Computers

Damn, hard drives are getting cheap and huge

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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.

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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.

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3M Laptop Stand, Raise Screen Height to Reduce Neck Strain, Vertical Design Allows You to Bring Screen Closer, Compact Foot Print Saves Desk Space, Non-Skid Base Keeps Laptop Secure, Black (LX550)

This might actually be what I’ve been looking for.

Ordinarily, my workspace looks like this:

laptop | monitor | tablet

And frequently my mouse pad is closer to the monitor with my keyboard shifted a bit to the left. Making it easier to access my tablet and shift its and my position as I work.

But a 14″ Latitude is kinda chunky and takes up a lot of bench space. Along with being too short and far away from my peepers to really use as a second monitor without crowding my Bluetooth keyboard. So, I’ve been thinking of late how nice it would be if I could open the system and elevate it closer to the vertical.

Such that the laptop would effectively be optimized for use as a secondary monitor rather than for using the keyboard and touchpad. Because let’s face it: I’ve got externals for that, and prefer it that way when docked.

Otherwise, I may as well just shut the lid and slide it out of the way; for the time being it’s mostly serving as a keeping-tabs workspace rather than a working monitor. E.g. I’ll leave a terminal there that I’m waiting for a long program to finish running, or for a summary of incoming mail. And then do everything on my external monitor, that’s better positioned; or on my tablet that’s more portable.

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https://apps.apple.com/us/story/id1480613325

While I’m not particularly fond of Photoshop, and there are people who aren’t entirely happy with its first showing on iPad, but I like the concept.

For Adobe: they can either take the path of being a leader as iPadOS grows or be left behind as others grow with the platform. So it’s good sense for them to maximize what Photoshop can do on the platform. I’m also pretty sure their are crazy people at Adobe who would like a more desktop grade Photoshop on their iPad: just as some of their customers do.

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Side effects of a seven year old computer:

Encoding with My Anime HEVC/AAC profile, which favors quality over size, runs at about 9 fps on my Core i5-3570K. This works out to roughly an hour per ~24 minute episode. Or roughly an entire day worth of taking over my processor when there’s a lot of episodes for HandBrake to crunch through.

On the flipside, I was about to get one of my favorite anime off eBay for less than half the going price on sources like Amazon.

Which coincidentally, runs around ten hours of video content. Thus it’ll probably be tomorrow night when my desktop stops melting from the encoding, lol.

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How a months-old AMD microcode bug destroyed my weekend [UPDATED]

Over the years, I’ve seen people and programs assume pseudo  random numbers are truly random often enough, and heard tell of broken hardware and firmware enough that I take all tendon binder generators with a grain of salt.

Because the only faith I have in random Numbers is the odds are pretty good that neither of us will will the lottery. And if it’s something like encrypting nuclear launch codes or grandma’s biscuit recipe, maybe you shouldn’t take it on faith that you won’t get the same value for infinity 😜

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Insults to injuries:

When you’re about to use your desktop to login, load a slow ass webpage, to go edit something the app doesn’t offer, and you’re next thought is “Wait, my iPad’s browser is still faster than this thing.”

My desktop mostly remains because it does one thing very well: play Direct3D games. Because while its era of Core i5 is getting quite long in the toofers: it still can throw three pounds of GTX at problems my other machines can’t.

Actually, based on the few games that really stress the shit out of my desktop: I’m inclined to think the old Core i5-3570K is the real bottleneck. That is to say when games like Final Fantasy XV or Resident Evil 7 get a spike o lagocity, it coincides with the processor load looking like a tomahawk cruise missile hit in the family jewels.

That said: the machine has held up very well. Beyond those two titles: it hasn’t really blushed in the face of melting as far as 1080p gaming goes.

Expected decommissioning date has long since come and gone versus how long I had designed Centauri to service my computing needs. It’s mostly been economics, and the lack of need to retire it that the machine has endured. Which is why the last overhaul was migrating from the very first SSD that I ever bought to a considerable larger one.

The obvious catch to the age is, for tasks like web browser page load times, my iPad basically smokes my desktop :/. But the fruity thing can’t drive my GTX 780, nor will it ever natively run the games that dominate my desktop’s reason for existence.

Last time that I researched options for the longer term: it pretty much boiled down to two issues. The older Core i7 models that fit my motherboard aren’t easy to come by for a good price unless they’re second hand. Versus new: may as well buy a modern Core i5, but then it is in for a penny, in for a pound of ram. Needless to say, I don’t invision Centauri’s next significant hardware refit to be for quite a while.

