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Thus far, I’ve found Hulu’s Halloween suggestions mostly a positive. A broad mixture of horror films, largely from the ‘70s to the ‘90s and beyond for some more recent films. Both familiar films and ones I hadn’t gotten around to yet.

This afternoon, I’m going with something I haven’t seen in a few years: the second version of The Haunting.
Personally, I think the film more or less deserves the critical panning it received, it’s a film you watch for the effects not because it’s an essential anything. For me, it’s probably the last movie that ever scared me. I remember watching it on a rather long break many years ago and then having to go move furniture, and being a bit unnerved. I mean, it’s basically a house that comes alive and eats people as far as the special effects go. What’s not unnerving about that concept? Since then tidbits of Hill House have haunted my dreams over the past few decades: enough to no longer be scary as it became a reoccurring setting for various nightmares.
On the flip side, I’ve never really cared much for the original film. It was very fateful to the novel in my honest opinion, but just not scary. As a horror film: it’s only scary in the sense of kids around a campfire kind of stories, not terrifying, well not when I first watched it fifty some years after the book was written. Perhaps because I view Eleanor’s part in the story more a cause for sadness than a vehicle for terror, which is kind of essential to the novel. Her torment and place in the world is the real terror, not the house or spooky occurrences. Meanwhile, as out of the wall as the ‘99 film is, it tries to rely largely on the horror of the situation rather than the characterizations. The two films have different takes, and the novel’s greater time for exposition means it can leverage a more psychological terror than the simple scares the ‘63 horror film could ablidge.
If you have some time, probably better to read the novel and ignore the rest, or just watch the ‘63 film if you want a decent abridged version of the story. Me? I watch the later film because I remember being like 12, and finding it disturbingly horror.
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Random factoid, but I find it surprisingly easy to read an analog clock.

I remember learning how the analog clock face works somewhere around kindergarten or so. But the caveat was my brother couldn’t read analog, and even as a child I had a measure of love for precision.  When you consider my brother is a decade my senior that might be a little sad. But that’s how it was.

Growing up at a point in time where the heights of coolness was probably a Casio Databank and alarm clocks that could wake you up with radio, that situation pretty much ensured that digital clocks dominated in my family because they were idiot proof. Also who didn’t want a portable calculator back then? 🤪

Thus most of my need for dealing with clock faces has been in giving directions, whenever my head’s translation table between port/starboard -> left/right isn’t sufficient. Despite how dusty the part of my brain where this is recorded must be, it’s still a functioning piece of grey matter.

I’d also like to think by now, my older brother can read an analog clock worth a fart…. since it was about twenty five years ago that I learned how.

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iPadOS review: The iPad is dead, long live the iPad–Step by step, Apple is taking the iPad in a wholly new direction.

Ars’ is probably the best in depth review that I’ve seen of iPadOS 13, outside of YouTube videos.

While pretty much every freaking thing about the Fruit Company’s operating system demands you learn to swipe friend in Elvish, Dwarvish, and sometimes enemies in Klingon, the multitasking is pretty win. In my eyes: Google mostly frakked it up with Android 9/Pie, and the ubiquitous metaphors of stacking window managers just suck when you throw fingers at them.

Coming from Android land: the iOS home screen is pretty damned primitive. Like any more primitive and iOS 12 would have had me pounding rocks together to make fire. It still mostly smells of cave men in iPadOS 13, but has a longer beard.

The floating keyboard supporting swipe style typing, pretty much rectified my only true issue with Apple’s keyboard. Not that I like it being one glitchy mother fucker. The amount of times I’ve had my FKB decide to reposition itself, usually by zig zagging its ass until the drag bar is offscreen — or simply fscked up input, is insane for a released product. But when it doesn’t make me have to reboot my iPad it does work really, really well; much like Gboard on my Samsung. Like Mr. Axon, I’d rather see the input as part of the regular full sized touch keyboard but I’ll take whatever progress I can get.

