A weekend with the N800

I did it! I went from Thursday to Monday without actually using my laptop while I was away from home. I have to say the N800 wasn't a perfect substitute but it was pretty handy. Here's a few things that caused me problems over the long weekend:

Rebooting on Startup: For some reason it would reboot automatically after being on for about 2 minutes. I'd have a few seconds where I could open a browser or try tell it to connect to the Internet via my phone and then Boom!!! It would just freeze and reboot. On Saturday it did this 6 or 7 times before it stopped and finally settled down. After that I left the car charger plugged in and left it on.

I thought this whole reboot problem was related to not being able to get on a network but when I got home I tried booting it up with the same results, freezing after start up and then reboot. I can't seem to find any correlation. It does it with the bluetooth keyboard on or off. It does it when you have a network connection or not. The best thing to do seems to be to let it just boot up and sit there for a few minutes. Then it will work.

Opera and Ebay: So ebay is trying to make more of it's web site Web 2.0 friendly. Only problem is that many of their enhancements don't work so well with Opera. One in particular is the drop down box under the action column. It's supposed to give you a list of options that you want to both for items you are buying and selling. In fact it's the only way to end an auction early. But when you click on the drop down it just shows you a blank box. That's a problem. Luckily I also installed Minimo so I just logged in using Minimo when I needed to do things that required use of the drop down boxes.

Wrong memory card for my camera: Unfortunately my camera uses the older, very outdated Smart Media cards so I couldn't view the pictures I took. This really isn't a problem with the N800 it just means it's time to get an updated camera uses MMC cards.

Well that about sums it up. While writing this entry I've been trying to turn on my N800. It just keeps rebooting after 2 minutes. I can get into it remotely via ssh and top reports jffs2_gcd_mtd4 as the highest usage program so maybe it's time to figure out what that is and what it's doing to cause my problems.

BTW: The Stoaway BT keyboard works great on my lap!

2 days with my N800

So it´s the end of the day and I´ve surprised myself with how easy it is to leave my laptop in it´ś backpack. Sure if there was a big server crash I´d probably have to pull it out just to work quicker. But for basic email and web surfing it works fine. The most difficult thing I´ve found so far is with logging into the dashboard to publish this blog. For some reason the signin link at the top of the page doesnt work. Instead I have to go to sign up for a new blog, then click on the sign in page and enter my credentials. Then I can type in www.blogger.com as the URL and I´ĺl see my dashboard. Sort of a pain but easier now that I´ve figured out how to do it.

One annoying thing is when there isn´t a connection available. I´ve had problems with it freezing and then rebooting. Tonight there were some updates available so I applied them. I´ĺl have to see how the unit does tomorrow.

It seems it´ś harder than I expected to find open wireless networks. I guess more and more folks are figuring out how to secure their wireless networks. Thankfully using the DUN on my Treo I can get connectivity almost anywhere as long as I have cellular service. Hooray!