The Blork Blog

There’s been a backlash against netbooks in recent weeks, with one blog post in particular standing out. Netbooks, for the uninitiated, are small, lightweight and not-so-powerful laptops that have been selling like hotcakes for the past year because they offer most of the capabilities of a full-size laptop in a lightweight package (usually about a kilogram), and at a lightweight price (generally from $250 to $500, but I’ve seen them south of $199 on occasion).

A lot of the complaints come from the “mobility” fans — people who already have big, heavy, and powerful laptops as well as smart phones (usually iPhones). They see netbooks as entirely pointless because they lack the power of their serious laptops and the mobility of their smart phones. News flash: if you already have a laptop and an iPhone then yes, a netbook would be pointless. News flash update: not everybody shares your situation.

I’m an example of the kind of person who finds a netbook to be a perfect device for my needs. I have a desktop computer where I do all my “heavy lifting,” including image processing for my two photoblogs. I have a beautiful 22-inch HP monitor that should be (and hopefully will be) color calibrated for photography work. I’m perfectly happy to do that work — and most of my writing and blogging work — at my desk in front of that big bright monitor, using the keyboard and mouse of my choice. I have no desire to do that work on a laptop. None at all. (You want reasons? Start with not wanting to carry my entire photo library and other valuable files around with me every day.)

However, I do like to occasionally go somewhere else to write. I also like to read the BBC online news in the kitchen while eating my breakfast. I find it handy to be able to look things up on IMDB and Wikipedia while I’m watching TV in the living room. I like having the option of updating my blog from anywhere — such as when I’m on vacation or merely passing time in a café or someone else’s house — and to do video chat or Skype from where ever I happen to be. I can get all that by having a laptop to go with my desktop machine. Or I can get a netbook, which does all of those things for half the price and less than half the weight.

Incidentally, I don’t have a smart phone, but I have an iPod Touch, which, with WiFi, is almost the same. More often than not when I’m looking things up on the Web while watching TV it’s on the iPod. Sometimes I use it to read the news on the Beeb, too, but all the scrolling can easily get annoying while you’re trying to eat.

That said, what I find rather laughable are the mobility fans who think you can do just as much (or even “almost” as much) on a smart phone as you could on a netbook. That is daft. Below I will list a few challenges; things that are dead simple on a netbook (or a laptop) that are very difficult or even impossible on a smart phone. These are things I do on a regular basis. OK, mobility fans, let’s see you do any of these on your iPhone:

• Edit a Wikipedia article, including adding references and updating the history and discussion pages.
• Make a 600 word blog post on your self-hosted Wordpress blog.
• While reading a long article in the New York Times (online), use your browser’s search function to find a keyword.
• Update an old blog post to include some new links (which generally involves having multiple tabs open, easily moving between them, cutting and pasting, and forcing a link to open in a new tab).
• Play the video that appears in a BBC online news story.
• Buy something on eBay.

“Oh, but those are things I do with my laptop” you might say. Well yes, but I don’t have a laptop! And if I want to do those lightweight things, why should I get a heavy monster of a laptop — or pay $2000+ for an “ultraportable” like the Macbook Air or the Toshiba Portégé — when I can get a netbook that is cheap and effortless to carry? It’s a matter of knowing what you need and buying accordingly.

Put another way, if you live in the suburbs and you need a vehicle for hauling lots of gear around for your gardening business, you should probably get a big pickup truck. If you need a second vehicle for getting around when it’s just you and your sweetie, get a tiny, fuel efficient thing like a two-seater Smart car. If all you ever do is go from Point A to Point B and back on a regular schedule, get a bus pass.

You can see where that’s going. My desktop is my pickup truck. My netbook is my Smart car. My iPod Touch is my bus pass.

It gives me no pleasure to speak ill of the dead. Yet, amidst all this gushing hagiography I feel I have to say something about Michael Jackson.

I’d like to point out that Michael Jackson hasn’t done a single interesting thing, creatively speaking, for 20 years. His recent recordings were bland, over-processed, and derivative. His famous dancing, which set the world alight in the 1980s, didn’t change a step since then. But so what? Many people peak early, and the body of work from his early years is truly impressive.

Then there’s the weirdness. There’s the excessive consumption — it’s reported that he spend on average $30 million per year more than he earned, and this went on for a decade. There’s also the identity issue, made highly ironic and even offensive in the face of his “Black or White” song. And of course the allegations of child molestation.

