I have a difficult time with elections in the same way that I have a difficult time being around giant Nagios dashboards. Being continuously confronted with too much information makes me incredibly tense especially when it amounts to a slow tally of varying types of ballots across an enormous and politically divided country. I’m going to try to avoid looking into results until much later in the day which means I won’t be looking at most of the newsfeeds I perpetually distract myself with for most of the day.
In my personal technology life, I do move pretty fucking fast. Once I’ve decided that I like one thing better than another then I’m mere seconds away from huge piles of administrivia and credit card debt. It’s just how I function which is arguably broken as hell. Just ask my credit cards. They’re very much aware of the problem.
After deciding that I wanted back into the Pixel game now that the Pixel 4 is kind of a dead issue and most of the design decisions that I found untenable for my own use have gone the way of the dinosaur, I hit the preorder button with no regrets. It arrived last night and, as I mentioned previously, there’s no time to start messing with an electronic device that is central to both your life and how you make a living than right after that device arrived.
I started the whole process by porting my phone number from Sprint to Mint Mobile. I did have to attempt this a couple of times and actually talk to someone at Sprint in order to get the account PIN that I actually knew and had written down to work for the porting process. Unlike my Comcast cancellation when I moved out of my post-divorce apartment, at no point did I lie and say that I was moving to Antarctica. The whole porting process only took about 15 minutes from when I hit the Submit button until I had phone service again which was smoother than I expected. My previous service was Spent-Mobile so I’m essentially using the same towers as I was a few minutes ago. Easy.
I transferred data from my OnePlus 7 Pro 5G over to the Pixel with no hiccups so other than a couple of political spam messages that came in while this was in progress nothing was lost. After the super tall OnePlus screen for the past year or so the Pixel 5 felt absurdly tiny. I have pretty small hands so it was novel to be able to reach all sides of the screen one handed. Despite being well accustomed to the 90 Hz illusion of everything on your phone being alarmingly fast the Pixel 5 feels impressively snappy despite the cheaper chipset. I think the compromises that Google made towards things people actually wanted like more RAM and a larger battery were the best design decisions they’ve made recently. The Soli chip included with the Pixel 4 probably seemed like a cool bleeding edge thing to include in their phone until it failed to do anything useful and truncated battery life. There are none of the surprises that I didn’t want and all of the things that I loved about my Pixel 3 XL (excepting the screen size) like the fingerprint reader and that fucking camera.
I didn’t realize how much I’d missed having a phone with a great camera until I took my first experimental Night Sight photo of the view from my front porch. I live in a newly built out part of suburban Denver and the other side of the street is the beginning of a wildlife preserve so there is very little ambient light outside. I think the nearest operational street light is at least a block away and this is what came out the other side:
which was pretty satisfying since it was taken at nearly midnight with no actual source of light other than a windows behind me. When you want to actually take memorable photos but can’t be bothered with messing with anything beyond a confirmation that you’d like to use Night Sight then the Pixel is the phone for you. The sensor is pretty much the same as the one included in my older Pixel phone and the photo above is the result of extending my arm, clicking the photo button, and not doing a good job of keeping my hand still. That is what I expect out of my camera which probably accounts for how badly I felt about most of the photos I took on my OnePlus. The magical idiot-proofing just isn’t there.
The other important part for me was the increased battery capacity and the Pixel has more than delivered on that front. After the initial charge up from out of the box, I’ve been running from that initial charge since then and just recently hit the 30% mark. That’s pretty stellar given the amount of time I spend monkeying around with settings and twitchily tweaking settings. I tend to at least passively charge my phone whenever I’m sitting in one place for more than 30 minutes and after resisting the urge to do that for the sake of science I’m pretty confident that I could get away with charging this phone every other day if I needed to. That is a tremendous improvement upon what I saw with my Pixel 3 XL. It would hit the 20% mark near the end of the day without any topping up charge which always made me a little uncomfortable. I’m fond of being able to forget to plug in my phone before going to bed and still having some life left in it the next morning. I will miss the OnePlus warp charging that would erase some of those mistakes but I’d still prefer to just have the capacity to begin with rather than just pumping a ridiculous amount of watts into the battery to stave off the empties.
My first 24 hours with the Pixel 5 have been great and I’m actually excited to be completely happy with a middle of the road phone specifications-wise. I’m glad that there are at least a few companies acknowledging that just spec-bumping once a year doesn’t make a compelling argument for switching phones.
Instruments were recorded on an iPhone for fucks sake and still this sounds energized and vital. The vocals come from one of my all time favorites:
We could all use a lot more Slow especially whilst cooped up during a pandemic that, at least in the Unites States, will seemingly never end. Creating some barriers between me and a potential purchase never seemed like a better idea.