Given how well Centauri has aged, and the odds that its GTX will need to retire by the time Centauri does, I rather wonder if whatever comes next in hardware will just be a laptop with a Thunderbolt eGPU dock or whatever nVidia equipped laptops look like by then. For now, I’m just happy the machine hasn’t died in a puff of smoke despite all the years of hard work, hehe. It remains one of the best computers that I’ve ever owned.

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Windows 10X Leaks Show A Mobile OS World I Want No Part Of

There’s probably two kinds of people that crept out of their terminals over the decades. Those that want what they’re used to, and those who want something new. You can hazard a guess as to which the author is.
Personally, I don’t really care about having a “Desktop” experience on my laptop, so much as desktop class processing power. Why? Because it’s software that’s become the bottleneck.
There’s a reason why we still say “Desktop” experience but laptops came to dominate the PC world. As the laptop form factor evolved: it came to run the same software as the microcomputers people were already using. We were just pulling off a functional desktop, and no one had the resources or the inclination to optimize software for a mobile device, nor learn how to navigate it. Yet laptops largely came into the own because they are mobile devices, and able to run the same applications as our desktops with close enough processing power to be worth it. Whether your mobility is every day or every month, a laptop is a mobile device compared to hauling a tower, monitor, keyboard, mouse, and a cart with a car battery around.
So needless to say, the most fucks anyone has had to give in the land of desktops is where laptop capabilities and older desktops intersect on specs. Beyond that, software developers don’t tend to distinguish much between desktop and laptop.
But now phones and tablets exist, and make your desktop centric human interface guidelines look more like a calculator watch than something that adapted your fingers. Laptops are becoming more tablet like over time, and the software experiences have to adapt to the changing norms of hardware or face the long roads to obsolescence and extinction. 
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iPadOS Challenge – Ditching the Laptop for a Week

The issues of file system and persistence from about 15 minutes onwards, are the two I notice most frequently, being a tablet whore from imported from another platform.

How Brad describes the gap between a folder and the photos app as a file system, is a real systemic problem to the operating system. Because traditionally, iPhone doesn’t have a file system for people to go mucking with. And while that’s usually a good thing in my opinion, there are just times when having the whole files thing at your fingertips is productive. Considering that iPadOS 13 is the first time Apple shipped a real file manager, and the Files app actually shipped two years ago, I have some forgiveness for that one. Because let’s be honest, the platform has spent most of its life without any real file system.

The way I look at this is pretty simple. Open app → go browse file crap, isn’t how I want to use my machines. But being able to stuff a file in a folder with special meaning to apps, is a handy thing.

The issue of persistence is a simple reality. iOS, and Android prioritize what you’re doing, and have a history of, by modern standards, very memory constrained environments. One of the things I liked about Android Jelly Bean and the rise of 2 GB of memory was how rare things would get reaped. In Android land, it’s kinda disappeared as an issue as devices begin to have comical levels of memory for a mobile. iOS also works pretty well but occasionally blurps. I mostly see grumbly things in the sense like Evernote → switch app, lock screen, whatever, and then → Evernote again, often my position is reaped. I might be in a previously snapshotted note or I might have to wait for the note to refresh, and have to go reset my cursor position. That gets old, when you’ve got like ten screenfuls of text in a journal entry. To keep your current task fast, you’ve got to reap your previous tasks in some form.

Difference is if you workhorse your desktop: you will grind it to a halt. That’s why our machines now have oodles and oodles of memory, and slow spinning platters are going the way of to floppy diskette. ‘Cuz speed and good over cost. If you’ve ever experienced what true virtual memory trashing is like then you’ll never want to trade a blazing fast system for crap again. Compared to what an iPad offers, you can do a hell of a lot of shit before a modern desktop will have comparable pressure.

For reference, my desktop has three times the memory of iPad Pro, and my laptop has four times the memory installed. My iPad has two to four times as much memory as most iPad models, depending on whether you’re looking at what’s currently supported or production history.

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The Remarkable Tablet Is Better Than the Apple iPad for Taking Notes Hands (and Pencils) Down
http://flip.it/T_MjbI

As much as I would like to see more devices like this, and think the reMarkable is a pretty damned nice offering, I kind of disagree with the conclusion. Based on how well my various pen packing Samsung tablets have worked over the past seven years, and my iPad Pro 11, I expect that most people would get more value out of the cheaper Tab A and iPad models.

Because for comparable cost, you wind up with a general purpose tablet with all the benefits of a widely supported, popularly developed for operating system. What’s lacking is the more paper like experience (overrated, IMHO) and the power efficiency.