Computers

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Lifehacker: The Raspberry Pi 4’s Most Interesting Quirks.
https://lifehacker.com/the-raspberry-pi-4s-most-interesting-quirks-1835871780
Sounds like everything I found bothersome has been improved, except for trying to do any kind of serious video playback without using omxplayer.
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MSPoweruser: Bill Gates calls losing the smartphone market to Android his “greatest mistake”.

In times equally long past I would have guessed it smart phones became a thing: they’d probably run something derived from Windows CE or be a tad Palmy. Meanwhile what I would have wanted back then would probably had looked something like PDAs from Sharp and Nokia.
Today, be it for better or worse: Android is insanely successful. It is to mobile what Windows is to PC in just about every sense of the word. Except it grew up with underpinnings built around Linux and Java rather than DOS and C. It also has had the benefit of hindsight: as those creating it came from a world populated by Windows and Unix based systems.
Microsoft is doing pretty well today. Hell they’ve even made some nice software and services. But they are dead as the platform for mobile. Want to use Microsoft things on the go? Your phone runs probably Android. If not well it sure won’t be running a Microsoft operating system!
For about the last five years or so, I’ve kind of wondered if in about another thirty years: will Android eventually overtake Windows. Much as Microsoft pretty much became the gold standard as Unix vendors fiddled and burned.
One thing is for sure: the Linux kernel ain’t disappearing anytime soon 😜.
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Chrome Unboxed: Google Assistant Could Arrive On All Chromebooks In Late Summer.

For the most part I’ve been done with Google Assistant, and lax in using such tools. But I wouldn’t mind seeing them in more places as an option.

My relationship with voice tools tend to take two forms: pressing the microphone button on my phone and sighing at Google’s failures to handle my reminders and pressing the microphone button on my remote and asking Alexa to launch something I want to resume watching on Fire TV.

It’s nice to have options even if most of the options have failings.

Even my desktop is able to use Alexa and Cortana without much effort; Google Assistant not so much. But of course none really do that much that I find useful in that machine.

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Ars Technica: A tale of two cities: Why ransomware will just get worse.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/06/a-tale-of-two-cities-why-ransomware-will-just-get-worse/

Personally I think it a bad precedent to pay such a random. The odds of such things happening probably go up when they turn out to be profitable rather than purely gloat factors.

However I do understand that not everyone goes into writing a disaster recovery plan starting off with the statement, “Oh fuck!, My computer just exploded!” as the baseline. I can just imagine how peachy most town and county networks would fair….. like a flaming car on a roller coaster track: descending into a pit of kerosene.

Reflections on my road to becoming a computer nerd

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Generally I would say there were about four things that really got me into computers.

  1. Information access.
  2. Word processing.
  3. Video games.
  4. Community

Growing up in an environment where your choice was the family encyclopedias and dictionary: both about as old as me; or waiting a week or two for a trip to the library to actually happen. I was somewhat fortunate in the sense I could checkout books and learn about how nuclear power or jet engines function, and not be worried what people think. Today, I’m not quite sure I’d wanna see the alarmed glares kids might get today at the stuff I read back then but I guess there aren’t that many librarians left either.

Online however made a very different set of information available than the bookstores and library could offer me. Two websites especially: the Gundam Project and the Mecha & Anime HQ. While MAHQ is still around the former went defunct before my family switched from dial up to broadbanned. As my interests exploded I found that increasingly the Internet was the way to gather information. You could go to the used bookstore and get books on Star Trek and Star Wars. You couldn’t find so much related to Mobile Suit Gundam and Macross. Hell the nearest source of anime was probably drive two hours to a Suncoast, and that usually made it both very rare and expensive for our income level.

Likewise as my interests exploded: I generally faced two problems. One is the inefficiency of handwriting all your nerdy documents. Second was how painful corrections were with a typewriter when your spelling is less than 110% of perfection. I don’t think I have even touched one since the 6th grade but correction tape integrated into a typewriter is still among my definitions of wasted time and misery. When I gave the computer a shot at these matters, what those older than I dubbed word processing; my fate was rather sealed. Because between the rapid access to information and the ease of editing text I came to spend inordinate amounts of time in front of a computers.

