Signs it’s time to recycle old equipment: when replacement parts cost almost as much as the machine.
Also, when you’ve been more inclined to use the machine for propping open a window than actually using it.
Computers
My Modern iPad Home Screen: Apps, Widgets, Files, Folders, and Shortcuts
http://flip.it/jQ8Bd3
The idea of putting apps you frequently multitask with in the dock is one that makes me think. The small number of apps in my dock reflect applications that I frequently switch to, and plenty that I split or slide are somewhere in my home screens.
Most of my use for folders has been to group related but infrequent applications together. E.g. all the banking apps I might launch a few times a month get a folder. But most document related apps get an entire page of the home screen.
Largely I find it amusing as well. The operating system and apps are more giant phone like than Android tablets, for most of the platform’s respective lives. But iPad OS 13 and other recent iOS releases for iPad, really make the user experience suck less.
I can’t help but think: one of these would have been really damned lovely when I was a teenager, but good luck finding that at a garage sale.
The thing that scares me, is less that I would have used such a thing back then, and more that the parallel connection makes me remember some of the squirrely things I’ve had to do in the name of serial ports…hahaha.
Part of me is tempted to try a keyboard case like this one, and part of me thinks I have enough useless things. There’s at least two variants by various mostly generic vendors, Procase just happens to be one of the cheaper offerings with USB-C charging support.
My experience with keyboards and tablets have been a touch spotty, given my taste in device size versus my requirements for a keyboard. The smallest that I find really useful for a keyboard are models like Logitech’s K380, and their old K810. Which is about as full size a keyboard as you can get while ditching the keys that don’t really matter, and settling for laptop style arrow keys.
Device wise, I’ve usually favored smaller. One of my most heavily used tablets was the Galaxy Note 8.0, but it was useless with a keyboard case. An external keyboard like the K810 works beautifully, but a 16:10 tablet just yields a useless keyboard if you make it fit a case. An 8″ wide case means the keyboard will be so ridiculously cramped that you’re better off using the touch screen keyboard^.
The only good thing about 10″ widescreen tablets were their screen size overlapped with the smallest you could squish a laptop keyboard down and expect it to be worth typing on. The 9.7″ standard tablets I’ve had push that down a peg, but aren’t useless. Using the keyboard case that Zagg made for the Tab S2, I found it a bit too cramped to really want to use seriously, but at least it was large enough to be useful rather than counter productive.
When I look at the size difference between my K810 and my 11″ iPad Pro, I contemplate where this winds up. I’ve usually found 12″/4:3 laptops a rather a touch cramped.
One of the differences, I think is also the OS. In Android, using Gboard I generally could write a couple dozen paragraphs on my Tab S2 and Tab S3 without caring about the touch screen; throw in glide/swype typing using an S-Pen and I was damned efficient. Rather using keyboards with Android was more important for tasks like bash and vim sessions over SSH.
On the other hand, the way iOS works for editing text using Apple’s keyboard: I’m inclined to think that text editing on an iPad was more of a scream at the top of your lungs and beat people with a stick kind of necessary for iOS 12; in iOS 13, it’s not as bad but due to the buggy’ass nature of Apple’s on screen keyboard, I would still say use a keyboard. It’s like the most important iPad accessory, where as for an Android device, I would say a real (i.e. Wacom based) stylus is the most important accessory.
So I find myself wondering if it’ll actually be worth it. The lossage to keyboard space is worrisome but it’s much closer to normal than other tablets I’ve owned, and if I had gone with the 12.9″ behmeth, I wouldn’t even be contemplating the question since its so huge ^_^. But in my head, I figure if all else fails, I could velcro a real keyboard to the thing, and if I really wanted to get jiggy I could put my dock and hard drive on the back in a similar fashion.
In any event: the case would be getting removed and attached fairly often. The little magnetic case I use with my Pro, mostly serves for times when I want a stand to go and when I want a little more protection at work. At home, my device pretty much runs naked unless I’m using the case for a stand at my desk, and I prefer my devices naked.
^ To be fair, I also feel the same way about sliders. My HTC Doubleshot’s keyboard didn’t make up for the dinky 3.7″ screen, and I was better off with the Galaxy SIII’s 4.8″ screen in every single sense of typing shit.
Well, my back hurts and I need a fresh shower, but my closet is a box of shit lighter and now back into an organized tech state.
The dogs, Corky especially, were about half convinced that I had lost my mind.
Last time I cleaned tech, I had eliminated some of the oldest stuff. E.g. limiting myself to a single graphics card that’s AGP, one SATA DVD burner, and a lone floppy drive/cable: just in case. But that did nothing for ~20 years of VGA, Ethernet, AC power, IDE, and other cables. Most of which survived.
For some of the harder to kill items like VGA and IDE, I’m keeping at least one decent pair for the odds that someday I’ll actually need one, and that’ll probably be in enough decades that they won’t be so cheap without visiting a landfill.