Editing text in iPadOS 13 being improved, I don’t think can be overstated. When I first booted up my iPad Pro, I felt like trying to move the cursor for editing text was bad. Somewhere between having my hands wrapped up like a movie burn victim and fuck it, I’m returning this shit level bad. Seriously, the two finger trackpad trick the keyboard does is the only reason I persisted to see what iPadOS 13 would bring. By contrast, iPadOS 13 feels like someone finally admitted that the era of 3″ phone screens and being totally hopeless typing at all on the damned thing, is long since over; or needs to be.

I for one, look forward to 13.2 in the hopes of less bugginess–and have high hopes for 14.x being an iterative improvement on the system.

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Really can’t remember the last time I made breakfast, and it was more significant than a granola bar or a frozen waffle. The dogs on the other hand are just glad that the sausage was on sale, so they got a really good breakfast out of this deal.

Sadly, no picture of expectant our happy doggies, since some images are harder to capture without a camera chained to your glasses.
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If you replaced the leftover rice/beans with mashed potatoes, and smothered the whole thing in brown gravy, this is probably a diner my mother would be proud of, lol

Flagging the sale on cube steaks before shopping day also turned out to be a good plan.

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Willow was so genius level comfortable, that after these pictures, two dogs may have gotten kisses on the head, lol.

Wave of passing thoughts

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As I sit here, a wave of thoughts pass through my mind.

For one, I’ve owned flash drives with less capacity than the download size of nVidia’s drivers. As I sit here with my iPad, I think my desktop is unpacking and installing a 570+ meg download.

Cream reminds me, of how nice it would be if machines didn’t hang on reboot. Centauri actually does the same but less frequently, and Intel’s errata sheet can kiss my hairy ass.

Being smart would mean cycling the dishwasher instead of messing with my iPad while I’m waiting for the driver update to finish.

And if there’s really any good reason to prefer the K380 I use at work to the K810 I use at home, it’s the tweaking of the modifier keys from PC to Mac style. I assume the keyboard’s microcontroller just shifts its keymap when the active device has an Apple identifier; when my K810 came out the solution was buy a different model. Also helps that the K380 is almost cheap enough to use as a Frisbee compared to my K810, which more like pulling teeth when I bought it for the multiswitch capabilities.

Evernote’s release engineering often comes with entertaining release notes. I really like that they have a sense of humour.

It’s quite possible that the next time I have good reason to buy a monitor, 1080p60 Full High Definition will look like a VHS tape. Or that /dev/desk will have been taken over the rest of the way by my tablet, and I wouldn’t mind if it was a display with a Chromecast or AirPlay function built in.

Hmm, it’s been 5~6 years. I really do hope this Asus monitor makes like it’s forebears, which are more like ~10 for my first LCD screen (an old LG Flattron) and filed under “Won’t ask, Don’t want to know” for the last tube monitor I owned, lol.

Ahh, well, time to move my fat ass again 8-).

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While at first, I was rather hesitant to bother with Apple News, I’ve got to admit it’s pretty nice.

On first launch, my impression was it looks a lot like Microsoft’s news app when I had tried it some years back. After trying to use it and populate it with topics, it feels more like Apple News combines the things I like most about the Google News and Flipboard apps.

I’ve generally come to prefer Google News’s emphasis on its own page view rather than being subjected to countless, often craptacular and annoying web designs just for the sake of reading an article. Both Google’s and Apple’s apps offer that. But Apple’s also will throw you upstream after a continue reading, so there is that.

Flipboard on the other hand, I’ve usually enjoyed because it is smart enough to recommend a broader content base than my topics of interest, and refloat articles into view once in a while, making it easier than scrolling backwards if you change your mind. The way Apple News bundles sections together kinda achieves that too.

And then there’s the fact an iPad has such performance that you don’t have to groan at the performance of page loads. Which has been especially a plague upon Flipboard for Android over the years, IMHO.