foolfillment: the blog

I’ve managed to snaffle a wee shot on an Asus EeepPC. Tess Watson visited me at Ross today and has kindly loaned me one for the weekend. So far I’m really impressed, it’s is all dead easy to use, the main drawback so far has been the keyboard size. I’m typing this post on it right now and keep making a lot of typos, that said the machine manages to strike a great balance between usability and portability.

As far as the potential for use in a classroom/workshop, things are looking great. It is so lightweight (yet sturdy feeling) that I wouldn’t have too many concerns about giving them to pupils, and the ease with which they could access information would make it incredibly useful – especially if the school had a wireless network. The integrated webcam is a nice touch but is really only useful for phone calls as it doesn’t move, more useful perhaps would be just a USB wired camera that could be pointed at whatever you wanted. The software that runs with the webcam though is great – it is very fast to capture an image or video. With a maneuverable camera it would be very useful for capturing demonstrations of practical tasks in the workshop or graphics room and then making them available for pupils to run in a loop on their own machine at their bench.

I’ll get back to you later in in the weekend on how I get on, but so far things look pretty good for quick use of the basic stuff. One thing it wouldn’t be great for is graphics work, but that isn’t what this machine is aimed at so not a huge problem, but that didn’t stop me having a look at what linux CAD/CAG programs there are