Captain’s Log

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Annoying differences in culture, or slow points of progress.

Android land:

  1. Copy files over network to Pictures/Wall Papers
  2. Launch set wall paper thingy.
iOS land:
  1. Copy files over…fuck that’s slow.
  2. Copy files over USB…gah still slow.
  3. Well fuck.
  4. Okay, Photos has no idea of how to import from my USB drive.
  5. Jack in to desktop.
  6. Launch iTunes.
  7. How the fuck do you make this music player push files to applications again?
  8. Clicks little iPad icon that’s not the obvious one.
  9. Where the heck is it?
  10. Google it and find directions that are out of date.
  11. Screw it. *click Photos*, *drag and drop shit*. Nope that don’t work either.
  12. Files -> On My iPad -> Wall Papers/…. -> share -> save image.
  13. Yeah, fuck if I’m doing that ~1,700 more times!
  14. Launch set wall paper thingy.
That’s just the short version of things I tried, being a stranger in a foreign land. Of my various attempts it’s hard to decide if I feel more trapped by the ’90s or the ’00s. So let’s just say it’s unlikely I will bother to change my iPad’s wall papers very often ™.
Also while I give kudos for being able to select multiple files and actually share them, *cough* save to the photos app, I would not recommend trying to select several hundred at a time and then tap share. You’ll just end up swiping the process away a few times.
Android’s nature of making defined shared places to stuff shit, and API hooks for Applications to resolve those is pretty intuitive to a nerd like me. Likewise the idea of making an application’s private files not usable dickable, rather attractive for many reasons.
iTunes, if you can find the right screen, pretty much lets you explore an what private files an application choose to allow or means of importing/exporting things they (probably) think of as a database. Which owes to the tradition of not having any real concept of shared storage that multiple applications can monitor. But it’s better than not being able to touch anything at all.
The only real forgiveness I have for these concepts, is once upon a time the bane of my existence was the amount of people that couldn’t double click a file after downloading it from a web page. Countless games were held up for hours because of the challenge of launching a map installer. I had kind of came to grips with the concept of a file somewhere between DOS 3 and Windows 98. So as counter intuitive as something like iTunes feels to me versus a file system, I do recognize if you can’t tell the difference between a mouse and a floppy disk, it’s probably easier to use iTunes’ model.
Or as I like to remember, remove choices, because most of us give up faster than I do 8=).
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I think the decision is largely made at this point. The fruit company is my tablet computing destination, whether I like it or not.

The dire lack of Android tablets with a stylus, the Q/A that matches Chrome OS’s rapid release cycle, and the shrinking number of companies making a ‘real’ Android tablet that is worth my time, has had me considering jumping ship for a while. Google’s pox upon multitasking making its way to my Tab S3, is pretty much the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Most of the software that I run on my Tab S3 supports both iOS and Android. Alternatives exist for the more systemy stuff at the edges, like the corporate printer or dealing with my file server. Pretty much if I find an analog to FolderSync Pro, the only thing I’ll really be losing software wise is free editing support for Microsoft Excel and Word. Before ending up with a Samsung that bundled MS Office, my long term solution was OfficeSuite Pro which has enough compatibility to handle documents at work. So for the most part I’m not worried much about software. It also helps that by living in Android land so long, iOS has been working its big boy shorts for while now instead of their update notes sounding like a baby’s toy.

When the 1″ crack in my Tab S3’s screen becomes terminal, I’ll have little option but to replace it one way or another, and I have had a very long time now to contemplate what that will be. For now I’m just happy the what the hell moments related to the crack are few and far in between versus my heavy tablet use.

In Android land: the only things that are viable replacements are the Tab S4 and S6, which are old and new successors, respectively. Negatives to both are they will also come with Google’s pox and they’re widescreens. DeX isn’t going to fix what Pie did to multitasking and I greatly prefer 4:3 and 3:2 tablets.

No Chrome OS device exists yet that aligns with my requirements, and the only ones worth paying for are too big to replace my Tab S3. And that just leaves iPads. Which for as little love as I have for Apple, and my lack of caring for iOS, solve the problem Android has been most screwing me with the longest–there’s a lot more freaking iPads to choose from that support a decent stylus than their are Android devices with a decent stylus.

