Computers

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Passing thought: values per year.

The Galaxy Tab S3 launched at about $600, and I got $100 off thanks to the trade in promotion that Samsung and Best Buy like to do around launch.

Come March the device will hit the three year mark since release. For me the only reason for upgrading from the previous model, which was awesome, was they added the stylus and kept the awesomeness.

That works out to about $166~year at this point, which isn’t bad for the life of an Android tablet if it’s any good. If it wasn’t for the inch long crack in the screen from earlier this year, I’d probably aim to get another year (4) or two (5) out of the device for how well it’s held up.

My main worry is that damned crack 😂

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A few random reflections and personal biases:

Things that I like about Android as my getting it done OS:

  1. Appliance like: it stays out of my way.
  2. I can have my terminal, e-mail, browser, and notes client software all on the same machine.
  3. Aqua Mail beats the crap out of every GUI mail client I’ve used.

The main negatives of using Android over the years has been that terminal apps don’t make copying text to the Android clipboard a decent experience and Chrome for Android sucks ass compared to a desktop. Would also be nice if the support for an external monitor was more like PCs than simply screen mirroring but hey, can’t have it all. By in large a very nice experience but I’m weird and you can’t stop people from sending hypertext ladden emails 8-).

Things that I like about Chrome OS as my getting it done OS:

  1. Appliance like: it stays out of my way.
  2. Good support for Android apps.
  3. Excellent web browsing experience.

The main negatives of using Chrome OS over the years has been the shift into speed over quality. Releases come pretty frequent to the stable channel but you’ll find yourself living with minor grumbles for long periods of time. Be that bull like having to re-open the notification menu before being able to close other notifications, glitchy handling of application windows, or other things. It’s cheap, simple, and disposable but you’ll have plenty of papercuts if you move past the browser window. If it wasn’t for how far NT has come, I’d probably buy a higher end Chromebook for the performance boost.

At this point most people are probably best off with a Chromebook unless they’ve got a real reason to do otherwise.

Things that I like about Debian as my getting it done OS:

  1. Easily loaded on beefcake hardware.
  2. Debian is largely stable and easily maintained.
  3. My work is off a Linux box anyway.
The main negatives of using Debian over the years has been the sore spots I hate about desktop centric PCs to begin with. Crappy notifications, shitty mail and calendaring clients outside of terminal land, donating most of my memory to a web browser, etc. Considering that most of the fucks I have to give about the PC as a platform revolve around an X-Terminal and unix command line environment, I find it a fair price to pay.

Things that I like about Windows 10 as my getting it done OS:

  1. Desktop experience sucks less than W7.
  2. Android style mail/calendar sync built in.
  3. Userspace ABI has been pretty stable for decades.
The main negatives of using Windows 10 over the years tend to cross paths with many of the grumbles I desktop centric PCs but a few unique to NT are traits that have always been there. W10 has made the experience of the desktop suck a lot less when it comes to window and notification management, a process that arguably began in Vista and has kept growing. But the fastest way to make me groan at NT remains talking to things. I can load programs on my NT machine that are several times older than the hardware and expect them to just run but once device drivers enter the picture my anger likely will as well, whether they were written for the current OS or not. Somethings just piss me off less in Linux.
Personally, W10 is the first iteration of NT to not piss me off as a standard. But much as Debian gives me that groans at the evolution from tube terminals to X, NT has loads of its own baggage. I’m just glad it feels less archaic and evolves more rapidly than once a lustrum or decade.
General disclaimer: I’m weird :P.
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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.