Computers

by

Things that I consider potential risks, now that I again have a tablet capable of HDMI output:

  • Monitor, and Xbox controller = gaming
  • Monitor, keyboard, and mouse = relaxing.
Typically, my Tab S3 and its predecessors had a high probability of being my device of choice even when sitting at my desk. The main thing that gets me to power on Centauri and use it, is the laziness wires to plug in if I want to share the monitor.
Sadly, Scarlett’s one real failing versus Goldie was the loss of external monitor support. Samsung’s first iteration of USB-C, while welcomed, did not come with DP or MHL alt modes. Which is how Celes, the Chromebook entered the collection of devices I deal with.
Nerine the iPad on the other hand, has external monitor support via DP alt mode, and my USB hub quite the few ports. The risk that I’ll eventually buy yet another Bluetooth mouse, also seems to be incrementing.
What shows no real sign of changing however, is how much I dislike the Mac editing shortcuts. Having had PCs for nearly thirty years, the way you combine arrow keys with modifier keys, while cursing the lack of vi and emacs editing strokes in joe random UI widget, is kind of deeply ingrained by now. Macs, of course do it differently. When you start dicking with the order of modifiers, and which do what, my muscle memory requires a “Are ya really sure?” level of buffering. It will probably be quite a while before that can be eliminted.
On the upside however, I still type at a decently high speed provided that I’m not editing what I insert. Being able to type as fast as I can think, is not a problem. Having to correct for my inability to spell shit is the actual problem. Sigh, that one actually has no real solution. Unless maybe you can make my keyboard provide an electric shock for every genuinely misspelled word, lol. Wait, don’t do that…I’d die.
by

Pretty consistently, I’ve never cared much for dragging windows around and stacking them across my desktop workspace. Anywhere, or anytime.

When we made the transition from a ROM/floppy system to a modern hard drive and window based system, monitors in my family were universally too small to care, not to mention Windows 98 wasn’t exactly a sexy multitasking anything at that point.

The thing that’s basically stuck with me is how I tend to favor a central application of focus, and rapid switching to another; like having an xterm and API docs side by side. It’s only been the era of the 20-something inch screen that I’ve really found much use for having my workspace split into two or more applications. It’s kinda rare that I do a one window split with two, or a quartet approach even on a big screen.

Once we get down to much less than 20” diagonal, the value largely disappears from many desktop apps. Rather you end up with something more like 1.5 apps or 1.2 apps on a laptop sized screen. Which usually results in me just maximizing what I’m doing, and using alt+tab to switch actives.

It’s probably little wonder that I prefer the style of window management found on Android tablets and iPads to drawing and stacking crap. Or that when I ask my PCs to do much more than provide a convieniet Xfce session, you’ll usually find me running something like Xmonad—that manages application windows for me.

Because I’ve got better damned things to do with my computers than dragging windows around all day.

by

Happy fun times: when you power on your computer, and your Bluetooth keyboard doesn’t want to power on. Being lazy, rather than fetch my trusty USB keyboard I simply used accessibility features to login.

Windows NT decided my Bluetooth dongle was nadda, and only gave a faint blue like power was coming through the port but no goodness. Migrating to a neighboring USB port, and lo and behold: it suddenly lights up. I seem to recall that some ballocks like this, is how it ended up in the port it was in.

I’m pretty sure that the day I believe a Windows desktop ever does Bluetooth, or even USB things well, the deepest levels of hell may have frozen colder than can be measured.

by

Mac Stories -Beyond the Tablet: Seven Years of iPad as My Main Computer

Seven years after I started (slowly) replacing my MacBook Air with an iPad, my life is different, but one principle still holds true: I never want to find myself forced to work on a computer that’s only effective at home, that can’t be held in my hands, or that can’t be customized for different setups. For this reason, the iPad Pro is the best computer for the kind of lifestyle I want.

