A new toy for a road warrior

For the last couple of weeks I've been staying at a friend's house while I've been working for a short stint in the South. Needless to say, I was shocked and stunned when he told me he didn't have a wireless LAN at home. (He does have three wireless routers but none of them are configured.) That means no easy connection for my laptop and no connection at all for my Wi-Fi phone or iPod Touch.

This set me looking for a portable wireless router that I could use when I'm away from home. I almost bought one over a year ago but never made it back to the shop in Tokyo where I had seen my then only option. Many months on I was surprised to find there don't seem to be too many more choices. Asus do a WL-330g but I struggled to find anyone who stocked them. Also I was discouraged by the fact these have external power bricks, some extra wire and bulk which I really do not want to have to carry around. The Linksys WTR54GS isn't available in the UK until next month and is equally untidy with a UK power lead. The only example I could find with the size, neatness and general availability I hoped for came from an entirely predictable manufacturer.

Apart from having to configure the device via an unnecessarily clunky MacOS or Windows application (there's no browser based interface), the Airport Express is small, versatile, reasonably priced, at £65, and very neat. I have mine configured so I can just plug in the hotel's (or friend's) Ethernet connection and I'm instantly up and running with 802.11a/b/g/n. Security is unfortunately a feature that didn't make it through the consumer tests so appropriate care must be taken. Removing the UK adapter reveals a very useful figure-8 socket so it's easy to find a lead wherever you might be. Yet again, an Apple Corp product that's hard to resist.

Some might say I did not really need my travel WAP. For a little bit of perspective, my same friend yesterday took delivery of his new £38k 354bhp 4.1 second 0-60 (~10mpg, 328g/km CO2) Mitsubishi Evolution X GSR FQ-360. The mad fool even let me drive it and I can confirm the FQ (Flippin' Quick?) designation is definitely deserved - a crazy machine to sell to any "young" man. :-)

Living with my subnotebook

Now that I've spent some quality time with my holiday laptop I thought I would report back in perhaps a less excited manner than on the day of delivery. All in all I am still very happy with my purchase and the Asus does everything that I had hoped and more. The addition of Bluetooth worked really well and I could get on t'Internet from pretty much anywhere.

Firstly, I've found there's almost no reason to enable the "advanced desktop" or add any "easy mode icons" if you're in anyway familiar with a Bash shell. Reaching the command line is trivial (CTRL+ALT+T) and you can do all you need from there.

A brief look at the security of the device held no surprises - there's basically none out of the box. However, I didn't have to do much more than configure hosts.deny and disable the vulnerable Samba service for the device to be reasonably safe, if not a little noisy on the network. Enabling iptables looked a little more complicated than I wanted to try so many miles from home.

Wireless discovery is great. I updated the MadWifi drivers, installed Wireshark, Kismet, nmap, ettercap and aircrack with no problems. Three wood stools and a little bit of delicate balancing meant I could see around 15 networks from my Tenerife apartment and, due to being so high up, more than 40 from the accommodation in Tignes.

Using the Eee PC with cameras works quite well too. The built-in SD reader works very simply with the Xandros automount tool and a 5-in-1 card reader is only a little bit trickier. There's support for importing images from Canon cameras if you enable the "KIPI Digital Camera Interface" plugin in Photo Manager. However, as I'd already installed the GIMP, I got UFRaw up and running so I could play with all the formats my DSLR can produce.

Working with iPods is a bit more problematic. I was delighted that my Nano G3 was immediately recognised and mounted and I liked the Music Manager application (a rebranded Amarok). But I was less pleased when I ejected the device only to find that the music was no longer playable and that I had 8GB of "other" files. After a few days of tinkering I used gtkpod to rebuild what I found to be a corrupted iTunesDB file. All was then good but for the cover art. This is the only real disappointment I suffered and is definitely something Asus should fix.

Remote access back to the ranch worked well with a native Linux PuTTYgen to reformat SSH keys and a replacement v1.5.0 rdesktop to control some Windows machines via an SSH tunnel. I was surprised to see the ftp client was missing from the default OS installation but again this was easily fixed, as was installing Filezilla.

Save for not quite enough capacity in the battery, I get ~1½ hours from a full charge, the overall package is great. The screen is almost big enough for most tasks and I'm sure the next generation will offer a better resolution. I can't wait.

