Computers

Nebo + Evernote = Awesomeness

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This past week, I’ve been trying an experiment with my work journals: handwriting. Shy of writing a novel, this is probably the greatest mark of Nebo being a useful tool.

For a long time now, I’ve used Evernote as the central note taking hub. Regardless of where created, if it’s non-transient, it’ll end up in Evernote. For the years of working from Android: it’s usually been just an alt+tab away when using my keyboard while docked, and when undocked I’ve been a stylus with glide/swype style input.

A side effect of the iPad change over is multitasking sucks, and the floaty keyboard has a bugnormous history on iPad. When I shift between apps in Android, Evernote yields a pretty lossless experience. When I do the same thing in iOS, it’s more like “Snap back to save point”, so alt+tab’ing back to Evernote on my iPad can be followed by changing side-tabs, finding the note again, and repositioning my cursor. Yeah, that sucks, but that’s the iOS app. It took quite a while for most of the floating keyboard bugs to get knocked out of the OS as well, for us freaks that do swypy style writing with a pencil.

Nebo’s been a side tool for a while now. Often my choice in meetings^ and simple charts/diagrams, which would then be exported as PDFs for Evernote or HTML for my internal web server, depending on context. But I’ve never really used it for my journal, despite being unexpectedly good at handling the funky nouns local to my environment.

By in large my work journals have consisted of typed text, entered into my notes system.

Handwriting has mostly been limited to tasks that called for mobility, such as scribbling results as I move between pieces of equipment, and not converted to typed text–which is Nebo’s speciality. Depending on what I’m working on, my journal entries can vary from a note per day to a note every few months.

What I’ve been doing this week has been creating my entry in Nebo. Usually written a sentence or a paragraph at a time, and then converted to typed text. No, I can’t spell any better with a pencil than a set of fingers; but Nebo works excellent at converting handwriting to typed text. Among other things.

So typically, I’ll have my iPad across from my keyboard, and I’ll shift to it periodically to write stuff in my journal entry. When I’ve finished: I export the page as text, and send it to Evernote. Send it to my notebook for journals, tag it as a work related journal entry, and tag it for the projects and search-worthy terms relevant to what I’ve been writing and working on. If I start the page with the title, Evernote for iOS even picks that up as the note title.

This has been working well enough for me that I think that I’ll stick to it. Things that Nebo doesn’t support, like attaching files, I can always do after the export. Things that are lossy, like subtitle formatting, I can usually enter manually or omit. Nebo also lets me shift to directly typing text: both using the on screen, and my Bluetooth keyboard.

Net result is I get the convenience of pen input, the searchability of typed text, and don’t have to curse profanities at the autocorrect for swiping words. I’m liking it a lot more than I thought.

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^ I’ve given up on Evernote’s handwriting stuff. Because it mostly sucks on all platforms, and when combined with app switching on iOS, usually erased my frakking writing!

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https://apps.apple.com/us/story/id1475021190

I can’t help but look at this Post-it notes app, and debate if this is an indispensable idea—or just the destroyer of my sanity, lol.

Typically I only use Post-it notes in the meat space when I have a high property reminder, so much that I should pin it to my monitor, or the like. Ditto if I need to tape a note on a piece of equipment because I can’t just scratch NFG into the property of others. Left to my own devices, I’m pretty paperless for about the last fifteen years or so.

But I know well the value of short, concise, orderly, notes.

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Some time ago, I setup DavMail POP/IMAP/SMTP/Caldav/Carddav/LDAP Exchange and Office 365 Gateway on my development laptop to connect Thunderbird to my mail account at work. Handling email was the largest change of swapping from my Android centric work station back to regular desktop Linux.

Give or take my generally meh feelings towards today’s desktop mail clients, Thunderbird especially: this has worked out pretty well, and with pretty minimal pain, thanks to the Actually Worth Reading setup guides.

Today, I finally got around to connecting the address book and calendar functions, and much to my surprise: those actually, Just Work ™. Which is kind of nice: because I’ve been switching to my tablet for those functions. Thunderbird collected addresses thing, also helpful.

When the rise of the S-Pen made me upgrade tablets, I had to contend with the loss of video output during my otherwise painless Tan S2 -> Tab S3 conversion. Eventually, I traded in some old hardware and got a cheap assed Chromebook that was new enough to do Android apps, and serve as a replacement for docking my tablet. That mostly worked, give or take that Chrome OS is like 10 x buggier and more restrictive than native Android. But eventually that combined with the crappy performance lead me to replace it with using my development laptop directly, rather than using SSH and SMB to access it. The performance grumbles, such as Play Music stuttering whenever opening heavier web pages, made more powerful hardware worth the coin—the quality of Chrome OS as an Android replacement, made using a Linux or NT based system a better option. Thus rather than increment debt, I said screw out and started using my development laptop directly because that was the simplest, cheapest way to kill both birds with one stone.

So, I guess I’ll get to see how well Thunderbird’s calendar works. For my pen use cases, typically my synced to all my devices taste in calendars are used; and I maintain several. My exchange calendar, basically exists purely for dealing with meetings and events going through Exchange users. Since meetings are inescapable, dealings with Exchange calendars.

Coincidentally, Microsoft Outlook for iPad rather sucks as a mail client if you have any significant volume of mail to process, and it’s calendar function is little better than typing cal into an xterm. But it at last syncs with little fuss.

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A subject that I find intriguing. Especially when I live in a world, where friends kids usually have computers in school: and I find it amazing that schools are able to offer that.

The way that my family got our first computer, basically owes to one of my mother’s friends, and how much her son had improved at school, and that she should get my older brother a computer. I have no freaking idea how our mother could afford such a machine.

