Dredd

As a fan of the character here's hoping this will be good when it's released in September...

Jolicloud

Way back in 2008 I picked up an Asus Eee PC as an experiment and had some fun messing about with it; however, it came a poor second as a usable device once the iPad came along.  My other half has been using it ever since as her around the house web browsing device.

Unfortunately the netbook has been getting slower and slower, so I decided to try installing a new lighter OS on it to see how it would fare.

After some research I chose Jolicloud as it seemed to have the least hassle install and the features we needed.  I downloaded the ISO and created a bootable SD card from it and then tried that on the Eee PC.  All the hardware (microphone, sound, webcam etc.) seemed to work straight out of the box and so I installed it on the internal drive but alongside the original Xandros.

So far everything seems to be working pretty well and the machine is fairly zippy.  I'll provide some updates once we have tried it out for a while in real life conditions.

Ethernet over Power

For some reason I can't manage to pin down my wifi router will not operate at 802.11n - it always finds some reason to drop down to b/g instead.  This makes moving big files around a really slow process.

Not having ethernet cabling in our new house means I had one of four choices: (1) put up with slow wifi (frustrating but cheap), (2) buy a new wifi router (more expense and not guaranteed to fix the problem), (3) install ethernet cabling (not very straightforward and so probably rather expensive), or (4) try ethernet over my mains cabling.

I plumped for option (4) and picked up a set of TP-Link powerline adapters from Amazon.

They arrived today, came with a couple of short but useful ethernet cables and were an absolute breeze to set up.  Obviously they're not as fast as proper ethernet but it's a significant improvement in both speed and reliability.