CR-48 to hospital for baby delivery

We had a new baby last night. Our third. I brought the cr-48 along for it's portability, quick use, and battery life. My wife brought her full-size laptop as well, but the cr-48 got all the action. Other than now-reported bugs (accounts automatically logging out, trackpad problem, difficulty getting on hospital's wifi), Chrome OS works perfectly for the quick, gotta-get-this-email-out sort of use. Quick login, bootup, and shutdown are perfect for this situation, when you want to communicate online, but can not miss anything in real life, either. An android phone might have been better, but I can't even begin to afford a smartphone.

Developer mode

I put my CR-48 into developer mode earlier this evening.  Why?  To get access to more options in the shell, including root access.  To set up access to the file system.  To change my avatar picture (specifically, to start from scratch, make an avatar pic, and then change it).  These sorts of options should be available without going in to developer mode.

Making Chrome OS work for public access PCs

As a reference librarian, and the person in charge of tech at the library, one of the main reasons I wanted to try the Cr-48 was to evaluate whether ChromeOS could potentially be used on our public access machines.  The touted advantages are very tempting - no documents stored locally, can be used in guest mode so nothing is kept, no need for anti-virus, etc.  Google promises us that we can (or will in the near future) do everything we need to do in the cloud.  What could be better for a computer lab at a public library, where we want the machines to be strongly protected, while allowing users to do everything from fill out online applications, to making PowerPoint presentations, to playing games?  Our peculiar use case requires both high flexibility and high security, and Chrome OS provides much of the latter, while Google promises we'll be getting more of the former in the cloud.

Problem is, Chrome OS can't do a lot of things that a library needs it to do.  Dut to the very nature of this OS, commentary and reviews are going to focus on what Chrome OS can not do.  After all, Google's contention (well, my take on it) is that we don't need 90+% of what computers can do, thanks to the power of the cloud.

Here's a list, of the top of my head, of what a library would need for public access machines, that Chrome OS does not yet provide:

Fear the Con 4

Loooong entry here, related entirely to table-top gaming, so feel free to skip it if you're here for the Cr-48 babble.

Go here to read up about Fear the Con: Con Planner

I started gaming (tabletop roleplay gaming, specifically) in, I think, 1984. I've tried a lot of games, I've gamed with a very wide variety of people, and I've been to a few conventions. The best con, by far, is Fear the Con.

It was organized by the hosts of Fear the Boot, a gaming podcast that will be well known to any gamer who has even thought about listening to podcasts. I would travel far and pay big money to go to Fear the Con. Thankfully, it's held here in the St. Louis area, and the whole shebang only costs 25 bucks. That includes dinner the night before (Thursday, March 17th, 2011) at an event called World Wide Wing Night, and two full days of gaming (March 18th and 19th) with what I think must be the best group of gamers ever to congregate. Did I mention the free beer? Yes, free beer. No, seriously, free beer.

It's, like, stadium beer, but it's beer.

But this is a full-on gaming con -- all gaming, all the time. We game from 10:30 am to 11:30 pm.  As in, lots of groups gaming in a big room full of tables. Sign up ahead of time, or jump in if there's space, or make your own pick-up game.  There's other great stuff going on -- comedian Mikey Mason, a recording of the podcast, board games and card games, prizes for game masters, etc -- but we come to game. This is made easier by extraordinary table-side concessions -- great chili, carmelitas, burgers, fruit, etc -- at phenomenal prices. You can eat all day on 10 bucks or less, and never have to leave the gaming table.

(Much more after the break)

Example of Chrome OS best use case?

This morning I had the first instance of the Cr-48 being a better choice than my regular computer when the two devices were side by side, but it was a narrow circumstance.

I had turned off my main computer (a Dell Studio XPS 8000 running Windows 7) last night. This morning, I wanted to see if a new episode of This Week in Google (a podcast from the Twit network at twit.tv) had come out. Normally, I would boot the computer, connect my Zune player (2nd gen, 16GB, for the idly curious), and use the Zune software to look for new episodes. But, I was in a hurry to get to work, so instead I booted up my Cr-48 (which takes about 15 seconds to boot) and went to twit.tv to see what the latest release was.  This saved me probably 75 seconds, maybe -- my Dell fully boots in about a minute, plus time to open the Chrome browser and type in the address.

Now, if there had been a new episode available, I would still have to have booted up the Dell and connected the Zune. In what is the only drawback in an otherwise excellent media player, the Zune player requires the Zune software (in itself pretty good - better than iTunes, anyway, for my purposes). I abhor the locked-in, "walled garden", stuntware (purposefully stunted software/hardware) approach to computing, and was quite annoyed at discovering my then-new Zune would force me into exactly that. Each element of the ecosystem is excellent, but I bridle at having to be confined by an "ecosystem" at all. But, I digress.

I would have had to boot up the big computer because, obviously, the Zune software will not run on the Cr-48. Nothing will run on the Cr-48 except the Chrome browser and the pieces that hang off Chrome. Another kind of walled garden?

It's certainly stuntware.

12 Ways Libraries Are Good for the Country | American Libraries Magazine

Just noting this article as a fine example of why I'm a librarian:

12 Ways Libraries Are Good for the Country | American Libraries Magazine

CR-48

Just got the Cr-48 from Google.  It's a laptop with the new Chrome OS beta installed, for testing purposes.  I figure that's a good enough reason to blabber on in blog format.

First tip -- if you're setting up a Cr-48 for the first time, go ahead and save that account picture they offer you.  It only shows up when you log in to the machine, and you can't go back later and put one in (at least, not yet, but they are promising to allow this in a future update).

I wonder if Google would rather I ask before blogging on about the new OS?  Not like it matters -- who would I ask?  A Python script?