Now that I’ve used Scrivener I can definitely say that it’s great and I love using it. (A fuller review will come, as soon as the story I was writing it for is taken off hold.) I don’t know that I would switch to a Mac for it. I like my netbook, for one thing. And I don’t have money to spend on a $1,000+ computer for just one purpose.

There is another alternative, though. You could always turn a netbook into a Mac.

How, you ask? Hackintoshing! This age-old process of fiddling with OS X until it will install on a non-Apple system wasn’t invented for netbooks, but has definitely found a slew of new adherents in the past couple of years. And since Apple is determined not to give the people what they want, the people will have to get it themselves.

Used to be that Hackintoshing required a lot of dedication, forum-lurking, and some soldering skills. But a new website called MyMacNetbook aims to make the process a bit less opaque. Right now there are a few step-by-step guides for some systems, but the real goodies lurk in the compatitility chart. This is where you’ll find a long list of netbooks and the hardware features that work with OS X out of the box. You’ll note that the MSI Wind is about the perfect hackintoshing netbook.

Writers who’re jonesing for some Scrivener but don’t have the money for a Mac but do have the money for a netbook, this is your best bet. And if you’re a Mac lover who longs for the portability of the 10-inch form factor, now you don’t have to pine (or settle for an iPad). Many of the netbooks that work without too much fiddling are older, so you can probably find them at a deep discount these days.

If you have Firefox open now and you’re running Windows, go to your Task Manager^[1] and click on the Processes tab. Look for the process called firefox.exe and make a note of the number in the Mem Usage column^[2]. Then go to your Firefox toolbar, click Help, then About Mozilla Firefox and make a note of the current version you’re running. Then come here and post this in the comments along with the number of tabs (or tabs and windows) you currently have open. Would also help if you said which OS you’re running.

Update: Adam provides instructions for Mac: you can find the memory usage by opening Activity Monitor (in utilities), looking for Firefox in the Process Name column, and seeing what the Real Memory usage is.

Eric provides Ubuntu instructions: you can check out the memory usage under System > Administration > System Monitor, but you’ll have to convert the stats from MiB.

You don’t have to restart your computer or browser or anything like that. I just want to get a snapshot of how much memory Firefox uses for different people. The more data I can collect, the better. I’ll start:

Memory Usage: 920,200K | 11 tabs | Firefox 3.5.7 | Windows XP

Yes, that memory usage is real. Remember the days when Firefox would only use around 300,000K? Or even the long ago when 100,000 was reasonable? Ah, nostalgia.

I showed you mine, now show me yours.

Notes

1. Right click on the taskbar to find it. Or hit Ctrl Alt Delete.
2. If the number keeps changing, you can round off to the nearest hundred thousand. Like 350,000 or whatnot.

The idea of a netbook as an accessory to your busy or even not-so-busy life is a fine one. But the Samsung promo video I posted over on LAPTOP’s blog today has me truly mystified.

Brad Linder claims that it’s supposed to highlight the netbook’s all-day longevity. Could have fooled me. All it seems to highlight is that model’s ability to stretch her lanky body and possibly to warn young ladies from trusting that their boyfriends will pick them up at the train station as promised. Seriously, go look (and please comment there, I am eager to watch you all apply your creative minds to the plot and message).

When I compare that video to this one Nokia did for their new netbook, I find myself much more drawn to the Booklet 3G. This video tells me what this device is, what it does, what makes it special, and even includes some heart-tugging music that somehow makes me want it even more.

But if we must have models, here’s what I’d like to see: women actually using netbooks in some way that shows off what netbooks are good for while providing the eye candy that someone is convinced consumers need. That way it appeals to those of us to buy tech for what it does and those of us who buy anything because hot women are peddling it.

For a long time, I stuck with MusicMatch Jukebox, a player that sometimes came free with new computers and to which I became very attached. I liked the way MMJB displayed and organized my library, plus it had a ton of options. The best one was a feature which would help me identify the ID3 information of a track by looking it up on a CD database and tag it accordingly. This tool also conveniently renamed tracks, individually or in swaths, based on the tag information. I was in the process of cleaning up my moderately-sized MP3 collection when MMJB completely died on me one day.

Under normal circumstances this would not be a problem — just re-install or download again. But no. You see, many years ago Yahoo purchased MusicMatch (which was also a content site with the ability to stream stations of music by similar artist or genre, similar to Last.fm today) and that eventually became Yahoo!Music. Along with the site came the player, and soon I began to get random pop-ups informing me that MMJB was now Yahoo Jukebox (or something, I admit I was too angry to pay close attention) and that support for my version of the program would end soon. I didn’t want the new, intrusive and horrendous Yahoo version of the player, so I stuck with mine. Eventually support ended and the popups mostly went away.

