Using the Sony PCM-D50 with an Eee PC

I recently bought two gadgets that are awesome and doing two very different things. The Sony PCM-D50 is an amazing little digital audio recorder that I've been using for my work as a radio journalist and audio producer. The Asus Eee PC is an amazing little (really little, we're talking seven inch screen and 2.1 pound weight) PC that I've been using for blogging on the go.

While I don't really expect to use my Eee PC for radio production much more than I expect to use my PCM-D50 for blogging, the truth is there is some overlap. Every now and again I record interviews on my digital audio recorders for podcasts, or in some cases as soundtracks to videos I produce for this or other web sites. And the Eee PC is powerful enough to run basic audio editing utilities when I need to make some quick edits on the go.

There's just one problem. While the Eee PC instantly recognized my Zoom H4 recorder when I plugged it in (letting me drag and drop audio files, or even use the Zoom as an external microphone for Skype calls), the Eee PC doesn't recognize my PCM-D50.

If I were running Windows, I could install the driver that Sony includes for stubborn PCs that fail to recognize the PCM-D50. But there's no Linux driver at the moment. So the best solution I've been able to find so far is to scrap the custom Linux distribution that comes with the Eee PC and install Ubuntu. OK, scrap might not be the right word. I'm not quite ready to give up on Xandros. But I've found that when you boot Ubuntu (or eeeXubuntu to be specific) from a flash card, the Eee PC recognizes the PCM-D50 as an external hard drive with no problem.

As an added bonus, it's much easier to install Audacity 1.3.3 on Ubuntu than on Xandros. That's because Audacity 1.3+ is still in beta, even though it's pretty stable. The newer beta versions of Audacity include a whole bunch of features that are missing in the 1.2.6 version that you can download and install on Xandros.

So right now I'm carrying a 4GB SD card around with my Eee PC. It has eeeXubuntu installed, meaning I can boot into either Xandros using the main memory or eeeXubuntu using the flash card. There's only about 1.5 GB of free space on the card, and even less on the main memory, so I have no plans to do any serious audio editing on this setup. But as soon as the eeeXubuntu developer adds a few more features like support for all the Fn keys on the Eee PC, I'll probably install the operating system to the computer's main memory and use the 4GB SD card just for storage, which should provide plenty of space for editing long interviews.

Announcing Eee Site

I've realized that this blog has become a bit of a mish mosh of news about digital audio recorders, podcasting, radio, and the Eee PC. One of these things is not (much) like the others, so I've decided to launch a spinoff site: Eee Site.

I'm not sure if I have the energy to update two sites in addition to my daily blogging routine over at Download Squad, Green Daily, TV Squad. Oh yeah, and I still manage to squeeze some time in for radio occasionally.

So for now, Eee Site contains mirrors of most of the articles I've written about the Eee PC. My goal is to continue publishing future articles about Eee news and tips over at Eee site. When those articles are related to blogging, audio production, and/or journalism I may mirror the posts on this site as well. It's all still an experiment and a work in progress. I may dump the whole thing and just keep publishing all of my non Weblogs Inc posts on this site.

But if you've only been reading this site for Eee news and couldn't care less about digital audio recorders, you might want to check out Eee Site.

Asus launches $499 Asus Eee PC 8G

Just a month after Asus first released the Eee PC 4G in the US, it looks like the company is ready to start pumping out some new variations, including a black model and the higher end 8G.

The 8G is pretty much identical to the 4G, except it has 8GB of solid state memory instead of 4GB, and 1GB of RAM instead of 512MB. Oh yeah, and it costs $100 more. If you're willing to void your warranty, you could upgrade your RAM pretty easily on your own for less money. But increasing the storage capacity would take a bit more work, so this seems like a reasonable price. Still, somehow a $500 Eee PC just doesn't seem as appealing as a $400 model.

