Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Touring With a Netbook

I've been getting the old Asus Eeepc 701 ready for my son going to Uganda. I've put the tailored Linux distribution eeebuntu on it, and it works great. With Firefox and Openoffice, it's all ready for writing. But the big problem is handling photos while on the run. Traditionally, they just leave all the raw photos on the chip, and let Dad clean them up in a few hours of horribly tedious work.

But I've moved beyond that, since I am inherently lazy, and love to avoid work. I've tested out the whole arrangement on the netbook. Basically, I have an older camera that uses sd cards. I bought a nifty usb card reader for the chip, and I also bought a larger 16 gb chip, which cannot go in the old camera directly.

Now, I've installed the Gimp (a Linux image processor) on the netbook, and it works great. So, when taking pictures, you transfer them to the pc, and process them with gimp. You toss out the losers, and scale down images for the blog to around 600 pixels. Then you put in the 16 gb chip, and store the processed images. You write your blog on openoffice.

At the local McDonalds serving Antelope-burgers, you upload your blog with pictures.

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