Welcome to my new blog about gadgets and gismos.  Over the coming weeks I will be posting some links to my favourite gadgets, old and new.

Two of the most popular gadgets available at the moment are the pole dancer, and the Remote control helicopter.

I am relatively new to blogging and all that goes with it. I have just opened a Twitter account and a Squidoo, and whilst it is easy, it isn’t, all at the same time. Even putting this blog together is not second nature to me and I recon I know a bit more than the average Joe. How come, when I look at all your bloggs out there, they look great, in order, with gadgets and gismos all over. I haven’t figured out RSS yet…..

I am too slow I wonder?

Thanks for having Satan’s minions wish me a happy birthday, Sean. I enjoyed it; Just wish I didn’t have to go back to work today. Oh, and while Happy Birthday by Weird Al may be a popular song for AMVs, Kingdom Hearts is pretty common for AMV’s, too. I’ll probably post more about Kingdom Hearts fairly soon.

And, yes, I have always considered my birthday my sacred day and most important holiday. That may seem a bit egocentric, but consider, I’m not expecting to be anyone else’s most important holiday. Just mine. It, basically, is the one day that is entirely about me, and doing whatever I feel like[1].

Now, I generally like to get myself something on my birthday that I wouldn’t have gotten myself otherwise as past of this.

And I’ll admit it; I have a bit of a gadget fetish.

So, I am now the owner of an Asus EeePc.

Those of you in the know probably are already going “Cool!”, while everyone else is going “Huh? Whatcha talking about?”

Well, the EeePc’s are fairly new, and they pretty much consist of a middle ground between a laptop and a pda. It is more like a legtop then a laptop, really. 7″ monitor, and it weighs 2 lbs. That’s right, 2 frickin’ lbs. Its around the size of a hardcover book[2], and not an especially thick one.

There are compromises, naturally. There isn’t a dvd or cd drive, just 3 usb ports and a sd card reader. The version I have, second of the three main models hey have, has 512 MB of DDR2 memory, and an internal flash chip with 4GB of space. And it comes loaded with a custom Linux distribution.

It starts up in less then 30 secs, and runs fairly fast, especially considering that it is only 900 Ghz. And it has built-in wifi and an ethernet port. The bootup looks like this, except that I’ve already taken it off the silly Easy fnord mode shown after bootup, and stuck it in Advanced Mode:

I’ve already hacked it somewhat. Eventually, I’ll probably install a different distribution on it, to free up some space and customize things more. But I have a 4 GB SD card in it, and a 4 GB USB stick plugged in, so I’m not suffering for space yet.

Oh, incidentally, one of the things that makes this cool is the price factor. The prices for the three models are, respectively, 2GB for $299, 4GB for $399, and 8GB for $499. And though I’m not going to do this, you can install evil fnord on it if you like:

You can also pimp out the thing by installing all sorts of usb gadgets inside the case, if you’re willing to void your warranty fnord by doing a little soldering.

And I’ll certainly be using this as a gaming pc; A few PDFs of RPG books, and character sheets in Open Office, and I’m there.

[1] And I did skim through the Satanic Bible at one point a long time ago. It had it’s points, but the philosophy seemed to center around always putting your self, and your ego first, and it wasn’t really how I wanted to approach things…

[2] I just visually compared it to a hardcover book, “Wodehouse is the Best Medicine”, which is a collection of Wodehouse stories which ranks in at 326 pages. The EeePC is the same size, but considerably thinner.