I’ve been playing with the early release of MaePad and it’s quite a lot of fun. Like a sketch pad / notepad / finger paint thing. The only thing it needs is the ability to print it out in it’s full glory. And that brings back to the point about the Nokia N900, it really is a computer with a phone app installed. And while you can live without a printer for your phone, having a computer without a printer is missing something.
Printing
Legacy Unix always works
Great, I now have a printer that works, but not due to any fancy new features, and also not due to my brilliance, though it should have. But again I am reminded (via Google) to remember the one thing that Unix is, it’s files everything in /dev is a pointer to the device, which for all intents and purposes is just a file. So to print, just cp to /dev/printers/1 which in my case was the USB printer. So by bypassing the fancy stuff, you just call it a file and point at it.