Year: 2019

Breffo Spiderpodiums as an Xbox controller caddy and headphone stand

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The Breffo Spiderpodium was originally made with holding an iPhone in mind, but I have to admit that it works pretty good as an Xbox controller caddy.

Two middle legs are folded to create stand, two back legs to lip over the controller, and two front legs are folded to make a sort of rest by the accessory port. So I can pretty much tilt the controller about ten degrees downward, slide it into place, and relax.

The larger model originally designed for the iPad, also works pretty neatly as a headphones holder. Hehe.

Plus whatever Breffo’s definition of British steel or whatever the interior is made out of, I’ve never actually managed to break one of these things. The most damage I’ve ever done is melting the plastic a bit by hanging one out of my car’s air vents for a lustrum or more.

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Check out what I’m watching on Crunchyroll! http://www.crunchyroll.com/oresuki-are-you-the-only-one-who-loves-me/episode-7-i-discover-an-unexpected-side-790234

This episode especially made me laugh, in a pretty steady symmetrical fashion. Perhaps helps that the jokes with Sun-Chan just made me cackle louder. Their trip to the pool is just filled with reasons to laugh, while somehow maintaining the pseudo-serious tone of the series; it really worked for my funny bone.

Oresuki is probably worth watching for the twisted-characters and wise cracks about rom-coms, but this episode is just worth watching, period.

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Not sure why I’m so ridiculously tired tonight.

But I’m tempted to either blame the comfy goons, or tell them to move over.

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Mastery of the comfy nap award of the day, goes to Willow.

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Hunger was banished by beefaroni.

Which happens to be a great recipe for food comas.

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I think I’ve finally found something my iPad truly does better than my Androids, lol.

By in large, my many years of using my Android tablets docked to a keyboard, mouse, and monitor has been a pleasant experience. Enough that the only real beefs I’ve had, have been when apps (read Google’s) break the scroll wheel support. Mostly, it just works(tm).

One sore spot however was anything that involves a pinch gesture. Like trying to zoom in and out on Google Maps, which did not always have eat double tap and slide gestures to it. Everything else worked pretty well.

Well, I think I finally smiled. Apple binds the right mouse button to penning the accessibility menu, which is an artifact I guess, of mouse support being more of an accessibility minded thing then a general feature like Android’s support. But when you open this menu and goto Custom it offers the ability to trigger a pich. Which changes the cursor and left click behavior to let you navigate pinching in multiple axis of movement. It doesn’t suck, although naturally it might be a tad confusing.

That’s kind of cool. Good job, Apple. I know I rarely say that instead of four letter gestures, but this one made me happy.

Flash, flash, flash–storage fest

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In thinking about cutting down my load, I’ve come up with an idea. Stark has a forward SD slot under its trackpad that usually houses a simple slug that Dell pre-installed. Swapping this with my spare MicroSD and a SD adapter is one less thing to keep track of.

Experimenting with this idea, I also opted to try a few drives in my standard kit.

My old 1TB Transcend drive works pretty snazzy. This is one of those old green laced grey “Milspec” framed drives connected with an old Samsung MicroB 3.0 cable.

root@stark:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/terryp/Transcend/dd.img bs=1M count=10241024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 1.80687 s, 594 MB/s
root@stark:~# rm /media/terryp/Transcend/dd.img 

Generally, I use this drive for backing up my laptop since it’s one of the better portable drives that I own. Give or take how old it is, lol. This drive is also formatted exFAT unlike the other drives, which are all FAT32.

Here’s the 128G SanDisk Ultra flash drive I bought some years back:

root@stark:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/terryp/DE47-D1C8/dd.img bs=1M count=10241024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 14.8877 s, 72.1 MB/s
root@stark:~# rm /media/terryp/DE47-D1C8/dd.img 

Which mostly serves for shuffling files around, since it’s a decent capacity for a small size.

Here’s a pair of USB drives from Microcenter free coupons. A slower 32G drive labelled USB 3.0 and a faster 16G drive labelled USB 3.1; the translucent cases look like the board designs are the same.

root@stark:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/terryp/USB DISK/dd.img bs=1M count=10241024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 196.081 s, 5.5 MB/s
root@stark:~# rm /media/terryp/USB DISK/dd.img 

root@stark:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/terryp/USB DISK/dd.img bs=1M count=1024
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 32.868 s, 32.7 MB/s
root@stark:~# rm /media/terryp/USB DISK/dd.img 
root@stark:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/terryp/DE47-D1C8/dd.img bs=1M count=1024

The 32G which is slow, serves as my offline video cache for my tablet. The 16G I just got tonight courtesy of another coupon.

And here’s the 32G TF/MicroSD card that caused this line of testing, also from Microcenter.

root@stark:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/terryp/32 GB/dd.img bs=1M count=1024
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 95.4401 s, 11.3 MB/s
root@stark:~# rm /media/terryp/32 GB/dd.img

Hmm. I think that I will just leave the card in there. It’s pretty unlikely to get knocked out, and I don’t expect it would cause notable impact to the battery life. Keep the USB adapter in my usual travel gear, but keep the card in Stark.

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Microsoft Surface Pro X Three Week Review: Better Than I Expected For My Productivity Use Case
https://flip.it/Fe2Ydr

While I think many people would be unhappy with Windows on ARM, I expect most people would be happier with the traditional desktop experience than the flatter model used over in Android and iOS. For those that can get away with largely first party software, you also get the perks of not having to buck the software catalog.

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Dropbox And Other Major Apps Need To Get On Board With Windows On Snapdragon.

The PC revolution, I think had enjoyed a pretty remarkable binary portability: one that I think today’s users just take for granted. CP/M while a bit tricky, did surprisingly well for the hardware variations. MS-DOS managed to improve the concept of copying some shit and expecting it to run on your computer. And then there was Windows, which has probably had one of the strongest ABIs for decades while Unix systems came to prefer the portability of source code over the resulting redistributibles.

Today, the concept that you can download some program and that it won’t run because your processor architecture isn’t an Intel chip made within the past ten to twenty five years, is less familiar to everyday Windows users. As opposed to folks who have managed multiple flavors of Unix system across several processor architectures.

In many ways, I think the ease of jockeying binaries around on floppy diskettes and bulletin boards is as important to our computing history as the rise of sharing the source code over the Internet. But the systemic effects kinda work the other way as well: it’s hard to maximize the value of multiple processor architectures if you’re surrounded by binaries that won’t run, and it isn’t so practical to just solve the problem with virtualization and translation.

I think it is telling that modern methods of binary software distribution tend to address the problem from the get go. Installing packages on my Debian systems are pretty much the same whether they’re x86 or ARM based, and that’s probably true of the many supported architectures. Dealing with native code on Android  has long dealt with the issue of bundling binaries for different Android ABIs as well. The path from random ass files to a structured delivery from a repository has its upsides.