In other news, at least one retailer seems to be selling the 4G for $299. I've never heard of this company, I've never bought anything from them, and I wouldn't recommend you do so either unless you know someone who has dealt with them in the past. At $299, I can't imagine anyone is making any money on this deal, so it sort of feels like a scam. If you have reason to believe otherwise, please let me know in the comments.

[via Gizmodo and Asus Eee Hacks]

Eee PC: Running Ubuntu from a flash drive

Well, my foray into the world of Puppy Linux was short and sweet. But since I couldn't get the audio drivers working, I decided to move on.

The folks at Pendrivelinux.com have some incredibly simple tutorials for loading Knoppix, Slax, DSL, Gentoo, and Ubuntu onto USB flash drives. Since I've spent some time with Ubuntu on my primarily laptop, I figured I'd give it a whirl on my tiny new laptop.

Continue reading at Eee Site.

Puppy Linux on the Eee PC

With all this talk of people installing Mac OS X, Windows XP, and even Windows Vista on the Eee PC, I figured I had to get in on some of this alternate OS action. But I don't have a USB DVD drive, and more importantly, I don't really want to mess with the Xandros operating system that comes with the Eee PC, which for the most part I love.

So I decided to give my Eee some puppy love. Puppy Linux, that is. Puppy is a tiny Linux distribution that fits on a flash drive, and can be booted from a flash drive. It's sort of like a LiveCD, in that you can run it from any PC without writing anything to the PC's hard drive. But since you're running the OS off of flash memory and not a CD, you can save data.

Continue reading at Eee Site.

Restore factory settings Eee PC vs. my Vista laptop

Wow. I've forgotten how much work it can be to restore a Windows PC to factory default settings.

In the two weeks since I brought home my Eee PC, I've done a complete system restore about 3 or 4 times. This is the price you pay for running through a ton of experiments. Sometimes it seems easier to start from a clean slate than to undo all the damage you've done.

And it only takes a few minutes. Because The Eee PC uses the Unionfs file system, most of the base Xandros operating system is hiding in a protected part of your memory. You can't easily touch it and mess it up. So doing a system restore means wiping the user portion of your data, but you don't have to format the whole disk or reinstall your operating system.

So you just hit F9 while rebooting, and a few minutes later your machine is as good as new. Since I only run a few third party apps like GIMP and Audacity, it takes just a few minutes to reconfigure everything the way I like it.

Now, after spending the better part of a year with my Toshiba laptop, I'm noticing that it's significantly less responsive than it was the day I brought it home. And I've been having odd glitches in my Skype calls which I wasn't experiencing using the much slower Eee PC. So I decided to do a system restore using the discs provided by Toshiba this morning.

An hour and a half later, I've almost got my OS back up and running. It will probably take me days to reconfigure all the software. In the meantime, I'll probably be using my Eee PC for a lot of day to day tasks.

Update: For a list of apps I loaded onto my Windows Vista PC right after doing a fresh install, check out my writeup at Download Squad.

This blog is now Eee PC friendly

After spending way too much time tweaking my template, this web page should now be as easy to read on the Eee PC's 800 x 480 pixel screen as it is on your big ole desktop PC.

If you're using a device with an even smaller screen, like a cellphone or PDA, check out the new "mobile version" link in the top left corner. It will take you to a stripped down version of this site optimized for small-screen reading.

Adding power management to the Eee PC

Update: It's not particularly clear that mucking with the Eee PC's clock speed actually does anything to improve battery life. So consider everything that comes below to be an intellectual exercise.

Original Post: The Asus Eee PC uses a relatively low power 900 MHz Celeron processor to help cut down on costs and to help prolong battery life. Unlike newer Pentium chips, Celeron processors don't include SpeedStep technology, which means you generally don't get advanced power management features. But while you can't configure the Eee PC's processor to alter its voltage, you can alter the processor frequency, which should theoretically prolong your battery life.

SmallFootprint over at Eee User wrote up some great instructions for turning on CPU scaling using a command line process. I figured there was no way I was going to remember that command though, so I wanted to create some shortcuts to put in my start menu. Here's how I did it.