Those are just the obvious things, and again one could ask “so what?” Michael Jackson had no monoply on celebrity weirdness. Heck, for the most part I admire famous people who are able to live strange and unusual lives (RIP, Hunter S. Thompson).

Where it’s different in the case of Michael Jackson is the extent that his weirdness directly affected other people. Namely, the trio of Fauntleroys that are generally referred to as his children.

I cringe every time I see a photograph of Jackson with his gauze draped kids, and I wonder what kind of mental development issues arise when you’re brought up by a self absorbed Peter Pan who has, at best, a faint grip on the reality of everyday life. Here is a “parent” who repeatedly shows no understanding of financial, personal, or any other kind of responsibility, charged with raising three children without another parent on the scene to try to balance things out. It takes more than hugs and cookies and Coke cans filled with wine to raise children.

As the fans and the media continue to gush, I keep coming back to those kids, and my feeling that maybe now there’s a chance they’ll have something resembling a normal life.

Every year in late spring, the mayflies swarm out of the St. Lawrence river and cover the city of Montreal in a blanket of fluttering wings. It lasts for a few days and then they are gone. Fortunately, mayflies don’t bite or sting. Their only annoyance comes from their sheer numbers and their absolute stupidity. All they do is show up and flutter, flutter, flutter, tirelessly and endlessly. They cover our cars and busses, they darken our windows, and they circle round and round your head until you think you’re going to lose your mind.

Last Friday evening I was holding court at Verses Sky, the terrace on the roof of the Hotel Nelligan in old Montreal. Everything was fine until about 7:30 PM, and then, as if someone flipped a switch, mayfly season opened.

Did I mention they’re stupid? They seemed fixated on the Carlsberg umbrellas. Every Carlsberg umbrella had a cloud of mayflies incessantly spinning in circles over its apex. It went on and on. Half an hour later it was still going on, except there were more of them.

By 8:15 it was out of control. Every umbrella had its own swarm, four times bigger than you see in these pictures, plus a handful of random un-umbrellaed tables had swirling balls of mayflies just above face level. People were smoking furiously in futile attempts to shoo them away, but they kept at it. There was no purpose to it; they’re not like mosquitos on the hunt for blood, or moths stupidly drawn to flame. No, they just picked random tables and went to town with their infinite and useless swirling.

We left. Even though our table was unbothered by the mayflies, their unending and futile flapping (not unlike SEO and social network marketing types on Twitter) was driving me nuts. So too was the lack of beer on tap (bottles only? WTF?); an inconvenience I was willing to put up with for the sake of the view. But with the sun setting and the mayflies threatening to smother us, off we went.

But that’s no reason to avoid Verses Sky. By the time you read this, mayfly season will likely be over.

Quick, what’s the connection between my trip to Italy in 2006, the promotion for “Sxy Jns” currently on in Mexico City, and my mixed feelings for Google?

The answer begins with this blog post.

Let me explain. A few years ago I tried running Google ads on the Blork Blog. After about a year I had accumulated about $95 in revenue, which isn’t much, so I was thinking about removing the ads.

Part of the Google Adsense terms of service is this:

You are not permitted to encourage users to click on Google ads or bring excessive attention to ad units.

Regardless, soon after starting to run the ads I did exactly that, one time, and ironically. It was in a post where I was lamenting the commercialization of “alternative” journalism. I concluded with the joke “Alternative journalism at its finest. Now please click on one of my Google ads…” Given my (then) 1400 or so blog posts that never mentioned ads, I did not think that was bringing “excessive attention to ad units.”

Google spotted that while I was on vacation in Italy, a year after I made the post. They sent me an email demanding I remove the post within 72 hours or they would withhold my revenue.

What?

It was one ironic line in a blog that at that time had over 400,000 published words not mentioning the ads. Can Google not differentiate between persistent click solicitation and a one-time joke? Of course they could if they wanted to, but our friend Google, whom everyone knows and loves, showed its real self that day. When it comes to money and service agreements, Google is as short sighted and greedy as Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and all the other technology “heroes” of our day.

Bah!

Fortunately I had stopped into an Internet cafe in Rome and had read the email. So I had to log into my account and change the post – all the while paying extortionate usage fees to the cafe. I was severely pissed off. A few weeks later I hit the $100 mark (the threshold below which Google will make no payments). I cashed in and immediately removed the Google ads from my blog. Incidentally, I also restored the offending post to its original state.

