by

Thinking about reusing some of the containers from storage, I did a search for how long stuff takes to decompose, because I’m pretty sure the plastic containers we bought when I was like 5 will outlive me by multiple generations. Plastic like that does pretty much last forever, and will probably be found in the rubble of some post apocalyptic event.

Strangely, the note that styrofoam doesn’t biodegrade, just makes me remember stories I’ve heard over the years from people’s childhoods, which I’ll just describe as why you shouldn’t try to make Greek Fire at home….lololol

What’s wrong with me versus what’s wrong with me

by

What’s wrong with me versus what’s wrong with me:

It’s not moving my grandmother’s commercial sewing machine and squeezing it into a tiny storage room on my patio that bothers me. Fair enough if that shouldn’t be stored on my patio.

It’s finding a garbage bag full of Disney VHS tapes, that the machine kept snagging on, that really bothers me. Because why the fuck do I still have that!?

Between my mother’s passing and the last time I moved, things were pretty much sorted into four groups: thrash, keep, brother’s attic, and defer. I’m pretty sure it’s time some defers become trashed. On the flip side, I’m pretty sure that I found a cache of DVDs that I know I have but haven’t been able to find since I moved in, lol.

by

Before heading to visit friends over the weekend, I opted to plan ahead and download a few choice albums. So I could set my phone to playing Google Play Music in downloaded only mode without worrying.

Seems like a lot of the music from my Hackmode 2017-01 playlist ended up there, as well as various cached music. I had created that playlist as I was going into crunch, that became a 15-day straight bombing run. Filled with music for the various emotions that go with working much overtime and the need for deep focusing.

Combined with the various files, Play Music opted to make a surprising mixture. On one hand, music like Alan Jackson and Ritchie Valens on one side, P!nk and Queen on the other, bracketing sound track made for The Hero of Fereldan descending into the hell to fight the Darkspawn and Faith doing the whole parkour across totalitarian future metropolis thing.

This kinda worked out better than expected, so I saved the queue as a Playlist: Roadtrip 2019-10.

In retrospect, I have to admit that the sound track from Dragon Age: Origins works for driving, as well as a fantasy RPG and focusing. Like, we don’t have John Williams and this isn’t Star Wars, but it better be damned awesome was probably their yard stick for composing the game’s score.

Hmmmm

by

Sad truths: when your tablet doesn’t come with a calculator and you don’t mind, because you end up in Safari so much that you may as well use Google as a calculator.

by

Looking at the iPad From Two Angles

Skimming through the Wikipedia entry on the original iPad, I found a reference to this old review from the NYTimes, and I can’t help but scratch the feeling that I probably read it a micro-eon ago closer to when I bought the Asus EeePad Transformer, my first tablet, or closer to when the article was written. Let’s just say that it’s probably been a long time!

In any case, it’s a pretty great double view on the iPad, and general tablet concept, and in many ways still rings true. I also find it a little amusing that at the bottom, it notes having made it into a print edition for April 1st 🤣.

iPads, flash drives, and VLC, oh my!

by

A simple round of experimentation.

Loaded one of my flash drives with a nice collection of video files from my anime collection, to serve as a portable cache. There’s usually several forms of flash media in my tablet sleeve, alongside a super speed USB-C to USB-A adapter; so proper spot ^_^.

The Files app is content enough to open my Matroska (.mkv) files in VLC, and might be more video aware if I had gone with MPEG-4 containers. VLC is happy enough to do what I want, which is to play my files and have enough feature completeness that I can choose which audio and video streams to decode.

Probably due to running from USB media, it doesn’t seem to be able to use my m3u8 / vlc playlists. But I can’t say that I mind that very much, since I rarely use video playlists when I’m more mobile than Plex to my Fire TVs.

One of the negatives I’ve heard of VLC is its library management, which is kind of expected but quizical. VLC is a superb video player, and easier to teach mortals than how to run MPlayer. But it’s never been meant to manage libraries of media files; much like iOS was never really meant to manage sharing directories between apps. Over in Android land, I usually opted to use Samsung’s vidoe player and Solid Explorer, but I’m weird :P.

by

https://apps.apple.com/us/story/id1439852114

Nice to see Life is Strange: Before the Storm featured. Having played the original, I found it made the in between prequel more worth while than I had expected. I’d imagine a modern iPad could run it well enough, since my Xbox never broke a sweat.

by

Surface reveals new holiday lineup and introduces a new category of dual-screen devices built for mobile productivity.

Yippee ki yay, Surface!

The refreshes of the existing stuff are somewhat less exciting; I might care more if the regular laptop can drive a eGPU over Thunderbolt, otherwise it’s mostly iterative goodness.

Far, far more interesting to me is the Neo and the Duo.

Surface Neo is the device I’ve long wanted to see someone build, and have a snow balls chance of not screwing up the productivity side of the software. The keyboard trick, is where I shout, “Fuck, yeah!”. Pretty much it matches up with the oh so wish it becomes a product, rumors from earlier this year.

Duo on the other hand is a long overdue device IMHO. Thanks to how Nadella era Microsoft has played out, I’ve been kinda wanting to see a Microsoft based Android device. It might not be as technologically innovative  as something like the Galaxy Fold, but it’s a step in the right direction.