Month: February 2020

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I Gave Up My MacBook and iPhone for a PC and Google Pixel For a Week. Here’s What Happened | Inc.com
https://flip.it/bQHv5k

As someone that’s done an Android-> iPad maneuver, I rather found that most of the apps being “Basically “ the same made the experience much less jarring. Kind of like how most of the non-gaming software I use on PCs is the same, regardless of Linux, NT, or BSD, many of the apps I use on my iPad are basically the same as the apps I used on my Android tablet.

Being a freako who used Android as a laptop replacement, and that otherwise has been all PC based, I too found the keyboard shortcuts confounding to the muscle memory. My iPad differs drastically from all my other machines on the shortcut part, due to Apple vs IBM/MS modifiers; and for bonus points some of my PC keyboards will toggle the behavior of those keys based on whether or not they connect to an Apple device via Bluetooth.

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I find it a tad curious that my habits of journaling and note taking have only expanded with the rise of software.

For a time it was the norm to have composition books and more portable notepads around. Well into my teens, pencils at home were divided by preferences for writing and drawing. A planner/organizer for things more orderly and less notable.

And then there was my relationship with typewriters. I find it ironic and amusing that my keyboard tries to autocorrect that to torturers. Documents more read oriented called for typewriter action, but the tedium made it a rarity because of the error rate. Many years since I last touched a typewriter, I’m pretty sure that handing me correction tape or similar is a good way to piss me off.

Some years after discovering how awesome computers solved my pains with typewriters, laptops would eventually kill off my use for most things paper that involve the written word. But along the way, I’ve come to take increasingly more notes, and journal regularly. Part of this may owe to accumulating age, and necessity, but I feel it has more to do with the ease of editing and collecting data: since the 2000s, I find the sources and subject of things are far more computer related as well.

Also possible that I’m just kind of strange 😝

Nebo + Evernote = Awesomeness

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This past week, I’ve been trying an experiment with my work journals: handwriting. Shy of writing a novel, this is probably the greatest mark of Nebo being a useful tool.

For a long time now, I’ve used Evernote as the central note taking hub. Regardless of where created, if it’s non-transient, it’ll end up in Evernote. For the years of working from Android: it’s usually been just an alt+tab away when using my keyboard while docked, and when undocked I’ve been a stylus with glide/swype style input.

A side effect of the iPad change over is multitasking sucks, and the floaty keyboard has a bugnormous history on iPad. When I shift between apps in Android, Evernote yields a pretty lossless experience. When I do the same thing in iOS, it’s more like “Snap back to save point”, so alt+tab’ing back to Evernote on my iPad can be followed by changing side-tabs, finding the note again, and repositioning my cursor. Yeah, that sucks, but that’s the iOS app. It took quite a while for most of the floating keyboard bugs to get knocked out of the OS as well, for us freaks that do swypy style writing with a pencil.

Nebo’s been a side tool for a while now. Often my choice in meetings^ and simple charts/diagrams, which would then be exported as PDFs for Evernote or HTML for my internal web server, depending on context. But I’ve never really used it for my journal, despite being unexpectedly good at handling the funky nouns local to my environment.

By in large my work journals have consisted of typed text, entered into my notes system.

Handwriting has mostly been limited to tasks that called for mobility, such as scribbling results as I move between pieces of equipment, and not converted to typed text–which is Nebo’s speciality. Depending on what I’m working on, my journal entries can vary from a note per day to a note every few months.

What I’ve been doing this week has been creating my entry in Nebo. Usually written a sentence or a paragraph at a time, and then converted to typed text. No, I can’t spell any better with a pencil than a set of fingers; but Nebo works excellent at converting handwriting to typed text. Among other things.

So typically, I’ll have my iPad across from my keyboard, and I’ll shift to it periodically to write stuff in my journal entry. When I’ve finished: I export the page as text, and send it to Evernote. Send it to my notebook for journals, tag it as a work related journal entry, and tag it for the projects and search-worthy terms relevant to what I’ve been writing and working on. If I start the page with the title, Evernote for iOS even picks that up as the note title.

This has been working well enough for me that I think that I’ll stick to it. Things that Nebo doesn’t support, like attaching files, I can always do after the export. Things that are lossy, like subtitle formatting, I can usually enter manually or omit. Nebo also lets me shift to directly typing text: both using the on screen, and my Bluetooth keyboard.

Net result is I get the convenience of pen input, the searchability of typed text, and don’t have to curse profanities at the autocorrect for swiping words. I’m liking it a lot more than I thought.

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^ I’ve given up on Evernote’s handwriting stuff. Because it mostly sucks on all platforms, and when combined with app switching on iOS, usually erased my frakking writing!

