There are a couple of downsides to blogging the Baltic. Wi-Fi isn’t quite as pervasive as it might be. And laptops are quite heavy if you hump them any distance on the offchance of some free to air.

A little netbook would be nice - if Apple made one. Yet it is possible, I discover, to patch Mac OSX Leopard onto some models with Intel’s Atom board. Full instructions are here.

You have to be a bit nerdy to do this. But you will end up with the 10″ netbook Apple never made for half the price Apple would have charged.

You can patch Mac OSX onto several netbooks: the MSI Wind, the Advent 4211, the Medion Akoya and the tiny ASUS.

It’s necessary to change the internal Wi-Fi cards to be recognised by Apple’s system. (Not difficult.) You won’t be able to use the mic and audio inputs on any of these machines with OSX. (So, use audio via USB instead.) But for the rest, it’s cool.

Anyway, this should give more mobility than the old Power Book, which is usually at anchor next to a beer in Kaliningrad’s Station cafe. (Good kartochka and lots of handy, unattended wall sockets.)

See also ‘The Blogging Environment’ #1