Computers

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Modular Computer: iPad Pro as a Tablet, Laptop, and Desktop Workstation BY FEDERICO VITICCI.

Most websites covering news about software and tech for nerds, are pretty meh at best. One of the reasons I like dropping by Mac Stories is because it takes a short at doing things decently. It’s probably the only one focused on Apple that I don’t roll my eyes at, but then again I’m not part of various the fruit cults.

Also Federico is probably a worse tablet whore than I am, and after nearly a decade of using tablets: I don’t personally know anyone who uses their tablet more than I do, lol. Thus, I am more likely to find interesting stuff on Mac Stories.

Coming from the land of Android tablets, the bane of my modularity has long been the laptop issue. Handling tablet and desk mode has been straight forward for the most part, but accessories pretty much suck unless you buy some form of iPad. Meanwhile pretty much everyone seems to make something for the iPad with a keyboard to go.

iPadOS bringing a desktop style mouse experience, and discarding the Android like one, makes me more tempted to try docking Nerine instead of relying on Stark and Centauri for desk duty. Much as its many Android forbears have over the past decade.

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Passing thought: we’ve increasingly lived in a world of long file names since the 1990s, yet out of convenience: we still tend to create three character file extensions whenever we pull new ones out of thin air.

One almost has to wonder if three is especially magical, or if humanity is that lazy. I would like to think it’s just enough bytes to convey the majority of information, and still appease every lazy git alive. Because no one likes file names, or file extensions the length of a sentence 😣.

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How to Customize the Look of Your Cursor in iPadOS 13.4.

This was something I had hoped would be possible after messing with the new mouse support. The default cursor is rather too damned tiny for my tastes, which I assume is an artifact of designers with 20/10 eyesight or a Mac thing. But it’s waaay smaller than I’d expect, coming from Linux and NT machines.

A little bit of tweaking later, and it’s quite nice 🙂.

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Step one: phone hijacks SMS sending to Android Messages, and disables function in Hangouts.
Step two: tablet can only sync my sent messages. Not getting incoming at all.
Step three: re-enable SMS / set default on my phone.
Step four: archive threads because now they’re two on my phone , and the other only gets a copy of mine.
Step five: send a new message from tablet.

Step six: remember that over the past decade, Google has gone from being one of my favorite tech companies to quite possibly the one that pisses me off the absolute most often. I really miss the days when their betas were more reliable than what the rest of us called release quality. Sigh.

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Cursors on the iPad – MacStories

This transform ability has been a large part of why tablets became my primary computing platform. Android since Honeycomb, and iOS since iPadOS increasingly so, handle the whole mouse / monitor / keyboard thing pretty well.

Whether I’ve wanted a device docked that can be my work terminal, or to lean back on the couch, tablets have served me well. Aptly these are both environments where I’ll probably yell at you if you take away my keyboard, or force me to use a conventional laptop, lol.

Much of my advanced computer use revolves around an X-Terminal, so it’s been pretty easy to delegate other tasks like email and notes taking. Where as at home, I’m more likely to be focused on reading and messaging. Tasks that tend to benefit from either a keyboard centric use case with a big assed screen, or from a portable touch screen device.

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Over the course of my life, I’ve mostly determined that a few things are relatively true about e-mail:

  1. Email is either the best or worst invention, probably both if you grew up with paper.
  2. All mail user agents pretty much suck.
  3. All standard protocols for dealing with mail are ancient.
Point one is something that I’ve concluded since the ‘90s. Point two is mostly internal bias. Point three should probably be considered fact at this point.
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My Decade with the iPad: Upping the Ante
https://flip.it/-_vnWx

For me it was the Asus Eee PAD Transformer, the original model TF101. My Linux powered netbook had fairly limited battery life compared to the bottomless battery life of a docked TF101, and the desktop struggled under loads that Android breezed through on even less powerful hardware. On the flip side even the lowly netbook could compile code far faster, but couldn’t handle the rising UI load of modern web pages and desktop applications.

Or as I like to remember those days, if all I did was type notes into a vtty, my netbook would often be dead during one flight, and was mostly dead weight on longer trips. That experience traveling lead me to consider a rooted Android just for the battery life. The TF101 was kind of special in that it had a good battery life, and that it had a slightly smaller one in its clamshell keyboard.

The tablet with the keyboard dock had enough juice to take three planes, and fall asleep watching Netflix before needing to charge. After that travel experience, I went on to using Android pretty extensively as laptop and desktop replacements until last year.

Beefy endurance compared to Intel brought me into the platform for getting stuff done. Having an excellent lean back on the couch experience kept me using it.