On one hand: I try to respect how much care seems to have gone into Steam’s controller. Whether it was an internal Valve team or an external, some real TLC was put into its design.

On the other hand: trying to use it makes me feel like I’ve had a frontal lobotomy, and don’t really feel like my brain cells can ever adjust to it versus a normal controller. Where normal is probably anything in the vein of a PlayStation or Xbox (modern) or Super Nintendo or Genesis (classic) controller.

Yeah, I think it’s going to end up in /dev/closet. Unless someday they’re worth something on eBay.

Progress, probably

Passing thought on browsing the World Wide Web:

In the ‘90s my greatest bane was pop up ads and file transfers.

In the ‘00s my greatest bane was browser plugins and crashes.

In the ‘10s my greatest bane was cookie notices and on boarding.

As the ‘20s begin, I would like to think this is progress as far as getting pissed off at surfing the web goes. It’s abnormal to have to close a half dozen (or over a dozen) windows when leaving a website, and file transfers tend to complete instead of hoping no one messes with the phone line. Browsers rarely crash, and plugins from hell are mostly a relic today. But pretty much every freaking website puts up a hey pal, we’ve gotta mention these cookies notice, and far too many put up a near full screen pop up asking you to sign up for something.

I honestly have no idea why Don’t Copy That Floppy just started playing in my head.

A Decade of iPad
https://flip.it/bBeP6L

Personally, I think that netbooks worked out far better than anyone should have expected; and I feel that the rise of the iPad and Chromebook is due to realizing that you don’t need to make a netbook that is a piece of crap. Nor do you necessarily need to spend several grand of laptop just to update Twitter.

Tablets are a remarkable option that is mostly hamstrung by software and accessories. As a docked machine, it’s just a matter of software. My iPad Pro runs circles around my aging Core i5, but docking an iPad doesn’t change the software into a Windows desktop, nor should it.

I find that tablets tend to serve best when you are doing general computery things rather than highly focused tasks. If you’re a heavy user of keys other than alphanumerical, such as modifier based keyboard shortcuts then you’re not going to like typing on tablets. The more efficient you must be at manipulating text: the more you will require a full sized physical keyboard, regardless of your device’s form factor. Likewise if you need pixel precise interaction, you’re probably going to make a middle finger gesture if anyone tries to replace your mouse or track ball with a touchscreen, lol.

In many cases, throwing a keyboard and mouse, or even an external monitor works far better with tablet or phone like software than desktop like software. Don’t believe me? Try using Windows 95 with only your fingers, and then try using your phone with only a keyboard and mouse.

The whole windows desktop paradigm and software designed around a desktop PC does not adapt to a tablet as well as it did to notebooks. But software that doesn’t suck on a tablet, does not necessarily suck on a delete desktop. Software is what you make of it but hardware determines how you physically interact with it.

Most of the negative aspects of my relationship with desktop oriented software is mired in antiquity. I’m sure we would all have done things differently if you landed an Intrepid class star ship on earth in the 1960s than if you tried to grow CP/M into NT, and a host of other histories.

Most of the negative aspects of my relationship with tablet oriented software is mired in quality. I’m sure bug free software does not exist, and will never be the result of Google or Apple, lol. Typically my groan at my iPad is the buggy operating system, much as with Android my problem tends to be Google’s additional  software.

Chrome OS has stalled out
https://flip.it/ung6rA

Personally, I’ve come to have mixed feelings about Chromebooks but that mostly owes to a mixture of my own tastes and Google’s performance.

Pretty much if you’re happy to live in a full screen browser session, or can’t remember the last time you dragged anything other than a browser window around—Chrome OS is for you, and the appliance factor is a win. Just buy a better model with a better processor than average.

By contrast I’d like me, your interest is largely in an Android powered laptop: you will be disappointed or suffer the same slings and arrows that iOS users do. That is to say things work pretty well but you must avert your eyes from the problems more often than you should have to.

Android actually works pretty well with a monitor, mouse, and keyboard. I’ve done that a crap fuck ton since Honeycomb. Chromebooks offer an easier path to the docked experience, and a tremendously easier path to a laptop style form factor.

But by in large Android on my Chromebook has been far more buggy and glitchy than any Android tablet that I’ve ever connected to a monitor, mouse, and keyboard; and I’ve done that to more than a few! The flip side is that the hardware strain of running Android apps tends to be less than heavy, complicated web applications.

So there are times that a cheaper Chromebook running an Android app can be more ideal than throwing the web app at the same hardware, or more appealing than buying a Chromebook that has a Core M or i series processor instead of dinky Celeron and Pentium processors.

Combined with the limited choices for high end Android tablets, not to mention ones with a true hardware stylus, my Android experience on my Chromebook is chunk of why I decided to buy an iPad Pro—because a Chome OS tablet won’t replace my Android tablet the way it could most people’s Windows beater.