But what does that have to do with Sxy Jns? (”Sexy Jeans,” for the uninitiated.) A year after the Google fiasco I made a blog post in which I presented a nice photo of a bunch of wet mint leaves; a photo I had taken in my back yard. I thought it would make a nice background for something, such as a desktop wallpaper, so I decided to share it. I joked that there was no need to thank me, to just click on an ad (followed by “oh wait, I no longer have ads”). Thus is the connection between these minty leaves, my trip to Italy, and Google. But where does Sxy Jns fit in?

In that blog post with the wet leaves photo I also suggested that if you want to use the photo as your wallpaper you could toss me a nickel next time you see me. Little did I know that a year and a half later someone at an advertising agency in Mexico would be scouring Google Images looking for a nice photo of fresh spring leaves to use as the background for a spring promotion of Sxy Jns. The rest of the story is self evident; he found my image and requested a high resolution version that could be used in the campaign. And he didn’t just toss me a nickel; we agreed on a reasonable price (that was, incidentally, more than I got from Google for a whole year’s worth of ads).

It is interesting that Google plays a role in all chapters of this story. I remain severely pissed off at Google although I am grateful for its service – which I use on an hourly basis and have even made money from (this is not the first time I’ve sold usage rights to an image that someone found on Google).

When I was running the Google ads, I respected the terms of use, but allowed one minor exception, which I thought would be OK because it was clearly a joke and was not excessive. What pissed me off was Google’s Draconian response. Not only did they come down on me hard for that one reference, they gave me very little time to respond.

In the end, I feel a bit like one of those captive trophy wives; someone who is grateful for the lifestyle but really hates the source of it.

Come on, Google, grow the Hell up and use some of that awesome power you have to put a reasonable threshold on usage terms before you call in the storm troopers!

Right now, as we speak, four two-kilogram hunks of pancetta are hanging in my basement.

4 x 2KG = yummy!

“WTF?” you may ask. Well I’ll tell you WTF. Once you’ve had real, hand-made pancetta, you’ll never go back to that factory-made crap you think is so exotic. And here’s the secret: making your own pancetta isn’t even difficult.

No indeed. You only need two things: (a) a friend who’s a big fan of Michael Ruhlman’s book Charcuterie, and (b) a cool and dry place to hang the stumps of meat to let them dry and age (two weeks minimum). In this case, His Nibs buys the pork bellies and does the salting and rolling, and I do the tough part; letting it hang in my basement — which is rather perfect for the task.

When it has hung sufficiently, we divide the spoils. There will be much slicing and bagging (fortunately, it freezes very well), and then the blork.org pancetta festival will begin:

• Spaghetti alla carbonara
• Bucatini all’Amatricana
• Sautéed mushrooms with pancetta
• PLT sandwiches
• Butternut squash and pancetta risotto
• Arugula salad with balsamic vinegar and pancetta
• Pizza with porcini mushrooms and pancetta

Etc. etc. etc.

Perhaps there will be pictures.

A year ago (almost to the day) I reviewed a book called “Grilled Pizzas & Piadinas,” by Craig W. Priebe and Dianne Jacob. I mentioned in that review that I had tried grilling pizza once before, with modest but not outstanding success. After all, I’ve been trying to perfect the oven technique for years, and this idea of grilling is a whole other deal. Why confuse things?

But what the heck. I decided to give it another try this weekend, and I’m happy to report that it was a success.

The book helped. I used its recommended dough and dough-handling technique (tip: chill the dough after it rises). Also, for some reason my grill (or, as we call it in Canada, “BBQ”) was being more cooperative than in the past, and wasn’t cooking the crust too fast.

That said, there is a lot of technique involved. For example, you can’t walk away from the grill, expecially if your grill doesn’t heat perfectly evenly (as is the case with mine). You need to keep shuffling the crust around so it doesn’t burn on the hotspots, and you need to have a grill big enough to allow the pizza to cook under indirect heat for a few minutes after the initial toasting.

Another pleasant surprise was that the cheese on the first pie — bocconcini — melted nicely. Grilling will never give you that golden cheesy blistering that you get from a regular oven or a broiler, but it at least in this case it melted nicely.

Following the tradition of pizza nights Chez Blork, the first pie was a Margherita. I used a different sauce this time; roma tomatoes pushed through a food mill and then drained in a wire sieve, lightly cooked with some fresh slivered garlic, sea salt, pepper, and olive oil, with just a pinch of oregano. (I usually use canned San Marzano tomatoes with salt, pepper, and olive oil, and no cooking).

