Computers

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 So of the various ways that Windows NT pisses me off, one is networking.

Years of roaming between my home and work networks never made my Debian partition miss a beat. But with the Windows partition, it often decides to give me the finger.

Home/DHCP and Work/Static shouldn’t be an issue, but however I’ve managed to achieve the state (more than once) it decides that Work/DNS servers should be used in place of Home/DHCP lease. Which of course means pain in my arse.

The various methods of stabbing NT’s network stack with a spork through netsh and ipconfig didn’t help me, or I’ve never learned more useful pressure points. Regardless the applied settings don’t match what I’ve tried to configure on the connection nor the adapter through both the modern and old interface.

What finally works is this: https://superuser.com/a/1464468/295120

Hunted down the entry that corresponds to my pain woe and purged the value of ProfileNameServer for both tcpip and tcpip6. Vola the mother fucker switches back to the DNS in my DHCP lease.

Sigh.

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The new 2020 iPad isn’t enough for Zoom school

Pretty sure that every time I’ve seen a review of the new iPad pop up there’s been three consistent complaints from reviewers:

  1. Same old design 
  2. 32 GB storage 
  3. Single user.
Personally, I think the complaints are overrated.
On the hardware front: I’d say if it isn’t broken, why replace it? The physical design is no less awesome or crappy than it was years ago. Just now you’ve got sexier models available for twice the price tag!
On my iPad Pro there is usually thirty some gigs of storage usage. At the same time it usually recommends I let it deep six a dozen or so gigs of stuff. Considering the base iPad costs a lot less, and offers even more storage (still for less) as an option: that’s pretty swell for the cheapest iPads.
The place where I nod my head in agreement however is USB-C. I’m hoping that as SoCs trickle down the fruit company eventually goes USB-C all the way. Even if it lead to a Pencil that just replaced the charging connector: I’d call it a win.
For the most part I think iOS has deserved it’s criticism over the years. Slow, terribly slow evolutionary pace but pretty good results. I personally care much more when it comes to the tablet front since my tablet vs phone usage is something like 90% vs 10%, lol.
At this point it’s fair to call iPadOS a multitasking OS. Both in the technical sense, and the user capabilities. Just not as ironed out as what you’ve been doing on your PC since the late ‘80s, lol.
What I find intriguing is the rice of reviewers moaning about iPadOS being a single user operating system.
That iPads are expensive is a given. That outfitting an entire family with Apple products is comically expensive is only avoidable by not doing it. But we still live in a world where sharing computers isn’t as typical as it once was.
Once upon a time: computers were so crazy expensive that time sharing was a key. There were reasons you ran a bunch of terminals to tens of thousands of dollars of equipment, and PCs costing several grand were a joke.
Today your wrist watch probably has more computing power than the old time sharing systems. Yet most people tend to operate as either one PC per person or with a device in a shared location. Ya know the whole P in Personal Computer?
Multiple user accounts on tablets are kind of attractive from the idea of leaving a tablet in community areas with no specific user. But do you really want to pay that much for a dedicated coffee table or kitchen ‘puter?
Tablets like phones tend to be pretty personal, single user devices. Much like DOS PCs of old the reason to share tends to be purpose deployed rather than intent designed.
Plus if you’ve been bitching and moaning that Android tablets are shit and never get updates for so many years, you probably shouldn’t complain about how many years before the cheapest iPads and your old hand me downs are good enough for your kids 😅.
Real people tend to be more pragmatic than nitpicking reviewers and tech blogs. And yes, sometimes you should consider price a driving factor.

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Windows Me, 20 Years Later: Was It Really That Bad?

While Millennium Edition is mostly remembered as a disastrous hell pit: it did try to roll up quite a few odds and ends. That’s probably part of why it was so buggy, and XP had more time.
To be fair the Windows 9x line probably brought their operating system as far forward as it could really go without dropping the relationship to MS-DOS. A compatibility issue of decreasing importance by the time 98 SE reached customers, and more and more software came to expect a 32-bit Windows and modern memory management units.
XP is itself long post it’s throw out date: but was definitely a step in the right direction. Part of me remembers it fondly because it was the first time we really had a computing environment that could play games, and want e limited by outdated hardware. At the same time the shiny of business as usual left me ready for a unix environment long beds XP itself became outdated.
Part of me rather wonders what the modern desktop might look like if Microsoft would of had as much ownership of Xenix as they ended up with NT. At least few of us really need MS-DOS or 286 compatibility today as much as we may want Windows 98 or XP compatibility.
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 Surface Duo postures: Every bend and fold you need to know

For some years, I’ve thought it would probably be awesome sauce if you took two tablets and put them in a book like case side by side, and made some kind of software pipe between them for opening apps and sharing via intents.