But then the program itself began to break down.

It wouldn’t start properly every time — sometimes looking for updates to software on servers that probably didn’t exist anymore. Shutting down always required intervention from the Task Manager. One day I stopped having the ability to burn CDs.

I finally had to give the program up.

In my search for a replacement I discovered something about music and media players: a lot of them suck!

Before MMJB I used RealPlayer, but that had pretty limited functionality, horrible library management, and no tag tools to speak of. Windows Media Player wasn’t much better, but it was okay in a pinch. WinAmp failed to impress me, as did Songbird (that app is really not ready for prime time). I despaired of finding a comparable program and started to investigate re-downloading an old version of MMJB, even if I couldn’t activate the Pro mode.

Then someone suggested MediaMonkey. That person saved my musical life.

MediaMonkey is an audio player by Ventis Media. It isn’t designed for just one device, like iTunes, and offers users many tools to help organize and manage large music libraries for free. It can play a plethora of file types, including ogg. The Gold version offers even more tools.

The default look of MediaMonkey is very reminiscent of MMJB — the main area is split into three columns. From left to right, an explorer column with access to tracks, playlists, and optical drives; a detailed track listing window with configurable headers; a Now Playing column.

Along the top is the usual suite of buttons with easy access to typical functionalities. The bottom of the screen is dedicated to the seek bar, controls, track info, and equalizer button.

On a netbook this can all seem crowded, but the View menu allows me to decide which of these or a few other options are displayed.

I particularly appreciate the Explorer column because it allows me to find music in several ways: by artist, album, title, genre, year, rating, playlist, location, On the Computer, classification (tempo, mood, etc), even the web. It will also list podcasts in a separate dropdown so it’s easier to manage those separate from regular MP3s. As simple as this seems, there were very few programs I tried that gave me all this in a satisfactory manner.

I haven’t had a chance to try out all of the functions — I’m going to try burning a CD soon and, when I’m feeling adventurous, syncing my MP3 player. I’ve been spending time working with the Tag utilities.

MediaMonkey gives you an option to AutoTag from information found on the web, AutoTag from the file name, AutoOrganize files and, under Advanced, sync tags and clean them up according to ID3v1 or v2 standards.

Though the app is far more robust than most others I’ve tried, it still doesn’t quite measure up to MMJB’s tagging abilities. AutoTagging from the web searches Amazon.com for album information and attempts to apply it to your track or selection of tracks. But Amazon’s database doesn’t have enough discrete fields or data to be 100% effective in this regard. Also, the search engine is a bit hinkey, so you have to fiddle a bit. Basically, you need to know exactly what album you’re looking for. MMJB’s was a bit more intuitive and only needed a little information to find the correct data.

AutoTag from File Name is also not as useful as it could be, as the engine counts plain spaces as delimiters. So, if my file name is:

John Barrowman – Time After Time – 06.mp3

And I try to tell it to tag the file:

– –

The engine will get confused by the space and list the artist as John and the track name as “Barrowman – Time After Time – 06” or something like that. MMJB was a bit smarter than this.

Luckily, MediaMonkey is one of those programs with an active community and involved developers. It’s not exactly open source, but the development of the software is influenced by the users. This may mean more involvement than most casual users want, but for someone who is very particular about what she wants, I’m willing to put in the effort.

Another thing I plan to do soon is play around with the library maintenance function to see if it’s useful.

If you have a large music collection and hate iTunes, then MediaMonkey is your best bet. It’s probably your best bet even if you like iTunes. You’d probably enjoy it even if you want a simple, easy music player — MediaMonkey doesn’t try to do more for you than you ask of it. Though, after using it for a while, you’ll probably get curious about some of the more complex functionality and give some of it a try.

I don’t know if it’s an issue on the hardware or software side, but I suspect it’s more software side, especially considering the capabilities we’ve seen in touchscreen smartphones like the the iPod. Every time I’ve ever used a touch notebook I’ve found it nice, but limited. Yes, I can hand write text into documents, but I haven’t seen a program that allows me to draw on or create notes in the margin of documents like I can with a pen and paper. This may exist and I’ve missed it, but I feel like something of that nature should come standard with every touchscreen computer. It’s a basic need from my perspective.

Beyond that, I’ve not been bown away with any touch software ideas or concepts. Why bother having a touchcreen at all if it just means that you can write in small, yellow boxes that have to be cleared periodically, anyway?

Before touch can blow up on any laptop format, someone has to make touchscreens worth having. The iPhone did, and it rode on the coattails of other smartphones and PDAs that tentatively pushed the touch envelope before it came along. For once I feel like Apple’s insistence on controlling both software and hardware was the right move.