While my tablet life style hasn’t been due to health problems and having started in Android land, hasn’t been so focused on dealing with an operating system limiting my abilities, I really agree with the above excerpt. Particularly the part I have added emphasis to.
Working from Android, I’ve had pretty complete file management since the beginning. As much as I prefer apps and their own data, such as Evernote and Play Music over wrangling files around like the stone ages, it’s nice having comprehensive control. I hope that apps on iOS will become more attuned to the file system, because files are kinda nice for sharing some forms of data between applications. As opposed to cases like my experience setting up a custom alarm tone or wallpapers. Being a fuck ton versions late to the party, I got to miss the lack of a file system part and have arrived for the apps still aren’t used to their being a file system part.
Another perk of coming late to the party, is while I experienced Android’s growing pains for multi tasking, I don’t really have to re-experiences them with iOS. Samsung did the whole split screen a lot of freaking years ago, well before Google mucked with it.
Having only scratched the surface on the shortcuts stuff, I have to admit that it’s a large part of what makes Siri interesting, aside from being less of a pain in my Fi phone then Google’s voice shit. I’ll probably be referencing this article later when I screw with shortcuts more.
Accessories are another thing I find attractive about iPads. Android was pretty quick to bring support for things like keyboards, mice, hard drives, monitors, controllers, etc. Aside from Google Play Services combined with Ethernet breaking push notifications for eons, it’s been a pleasent experience using external devices with Android.
What hasn’t been fun is anything form fitting. Aside from largely generic cases adapted to fit specific models, the options have sucked. Turning an iPad into a clamshell ala EeePad Transformer TF101, has been a thing for years on iPad. Some accessories are easier purchased than made at home, if available to begin with. Not to mention how badly Android needs more than a hardware Specific  S-Pen for those of us who demand a real stylus.
Sometime I also need to play with the external monitor truck noted in the end; really I like the concept, and it basically reflects the fact that I’d like better external monitor support without having to run regular PC shit.
by

https://www.cnet.com/reviews/apple-ipad-10-2-inch-2019-review/

While I’m not sure that I agree with the storage comment, I think the article’s parting comment is spot on. Pretty good one.

You see, if your customer thinks maybe they should have spent a few C-Notes more on that faster, sexier model that’s better than them buying your only product and thinking it’s a cheap piece of shit, and that they should have gone with someone else’s product. In that sense options are a very good thing, and the Fruit Co has done well IMHO to offer the basic, mid range, and high end models.

Most tablet goers would probably be best served by the Air and its excellent trade off between price and performance. Most actual people will probably be happy with the cheapest issue, and unless it’s your main computer, odds are no one needs a Pro. All depends on how much you live on your tablet.

Coincidentally, my 90~95 % of the time computer is my tablet and I have a usage around 26/64 GB, or just a bit over 40% storage utilization. On my last Samsung, the 32 GB was just starting to get tight but was still quite effective when you’re not full of games and videos instead of apps and books. While iPads note have decent support for external drives, they do lack the internal micro SD slot common on Samsung tablets.

Personally, I’d like to see tablet computing become more popular but my belief is that you should use what works best for you. That is to say: you do you, and I do me. Not everyone has the same computing needs or preferences, and freedom of choice rocks.

by

Part of me wonders if iPad OS 13.1.3 makes the pen swipey friendly floating keyboard even more prone to doing its wiggle off screen act, and other bullshit—or if I should just reboot my ducking iPad Pro every hour. This is getting highly annoying when tablet == main computer.

Apple, debug your shit.

by

Things a smidge useful about having been around a while, and stuck in heterogeneous computing environments.

One of my routine tasks when Cream reboots for updates every now and then, is to run a simple script that runs my post bot for sending my blog posts to D*. The issue that the Intel chipset likes to hang on reboots over USB things is a different issue than making sure software starts up on sign in.

In *nix land, the cheesey, read simplist, method is just insert it into your X session script (Yes, I still use xinit :P). Fancier session managers, XDG autostart, and gasp, systemd user units, also exist. Of course there’s always more than one way to do it. Not to mention that when its your box, you can abuse the system level parts ^_^.

NT on the other hand, I remember the easiest way. Go stick a shortcut to the script in the startup directory and be done with it. That’s “%APPDATA%MicrosoftWindowsStart MenuProgramsStartup” in this day and age.

My scripts are pretty simple. The first is a wrapper (post-bot.cmd) that goes to where I keep my post bot’s install, and runs this daemon.cmd script:

@ECHO OFF

IF EXIST %VIRTUAL_ENV% GOTO post_loop

:load_venv
    ECHO Loading venv
    CALL .pythonScriptsactivate.bat
    GOTO post_loop

:post_loop
    ECHO Running
    python .pythonScriptsrss2diaspora-spider -v -s dataconfig.txt 
    ECHO Looping
    TIMEOUT /T 900
    GOTO post_loop

Which is sufficient for making sure it runs every fifteen minutes without having to care about much more than the box rebooting. So whenever my blog’s RSS feed updates, my posts eventually get converted to markdown and pushed to Diaspora without me having to care too much.

