Thursday 19 February 2009

Pic of the day: Acer Aspire One. (The plastic of the screen is not actually melting - it is a trick of the light.)

Gadgets arrive!

Today I came home to find two packages waiting for me at the post office. (Which, incidentally, is located in a nearby grocery shop.) Even though I had ordered them a couple days apart, but from the same shop, they both arrived today, but with different sender addresses.

One is the "brainmouse" I wrote about last year, the OCZ Neural Impulse Activator. As the names imply, it can read brain waves and the movement of my eyes and the tension of facial muscles, and convert these into signals like keypresses or mouse clicks. It is a fascinating concept, although it is not very useful in its current form. Well, it is probably opening a new world to people who are unable to use their limbs, but for the casual gamer it is likely to be a disappointment. Actually, I was prepared for that. I bought it anyway, because I want to encourage this kind of technology. And in times when the economy is pruned, the only hope to encourage something is to buy it. Well, unless you are a venture capitalist, I guess. I am definitely not.

It is the same logic that lies behind my other purchase, a very small and cheap laptop, what they now call a "netbook". Apart from all of those things, this model uses a solid state device (SSD, sometimes called flash disk) instead of a hard disk. It holds only 8 GB, but I still remember the time when we would go "who in their right mind would need a whole gigabyte of hard disk??". Besides, it can be expanded by up to 16 GB of plug-in SD card (not sure if those exist yet, but 8 GB do and are almost affordable. Not that I plan to get them.) And with 3 USB ports you can add USB memory or even external hard disks, like the small portable USB-powered Western Digital "Passport" disk. Yes, I have one of those as well.

More important than the new storage technology however is the operating system. The computer uses Linux and you don't pay "Microsoft tax" at all when you buy it. And that pleases me mightily! Muahaha! I am actually grateful to Microsoft for what they have done to make the modern world come into being. Until they broke IBM's stranglehold, the "personal computer" as we know it was not possible. There were home computers which were little more than toys, and big business computers. There was no all-purpose, networkable computer that could run a million programs from games to databases. The Internet as we know it depends on this liberated personal computer. But gratitude is one thing. Having to pay a quite noticeable sum to an American company to be allowed to run an African operating system on an Asian computer is something else. It is a less violent equivalent of "protection money" that you pay to gangsters, because they have the police in their pocket.

And so I do what I must, because I can. I don't really need any of these two shiny new objects, but the world does. And the world is panicking right now. I am not, yet. That will have to wait till the 25th, when I go to the dentist again...