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Rebooting for the modern age:

BSD: time for kernel updates.
Linux: power outage finally won.
Android: dog ate the charger.
Windows: every update and driver fart.
Chromebook: whenever it gets funky.
iPad OS: more often Chromebook but same concept.

In vague order of frequency, lol

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You Can Officially Transform Your Smartphone Into a Pokedex

I’m pretty sure that when Pokémon Red and Blue were still current releases themselves, you probably could have gotten me to accept a phone just for the sake of this case—I wasn’t really a fan of smart phones until many years later.

Aptly, then as now, I’d rather have a Game Boy that looks like a Pokédex than a phone case, lol.

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Remarkable raises $15 million to bring its e-paper tablets to more scribblers

I’d actually like to see a lot more devices like this, and find the reMarkable particularly interesting. The main negative imho behind the cost compared to more general purpose devices.

Which is to say for most folks, you may as well buy an Apple Pencil and the cheapest iPad that’ll work with it. It won’t be the same thing but it would be more value to the average user.

E-Ink and styli are both tech I’d rather like to see more commonly used, so my bias is fairly obvious 😜

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Sad truths: when things needed on your shopping list are both on sale and have a coupon, very happy feelings should follow.

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Amazon updates Fire HD 10 tablet with USB Type-C and Android Pie
https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/10/07/amazon-updates-fire-hd-10-tablet-with-usb-type-c-and-android-pie/

When even the cheap option goes to USB-C, I kinda feel less sad about how much MicroUSB-B has died out in my home. Pretty much I keep one on my charger for powering my Bluetooth speaker, and still need such cables for my Xbox controller and one of my Bluetooth keyboards. But pretty much everything around here is built around USB-C, or requires something other than USB for its supply of go go juice.

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iPadOS review: 50 percent more computer

Little surprised to see the top note about bugginess, which has been something more experienced than heard about from things I see or read on the Internet.

It does amuse me though that this article’s leading beef is the lack of multi user support. Which I think is only half valuable.

On our side of the coin, or at least mine: it is a Personal Computer world. A large part of the success of the microcomputer owes to beefing so cheap that we can all have our own instead of time sharing a larger system with our peers. In fact, PCs were really damned slow to become multiuser if you ran something closer to DOS/Windows than Xenix/SCO. But hey, even dumb ass Windows people had to get with that program by the 2000s 😜.

For me, my iPad is probably far more personal than my desktop. Much as your desktop is probably more personal than a corporate main frame. It’s just that like laptops, most  tablets aren’t cheap enough to use as a frisbee.

Where multiple users really make sense to me on tablets, are the case where you may have a communal tablet on a counter or table somewhere. In which case, I’m sure Apple would rather you buy two iPads for more than one iPad Air, or better yet just buy a new higher end model and repurpose your old model 😄.

For business and class room use, I think you can make the case for multiuser support far more seriously than with tablets in people’s homes. Where it may be more important that a device remain on the premises and within a certain area of operation. Not sure about commercial uses but to my understanding Apple already has some kind of multiuser stuff if you’re using a school provided iPad.

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Think I may have finally found how Apple Notes could fit into my world.

My notes typically take two forms: Evernote and Nebo.

Pretty much if it’s important it will be in my Evernote, behind 2FA and such. While it doesn’t take as free form a view as OneNote or Apple Notes, so much as a Word processor like one, I have found that Evernote makes a great backbone for collection and organizing notes regardless of source. It’s also pretty affordable in terms of large, long term storage compared to a cloud drive full of regular files.

One of the sore spots however is the handwriting support. The magic for that is better suited to bar coaster length diagrams and the occasional sketch than being a notebook. Plus unlike Android there of a tendency to erase the drawing area content when multitasking between Evernote and other iOS apps.

If it’s something that I want to do by handwriting , I’ll usually use Nebo, which lets me readily convert handwritten text to typed text, as well as sharing individual pages. So great at collecting random shit for thinking or having a document with fairly simple structure (headings, lists, images, etc). But you probably won’t want to write a novel or thesis in Nebo.

Apple Notes offers a kind of nice canvas approach, much like OneNote but without being forced to store the data in cloud drives. Is able to store notes on my iPad, much like Nebo; where the cloud sync is purely optional. The difference is Apple Notes lends itself to generating a PDF for printing or clipping to Evernote, for when handwriting or highly free form is the desired format. So in cases where I want to preserve rather than convert, I think it’ll work.

Where with Nebo, unless it’s pretty fancy: you may as well export to text, or be generating a PDF of a diagram. Stuff like the HTML and Word export is more useful for work stuff than home stuff, and Evernote collects all eventually.