It worked out really well, and the crust was crispy with a just the right amount of char.

Click for huge Food Porn version on Flickr.

The second pie was more like a foccacia, as there was very little sauce left, and no bocconcini. I bascially topped it with a lot of olive oil, finely grated Parmesano Reggiano, and a medley of grilled vegetables and chopped fresh tomatoes.

Click for huge Food Porn version on Flickr.

It took a year before I tried the techniques from Priebe and Jacobs’ book, but I’m glad I did. Success means pizza is an option on even the warmest summer evenings.

Last week I came upon a reference to a product called Presto. It claims to be a fast, lightweight version of Xandros Linux designed for fast booting and minimal operating system overhead. The odd thing is that it isn’t installed independently; you install it from Windows. When you boot your machine, you are given the choice of running Windows or Presto. However, according to Presto’s FAQ, it isn’t actually Linux; it’s “a Windows application based on Linux.”

Regardless, it sounded interesting and I thought I’d like to try it on my HP Mini 1000 netbook. I did a quick search to see if there were any known problems, and I found nothing of significance so I installed the trial version. True to its claims, it booted in 12 seconds. Wow!

After that, things didn’t go so well. I’ll begin by listing the good stuff, then the bad. Spoiler: the bad was so bad I uninstalled it and ended up having to reinstall Windows in order to get my Mini 1000 working correctly.

The Good

It boots really quickly, like 12 seconds quickly. Wow!

It shuts down really quickly. Something like three or four seconds.

The interface, while very minimal, is quite functional. You get a sort of task bar on the side of the screen that has a few buttons (one for the web browser, one for the file manager, etc.). Very basic, but that’s what you should expect from an OS that boots in 12 seconds.

It has an “App Store,” just like the iPhone. This is an excellent innovation, because one of the biggest complaints that nOObs have about Linux is the difficulty of installing software. Typically, you need to use some obscure commands in a terminal window to access some kind of repository somewhere (and it’s never really clear which repository to use), and then you often have to download the software in different parts and do all sorts of things that only make sense to Linux experts. Presto’s Linux App Store is the kind of thing that could really help bring Linux to the average user.

The Bad

Hidden Control Panel

Presto looks terrible when you first start it up. The fonts are all to big and the buttons are ugly. I could not find a control panel, so I went to the Presto web site and checked out their very minimal FAQ. It turns out you have to open a terminal window first (Ctrl-Alt-t) and then type this unintuitive command: xfce4-settings-manager. You have to do that every time you want to change settings.

Further research revealed that the control panel was pinned to the task bar in the beta version of Presto, but not in the 1.0 release. Why? Who decided to pull this very useful tool out of plain view and hide it behind an arcane terminal command? (WTF does “xfce4” even mean?)

Hidden Apps

I decided to try out the App Store. I went in a poked around and downloaded two free applications; a text editor and FileZilla (FTP). Great. But where the heck did they go? There was no sign of them anywhere. Nothing appeared on the task bar and there were no desktop icons. I dug around some more on the web, and found out that a patch had been issued, available from the App Store, that puts the Control Panel back on the task bar. It also includes a “launcher.”

It required a lot of digging to find the patch and I never would have found it had I not read about it in the Presto forums. I installed it, and bingo! The launcher appeared, and there too were my text editor and FileZilla.

At this point the Linux dorks (not to be confused with Linux users) are thinking “yay, he dug around and now it’s working the way he wants it to. So what’s he complaining about?” The rest of us, however, are thinking “what idiot decided to hide those things in the first place? Is the product manager asleep at the wheel? The launcher should be part of the initial installation because it’s an important part of the user experience.”

Trackpad Problem

In Presto, the trackpad on my Mini 1000 worked as a basic pointer, but there was no scrolling function. In the forums I found a reference to this issue that said it was just a matter of downloading and installing the right drivers. So I asked for clarification; what drivers and where do I get them? Silence. More silence. Days passed, and still nothing but silence. Great. Thanks for the excellent support.

No Sleep Mode

Every laptop on earth has a sleep mode. You close the lid, and the machine goes to sleep. It’s still on, but the hard drive and the screen is powered down. This is basic, standard stuff. With Presto, when you close the lid it shuts off.

