Year: 2019

Wave of passing thoughts

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As I sit here, a wave of thoughts pass through my mind.

For one, I’ve owned flash drives with less capacity than the download size of nVidia’s drivers. As I sit here with my iPad, I think my desktop is unpacking and installing a 570+ meg download.

Cream reminds me, of how nice it would be if machines didn’t hang on reboot. Centauri actually does the same but less frequently, and Intel’s errata sheet can kiss my hairy ass.

Being smart would mean cycling the dishwasher instead of messing with my iPad while I’m waiting for the driver update to finish.

And if there’s really any good reason to prefer the K380 I use at work to the K810 I use at home, it’s the tweaking of the modifier keys from PC to Mac style. I assume the keyboard’s microcontroller just shifts its keymap when the active device has an Apple identifier; when my K810 came out the solution was buy a different model. Also helps that the K380 is almost cheap enough to use as a Frisbee compared to my K810, which more like pulling teeth when I bought it for the multiswitch capabilities.

Evernote’s release engineering often comes with entertaining release notes. I really like that they have a sense of humour.

It’s quite possible that the next time I have good reason to buy a monitor, 1080p60 Full High Definition will look like a VHS tape. Or that /dev/desk will have been taken over the rest of the way by my tablet, and I wouldn’t mind if it was a display with a Chromecast or AirPlay function built in.

Hmm, it’s been 5~6 years. I really do hope this Asus monitor makes like it’s forebears, which are more like ~10 for my first LCD screen (an old LG Flattron) and filed under “Won’t ask, Don’t want to know” for the last tube monitor I owned, lol.

Ahh, well, time to move my fat ass again 8-).

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While at first, I was rather hesitant to bother with Apple News, I’ve got to admit it’s pretty nice.

On first launch, my impression was it looks a lot like Microsoft’s news app when I had tried it some years back. After trying to use it and populate it with topics, it feels more like Apple News combines the things I like most about the Google News and Flipboard apps.

I’ve generally come to prefer Google News’s emphasis on its own page view rather than being subjected to countless, often craptacular and annoying web designs just for the sake of reading an article. Both Google’s and Apple’s apps offer that. But Apple’s also will throw you upstream after a continue reading, so there is that.

Flipboard on the other hand, I’ve usually enjoyed because it is smart enough to recommend a broader content base than my topics of interest, and refloat articles into view once in a while, making it easier than scrolling backwards if you change your mind. The way Apple News bundles sections together kinda achieves that too.

And then there’s the fact an iPad has such performance that you don’t have to groan at the performance of page loads. Which has been especially a plague upon Flipboard for Android over the years, IMHO.

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Her iPhone died. It led to her being charged as a criminal

While I rather like the notion of less things to carry, I don’t foresee leaving home with my phone rather than my wallet to happen for another fifty years or so. It’s just not practical enough, even if you’re surrounded by modern technology.
There’s really two reasons for that. 
One is my Driver’s License, a fairly important piece that while in the surface it might seem old hat, thanks to modern requirements has more to it than a reference number for a database. Or as I like to remember it, renewing my license was a pain in the ass due to stricter prove who you are requirements than when mine has been originally issued and the chipping of personal identification.
Another is that contactless payments have been a bout slow to catch on. Newer terminals haven’t been uncommon where I live, thanks to America becoming a little less stone aged about swipe versus stick processing. But being able to talk my phone, or my card which does that too, isn’t offered in enough places I frequent to be able to skip it. Thus if I’m going to pay for something, I’ll probably have need of my wallet anyhow.
There’s also the bonus that the cards in my wallet don’t require managing a power source the way a phone or smart watch does. And sadly, those imprint machines still exist in the wild for when computerized payment processing systems go wonkers. But having to carry a card, or even more annoyingly a coin purse, beats the dead phone induced trouble this article described.
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Nokia 2720 Flip Review: The Feature Phone Grows Up

And unlike the Motorola Razr I have in a drawer somewhere, it probably can handle a modern network.

Being more a tablet guy than a phone addict, I actually considered taking to a flip phone as part of cutting costs. Since I rarely need the connectivity of a modern phone; in the end the reason I kept on the smart phone track is it can be convenient in a pinch and Google Fi makes things very economical when your data use is typically a few hundred megs at most.

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Rebooting for the modern age:

BSD: time for kernel updates.
Linux: power outage finally won.
Android: dog ate the charger.
Windows: every update and driver fart.
Chromebook: whenever it gets funky.
iPad OS: more often Chromebook but same concept.

In vague order of frequency, lol

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You Can Officially Transform Your Smartphone Into a Pokedex

I’m pretty sure that when Pokémon Red and Blue were still current releases themselves, you probably could have gotten me to accept a phone just for the sake of this case—I wasn’t really a fan of smart phones until many years later.

Aptly, then as now, I’d rather have a Game Boy that looks like a Pokédex than a phone case, lol.

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Remarkable raises $15 million to bring its e-paper tablets to more scribblers

I’d actually like to see a lot more devices like this, and find the reMarkable particularly interesting. The main negative imho behind the cost compared to more general purpose devices.

Which is to say for most folks, you may as well buy an Apple Pencil and the cheapest iPad that’ll work with it. It won’t be the same thing but it would be more value to the average user.

E-Ink and styli are both tech I’d rather like to see more commonly used, so my bias is fairly obvious 😜