Computers

by

This long, tiresome week, I’ve opted to conduct an experiment: working out of my Windows partition. Since shoving my Chromebook in a closet ages ago, I’ve usually booted Stark  from my Debian partition. Well, this week I tried a little insanity.

So what worked? Well the important stuff. Namely WSL2 and Docker for Windows now enable me to do the things my Debian partition offers that actually matter. Yay for that. Being a busy week, I kind of put that part of the system through five hundred laps of abuse without a problem.

A very large part of my time revolves around command line environments one way or another, so a lot of my client machine’s job is being a glorified X-Terminal on steroids. Most GUI software I rely on is cross-platform within the desktop family trees, pardoning proprietary bits. Most parts I really care about are terminal friendly; most GUI parts involve interaction with others or specific tasks.

In particular I found it pleasant to have a Evernote’s desktop client. The web client’s not my cup of tea, beyond some of the editing shortcuts it shares with the Android and iOS clients. While most of what I do on my Linux partition was direct and to the point thanks to WSL, Evernote was a big shift.

What didn’t work so hot?

In a very unsurprising shortfall was Bluetooth. Twice I had to totally start from scratch pairing my Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. To be fair, W10 20H1 launched with problems that are supposedly resolved. To be honest I’ve always had trouble with NT and Bluetooth: going as far back as the XP era. By contrast in a decade of combing Bluetooth and Linux: the only issue I’ve had is changing batteries šŸ¤£.

Another is the networking side. Seems like W10 is happy enough to use my static/dns setup for Wi-Fi at work, and DHCP for my Wi-Fi setup at home. It’ll even deal with the DNS suffix at home. But sometimes it thinks my home network has no Internet connectivity because it’s trying to use my work DNS servers with my home connection. I suppose, considering the era NT comes from: I should just be glad that W10 has a concept of different configurations for different wireless connections. But annoying.

Shifting from Davmail / Thunderbird to the various Microsoft things, I mostly have two comments. One: easier setup. Second: different quirks. On the flipside, Davmail has a spectacularly accurate manual. And Thunderbird probably has more bugs and quirks than it’s competition, lol. I could actually replicate my Linux setup on W10, but would rather not during the experiment.

Explorer is probably the gold standard of file managers. Compared to Thunar, it sure is. But I found it amusing how it was a sticking point. On occasion Explorer total death hangs until I eject my SD card. In the kill explorer from taskkill /f and then restart the damned thing just to get my panel back kind of hangs. Although, I’ve probably seen more crashes from X file managers than you can shake a stick at, it’s compensated by *nix having a far superior command line environment.

More minor were things like my internal web server. Easy enough to replicate my simple lighttpd setup in IIS, and to lock it to my connection at work. Most of my stuff is either static, Perl CGI, or bash based; so the only thing that’s not operational with trivial effort is a few CGI scripts done in bash.

And then there’s the part that should really scare me: I didn’t hate the experience. By comparison using Windows 7 and its predecessors generally lead to cursing and gnashing of teeth.

by

I Tried to Live Without the Tech Giants. It Was Impossible.

Most people donā€™t go to such an extent to avoid the big tech companies, even for an experiment it is a bit super thorough. But makes a solid point.
ā€œCritics of the big tech companies are often told, ā€œIf you donā€™t like the company, donā€™t use its products.ā€ My takeaway from the experiment was that itā€™s not possible to do that. Itā€™s not just the products and services branded with the big tech giantā€™s name. Itā€™s that these companies control a thicket of more obscure products and services that are hard to untangle from tools we rely on for everything we do, from work to getting from point A to point B.ā€
Perhaps the question we really should be asking ourselves is whether or not these companies are a necessary evil.
Would such services exist, or be anywhere near as good without the help of such companies? Miss Hill points out the dominance of Google Maps and the interaction with things like Uber, and I think thatā€™s kind of key. We had GPS navigation long before we had Google Maps and smart phones, but which would you rather use? Part of what made Google Maps what it is today is the insane investment: sending people and hardware off into the wild blue yonder to build a better dataset than simply importing maps and satellite photos could. Who the hell has that much money? Well, Google did. Some clown in their parents garage might be able to kick start the next Apple or Amazon, but theyā€™re not going to be able to afford to run Google Streetview without monopolistic funding.
As things worked out, Iā€™d say Amazon turned out to be a pretty great idea. But twenty six years ago: weā€™d probably forgive you for thinking Bezos was crazy instead of anticipating he would become several times richer than God, building one of the worldā€™s most well known enterprises along the way.
See, we build our success upon the success of othersā€”and our success is often in enabling others to succeed. The question is can we do that without the ginormous bankrolls and the infrastructure that entails.
Iā€™d like to think we have yet to see the last great American tech company. But without a governmental strongarm, I donā€™t think we will ever see these empires displaced. Not until landmark paradigm shifts cause them to exit a market, or for profitability sake they choose to exit or destroy one. Youā€™re not going to beat Google Maps unless theyā€™re incompetent and youā€™re hyper lucky and clever at just the right time: or they choose to shutter the entire operation. Thatā€™s just how it works at scale.
Yes, Iā€™m pretty sure that we should refer to them as monopolies. But are they ones we need, or are they ones we can ill afford? As someone who long resisted Google and Facebook, I find that a very intriguing question.
by

ARM-Based 12-inch MacBook Specs Include A14X Bionic SoC, up to 16GB RAM, 20-Hour Battery Life & More

To me it would make sense if the first Macintosh to sport Appleā€™s ARM system on a chip was the basic MacBook. Itā€™s entry level enough to support up selling more powerful machines, and down low enough to write it off if the horse power cells to wow everyoneā€™s eyes out of their sockets.
ā€œLooking at these rumored specs, it honestly looks like Apple wants to repurpose the discontinued 12-inch MacBook to sport its own A14X Bionic SoC. Since the A14X Bionic is expected to be made on the 5nm process and not have a ridiculously high TDP, the 12-inch MacBookā€™s chassis should be sufficient to cool the chipā€œ
Which would also be inline with modern Apple and Samsung devices. Not to mention, if itā€™s not busted: why fix it?
by

Itā€™s probably telling that with my laptop less than three meters away, and my tabletā€™s keyboard/mouse more like seven meters away; I opted to go with the tablet approach.

For sitting on my couch: tablets are generally an ideal formfactor. For being at a desk often the lure of a large keyboard and an even larger display is hard to pass out. But there are times where Iā€™d rather be at my couch just like there are times I would rather be at my desk.
Generally, Iā€™ve found that my laptop and desktop arenā€™t devices I reach for as often for their form factor as I do for the ease of using an X-Terminal, or simply doing things on it through a glorified X-Terminal and associated trappings. Or for very specialized tasks: because good luck cramming a massive GTX into a tablet, lol.
by

Microsoftā€™s Edge browser is crashing if you have Google set as default search – Thereā€™s a temporary workaround

Considering how much of Edge is Google, and both companies histories, I do find this kind of amusing. Given the isolation it almost makes me wonder if some Googly interface somewhere has changed its response in a funny way, or if a Microsoft change relative to Chromium induces a crashola.
In any case, looks like people using Edge should stop sending their address bar inputs to Google ala Chrome.
by

Apple Watch continues to help save lives in a variety of ways

While Iā€™d doubt a wristwatch will ever replace a hospital for something like an electrocardiogram: Iā€™d like to think that as far as canaries go an Apple Watch is better than feeding it to the cat.
Coming from a family tree where hearts are among leading cause of death, the health features are about the only aspect of the device I find intriguing. But then in lays the real problem: even if you could convince me to pay that much for a watch the fact remains that I do not want an iPhone to go with it.