Microsoft’s Surface Duo definitely represents something much more complete and natural. And sadly just as expensive, or more. But it’s an actual product you can sell your left nut or right tit for. So there is that 🤣.

I would love to see more devices like this. Both in the Duo’s size that can bridge between a phone and a tablet, and something closer to a tablet than a phone.

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Thinking over my experiment, I think I can principally call it a success. Over the past ~three weeks, I’ve managed to not go out of my cottin pickin’ mind and want to flip my NT partition out a window. 

As someone that’s principally had a FreeBSD or Debian setup on hand for the past fifteen years, I’m going to call that signs of progress on Microsoft’s part. Because while there are worts here and there using a X session: traditionally they piss me off less than Windows.

Since the experiment began I’ve made numerous changes, but mostly small ones.

The freaky SD card freezes Explorer thing hasn’t happened in ages, so I can probably thank updates for that. Likewise I find turning my keyboard off before power down seems to result in less having to repair the damned thing. Pretty stable for the most part.

IIS is definitely slow as dog poop compared to lighttpd, but given how easy it is to lock it down to a specific network, I’ll forgive that.

The thing I miss the most is how copy/paste works in X. The whole thing about ^C/^V versus the mouse selection and clicking the middle mouse button is really helpful when you’re copying between a terminal and a note editor. The select / right click thing with modern Windows terminal emulators and console things, not so much. But that was also something I disliked about using Android and a monitor anyway.

Since modern Linux tends to treat otherwise available memory like a ramdisk, and buffers the crap out of it for faster file I/O, I’ve made a small tweak to WSL2 setup:

PS > type ..wslconfig
[wsl2]
# default is 80%, or about 12.8 if you’ve got 16GB.
memory=8GB
# Default is 25%, or about 4GB if you’ve got 16GB
# It’s a VHDX file used as swap: not system virtual memory.
#swap=?

Effectively limiting WSL2 to half my system’s physical memory. Otherwise I’ll find myself with 300~400 MB free in task manager. Some of the projects I work on generate ~20 GB of files and general nut punches memory.

That my desktop sessions on W10 usually burn up to 3.5 ~ 6.5 GB according to Task Manager, this further increments my desire that my next machine offer at least 32 GB of RAM. Because 640 KB isn’t enough for anything anymore 🤣.

As most of my interests revolve around an xterm session, WSL works pretty damned good for me. Enough so that using Xfce4 and Thunar vs NT’s DWM and Explorer aren’t as large an impact as the change from Davmail + Thunderbird to ActiveSync and Windows Mail.

Much to my amusement if I do the old “Send to” -> “Mail recipient” trick, I get an error message that there is no program for that. Actually, I can’t remember what decade I last actually tried that. But I’m pretty sure that XP or ’98 was still sexy at the time.

I’ve been happy to see that Windows Terminal has come along nicely. When I tried it very early on, I found it annoying because I abuse bash’s classic line editing instead of using notepad like shortcuts. No frustrations or interference with a release version of Windows Terminal; in fact my only negative comment is the fancy pane split stuff isn’t the same as tmux or screen, hehe.

Spending more time on Windows 10 than normal, I find myself reminded that it’s been about a decade since I figured I should learn how to use PowerShell. While I mostly skipped having to care about batch files in command.com, I have had no such luck avoiding cmd.exe in my life. And PowerShell frequently reminds me how nicer it is–if only I’d have the time to learn it as well as I do bash and general Bourne Shell voodoo.

My little experiment of using Windows 10 Pro instead of Debian Buster was meant to answer the question “Can I” use NT as my main development and work platform. The question of “Should I” however is a different one. That I haven’t gone insane is a positive. That I’ve tried at all of course indicates that I may be a tad more insane than normal.