Back to the forums. Apparently there is no fix for this, and in a rare appearance by someone who actually works for Xandros (the parent company of Presto), the claim was made that it was a safely issue.

The guy said a laptop in sleep mode might overheat if put into a backpack. What? All around me, every day, I see thousands of people carrying their sleeping laptops. I’ve done it myself with the half dozen or so laptops I’ve used over the years. Yet this one guy at Xandros has apparently not been living on the same planet as me, because he thinks we’ll burst into flames if we put our sleeping laptops into our backpacks. Therefore, no sleep mode for Presto.

Well, sir, no sleep mode is a deal breaker for me. Even if Presto boots in only 12 seconds, I open and close my laptop dozens of times a day, sometimes a dozen times in an hour. I don’t want to have to close my applications every time I want to close the lid. No sleep mode is absolutely retarded!

Help and Documentation

The Presto web site has a few words of instructions for installation, a very basic FAQ, and links to the forums. There is also a feedback form where you can send in your questions. That’s it!

Oh, but we’re in the time of web 2.0 you say. Get all your help from the forums! That would be great if people actually responded to questions that are posted.

I posted four questions, none if which were complicated, and as of this writing none have been answered.

The silence of the forums.

Dear Xandros; if you’re going to rely on user forums for tech support then you really need to assign a few people to monitor the forums and to reply to questions that are not being addressed by other users. This is the FAIL zone for product launches; if you don’t actively support your new users they will go away. Relying on un-monitored forums is passive support.

Windows Hose Job

Here’s where it goes beyond “deal breaker.” At one point I decided to boot into Windows. While there, I went to check something on the web. Zonk! Pages not loading. I tried Firefox, Chrome, and IE and none of the browsers would load a page. (Yes, I was definitely connected and online). I went back into Presto and Firefox worked fine. Back to Windows; nothing.

(This is where Presto as “a Windows application based on Linux,” as opposed to a standalone Linux operating system, shows itself as a hazard. You seem to be in a lightweight Linux environment, but in fact it’s messing with your Windows setup and drivers.)

Interestingly, the Windows troubleshooting GUI had to go online to get some information, and it did so without any problems. Also, I could ping web sites in a Windows command window. It just wouldn’t connect through any of my web browsers. Incidentally, I also noticed that my LAN icon in the taskbar was missing.

I tried many fixes, and none of them worked. I spent hours on this, trying everything. All indications were that I was connected and everything was fine. I just couldn’t connect to any web pages. (The Linux dorks are shaking their heads saying “the workaround is obvious; surf the web through Presto.” I won’t elaborate on just how stupid that is.)

In the end, I uninstalled Presto. But guess what? That didn’t bring my Windows web browsing back. After much more fixing attempts I managed to get it so it would occasionally load some pages, but it was intermittent and entirely unacceptable. (Incidentally, after uninstalling Presto my LAN indicator came back. I don’t know what the connection between the two is.)

So thanks to Presto, I spent most of last night reinstalling Windows on my HP Mini 1000. This is no easy feat given that my netbook does not have a CD or DVD drive. But I managed it, and many hours later I am back online and everything works.

In the meantime, my questions in the forums are still lying there, unanswered. I did, however, get an email response to my support form query about the connectivity problem in Windows. After a three day wait I got this brilliant reply: “Can you check with your Windows Xp Network Settings for any incorrect settings. Also check for any wireless connection settings configuration that might have any issues.” Dude, I spent an entire day doing that!

The verdict is this: Presto sucks.

Presto sucks because of its lack of user support, its product management FAILURE, and because it hosed my Windows connectivity.

Update: the day after I finally heard from the support guy (and did not reply), he followed up, asking if I had made any progress. So they at least have a pulse.

Update 2: It has been pointed out to me offline that this review reads a bit like someone winging because some obscure Linux variation isn’t supported to my liking. However, I should point out that Presto is not some obscure Linux variation designed for tinkerers. It is a commercial venture, designed to appeal to non-specialized users.

Xandros is a big company, and Presto has a lot of marketing money behind it. (That Video on their Web site is professionally made, and that App Store was not coded overnight.) You have to pay to use Presto beyond its seven day trial, and you have to pay for many of the apps in the App Store.

If Presto were indeed a tinkerer’s delight, I would have gone in with the expectation of having to fight with it. (Or, truth be told, I wouldn’t have gone in at all.) But my criticisms are based on Presto as a commercial venture.