It’s always been hard to find an Android tablet with a nice stylus, and Samsung while expensive has filled that role pretty swell. But they’re kind of becoming the only vendor to choose from, both in terms of an Android tablet that meets my requirement for stylus, and Android tablets in general.

I also find it kind of funny how this works out. In the old days when Android tablets were quite new, I found the iPad excessively overpriced and Android underappreciated; Apple has at least solved that with their expanded selection. Likewise, most new iPhone launches were followed by me scratching my head and wondering how people lived so long without essential features; iOS release notes stopped feeling like a slow as hell iteration several years ago.

And then there’s the fact, that I’ve never actually owned an Apple product. I’m more at home with an xterm than a Mac. More than a few of my friends have soft spots for fruity products, and have since at least as far back as the iPod and PowerBook. Me, never have. But I suppose there is probably a first time for everything.

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Whenever I walk out and the direct sunlight hitting my chest feels really good, I blame my Floridian upbringing; where escaping from the sun was like closing your eyes while living on the surface of a star.

That my brain’s internal monologue tends to sound like “Ahh, きもち” is a more modern problem.

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It’s probably sad how much I would like seemless integration between apps on my PC with the ones on my tablet.

Prime example of lazyness:
  1. PC is being used as a canvas to view videos.
  2. I am learning back in my chair.
  3. Using my tablet at the same time.
  4. “Damn, would be nice to just browse and fling to my monitor.”
Often it tends to take this form more than openning files from the same file stores or dropping files between them. Probably because my desktop is more often my secondary or ‘slave’ device and my tablet is typically my main computer if no X Terminals are involved.
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It would suffice to say aging sucks. But when I stay up late, still get enough sleep, and feel much the zombie in the morning, I can’t help but think it has more to do with how much of my youth was spent with next to no sleep.

So much of my younger days, sleep time fell somewhere between 0400 – 0700 with wake times usually 0900 – 1000. Because in my family if you wanted any peace or needed concentration that meant waiting for everyone else to be asleep. Ironically back then I didn’t consume caffeine either, lol.

Last night was more like 0045 – 0915, or about eight hours of glorious sleep. Pardon me whilst I drain coffee like crazy.

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Going by my place this far, probably ~140 some pages into That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, Vol. 1 (light novel), I can’t help but think there’s still hope for me yet.

When I was a kid, I was the kind that could binge read Dune and its appendexes with Glee. As an adult I find that I don’t tend to consume many books. Much inverted as well, in that as a kid there was always a shortage of novels to read and as an adult my reading list is never zeroed.

Over the past lustrum I’ve generally noticed a pattern of sorts. Where games, TV, or books tend to consume what passes for my leisure time in cyclic spells rather than simultaneously. E.g. for a few months you’re more likely to find me in front of a game than the others; for a few months you’re more likely to find me watching videos than the others; and so on.

For the most part that doesn’t tend to bother me much. My queues are always filled leaving me with the questions of what do I have time for and what do I want to do: not a lack of content. But how wacko the graph of my reading habits would look over the past twenty years or so is kind of worrisome.

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Cheapskate Handy repurposing of old stuff: turning my multimedia dock into a spare tablet stand.

After writing this the other day, I was a bit tempted to get another stand similar to the Anker I use in my living room or just transition one of my Breffo Spider Podiums to my desk.

Rooting around in the closet to see if I had any spare Spider podiums to use as a headphone stand, I foumd my old Samsung multimedia dock. Sadly it became a paper weight when I upgraded from the Tab S2 to the Tab S3, much as I traded external monitor support for S-Pen capability when I did. Without Samsung’s old 11-pin MHL/MicroUSB and driver support the ports are basically useless. Shame because it was a great one cable and done docking station when I used my tablet as my workstation.

But the little fellow still remains physically useful as a stand since my Tab S3 still fits in the slot. Thus one problem solved by recycling, and not having to spend a dime; this makes me happy even if the poor dock is no longer able to fulfil its original purpose. It is still useful for more than keeping makkuro kurosuke from settling in /dev/closet.

