Comfy is the natural state around here
Year: 2019
The negative points are pretty much why I haven’t used paper notebooks very much since my teens. Having a pile of stuff to sort, revise, and remove the cruft from: is a problem that doesn’t scale. Or as I like to remember: after about three binders, I’m pretty much done and hate dealing with heaps of folders.
Most of the advantages I sought came from having a digital file system. Typewriters never really did it for me the way text edited and word processors do. But as a consequence of funneling everything down the word hole: you lose the freedom of the page.
One of the things I’ve enjoyed about having tablets is the ability to have my tablet alongside as I work. Lean over, and swipe words into my textual notes, and then shift back to my work. Evernote also works pretty well in that it optimizes for the more word processor like nature of many of my work notes, yet makes it easy to merge disparate bits of information from external resources. Including handwriting, images, documents, scripts, etc.
Tablets open up greater ease to get off the beaten path of the word processor: while retaining the ability to keep it as simple as WordStar. Especially when you have both a stylus and a keyboard available to aide your note taking.
Side effects of a seven year old computer:
Encoding with My Anime HEVC/AAC profile, which favors quality over size, runs at about 9 fps on my Core i5-3570K. This works out to roughly an hour per ~24 minute episode. Or roughly an entire day worth of taking over my processor when there’s a lot of episodes for HandBrake to crunch through.
On the flipside, I was about to get one of my favorite anime off eBay for less than half the going price on sources like Amazon.
Which coincidentally, runs around ten hours of video content. Thus it’ll probably be tomorrow night when my desktop stops melting from the encoding, lol.
Complaints Mounting About iOS 13.2 Being ‘More Aggressive at Killing Background Apps and Tasks’
Hmm, I guess it isn’t just me that has felt that things have been reaping in the background a bit more than normal.
The problem with digital reminders: notification systems.
The problem with paper reminders: which stack is my notepad in?
And then there’s times where the upper limit on human multitasking collides with actual task counts 🙁
FML: noun; words uttered when sorting your Steam wishlist by price during a sale.
Not going to share the words for when 30 – 80 % makes half one’s list under $10, lol.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-3xx?wprov=sfti1
I’ve always wondered somewhat, just how much consideration was really put into using one orbiter to rescue another. Because, it’d probably be nice not to be blind sided when the problem is closer to needing a flying tow truck than a memorial service.
In history though, I reckon the latter is how things turned out for NASA. Over the course of a hundred and thirty five launches: only two shuttles and their crews were lost. Catastrophic failures were the only true failures is probably a fair statement.
Actually, that’s a pretty good success rate if you ask me.
How a months-old AMD microcode bug destroyed my weekend [UPDATED]
Over the years, I’ve seen people and programs assume pseudo random numbers are truly random often enough, and heard tell of broken hardware and firmware enough that I take all tendon binder generators with a grain of salt.
Because the only faith I have in random Numbers is the odds are pretty good that neither of us will will the lottery. And if it’s something like encrypting nuclear launch codes or grandma’s biscuit recipe, maybe you shouldn’t take it on faith that you won’t get the same value for infinity 😜
iOS 10 How-To: Print to PDF from anywhere in iOS using 3D Touch
One of the things that I miss about Android is the ease of printing. Android’s PDF oriented printing and ease of integration m meant that it was pretty trivial to get a save as PDF out of anything that can print, as well as send it to pretty much anything via standard protocols by picking an item from the system UI. Most times I print I either want a PDF or I want to use the office printer. Mostly though, I want a PDF.
In the case of iOS, well my iPad offers the option to print shit more often than my Android’s did. Which is nice in its own way. But to print to PDF: you have the usual case of swipe friend in elvish rather than just picking a damned list item. Likewise, the printing system as a whole sucks the further you go from having an Apple AirPrint capable printer instead of a really old net printer. Needless to say where I typically need to print, isn’t an office that replaces printers very often.
Which makes me wonder, just how many times have I had to help someone get the a younger version of Windows to actually print to the old printers at work…yeah, sometimes you’re better off with CUPS for that.
Insults to injuries:
When you’re about to use your desktop to login, load a slow ass webpage, to go edit something the app doesn’t offer, and you’re next thought is “Wait, my iPad’s browser is still faster than this thing.”
My desktop mostly remains because it does one thing very well: play Direct3D games. Because while its era of Core i5 is getting quite long in the toofers: it still can throw three pounds of GTX at problems my other machines can’t.
Actually, based on the few games that really stress the shit out of my desktop: I’m inclined to think the old Core i5-3570K is the real bottleneck. That is to say when games like Final Fantasy XV or Resident Evil 7 get a spike o lagocity, it coincides with the processor load looking like a tomahawk cruise missile hit in the family jewels.
That said: the machine has held up very well. Beyond those two titles: it hasn’t really blushed in the face of melting as far as 1080p gaming goes.
Expected decommissioning date has long since come and gone versus how long I had designed Centauri to service my computing needs. It’s mostly been economics, and the lack of need to retire it that the machine has endured. Which is why the last overhaul was migrating from the very first SSD that I ever bought to a considerable larger one.
The obvious catch to the age is, for tasks like web browser page load times, my iPad basically smokes my desktop :/. But the fruity thing can’t drive my GTX 780, nor will it ever natively run the games that dominate my desktop’s reason for existence.
Last time that I researched options for the longer term: it pretty much boiled down to two issues. The older Core i7 models that fit my motherboard aren’t easy to come by for a good price unless they’re second hand. Versus new: may as well buy a modern Core i5, but then it is in for a penny, in for a pound of ram. Needless to say, I don’t invision Centauri’s next significant hardware refit to be for quite a while.
Given how well Centauri has aged, and the odds that its GTX will need to retire by the time Centauri does, I rather wonder if whatever comes next in hardware will just be a laptop with a Thunderbolt eGPU dock or whatever nVidia equipped laptops look like by then. For now, I’m just happy the machine hasn’t died in a puff of smoke despite all the years of hard work, hehe. It remains one of the best computers that I’ve ever owned.