Computers

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The Verge: Google and Dell team up to take on Microsoft with Chromebook Enterprise laptops.

As someone fond both of Android tablets and of Dell’s Latitudes, I’d be a lot more tempted by this if it wasn’t for two problems:

  1. My Chromebook is a lot more buggy than my Android, Linux, and NT devices.
  2. Chrome’s “Stable” channel prefers rapidly pushing versions over Q/A.
Or as I like to think of it: there’s really two reasons I’ve been using my Latitude running Debian ore than my Chromebook the past few reasons. A Core i5 smokes a Celeron, and I’m tired of OS upgrades that leaves me grumbling over quality, both at the Android support and native Chrome OS.
In practice these days I’ll usually have Stark and Scarlett at my sides during the work day; with my Chromebook relegated to a spare machine. That’s after using the Chromebook as my main workstation for a year and after a lot of years using an Android tablet as a workstation replacement.
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It’s probably sad how much I would like seemless integration between apps on my PC with the ones on my tablet.

Prime example of lazyness:
  1. PC is being used as a canvas to view videos.
  2. I am learning back in my chair.
  3. Using my tablet at the same time.
  4. “Damn, would be nice to just browse and fling to my monitor.”
Often it tends to take this form more than openning files from the same file stores or dropping files between them. Probably because my desktop is more often my secondary or ‘slave’ device and my tablet is typically my main computer if no X Terminals are involved.
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Android’s iconic dessert names are going away, starting with Android 10

Part of me is a little sad and disappointed at this news. I had kinda hoped they would make it to Zebra Cake or something like that. But really I’m surprised they’ve made it this far.

Of course, this doesn’t mean the build numbers and the version numbers will converts. Just that you’ll be less likely to wonder if the folks behind Android are less likely to develop diabetes….

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Google’s new Android phone feature may help save your life

It’s kind of sad this has taken so long. Features like these might not be popular on the mind of mostly healthy, mostly young engineers who probably won’t see an ambulance ride for most of their lives if at all–but it’s damned nice use of technology.

We all have location and voice synthesis services in our pocket. Why not make use of it?

That fact that in my country, the cost of an ambulance or a serious hospital stay would probably give you a heart attack, is a different problem 😜😂

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Special bonuses to running the built in OpenSSH service on your W10 install: being able to SSH in and taskkill a fullscreen game that is stuck.

Because apparently the “Hey, let me freaking alt+tab to taskmgr!” problem remains possible even after decades ^_^.

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At least my battery usage reflects what my tablet has been up to. How much gets sucked up by my music streaming habits is kind of worrisome though.

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Over the years I have uttered many words at the software I deal with, mostly profanity.

I’m pretty sure the loving to hateful words ratio between me and ALSA is about 0 : 1,000,000. Or in short if I ever say “I effing love ALSA”, it’s a pretty safe bet that I’ve been replaced by a bodysnatcher or something.

Generally I have used ALSA directly as much as possible over the years because at the end of the road on Linux systems you will always, sadly, end up with that. But I also find that configuring and living with it tends to be a bitch on wheels of fire the more complicated people make things. Let’s say that ALSA is something I suffer not something I love.

Well, recently I’ve had a bit of a pain in my arse dealing with ALSA, GStreamer, and trying to do audio passthrough. And I’ve learned that I really do like PulseAudio.

mpv is able to do passthrough but that doesn’t suit my purposes, or let’s just say scripting that ain’t my real objective.

$ mpv –aid={track #} –audio-device=alsa/{device} –audio-channels=5.1 {my file with fancy audios}

GStreamer is smart enough to passthrough audio if you send the bits to the sink. Most elements that manipulate audio expect audio/x-raw data like you would get out of your audio decoder. But the sinks can also take other formats–much like my surround system knows how to decode pretty much anything.

What I ran into was alsasink never reporting any of the compressed formats my graphics card supports, after GStreamer tries to decipher what the device is capable of.

Enter PulseAudio!

$ gst-launch-1.0 filesrc location=”{my file}” ! queue ! {demuxer} ! audio/x-ac3 ! queue ! parsebin ! pulsesink

Where I had no luck getting this to work with alsasink it was easy as pie with pulsesink.

Deciphering the documentation to configure the default profile for my card via pactl and add the formats I want to passthrough to my surround sound system was a snap that only took 15~20 minutes. Figuring out the device names used for pulsesink based on pactl list was a bit tricker. I spent 2~3 days screwing with ALSA before that.

