You see?  That one little evisceration was an isolated incident.  It is, by and large, a gentle little beast.  Speak to it in soothing tones and don’t let it see you carrying any Microsoft software, and everyone gets along just fine.

Only two days after I acquired my 11″ MacBook Air, it has eliminated all possible threats to its power by savaging the only other ultraportable laptop in the apartment.  The smaller, plastic-bodied Asus Eee 1000HE — already weakened by a year of battering and no longer able to reliably power up — never stood a chance.

The Eee served me well for a while, but as you can see there is no point in getting sentimental.  Pieces of the Eee will live on; I will get an enclosure for the hard drive and use it as an on-the-go backup disk, and that lonely gig of memory will find its way into something.  The rest will be recycled or sold as replacement parts for Eees of greater fitness.

John’s company makes wind-powered recumbent tricycles.  When I passed him John had the sail stowed and was getting along by pedaling, but there are sailing videos on his website.  Difficult to see in this picture is the flexible solar panel over John’s head which serves as dual sun shade and iPod charger.  The website also shows a camping add-on where the mast serves as the central pole of a teepee-style enclosure (claimed to be able to sleep six, though that seems like overkill to me for a one-person vehicle).

I’ve read plenty of stories that feature sail-powered land transport, but this was my first real world encounter with the concept.  I can’t quite decide if it felt more like seeing a glimpse of a techno-optimist sustainable energy future or a Bacigalupian calorie economy dystopia.  Strange to think that the Venn diagram of those two milieus may have some overlap.  But it’s an elegant and fascinating device.  Continued good luck to John on his trip across the country.

The little guy is now a hackintosh.  To make this work I had to get an SSD big enough to hold OS X, so I picked up a 16 gig for $60.  I also used a lot of information (not to mention a few different bootloaders) found on the mydellmini.com forum.

It has rounded clamshell design with an easy to grip rubberized plastic case.  The keyboard is 93% standard size with textured, island keys.  The display is edge to edge glass, like the current Macbook line has, making it supremely easy to clean.  Physically, it is a lovely machine and would be a pleasure to use if I were willing to run the operating system it comes with and is configured for, Windows XP.  Unfortunately, I’m not.

The N310 did not want to play nice with Ubuntu Linux.  The biggest problem was, I suspect, with the power management software.  If I left the unit plugged in and set up not to go into suspend or hibernate mode, then it worked fine.  But, of course, that’s not what a netbook is for.  On battery, or whenever it went through suspend/resume cycles, hardware support became very spotty, and I got frequent disk I/O errors that necessitated rebooting.  Additionally, the screen brightness controls were eccentric to the point of being unusable, and the open source drivers for the Atheros wifi card never reported better than 60% signal strength on the occasions when they worked at all.  A power user might know enough to implement workarounds for these quirks, but I couldn’t figure out any fixes, nor find any in the community support fora.  There are enough equivalent, better supported units that I finally decided I didn’t want to bother with it anymore, I wanted a computer that would let me get work done.

I reiterate, none of these problems were there under Windows XP, so if that is a usable operating system for you then the Samsung N310 is a very, very nice unit (albeit not for people who want to mess with the internals of their computer; the case is hostile to tampering).  But for me Windows itself is a problem, and so my N310 is on its way back to where it came from.

From left to right: DVD writer, Dell mini 9, Samsung N310, 13″ MacBook.  This is going to be fun.

That was a little over four weeks ago.  I’ve lost 9.5 lbs.

Lose It is more than just a calorie tracker.  It calculates your resting metabolic rate and assigns you a daily calorie budget to meet your weight loss goal.  Every day you put in the food you eat and, if you so desire, the exercise you undertake, and it keeps statistics about your budget management on a daily and weekly basis.  What makes it really effective is that its interface for tracking diet is connected to an online food database that makes it largely unnecessary to know the caloric content of what you are eating beforehand; you can find the the meal you just ate, or a reasonable approximation thereof, from within the program itself.  The database has specific meals from many national restaurant chains, most national grocery brands, and any individual ingredient you are likely to use.  You can input custom recipes and foodstuffs, and the app remembers them so you need only select it the next time.  I’m not an eater of staggering variety, so after a month of using Lose It I very rarely have to search for foods anymore; most of what I eat is there to be selected from my list of previous meals.  I’m also not a person of great willpower, but the subtle feedback of my green calorie bar turning red when I go over-budget for day seems to be enough to keep me in line.  I’m averaging about one over-budget day a week, making me consistently under-budget on a week-by-week basis.  And, as I mentioned, it’s working.  I’m losing weight.

Lose It (iTunes App Store link) is a great.  It even has nutrition tracking functions, which I haven’t used because I’m more interested in vanity than health, but I’m sure they’re excellent.  It’s a free download, so if you are an iPhone user there’s no reason not to check it out.

• ARM® Cortex™-A8 600Mhz+ CPU running Linux
• 430-MHz TMS320C64x+™ DSP Core
• PowerVR SGX OpenGL 2.0 ES compliant 3D hardware
• 800×480 4.3″ 16.7 million colours touchscreen LCD
• Wifi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth & High Speed USB 2.0 Host
• Dual SDHC card slots & SVideo TV output
• Dual Analogue and Digital gaming controls
• 43 button QWERTY and numeric keypad
• Around 10+ Hours battery life

Screw getting a netbook.  I want one of these.  The first batch is sold out, and there is still design work being done, but the organizers claim to be on schedule to ship this year.  If this product ever fully condensces out of the vaporware, one will be mine.  It is necessary.