There are three commands you need to know:

1. "echo ondemand > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor" will turn on CPU scaling (which will automatically adjust your CPU speed from 112.5 to 900 MHz depending on your work load).
   
2. "echo performance > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor" will return you to full performance mode (where your CPU will run at 900 MHz all the time).
3. "cat /proc/cpuinfo" will show you what your current CPU speed is.

You can type any of these commands into a terminal. You may need to type "sudo" at the start of each command so that your command will have root privileges. Or you might want to type "sudo bash" to bring up a root terminal so that you shouldn't have to type "sudo" before each command.

In order to add these commands to my start menu, I first created two executable files:

1. Open File Manager
2. Navigate to your Home/User folder or whatever folder you want to put these files in.
3. Right click in the File Manager and select "Create New" and then "Text File."
   
4. I named the first "Power Saver," and the second "Performance."
5. Open up the first file using the Kate text editor by double-clicking on the file. Later, we'll make these files executable, so you'll need to right-click and select "open with text editor" to edit them.
6. Enter "echo ondemand > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor" (without the quotes) in your power saver file.
   
7. Click Save and Exit.
   
8. Enter ""echo performance > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor" in your performance file.
9. Click Save and Exit.

Now you'll want to make the files executable:

1. Right-click on a file and select Properties
2. Select the Permissions tab
3. Make sure the box that says Exec is checked. For good measure, I check the boxes under Owner, Group and Others. I'm not sure is you need to click all three, but I don't think it hurts.
4. Repeat the process with your other file.

Now you should be able to double-click on a file to execute it. To check and see if it worked, bring up a console and type "cat /proc/cpuinfo" and check the CPU speed. You might need to type this a few times to be certain. In power saver mode, you will sometimes get a 900MHz report, especially if you've just executed a series of commands.

Before adding the items to my start menu, I decided to hide them so I won't see them all the time and accidentally delete or modify them. All you have to do to make these hidden files is right-click the file, select "rename" and place a "." before each file. Now in order to see them you'll have to select "show hidden files" from the File Manager.

Okay, next up let's bring up the menu editor by selecting Applications/System/Menu Editor from the start menu. Select the folder you want to place the new icons in and either create a new item or a new subfolder from the File Menu. I decided to add my files to a new folder called Applications/System/CPU Speed.

Here's how to create your new shortcut:

1. Type a name into the name field, and a description into the description field if you like.
2. Click the folder icon next to the Command box and a window will pop up that lets you browse to find your executable files. If you've hidden them, you'll have to right-click on the white part of the window and select "show hidden files."
3. Click on the icon section next to Name and Description and look through the system icons to see if you like any. You don't really need an icon, but it makes your start menu look prettier.

Now you should have a start menu that looks something like this:

When you select Power Saver or Performance, a little hourglass should pop up in your taskbar. It takes a few moments for the changes to kick in, which is odd because they're almost instantaneous in command line mode. But I think this solution is still a lot more convenient.

Note that when you reboot your PC, you will always wind up back in performance mode. But I'm pretty certain someone at the Eee User forum will come up with a way to fix that soon. And I haven't been using the new power saving trick long enough to know what if any impact it has on battery life. I'll keep you posted.

Update: OK, there seems to be a flaw in my brilliant plan. In order for the shortcuts to work, you need to make sure that scaling_governor is executable. I figured that doing this once would be enough. But it turns out that when you reboot your Eee PC, you have to reenable executable access. I'll let you know if I come up with a solution. Or if anyone has a better idea for creating a working power management shortcut, let me know.

How to run Audacity 1.3 beta on an Eee PC

I was so excited to get Audacity installed on my Eee PC the other day, that I didn't notice at first that I'd installed Audacity 1.2.6. What I really wanted was Audacity 1.3.3 beta or at the very least 1.3 beta.

