Computers

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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.
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Signs that this iPhone thing is going to workout:

  • Use of three and four letter expletives to describe messaging from my phone is down by 90%, effectively now at the level of autocorrect.
  • Use of same to describe messaging from my tablet is now down 70%, and is no longer filled with pain and agony whenever I do more than type.
  • I haven’t felt the urge to break the damned thing.
Part of the value here also lay in the use cases. Typically my tablet screen on time can be measured in hours per day. More if I’m using it, less if I’m mesmerized by some video game or book or Netflix or whatever. By contrast my phone screen on time can probably be measured in tens of minutes per day, unless someone sends me a lot of text messages in the middle of the night.
Which is a pretty stark contrast to years past, where I used my phone pretty significantly. Over the past five years or so, Android’s evolution and my usage patterns basically killed my phone use in favor of tablet use the rest of the way. While the transition to iPadOS was rather rocky, given my heavy demands in tablet: the transition to iOS has mostly been trivial.
You could say that my life around Android largely caused me to bypass the long ass wait for decency in iOS features, after eons of going “Huh, how the frak have people lived without that all these years?” whenever a new iOS release happens. Likewise the tablet use killing phone use, basically means I don’t give a frak. Jelly Bean was still a thing when I used my phone heavy enough to care as much about my phone, as my tablet keeping pace with my computing needs. So by now, iOS easily handles my demands upon a phone and mostly fits my demands upon a tablet or desktop.
Sigh. Here’s to hoping someday Google returns to producing software that I can depend on instead of software prone to pissing me off more often than not.

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Google’s solution to the end of Hangouts is Messages. My solution to this problem has been, “Screw that”.

For the majority of my use case my SMS roll through my tablet. A process that Hangouts, as meh as a chat app is it has always been: handled well. In the years prior, I had relied on a Bluetooth connection between my Android phone and tablet to make the magic happen. In the post Hangouts world, I pretty much just relied on its integration.

Google Fi and Hangouts started the GTFO and use Messages push a week or two ago. Since Hangouts ends in January, I decided to give it a go and see how good the results would be. Well, an iPhone SE is how well that experiment went.

Using the web version on my tablet shifts from how Meh the current iteration of Hangouts is to “And why the frak am I using this?”. I figured, at least, it had to be worth while on my phone. Whether it’s the natural way it works, or an aspect of Google Fi: Messages sucks ass on my Moto X4. I dislike using the web version; I despise using the Android version. Even more so where the combination of web + phone often leads me to to using multiple profanities when the phone eventually catches up.

Originally, I had assumed that I would be using android messages when I upgraded from my old Galaxy S5 to the Moto X4. But most messages arriving through Hangouts rather than that, pretty much lead to me ignoring it. Not broke, don’t care. Well, at least for a few more years at that time.

My primary computer when I’m not doing real work is a tablet. Many of the Android tablets I’ve used ended up full blown keyboard/mouse/monitor driven workstations on top of being my general purpose tablet. Thus my phone doesn’t really see a lot of use.

Typically I use my phone when:

  • Checking off my shopping list at the grocery store.
  • I’ve gone to bed, and it’s easier to reach for my phone than my tablet to answer messages or read Wikipedia with one eye open.
  • I’m standing in the checkout line at the grocery store.
  • Waiting on food at the microwave at work.
  • Suddenly need a calculator or a stop watch, and other things that were cool on a wristwatch when I was a kid.
  • The rare times I actually want a one hand device more than a better device.
  • The few times I rely on Maps to make sure I don’t take a wrong turn.
  • The every few years I’m driving out of range of my favorite radio tower, and choose to jack a playlist into my car’s head unit.
In effect this means my phone represents 10 – 15 % of my non-productivity minded computing, and aside from answering messages in the middle of the night: I’m usually found on my tablet or I’m occupied and not available. Since I’m usually using a tablet, my phone’s data use represents an average of up to a hundred megabytes of cellular data. Drastically down from the years where I averaged several gigabytes.
Apple’s iMessage doesn’t really interest me. But it does two things for me. It fixes the suck-ass experience of using my iPad Pro with Google’s new plan for my Messages, and it makes me not want to flip my phone out a window whenever I wait for messages to sync back up 🤣.
Thus Bean Sprout has been retired in favor of Benimaru. So named because the Project (RED) design reminds me of Rimiru’s commander in chief in TenSura.

