don’t think of it as every app and document under the tip of your fingers, without having to touch the trackpad
  • Megazoomer: Zoom any app to full screen. Very handy for browsing, although it seems to be a bit temperamental sometimes.
  • Caffeine: Prevents your machine from falling asleep when you don’t want it to. Handy for when you’re giving a presentation or when you’re watching a YouTube video.
  • DropBox: Simply the best app for sharing documents across multiple machines. I can’t live without anymore.
  • 1Password: Never need to remember your password again. Combine it with DropBox and your passwords are synced across all your machines.

The not so cool

• Installing was a bit of a pain as it required a lot of reading, diving into tutorials, and most of all knowledge of both OS X and Windows. The most useful resource for everything seemed to be this Dell Mini specific forum.
• I don’t dare to upgrade to 10.6.2 because things might break. Add to that the fact that making a bootable backup is even harder, it doesn’t make for a very reliable machine that you would want to count on for your important documents.
• This is not the fastest machine. It can play SD quality video fine, but the new generation of online videos, including YouTube, seem to be very focussed on HD video, which this machine really can’t handle.
• The standard battery only gives about 2.5 hours of battery, about the same (or even less) as my MacBook did. Where is all of  that power going?! I though these machines were supposed to be energy efficient! I had a look at a 6 cell battery which gives about 5hour+ battery life but they are hard to find in the UK and ridiculously expensive. I had a 6 cell battery with my Dell Mini 10 (non-V) but crazy enough that one didn’t fit on the Dell Mini 10v. Bastards at Dell!
• Hibernation doesn’t work (for now) and I can live with that. The real problem though is sleeping. Although the machine sleeps, if I leave it overnight it will drain quite a bit of the battery (20%). I will have to see if this can be fixed.
• I really need to bring a USB mouse when I’m off to the Netherlands for Christmas for 2 weeks. The trackpad is nice, but if you want to do some real work a external mouse is a must. The keyboard is quite useable though.

The unknown

• I’m not sure if the VGA out works, I need to hook it up to a monitor.

The future

• I might one day take out the Dell logos on the front and back and replace them with something more Apple. I already looked around and found a few articles where people laser cut an Apple logo into their machine and added a glowing apple in it’s place. It seems to require a laser cutter though, which I don’t have.
• I might order a US layout keyboard one day to replace this one. I already set my keyboard to US which means I can type as I’m used to as long as I don’t look at the keys.
• If I hit the F1 key the screen flickers, goes black, and that’s it. This button is somehow wired to do something special that the OS X install doesn’t like. There are some fixes for this which I need to look into.

The photos

So yesterday my new laptop arrived. I decided to get a little Dell Mini 10 netbook as a companion to my new Mac Mini workstation. At the moment I’m at the point of selling it again though.

I found a good deal on eBay for a Dell Mini 10 with integrated wireless-n, bluetooth, 3G/HSDPA, TV-tuner, HD screen and a 6 cell battery. Additionally I liked the model because everyone seems to like the Dell Mini 10 for  turning them into hackintoshes. Yeah, that’s where I was wrong.

The Dell Mini 10 has a little brother called the Dell Mini 10v (where the v stands for value). This model rarely comes with all the extras and has a atom N series processor. It turns out that my machines Z-series atom is actually the reason why I can’t run Mac OS X on it. Doh!

Now I promised myself at the beginning of the year to invest some more time in Linux, so I saw this as a good moment to try it out. I started off with Ubuntu 9.10, which is the newest Ubuntu version. After install the wifi didn’t work, neither did the graphics driver, nor the brightness controls, nor the sleep/suspend, nor the wifi, etc. I spend a few hours getting the wifi and screen to work correctly, and a hack gave me hibernation support. But by then the audio started acting up even more so I decided to do the wise thing to switch to Ubuntu 9.04 (the current long-term-support release).

I chose for the Netbook Remix release because I already started to notice that having a UI that’s optimized for a small screen and a small keyboard might be a wise plan. I managed to get everything to work pretty quickly (except for the TV tuner software) but realized that even the netbook remix doesn’t really run that smoothly on my Z530 with 1GB of ram.

Now to be fair, I’m used to machines with 4GB of ram for the least 4 years, so this is quite a step back. But the screen tearing and slow response is just sometimes killing me. So I decided to look into upgrading the RAM in this machine. This is when I realized this machine doesn’t have any upgradable RAM!

So at the moment I’m really contemplating my options. I love the built-in 3G in this machine, and the 6 cell battery is interesting, but the keyboard is crap, the upgradability sucks, and it won’t run Mac OS X.

So, what IS the best netbook out there that can run Mac OS X? Should I stick with this machine for now or maybe go back to Mac? A Macbook Air is starting to look very tempting.

I had to update my histogram service a little bit because apparently it wasn’t handling files  with spaces in it properly. I have to thank Jeroen Kluft for notifying me about this. Go and have a look at his site to see how he has been incorporating my histogram service into his own photo album. I think it’s pretty awesome!

It’s time for a roundup of week 3 of my photo challenges.

This week the theme was “The Rule of Thirds” and I again decided to pick one of my 7 daily submissions as the entry for the theme. Here they are in order.

Day 15 – Track Workers

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I had some spare time during Christmas and new Year, reason for me to use my spare time to learn something new. In this case it involves making my first Firefox Extension and using Git.

The project I decided to work in is something very simple. As a Facebook Application Developer I often run into the problem of needing to be able to view part of the source of the HTML response of Facebook. Reason for this is that Facebook embeds server errors on our servers as hidden comments in the HTML. This is handy for developers as they can then see what error their server generated.

The only problem though is that this response is hidden in the source. I therefore decided to make a small bookmarklet that extracts this data, and opens it in a new window. The bookmarklet can be found below:

Bookmarklet: Facebook HTML Uncomment

I also always wanted to make a Firefox extension, so I decided to make my bookmarklet into a Firefox Extension that detects the hidden Facebook HTML Comments and shows the user a small icon that they can they click to view the full server response. It was a bit hard, especially as Firefox extensions have their own flavor of Javascript, but it turned out to be fairly easy (less than a days work).

The result can be found here on the Firefox Add-Ons page but it’s currently still listed as experimental, so leave a comment or feedback to help me make this a public Add-On. For a tutorial on how to use the Add-On or the Bookmarket, see the video below:

Finally. I decided to add this entire project as Open Source on GitHub. I already had a GitHub account but no projects. I will probably be moving more projects over soon though, so be sure to follow the project for updates or follow me to see more of my projects show up in time.

Video

I know I could write down some traditional new year’s resolutions like last year, but everyone knows (and nobody cares) that I need to eat more healthy, sport more, etc, etc.

So here are some of my more geeky new years resolutions for this year.