1…
This jumped straight to the top of my “stuff I can justify buying for some good reason, while secretly preparing for the zombie outbreak” list.
2…
My new Asus eeePC 1000he netbook makes me pretty happy. It took me a little more than a year to talk myself into it, and waiting that long meant that I got a 10-inch screen, much-improved keyboard, and a purported 8+ hours of battery life (YMMV) for about 75% of what I would have ended up paying for a lesser machine in 2008.
3…
While cleaning the bloatware from the netbook (which I’ve named “The FMA” until I think of something better), I dug about for the tools I wanted to turn the thing into an open source/freeware writing machine. OpenOffice was a no-brainer for word processing and MS-Office-friendly output, but I MUST bring your attention to Write Monkey.
Write Monkey is a full-screen … I was going to say “word processor”, but it’s both more (a writer’s tool) and less (a text editor). The creator promises a distraction-free writing experience, and that’s what you get: just you and the words on a black screen. Word count display is optional, as is a “Write or Die” timer. It has a few nice options hidden in the background that I’m not going to spoil, and an all-keyboard-commands style of interface that I absolutely love; I wrote my first stories on ProWrite 2.0 for DOS 3.1, and this this feels like coming home. (It also has a solid “export to doc format” function that works quite well.)
My current favorite part? The Repository screen, where you can hide all the bits you haven’t found a place for in the story, yet. Brilliant.
4…
What else did I put on there? A bunch of game-rules PDFs, VLC Portable, bookmarks to Slacker Radio and Graham Walmsley’s Very Fine Dice Roller, and I’m pretty much good to go for everything I’d want to do with the thing. (Full disclosure: I also put LotRO on it, just to see if it would run. It did, and the less said (or done) about that, the better.)
Anyone else have a software app they think the whole world should be using? Lemme know: I have tons of free space and a strong desire to tinker. (Note to self: figure out why you can’t boot to the eeebuntu thumbdrive. :P)