It also puts my tablet at a fairly convenient angle, hehe.

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I wonder what’s technically worse: when you’re sitting at your desk and using your tablet/pen to finish something. Or when you’re still sitting at your desk and consider transitioning your keyboard over to aforementioned tablet rather than switching to a PC.

An odd artifact of my small desk space is how well it meshes with my tablet.

The mousepad dominates most of the working surface; the Razer Goliathus because I wanted a large pad and the SteelSeries Rival because I got tired of how fast Logic MX rats wore out^. Years ago, I had bought my K810 as a way of sharing a keyboard between my tablet, laptop, and desktop at work; these days it just serves as my desktop keyboard. Underneath the headphones and xbox controller off to the left is a USB keyboard of similar size and layout.

This lack of space is what lead me to such a small keyboard–full size but with the “Right” matter, the numpad and navigation clusters removed. Basically a few hairs larger than the smallest you can make a physical keyboard without me calling it useless.

Conveniently my tablet fits in much the same spot. Since swapping the wired keyboard for the Bluetooth one, I find it much less hassle to simple push my keyboard aside and put my tablet in the same spot; whichever I am using at the time usually takes center stage and the displaced ends up on the side-zone or next to the charging cable.

I think it is quite possible that if I had a dandy stand in here like I do on my living room end table, I’d probably would have dropped my tablet in it and toggled my keyboard over to my tablet; rather than writing this on my desktop. Yes, I’m kind of lazy 🙄.

^ Two left mouse buttons in 10-15 years is too much 😜. I loved both my Logitech MX-series laser mice but wanted something with claims of “Many damned clicks” before it dies.

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Some thoughts on long term planning,

At this point the kind of off machine that fits my “I’m done, that’s close enough” form adds up to about $1,500 if you shop off the rack. But that means 2 kilos of luggable with a GTX1650, a Thunderbolt expansion port and non soldered memory for its upgrade path. Something less awesome could be found quite a bit cheaper if combined with +$300 worth of eGPU dock but that usually means giving up something like the ability to reuse my ginormous SSD or having to suffer 8 GB of soldered on system memory, and aforementioned eGPU dock would be a prerequisite for handling games, as far as cheaper notebooks go.

Frugality makes me look at future upgrades for my desktop.Where good old Centauri principally hits her limits are games like Final Fantasy 15 and Resident Evil 7. Games that either hit harder than normal or that you wish had more fine tuning put into them, lol.

A trend that will only continue over the next 5 years of her extended life–I have already exceeded the retirement age I had designed Centauri for, and am tempted to see just how far she keeps on truckin’. Because while showing the signs of age: Centauri has been a superb machine.

Replacing the Core i5-3570K with a Core i7-3770K would cost about $200 and deliver a major CPU bump. On the downside this would mean a really nice processor goes to /dev/closet. But the crunch boost would probably last another lustrum quite easily.

A modern Core i5-9400F would deliver comparable enough crunch power for about the same costs when factoring in the motherboard replacement it would need. But then it’s + $75~$100 more for making the generational leap in memory. On a machine originally built for 8 GB and retrofitted to 12 GB when her older sister retired; needless to say forward motion is 16. And that would tally about $300 between processor, motherboard, and memory.

On the flipside one can find pretty decent deals on the GTX 1660 Ti and original RTX 2060 for between $300 and $400. Both solve one of the limits of my antique GTX 780 which is being limited to only 3 GB of graphics memory.

While my general suspicion for RE7’s performance issues vs RE2 running quite smooth has been expecting my processor to be the bottleneck, in FFXV I am running virtually full of VRAM all the time. So much so that I wonder if many of the performance dings align with the allocator trying to decide which textures to flush and which to keep. or if the game was designed to maximize usage. Performance drops often coincide with with the games FPS overlay showing graphics memory usage at holy crap full levels, relative to the near constantly full levels.

Hmm, think I’ll screw around with FFXV’s benchmarking program.

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Passing thought: Dad’s habit was reading a newspaper. Mine is called a tablet.

These do pretty much serve similar purposes. Except as a multi role thingamajig I’m going to say the other uses for a tablet tend to be more fun then what you can do with old newspapers.