As I’m sure many of you will remember, a few months ago Gear Diary suffered a server crash, and a whole lot of data was lost. Fortunately, some of the data (reviews mainly) was stored in Google Cache, a fabulous little repository of lost websites. Whilst very handy for recovery, it’s can also be of use when a website is down for maintenance or their server is temporarily offline.

Today I was trying to look up some information on XDA-Developers, and I found that they are having some kind of service difficulties. I was able to get to the page I wanted to view using a search on Google, then clicking the “Cached” button below the search result. Now while that is pretty easy, surfing between pages on the site can be a bit of a pain.

Since I use Firefox I figure someone will have created an ingenious little extension that takes advantage of Google Cache for surfing, and that was exactly what I found. Called CacheIt!, the extension let you right click on a link and view the last cache, or snapshot, of that page that Google took when crawling around the web for search results. Very useful if the site you need to access is down (or no longer exists).

It’s also compatible with Firefox 3!

I’ve been using the final release version of Firefox 3.0 since it was released a few days ago, and I’ve been very impressed. It is considerably faster than Firefox 2.0, both when first started and after several days of having hundreds of tabs opened and closed (without restart, and often 20 or more simultaneously).

This morning when I fired up my Eee, I got online using my USB HSDPA modem and downloaded the new version. Since my Eee has the tiny 7″ 800×480 display, web browsing isn’t the most comfortable experience, since 1024px wide seems to be the norm in website formatting these days. In Firefox 2.0 zooming was next to useless, and didn’t provide any benefit. I’d resorted to using AsTray to force the display res up to 1000×600, which to be honest doesn’t look good at all. Continue Reading

Now that Mitchell has shared his views, I will share my views on the Eee.

The 8 GB drive on my Eee is fine for almost any OS.  Once you start using the machine, it becomes clear that the 2, 4 and 8GB drives available are simply not enough.  Plus Asus, in their infinite wisdom, has used the Union FS so that you can quickly restore the Eee back to the factory OS.  You can do this without needing to have a External Optical drive or a USB thumb drive.  It’s very convenient, but it takes up a tremendous amount of space on the 8 GB drive.  One of these days I need to follow the instructions on eeeuser.com to remove the partition.  This will make the full 8 GB of flash available.  I have already bought a external USB drive from Best Buy, which goes with me when I need the extra storage.  I have most of my music on that drive with a subset of music on an SD card.  I also have some video and a backup of all documents on the Eee stored on this drive.  Because it’s a portable drive, it’s completely powered by the Eee’s USB ports.  It takes up two of the three ports.  It runs just fine when it’s on battery but it does suck the battery down faster.  Soon I am going to be purchasing a 16 GB SDHC so I can leave the USB drive behind occasionally.

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