Computers

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Ctrl blog: Investigating why my 7-year old Windows 10 laptop became unbearably slow.

While some might be quick to harp on the DRM aspect and tune out the rest, or ditto the unjoy that can be Windows, I’m kind of reminded of the times when DEP and the rise of dual core processors. New things equal new points of failures.
I don’t recall encountering many problems when those features came to NT but whenever I did it usually involved I video game doing squirrelly things. Because running old, poorly and hastely written software on newer operating systems and hardware sometimes bite you in the arse.
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AppleInsider: I replaced my Mac with my iPad Pro for a week — here’s how it went.

Kudos for not publicly blaming the app developer when you’re test driving a beta version of the operating system and relatively young features.

The concept that things aren’t difficult but more time consuming, and the feeling of jumping between apps is typical of pushing modern mobile-centric operating systems harder than most. Or at least that’s my opinion having been a tablet but since Android Gingerbread and Honeycomb.

What I think people should really ask themselves are three things:

  1. Do I really do that often?
  2. Is what I do most, smooth?
  3. Can I do this here?

When you do something very often it becomes more important how smooth the process is.

If you spend a lot of time shuffling data between applications, paradigms like: Android intents (sharing), drag & drop, and the almighty Unix pipe become more important IMHO. Spending time juggling file open and save as dialogs; etc can become a drag pretty rapidly when what you’re really trying to do is manipulate and share data instead of leaving a trail of temporary files. I get happier when I can quickly move my data between applications without having to go out of my way to make the transfer happen.

Just because a method of operation or workflow is different doesn’t mean it sucks or that it is great.

What’s the quality difference between one tap and two menus deep? How often you do it! We find ourselves doing certain tasks more frequently than others. You will evaluate a function in a spreadsheet cell far more often than you will lookup what function performs any given task. As a side effect it’s effective to be able to smoothly insert common functions with a little typing; a menu to find a specific type of function instead of Googling it is a plus. Having to walk through several menus and a multi page wizard as the only way to input data would just be deranged and painful for an application like a spreadsheet. Software for getting real work done will care more about the tasks you do all the damn time than software just trying to do the task once in a blue moon.

But here’s the one that tends to be most cut and dry: can you really do this? Yes, odds are you can or you will give up pretty quickly. Just because you can run a word processor on your phone doesn’t mean you should write that five hundred page novel on your phone. Just because it’s backed up to the cloud doesn’t mean you won’t cry when you drop your phone in the toilet either 😜.

Software takes time to mature and different people (and problem domains) have different ways of working. There is a big gap between what you do constantly and what you do occasionally, and that tends to be where it goes south.

Ahh, now I’m rambling 😂.

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Testing a pair of headphones, what is the first thing I fire off? P!nk’s Funhouse!

So far for a cheap pair of headphones the Mpow H7 Plus definitely exceed my ears requirements but I wouldn’t recommend it for anything base heavy. Sometimes headphones are more convenient than my antique 2.1 system, which usually means having to jack my Xbox headset into its AUX IN or Centauri’s motherboard.

Ordinarily, I think I’d just get a second pair of AF32s as I’ve been very happy with my pair from back in ’13. But the prices on the current gen are a bit too steep for my blood. Unlike the pair I use with my tablet there isn’t a 50% off deal.

But that’s where in lays the rub. When I want to use headphones it’s a bother to screw with things. When you’re turned into a dog chair sometimes having a wire between your desk and head isn’t convenient and neither is repairing devices often. Being cheap and lazy has its side effects.

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Prime Day Deal on Fire TV Stick 4K

So $25 for the 4K stick and $15 for the 1080p sick? Well I’m likely sold.

A while back I was debating if I wanted to retire my first generation (2014 iirc) Fire TV box with one of the modern iterations of the Fire TV Stick just for the upgraded codec support.

Pretty much my old first generation box and Sandy Ivy Bridge desktop are the last Gizmos I use that lacks H.265 support. My desktop, well it doesn’t spend its days playing video and can probably brute force anything 1080p at this point.

The only reasons to hang on to my first generation box is it still works damned great and the Ethernet port happens to be a short trip to my network. That and the dollars per year of usage must be ludicrously awesome by now, lol.

