A couple of months ago I gave up waiting for Apple to release a slight, small notebook. The Macbook Air is too big. I didn’t need a paper-thin laptop that still required a large bag to put it in. I needed a small thing I could throw in my backpack and not have to make the daily decision as to whether I really needed to take it with me. Cue the Eee PC 901. I bought the XP version as I wasn’t sure how I’d find working with linux. After about a week of using XP I wiped it and installed Xubuntu. It’s lighter than Ubuntu as it uses XFCE rather than Gnome as its desktop. As a total mac-head I needed to find some equivalent apps to put on my new toy.

The Easy Stuff

Some apps didn’t need replacing, Firefox is available for linux and Photoshop runs brilliantly under Wine. And of course linux has a Terminal.

Text Editor

Mac: TextMate
Linux: jEdit

I’ve been using TextMate for a while now, it’s probably my most used app, it’s the only one I actually miss when using my laptop. jEdit is a reasonable substitute, it allows you to configure your own syntax colouring, so I copied my favourite TextMate colour scheme.

FTP

Mac: Transmit
Linux: gFTP

Initially I tried FileZilla but I had problems with it disconnecting from servers, it got painful having to navigate to the same folder over and over again each time I wanted to update a file. gFTP fixes this, plus it is quick to load and run.

Chat

Mac: Adium
Linux: Pidgin

Pidgin is available for both windows and linux. It supports MSN, AIM, Google Talk, ICQ and Bonjour among others.

Music Player

Mac: iTunes
Linux: Exaile

Exaile doesn’t do everything, it won’t sync my iPod for instance. It does play MP3s however and that’s all I needed.

PDF Reader With Annotation

Mac: Adobe Acrobat
Linux: PDF Xchange Portable

This one’s a bit of a cheat, being a Windows app it needs to be run under Wine. I searched in vain for a native linux app that handled annotation in a standard way; I need to be able to read my annotations on my mac as well as my Eee. PDF Xchange Portable runs very well under Wine.

Round three of the Phorm trials start tomorrow. If I were with BT / Talk Talk / Virgin Media I’d be seriously thinking of changing my ISP about now. Just the thought of all my HTTP traffic being monitored makes me twitch. After all, I am already paying for my ISP service, that surely should be enough. Greedy ISPs deserve to lose customers.

You can read all about Phorm here and find some useful detection scripts here.

I keep a personal WordPress as a notebook online along with a page that allows me to save the entire contents for offline viewing. I thought it would be useful to have this file on my iPod. I’ve written up my method here in case someone else might find it useful. This guide makes the following assumptions:

• You have 2.* software jailbroken iPod
• Using Cydia you have installed the following:
  • Mobile Terminal
  • sudo
  • wget
  • file:// Schema in Safari

Overview

The aim is to have a simple command that can be run from the terminal on the iPod to download the HTML file. Safari is then used to view the file offline.

Setting up the aliases

Create a .bashrc file in your home directory, this is where we will store the alias settings. We will use Nano for this:

iPod:~ mobile$ nano .bashrc

Hopefully your screen now looks something like the image below.

I’m making an assumption about the filename you wish to give your downloaded HTML file, change it if you wish. In Nano you need to type the following:

alias notes='cd; mv notes.html notes~.html; wget http://www.domain.com/page.html --output-document=notes.html'

If, like me, the page you wish to download is behind a password change the dlnotes alias to the following, supplying your own username and password:

alias notes='cd; mv notes.html notes~.html; wget http://www.domain.com/page.html --http-user=username –http-password=password –output-document=notes.html’

That’s it. You can now save your .bashrc file by typing CTRL-o and answering yes to the prompt. Quit Nano by typing CTRL-x.

The iPod doesn’t always load the .bashrc file so we need to create a .profile page again using Nano and add the following code:

source $HOME/.bashrc

Finally you need to reload your .bashrc file:

iPod:~ mobile$ source .bashrc

Whenever you want to grab your HTML page for offline viewing just open the terminal and type notes. Then view the file in Safari by typing in the URL file://var/mobile/notes.html, a copy of the old HTML file will have been saved too just in case. You can setup another alias to delete the backup in the same way above, the command would be:

alias delnotes='cd; rm notes~.html'

Air Sharing

If you use Air Sharing you may want your file to be saved in its directory and be available over a network. Below is a quick guide to finding where Air Sharing stores files.

Use Air Sharing to copy a file from your computer to your iPod, make its filename unique as you will need to search for it later on. e.g. moocow.html

The rest of the work is done in the iPod Terminal. So grab your iPod and open the Terminal application. Note that I’ve highlighted the commands you type as bold.

We can use the locate command to find the file. First you will need to update the locate database. This needs to be done as root. To change to the root user type the commands below. The password will be alpine unless you’ve changed it:

iPod:~ mobile$ su
Password:<password>
iPod:/var/mobile root# updatedb
iPod:/var/mobile root# exit


Next we search for the file you copied over with Air Sharing:

iPod:~ mobile$ locate moocow.html

Note that it may take a few seconds to search, there are a lot of files on your iPod. You should get something back that looks like this:

/private/var/mobile/Applications/94724F2A-847G-371D-8H36-3DF5E659C9D2/Documents/Air\ Sharing/moocow.html

So now we know that Air Sharing stores its files here:

/private/var/mobile/Applications/94724F2A-847G-371D-8H36-3DF5E659C9D2/Documents/Air\ Sharing/

Using this information you can adjust the alias above to download your files directly to the Air Sharing directory.