Computers

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Microsoft to deploy ElectionGuard voting software for the first time tomorrow

I for one, see two good things about this.

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.

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Microsoft shows off how containerized apps will work in Windows 10X

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.

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Popular iOS and Mac email apps scrape inboxes to profit from personal data, report finds [U]

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.

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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.

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.