What's the difference? Well, there are a bunch of improvements in the 1.3 line, but the single most important change for me is in the way Audacity handles WAV splitting. In Audacity 1.2 the only way to grab a portion of the audio track and move it to the left or right is to create a new audio track. What I frequently need to do is chop an audio file up into lots of little itty pieces and place them on a timeline, which you can do with Audacity 1.3. If that didn't make any sense at all to you, just take a look at the image above.

Continue reading at Eee Site.

Sony PCM-D50 audio recorder release pushed back

So I went ahead and pre-ordered a Sony PCM-D50 flash audio recorder from Sweetwater a week or two back when I saw that the company planned to ship them out the same day they receive their stock. And that was supposed to be November 2nd.

Well, that was last week and I haven't heard a peep about my order. So I head over to the oft-updated sales page, only to see that the new estimated ship date is November 18th.

As far as I can tell, the problem is Sony's, not Sweetwater's, because I don't think anybody else has any of the digital audio recorders in stock yet. But I was kind of hoping to have another new toy this week. On the bright side, Sweetwater won't charge my credit card until the PCM-D50 ships, so I might wind up not having to pay for my new audio recorder and my new laptop in the same month.

Dealing with large program windows on the Eee PC

One problem with the Asus Eee PC's non-standard 800 x 480 pixel screen is that some applications just don't fit on the screen. For example, sometimes when you go to add programs using the Synaptic Package Manager, the "OK" button will actually pop up below the taskbar, where you can't easily get to it. Or when you install a Firefox add-on with a particularly long list of customizable preferences, you might not be able to click all of the check boxes.

Up until yesterday, my solution was to plug in an external monitor with a higher resolution whenever I needed to see what was on those windows. This works fine if all you're doing is installing and customizing programs. How often do you need to do that when you're out at a coffee shop?

But Digital Home reader Aaron sent in a much easier solution: Hold down the Alt button and then click anywhere on the window you want to move and you can drag it around the screen.

This works better than just clicking the top of the window to drag. You'll notice that when you do this, the bottom of your window will still look cut off, but you can fix that by moving your mouse over to the edge of the window to resize it.

Eee PC + external monitor = awesome

So it turns out that not only can you use that little VGA port on the Eee PC to display an 800 x 480 desktop on an external monitor, you can go all the way up to 1280 x 1024, and possibly beyond. Since my monitor won't support resolutions higher than that, I can't promise anything.

When you plug in an external monitor you can choose to view the display just on your Eee PC, just on your external monitor, or on both screens. Then you can choose whether to display 800 x 480 pixels on both screens, or manually set your resolution. If you choose anything higher than 800 x 480, only a portion of your desktop will actually be displayed on your Eee PC. Here's a shot of Google Reader in Firefox showing how much more screen real estate you get with an external monitor:


And here's a game:


Although you could probably buy a more powerful laptop or desktop PC for $400, I'm starting to think that you really could use the Eee PC as primary computer. Just plug in a mouse, monitor, and external keyboard and you're good to go.

Oh yeah, and while support for external monitors is cool, it's also very useful. Because of the Eee PC's cramped display, some applications just don't fit very well. I've run across several programs that make it nearly impossible to edit your preferences, because several check boxes (including the "ok" or "apply" buttons) fall below the screen where you can't access them without an external display.

Eee PC: Enabling Full Desktop Mode

When Asus first announced it was developing the Eee PC, the company said there would be two ways to use the device. First was an innovative new "easy mode" that would replace the typical start menu with six easy to use tabs labeled internet, work, learn, play, settings, and favorites. And for more advanced users, there would be a full KDE-based desktop.

But now that the Eee PC is shipping, it looks like Asus has disabled the full desktop mode. Sort of. It turns out that you can toggle back and forth between easy and full desktop modes, but you need to install a few packages first. This isn't very advanced hacking. You don't need to add any repositories, for example.

Read the rest of this article at Eee Site.

