Free Thinking.

The post.

  1. A nifty Eee PC tweak

    Posted 3 months ago and tagged as

    eeepc.jpg

    While waiting for the flight back from the recent Highland Fling conference in Edinburgh I picked up an “ultra-portable” Asus Eee PC. It’s a fantastic, 7″ laptop based on the Xandros Linux distribution and because of this packs a pretty nifty setup out of the box, not to mention the glorious expandability Linux offers.

    However, most of the stuff I want to use the Eee for is oriented around the Firefox browser and as a result of being an “early adopter”, people really aren’t building websites to work at the low resolution of the Eee’s display. However, a lot of people are building sites to work with the iPhone. So I figured, what if I could run iPhone specific versions of sites in Firefox? For a lot of sites this is as easy as just going to an alternative URL. However, certain web apps (like Gmail) use sniffing to check for the iPhone user agent.

    The solution? A really sweet plugin for Firefox which allows you to serve up an alternative User Agent header string. Then it’s just a case of configuring it like this:

    • Description: iPhone
    • User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en)
    • App Name: AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko)
    • App Version: Version/3.0
    • Platform: Mobile/1A542a Safari/419.3

The comments.

  1. Added 1 month, 2 weeks ago by Phunky

    Aha! How are you finding the Eee? I’m really tempted to get my hands on one but going to wait till i start my new position first

  2. Added 1 month, 2 weeks ago by Chris Garrett

    @phunky - good to see ya back mate! Truth be told I’ve not really gotten much use out the Eee :s it’s too low spec to use for anything other than casual browsing, so I tend to just take my MacBook anywhere instead. I think if I could get Linux compatible drivers for my 3G modem I’d probably make more use of it.

    Spec wise it’s definitely up to the job, the only really annoying thing is the “easy” version of Xandos it ships with, but that’s easily hacked around.

  3. Added 1 month, 2 weeks ago by Phunky

    Yeah, i dont think i would use it for anything other than email and maybe backup of my main contacts and documents.

    Although the MSI Wind looks like a great little alternative!

    Anyway it would seem that you are doing very well at the moment :) really glad to see you have done so well for yourself.

    I start at a new company next month, will be the first true tech company i have ever worked for it you dont include ISP’s so really looking forward to it, hoping it will bring the spark back into my work which i have kinda lost in the last 3-4 years

  4. Added 1 month, 2 weeks ago by Chris Garrett

    @phunky - that’s awesome news mate! Looking forward to seeing some more blogging from you :)

  5. Added 1 month, 2 weeks ago by Phunky

    Heh, dont know if i will ever start blogging again as i’ve just got out of the habbit but you never know :)

    I do hope to start getting more creative again with this role and start enjoying my web work again.

    Although i’ve had a fun three years at ACORN there is only so much you can do with Stairlifts… and even less when you only really do internal apps.

  6. Added 1 month, 1 week ago by Jamie Dyer

    ello chris!

  7. Added 1 month, 1 week ago by Chris Garrett

    ‘ello Jamie!

  8. Added 3 weeks, 3 days ago by Tomas Breen

    Great tip. Handy for testing, and pretending that I have an iPhone.

Say something!

There are no links to this post yet. Be nice and make one :)