Computers

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.

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Signs that you’re a tablet whore:

  1. When you get to work and realize your tablet is still sitting on your desk.
  2. You wonder if forgetting your laptop would bother you less than forgetting your tablet.
  3. You’re pretty sure forgetting your tablet is worse.
  4. When you get home, you snuggle your tablet after hugging the dogs.
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One thing that I actually do like about using an iPad with a mouse is the spell check.

PC’s typically follow the model of right click → menu → suggestions or right click → suggestions on top of the context menu. Where the particulars of everything are application specific and very non portable, usually.

My iPad? Click the word → just give the suggestions and make you click again for the menu. Subsequent clicks toggle between spell check suggestions and the menu. Android usually just opens a context menu when you click the word, and keeps text selection different from spell checking. +/- some OEMs like to disable that by default (and Samsung used to remove the feature, way back when), iOS and Android mostly make it the OS’s job for text input things.

HDMI extension and switching time

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Well, it’s taken about six years, but I think I’ve finally found something the first generation Chromecast is good at, aside from demonstrating the meaning of choking hazard. They came with these little extension cables, so that you could put a bit of distance between your display’s HDMI port and the device itself versus shoving the Chromecast G1 into your TV.

Simply put, my old Asus monitor only has two real problems. One is the speakers are utterly and completely crap—that audio should never and under no circumstances have audio routed through them. Thankfully, Asus put a 3.5 mm port that let’s me hook up external speakers to handle the HDMI audio input. The other problem that is less easily solved: is there is only one HDMI port. It’s from an era where even a nice monitor only had one if any. Thus with my conversion to HDMI all the things around 2013~2014 thereabouts, It has been the real sticking point.

To swap cables: I’ve got to either blind man finger for the port until the HDMI goes in, or flip the monitor forward so I can get a visual on the port. Yeah, my top request for HDMI 3.0 is going to be a reversible connector like USB-C.

Today I did a bit of experiment. I connected my old HDMI switch, so I could check if my 780GTX or iPad took offense to it. At least under Linux, I’ve not been able to use Skylake or Braswell graphics with the switch, so it’s mostly been underutilized since my Xbox and Fire TV went to different displays. Much to my happiness, the GTX doesn’t care about the switch and my iPad Pro 11 -> HooToo adapter setup doesn’t seem to mind; although I didn’t test HDCP on either, I doubt that’s an issue here.

As a follow up, I decided to test if doing a hotplug from the iPad end would be smart enough to trigger the switches input auto switch behavior and it is not. Since the Chromecast G1 extension cable makes it easier to swap cables on my Asus monitor, I think what I will do is just toggle cables and spare myself wiring up yet another thing with an idiot light.

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Final signs that the tablet has won:

  1. Posting from my desk usually means my tablet is between my keyboard, and monitor, and the keyboard is paired to the monitor.
  2. If it doesn’t involve video playback, Direct3D games, or compling code, I’m probably going to use my tablet when I’m at my desk more than my desktop.
  3. The urge to hook up my HDMI switch again, so that I can share the monitor with my tablet.
Yes, I’m weird.

Breffo Spiderpodiums as an Xbox controller caddy and headphone stand

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The Breffo Spiderpodium was originally made with holding an iPhone in mind, but I have to admit that it works pretty good as an Xbox controller caddy.

Two middle legs are folded to create stand, two back legs to lip over the controller, and two front legs are folded to make a sort of rest by the accessory port. So I can pretty much tilt the controller about ten degrees downward, slide it into place, and relax.

The larger model originally designed for the iPad, also works pretty neatly as a headphones holder. Hehe.

Plus whatever Breffo’s definition of British steel or whatever the interior is made out of, I’ve never actually managed to break one of these things. The most damage I’ve ever done is melting the plastic a bit by hanging one out of my car’s air vents for a lustrum or more.

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I think I’ve finally found something my iPad truly does better than my Androids, lol.

By in large, my many years of using my Android tablets docked to a keyboard, mouse, and monitor has been a pleasant experience. Enough that the only real beefs I’ve had, have been when apps (read Google’s) break the scroll wheel support. Mostly, it just works(tm).

One sore spot however was anything that involves a pinch gesture. Like trying to zoom in and out on Google Maps, which did not always have eat double tap and slide gestures to it. Everything else worked pretty well.

Well, I think I finally smiled. Apple binds the right mouse button to penning the accessibility menu, which is an artifact I guess, of mouse support being more of an accessibility minded thing then a general feature like Android’s support. But when you open this menu and goto Custom it offers the ability to trigger a pich. Which changes the cursor and left click behavior to let you navigate pinching in multiple axis of movement. It doesn’t suck, although naturally it might be a tad confusing.

That’s kind of cool. Good job, Apple. I know I rarely say that instead of four letter gestures, but this one made me happy.

Flash, flash, flash–storage fest

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In thinking about cutting down my load, I’ve come up with an idea. Stark has a forward SD slot under its trackpad that usually houses a simple slug that Dell pre-installed. Swapping this with my spare MicroSD and a SD adapter is one less thing to keep track of.

Experimenting with this idea, I also opted to try a few drives in my standard kit.

My old 1TB Transcend drive works pretty snazzy. This is one of those old green laced grey “Milspec” framed drives connected with an old Samsung MicroB 3.0 cable.

root@stark:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/terryp/Transcend/dd.img bs=1M count=10241024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 1.80687 s, 594 MB/s
root@stark:~# rm /media/terryp/Transcend/dd.img 

Generally, I use this drive for backing up my laptop since it’s one of the better portable drives that I own. Give or take how old it is, lol. This drive is also formatted exFAT unlike the other drives, which are all FAT32.

Here’s the 128G SanDisk Ultra flash drive I bought some years back:

root@stark:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/terryp/DE47-D1C8/dd.img bs=1M count=10241024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 14.8877 s, 72.1 MB/s
root@stark:~# rm /media/terryp/DE47-D1C8/dd.img 

Which mostly serves for shuffling files around, since it’s a decent capacity for a small size.

Here’s a pair of USB drives from Microcenter free coupons. A slower 32G drive labelled USB 3.0 and a faster 16G drive labelled USB 3.1; the translucent cases look like the board designs are the same.

root@stark:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/terryp/USB DISK/dd.img bs=1M count=10241024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 196.081 s, 5.5 MB/s
root@stark:~# rm /media/terryp/USB DISK/dd.img 

root@stark:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/terryp/USB DISK/dd.img bs=1M count=1024
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 32.868 s, 32.7 MB/s
root@stark:~# rm /media/terryp/USB DISK/dd.img 
root@stark:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/terryp/DE47-D1C8/dd.img bs=1M count=1024

The 32G which is slow, serves as my offline video cache for my tablet. The 16G I just got tonight courtesy of another coupon.

And here’s the 32G TF/MicroSD card that caused this line of testing, also from Microcenter.

root@stark:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/terryp/32 GB/dd.img bs=1M count=1024
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 95.4401 s, 11.3 MB/s
root@stark:~# rm /media/terryp/32 GB/dd.img

Hmm. I think that I will just leave the card in there. It’s pretty unlikely to get knocked out, and I don’t expect it would cause notable impact to the battery life. Keep the USB adapter in my usual travel gear, but keep the card in Stark.

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Microsoft Surface Pro X Three Week Review: Better Than I Expected For My Productivity Use Case
https://flip.it/Fe2Ydr

While I think many people would be unhappy with Windows on ARM, I expect most people would be happier with the traditional desktop experience than the flatter model used over in Android and iOS. For those that can get away with largely first party software, you also get the perks of not having to buck the software catalog.