However, I feel that these blissful days are a long way away.  Because even though programs like the OpenOffice suite and GIMP emulate the non-free programs in broadstrokes, it’s always some small, seemingly marginal function that’s missing or doesn’t work as well that puts me right off.  I find myself even angrier, because I want to shake the open source community and scream “Why do you tempt me with a brave new world and then smack me in the face?!”

For example: OpenOffice Writer.  In many ways the parallel of MS Word.  I can create and format documents just the same in both programs as far as I know.  When I’m doing basic to intermediate tasks, Writer serves me well.

But then.

I want to do something that is really easy to do in MS Word: find paragraph marks and replace them with two sequential paragraph marks, thereby inserting a line between every paragraph. This is especially useful when posting things to blogging software. In plain text mode, two line breaks means insert a p tag.

In MS Word, it’s very easy and quick to do this.  You click Find & Replace and, if you don’t know the code for “paragraph mark” by heart (it’s ^p) then you click More>> and you’ll see a dropdown for special characters — paragraph marks, tabs, em dashes, a whole long list.  If you want to insert two breaks, you put ^p in find and ^p^p in replace. Simple, easy.

Not so with OpenOffice.  Not only is there no helpful dropdown in the Find & Replace window, the method for doing the operation I described above is completely counter-intuitive and flawed. After over an hour searching I was able to learn a bit about Regular Expressions and how they applied to the Find & Replace process. In order to get something approximating the simple process of finding one paragraph break and replacing it with two, I had to look through 7 web pages and I still did not find a method that produced completely satisfactory results.

And forget about doing my other oft-used Find & Replace maneuver: find all text formatted a certain way (ex: italicized) and put certain text or characters on either side of said formatted text (like HTML code). This is another fairly simple process in MS Word. I spent 3 hours trying to find a way to do this in OpenOffice one day. I gave up.

Another aspect of OpenOffice that bugs a lot of users (though not so much me) is the inability to have a “normal” page view. Not the Print Layout or the Web Layout, just straight text all the way down with a little dotted line indicating the page break. MS Word has this and OpenOffice users have been clamoring for it since 2001, apparently. And yet there is no satisfaction. Sad.

This kind of thing means that I can never use OpenOffice as my primary office suite. I will continue to need Word. I don’t want to need Word! And  I should not need to take a course in programming in order to do really simple tasks.

I could spend another 1000 words talking about the problems I have with GIMP over Photoshop or even Paint Shop Pro 6. I feel like every intermediate or advanced function of GIMP takes more steps or requires more hunting than is necessary for an image program. And having the tool menu in a separate window from the window with the image is maddening. Every time I have to use GIMP to do something as simple as crop then resize an image my blood pressure rises.

Take those frustrations with individual programs and apply them to a whole operating system – yeah, I’m looking at you, Linux. As Laptop Magazine commenter Gary Reaves so elegantly put it:

How would you like to own a toaster that requires you to design a timing circuit switch every time you want a piece of toast? Try marketing that to consumers. That’s basically what Linux Distros are all about…

Most problems don’t quite reach the timing circuit design level of complication. Still, any time a simple function or feature isn’t there or requires a lot of work and research to do, users are going to be unhappy. Heck, even non-free/open source software and operating systems run into this problem. Windows Vista, anyone? How about Office 2007? (That travesty of an office suite has kept me using Office XP for almost a decade now.) But Microsoft is the dominant force here. They can afford to pull crap like this (somewhat).

If open source software wants to play with the big boys, the programmers need to step up their game. It’s not the broad strokes of functionality that are going to make or break you with consumers, it’s the little things.

Linux Mint earned the Editor’s Choice, as well it should, as it was my favorite of the five.  Ubuntu was a close second. As I mentioned before, I am not partial to PCLinuxOS or Mandriva, and Fedora makes me want to never see Linux again. (This is especially sad because Fedora is the one that works best with the Samsung netbooks.)

Click on over to read. Maybe you will find yourself thinking about trying Linux. I am glad I did, despite everything.

I don’t think I’m all that different from most informed computer users. I use this funny box to do more than just check email and process words. My computer is central to my livelihood. And yet Linux held no temptation for me.

Then I got an Eee PC.

When I heard that Eee PCs came with Linux on them (a tweaked version of Xandros, as we all now know) I wasn’t put off. I was actually happy to hear it, because I figured not having Windows helped keep the cost down. After I bought it, I used that little netbook every day for months. In that case, I did mainly use it for surfing and writing and not much else. Still, Linux didn’t make things more difficult, trip me up, or otherwise annoy me. I actually enjoyed it. Plus, I will admit, it made me feel like an ubergeek, which is a good feeling.

When I interviewed for my current job I even said that I thought Linux was pretty awesome and would be willing to try it elsewhere. My boss hasn’t let me forget that yet. Especially in light of the last 5 weeks.

