I grew up on the Apple //e and the Apple IIgs. I have many fond memories of learning all about computers and programming on these machines. There is still a special place in my heart for The Beagle Bros, Infocom, ProTerm, and The Bards Tale.

I am fascinated by Ben Heckendorn latest project to build a laptop out of his original Apple //gs hardware. It has a 15" color monitor, original motherboard and RAM, compact flash to act as a hard drive, and a glowing Apple ][ logo.

Very cool!

With all the problems I have had recently with my HP B9180 printer, the customer service representative was nice enough to set me up with a retail packaged replacement. The retail packaging came with a recently manufactured unit, as well as new print heads and ink.

This replacement is easily the best B9180 printer I've had yet. The feed mechanism is working great with the 5.5"x8.5" art cards and the color on photo paper is excellent.

To ensure a clean start I used Revo Uninstaller to purge my HP drivers before reinstalling everything. This had the unintended consequence of deleting my custom ICC color profiles. Yikes! It has taken me longer than it should have to reconfigure everything.

I am printing on 60lb River Linen #1394 and building my profile based on the torchon ICC hfa9180torchon.icc and watercolor paper.

The HP Photosmart Pro B9180 is a sweet printer. It makes phenomenal prints. The colors are so true that prints on watercolor paper could easily be confused with original watercolor paintings.

I purchased the printer in May 2007. Since then I have made almost 1000 prints for Adine's art business.

I highly suggest the "hp care pack" extended warranty plan with this printer. The plan is about $40 and provides for next day shipping of replacement printers. I have had to use the plan four times in the past 10 months. The HP customer service is great. Especially if you are lucky enough to get through to Canada.

My latest replacement printer was shipped DOA. Very frustrating! The LED display indicates there is a "Service Stall... Press OK to continue". The service stall basically means the print head carriage does not move.

HP support was excellent and immediately offered to ship a new unit. I'm just frustrated that I've had so much trouble with this marvel of a printer.

Starting today, Sony's "Fresh Start" installation option is free. Fresh start allows us to buy Sony computers without unwanted free and trial software. Originally, Sony offered this for $50, but bad press from bloggers made them quickly change their policy.

I wonder how long until we have the option to purchase bloatware free machines from all vendors?

This week Dwight Silverman was able to get an Eee Pc from Amazon to review. After he played with it for a while, he called the online team to have a look.

It's tiny. It's light. It looks like it could be a Fisher-Price toy.

I played with it for about 10 minutes. It's run Linux, but they have taken great pains to make it feel windows-ish.

For a $300 laptop, it is nice. I would prefer if it had a larger screen, more memory, and even a larger keyboard. But if you add all these, then it would no longer be a $300 machine.

I can see why someone who wants to carry a small laptop with them would like it. However, I thought the keyboard was too small for my hands, and the mouse button was very stiff.