Year: 2019

by

Whiskey might not be the solution to all problems, but I have to admit that a shot glass makes a damned fine refillable portion size.

Combined with one’s favorite anime isn’t a bad idea either.

by

Happy fun times: when you power on your computer, and your Bluetooth keyboard doesn’t want to power on. Being lazy, rather than fetch my trusty USB keyboard I simply used accessibility features to login.

Windows NT decided my Bluetooth dongle was nadda, and only gave a faint blue like power was coming through the port but no goodness. Migrating to a neighboring USB port, and lo and behold: it suddenly lights up. I seem to recall that some ballocks like this, is how it ended up in the port it was in.

I’m pretty sure that the day I believe a Windows desktop ever does Bluetooth, or even USB things well, the deepest levels of hell may have frozen colder than can be measured.

by

Some years ago, I remember my mother had a great desire for some lo mein, and the Chinese place we liked is one of my favorite restaurants in the area; because the food is good and bountiful in portion. I had made the decision, order an extra helping since I had never had it. Two orders worth combined with my meal and some other goodies, we were eating for days. It had been an experience, memorable, and delicious smorgasbord of Chinese food.

Tonight, I opted to stop off and get my favorite meal there, and I asked for an order of pork lo mein to go with my usual Szechuan style fried chicken. As anticipated, they’ve yet to learn how to skimp on the food.

That is to say, I ate like a freaking hobbit and have enough leftover for lunch plus dinner tomorrow. And Corky tried to get his nose on the fortune cookies.

Working Copy makes my heart throbb

by

Working Copy is one freaking impressive feat of work.

One of my early bits of research into apps to solve less popular problems, was searching the app store for a Git client. Because I’m really more of a git and vim kind of guy than a cloud thing and browser based word processor kind of guy. On my old Tab S3 and on my Chromebook, it was easy enough to combine a git client and an editor to manage some repos, even keep a backup of some software projects for reference. Priorities being as they are, I started with iVim because muscle memory and most likely to freak out the fruity operating system. Combined with Pretext it gives me an editor I’m very familiar with, and a simple editor that matches what I’d want out of something neither vi nor emacs like.
After reading around Mac Stories, I decided to finally give Working Copy a whurl. I’m impressed, and I’m happy. Hell, judging by its user guide I could probably manage a nice local edit + git → remote build life cycle if I really wanted to.
For the most part, the software I use tends to be cross platform. E.g. developed on Linux, also available on Windows, cie; Android and iOS. And mostly the apps I use that are on both, are mostly the same on both. Except for the habit of iOS apps to use a scrunched landscape in portrait rather than going to a full screen view. Which is fine by me ‘cuz I’m a lazy git and have more than a few platforms to deal with.
Working Copy manages to be pretty native and runs with it all the way. You wanna know what my definition of professional grade, well made software for doing real shit would look like on an iPad? Well pal, Working Copy is now that definition, and what a damned stunning example it is!!!
Even more so, it appears to be feature complete enough that I don’t have to worry much. You see, I’m weird. I tend to like doing my work from the git command line client, and if I’m going to suffer a GUI then it’ll probably be git gui + gitk. And if Working Copy can’t do what I need to do, odds are I’d be running command line git regardless of the operating system, and probably quite out of my routine.
Something that makes me kind of happy about how native it is, is the file sync.
The way {App}/Documents is exported into the On My iPad provider as {App} is pretty nice. But doesn’t seem like the iOS Files stuff really has a concept of Unix style hidden files, so getting to .vim is a bit of a pickle.
Thus, I had Working Copy’s sync feature use On My iPad/iVim/vimfiles. Which for iVim, maps to ~/vimfiles. A quick :e ~/.vimrc and it only took a moment to get my stuff in order.
" For iVim on iOS.
" Working copy can sync my terryp/vim to ~/ or a subdir but not ~/.vim because iOS file goodies don't like dot files
" So let's use terryp/vim -> ~/vimfiles ala wintel.

set runtimepath+=~/vimfiles/
set runtimepath+=~/vimfiles/after
source ~/vimfiles/vimrc

Since Working Copy is trivially able to handle the submodules in my repo, which anger some GUI clients I’ve tried on PC and Android, all my stuff pretty much just works. Because my .vim/bundle gets synced to vimfiles/bundle like the rest of my stuff.

When someone makes an application as good as Working Copy,  we should all applaud. I know that I’m sure freaking happy! It takes a lot of work to make an application that great, and all to often when you find an application to scratch such a less popular itch, it can be hard to find a really great solution. Working Copy is one of those rare, great solutions.

by

Mac Stories -Beyond the Tablet: Seven Years of iPad as My Main Computer

Seven years after I started (slowly) replacing my MacBook Air with an iPad, my life is different, but one principle still holds true: I never want to find myself forced to work on a computer that’s only effective at home, that can’t be held in my hands, or that can’t be customized for different setups. For this reason, the iPad Pro is the best computer for the kind of lifestyle I want.

