An orange in an apple orchard
I can’t help but think: one of these would have been really damned lovely when I was a teenager, but good luck finding that at a garage sale.
The thing that scares me, is less that I would have used such a thing back then, and more that the parallel connection makes me remember some of the squirrely things I’ve had to do in the name of serial ports…hahaha.
Part of me is tempted to try a keyboard case like this one, and part of me thinks I have enough useless things. There’s at least two variants by various mostly generic vendors, Procase just happens to be one of the cheaper offerings with USB-C charging support.
My experience with keyboards and tablets have been a touch spotty, given my taste in device size versus my requirements for a keyboard. The smallest that I find really useful for a keyboard are models like Logitech’s K380, and their old K810. Which is about as full size a keyboard as you can get while ditching the keys that don’t really matter, and settling for laptop style arrow keys.
Device wise, I’ve usually favored smaller. One of my most heavily used tablets was the Galaxy Note 8.0, but it was useless with a keyboard case. An external keyboard like the K810 works beautifully, but a 16:10 tablet just yields a useless keyboard if you make it fit a case. An 8″ wide case means the keyboard will be so ridiculously cramped that you’re better off using the touch screen keyboard^.
The only good thing about 10″ widescreen tablets were their screen size overlapped with the smallest you could squish a laptop keyboard down and expect it to be worth typing on. The 9.7″ standard tablets I’ve had push that down a peg, but aren’t useless. Using the keyboard case that Zagg made for the Tab S2, I found it a bit too cramped to really want to use seriously, but at least it was large enough to be useful rather than counter productive.
When I look at the size difference between my K810 and my 11″ iPad Pro, I contemplate where this winds up. I’ve usually found 12″/4:3 laptops a rather a touch cramped.
One of the differences, I think is also the OS. In Android, using Gboard I generally could write a couple dozen paragraphs on my Tab S2 and Tab S3 without caring about the touch screen; throw in glide/swype typing using an S-Pen and I was damned efficient. Rather using keyboards with Android was more important for tasks like bash and vim sessions over SSH.
On the other hand, the way iOS works for editing text using Apple’s keyboard: I’m inclined to think that text editing on an iPad was more of a scream at the top of your lungs and beat people with a stick kind of necessary for iOS 12; in iOS 13, it’s not as bad but due to the buggy’ass nature of Apple’s on screen keyboard, I would still say use a keyboard. It’s like the most important iPad accessory, where as for an Android device, I would say a real (i.e. Wacom based) stylus is the most important accessory.
So I find myself wondering if it’ll actually be worth it. The lossage to keyboard space is worrisome but it’s much closer to normal than other tablets I’ve owned, and if I had gone with the 12.9″ behmeth, I wouldn’t even be contemplating the question since its so huge ^_^. But in my head, I figure if all else fails, I could velcro a real keyboard to the thing, and if I really wanted to get jiggy I could put my dock and hard drive on the back in a similar fashion.
In any event: the case would be getting removed and attached fairly often. The little magnetic case I use with my Pro, mostly serves for times when I want a stand to go and when I want a little more protection at work. At home, my device pretty much runs naked unless I’m using the case for a stand at my desk, and I prefer my devices naked.
^ To be fair, I also feel the same way about sliders. My HTC Doubleshot’s keyboard didn’t make up for the dinky 3.7″ screen, and I was better off with the Galaxy SIII’s 4.8″ screen in every single sense of typing shit.
Check out what I’m watching on Crunchyroll! http://www.crunchyroll.com/welcome-to-demon-school-iruma-kun/episode-1-iruma-kun-from-demon-school-789490
I’ve put off watching this series, filing it under maybe worth watching later. Well, I finally opted to try…and I’m nearly caught up with the current episode. Because it turns out to be a very amusing series 😄.
It kinda tickles multiple points for me with its antics, including and especially the funny bone.
The stages of food sharing around here:
Well, my back hurts and I need a fresh shower, but my closet is a box of shit lighter and now back into an organized tech state.
The dogs, Corky especially, were about half convinced that I had lost my mind.
Last time I cleaned tech, I had eliminated some of the oldest stuff. E.g. limiting myself to a single graphics card that’s AGP, one SATA DVD burner, and a lone floppy drive/cable: just in case. But that did nothing for ~20 years of VGA, Ethernet, AC power, IDE, and other cables. Most of which survived.
For some of the harder to kill items like VGA and IDE, I’m keeping at least one decent pair for the odds that someday I’ll actually need one, and that’ll probably be in enough decades that they won’t be so cheap without visiting a landfill.
