eee pc

Robyn using the eee p on free wifi @ the DMZ cafe, Hue
image by sridgway

Itś our last day of our month in Vietnam. I thought I would take this opportunity to reflect on the eee pc for those considering purchasing one for a OS sojourn.

I purchased the eee pc pretty much sight unseen for the trip just before we left. Add to that I am a newbie to linux so it was a an experiment all round.

After both Robyn and I have been using it for a month, blogging, editing images and uploading to flickr on largely free wifi networks I thought it would be a good to reflect on it' s strengths & weaknesses.

Overall it has been invaluable especially in Vietnam with such good wifi access and speed. Itś size and weight has meant I have been able to cart it around during the day and hook up to skype and check email for lunch or over a beer or 2.

As a traveler without a computer you mostly have to rely on the hotel computers which are often in high demand and poorly resourced. Most of the Hotels we stayed in were 2 star and the wifi signal was available in the room which meat we could do our work in the comfort of our room. The best was the Viet Anh in Hanoi which had a wifi router on every floor. For avid flickr users we wanted to edit & upload the days pictures at the end of the day. Most hotel computers had windows xp which does not have any image editing software installed. Robyn tried a few online ones to no avail. The eee pc has mtPaint 3.11 pre innstalled and proved more than adequate for the job of resizing, rotating and cropping for flickr.

The only 3 star hotel we stayed in had the worst internet access of all, and the wifi was wep and would not work. It had a swimming pool, which Robyn made the most of :> The higher the star rating the lower the network connectivity.

The downside, well when I got here it would not recognize any of our usb memory sticks, it was working fine before we left so a mystery as to why it fell off. Had to spend an hour looking @ geeky forums to fix it, but I got it working again in the end. Once you get away from the pre installed software things get geeky :<

I tried to install picas but would not work.

Other than this it has been a fantastic work horse, battery life about 2 hours with wifi on.

I would recommend it to anyone contemplating an OS trip.

Network Coverage

image of mobile tower in Sapa: robynejay

When I left Australia I enabled global roaming on my Vodafone account thinking that I would largely get coverage in the large cities such as Ho Chi Minh and Hanoi but not much in the rural areas.

To my surprise quite the contrary has been the case, we have had 100% mobile coverage wherever we have been, even in mountains regions such as Sapa and Bac Ha or coastal islands like Halong Bay. Most of the coverage has been via Vinafone, although while in Lao Cai I did briefly connect to China mobile, well the Chinese corder was 3 km away :>

Amazing really, compared to OZ we are like a 3rd world country when it comes to network coverage, 100 kms out of Sydney you are lucky to get a signal at all.

The same goes for internet access, everywhere we go we have been able to access free wifi, Hotels, Cafeś, restaurants etc. all tout free wifi for customers. Itś been great and I am so pleased we purchased the eee pc itś been fantastic for editing images, uploading to flickr and posting to the travel blog and google map.

Australia has a lot to learn about countries such as Vietnam in terms of providing ubiquitous access for it citizens.

GPS on the go

We have for some time liked the My Maps feature on Google maps so we decided to create one as a compliment to our travel blog.

The problem with Vietnam is that while the satellite images are ok, the definition of the street maps are very poor. To position our travel points we have had to us GPS coordinates to position the locations on the satellite image. Here is how we are doing it.

When we comes to a locations we would like to have registered on our google map I use a HP PDA which has a GPS receiver to capture the latitude and longitude. We then take a picture or video for use on the Google map with our regular digital cameras.



The PDA records the GPS in degrees, minutes, seconds eg. Latitude 21 deg 02 min 09 sec Longitude 105 deg 51 min 09 sec. For Google maps the format used is in decimal format so we use an online converter. There are numerous converters online however we have settled on this one from the FCC in America.

For example the the above points convert to Latitude 21.035833 Longitude 105.851667
One we have decimal valules these can be entered into the Google map search using the following format 21.035833, 105.851667

The result can be saved to our travel map, edited to have a title, description and image or video included.

While the PDA works well it does not have the best reception and is a tad slow to respond. So I am keeping my eye out for a cheap gps tool.

The final result


View Larger Map

Flickr video

No doubt those of you who are flickr users would have noticed that they recently added video support, upto 90 sec and 150 meg. per post, perfect for our travel blogging.
This was taken on my Canon Ixus 950 IS and uploaded directly to flickr, and then embedded from there in this post. Worked a treat. This video was just under 150 Mbyte.
Expect to see moe of these in our posts