netbooks

System76, the company that focuses on Ubuntu based computers, has just launched its first netbook model, the Starling.

By the end of 2007 I decided to buy a nice little gizmo for my 6 years old daughther, a tiny 7" laptop manufactured by Asus called the Eee PC 701. Nintendo had started with the funny sounding names a year before when launching the Wii.

Many thought there was no space in the market for a new kind of laptop. Boy they were all wrong, a couple of years later we have a new category added to the usual desktop and notebook line up, there are netbooks all over the place and if you're serious about web development you should be ordering yours just now. This is why.

While I was writing a new article about why every web developer should buy a netbook in his arsenal, writing that happens using my tiny daugther's Asus Eee PC 701, I was quite tempted to buy the newest star in Asus line of netbooks: the Asus Eee PC 1000HE.

At US$ 389, with a 10" screen, 1 Gb. of RAM, 160 Gb. hard disk, improved keyboard and the promise of more than 9 hours of battery life looks like a great deal.

I had it already in my shopping cart but then I made a few numbers and decided not to complete the checkout. The reason? I have two daughters now. Beatriz is seven and lovely little Catalina arrived just a couple of weeks ago.

Obtaining the much desired wife acceptance factor of one is more difficult than ever and the finance crisis, worldwide now, doesn't help either.

So, what a man/web developer/father's got to do? Well, ask for a little help from his friends, I guess.

I've created a Chipin account to raise the funds for my new Asus Eee PC 1000HE, see the nice widget above. I'm sure some of my articles may have helped some of you in the past so if you want to put a few bucks in the tip jar I would really appreciate it. Let's see how it goes.