Add a start menu to the Eee PC and customize it

One of the best and worst things about the Eee PC is its "easy mode" user interface. In easy mode, you have no start menu, and little ability to access some of the Eee PC's more advanced features (unless you know your way around a terminal, which you can pull up by hitting Ctrl+Alt+T).

If you like to customize your desktop, easy mode can be pretty frustrating. On the other hand, everything is well designed to fit on the Eee PC's 800 x 480 pixel monitor. (Well, almost everything. Every now and again a menu will pop up that you just can't edit properly because it extends below the screen. But we'll get to that in another post). And restricting access to some of the more advanced features is probably a good thing for many users who aren't familiar with Linux.

It turns out there is a pretty simple way to enable a full KDE desktop, but if you want the best of both worlds, you can also add customizable start menu to your easy mode interface. Somewhat ironically, this might be harder than enabling the full desktop.

Read the rest of this post at Eee Site.

Video walkthrough of the Eee PC interface

I put together a little video showing the highlights of the Eee PC user interface for Download Squad.

In part two, I'm going to walk through a couple of more advanced tricks like accessing a root terminal and installing unsupported applications.

Update: And part 2 is up.

Installing Audacity on the Eee PC take 2: The easy way

OK, it turns out there's an easy way to install Audacity, and there's an easy way. I showed you the hard way already. Now let's take a look at the easy way.

1. Go ahead and open a terminal by starting the file manager (located under the Work tab) and selecting "Open Console Window" from the Tools menu.
2. Now type "konqueror" to bring up the KDE file manager/web browser. If you want to avoid entering your password down the line, try typing "sudo konqueror."
3. Select Applications
4. Select System
5. Select Synaptic Package Manager
6. Under Settings, select Repositories
7. Click add and enter "deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ stable main"
8. Click the Search button and enter Audacity, GIMP, or any other program you're looking for.
9. Click on the check box next to the program you want to install and select Mark for installation
10. Click Apply and you're all set.

Related Posts:

• Installing Audacity on the Eee PC
• Unboxing the Eee PC
• Photos of the Eee PC next to other stuff

Photos of the Eee PC next to other stuff

I took a few shots of the Eee PC next to my laptop and PDA.

I won't give you all the dimensions, but for reference's sake, the Eee PC has a 7" screen, while my Toshiba A135-4527 laptop with a 15.4" screen and my Dell Axim X50v PDA has a 3.7" screen.

As you can see, the Eee PC is considerably smaller than my Toshiba laptop. The keyboard is cramped in comparison, but definitely usable. The biggest disadvantage to using the Eee PC (you know, besides less RAM, processor speed and storage space), is the smaller screen. Many web sites and applications fail to load properly. In fact, when I went to install the Gmail notifier plugin for Firefox, some of the check boxes were below the bottom of the screen. There was no way I could click on them.

Compared to my PDA, the Eee PC might look huge at first, but looks can be deceiving. Check out the last picture in this series.


Sure, you won't be putting the Eee PC in your pocket anytime soon. But as PCs go, it's pretty darned compact.

OK, that's my last update for tonight. I think. Stay tuned for a video walkthrough of the interface if I can get my digital camera to shoot that much video in one sitting.

Installing Audacity on the Eee PC

My primary plan for my Eee PC is to use it a mobile blogging tool. But I just had to see if I could install some audio editing software. It turns out the answer is yes. Yes I could.

Color me a little bit shocked that I managed to do this on my first day with my new toy. I had kind of sworn to myself that I wouldn't install any new software until I had played with everything the Eee PC had to offer out of the box. But where's the fun in that?

When you first power up the Eee PC, there are about 40 programs installed. One is a sound recorder, but that won't get you very far if you're editing podcasts or radio stories. Ardour might be pushing it a bit, so I figured I would try to install Audacity. There's a simple add/remove programs dialog included, but right now there are only a handful of programs that you can download and most of them are actually just updated versions of the applications that ship with the Eee PC.

Continue reading Installing Audacity on the Eee PC at Eee Site.

