I recently picked up an Acer Aspire One 522, for $330 sold and shipped by Amazon.  I'm very pleased with my purchase.  I'll publish a bit of info going forward on jumping some of the Linux hurdles, etc... but here's the general overview.

When I started shopping for a netbook, my wishlist involved a rare trinity of stats...

A minor tech note for anyone else in this situation:  I recently bought a Motorola Dext MB200 Android phone, shipped from Canada, originally sold and locked to the carrier Bell.  It's a very nice device and I got it for a great price.  There are eBay vendors who sell unlock codes for well under $10 for most types of phone, and before buying this phone, I verified that was the case for the Dext.

Today I constructed a thing of beauty.  The K2D2 is not the distant cousin of a famous Astromech droid... no, the K2D2 is an amalgam of two fine consumer products that were simply destined to meet.

Kentucky Fried Chicken's Double Down sandwich is a delightful thing.  Two boneless fried chicken breasts surround bacon, pepperjack cheese, and a savory sauce.  One of KFC's advertising claims regarding this masterpeice is that it is so meaty that there was simply no room for a bun.

I thought otherwise.

Taking inspiration from the fabled "Luther" burger and armed with an instrument of plastic cutlery, I obtained one Krispy Kreme glazed donut on my way to lunch with the Colonel.

I've been using computers pretty much constantly for over two and a half decades.  Until last week, I had involuntarily acquired viruses zero times.  I also maintained that record without constantly running antivirus products... after all, they consume more resources than most viruses, and if you adhere to safe practices, no problem, right?

I learned the hard way that I needed to make a couple amendments to my safe computing practices.  I'll share my methods, old and new:

I've continued to refine my environment on the Zipit Z2, and noticed that the direction towards Matchbox instead of Fluxbox is getting popular, in part, due to default window sizes in Fluxbox greatly exceeding the 320x240 Zipit's screen.  I fixed that in Fluxbox with three simple steps:

1) Install DevilsPie.

Towards making the Zipit Z2 a useful small computer, there are a few distinct paths:

• Optimize it as a command-line oriented, text-based tool, with lots of custom scripts and appropriate applications.
• Optimize it with a Linux GUI and adapt normal Linux applications to work with the small screen (320x240 pixels)
• Adapt prior work from small screen, PDA-oriented Linux GUIs, such as the work done for the Zaurus platform

I've been making efforts from all three angles... the first being easiest and simplest to acheive, the last offering the cleanest solution through the most effort.  Today, I'd like to share some of my success in the second arena.

On my Zipit running Debian, I've finally managed to control font sizes. 

I've been following the wonderful hackery going on for the Zipit Z2, mostly following tutorials from the Hunter Davis blog.

After following the Debian Install Instructions he posted, I've done some additions and explorations that I thought were worth sharing:

A couple weeks ago, I started using Mon.itor.us for uptime and response time tracking of my websites.  They're free.  They use a Netvibes-ish widgety sort of monitoring page where you can build custom graphs and charts for your sites.  I'm pretty impressed so far.  I tagged my various "External Monitors" (site response and uptime checkers) by the hosting provider, and I'll probably add tags for the software packages I use (Joomla, PHPBB, etc...) to do additional comparisons with their "External Report" feature, which can give you data by tag.

I've added the ability to monitor kids.woot.com from the Woot Tracker Widget.  Enjoy!

Atkins is so 10 years ago, and as such, not every restaurant has a low-carb menu these days... in fact, I can't count them on more than one hand.  However, a low-carbohydrate diet is still effective and maintainable, and a great way to stay fit or lose weight.  Even though it's mostly off the menus, it's still convenient and available if you're slightly creative.

Today I had Wendy's for lunch.  My meal amounted to 10 net grams of carbohydrate and it cost under $5.  It was satisfying for an adult male with an above-average appetite.  Here's what I ordered: