“Holy fuck that’s fast” “Is this powered by nitromethane or something?”
The main reason that I had converted my games machine back to Chrome was thanks to Edge being flaky release to release about my tab change / load habits, which could vary from smoother to an effect like watching the GUI thread block for background tab loads or something. Moving it back to Chrome was mostly to get performance that was consistent.
In the time that I used Edge on that machine, I was otherwise very happy with it as a browser. In fact if they had been more consistent, I probably would not have bothered to change things around.
With the move to a Chromium base, I doubt that there’s much reason to care anymore. The only reason that I’m actually left to care about is the bookmark and history syncs with my Debian machine, and I don’t really do that much with bookmarks anymore. Most interesting history bits can probably be solved by Google’s activity page, since doing anything in Chrome’s history usually rolls as “Gah, crap, I’ll just type a search term”, lol.
I finally broke down, and gave in, and giving this a shot. There’s the reality, that most of the time I find a tablet an ideal form factor. But it is also a reality that I am not always near a desk or table like surface when it would be effective to have an external keyboard.
Thus far this is looking good. Study enough that I’m not worried about tap-tapity-tap-taping it over, or gravity getting the sudden best of me. Big enough that I can get a decent typing experience, and light enough not to have to remove the tablet constantly. Although to be fair, ease of removing the tablet is one of my goals—most of the time I actually want my tablet to be a tablet, and the lighter the better.
Hitting https://10fastfingers.com/typing-test/english I was able to get a decent result after 10~15 minutes of putting around. 85 words per minute with 91.81% accuracy isn’t a bad first attempt. Close enough to my full typing speed, that it’s more a matter of accuracy and getting used to the keyboard, than it is the actual size.
Which is really nice: because that was my primary fear. See, keyboards for smaller devices have generally been a failure for me. A widescreen 10.1” works pretty well, and 11.6” is probably my idea of the perfect sized keyboard in terms of widescreen. For standard laptops of yore, I usually would vote for the ~12” range. A 7” or 8” tablet keyboard is so small that I am better off using two-thumbed touch screen typing, for both accuracy and speed. A 9.7” iPad size keyboard is too small, but at least approaches a size where I don’t feel like snapping the keyboard in half. Given that sordid history, I’m happy to find that the iPad Pro 11” in this dock, is pretty effective; much like how my old 10.1” systems were big enough to use as a full time keyboard but more error prone than a standard PC keyboard.
Unsure what disturbs me more: that I don’t think I’ve ever used my journal’s rss/atom feeds to test a news reader before, or that I feel tempted to setup one, lol.
In the increasingly distant past, I made fair use of news readers, and eventually welcomed Google Reader with open arms: because it solved the problem of syncing state between my laptop and desktop. I used it a lot until I didn’t.
What primarily changed wasn’t the demise of Reader, so much as my migration to different sources. By the time Reader shutdown, I hadn’t actively used it in several years. Typically, I now consume such content from my tablet: not my laptop, or desktop. Likewise feeds from sites that aggregate stories related to my interests, like ye ol /. gradually got replaced with things like Flipboard, Google News, etc. They are what really killed off my use of news feeds.
Today, the sync problem means less because I don’t wanna look at my feeds on my PC things—I wanna lean back, and read the feeds off my tablet. As time has gone on, most temptations I get to add some feed to my list, usually takes the form of a blog somewhere that gets updated with interesting stuff once in a while. More often, generally geeky news or world affairs populate through other sources.
The more time passes, the more I would like to see our future reflected in Corning’s old A Day Made of Glass videos.
It’s less something I view as necessary, so much as one I view as progress. We have all this frakking technology, why not use it?
There’s nothing wrong with having my tablet or a laminated recipe handy when I’m baking something, but wouldn’t it be nicer to just ask for my favourite cornbread recipe, and have it pop up on a surface near where I am preparing stuff?
One of the things that have changed over the past decade is how I view the future. Once upon a time, my vision likely had more in common with early Star Trek or Alien. After all, I was born in an era where having a VCR was pretty damned awesome sauce :P. Today, I rather think of the future looking more like The Next Generation or Prometheus–with interactive displays everywhere. Networking is already gone from pervasive to ubiquitous in my lifetime; I doubt most people in the first world can even get from their bed to their job without > 1 microchips being involved along the way. Today, many folks will pass that mark by the time their morning alarm chimes.