Once we made the transition into the Pentium 4 era: we finally had a computer worth while for gaming. Well, at least for games that didn’t come on and run from floppy diskette. Early in my childhood we had both a Tandy 1000 and a NES, so I’ve been exposed to video games in one form or another longer than I have been able to read my native language. But most of our computers in between weren’t worth much for games, which generally got dumped on consoles.

The rise of multiplayer gaming pretty much created and defined my social connections outside the meatspace, and that largely remained the only link until I began getting into unix systems and learning programming as a teenager.

Strangely today: video games are still a major point for my computer use. It was around 2007 or so where I hit the point that FreeBSD could replace my XP machines, except for the damned Direct3D gaming pickle. At this point I don’t think I would even have built my desktop if it wasn’t for Steam. My next PC will probably be a laptop and an eGPU rather than a tower.

But that’s really where things intersected with other people.

I was quite active in a few gaming circles, and as my knowledge of computers grew so did my participation in circles built around those topics. Many years later: I still have friends that I met through those circles. Well into my early twenties, I was still very active in various forums and news groups related to my interests. As time has gone on most people have generally moved in the direction of services like Facebook and the late G+, and thus so had I. Today that largely takes the form of Diaspora and the Pluspora pod.

As I reflect upon the road that lead me here: I do wonder whether that is a good or a bad trend. But I think it really owes to two facts. A lot of the social things we do with the Internet are like scraps of paper: detritus and transient. Things like G+ made the ease of integrating people a lot higher than when you had to manage many memberships and connect to dozens of systems but it never changed the fact that most of our output is pretty much digital scraps. These aren’t communities that will last longer than national governments and treasures in a museum: rather the things we post are closer to asking what some Tom, Dick, or Harry had for lunch in the 19th century. It’s all transient at the backbone but we enjoy it while we can.

On the flipside the warehouse of old data on my cold storage drive is rather easier to deal with than stacks of old handwritten and typeset papers. And more than a few of the places I’ve gone have allowed me quite a bit of ease in backing things up, hehe.

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Neowin: User concept re-imagines File Explorer with Fluent Design.

https://www.neowin.net/news/user-concept-re-imagines-file-explorer-with-fluent-design/

I’d actually like to see something like that. Generally I’ve come to appreciate the new age UIs that pop up in W10, mostly because I’ve already suffered their design evolution from mobile platforms. Much as I did various desktop horrors from Unix and Microsoft systems.

Windows 10’s file explorer largely keeping the status quo left me with mixed feelings. But the fact remains of you end up suffering a GUI file manager: Microsoft’s is the gold standard to curse at.

Titanium Backup + Dropbox HOWTO

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I set this up today at long last (and assume most of it will apply to Box as well). Couldn’t find much use on how to actually make it sync, so here is a picture!

Go into your Preferences -> Cloud sync settings; and enable dropbox. You can go into Dropbox Settings to control stuff like what to sync and where to sync, etc. Then go to the “Schedules” tab and voila!

I don’t see what is so schedule about that, and I seem to remember reading that you have to do sync’s manually rather than on a schedule but whatever. Couldn’t find crap on Google, so I took a screenie ^_^.

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Having glanced at news of the new Kelper card running the Smaritan demo, a job that originally took a trio of 580 GTX cards (can you say expensive and smokin’ hot?). I couldn’t help but wonder, just how much optimization work may have been invested between NVIDA and Epic Games, to get that monster running on the new card.