A few of you are aware of this (mainly because of my ranting), but I had to review 5 Linux distros in the past 5 weeks. I got to choose them, and I went with distros that I’d heard of and that had a reputation for being newbie friendly. Ubuntu (of course), Linux Mint, PCLinuxOS, Fedora and Mandriva. In order to review them, I installed, used, added to, configured, and poked at all five. I actually installed each of them more than once — some 3 times. I mostly tested them on different computers from LiveUSBs, but one of the sections in my reviews is all about installation and whether it’s easy for Linux newbies like myself.

And again, I’ll point out that I’m not a newbie or clueless computer user. I’m pretty savvy. Still, every version of Linux I installed made me curse out loud and break things. Ubuntu and Mint were, I admit, the easiest. But even then I was lost a lot when dealing with the partitioner. Fedora is the worst, then PCLinuxOS, then Mandriva. Fedora made me want to shoot myself. Repeatedly.

Granted, I was having troubles because I was attempting to install these Linuxes alongside existing operating systems (dual-boot) and thus had to deal with partitioning, which Ubuntu and Mint make fairly easy. If I just wanted to wipe out everything on the disk and do a clean install it wouldn’t have been so fraught with the other three. But I’m sure a lot of people would like to try Linux for a while to make sure that they can switch over successfully. Not everyone wants to ditch Windows or Apple forever and right away.

Even distros that claim to be friendly for new users and easy and such do not even have something as simple as on-screen help. I don’t understand the mentality here. Or, I do understand a bit of the mentality, but I think it’s kind of dumb.

Anyway, the reviews are all written so I don’t have to live and breathe Linux anymore. I’m probably going to end up reviewing other distros as time goes on and updating my reviews as new versions come out. (I may refuse to do Fedora, though.) I also pitched an idea to the editor concerning Linux software which I’ll probably end up doing for the website, if not for print.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m going to buy a new netbook soon (a Samsung, yay). It’ll probably only come with a choice of XP and… XP. Will I dual-boot with Linux? Actually, yes, most likely. I’ll probably end up putting Mint on it alongside Windows. My netbook needs are simple: access the internet, get my email, allow me to write and edit my files. Obviously I can do all of that with any Linux, but Mint is the only one I have any affection for. Perhaps it’s the color scheme. I can see myself ending up like this someday:

In a few years I may have left Windows behind completely. It all depends on how the first installment of my proposed software article comes out. I’m going to try and replicate all of the tools I use for web design in Linux. I’ll let you know how that goes.

Perhaps I’m being a bit curmudgeonly.  I use my netbook to get work done, so I need it… working.  But for developers, figuring out how to port things to different platforms and hardware is work.  Still, I always look at news of this type with a bit of skepticism.

Yesterday Brad Linder (of Liliputing) and Adam McDaniel put up instructions on how to create a LiveUSB of the HP Mi Edition version of Linux (which is basically Ubuntu with some semi-extensive tweaks).  This is big news for anyone interested in the Mi OS because up until now you could download it but the install would overwrite everything on your hard drive.  Most Linuxes have the ability to make LiveCDs or LiveUSBs so you can try a distro out and, as far as I know, all of them can install alongside an existing OS (in theory).  But I don’t know if HP expected there to be this kind of interest in the Mi Linux.

Anyway, Brad and Adam spent some time figuring out how to tweak things, so now anyone with a lot of time who isn’t turned off by using Terminal can spend an hour making a LiveUSB of this (admittedly sleek) OS.  Does this fall into Because You Can?  Maybe not.  After all, the OS is usable and meant to run on a netbook.  On the other hand: look at all this tech speak!

I’ve already been promised that I don’t have to do it.

I also installed the PortableApps platform on an SD card I had in my Eee PC (before I gave it to my niece for Christmas). PortableApps is amazing — lots of great, useful software on an SD card that, again, retains settings and information and leaves no trace behind on the computer you’re using. It’s great for security and supremely useful for me since I test a lot of netbooks and notebooks and don’t want to always install the same core programs over and over.

PortableApps utilizes all open source software, so there are many things I’m not entirely familiar with. But I’m taking it as an opportunity to learn about what’s out there. Of course I know all about Firefox and Thunderbird (which, by the way, everyone should be using instead of MS Office) and Open Office. I’m trying to evaluate whether KompoZer is an adequate substitute for Dreamweaver. GIMP isn’t adequate for anything, alas. There is a dearth of open source photo editing stuff. Someone please correct this!

Anyway, I’m getting very much into my portable OS and apps. Maybe, maybe, maybe it will facilitate my eventual switch to Linux, but I’m extremely dubious about that at this point. Mainly because I’ve had to deal with installing, configuring, and testing five distros in the past month and none of them have been easy or without problems. But that’s a post for another day.