In practice though, my brother didn’t really care that much for computers until well into the Pentium era, and ma didn’t really care much for computers herself until the late ‘90s. Thus, I had the advantage of a computer and little competition for its use.

As a child, typically the computer to me was a place to play games. I couldn’t read yet, and no one really understood computers very well, so it was hard to get a lot out of MS-DOS 3. But it was easy enough for us to learn the procedure for using floppies, and most of our diskettes had the associated command written on the label.

A few of these games, were purely entertainment. Like a Japanese based thing that could shift between robot / jet / car, or whatever; and Jeopardy. Most games however were more educational: math problems like making change, and dividing ingredients, and stuff like that. I probably moved a frog through a maze or painted interstellar space with wormholes a ridiculous amount of times, but most of the games were school related.

In fact: until compatible software started to become difficult to find in the mid~late ‘90s, most of our diskettes came from school supply stores with a software section.

As it turned out, I would basically be using computers since before kindergarten. Eventually though, Internet access via Web TV, and the usefulness of general purpose Pentium machines with modems, is where I really started to care about computers.

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For some reason, I am reminded of the era I was born into, before people even started talking.

Also pretty neat, both comments about the technology covered, and comments about what the future might hold. Like micros reaching the stage where you’ll be able to lose them like your keys because they will have become so small.

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The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

Apple is a lot of things, some good, some bad; consistent is not one of those things.

I actually used to have a fairly high opinion of Apple’s design skill, until the first time I tried to help an iPhone user. That was somewhere around the 3GS or iPhone 4. At which point I wondered how the fuck anyone could use the things.

Over in the land of PCs and Macs, I kind of recognize that many oddities exist. A great many are also artifacts leftover from a time where Apple or Microsoft did a thing, and were probably the first to really do it, rather than following on the trail of standards and successful giants. But that feeling never has repaired my opinion of the fruit company’s software. Today is also a much more connected world than the ‘90s and ‘80s were.

Apple actually does make some great stuff, and folks that helped create those products and experiences should be proud of their work. But like anything else with ten trillion moving parts, consistency kind of goes out the window quite rapidly.

I will admit though:

How would anyone ever figure out how to split-screen multitask on the iPad if they didn’t already know how to do it?

Is the kind of thing, that lead me to start making jokes about having to swipe friend in Elvish.

The iPad has developed a pretty nice on boarding experience, give or take four hundred privacy notices, and the user guide in the Safari default bookmarks is well worth giving anyone that has never used an iPad before. But there is definitely IMHO, a trend towards learning to swipe and gesture in elvish.

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One of the things that I think people mocking tablets, often forget is how revolutionary desktops were once upon a time.

In its context: the IBM PC and many of its close relatives were not powerful computers by any means, yet they helped change the world. The 5150 was no where near as capable as expensive time sharing systems, but it was cheap, and it was good enough.

For under ten grand you could get a pretty nice setup, and for a few grand you could get something worth using. Most early PCs ran an operating system that was a simplistic piece of crap, compared to what you would expect to find on computers costing tens of thousands, but it was enough for getting things done. Combined with the very anti-IBM approach of openness and third party support it caught on, and exploded—effectively wiping out competition from previous attempts to build an affordable ‘Good enough’, and eventually becoming more ubiquitous than the more capable machines that came before.

Remind you of the rise of Android and iOS any? In many ways the extent, and methods that exploded Android into the dominate phone OS, and a major player in tablets, reminds me a lot of how we went from computers that were too expensive to be personal, and reached a point where literally everyone can have their own computers.

You know, that kind of makes me feel more positive at Microsoft’s efforts with Metro and UWP, lol.

Random neurons firing

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My habit of preferring the wall-facing side of the bed, and leaving the open side to the comfy dogs, remind me that I never tended to write much in bed.

Trying to update handwritten notes: the net result is not having enough room to starboard to move my arm: which impacts my legibility. I.e. having to micro-manage my finger muscles, both results in crappier writing and a more exhausting experience. Which also means my tablet will have a harder time converting my writings to more useful typed text.

This kind of got me thinking: about the days I used to keep physical notebooks and binders as my modus operandi rather than computers and things. And you know what the norm was back then? Typically, I’d be found on a step stool, in front of a tall dresser, because that was the only large work surface other than the floor. Plus that dresser was in my closet, owing to the lack of space we had, and offered easy access to additional storage.

By the time I really tended to update notes from bed, I had already reached the point of sleeping draped over a laptop and vaguely wondering how the screen stayed attached, lol.

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The iPad at 10: A New Product Category Defined by Apps

As someone that’s come to rely on tablets heavily, despite avoiding the fruit company for much of the past decade, I kind of like the notion of tablets as a middle category—because that’s where most people’s computing lands.

A long time ago, I preferred laptops to desktops for the portability. Today, I don’t really believe in desktops so much for two main reasons: laptops aren’t as underpowered as they used to be, and rack mounted servers pwn most towers if you’re really going for raw compute power.

Tablets kind of answer the ability to do most of what regular people do with their computer. But aren’t so tied to the concept of a monitor, mouse, keyboard, and tower; laptops both suffer and benefit from rubbing the same software. And tablets would mostly suck for running the same software as desktops, far more than it would from adding a mouse and monitor to today’s tablets.

For better or worse: software often defines are interactions with devices. Think otherwise? Try using Windows 95 without a mouse or keyboard 🤣

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Strange an unusual things:

When hostname.domain gets assigned to prefix.someotherip, yet hostname has prefix.manuallyassigned. Or should we say that Cream had its expected address but my router server decided another, unused address was to be resolved to its name.

On the flipside, forcefully renewing the network connection and everybody is happy again. *Shrugs*