Computers

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Remarkable raises $15 million to bring its e-paper tablets to more scribblers

I’d actually like to see a lot more devices like this, and find the reMarkable particularly interesting. The main negative imho behind the cost compared to more general purpose devices.

Which is to say for most folks, you may as well buy an Apple Pencil and the cheapest iPad that’ll work with it. It won’t be the same thing but it would be more value to the average user.

E-Ink and styli are both tech I’d rather like to see more commonly used, so my bias is fairly obvious 😜

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iPadOS review: 50 percent more computer

Little surprised to see the top note about bugginess, which has been something more experienced than heard about from things I see or read on the Internet.

It does amuse me though that this article’s leading beef is the lack of multi user support. Which I think is only half valuable.

On our side of the coin, or at least mine: it is a Personal Computer world. A large part of the success of the microcomputer owes to beefing so cheap that we can all have our own instead of time sharing a larger system with our peers. In fact, PCs were really damned slow to become multiuser if you ran something closer to DOS/Windows than Xenix/SCO. But hey, even dumb ass Windows people had to get with that program by the 2000s 😜.

For me, my iPad is probably far more personal than my desktop. Much as your desktop is probably more personal than a corporate main frame. It’s just that like laptops, most  tablets aren’t cheap enough to use as a frisbee.

Where multiple users really make sense to me on tablets, are the case where you may have a communal tablet on a counter or table somewhere. In which case, I’m sure Apple would rather you buy two iPads for more than one iPad Air, or better yet just buy a new higher end model and repurpose your old model 😄.

For business and class room use, I think you can make the case for multiuser support far more seriously than with tablets in people’s homes. Where it may be more important that a device remain on the premises and within a certain area of operation. Not sure about commercial uses but to my understanding Apple already has some kind of multiuser stuff if you’re using a school provided iPad.

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Looking at the iPad From Two Angles

Skimming through the Wikipedia entry on the original iPad, I found a reference to this old review from the NYTimes, and I can’t help but scratch the feeling that I probably read it a micro-eon ago closer to when I bought the Asus EeePad Transformer, my first tablet, or closer to when the article was written. Let’s just say that it’s probably been a long time!

In any case, it’s a pretty great double view on the iPad, and general tablet concept, and in many ways still rings true. I also find it a little amusing that at the bottom, it notes having made it into a print edition for April 1st 🤣.

iPads, flash drives, and VLC, oh my!

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A simple round of experimentation.

Loaded one of my flash drives with a nice collection of video files from my anime collection, to serve as a portable cache. There’s usually several forms of flash media in my tablet sleeve, alongside a super speed USB-C to USB-A adapter; so proper spot ^_^.

The Files app is content enough to open my Matroska (.mkv) files in VLC, and might be more video aware if I had gone with MPEG-4 containers. VLC is happy enough to do what I want, which is to play my files and have enough feature completeness that I can choose which audio and video streams to decode.

Probably due to running from USB media, it doesn’t seem to be able to use my m3u8 / vlc playlists. But I can’t say that I mind that very much, since I rarely use video playlists when I’m more mobile than Plex to my Fire TVs.

One of the negatives I’ve heard of VLC is its library management, which is kind of expected but quizical. VLC is a superb video player, and easier to teach mortals than how to run MPlayer. But it’s never been meant to manage libraries of media files; much like iOS was never really meant to manage sharing directories between apps. Over in Android land, I usually opted to use Samsung’s vidoe player and Solid Explorer, but I’m weird :P.

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Surface reveals new holiday lineup and introduces a new category of dual-screen devices built for mobile productivity.

Yippee ki yay, Surface!

The refreshes of the existing stuff are somewhat less exciting; I might care more if the regular laptop can drive a eGPU over Thunderbolt, otherwise it’s mostly iterative goodness.

Far, far more interesting to me is the Neo and the Duo.

Surface Neo is the device I’ve long wanted to see someone build, and have a snow balls chance of not screwing up the productivity side of the software. The keyboard trick, is where I shout, “Fuck, yeah!”. Pretty much it matches up with the oh so wish it becomes a product, rumors from earlier this year.

Duo on the other hand is a long overdue device IMHO. Thanks to how Nadella era Microsoft has played out, I’ve been kinda wanting to see a Microsoft based Android device. It might not be as technologically innovative  as something like the Galaxy Fold, but it’s a step in the right direction.

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On one hand, I never paid much mind to the differences between PC and Mac modifier keys. And for the most part, if you just s/control/super/g most things will feel at home.

On the other hand, I’m pretty sure that the remapping of my various keyboards ctrl/super/alt based on how Macs do things, will confound and give me headaches when movements become like super+arrow = home ; alt+arrow = move by word; rather than fn+arrow = home; ctrl+arrow = move by word ; etc.

And then there is the fact that the key map in my head is basically an XFree86 key mapping….lol.

Because for the most part, I have lived in the land that Unix and CP/M wrought. Thus whenever I use quick editing shortcuts that are universal to GUI apps, as opposed to inspired by vi and emacs, I am very, very, very quick to execute actions like shift ctrl+left+left to select the previous two words.

If I am found laying on the floor, twitching, it’s probably Google’s fault. If I’m found laying on the floor spinning in circles, it’s probably because my Bluetooth keyboards are shared between a PC, and an iPad, and third things that are like PCs.

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Interesting. I post to my blog often enough that Shortcuts shows the create a post link in “Shortcuts from Your Apps”. If I run this from the home screen widget it works great: but going “Hey, Siri: Captain’s Log Supplemental”, I just get a blank tab referencing handoff.