Holiday 2 - update 2

I shamefully forgot to mention... Tea on day 2 was an extremely nice affair round at the Armaillis apartment. Nic prepared a salad to accompany the hot chicken, sausages and other stuff we got from the supermarket. The boy made his signature fruit salad with red wine and orange juice. Meanwhile, Hugh and Stew tried to commit suicide with their synchronised Canon flashgun antics (suicide from the point of view that the girls nearly murdered them). Wine, beer and bottle-top games then tired most of us out. For the record, we had a lovely dinner at Café Rouge on Monday night and a below average fare at Daffy's Café Tex-Mex in Val Claret (check out their mad website!) on Wednesday night.

Day 4 saw much better weather than the day before and Andy, the boy and I set out in earnest. We took Paquis, down a short red to Combe Folle (an "adult-only" lift that is only marked as such when you get there), down Creux, up Mont Blanc, down Moutons, up Borsat Express and down Borsat to lunch. With the cloud and falling snow getting thicker we took Marmottes and skied down Diebold to the Tommeuses lift. At the end of this one we were very cold and stopped for chocolate chaud at Toviere. A final run down Piste H to Val Claret and the bus home finished the day.

We all had a last dinner at Le Rendez-Vous before helping Stew, Leise, Hugh and Nic pack to be on their way home for 22:40. The holiday seems to have passed so very quickly.

Just as the boy was going to bed he started to complain of feeling sick. After a night frequently disturbed by false alarms he eventually came up with the goods at 05:00. Nothing very much to bring back made his heaving not a nice experience.

Andy and I left him in his cousin's care while we had a quick squiz up Palafour, Merles and Grand Huit. This is a nice route of wide blues and the weather was fantastic, clear as a clear thing from Clearsville and stiller than Ben. We skied back to the apartment to take over caring duties so Steve could have a run out.

The boy was still feeling proper poorly but his ambition to ski on such a beautiful day persuaded him to kit up and head out. Steve returned to Rosset for more practice and the party of three repeated the first route of the morning. A short rest and more retching at the top of two of the lifts did little to diminish the fun of the way down. However, this was enough for the boy and one more circuit was enough for Andy too.

I decided to go wild and have a final explore on my own; up Palafour, Merles, down to Val Claret, then up Bollin, Fresse, down to La Daille (in the valley just below Val d'Isere), then up Etroits, Tommeuses, back down to Val Claret, then up Tichot, Grattalu, Grand Huit and a final run back to our apartment. That was just enough to tire me out. We then loaded the car, found Kieran, paid the tourist tax and then left Tignes at around 17:40.

Despite ambitions to do something different and to avoid some of France's Péage fees (€68.90 on the way down and €71.90 on the way back), we ended up taking the same route in both directions. We made it to Calais for around 03:50 and took the 04:35 Pride of Kent sailing to be back on British roads for 05:10. A brief stop as Tesco's Ashford store and 30 minutes queueing on the M11 saw us home for shortly after 10:00.

Saturday spent unpacking and relaxing followed by a record sleep-in to 10:50 for Mummy's "special boy" marks the end of this Easter break.

Holiday 2 - update 1

All the travelling went well, the only slight hiccup being a 35 minute delayed departure on the Pride of Burgundy. From Calais at 20:45 Tomtom predicted a journey of 604 miles and an arrival time of 05:58. Against all odds (and the 110kmph when it's raining(!)) we arrived in resort at 06:00.

After a brief rest the boy and I, Stew, Leise, Nic and Hugh were out on the slopes. Most of the day was spent in clouds but we still managed some decent runs and were worn out by the time we got back to our apartment. Some fresh snowfall has made all the runs quite excellent and there's snow all the way to the bottom of the resort.

Opening the blinds on day 2 revealed glorious sunshine which was to last all day. Steven joined us and we headed up in the bubble lift to the top of the mountain. On the opposite side of the hill(!) to our resort the blue runs are fantastic. Lunch with a view to die for and the bubble lift back down topped it all off.

Day 3 (today) saw Andy for the first time. He'd been sick for the first two days, retching with nothing to show for it. However, as soon he was on the snow things got much better for him. We headed up the mountain again, did a run to the bottom and then headed back up for lunch. The idea was we would do the nice blues again and then take the bubble down. Malheuresment the weather came in, so much so the bubble was closed. We had to ski down to Val Claret in very poor visibility and into a wind that was strong enough to blow you back up hill. Everyone did well but my boy deserves a special mention for being so tough - good lad!

Café Rouge is just across from our apartment and has warmth, beer and free Wi-Fi access. Just the ticket to recover ready for tomorrow. :-)