Computers

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Why You Should Stop Using Gmail On Your iPhone

To me this is more an indication of whether or not you should use Gmail as a service rather than the application. Google has always been fairly open in that you should have no allusion to privacy between their services.
Applications like Apple Mail and Windows Mail have the virtue that we tend to think of them as Mail clients, from companies who also offer email services. Gmail we tend to think as both, and using any given client doesn’t change where your messages are stored and exposed; in fact it might even broaden them depending on the client and services used.

Command, Control, and Optionally conquer the Alternatives

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In some ways it may be a touch ironic. For years, I used an Android tablet docked to a monitor, mouse, and keyboard as a workstation; quite happily in fact. Puttering around with iPadOS my only real beef versus doing the same with Android is the keys.

Having spent most of my life around PC based systems, I’m naturally used to the shortcuts on a PC. Such as using control plus left and right to move the cursor a word at a time. On iPad these are more like home/end keys because you use option + left and right to move the cursor a word at a time.

Further complicating the fact is that some familiar shortcuts are control + thing while others are command + thing. For example command + W to close a tab but the familiar control + tab to change tabs. Basically pay back for having owned many a PC but never a Mac, lol.

In terms of keyboard and mouse support the only difference today is that iPadOS sports the same type of mouse based text selection as a PC or Mac. Android and the initial version of iPadOS had simply used it like a finger substitute, and more kludgy in iPadOS’s case. Aside from that I haven’t really had much difference in experience.

One of the notable distinctions as a user however is the software.

Modern iPadOS sports a version of Safari that is as good as Chrome or Edge on my PCs. My Androids on the other hand, being relegated to Chrome was always a bitter existence even if the stability leveled off with the years — and often keyboard/mouse operation in Chrome made my eyes roll out of their fucking sockets at the silly. So let’s just say at web browsers, iPad’s Safari beats Chrome for Android.

For most users I’d call that a win. Most people I know have a heavy slant towards web apps, and thus their connection to the rise of Chrome. In some cases, clutching Firefox like a gunnut and their AR-15s. So the result is Safari doesn’t piss me off, but I’m still one to prefer an app over a browser if you do any kind of decent job at it.

By contrast iPadOS sucks as a terminal client. Networking limitations basically murder any chance of being able to use SSH and multitasking; spend too long away and the connection will be force killed. By contrast in Android land the only real issue with SSH clients I tended to have was the poor copy/paste experiences. Stuff like VNC equally suck on both, but is less multitask friendly on iPad.

For me that’s kind of a negative. 90% of my interest in PCs revolve around command line environment or 3D graphics environments. But given my shift back to laptops for the heavy lifting that’s not been to terrible.

That’s to say, my move from a Chromebook to a Latitude had more to do with Celeron vs Core i5 than it did at using Android apps for terminal work. Likewise, my move from Android tablet to Android apps on a Chromebook was basically generated by Samsung omitted video output on my last tablet.

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AT&T customer since 1960 buys WSJ print ad to complain of slow speeds

I remember that spectacular quality and awesome sauce speed from nearly twenty years ago. Where my family lived there was two choices: Bellsouth and Charter. For all intents and purposes today, Bellsouth and AT&T can be considered abotu the same.

I also remember when my mother finally switched to Charter. After that the Internet access sucked a lot less by broadband standards of the word. But I’ll give Bellsouth this mouch, their aDSL service had been a major improvement over a 56 K modem that averaged more like 34 :P.

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Huawei’s HarmonyOS: “Fake it till you make it” meets OS development

Forking and building off Android is what I would call the natural response for Huawei’s situation. And pretty much as long as you respect the open source license agreements and such, nothing is wrong with that. The ability to do so is one of the best aspects of Android; the going it without the Google add ons one of the reasons fewer people do that with actual phones.
Ron kind of says it neat here:
Forking Android and launching your own rebranded operating system is totally fine. But be upfront about that. Say “HarmonyOS is a fork of Android” instead of “HarmonyOS is not a copy of Android.” Don’t call HarmonyOS “all-new” when pretty much the opposite is true.
Where the real ire of the story lay, and perhaps justly so. But the conclusion towards the end of the article also makes sense. Inside China the Google’less Android idea works, as an international product not so much.
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 A gander at the old hard drive.