For bonus points: I could test ahead of time using my laptop’s HDMI port and pavucontrol to configure the outputs, letting me know if this would be possible at all before I started learning how to do it with pactl.

I can’t say that I’m a big fan of the guy who wrote PA, or that I truly gave a flying hoot when the Linux desktop world went to PA and we all threw out things like aRts and ESD. My only horse in that race was I wanted audio to work in applications like mplayer and firefox without having to screw around.

In retrospect: I should have just learned how to use PulseAudio a long fucking time ago instead of dicking with /etc/asound.conf and amixer and all that BS. Because those aspects of PA really do suck less in my honest experience.

And then I find myself remembering FreeBSD and its OSS, in which the only issue I ever really had with audio was whether or not there was an suitable driver for my card, lol.

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Cheapskate Handy repurposing of old stuff: turning my multimedia dock into a spare tablet stand.

After writing this the other day, I was a bit tempted to get another stand similar to the Anker I use in my living room or just transition one of my Breffo Spider Podiums to my desk.

Rooting around in the closet to see if I had any spare Spider podiums to use as a headphone stand, I foumd my old Samsung multimedia dock. Sadly it became a paper weight when I upgraded from the Tab S2 to the Tab S3, much as I traded external monitor support for S-Pen capability when I did. Without Samsung’s old 11-pin MHL/MicroUSB and driver support the ports are basically useless. Shame because it was a great one cable and done docking station when I used my tablet as my workstation.

But the little fellow still remains physically useful as a stand since my Tab S3 still fits in the slot. Thus one problem solved by recycling, and not having to spend a dime; this makes me happy even if the poor dock is no longer able to fulfil its original purpose. It is still useful for more than keeping makkuro kurosuke from settling in /dev/closet.

It also puts my tablet at a fairly convenient angle, hehe.

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Wccftech: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER Benchmark Leaks Out, Almost Titan V Tier Performance For $699 US.

This reminds me: my hand me down GTX 780 fell into that price range when it was young, back in ’13. Far from New the old ‘780 still kicks more than a little ass at plowing through games. I’m also inclined to believe most of my issues with FVXV’s performance are due to my processor not aging equally as well, since the stutters revolved around my Core i5 spiking to 100% usage.

And that’s exactly why you would pay such a fortune for a top dog GPU: because you won’t have to buy a new one for quite a freaking while. 2019 – 2013 = 6 years and only now showing signs of age.

Personally, I’m more interested in what follows the GTX 16 / RTX 20 thing. But cards at that level have very long service lives to match the ludicrous price tags. Pretty much regardless of generation. By the time such cards age out it is because the mid ranged cards have finally caught up quite a few years later or because of more Direct 3D and driver level advancements leaving you in the dust; which isn’t so often.

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I wonder what’s technically worse: when you’re sitting at your desk and using your tablet/pen to finish something. Or when you’re still sitting at your desk and consider transitioning your keyboard over to aforementioned tablet rather than switching to a PC.

An odd artifact of my small desk space is how well it meshes with my tablet.

The mousepad dominates most of the working surface; the Razer Goliathus because I wanted a large pad and the SteelSeries Rival because I got tired of how fast Logic MX rats wore out^. Years ago, I had bought my K810 as a way of sharing a keyboard between my tablet, laptop, and desktop at work; these days it just serves as my desktop keyboard. Underneath the headphones and xbox controller off to the left is a USB keyboard of similar size and layout.

This lack of space is what lead me to such a small keyboard–full size but with the “Right” matter, the numpad and navigation clusters removed. Basically a few hairs larger than the smallest you can make a physical keyboard without me calling it useless.

Conveniently my tablet fits in much the same spot. Since swapping the wired keyboard for the Bluetooth one, I find it much less hassle to simple push my keyboard aside and put my tablet in the same spot; whichever I am using at the time usually takes center stage and the displaced ends up on the side-zone or next to the charging cable.

I think it is quite possible that if I had a dandy stand in here like I do on my living room end table, I’d probably would have dropped my tablet in it and toggled my keyboard over to my tablet; rather than writing this on my desktop. Yes, I’m kind of lazy 🙄.

^ Two left mouse buttons in 10-15 years is too much 😜. I loved both my Logitech MX-series laser mice but wanted something with claims of “Many damned clicks” before it dies.