Bringing an Asus Eee PC around is really a huge convenience. Our favorite miniscule mini-laptop started this whole netbook thing. With the dawn of these affordable and slightly underpowered and undersized notebooks, everyone suddenly decided to take this whole portable computing thing seriously. I don’t think I’ve seen that many laptop or netbook toting people before, and that’s a good thing.
And that’s the keyword here. Portable. As much as we want to bring our computers with us everywhere we go, there’s a bit of a limitation with carrying our laptops around – how in blue blazes are going to print our documents when needed?
Of course we can upload our files to dropbox, our webmail accounts, or some other cloud storage solution, and go to the nearest internet café to have it printed. And we all know that internet cafés aren’t available everywhere. We may not even have an internet connection – wifi, 3g or otherwise – available to use for uploading our Word documents.
This is why some people opt to buying a portable printer so they can print almost anywhere they want. Of course, it means that they’ll have to bring extra stuff like the printer, paper, and, in some cases, inkjet cartridges. I doubt portable printer owners would bring laser printer toner cartridges around because that would be ridiculous – there are no portable laser printers just yet.
Of course, being portable, these printers would be subject to a few corners cut here and there to ensure that it’ll be light and compact enough to carry around anywhere. You’d lose some features like duplex printing, the clarity of printouts used with Brother printer toner cartidges, and of course I doubt you’d be able to use these gadgets for heavy-duty printing. However, if you need to have hard copies of your documents handy, it won’t hurt to carry one of these babies along with your Asus Eee PC.
Guys, remember the NES? Remember the hours spent on it trying to rescue the princess? Now if you want to go on carrying around something that’ll give you lots more geek cred (because, really an Asus Eee is enough to give you geek cred), then you might consider getting a netbook case that’s patterned after the now-iconic NES controller.
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The world has seen the surprising buyers’ turnout for the phenomenal Asus EEE PC 700. Why not? It is more than just a better alternative for the XO-1 laptop of the “One Laptop Per Child” campaign. It has lived to be an “easy to learn, easy to work, and easy to play” device for everyone.
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If you have bought yourself a snazzy new A3 flatbed scanner and you have decided that you don’t need your old scanner anymore, here’s a little do-it-yourself project you can work on. Did you know that with a little bit of tinkering around, you can repurpose your old scanner into some sort of primitive pinhole camera?
The best thing about turning your old scanner into a camera? You don’t need to take the scanner apart, nor do you need to alter the scanner’s hardware in a permanent manner, so if you need your scanner back, it’s easy to undo what you’ve done. This is a safe DIY project, folks.
You will need black foamcore board, a magnifying glass, and a razor. First, you need to remove the cover. Then measure the size of the scanner glass for the baseboard, then cut the foamcore into the glass’ dimensions. You will need to glue together three layers of foamcore for some thickness. Cut out a 7×7 inch square hole in the middle of the foamcore boards. You will need to make a cube in the same dimensions as the hole, then you need to cover it with a cube of slightly bigger dimensions.
Then you will need to make the lensboard – just cut a 3.5-inch hole on a 7×7 board for the box’s cover. Cut a hole the size of the magnifying glass on a 6×6 inch board. Put that on top of the board. Now make pinhole/aperture cards, then you’re ready! Point your camera at your sublect, run your scanner as normal, and you have your pinhole scanner camera ready! You can find a video on how to make the camera here.
Your photos will come out with a bizarre and spooky appearance. Perfect for that Halloween photo project! Quick, try it out now!
If you want to upgrade your beloved netbook, then you should check out Crucial.com’s netbook upgrade center. You can get upgrades for RAM, SSDs, and more.
We could be getting Bluetooth 4.0 devices this late 2010 or 2011, according to Brad of Liliputing:
The vast majority of Bluetooth devices are still toting Bluetooth 2.1 or earlier instead of the more recent Bluetooth 3.0 technology. But the folks behind the short distance wireless data standard have announced the Bluetooth 4.0 standard is ready to go.
The update will bring support for a low energy mode for devixes like remote controls and watches that don’t need as much power as a laptop computer or smartphone. Bluetooth 4.0 will also support transmitting data over longer distances of up to 200 feet.
Holy wow, 200 feet of data transfer? That’s totally amazing. Read on for the complete press release. More »
Asus has revealed its newest Eee product: the Eee wireless keyboard. Echoing Mac-like designs, it’s also a “fully functional PC” with a secondary touchscreen. It connects to your TV with a wireless HDMI connection. In other words, it can turn your HDTV into a computer monitor, allowing you to turn any TV in your house into a multimedia PC.
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Aldrin Cantos of ASUS EEE HowTo held a contest recently. The mechanics were quite simple: leave a comment on the entry, subscribe to his RSS feed, and the winner gets picked randomly. So I left a comment, subscribed to his RSS and forgot all about it. And a few weeks later I recieved from Aldrin that I won an Eee keyboard protector!
It arrived via mail last night:
So I used it on my Eee:
I’m loving it so far. Thanks Aldrin!
A-DATA recently released a line of “made for EeePC” products. According to Engadget:
While you could of course use any USB flash drive of SDHC card with the laptop, A-DATA’s apparently hoping that its new “special edition” flash cards and drives will sway over at least a couple of Eee PC users, and we don’t doubt that they will. Apparently available only in 8GB versions, they each come in Eee PC-coordinating white, with the USB flash drive also boasting the extra bonus of a leather carrying strap. No word on pricing or availability just yet, unfortunately, but we wouldn’t be surprised if they demand a bit of a premium over their non-Eee counterparts.
Will they look good with the Eee? Yes. Will they work better with the Eee? I don’t think so.
Over at the official Asus Eee site, OEM accessories have been added, including mice, headphones, power adaptors and extra batteries for the Asus Eee PC.
I would agree with EeeUser that the six-cell 7800 mAh battery sounds particularly interesting, especially for those of us who want to get longer battery uptime from our Asus Eee computers.
I haven’t checked with the local (Philippine) distributors, dealers and retailers if they already carry the official accessory line, but I will update here if and once they do, along with price information. For those in other regions, do your retailers already offer these accessories for sale?
