Various thoughts I didn’t expect a decade ago

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That my greatest joy for voice assistants would amount to “Open {show name} on {service name} on {device name}” as a way to power on my entertainment system, and being able to use Alexa to pause/unpause my video.

That I wouldn’t give a shit about privacy because the most eaves voice assistants may drop is me talking to the dogs šŸ¤£.

That I would own an Apple product. Never mind two (not counting my iPad accessors).

That Microsoft would release an operating system that I actually like, but isn’t itself a Microsoft managed GNU/Linux distribution.

Google would piss me off so much.

That tablets would kill my use of laptops for uses that don’t involve editing code for several hours at a time. Thanks for that, Android.

That buying a voice powered smart plug would probably be worth it if I could say, “Alexa, turn on my desktop”. Yeah, might have to look into that one actually.

That I’d be thinking “Clap on, clap off” more instinctively than “Computer, lights!” when getting up in the middle of the night. But really, that’s a job for Alexa.

That my handwriting quality would be restored thanks to Samsung’s S-Pen.

That my relationship to files would become so abstract. I don’t often keep note files anymore, I have tools like Evernote and Nebo.

And probably a lot more, but updates are almost done installing and no one wants to hear about my taste in kitchen knives.

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 For a while now, Iā€™ve been considering going to rechargeable batteries. Last time I can remember encountering these in my family was as a child, since (as I recall being told) me and the charger had some kind of encounter with water around age 3 or 4. So itā€™s been a while.

The past decade has seen my use of batteries go up rather than down. Mostly due to a greater embrace meant of Bluetooth peripherals that are preferring AA/AAA batteries to built in cells and USB charging. Plenty of batteries go to my Logitech K380 and Samsung S-Mouse at work. Fewer at home since my old K810 charges from USB, and my Fire TV remotes last quite a while.

For years Iā€™ve used the Play & Charge kit for my controller, which is kind of nice for me since it charges from the controllerā€™s USB port. The pack looks like itā€™s just a connection for the controllerā€™s power management, and a pair of AA cells in a plastic casing. Worked out pretty well.

Based on my math overall costs would be up to $50 for enough to replace my battery needs and a charger. Considering my battery costs tend to be higher based on the which thing takes what vs which piece of my stockpile of batteries is at home and which is at work. Itā€™s probably worth it to just use rechargeable batteries with some in use, some kept spare, and not taking a bath with the charger.

When you account for the cost of making sure both home/work are stocked with the right size, the cost is about the same as an 8 packs of rechargeable NiMH. So this seems like a good plan to meā€”or just say screw it and buy about several years worth of regular batteries off Amazon and stuff them in a bin >.<

Command, Control, and Optionally conquer the Alternatives

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In some ways it may be a touch ironic. For years, I used an Android tablet docked to a monitor, mouse, and keyboard as a workstation; quite happily in fact. Puttering around with iPadOS my only real beef versus doing the same with Android is the keys.

Having spent most of my life around PC based systems, Iā€™m naturally used to the shortcuts on a PC. Such as using control plus left and right to move the cursor a word at a time. On iPad these are more like home/end keys because you use option + left and right to move the cursor a word at a time.

Further complicating the fact is that some familiar shortcuts are control + thing while others are command + thing. For example command + W to close a tab but the familiar control + tab to change tabs. Basically pay back for having owned many a PC but never a Mac, lol.

In terms of keyboard and mouse support the only difference today is that iPadOS sports the same type of mouse based text selection as a PC or Mac. Android and the initial version of iPadOS had simply used it like a finger substitute, and more kludgy in iPadOSā€™s case. Aside from that I havenā€™t really had much difference in experience.

One of the notable distinctions as a user however is the software.

Modern iPadOS sports a version of Safari that is as good as Chrome or Edge on my PCs. My Androids on the other hand, being relegated to Chrome was always a bitter existence even if the stability leveled off with the years ā€” and often keyboard/mouse operation in Chrome made my eyes roll out of their fucking sockets at the silly. So letā€™s just say at web browsers, iPadā€™s Safari beats Chrome for Android.

For most users Iā€™d call that a win. Most people I know have a heavy slant towards web apps, and thus their connection to the rise of Chrome. In some cases, clutching Firefox like a gunnut and their AR-15s. So the result is Safari doesnā€™t piss me off, but Iā€™m still one to prefer an app over a browser if you do any kind of decent job at it.

By contrast iPadOS sucks as a terminal client. Networking limitations basically murder any chance of being able to use SSH and multitasking; spend too long away and the connection will be force killed. By contrast in Android land the only real issue with SSH clients I tended to have was the poor copy/paste experiences. Stuff like VNC equally suck on both, but is less multitask friendly on iPad.