While my tablet life style hasn’t been due to health problems and having started in Android land, hasn’t been so focused on dealing with an operating system limiting my abilities, I really agree with the above excerpt. Particularly the part I have added emphasis to.
Working from Android, I’ve had pretty complete file management since the beginning. As much as I prefer apps and their own data, such as Evernote and Play Music over wrangling files around like the stone ages, it’s nice having comprehensive control. I hope that apps on iOS will become more attuned to the file system, because files are kinda nice for sharing some forms of data between applications. As opposed to cases like my experience setting up a custom alarm tone or wallpapers. Being a fuck ton versions late to the party, I got to miss the lack of a file system part and have arrived for the apps still aren’t used to their being a file system part.
Another perk of coming late to the party, is while I experienced Android’s growing pains for multi tasking, I don’t really have to re-experiences them with iOS. Samsung did the whole split screen a lot of freaking years ago, well before Google mucked with it.
Having only scratched the surface on the shortcuts stuff, I have to admit that it’s a large part of what makes Siri interesting, aside from being less of a pain in my Fi phone then Google’s voice shit. I’ll probably be referencing this article later when I screw with shortcuts more.
Accessories are another thing I find attractive about iPads. Android was pretty quick to bring support for things like keyboards, mice, hard drives, monitors, controllers, etc. Aside from Google Play Services combined with Ethernet breaking push notifications for eons, it’s been a pleasent experience using external devices with Android.
What hasn’t been fun is anything form fitting. Aside from largely generic cases adapted to fit specific models, the options have sucked. Turning an iPad into a clamshell ala EeePad Transformer TF101, has been a thing for years on iPad. Some accessories are easier purchased than made at home, if available to begin with. Not to mention how badly Android needs more than a hardware Specific  S-Pen for those of us who demand a real stylus.
Sometime I also need to play with the external monitor truck noted in the end; really I like the concept, and it basically reflects the fact that I’d like better external monitor support without having to run regular PC shit.
by

https://www.cnet.com/reviews/apple-ipad-10-2-inch-2019-review/

While I’m not sure that I agree with the storage comment, I think the article’s parting comment is spot on. Pretty good one.

You see, if your customer thinks maybe they should have spent a few C-Notes more on that faster, sexier model that’s better than them buying your only product and thinking it’s a cheap piece of shit, and that they should have gone with someone else’s product. In that sense options are a very good thing, and the Fruit Co has done well IMHO to offer the basic, mid range, and high end models.

Most tablet goers would probably be best served by the Air and its excellent trade off between price and performance. Most actual people will probably be happy with the cheapest issue, and unless it’s your main computer, odds are no one needs a Pro. All depends on how much you live on your tablet.

Coincidentally, my 90~95 % of the time computer is my tablet and I have a usage around 26/64 GB, or just a bit over 40% storage utilization. On my last Samsung, the 32 GB was just starting to get tight but was still quite effective when you’re not full of games and videos instead of apps and books. While iPads note have decent support for external drives, they do lack the internal micro SD slot common on Samsung tablets.

Personally, I’d like to see tablet computing become more popular but my belief is that you should use what works best for you. That is to say: you do you, and I do me. Not everyone has the same computing needs or preferences, and freedom of choice rocks.

by

+/- the soda, me trying to not eat like a horse.

Yummy cheese burger with mushroom, pickles, and burger sauce. Accompanied with tater tots / garlic sauce and some beans I wanted to get rid of. Misty was just happy taters mean sharing, lol.

I’ve been known to make meals like this with a second burger and about double the taters…. and eat most of it in one sitting.

by

Part of me wonders if iPad OS 13.1.3 makes the pen swipey friendly floating keyboard even more prone to doing its wiggle off screen act, and other bullshit—or if I should just reboot my ducking iPad Pro every hour. This is getting highly annoying when tablet == main computer.

Apple, debug your shit.

by

Check out what I’m watching on Crunchyroll! http://www.crunchyroll.com/didnt-i-say-to-make-my-abilities-average-in-the-next-life/episode-1-you-said-id-get-a-do-over-in-a-new-world-789445

It remains to be seen of this series will bore or chuckle me to death, but I have to admit that the “Flat chested” semi finale to episode made for much chuckles.

by

Things a smidge useful about having been around a while, and stuck in heterogeneous computing environments.

One of my routine tasks when Cream reboots for updates every now and then, is to run a simple script that runs my post bot for sending my blog posts to D*. The issue that the Intel chipset likes to hang on reboots over USB things is a different issue than making sure software starts up on sign in.

In *nix land, the cheesey, read simplist, method is just insert it into your X session script (Yes, I still use xinit :P). Fancier session managers, XDG autostart, and gasp, systemd user units, also exist. Of course there’s always more than one way to do it. Not to mention that when its your box, you can abuse the system level parts ^_^.

NT on the other hand, I remember the easiest way. Go stick a shortcut to the script in the startup directory and be done with it. That’s “%APPDATA%MicrosoftWindowsStart MenuProgramsStartup” in this day and age.

My scripts are pretty simple. The first is a wrapper (post-bot.cmd) that goes to where I keep my post bot’s install, and runs this daemon.cmd script:

@ECHO OFF

IF EXIST %VIRTUAL_ENV% GOTO post_loop

:load_venv
    ECHO Loading venv
    CALL .pythonScriptsactivate.bat
    GOTO post_loop

:post_loop
    ECHO Running
    python .pythonScriptsrss2diaspora-spider -v -s dataconfig.txt 
    ECHO Looping
    TIMEOUT /T 900
    GOTO post_loop

Which is sufficient for making sure it runs every fifteen minutes without having to care about much more than the box rebooting. So whenever my blog’s RSS feed updates, my posts eventually get converted to markdown and pushed to Diaspora without me having to care too much.

Yay, for laziness!