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The best part of food like this, is that it tastes twice as better the next day. You can also smother it in cheese, at which point it is not so healthy, I suppose.

Willow would really like it if she could have all the cheese, and some of the plate too.

Probably a good thing that around here, dog treats typically follow dinner.

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Having a bunch of elbow macaroni leftover, I’ve been thinking that I ought to make some beans and macaroni. It occurred to me that my heritage includes some other tasty things that go with beans, thus I arrived at beans, macaroni, spinach, and lima beans.

In my own cooking, I’ve not really done much involving spinach. But I remember well that my mother could make delicious meals around spinach, the key was cooking and seasoning. Fortunately my ancestry includes eating well even at affordable prices 😃

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https://apps.apple.com/us/story/id1475021190

I can’t help but look at this Post-it notes app, and debate if this is an indispensable idea—or just the destroyer of my sanity, lol.

Typically I only use Post-it notes in the meat space when I have a high property reminder, so much that I should pin it to my monitor, or the like. Ditto if I need to tape a note on a piece of equipment because I can’t just scratch NFG into the property of others. Left to my own devices, I’m pretty paperless for about the last fifteen years or so.

But I know well the value of short, concise, orderly, notes.

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Watching Day of the Dove over a batch of popcorn, I kind of think this is one of the episode types that The Original Series did rather well.

The Enterprise is lured to a world where it seems a human colony has vanished without a trace, as a damaged Klingon battle cruiser perceives the Federation having attacked them in an act of war. Rapidly it devolves into a battle for control of the ship, and anything that could draw it to a swift conclusion is blotted out by an alien being pulling their collective strings.

Despite the rather swashbuckling nature of the original Star Trek, which was a rather apt nature if you recall popular TV from the period, Kirk and his crew still represent a fairly enlightened humanity. One that fortunately, many of today’s viewers likely have more in common with than our ancestors: who grew up watching Star Trek, and the world they lived in.

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Some time ago, I setup DavMail POP/IMAP/SMTP/Caldav/Carddav/LDAP Exchange and Office 365 Gateway on my development laptop to connect Thunderbird to my mail account at work. Handling email was the largest change of swapping from my Android centric work station back to regular desktop Linux.

Give or take my generally meh feelings towards today’s desktop mail clients, Thunderbird especially: this has worked out pretty well, and with pretty minimal pain, thanks to the Actually Worth Reading setup guides.

Today, I finally got around to connecting the address book and calendar functions, and much to my surprise: those actually, Just Work ™. Which is kind of nice: because I’ve been switching to my tablet for those functions. Thunderbird collected addresses thing, also helpful.

When the rise of the S-Pen made me upgrade tablets, I had to contend with the loss of video output during my otherwise painless Tan S2 -> Tab S3 conversion. Eventually, I traded in some old hardware and got a cheap assed Chromebook that was new enough to do Android apps, and serve as a replacement for docking my tablet. That mostly worked, give or take that Chrome OS is like 10 x buggier and more restrictive than native Android. But eventually that combined with the crappy performance lead me to replace it with using my development laptop directly, rather than using SSH and SMB to access it. The performance grumbles, such as Play Music stuttering whenever opening heavier web pages, made more powerful hardware worth the coin—the quality of Chrome OS as an Android replacement, made using a Linux or NT based system a better option. Thus rather than increment debt, I said screw out and started using my development laptop directly because that was the simplest, cheapest way to kill both birds with one stone.

So, I guess I’ll get to see how well Thunderbird’s calendar works. For my pen use cases, typically my synced to all my devices taste in calendars are used; and I maintain several. My exchange calendar, basically exists purely for dealing with meetings and events going through Exchange users. Since meetings are inescapable, dealings with Exchange calendars.

Coincidentally, Microsoft Outlook for iPad rather sucks as a mail client if you have any significant volume of mail to process, and it’s calendar function is little better than typing cal into an xterm. But it at last syncs with little fuss.

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When my opinion of the temperature drifts, I write it off as the season.

When I’ve had a headache most of the day, I blame it on skipping lunch to take care of house work.

When I get that sick-smell breathing through my nose despite a lack of nasal troubles, I wonder if I’m coming down with something.

Hopefully, just coincidence or related to how elevated my stress and exhaustion levels have been. Or dried out running the heat a little higher than normal. I don’t tend to get sick often, but I have to admit: it’s probably an ideal time for Murphy to throw that one.

Between work, and Misty, I’ve been far more exhausted and extra duper stressed the past month or so. Plus given the amount of trips to the vet that we’ve had, I’ve probably had a wider exposure to the peoply filled outside world than normal. I wouldn’t say that my cold resistance is at it’s highest levels right now, yet don’t really feel that bad (yet). Usually, I experience colds as more of a sudden slam than a gradual decent, like into madness.