thanks resolve. How powerful is your thing? I mean can it cope with say photoshop for basic image manipulation (i.e. touching up your photos from a digi cam?)

how about for programming aps like your very own anki? I used to do games programming but those days are long gone and now im just looking at usiing maybe ruby to make some relatively simple apps. Would your laptop be fine for that (id be using an external keyboard and monitor for this.)

also you say you want to use flash to help avoid hard drive damage but wouldnt you literally need to remove it from the laptop to avoid it getting damaged???? surely it still spins after booting up no?

Congrats on the new gizmo Resolve!

TG3, I thought I'd blabbered enough about my new baby, but if you insist...!

I bought it, Kohjinsha sh8, on Halloween so I've had a good while to play with it.  120gb hard drive so plenty of space for whatever.  I figure the 800Mhz cpu is fine, but as Resolve said, more ram would be better.  In the U.S. people have upped the 1gb to 2gb, but for some reason Kohjinsha states that it cannot be done in their brochures.  Even with Vista(I made a few tweaks to liven things up.) Single apps are no problem, and even a couple/few are fine. Start-up is the sluggishiest time of all!

The 7 " screen is nice, bright as can be, doesn't hurt to turn it down and I've set it to automatically dim when on the battery, easy enough.  Lucky if I get 3 hours straight, but there's always a plug around somewhere.  Wanna get the big battery though.

I bought a really good case, same as for my 17" notebook, from Yamada Denki, 1500 yen.  It's made of that squishy-slow foam and eggshell-carton designed for less damage on impact.  I'm not worried in the least about it getting hurt.  It feels quite solid, including screen. I slip that into my nice new Jack Wolfskin Commuter pc-backpack/shoulder bag and I'm good to go.

Bluetooth and wirless are fairly easy to use and surfing the internet is really handy in town.  I've set the font a little bigger for the pc and firefox is so easy to blow-up and shrink pages, ctrl +/- so the small screen is not a problem.  I used it all day once and got a pretty bad head/eye-ache, but I'm talking ALL day. I don't advise it to be your main squeeze.  There is a monitor out.  Almost picked up a wireless keyboard to leave at work, but it came with a wireless mouse and I already have one.  Will wait til I find a bluetooth keyboard. I was using it at home, but I find that it is so much easier to use my big notebook.  But with a bigger screen, who knows.

I often reach out and hit ok buttons that pop up, but resolve is right, sometimes the keyboard is just so much faster.  I used it as scratchpad when I helped my students last week prep for a speech contest, writing comments on their speeches.  That was pretty cool.  Did the same for a work meeting.  Paper works just as well,  better, but it's digital so you can manipulate it if you like.

Main reason for buying it(besides liking gadgets) was use as a dictionary.  Wakan is great and I can leave it on in the background, but it doesn't take kanji input.  So, I've taken to using the perapera kun look-up bar in an open firefox window(no internet connection). I then use Vista's tablet pc input, hit tab, and it sends it to perapera kun and the words appear toot-sweet.  Wish I had an all-in-one dictionary program though. Lemme know if you guys know of one.

Anki every morning and I've taken to leaving Kanji gold running on the desktop as a pop-up.  And when I draw a blank I just pull open my Story List saved to word.(Still haven't imported those to my deck, Resolve.

So, to sum it up, no regrets!

Just wanted to post an update to say that I am loving the Asus eee pc.  It's perfect!  I put windows + Anki on it and now I'm a portable Japanese studying machineee!  Thanks geezer for the recommendation.

i would have just got the asus eee but i thought the touch screen would have been useful to enter kanji into dictionarys via stylus. How are you guys coping with that? By the sounds of it your not really using the touch screen. I read aikiboys method to enter kanji but dont know of the programs he was talking about (perapera?).

There are a number of issues I want to address before the next release. Just a matter of finding the time..

Aikiboy wrote:

I am using Firefox internet browser.  It allows add-on utilities. I have added "Rikai-chan" and "Perapera-kun", which utilizes rikai-chan. When looking at the internet, you can roll the cursor over a kanji and it instantly shows you the kanji/pronunciation/meaning,etc. I use the look-up bar option for peraperakun.

Wow, just added this to my firefox, it's great. Thanks for the heads-up.

-Mex

That's true. No need to buy what you don't need. I would say that if you have a notebook pc that isn't too old or you are happy with, or have no need for one, then why not just get a japanese denshi jisho? The text input was what I was looking for and my laptop is 2 years old(still fine) but has a 17" screen. Lugging it around was a bear to bear!   And the battery usage dropped to under 2 hours. And if you're rich just buy everything!

I've got a system that works for me, a little roundabout, but really convenient. I'll slim it down eventually, but for now I'm a happy camper!

Hmm, I wonder if you can use one of those art mouse pad thingys. Not portable, but it's plug and play.

Cheers.

Your options are limited at this point, I'm afraid. Anki's current deck representation uses a lot of memory, so the chances of it running on a PDA with less than 64 or 128MB of memory are low. I'm looking into an alternative backend which will offer some nice properties including lower memory footprint, but it will require rewriting large parts of Anki, and is a lot of work.

But even when that's finished, there's still the problem of actually porting Anki to a PDA. I don't have a PDA and don't really need one, so the only chance of getting Anki running on one is if someone steps forward and writes the code themselves. An example of this is the current work being done to port Mnemosyne to a Nokia N800 by one guy.

Same applies for the iphone. The Zaurus can load Anki's library pretty easily, but the standard OS doesn't support qt4, so there's no GUI.

So while there may be more options in the future, at this point you'll need to either look for other software, or reconsider the PDA idea.

It needs a bit of work to port to 0.3.x, though that shouldn't be hard. But a better approach is probably a small webserver so that whatever you PDA's GUI, you can just use the local browser to do things.

resolve wrote:

Same applies for the iphone. The Zaurus can load Anki's library pretty easily, but the standard OS doesn't support qt4, so there's no GUI.

Could you edit or quickly design another online review page with buttons that would be easy to press on a touchscreen device such as the iPhone?  That would be good enough.  The simple review page is a real pain to use on the phone because the links are too small to press without constantly zooming in.

resolve wrote:

The Zaurus can load Anki's library pretty easily, but the standard OS doesn't support qt4, so there's no GUI.

If you install a different distro, like pdaXrom or even Debian, you may be able to get QT4 onto it.  That's precisely what I'm planning to do to my SL-C3200 (yeah, I know it's not a phone, but it seems like runs the same O/S as the Zaurus phones).  Now I've just gotta find the time to do it...

Has anyone here done something similar?

resolve wrote:

Yes, someone has built qt for openzaurus, and they are preparing anki packages.

Do you know why they chose OpenZaurus?  I was eyeing it for a while, until I found out the project was closed in favour of another OS.

I'm still undecided as to what I'm going to put onto my Z next.

BTW.  Is this person on this forum?