USB CF Card reader not auto-mounting

I just took a few photos of the Zonbu sitting atop my “heavy artillery” desktop PC.

The size difference is quite striking, as you can see in the photo.

Oh wait, you can’t see the photo because I wasn’t able to copy it on to the Zonbu to upload it…

The “white desktop” bug, courtesy of media player?

Tonight I’m seeing how the Zonbu does with USB removeabe media.

I tried a USB memory key and now I have an old portable USB hard drive connected.

In the process I discoverd lots of old photos, documents, music and videos.

Smatterings from my past, family events, songs that mean something in the minds eye. That kind of stuff…

Zonbu Image Workshop shipping with no fonts configured?

I set out to see if the Zonbu can replace my Desktop PC for all my day-to-day tasks.

Tonight I’m trying to improve the avatar that appears next to my name in the comments. It needs to be much clearer that it’s Mr. Zonbu and not the Zonbu company that is posting.

I’m not artist but I should be able to whip something up. I certainly could in Adobe Photoshop.

Then again, I could also buy 2 full Zonbu systems with 1 year subscriptions just for the cost of Photoshop alone.

This afforded me a great opportunity to see how well the Image Workshop option on the Zonbu performs…

Another MIME-type observation: .sh files

Just a quick one for the MIME-type file.

I clicked on a shell script, in this case on http://oss.zonbu.com/ and instead of offering to open it in the text editor, it suggested the appropriate application was `less`, the command line utility for “paging” text. (If you don’t know it, it’s a cousin of “more”).

I’m thinking that the included ‘notepad’ application is probaby more appropriate.

-Mr. Zonbu

How to innocently crash the Zonbu IM client

Another day, another little “oops, looks like I discovered a bug” discovery.

I was talking to a colleague on GAIM, the instant messenger client. Using the MSN protocol. I copied a list of the most popular topics from this blog and pasted it in to our chat session.

Now, on windows, it would truncate the contents at the last allowable character and throw away the rest. So if I pasted in 50 lines, it would say, include the first 10. No problem. I expected GAIM to do the same thing…

Keyboard & Mouse enhancements

I use a Microsoft USB keyboard and a MS Intellimouse Explorer USB mouse.

Both work fine with the Zonbu and both also have some added features…

Zonbu power consumption; a closer look

I’ve had my Zonbu for a few days now and I wanted to revisit the topic of energy use.

This morning when I got up I reset my Kill-a-watt and went about using the PC.

Five hours have passed since then, and aside from a 45 minute break I spent enjoying my day off at the pool, the machine has been in regular use as my desktop…

The Zonbu, Bush and Privacy

[EDIT: CNET has put together an list of Frequently Asked Questions about this new law.]

I’m going to try and keep poltics out of this blog, but this story is just too important to let slide.

I wasn’t mind-reading the other day when I wrote my post about Zonbu needing to consider storage options outside of America, although it was definitely timely.

A reader just send me a link to this story at the New York times, “Bush Signs Law to Widen Legal Reach for Wiretapping”…

Zonbu & Developers: A mis-match in the model?

I’ve been struggling with the Zonbu concept of a “community edition” or “developer edition”.

Typically, the community that forms around an open source product has a vested interest in embracing and extending the product. They are users of the product. The improvements they contribute benefit all parties and are generally shared back with all parties.

In the case of the Zonbu, where the intention is to present a very consistent, proven and “locked down” desktop experience to the end user, I’m not sure how much enthusiasm there really is for the traditional kind of open source community involvement…