But hey, I spent many years using Android as a desktop replacement, so I’m obviously crazy to begin with ^_^.

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 Tested: How much does Bluetooth actually drain your phone battery?

And this is pretty much why for the last decade I’ve had virtually zero fucks to give about Bluetooth draining my phone’s battery. The difference tends to be limited if your device doesn’t suck.

Unless you’re optimizing for the worst case scenario: like fifteen minutes of phone charge is going to make the difference between getting home and sleeping at the airport kind of scenario. Pressuring you actually use it for something: it’s simply more bother to diddle Bluetooth than to charge normally.

Which also reminds me of why I use a Bluetooth speaker at work instead of my tablet’s speakers. For comparable volume blasting my tablet’s four speakers all day sucks down more charge than running the Bluetooth speaker.

Rather the real train to turn off Bluetooth IMHO is because you’re not using it more than a handful of times a year, or to limit your exposure to some one in a ten million asshats trying to spam you with pairing requests, lol

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 The Tech My Dad Banned From Our House

Interesting read. I suspect her dad must have been an interesting fellow.

For some reason I find myself remembering Ma mentioning my father counting out a roll of a hundred stamps as one of his quirks; I’ve always wondered how he must have gotten screwed over or otherwise ended up so pissed off once upon a time to go that far. Everyone has their quirks, pa’s notion of cutting vegetables to uniformed size at least made sense, but I’d have to have been positively mental at some event to ever do the stamps thing myself, lol.

As for my childhood I was probably fortunate. We pretty much had a computer and some form of game console my entire life, not that I will ever really fathom how our mother afforded the Tandy. I know Nanny and the local pawn shops was often involved in my brother’s drive for expensive things.

But for the most part tech considerations weren’t really imposed upon me. We had to deal with a rather tight income, but my widowed mother did her best to make her children happy. More effort than I think she should have, or more than we should have received, but those were her decisions. My brother and I certainly benefited from that side of our mother.

Should we say the tech side had both sides of that. If we could afford a PC game that I wanted, I’d probably get it eventually. If I wanted new hardware I’d probably be better off asking for a used car fund 🤣. Such was life.

Our first computer was technically my brother’s, but I was really the only one that used it very often. What really got my family interested was the Internet. WebTV was very limited but also a highly effective gateway drug to modern computing. For ma and me: it was a pragmatic thing to end up with a PC.  For my brother I imagine it was the ability to play video games and surf the Internet, but he had moved out during our WebTV era.

Someone at church that taught computer classes and such, gave us an old Pentium/32MB machine and even took the old Tandy 1000 off our hands. When it died: we ended up with our pastor’s old Packered Bell with a Pentium II/64MB. After that died, my brother naught a Dell simular to his Dimension, and ma paid him back until it was paid off. A snazzy 2 GHz Pentium 4 and probably 512 MB. Whatever, it finally had a hard drive big enough to actually install games and the best graphics card we had seen since the old Tandy!

It was these Pentium based machines where I actually had any competition for using the computer. Which was both a good and bad thing, but mostly a good thing. By that, I mean the only way we got broadband is eventually phone calls screwing around with her email was the last straw, because if my bitching and moaning wasn’t enough to drive that decision: our combined grumbles eventually did, lol.

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 If you really want to know anything about the reMarkable 2: I’d suggest watching this guy’s videos.

I kinda wish that more people spent such time on reviews, but I suppose that’s a bit excessive. Fro the reMarkable it makes more sense: being a device less typical and more specialized than your average consumer’s taste in electronics.

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 Here’s Doom Eternal running at 1,000fps with an Intel Core i7 9700K

Being a kid when the original DooM came out, and first experiencing it on console, since our Tandy was more at home with 8088 based than 386 based software, I find that kind of amazing and insane. My old i5-3570K and GTX 780 need the settings tuned just to ensure that the frame rate doesn’t dip in more demanding segments of the game, but does manage to be perfectly playable.

It’s hard to imagine Doom Eternal reaching 1000 FPS on current hardware. Not hard to imagine the first three games doing so, but that’s the virtue of time. I guess if you totally and insanely clock the shit out of a computer until you need liquid nitrogen just to avoid a halt and catch fire condition, some amazing shit is possible, lol.

Also not my fault if I’m suddenly tempted to reach for the 1993 version of DooM…..