For me thatā€™s kind of a negative. 90% of my interest in PCs revolve around command line environment or 3D graphics environments. But given my shift back to laptops for the heavy lifting thatā€™s not been to terrible.

Thatā€™s to say, my move from a Chromebook to a Latitude had more to do with Celeron vs Core i5 than it did at using Android apps for terminal work. Likewise, my move from Android tablet to Android apps on a Chromebook was basically generated by Samsung omitted video output on my last tablet.

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AT&T customer since 1960 buys WSJ print ad to complain of slow speeds

I remember that spectacular quality and awesome sauce speed from nearly twenty years ago. Where my family lived there was two choices: Bellsouth and Charter. For all intents and purposes today, Bellsouth and AT&T can be considered abotu the same.

I also remember when my mother finally switched to Charter. After that the Internet access sucked a lot less by broadband standards of the word. But Iā€™ll give Bellsouth this mouch, their aDSL service had been a major improvement over a 56 K modem that averaged more like 34 :P.

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Huaweiā€™s HarmonyOS: ā€œFake it till you make itā€ meets OS development

Forking and building off Android is what I would call the natural response for Huaweiā€™s situation. And pretty much as long as you respect the open source license agreements and such, nothing is wrong with that. The ability to do so is one of the best aspects of Android; the going it without the Google add ons one of the reasons fewer people do that with actual phones.
Ron kind of says it neat here:
Forking Android and launching your own rebranded operating system is totally fine. But be upfront about that. Say “HarmonyOS is a fork of Android” instead of “HarmonyOS is not a copy of Android.” Don’t call HarmonyOS “all-new” when pretty much the opposite is true.
Where the real ire of the story lay, and perhaps justly so. But the conclusion towards the end of the article also makes sense. Inside China the Googleā€™less Android idea works, as an international product not so much.
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Every crazy thing that happened in Apple and Facebookā€™s privacy feud today

Interesting to see how this plays out in the long term. The real telling, or should I say damning question is just now many apps make a lot of revenue off tracking users across other apps and websites. Obliviously companies like Facebook and Google have a vested interest in this because of ads and analytics but for most regular applications the difference is down to how the above pay out from their services.
Personally, I don’t think it is an unreasonable expectation that users should be made aware of where their data is being sent. Online most people should already beware of tracking cookies and such. But the same expectation is not there with moving between apps; perhaps it should be given the prevalence of large ad networks.
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In the course of my life, often the solutions to problems have been ā€œPut your back into it!ā€. Either because power tools are expensive, or itā€™s something Iā€™ll probably use once every several years at best.

Repeat after me: ā€œI will buy a drill.ā€

Then go buy a drill.

Honestly at this point, the only negative I can see is the dogs might swap from offering emotional support to running for cover. Which isnā€™t necessarily a bad thing depending on what youā€™re working on.

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 A gander at the old hard drive.

3 TB of reliable

So the drive is about 7 years old.

SMART via SATA native
And has about 5 Ā½ years of up time.

SATA native

Connected to my desktop’s SATA controller: Crystal Disk Mark shows about the performance I would expect for such a drive.

USB Enclosure

Connected to the enclosure on the other hand, I’m just getting pure crap. Suggesting that either the enclosure is falling back to USB 2.0 when connected to my USB 3.0 controller, or just doesn’t like my desktop.

The symptoms observed with the file server was the drive dismounting whenever I tried to start Plex, or try to see if I could get any SMART via passthrough.

Damningly, if I connect an old Samsung SSD through the enclosure: I get about the same level of performance. While nearly old as the drive the enclosure is a 3.0 with UASP that has generally delivered hard drive performance just fine until recently.

Which reminds me that one of the nifty changes of the new 8 TB drive is loading sections of my Plex is now a hella lot faster on my Fire TV than it used to be.

I think that my spare enclosure made its way to work for various need fillings. So the other of the three is hanging off my Xbox with a 1 TB drive that is probably manufactured circa 2012. Perhaps I will swap that 1 TB drive with this 3 TB drive and use that for a comparison; can break that down into power supply, USB cable, and enclosure without having to pull the PCB. More detailed testing will require hooking it up to my Linux machines.

Possible re-homings include my Xbox for storing games, or adding it to my desktop to store video files being processed for my file server. Both tasks fall under transient data storage, and I’m disinclined to use a drive with over 2,000 power on hours for anything mission critical. Hmm, I think modern Xboxes have a limit of 128 GB – 16 TB for USB 3.0 drives.