Likewise it feels good to have things back to order. One drawer is everything audio, video, network, and power that isn’t collected else where. Another bin collects the various USB things that aren’t the above, and another for misc stuff like my spare keyboards. Boxes used to collect internal components, like old PCI-E graphics cards(, and yes, still one AGP card), my old Audigy 4, internal cables and fans and shit, etc. Some larger things like an old tape drive
It’s kinda interesting how over the past thirty years, we went from having hardly anything but the Tandy 1000 set, to a closet full of computer shit. I feel bad for how unlikely some of it is—might need a VGA cable within the next twenty years, but I doubt MHL and SlimPort DP over MicroUSB-B are ever going to make the “Just in case” bin. Actually in another five to ten years, those should probably join the last composite video cables on their way out….lol.
It’s probably sad that when such machines were less well suited for propping open a window, and more suited to getting work done, I probably would have loved such a machine. I always wondered what use that form of Windows might be, especially when I learned there was a sorta-port of vim to CE.
The reality is, while by the time I reached the stage of wanting such machines, I didn’t really like Windows. But the reality is, what I really wanted was a device that was portable and capable of doing text editing and file management. In a better way than setting an e-mail to yourself off a phone.
When I was younger, the sexist thing a phone might be able to do is send an e-mail. That was part of why I looked at the launch of the T-Mobile G1 with sad, watery eyes; because I realized the devices I wanted were coming down the pike, and at my age, I may as well have wanted a Camaro for that kind of price tag, lol.
How Steve Jobs saved Apple with the online Apple Store
Not sure if memory lane makes me feel old, or just makes me remember the shopping experience from when we bought our first WebTV back in the mid nineties. I also find the old snap of Dell’s site oddly appropriate, and appealing, as someone that experienced that era of the World Wide Web.
And with regards to our present time? Well let’s just say, Amazon is a big thing now.
My desktop is for games
Ways to know your desktop has one true job:
- 80% of your storage use is installed software.
- 97.2% of that is your Steam library.
- You wouldn’t own a desktop if you didn’t need the huge GTX card.
- You wouldn’t need the huge GTX card if you didn’t play PC games.
Coincidentally, WinDirStat calculates my %UserProfile% is about 5% of my storage use and a bit of 7% is my non-steam games directory. Most of my user profile’s use is taken up by Android SDK files, and I don’t think I’ve even touched that in a couple years.
So, yes. I think it’s pretty safe in saying that Centauri only really has one true job.
That I also use the machine for video ripping and conversion, is secondary really. Or should we say a side effect that it’s the machine I have connected to a Blu-ray drive, and conversions are done on it because the only better candidates don’t run HandBrake.
Most other reasons, it just happens to be the machine in front of me at the time, and even then I’m often inclined to reach for my tablet instead.
Damn, hard drives are getting cheap and huge
Passing thought: damn, hard drives are getting cheap and huge.
Judging by the prices, I kind of hope that my drives keep on lasting on, because if they do, by the time the older ones die, I’ll probably be able to get one drive for the same price: that fits my entire storage needs, lol.
Currently, storage around here is fairly simple but divided.
Centauri was originally a small SSD and a 1 TB HDD. Earlier this year I replaced the first SSD I ever bought with a modern 1 TB SSD, which frigging cost less than the original 120 GB SSD. With that migration: Centauri’s second drive is now mostly for things I haven’t bothered to move over.
Cream has its own internal storage media, but those are solid state storage for running its OS and associated trappings. It’s meat and potatoes are a pair of platter drives: a 2 TB that serves as cold storage, and a 3 TB drive that serves as media storage as well as a backup of the first. Originally cold storage was a 1 TB drive that I bought at the same time as Centuari’s, but it finally went the death of too many years of power on hours; and a 2 TB was the same price by then.
I suspect at some point, Centauri’s now redundant hard drive will be getting swapped with the drive hanging off my Xbox. Because that drive is both too damned small for games (~320G) and too damned slow for games (~5400 rpm laptop). With Centauri’s 1 TB drive now being the oldest still in use here, giving it a job where failure is not a problem but where capacity is, seems like a good plan.
The downside is of course this means actually getting off my fat arse and doing things (>_<).
I’m pretty sure if my drives just keep on trucking a few more years, drives these sizes will be free with a box of cracker jacks. Nevermind typical drive sizes being larger than their collective whole.
Adobe deals with ‘painful’ early reviews of Photoshop for iPad
If I was Adobe: the thing I would fear most is the top competition on iPad OS becoming a threat on Mac over the next ten to twenty years. Much as if I were them, my biggest worry would be Adobe making rapid headway on iPadOS over the next two to five years.
Right now: Adobe is still in a fairly powerful position. Or as I like to think of it: the subscription reflects their needs of doing business, and the feelings of a clawed demon hand gripping your balls, reflects users’ dependence upon Adobe’s products. Despite much grumbling about Creative Cloud, everyone is still either looking for a non-paid option, or using Photoshop and friends in their workflows. Much as before.
But nothing ever lasts forever, and maintaining dominance isn’t always assured. Today is not tomorrow, nor is it yesterday.