Subnotebooks

I’m wondering if anyone has taken a subnotebook to the field, and if so, how it went. The earlier ones didn’t look appropriate (hard drive too small, for example) but not there are machines with 1.6GHz processors, 80Gb hard drives, and with Ubuntu as the operating system that’s a pretty good setup.

Fieldwork with computers

The last couple of days I’ve been working directly from computer notes, either elicitation or Laves story correction. I’m trying to work out if I like it, and if the disadvantages outweigh the advantages (and/or vice versa :) ).
On the one hand, it’s nice to enter sentences directly onto computer without having to retranscribe. And [...]

Thank you Finnair!

In 2001 or so I got a free pack of playing cards on a Finnair trip between Paris and Helsinki. They are quite nice, really. Each card has a pic of some morally improving Finnish scenary, or kids in knitted hats, for artistic ice-covered berries, or reindeer. You know the sort of stuff.
I brought them [...]

spoffles and other creatures

The use of the term ‘dead cat’ for things that look like this, or this, on the ILAT list recently spurred me to ask for other examples of the term.
Many thanks to everyone who wrote back.* Do add further terms in the comments.

dead cat
windshield [Aus term]
windscreen [US term]
popshield
spoffle
fur slug (?)
shaggy dog
windsock, wind sock
furball [furry ones [...]

New fieldwork equipment

[more in the series of old partial posts with current relevance.. this one edited since it's been pointed out that the original post was rather cryptic.]
I had a bunch of new equipment to take to the field last year:

new earphones (much smaller than my previous travel pair)
SD digi video
Edirol R-09 (used before, but not in [...]

PDAs and fieldwork

I used mine for data entry with speakers for the first time this most recent field trip, so I thought I would post something about it.
Pros:

It allowed relatively fast data entry, and saved a lot of rewriting.
It obviated my need for a printer.
Speakers adjusted to the replacement orthography very easily (my PDA cannot display Unicode or [...]

Vaio Review

I’ve had a bit of a computer saga over the last year or two. If someone wrote a play about it (and what a boring play it would be) they might call it “Death of a motherboard”. But it was also not powerful enough for decently running sound files, it took ages to load stuff, [...]