Unboxing the Asus Eee PC

I went ahead and bit the bullet. Here are my first few moments with the Asus Eee PC.



The battery is charging up right now, but I have taken a few minutes to play with the tiny, tiny PC.

Here are some initial thoughts:

• It's smaller than you think. I've typed on small keyboards before, but this one's going to take a little getting used to.
• The trackpad also takes a little getting used to. I think I'll invest in a tiny mouse for traveling with the Eee PC.
• The 800 x 480 pixel screen is a bit small for viewing many, if not most websites. But it certainly beats the heck out of most PDA/phone browsers. It will be interesting to see if Asus makes it easy to install Opera or another web browser that's capable of auto-scaling web pages.
• The operating system and preloaded applications take up about 62% of the 4GB of memory. When Asus begins shipping the 2GB versions of the Eee PC, the company will obviously have to strip off some of the applications.
  
• While initial reports were that you could either use the simple Xandros-based user interface or a complete Xandros desktop, I don't see a way to access the complete desktop yet. For most users, this is probably a good thing. The Eee PC is very easy to use right now, and includes Office software, a web browser, some games, an e-mail client. What more do you need?
• The add/remove software feature links directly to an Asus server. Right now there are only three or four applications available for installation. And several of them are actually just updates for applications that are already installed. I would like to see an option to install 3rd party software like Audacity, but it's not a high priority at this point.

Stay tuned for more videos/photos as I put this puppy through the paces.

Coming soon: Asus $199 PC for $1000

When Asus announced plans to launch a $199 PC earlier this year, I was skeptical but optimistic. I wasn't particularly surprised when the company announced that the low price would only be available to governments that ordered in bulk (and perhaps waved taxes). But $299 still seemed like a pretty good price.

Now that the EEE PC is set to go on sale in the US this week, it looks like the cheapest model available will be $399. The unit includes a 900MHz celeron processor, a 3.5 hour battery, 4GB of flash memory, an SD expansion slot, 3 USB ports, a VGA port, a 7-inch 800 x 480 pixel screen, and a custom version of Xandros Linux with OpenOffice, Firefox, and other goodies.

It's a bit more pricey than I'd hoped, but I'm still sorely tempted to drop the money and pick up the 2 pound mini-laptop. You wouldn't think that there's that much difference between a 2 pound laptop and a 6 pound laptop until you've tried lugging the 6 pounder around a few places.

And it's not like the little PC isn't worth $400. Sure, you could find a more powerful machine on sale for a similar price, but there's no way you're going to find an ultra-portable laptop that comes anywhere close.

Since the EEE PC is a full fledged computer, you can install alternate operating systems. The folks at ZDNet UK have already managed to get Ubuntu up and running, although it's doubtful whether Ubuntu is actually more useful than the Xandros OS that ships with the computer. And while you could install Windows on the EEE PC, odds are the operating system would eat up most of your internal memory.

But Asus plans to release another version of the EEE PC later this year/early next year with Windows XP preloaded. Again, I had a feeling that would drive up the price, but I had no idea how much. InfoWorld is reporting that machines running Windows XP will sell for as much as $1000. That's a far cry from $199.

Now, I know that Microsoft charges a lot of money for its operating systems. And I know that the price includes Microsoft Office. But I'm hoping you get a hardware bump for that extra $600. Because you can get a pretty nice laptop or UMPC for $1000.

I still haven't decided whether I'm going to drop $400 on an EEE PC. But I can tell you one thing. I won't be paying $1000 for one.

Update: It looks like there's a good chance the XP version of the EEE PC will not cost $1000. Yahoo! News seems to have done a poor job of condensing Dan Nystedt's IDG article. InfoWorld has what looks like it may be the original article, where Nystedt states that the difference between the Linux and XP versions of the EEE PC is expected to be about NT$1000.

That's a far cry from saying the XP version will cost $1000 US. In fact, it could mean the XP version will sell for just about $40-$50 more than the Linux PC.