To PowerShell or not to PowerShell

For the most part, I’ve found it very hard to care about PowerShell. But as time goes on, I mostly look at it with the thought, “Wish I had more use for that”.

Things that I do that require some scripting, and that run on more than unix systems, usually resort to creating .cmd or .bat files to handle the Windows systems. There’s mostly two reasons for that: execution policies and portability.

I don’t really like scripting cmd.exe. As an interactive shell, it’s barely livable but gets the job done. The focus on interactive mode, and the nature of DOS, show through in what can be done in cmd.exe. NT’s modern extensions and so on make it a lot better than COMMAND.COM but cmd.exe is not a good scripting environment, nor a great interactive shell: it just sucks less than its predecessors.

PowerShell on the other hand took some good ideas and largely addressed much of the suck. Exposing .NET even offers the opportunity to solve problems that would call for writing a solution in something beyond bash/ksh, or finding dedicated utilities for. It is really neat the amount of shit you can do in a PowerShell script.

But in the end, the default execution policy is what really keeps me away. Open sourcing and cross platformyness stuff in Core 6.x resolved most of my negative feelings for PowerShell, but it doesn’t suit my scripting needs.

By default: client systems reject running PowerShell scripts, and so monkeying with execution policy is needed. Either to unrestrict it for the current  session or my user. Which makes using it for projects less useful than using the older comspec. Because while cmd.exe is very meh, it doesn’t require any extra monkeying after I’ve git cloned my repo. Yet another thing to do when setting up a system, or document about a code base, that I don’t need.

Not sure who writes release notes for Evernote these days, but I like the cut of your jib.

Release Notes for Version 6.22

Note: Versions 6.22 is supported in Windows OS versions 7 and up.

Windows 6.22

Fixed:

– If you opened a note via your shortcuts or after searching for a tag, any links to other notes in your account would be broken. That defeated the whole purpose of having links so we fixed it.
– Editing shared notes with images inside them would sometimes cause the app to crash. That’s now a thing of the past.
– Occasionally the app would crash when you clicked on a note in the note list, which you probably did quite often. But it should be smooth sailing now.
– If you opened an image pasted from Snipping Tools, the app would sometimes freeze, but no longer.
– You can now edit your notes to include hyperlinks with a UNC path (in other words, \host-nameshare-namefile_path).
– Updates to templates
– When you click on a note link in a tagged note, the app will now show you the note you wanted. A big improvement from before.
– We tweaked the text on one screen to make it easier to read.

Yay, it looks like iPad OS 13.3 fixed the holy-crap-the-packets-are-gone level of lagosity when combining Bluetooth mouse and keyboard. Me thinks this will get some use.

And I’ve yet to cry bugs, bugs, bugs everywhere and not a fix in sight as hard as < 13.2.2~13.2.3. As far as I can tell the only knew issue is the mouse wheel scrolling is broken, and that’s hardly a problem compared to can’t effin’ type ‘it.

Well, it has taken a good sweet time but I finally got around to something I’ve been meaning to do for a while now.

Earlier this year, I replaced Centauri’s system drive. Going from the first small SSD I ever bought, to a shiny 1 TB able to replace its hard drive. Since then, I’ve largely migrated all data over from the hard drive.

My plans for the now redundant storage capacity has been to fix the actual thorn in my storage side. Since repurposing my best portable drive to deal with my laptop’s backups, my xbox has had to make due with an old and extremely slow 300G laptop drive for its external drive. One that sucks so much that it actually makes Deathstar One’s internal 500G look sexy, and the original Xbox Ones are not equipped with sexy drives.

Hauling Centauri out was mostly leg work rather than effort. The only real pain in the arse is that the gigabit cable doesn’t have enough extra length for me to “Pull” the tower out, rather I need to connect/disconnect the cable before moving the tower more than an inch or so from final resting place next to the wall. Yeah, bollocks to that.

Of course plugging the drive into one of my spare enclosures is as easy peasy as pulling out the screw driver set; it helps that I kept one spare within quick reach and my second spare in deep storage, last time I redid /dev/closet.

Now the real irksome ribbon was the Xbox. It decided to disavow all knowledge of how to format the sucker. Because Microsoft in all their glory, eventually decided there should be a ~200M magic partition ahead of the NTFS volume. And Xbox, no likely. Enter Linux powered laptop, GNU parted, and cursing at HDMI cables finally falling out the back of Deathstar One (>_<).

In theory, by morning most of the data should now be transferred over to it. Allowing me to decommission the 300G laptop drive to virtually anything but video game storage, and it’ll be nice not running 97+++++ percent full all the frickin’ time.

Even my lazy ass can get around to juggling parts around if you piss me off enough.

https://youtu.be/HAaEwR3NZSs

I remember reading about the bento box design of the ThinkPad some years ago, and not really seeing it. Because most of the devices I had seen were from the stack-of-notebooks era of design, and then one day I came across what these old as !@#$ models looked like. And then I thought to myself, yeah, I can see that now.

This video is one of those kind of ThinkPad.