Something that I really do love about Corning’s old videos: is the attention to interface. See, I imagine by the time I’m old as heck, we’ll probably have stuff that looks more like the Enterprise-D: which had bloody interactive touch screens literally all over the place. But real software doesn’t tend to look like LCARS, the way real equipment tended to look like Kirk’s ship. As a UI, I think a lot of what we’ve seen on Star Trek is pretty bad from a getting real work done perspective, and that’s alright: it wasn’t made to be an interface that people used ever single day to do every single thing we will ever do with a computer. It was made to be an inspiring, and effective on screen graphic. Plus let’s be honest, the Okudas did a lot of really amazing work.
Cornings video on the other hand is riddled with software experiences that are so close to what we have now, that it makes it more plausible, more accessible. Much like how the physical controls of Jefferies’ Enterprise were very believable when my mother watched Star Trek back in the ’60s. By contrast, I look at LCARs, and I see a pictures of what could be. I doubt we would envision the future so easily without Okuda’s work, it’s just the software will be very different.
Windows 10X: Everything you need to know about the foldable PC OS https://flip.it/tk_HYE
I for one, am more interested in foldable devices like these than ones we see harped on in phone space.
For me, there’s only two points of interest in a foldable phone. Either one that “Pops” open into a tablet, around the size of a Nexus 7 or iPad Mini; or something very compact ala the old Motorola Razrs. That’s about it. I don’t really want or care about most of the other things that have come up in phones, nor about a seamless display.
Now when we move into the size of a tablet or laptop: my tune changes! A device that can be the size of one, or two iPads; a device that can be a massive tablet or a dual screen book, that’s something I could use. I’m less interested in a seamlessly folded one piece screen than I am a layout more like a notebook with a thin bezel at the spine. See, PC operating systems like NT have better handling of multiple displays than contemporaries like Android and iOS. It’s a faster leap to abusing two screens if your starting point is something like Windows 10 than Android.
I want to see productivity gains from having two related, but not unified displays. It’s less about having a 14” tablet that can fold in half, and more about how two monitors that can interact—touch screen monitors, running mature software.
Firstly that it has an open source base. Voting machines are not a problem domain where we should accept proprietary software from a contractor as good enough. Some form of open review and code auditing is a good thing, and obscurity is not security here: unless you’re the one hacking the ballet.
Second is that Microsoft, for all the crap we give them over Windows, is actually competent. They have both the experience and the suffering to be an ideal player. Microsoft as a company is more aware of security woe than most of us. Plus, did you catch the open source part?
I never actually thought I’d hear about something involving computers, and voting, and not find myself rolling my eyes, or cursing at stupidity.
My interest in dual screen productivity to go, aside, I’m kind of interested to see where this goes. Most of the experiences I’ve had with containers in Linux, be out Docker, or building on top of chroot, have been a largely positive experience. Combine that container concept with the stability of the Win32 ABI, and there’s some viable good sides to this.
As software becomes increasingly long lived, the need to support software no one is ever going to recompile: keeps going up. Not to mention software that no one is ever going to port forward to more modern APIs and tool chains.
I think that people sometimes forget: this is practically the definition of a modern mail client, lol. Hell, some actual mail services describe this sort of thing as a feature, if you really want to be pedantic.
In fact, it’s part of why I was very hesitant about switching to Gmail many years ago. Because it would place my mail under the privacy policy of an advertising company, and probably one of the most likely ones to unleash SkyNet upon the world in some distant future.
With modern mail clients, now you often need to decide whether or not you trust the company that made your client, not just the folks running your mail servers.
I Gave Up My MacBook and iPhone for a PC and Google Pixel For a Week. Here’s What Happened | Inc.com https://flip.it/bQHv5k
As someone that’s done an Android-> iPad maneuver, I rather found that most of the apps being “Basically “ the same made the experience much less jarring. Kind of like how most of the non-gaming software I use on PCs is the same, regardless of Linux, NT, or BSD, many of the apps I use on my iPad are basically the same as the apps I used on my Android tablet.
Being a freako who used Android as a laptop replacement, and that otherwise has been all PC based, I too found the keyboard shortcuts confounding to the muscle memory. My iPad differs drastically from all my other machines on the shortcut part, due to Apple vs IBM/MS modifiers; and for bonus points some of my PC keyboards will toggle the behavior of those keys based on whether or not they connect to an Apple device via Bluetooth.