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 Someday, computer shit will actually just work.

I’m pretty sure that will be the day the first Terminator rolls off SkyNet’s assembly line.

That I sit here fucking with Google and Apple things, both those sentences give my sense of humour a perverse tickle to the funny bone.

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Apple’s M1 MacBook Air has that Apple Silicon magic

The M1 laptops cresting the horizon are a unique view for me. See, my iPad Pro is the first, and to date, only Apple product I’ve ever owned. Even then it was only partly by choice. But ever since my first Android tablet, the Asus Eee PAD Transformer TF01: I’ve desired to see ARM based laptops and desktops be a real thing.

Thus it is safe to say that I find Apple’s new Macs intensely interesting in a way I haven’t looked at them in years. Back when there was no real alternative to the MacBook Air, I found the machine interesting; along with the desire for a Retina screen on the smaller model. I don’t think there’s ever really been a MacBook Pro released that I cared about, on that end of the spectrum we’d have to look backwards to the Power era for me to largely give half a fuck. Most of Apple’s computers are simply too expensive for my tastes, which usually ends all temptation from square one.

I find it interesting how times have changed. The new Air would be a great laptop for my traditional use cases. Not so much a development system though. As hardware it’s a super win, as software not so much.

But there’s the real caveat. For most that I really do with laptops that warrants such a price tag: I need Linux x86-64 software compatibility. Plus, I have a strong desire for 32 GB of memory with how much pressure my 16 GB Latitude has been under for years. In fact, above xterm level there’s it much about macOS that I actually care about compared to NT or Android. The best reason to buy a MacBook in my views have generally been if OS X is your bag, and most folks I’ve known who fit that bill, live in their GUI. For me the only reason to care about macOS is that it’s got Unix underpinning it’s shit.

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Why Apple’s M1 chip will make your PC games run faster

While I’d say the title sucks, this was a surprisingly nice article.

For me the attraction of ARM has generally been the power efficiency rather than the raw performance. Intel has had to squeeze it’s ass down the don’t chainsaw the battery life to death until you’re actually under load path. Something they’ve done pretty well; modern x86 processors tend to last a long ass time until you start demanding the heavy duty performance. A fair trade if you want a laptop with both practical battery life and serious performance. Meanwhile ARM processors I’ve used have put x86 to shame in terms of endurance, and they’ve had to squeeze their ass down the track of delivering heavy duty performance.

Personally, I’m not highly attached to x86. My focus on Unix systems means my cart is hitched to the source compatibility wagon. Where PCs have long tended to favor the ease of running someone else’s compiled binaries ad nauseum. I’ve been hoping that Microsoft’s greater push at Windows on ARM will eventually shove the PC world away from a single ISA family.

From the prospect of Linux, my experience has best been summarized as user space is just honky dory, and damn you graphic drivers. That is to say, things like hardware accelerated rendering and decoding have been more problematic, but for most things it still amounts to apt-get and move on.

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Baldur’s Gate 3 devs built a testing AI. Then, they tried to defeat it.

That is kind of neat, and likely worth the effort as it grows more capabilities for abusing the game.

Television, novels, and comics tell us one day the super cool A.I. will be super smart, and may or may not try to kill us all. Personally, I think the future looks more like a series of special purpose constructs aimed to help us with specific tasks. That’s the super-cool A.I. I’m looking forward to, because I’m probably going to be dead decades or centuries before we see anything like Cortana or Jarvis, lol.

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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.