3 TB of reliable

So the drive is about 7 years old.

SMART via SATA native
And has about 5 ½ years of up time.

SATA native

Connected to my desktop’s SATA controller: Crystal Disk Mark shows about the performance I would expect for such a drive.

USB Enclosure

Connected to the enclosure on the other hand, I’m just getting pure crap. Suggesting that either the enclosure is falling back to USB 2.0 when connected to my USB 3.0 controller, or just doesn’t like my desktop.

The symptoms observed with the file server was the drive dismounting whenever I tried to start Plex, or try to see if I could get any SMART via passthrough.

Damningly, if I connect an old Samsung SSD through the enclosure: I get about the same level of performance. While nearly old as the drive the enclosure is a 3.0 with UASP that has generally delivered hard drive performance just fine until recently.

Which reminds me that one of the nifty changes of the new 8 TB drive is loading sections of my Plex is now a hella lot faster on my Fire TV than it used to be.

I think that my spare enclosure made its way to work for various need fillings. So the other of the three is hanging off my Xbox with a 1 TB drive that is probably manufactured circa 2012. Perhaps I will swap that 1 TB drive with this 3 TB drive and use that for a comparison; can break that down into power supply, USB cable, and enclosure without having to pull the PCB. More detailed testing will require hooking it up to my Linux machines.

Possible re-homings include my Xbox for storing games, or adding it to my desktop to store video files being processed for my file server. Both tasks fall under transient data storage, and I’m disinclined to use a drive with over 2,000 power on hours for anything mission critical. Hmm, I think modern Xboxes have a limit of 128 GB – 16 TB for USB 3.0 drives.

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 There are days when I can sympathize with Mr. Spock’s plight in The City On The Edge Of Forever.

“I am endeavoring, ma’am, to construct a mnemonic memory circuit using stone knives and bearskins.”

Tech things that mildly worry me

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I find it just a bit worrisome how often I remember shortcuts for running the MMC‘s various faces.

PS C:UsersTerry> gci C:WindowsSystem32*.msc


    Directory: C:WindowsSystem32


Mode                 LastWriteTime         Length Name
----                 -------------         ------ ----
-a----        2019-12-07     04:09          41587 azman.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:09          63081 certlm.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:09          63070 certmgr.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:08         124118 comexp.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:09         113256 compmgmt.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:09         145622 devmgmt.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:09          13091 DevModeRunAsUserConfig.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:08          47682 diskmgmt.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:09         145127 eventvwr.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:09         144909 fsmgmt.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:53         147439 gpedit.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:08         144998 lusrmgr.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:09         145519 perfmon.msc
-a----        2019-10-15     09:53         146389 printmanagement.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:53          43566 rsop.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:53         120458 secpol.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:09          92746 services.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:09         145059 taskschd.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:08         144862 tpm.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     06:19         144967 virtmgmt.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:08         115109 WF.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:08         144673 WmiMgmt.msc

In most cases I’m more likely to do foo.msc from a command prompt than go hunt down what I want through the start menu or other methods. Despite my background having focused heavily on unix systems, I’ve actually have learned a fair bit of NT over the past 15~20 years. Don’t think I’ll ever enjoy the care and feeding of Windows systems but it does come with the computer nerd territory, I suppose.

When you consider that for much of the past fifteen or so, the main reason I’ve kept Windows around has been for video games it may be kind of sad and worrisome, lol.

My data migration plan is almost wrapped up, yay!

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Attempts to start Plex, or fire up Speccy to see if I could get a smart reading, was causing my 3 TB drive to dismount. Read access at least has proven reliable, and despite the drive’s age it doesn’t sound like hell.

Since the important stuff on that drive is copied to my backups drive, and a copy of the backups drive is periodically sent to it: data loss would have been minimal if it went duddaaa splat like my old 1 TB did. Risk of loss was most of my Plex content, and the local mirror of my backups.

Last time I replaced a failing drive: one of the 1 TB drives I bought back in January 2013 died. Of course it was the one used for backups, and a short time after I started backing up the backups in full rather than the most vital parts. Which turned out to be rather handy, even if most stuff on ny backups drive are files I won’t cry if they’re lost—unlike my photo albums.

