Gunnar Wolf

Today I went to the La Merced area to finally buy a foldable bike. There were basically four options: Benotto's 20" Utopia, Alubike 16" Foldingbike, Alubike 24" and a custom-made bike at a smaller store, Bici Universo. In Mexico it is also possible to buy a Brompton, although they are not available in larger stores and their pricing is prohibitive. Sergio Mendoza advised me to look for the Dahon bikes at Benotto, but they have discontinued them in favor of their own making.

I ended up buying the Bici Universo one. I must say this: I sincerely hope not to regret this option — I got this bike because neither of the other ones satisfied me, and this one was at about two thirds the price (MX$1800, plus some extras I requested, MX$2100 — That means, US$187 or €113).

First of all, after thinking about it for a while, I decided I didn't want a larger, more normal wheel — The Alubike 24 (which I'd have to build shopping piece by piece, as they had only the frame for sale — Would be a good ocassion to learn more about the whole process!) is basically a great regular bike you can put in a regular car trunk, but is still too large for taking it into public transport or lugging along when travelling, by bus or by plane. Besides, the handlebar1 is not foldable. So it is basically as portable as this venerable Compaq.

The Benotto's manubrium does fold, but the bike does not hold itself together when folded, it is not stable. You have to explicitly keep it folded. Not exactly comfortable.

I had tested the smaller Alubike at another bike store closer to my home. It feels a bit freer than the Universo one (I'll get to it soon), but still feels a bit kludgy... And at a price about MX$1000 higher, I decided against it.

Now, why am I wary with the Universo? Because after all... It is just a bike for kids age 4-7 and 7-12 (?) cut in half, and with a hinge soldered on:

It is also a heavy bike (I have not weighed it yet, but comparative guesstimates puts it over the Alubikes), so it might be problematic when travelling... I'll see when in Nicaragua in a couple of weeks ;-) I have yet a couple of adjustments to make to it, but I am very looking forward to travelling with my bike on. I hope it turns out to be comfortable.

And in any case, I can —of course!— donate it to my nephews... who are in the right age group.

Some photos:

• The bike, the cats
• The Universo bike, folded next to my regular 26" Benotto
• Nadezhda riding the Universo

1. 1. the original word I used, manubrium, seems strange, but that's Google's suggestion — The bar you take with your hands to steer the bike

Almost a month ago, Mauro pointed towards acerfand, a daemon to keep the Acer Aspire One's fan quiet while not needed. Thanks, Mauro, you made my life more pleasant ;-)
Today I had some free time in my hands (of course, putting aside everything else I should be doing), so I decided to un-uglify my machine. I hate having random stuff in /usr/local! So I packaged Rachel Greenham's acerfand for Debian. It should hit unstable soon.
Of course, it will not make it to Lenny - which is a shame, giving how nicely Lenny recognizes everything in this sweet machine. So, I have set up a repository for it - Once the package is formally accepted in Debian, and once lenny-backports comes to life there, I will move it to backports.org. Anyway, you can add this to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://www.iiec.unam.mx/apt/ lenny acer
deb-src http://www.iiec.unam.mx/apt/ lenny acer

Note that in the future, this package might provide some more niceties... I decided to -at least for now- stash away acer_ec in /usr/share/acerfand, but it does open a nice window to the AAO's EC(?) registers... And could be useful for many other things.
[Update]: Following Matthew's comments, both on this blog post and on the ITP bug, I am not uploading acerfand to Debian. Still, I'm using the program and find it working fine, and quite useful. You can use it from my personal repository, as written above.

Back from Argentina, back from DebConf. As always, the ~3 weeks I spent there were really great, in as many fronts as I can imagine or describe. But I won't go into that now - For the purposes of this posting, the single thing that I got out of DebConf was looking with envy at all the people that had something that used to be called a sub-notebook some time ago, and now morphed into the more modern(?) name netbook.
Several people were seen with their tiny Asus Eee machines, of various models. And I definitively decided I want one - I was quite close to buying one in Argentina, as they are readily for sale there (surprisingly, in Mexico Asus sells motherboards, but no netbooks)... But I've always prefered waiting or paying a little premium for having an on-country seller and warranty.

Back home, Pooka told me that several stores in Mexico do sell the Acer Aspire One. After a little research, I decided to go for it. Office Depot sells the AAO for MX$4500 (around US$450). The only model they carry comes with Windows XP installed (instead of Linpus Linux), which is a shame I thoroughly repeated to the vendor - But it does come with 1GB RAM and 120GB HDD, much better for my needs than the other model, with 512MB RAM and 8GB SSD. This is, after all, a full (although very small) machine. It has an Intel Atom 270 CPU - I haven't yet measured how it fares, but it feels quite responsive so far for typical desktop tasks.
But what made me really happy about it is the Debian support. The only tricky part was to get the installer going, as it does not have a CD drive to boot from (and I didn't want to completely overwrite my only available USB stick's data). Don't try installing Debian Etch, as its kernel will not support the built-in Realtek RTL8101E network card (maybe etch-and-a-half's kernel does?). My greatest ally in this was, of course, the wiki.debian.org article on the Acer One - I rebooted with Lenny's debian-installer, and everything was smooth from that point on. Propietary firmware is required for the wireless AR5007 card and webcam, but -exactly as documented in the wiki- they are covered respectively by madwifi and linux-uvc.
I did a very regular install, with basically the default desktop and notebook setup. I continue to be amazed... Everything just works! It is not even fun, there are no funny drivers to recompile, no bang-your-head-against-the-wall... Even suspend-to-RAM. It just works.
The only glitch I found so far is that, after suspend-to-RAM, the madwifi module must be removed and reloaded to have wireless network. This is a well-known glitch that can be easily worked around. But besides that, it is... as easy as it gets. And, at such a price, and under 1Kg weight... This computer will get used to go out with me quite often! Battery life is just 2 hours, but for most situations, it's more than enough.