Well, turns out from the sound of it, that it probably wasn’t quite as bad as I thought it would be or not in the ways I expected it would be. The new FXAA (Fast Approximate Anti Aliasing) technique being one such “Unexpected”. The fairly simple write up in the article hints to normal people, why the amount of video memory on graphics cards have been going up so much. Damn, I remember when 32M was just starting to fade away, and when 256M was the going norm’ alas, times change.
Anti-aliasing is one of those things, people see in their games video settings (usually) but don’t understand. They only can summise it must be “Better” the higher the number gets and that e.g. 16x AA must be better than 0. Ditto for issues like Anisotropic, trilinear, and bilinear filtering. It really isn’t hard to understand. Further complicating the life of a gamer,  some games let you choose various types of Anti Aliasing (such as MSAA or CSAA).
Anti-aliasing makes things look “Better” in simple terms. Let’s just say that aliasing is a distortion of the image. Something like this: 
The above picture taken from Wikipedia shows the effects of anti-aliasing on the right. SImply put, it makes things better. In some games it can be a lot more noticeable than others, Raven Shield or Call of Duty for example might benefit from AA a lot better than Sonic the Hedgehog or Pong.
The problem is it is expensive. Imagine, you can make things appear less jagged but you must pay a painter to smooth out the image. Now imagine, not only do you have to do this not only for every Frame Per Second of game play, but also for every pixel on screen. On my computer that is 1,920 x 1,080 = 2,073,600 pixels. Most games need at least 25-35 frames per second to be playable smoothly and 50~60 can be noticeably better.
The artist is using your CPU and GPU (graphics card) to do all this work. Because the screen works with “Pixels”, little dots, it can be a hell of a lot of work but hey, it’s easier to smooth out your neighbors than using a paint brush.
 
Techniques for doing all this shit have varied with time but in essence, they can vastly change the work load on your computer. One way of thinking it, if you can play a game fine in 800×600 with AA, you might be doing more work than playing it in 3200×2400 without it! This site has a great and simple write up about various techniques. 
In general a little anti aliasing is good but you are not likely to notice turning it all the way up to 16x FSAA, give or take your computer might cry.
FSAA should probably be avoided unless you want to boast about your hardware or publish screen shots that look good.
MSAA is close enough that for how much less work it takes to do, it’s worth while. 
CSAA or CFAA are available on most decent graphics cards since 2006, and is worth consideration. Think of it as similar to MSAA in the way MSAA is to FSAA. If you have a fairly dark game like SWAT 4 or Modern Warfare 2, as opposed to a very vibrant and colorful game, CSAA is probably worth it.
If you have a lower end graphics card, try using CSAA. If you can _actually_ tell the difference or just want to flaunt your cash, try MSAA.
In most cases, it is “O.K.” to use like 2x or 4x AA in a game now. It’s not like the old days when the computers just couldn’t handle it so much without better hardware. By the time you reach and exceed like 8x (MS)AA, you are probably not going to notice the difference all that much, seriously. If the difference between 16x MSAA and 8x MSAA is so easily seen on your screen and it bugs you, you probably should get a top end graphics card.
How to tell what you should use? Welp, just try a value like 4x Anti Aliasing and see how it impacts your game. If your computer can’t handle it, try tuning it down a bit (2x or off). If you can run it fine, hey, feel free to see if you can go up a notch or two.
A little secret though: no one gives a shit as long as the game looks good and plays good. So as long as you don’t turn the setting to high, it’s all good.

Curse you irony!

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Just before I got up to pee, I was looking at Skinomi carbon fibre skin protectors and thinking, “Maybe later” after I get my new dock.

Guess what? My foot caught the fucking charging cord and slid my Prime off the desk, and me “Snap catching slash pushing” it against the desk to keep it from falling: just gave me a finger nail sized ding in the aluminum backplate.

*groan* nothing like denting $600 because it takes for fucking ever to get a dock shipped here: that extra batter life and keyboard really helps.

The Big Android Browser Test

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There have been a couple of things on the net about various browsers, I’m sure, but certainly nothing comprehensive that I have found. Like wise, over @XDA in the Transformer forums at least, things tend to get muddled up after awhile from all the commentary.

So I thought I would install a shit load of browsers and do some testing! My test procedures can be found here.

It will take a while to do in my off hours and I doubt I’m going to get much done today, stuck home with the parental unit sick, so, I’m pretty much on butler call all day :-/. I’d rather be getting work done, like debugging yesterdays crap near interrupt free.