Faced with a drive going wonkers, and limited time. I did some planning and found myself buying a pair of 8 TB drives — because the price was so good, I decided to get a spare.

Since taking a day to migrate my unbacked up media over to the new 8 TB drive, I’ve also decided to shift gears on how my dual drive arrangement works.

How it’s been done:

  1. Backups drive
  2. Plex drive
Originally these were both 1 TB drives. The 3 TB in question replaced one when various retro fittings occurred. The 1 TB that failed a year or two ago was replaced with a 2 TB. But otherwise things remained the same.
Rather than backup vitals pike photos from Plex to Backups, and then mirror Backups to Plex just in case. I’ve decided to integrate everything into one drive. 
Such that one new 8 TB drive is the complete data set. Backups, Plex, etc. Thus the 2 TB drive can go on to replace either the 2013-era 1 TB drive hanging out of my xbox, or the roughly as old 1 TB used to backup my laptop’s 0.5 TB drive. It could even serve as an extra backup of the most important parts. I’ll figure that out later.
I chose to buy a second 8 TB drive in part because the prices are so nice. And because it’s big enough that whatever fits on the new “Master” drive can also fit on the spare.
The open loop is how I want to handle backups in this new arrangement.
Periodically mirroring the master to the backups would leave me with an automation that makes the spare ready to rock and roll. Syncing up once or twice a month is sufficient risk prevention for my needs. In that time period, data at risk typically exists on other devices or offsite.
Alternatively, I could simply use the “Spare” as a destination for backups of the new master. Similar to how I take care of my file server’s system drive being backed up to the “Backups” drive that is now a folder on the master. Ditto other machines are backed up to that location in similar ways but less frequently.
As I see it the differences are moot from la failure rate perspective.
Mirroring on a monthly basis will generate ample file accesses; the difference is the “Spare” won’t have the wakeful workloads of the “Master”. By contrast the various backup software I rely on, can easily toss differential backups but doesn’t make the drive ready to rock. Doing so will still generate load on the drive whenever the operation occurs.
Thus I find myself favoring the approach where recovery is change mount point, go by new drives. One to replace failure, and one to decommission the spare for less sensitive uses.

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 Why a portless iPhone would be a nightmare

Reading this, I kind of have to ask myself: how many people actually use their phone’s port for something other than charging?

I’ve used the Micro-B ports on my phones to mount a monitor, flash drive, or use a keyboard, but this has been a rarity. Most times I’ve used the port for debugging Android applications with logcat. Since I strongly prefer a tablet, the monitor, drive, and keyboard stuff usually fell to that rather than my phones.

In terms of what my iPhone SE 2020 offers, I can’t say I’d actually give a flying floop if it was wireless charging only. In the sense that Lighting already declares I am unlikely to do anything more complicated than mount it in iTunes and copy ringtones, lol

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Here’s why everyone should own a cheap Android tablet

An interesting if unusual line of reasoning for a site full of nerds and shifting attention spans.
Tablets are often more natural to repurpose than other computing devices. Phones are often too damned small or the only size you need. Laptops are often too damned big, or all you really want is the keyboard input. Tablets strike an excellent size between being so compact you can Velcro it to the wall, and being large enough to prevent and interact with globs of data like videos and web pages.
Kitchens, bathrooms, garages, craft rooms, head boards, et.al. often have space as a premium. If not at first then eventually, lol. If money grew on trees instead of being made from trees and tears, I’d probably have a dedicated tablet just for scribbling notes.
One of the open questions I’ve had since my Tab S3 -> iPad Pro conversion is what do I want to do with Scarlett. The cracked screen works fine most of the time, but I’d largely prefer to avoid putting it in a position where fluids and cleaning are regular needs. The old HDX7 has principally become a clock now that it’s long form reading duties have migrated to a conventional Kindle.
Currently it resides near the charger cluster of /dev/headboard. Which has shown promising possibilities as an electronic picture frame or clock in either room. Mounting it on a kitchen wall or the side of my refrigerator would readily solve the problem that I’ll need to update my grocery list for something, but don’t have the time to leave my kitchen to go get a phone or tablet. There’s also the perk that the S-Pen still works pretty well as long as you don’t rest your hand too heavily on the screen, or need fine lines near the cracked part.