Outdoor Bloggers join together

This is cross posted on a lot of outdoor bloggers sites.

Weird Darren has set-up an e-petition to try and get the Government to legalise Wild Camping in England & Wales

"We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to legalise wild camping in England and Wales. Currently without the landowners consent it is illegal to wild camp on the moors, mountains, National Parks and MOD land. It is time to give people the same rights as those given North of the Border in Scotland to allow them to wild camp in these places without threat of legal action."

The deadline is 24th May 2008; you must be a British citizen or resident to sign the petition.

To get this petition taken serious; it needs a minimum of 200 signatures.

Please pass this to other websites that may have an interest in the outdoors, it needs plenty of support.

Thanks to AktoMan for the graphic

EEE PC Review

I`ve been playing around with the e3 pc for the last couple of days, and must say that it really is a great little machine.

Some stats on the machine first:

Weight 900 gm

900Mhz Intel Celeron-M processor

800 x 400 pixel screen resolution

3 Usb 2.0 ports

VGA output

Ethernet socket

Webcam

Stereo speakers

Headphone & mic sockets

Built-in mic

SD card slot

Built-in WiFi

Flash storage

I have the standard white 4Gb, 512Mb ram machine; which can be upgrade to 2Gb ram.

The OS in a special version of Xandros Linux. There are a host of open source programs pre-loaded, which include OpenOffice for word processing, spreadsheets and the like.

There are a couple of media players for playing MP3's and video., there is also a a voice recorder.

The EEE PC & Psion Revo

So far; I have been using the E3 for most of my computing usage; writing emails, surfing the web and some word processing. The E3 has worked well for all these, the keyboard is a bit small and the keys are a bit flimsy to the touch. If you are a touch typist it will be a strange experience but as a two fingered typist, I`m not finding it to much trouble.

The Wifi works pretty well in all parts of the house, I haven't tried it out and about yet.

The web browser is Firefox and the email is web based and has tabs for most of the major email web based players.

All the web pages load O.K and look good on the screen, video channel play the same as on my main computer.

The machine only takes 15-20 seconds to boot up and normally starts in the easy desktop, this is the default setting.

Easy desktop

The easy desktop has tabs across the top for the major areas of usage and subsections within them.

Everything is pretty straight forward and getting start doesn't even require the user manual.

The desktop can be changed to advanced mode, which requires a download. This then looks like a normal Windows/Mac desktop.

Advanced mode

There is a good user group for the E3 and also a Wiki; this is where I found out about how to chance the desktop.

All of my USB devices; Aiptek camera, MP3 player and USB flash key have all been recognised by the machine.

Battery life is about 3-4 hours even with the Wifi switched on.

I have found that the webcam is O.K when viewing but the actual recording seems very jerky and not to clear.

The machine is really designed for children and does look like a toy but it is a really neat little machine.

The biggest advantage over the Psion is the WiFi; with so many hotspots around it means getting that all important blog entry in quickly.

Sizewise you wouldn't want to take it backpacking but overall this a useful machine for quickly checking emails, a bit of surfing and some word processing.

I`m Free, EEE PC

Well not exactly free but wireless.

I`ve finally gotten around to buying a router and setting the home PC to a wireless connection.

The main reason for this is so I can connect my latest gadget to the internet, and the latest gadget is the Asus EEE PC.

The EEE is small and very portable; it's about the size of an A4 sheet of paper, weighs about a kilo, has wifi and looks great. It even has a 0.3 mp webcam built-in.

I'm typing this blog entry on it and the keyboard is big enough even for my large fingers.

The OS is linux but it can run windows XP, I'll have to look into the ways to run that but at present the linux OS works fine.

There's no HD but a 4GB solid-state flash storage 'disk', there are 3 USB ports and VGA port and a combined SD/MMC card slot, so memory cards from a digital camera can be accessed.

A big step up from my old psion Revo.

Why backpacker are so cool

I just caught this video over on Youtube.



Personally I think this is a good way to pass on some of that backpacking gear you don't use anymore, but is to good to throw out.

I must have a cupboard full; of little piece of equipment that I'll never use again and could probably be useful to someone else.

2008

Well 2008 is upon us, so Happy new year.

I can't really look back on 2007 as a good year for backpacking; only one trip.

That's the first time in seven years that I haven't been out more.

Part of the problem is living in the South-east of England; small friendly campsite seem to be disappearing at a rate of knots, which makes it difficult to arrange something local (local is anywhere on the South Downs or the South coast), and when you do find somewhere, some are looking to charge a high price for a night's camping.

Going further afield is problematic to; a trip to the Lakes or Scotland for 3 days is just not viable. Doing these kind of trips really has to be at least a week long, 1) to make to enjoyable without all the mad rushing around to get to places, and 2) to make the cost minimal.

I've nothing planned for the coming year but it is early days, so I may find some trips to get out on.