Andrew asks about Linux-friendly eSATA controllers. A long time ago, I also looked for some - but basically no one seems to know about that, or will try to rip your eyes for it.
In January, however, I looked for (and bought) an external USB enclosure for SATA disks. As portability was more important than speed, I only asked for USB. Good, got the kit, paid for it.
The external enclosure had an external eSATA port. Not only that, it shipped with a standard PC expansion slot bracket and adaptor - Yes, it connects to your internal SATA port, and provides an external eSATA port. And, of course, it will work with your current kernel painlessly. And, of course, it is even cheaper than a SATA controller with an external port.

Madduck complains about the lack of attractive data plans for mobile phone providers in Switzerland. Madduck: As always, you will have to remember there are many people confronted with a much worse situation than yours.
Up to a month ago, I never envisioned using my phone for anything besides... Well, talking. But yes, since I got my new gadget, I keep playing with GPS or using it for simple things that require Web access and do not require much interactivity (the suckiness of a 12-key keyboard is überhuge!) - Provided, of course, that I am near a WiFi hotspot, of course. My mobile service provider, Telcel, just publicly launched its 3G network - this means, of course, prices are well over the roof:
The cheapest plan starts at MX$59 (around US$5.5) a month, and gives you a whooping 1MB of allowed transfer - Anything you do over 1MB will cost you MX$0.06 per kilobyte. Yes, Telcel offers a 1.5Mbps connection, so it'd theoretically take only 6 seconds to exceed the monthly plan. After the joyful first seconds of network access, each second of full-fledged data transfer will cost you 9 pesos - Around US$0.85. How nice!
Now, there are plans for 1, 3, 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 50, 100 and 1000MB. Their price increases at a slow pace up to MX$459, which is still somewhat expensive if you even thought on using your cell phone as a gateway (say, over Bluetooth) for your regular computer's connectivity. Of course, if I buy 1GB of data transfer, I'd expect a much lower price for each additional Kb. Well, no, it only goes down to MX$0.03. Per Kilobyte, yes, you read right. Those little things your Vic20 was full of.
There is even an unlimited plan. Well, yes, unlimited but limited - For MX$579 (~US$55) you get a nice deal, right? After all, I pay MX$350 for my 1024/128 DSL connection - it is on the right range. Well, no - If you get over 3GB in one month, your data rate will drop to 128Kbps for the rest of the month. Nice. No good as a gateway either.
So, I'm not hiring a 3G plan at all. But that's also a danger - If I open a net-using program at the wrong moment, I'll be billed at MX$0.14 per Kilobyte.
Bah.
[update] There is another similar service in Mexico, IUSAcell's BAM. Pricing is equivalent, though.

Call me reiterative, but yes, it is this time of the month again: Last Sunday. Today we went cycling to my city's Ciclotón. Although Nadezhda already took part in the August 2007 ciclotón, I was flying in from Europe that day. When I did the Ciclotón in October, she was in Monterrey. Then in December, Rodrigo reminded us that we missed it. So, this is the first time I do the Ciclotón with Nadezhda! (To my defense: Yes, I sent a SMS to Rodrigo... But too late - He probably didn't plan it on time, so we just didn't meet once again).

And what, am I going to come and brag each time I take my bike out for a longer-than-usual ride? (40Km is no small feat. Well, not for me at least!) Probably not. But if you remember, I just got a new toy, and I can now prove it to you all:

A week ago, I got my fourth cell phone so far. This is the first time, however, that I pay for it - even though the first one I had was a very nice smartphone for its time (basically, a not-really-well-integrated Palm Vx and a bulky phone very worthy back in its time. Anyway - Some months ago, I decided I wanted a Wifi-able phone, in order not to need to carry around my laptop for simple tasks such as checking my mail. Shortly after I started looking for phones which fit my needs, I found Nokia's N95. The map-maniac in me found it had a GPS, and... Well, it just became matter of waiting until my phone company brought it to the Mexican market (as I paid about half its street-price... Y'know, points for customer loyalty, blah blah).
Anyway... I've been extensively playing with my new toy, and although I am still often frustrated by Symbian's so very-very-propietary-minded OS and general culture (it's amazing the number of for-a-fee very simple applications!), I'm very happy. So far, my favorite application (and, of course, the one that made me jump for it) is Nokia's Sports Tracker. While it does have some issues (particularly the web application - at least its interaction with firefIceWeasel is somewhat buggy; it abuses AJAX interaction and some pieces of information are just not linkable, they lack a proper URL), I'm delighted at using it - tracking my theoretically daily excercise sessions, be they excercising per se or my bike rides to work, linking photos taken during those sessions, tagging them to the point and moment they were taken (although, I must admit, it is awkward to take photos while running - And next to impossible while biking, of course).
Yes, to many this is not so impressive... But it is really the toy I was looking for.