Yay, for laziness!

by

An interesting little bit of calculation:

Apple iCloud: $0.99/month for 50 GB = $0.02/GB
Google Drive: $1.99/month for 100 GB = $0.02/GB
Box: $10/month for 100 GB = $0.1/GB
Office 365: $7.99/month for 1000 GB = $0.008/GB
Dropbox: $11.99/month for 2000 GB = $0.006/GB 

Sorted by smallest to largest firsts storage option. I’d include Amazon but having trouble pulling up prices on that.

I can’t help but think the pricing makes the larger, less tiered options more attractive. The options from the competing  phone nerds cost more per GB but offer the ability to have a lower monthly cost.

For comparison, standard 3.5”/7200RPM hard drives are about $0.045/GB for a 1TB drive at the local tech store. My file server costs probably about 45¢ a month on my electric bill, since it’s a low power N-series processor instead of an actually worth using CPU.

by

I’ve never had a very high opinion of Microsoft Outlook as a mail client, beyond the comprehensiveness of its rich text editing widget. Today I was kind of reminded why.

Email came in canceling a meeting. I hit the button to remove it from my Exchange calendar, and as typical the email just disappears upon interaction. Usually to trash or something.

Outlook continued to display a badge showing one unread email, or something. Yet I had no messages, no matter how many times I refreshed or tried to filter by unread. Nada.

Then I switched from my tablet to my laptop, and took a gander at Thunderbird and scratched my head. There was the cancellation message at the top, and it was marked unread. Even after whomping get messages.

Checked outlook and despite being excluded from the unread filter(!), there was same message at the foot of my inbox with the blue circle. Tried to load it and I get a message saying that it doesn’t exist, and lo and behold the problem is solved with one more sync….lol

At some point I need to find a mail client that sucks less than outlook, yet speaks Exchange mail, contacts, and calendaring. Sigh, I do miss Aqua Mail for Android: it was such a great client, I used it for both my personal and work accounts. Sadly though it is Android only, leaving me without a good iOS client for my tablet and with meh options for my Debian laptop.

by

Safari in iOS 13 was sending browsing data to Chinese tech giant Tencent
http://flip.it/_rQW_A

I find it a little amusing in a way. Having had internet access since about 1996, I’ve long since gave up on considering my browsing habits to be private—it’s my browsing contents that I want kept private.

Between how browsers work and how much control we yield to the other end of a socket, I think it fool hearty to assume you can remain private about the basics. If you have ever visited a web site in recent times, it’s a fairly safe bet that someone, somewhere can collate a unique identifier for you across several websites. Yielding things like your IP and resources (you know, the /blah/blah part of urls you visit) are integral to how user agents (browsers) and servers work. Cookies have been a fact of browsing virtually forever. You don’t have enough control over how any of this shit works, to be able to enforce strict privacy from being tracked.

Anonymity is the difference between sending the Gestapo to 742 Evergreen Terrace and f24088cc-4914-43ab-9810-07cdc069ebac visited five websites about donuts, and then logged into Yahoo mail; let’s ask Yahoo about them.

What we do however have some control over is the secrecy of our session content. Transport Layer Security, ala HTTPS, provides for some measure of privacy where it matters in our browsing. Nothing is going to stop donuts dot com from using an obvious /glazed resource for finding out about glazed donuts, but telling that you typed “HJS” into the search box and it popped up a super secret bulk ordering form, and your transaction details, is a different story. The security measures make it harder for someone to be dropping eaves if the other side is trustworthy; not being tracked is just hopeless at this point.

I have more hope in solutions that are technical and procedural in nature. Because if you can’t trust donuts dot com with where to bill and ship donuts then you probably shouldn’t be ordering donuts from them. If donuts dot com isn’t allowed to do business in your country without being obligated to offer up your payment data to the request of law enforcement, or pushing it to government donut databases, that’s a social problem and therefore political.

For better or worse there’s only so much that can be done on a technical front without changes to how the World Wide Web functions, and that shit just isn’t going to change for the sake of personal privacy.