Computers

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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

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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.

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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.
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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.

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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.

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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.

:find – where have you been all my life?

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Over the last fourteen years of using vim, the rate at which I discover features and commands probably slowed a lot after the first six to eight years. As knowledge of awesomeness expanded, and business reasons limit my lurking in #vim irc, the the intake has been kinda slow. It didn’t really take long to learn enough vi to be highly editing effective, and some years of using vim all the fricken time, will probably teach anyone most of the important stuff.

Today, I discovered a new-old thing. Or had one of those “Where have you been all my life?” moments.

I often find myself copying a path; usually done via tmux’s copy/paste features, as I’m a keyboard whore, and not every terminal I rely on lets you use a mouse so readily for that. And then pasting it into a vim command to open a file, be it :e[dit], :tabe[dit], :sp[lit], or :vsp[lit], or even just to go do `vim somefile’.

Today, I was doing a fair bit of find commands to go look up a file, because when you have a solid state drive and some people like dozens of folders in nesting, sometimes that’s faster than remembering enough for tab completion.

Then I had a thought, “Hey, isn’t there a :find for looking up files? There’s gotta be a way to open those results in a buffer.” And of course there is!

Much to my disappointment, :find foo doesn’t really search many places. The default path on *nix is something like ., /usr/include, and the heck a trailing coma means (path=.,/usr/include,,). Which is great for something like :find sysexits.h but not so much for crawling a directory structure. But there’s a solution!

    :set path+=**
    :find foo
    -> suddenly qux/ham/spam/eggs/and/yippee/ki/yay/foo opens in the current buffer.

There’s a fair number of vim things that I’ve learned over the years, and don’t often need. On an occasion they teach me good things when I am smart enough to go look for them again.

Some random numbers

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If I run a split screen on my 23” at a usable font size, I arrive at approx 119×52 characters of display.

Comparably, if I SSH into my machine with a font size easy on the peepers for the 11” screen, the results are a very respectable 109×32 characters display. Which is probably the Shelly app’s default, or a notch or two above.

Running iVim locally, with a default font that’s hard on the peepers unless using the external monitor: 149×47 characters.

Generally, I aim for about 80×35~45 characters as a terminal. Going around 160 is when I start consider :vsplit windows viable instead of relying on regular :split windows. Maybe I’m weird but I tend to like having a source file | header file combo in my vim session, when I’m afforded a big ass editing surface.

Thinking about these numbers, I kind of hope that Apple fixes the brokeness for keyboard/mouse support. I can use my keyboard, or I can use my mouse, but the moment that both are connected, iPadOS 13.2.3 decides that keyboard I/O should become like packet flow over a smoke signals modem. Which makes me less thrilled to dock my iPad until OS 13.2.4 or 13.3 happens, and cross my fingers that I won’t be stuck waiting until iPadOS 14.

I suppose that I could try pairing another Bluetooth mouse to see if for some reason, it simply hates my Logitech mouse, but I don’t imagine that I’d be that lucky with how much of a buggy mess iOS 13 has been.

Musing from an E6430S

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The things I’d actually change about my Latitude:

  1. Not weigh 3~4 lbs.
  2. Have more than 16GB of RAM.
  3. Have USB-C where the USB2 + ESATA is.
  4. Swap the rear USB3 and side VGA cables.
  5. Have internal Bluetooth instead of dongle in my rear USB3 port.

Notice, these are pretty much in the order of impossible, lol.

Newer machines offer faster processors and better capabilities for USB-C than Stark does, but not by much. I think the hardest to solve is the weight problem. The closest thing to a lightweight laptop in Stark’s formfactor is the X1 Carbon, and I say that’s lightweight relative to its peers rather than my tastes.

And there in lays why when I reach for my laptop at home, it usually has more to do with an x-terminal than a keyboard. Because my tablet’s weight is < 0.5 kg and my laptop’s weight is < 4 kg.

On the flipside, one of these days I should probably dig up one of the old E-series docks and see how well that works with Linux. I seem to recall the D-series docks worked pretty good with FreeBSD if you followed polite undocking procedures, and I don’t think Linux gives as many farts about the hotplugging.

Damn it, fruit co!

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Reasons to look forward to a knew iPadOS version: if I connect my keyboard or my mouse individually, they work excellently. If I have both connected: the keyboard lags at a rate of 5+ seconds per character with frequent drops and repretitions.

So basically, Apple seems to have broken the ability to use a keyboard and a mouse at the same time in 13.2.3. Nevermind that that mouse support and productivity are cornerstone goals for iPad OS 13 o/.

On the positive side, disconnecting the mouse fixes the keyboard distruption about as instant as the connection terminates. And restores it as fast as the mouse reconnects.  So unlike most issues I’ve experienced with iOS 13 bugs, reboots aren’t required.

I find this less amusing when you take both the fact that I am more inclined to use my tablets with mouse/monitor/keyboard than most people, and that the touchscreen keyboard vs the physical keyboard is a delta of about 40~50 words per minute in my typing speed. And Apple’s floatly keyboard with the pen input is one of the buggist mother fuckers ever shipped.