Likewise it feels good to have things back to order. One drawer is everything audio, video, network, and power that isn’t collected else where. Another bin collects the various USB things that aren’t the above, and another for misc stuff like my spare keyboards. Boxes used to collect internal components, like old PCI-E graphics cards(, and yes, still one AGP card), my old Audigy 4, internal cables and fans and shit, etc. Some larger things like an old tape drive
It’s kinda interesting how over the past thirty years, we went from having hardly anything but the Tandy 1000 set, to a closet full of computer shit. I feel bad for how unlikely some of it is—might need a VGA cable within the next twenty years, but I doubt MHL and SlimPort DP over MicroUSB-B are ever going to make the “Just in case” bin. Actually in another five to ten years, those should probably join the last composite video cables on their way out….lol.
Part of my mind says, “I will not use Velcro to solve problems”.
Part of me says, “Why the hell not?”.
Hahahahaha (^+^).
This kind of makes me feel old, and tempted to root around in my closet.
A long, long time ago in a childhood increasingly far away, I remember what mobile gaming was like. More than a bit of my childhood involved being stuck in the back of a car, bored for the duration, or stuck waiting places. Needless to say it was more remember to bring your shit with you than remember your phone charger. ‘Cuz if T-800 and Cpl Hicks lost their guns, you weren’t going back, lol.
Mobile gaming when I was little was something more like Tiger’s hand held games. I’m pretty sure that Double Dragon passed more than a few hours of my early childhood. And then there was Game Boy and Game Gear. Those were cool. More often than not, mobile gaming was borrowing my grandmother’s deck of cards, which didn’t require more power than daylight.
My first “Real” video gaming system of my own, was the Super NES. Between the original NES my brother and I played, and the THHGs I was used to, I came very close to choosing the original Game Boy for my first system, but in the end the green screen balanced me in favor of a more traditional console. The Super Nintendo had plenty of pretty colours, and Super Game Boy was eventually a thing anyway. Some time later my brother would also end up with a Sega Game Gear, but that was short lived.
Most of my time with the Game Boy turned out to be the later Color model. My mother bought me a purple Game Boy Color out of the local pawn shop around the time Pokemon Red & Blue were still young in America, and I still have that GBC in my closet. Along with my Pokemon Blue cartridge, and other games. Before the rise of the affordable smart phone, more than a bit of time spent waiting someplace, I passed either reading books or playing on my Game Boy Color.
It’s probably sad that when such machines were less well suited for propping open a window, and more suited to getting work done, I probably would have loved such a machine. I always wondered what use that form of Windows might be, especially when I learned there was a sorta-port of vim to CE.
The reality is, while by the time I reached the stage of wanting such machines, I didn’t really like Windows. But the reality is, what I really wanted was a device that was portable and capable of doing text editing and file management. In a better way than setting an e-mail to yourself off a phone.
When I was younger, the sexist thing a phone might be able to do is send an e-mail. That was part of why I looked at the launch of the T-Mobile G1 with sad, watery eyes; because I realized the devices I wanted were coming down the pike, and at my age, I may as well have wanted a Camaro for that kind of price tag, lol.
A Visual History of the Motorola Razr
http://flip.it/cmcBvO
Makes me wonder what drawer or box my mother’s old Razr ended up in. Seemed like she used that thing forever, until the smartphone era finally caught up to us, or vice versa.
Over the years, I’ve screwed with a lot of build systems. Both in the course of my own projects and other people’s, and I’ve come to a conclusion over the past fourteen years.
At best: you can reimplement make poorly. At worst you can reimplment half of autotools, poorly.
That’s pretty much what I’ve seen. Thus as time has gone on, I see it very hard to do better than good old Make. Especially when the GNU version has about five hundred pages worth of voodoo to appease even the worst masterbaters, and the need for autotools is kind of waning IMHO.
Enter ninja.
What I’ve generally found with Ninja is that it’s very simple. Like C: the little bit of syntax you need to remember is a small quantity. Opening a build.ninja file is probably enough to grok what’s going on if you’ve ever used an actual build system that involves editing files.
Likewise answers to questions that tend to make it easier to build a wonky, hellish, broken build monstrosity, tend to be “No, you can’t because that would make this slow”. And let’s face it, if you want much more than a relatively simple Makefile, you’re probably building a case for pain.
Based on the past year, I think ninja will be sitting next to vim and dump in my toolkit of loved and trusty computing companions.