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Some thoughts on long term planning,

At this point the kind of off machine that fits my “I’m done, that’s close enough” form adds up to about $1,500 if you shop off the rack. But that means 2 kilos of luggable with a GTX1650, a Thunderbolt expansion port and non soldered memory for its upgrade path. Something less awesome could be found quite a bit cheaper if combined with +$300 worth of eGPU dock but that usually means giving up something like the ability to reuse my ginormous SSD or having to suffer 8 GB of soldered on system memory, and aforementioned eGPU dock would be a prerequisite for handling games, as far as cheaper notebooks go.

Frugality makes me look at future upgrades for my desktop.Where good old Centauri principally hits her limits are games like Final Fantasy 15 and Resident Evil 7. Games that either hit harder than normal or that you wish had more fine tuning put into them, lol.

A trend that will only continue over the next 5 years of her extended life–I have already exceeded the retirement age I had designed Centauri for, and am tempted to see just how far she keeps on truckin’. Because while showing the signs of age: Centauri has been a superb machine.

Replacing the Core i5-3570K with a Core i7-3770K would cost about $200 and deliver a major CPU bump. On the downside this would mean a really nice processor goes to /dev/closet. But the crunch boost would probably last another lustrum quite easily.

A modern Core i5-9400F would deliver comparable enough crunch power for about the same costs when factoring in the motherboard replacement it would need. But then it’s + $75~$100 more for making the generational leap in memory. On a machine originally built for 8 GB and retrofitted to 12 GB when her older sister retired; needless to say forward motion is 16. And that would tally about $300 between processor, motherboard, and memory.

On the flipside one can find pretty decent deals on the GTX 1660 Ti and original RTX 2060 for between $300 and $400. Both solve one of the limits of my antique GTX 780 which is being limited to only 3 GB of graphics memory.

While my general suspicion for RE7’s performance issues vs RE2 running quite smooth has been expecting my processor to be the bottleneck, in FFXV I am running virtually full of VRAM all the time. So much so that I wonder if many of the performance dings align with the allocator trying to decide which textures to flush and which to keep. or if the game was designed to maximize usage. Performance drops often coincide with with the games FPS overlay showing graphics memory usage at holy crap full levels, relative to the near constantly full levels.

Hmm, think I’ll screw around with FFXV’s benchmarking program.

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Forbes: Shock Samsung Confession Fuels Galaxy Note Cancellation Fears.

Another part of why I believe more in tablets then over sized phones: you’ve got more room to spare. Not to mention a bigger screen and sizes that trigger tablet UI layouts in applications.

But in the flip side tablets don’t really do phone calls that well enough you’re doing speakerphone or headsets. You do use your expensive phone for answering phone calls, right? 😉

Also the overall usage gap between my phone and tablet is such that you don’t wanna know how many incoming calls I take on my tablet instead of my phone; be it in the next room or in my pocket.

A little Ray of sunshine after the disappointment of the Tab S5e

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Exclusive: This is the Galaxy Tab S6 and it has a dual camera.

A little Ray of sunshine after the disappointment of the Tab S5e.

The return to 16:10 is still as disappointing as it was when the Tab S4 came out, but nothing compared to the saddness of my Tab S3 having a cracked screen and the latest model launching with no pen and mid ranged specs.

I do have to admit though, in terms of hardware it’s becoming harder to justify Samsung’s tablets over Apple’s. Today it’s mostly the fact that behind here since the era of the Steak 7 and EeePad Transformer–I know Android fulfills my software needs with flying colors. While I still expect iOS to make me grumble and groan.

My upgrade path has been looking rocky. Since the crack, the only Android option has been the Tab S4 which is already aged a bit. Over in fruit co land there’s at least the 11″ and 10.5″ iPad Pro models as viable successors.

In reality of course I’d just like my screen’s crack not to expand for another year or two…. Lol.

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Looking through Google Play’s editors choice sections, I’m happy to see ArtFlow listed.

Think I’ve had this on my devices since the days of the Note series tablets. It’s become about the only drawing app on Android that I tend to care about.

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BGR: Bill Gates explains why he couldn’t duplicate Steve Jobs’ magic ‘spells’.

“I was like a minor wizard because he would be casting spells, and I would see people mesmerized, but because I’m a minor wizard, the spells don’t work on me,” 

Gates said, according to advance news of his remarks reported by B/oomberg. 

While the minor wizard bit might seem modest but I’ve got to admit: it strikes me as an excellent way of putting it. In a way it also makes me wonder how many table top RPGs Bill Gates may have played over the years, lol