Zonbu Mini-PC & Solar Power = A match made in heaven?

 

With a draw of only 15W, the Zonbu is not only green when using traditional energy sources, but its energy needs are so modest it may be well suited to being powered by alternate sources like solar.

I’m no expert in this space, but News.com is running an interesting story on concentrated solar power that I think may be of interest to you as a reader.

We will be exploring this topic in more detail over the coming weeks, but I wanted to toss the idea out to the growing readership for discussion and comment.

Are you using any alternate energy at home now? Would you consider alternate sources to power your Zonbu?

-Mr. Zonbu

Flash/YouTube performance on my Zonbu simluator

Just a brief note to address a question we had from a reader.

Gregg wanted to know how smooth the flash playback is, as some early reviews said it was jerky on the beta machines…

Zonbu & Hotels: Partner and bundling strategies – Part Deux

So far, the Zonbu appears to be a great product from an interesting new company.

Lots of information is provided on on their website and seem genuinely interested in “doing it right”.

Like any start-up they have some rough edges and some kinks to work out, but overall they are getting broad praise for their product/service; including from me.

Can they hope to achieve the kind of volume of sales necessary to sustain their business model? Are the focused on the right channels and partners?

Today we’re going to explore another potential partner/bundling avenue for the Zonbu: the hospitality industry…

The Zonbu desktop is XFCE…

I just wanted to do a quick post to report that the Zonbu desktop runs XFCE.

There has been some confusion about it, since the “start menu” bar looks very windows/KDE-ish, but it is in fact XFCE underneath, and the Thunar file manager….

F-Spot and Zonbu Photo Management

Today, I decided to venture out beyond the confines of the Zonbu IM client and web browser and explore digital photo management.I copy my photos to my PC in the old fashioned way; plug the memory card in to a reader and use the windows photo acquisition wizard to select the ones I want, tag the files with a common name and pick a directory. It works fairly well under windows. I don’t usually install custom camera software as the XP wizard has always met my needs.

I wanted to see how the Zonbu would handle my digital photos and how it stacks up against XP in this regard, so I grabbed my memory card and a USB reader and plugged it in to see what would happen…