Acer Aspire One: an excellent IP-TV player

I have just installed Zattoo in my wife's Acer Aspire One. It is a very good IP-TV player that offers many Spanish TV channels and some international ones. It provides localised TV-channel lists for Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, Spain, Switzerland and United Kingdom and its web page is available in English, French, German, Spanish and Italian.

It works smoothly on the Aspire One (even in fullscreen mode), so it allows this cheap machine to become an IP-TV box. The service has been free until this month but in Spain, due to users demand, they are charging 2.40€ + VAT if you want to use it in Spain during August and September in 2008. I had used it in the past, but I have paid for it in order to have another place where to watch the Olympic Games.

Zattoo is available for Linux (several distros), Windows XP & Vista and Mac OSX so you do not have any excuse to start downloading it. Absolutely recommended.

Spanish football needs Sporting de Gijón

It is not me saying this. Today, you can read in as.com about the semifinal of the summer tournamente Teresa Herrera between Atlético de Madrid and Real Sporting de Gijón (the local football team and the only one that I support, in case you never visited this blog before). The journalist who wrote the article says:

"If our football needs Atletico in the mood to compete against Real Madrid and FC Barcelona, it also needs Sporting among the great ones. El Molinón has always been the stage for fine matches. And Sporting has had in its roster top-level players."

Wise words :-)

Ahora más que nunca, ¡Sporting de Gijón!

Second post on Acer Aspire One

Full menu of xfce4 enabled by right-clicking on the desktop.

Several applications installed: vlc and skype firstly so any video can be played and A/V conferencing works. Problem with pidgin because of a version conflict with libpurple in the repositories -working on it-).

The peculiar netbook-typical desktop is reconfigured to offer me the apps that I want to shortcut.

Login screen enabled (need to enable a logout button O:-)).

compiz up and running at start time.

Now it is becoming a real netbook.

Ah, before I post on gaming on the Acer Aspire One. Remember to update mesa-libGL (sudo yum -y update mesa-libGL): glxgears reported 404-421 fps before the update, and 433-466 fps afterwards.

First experiences with Acer Aspire One

I gave my wife yesterday an Acer Aspire One as the day of our IX Anniversary is pretty close. She sa w me carrying the wrapped gift and... mmmmm... let's say I was "adviced" to give it to her in advance.

She is very happy with it, although she misses a real desktop and the Linpus Lite linux distribution is a bit poor to her. This is not a con against this distribution because I guess it is what computer newbies need to be able to start using a PC with Linux on it. It offers a home screen with big icons taking you to the main applications needed: browser, email and IM clients, multimedia, games, basic configuration options.

The lack of a chance to install new applications (at least it is not obvious how to manage to do it) is something that makes you want to install another Linux distribution. I hope Acer and Linpus will improve this issue.

It takes a bit to get used to the keyboard but after some minutes you are used to it. WiFi works perfectly. It boots in about 20 seconds and it shuts down even faster.

Great buy for 298€. I love cheap ultralaptops.

EDITORIAL NOTE: Copied to the OMAG blog and enhanced.
EDITORIAL NOTE 2 (18/10/2008): s/ultralaptops/netbooks/ :-)

First Olympic Medal is Gold and is Asturian

Samuel Sánchez made it. He managed to surprise the favourite candidates for the Gold Medal in the Road Cycling Course. Samuel got the first medal for Spain in the first day of the Olypic Games. He got a gold and he is Asturian.

By the way, Giro d'Italia, Tour de Francia and Road Cycling Course won by Spaniards. Great year for Spain in sports: Nadal winning Roland Garros and Wimbledon, the Spanish Football Team becoming European Champion, ...

I hope this is all a prelude to the most successful year in sports. Errrr... Anyone thinking about taxes and prices decreasing in order to properly celebrate it? :-)

I hate fragmentation

Device fragmentation (or device diversity) is a problem. Too many different software stacks installed in those little devils. Although a lot has been done to improve Linux distribution fragmentation in the last years, something similar happens in this field. This is why I hate that different Linux-based mobile environments join forces and this is why news like this make me unhappy.

... and Even Better News for the Mobile Web

And how is it that it took so long to the W3C MWBP working group in order to be able to provide its first W3C Recommendation? The Mobile Web Best Practices have been waiting for months for XHTML Basic 1.1 to be a W3C Rec, because it was defined as the mark-up language of reference for the Default Delivery Context define in the document.

Was it so important to wait for it? Yes, XHTML Basic 1.1 is the mark-up language jointly supported by both W3C and the OMA from now and on in order to be the hypertext language of reference in mobile devices. So no more XHTML Basic vs XHTML Mobile Profile (well, they shall be taken into account for a few years as old devices disappear and new devices start including browsers supporting XHTML Basic 1.1). It is great that, in the next future, the OMA and W3C speak the same (hypertextual) language.

Good news for the mobile web

I am sure I am being the last one to spread the word, but I am proud to say that the Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 (Basic Guidelines) have become -two days ago- a W3C Recommendation. The proud is due to the fact that this document has been developed by the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices working group, under the umbrella of the W3C Mobile Web Initiative. I joined that group in September 2005 by attending the Face-to-Face meeting in Rome, some months after its birth in June 2005. I must say that in my first months within the working group I felt like fish out of the water. Little by little, I managed to understand the whole problem (it is easy to understand the problem of the web in mobile devices, in general; I am talking about understanding certain subtleties). Then, more people at work started understanding it too and participating in the group and we managed to even provide Reference Implementations of the Best Practices (i.e., web sites following the BPs), like zaragoza.mobi or the web site of Fundamentos Web. We have managed to do even more stuff related to all the efforts within the W3C Mobile Web Initiative, but these are stories yet to be told (some of them really soon) as the final version of new documents come out to the public.