From their website:
Passwords, long entry forms, 5-factor authentication, we got it all! Shop online and ask yourself “Do I really need this?” with an excessive amount of details.
This is utter timely genius. They’ve also made a Chrome extension available in case you’d enjoy the maximum amount of self flagellation while buying useless crap on the internet.
As much as understanding as I might pretend to have for whatever-driven advertising rates, I’ve been pretty sure that Facebook is the source of most horrible things in the world and would never remotely consider feeding any of my money into that ridiculous machine. Unfortunately, a whole lot of people consider that shit machine as the 2020 equivalent of thinking of the big blue ‘E’ of the Internet Explorer icon as the ‘internet.’ Given how much computing is done on mobile devices this almost makes sense but then you read something like this disassembly of advertising rates charged to both presidential campaigns and realize that the chaos boosting algorithms Facebooks prioritizes gives a ridiculous advantage to a candidate that doesn’t give a fuck about policy or the impact any of the trash his grotesque orange orifice spews.
I’m sick as fuck of even hearing about Facebook much less their half assed justifications for doing measurable harm to democratic process by measuring all things regardless of their impact with the same inane system of measuring ‘engagement.’ I still have an active Facebook account and the fact that it still exists, albeit largely as a way to log in to Spotify, is making me feel like I’m a larger part of the problem than I’m comfortable with.
I’m trying to stick with my pledge to not make excuses for my absences because why would I? This typically means, and will in this case, a link dump but I should also mention some of the things going on away from the keyboard since that’s where my focus is most of the time lately.
I’m starting a new job in just over a week. I managed to scrape up a week off between the two which fills me with joy and dread simultaneously. Colorado is back up to Safer At Home Level 3 which means there won’t be a whole lot of anything going on in the city and my house has rapidly degenerated into a state approximate to a 1990s punk house while my wife has been in the hospital over the past three weeks. That’s one of the weirdest parts about being largely confined to home; you’re stuck in the middle of it, realize in full what a godawful mess it is becoming, and cannot summon any enthusiasm for doing anything about it. That’s where I am right now.
Speaking of hospitals and my wife, her projected release date coincides with my first day at the new job. It’s hard to say in just words how relieved I am that she’s getting ready to come home after the sheer number of ‘so scared that I spend the day trying to not break down’ scares that we’ve had over the past couple weeks. I have no clear idea yet what the fiscal impact is going to be but I’m fairly certain that a 3 week hospital stay will not be inexpensive even with relatively good, for a stagnant startup, insurance coverage. I’m trying not to even think about that now but it looms eternally in the background along with all of the other worries that come with stupid adult life.
Here are some sights I saw:
1. You may or may not care about skate shoes. I happen to care a bunch but mainly because I’m always trying to find vegan skate shoes that don’t look like a hacky sack wrapped around my foot. The Savier story is pretty goddamned interesting. I read this story during lunch and ended up falling down an incredible rabbit hole chasing down a bunch of shoes and people who make shoes mentioned in the story.
2. Although this examination of Apple’s newfound commitment to lessening e-waste versus what you’re actually going to buy which incidentally comes in even more packaging is factually correct it is also a frustrating read for me. I have a cheap/old iPhone from Sprint-Mobile that is about ready to go back to the mothership because I have actual use for it. I’m also replacing my OnePlus 7 Pro 5G with a Pixel 5. It’s shipped and should be here shortly. Uh oh! I’m switching phones with different charging standards!! I have several warp chargers for my soon-to-be-ex OnePlus. Will I throw these chargers away? No, because they’re still useful as chargers for other USB-C devices. They may not charge what I’ve plugged it into up to 80% in a scant few minutes but in the wide world of Covid-19 I’m not away from home or even my desk very often. I can wait the extra 20 minutes in most cases. The point here being that because all of my phones excepting my cheapo iPhone all use a standard charging cable that magically just works (that phrase seems oddly familiar – perhaps from another lifetime?) with most of the devices that need charging. I need to charge my Kindle? Easy, just unplug the USB-C cable and plug the microUSB cable into the brick. The multiple wireless charging stands that I used with my Pixel 3 XL — they still fucking work with the new phone two versions later.
3. I really enjoyed reading one man’s 35 year history with Amiga machines as constant in his life. The stories about his nascent experiences with computers and the warm nostalgia that surround those memories was really heartening for me.
4. I also enjoyed this criticism of the odd design decisions Zoom made when implementing end to end encryption because it was a easily digestible and entertaining explanation even to someone who is really not all that interested in the specifics of encryption. The furry stuff creeped me the fuck out but I guess nobody rides for free?
My Pinebook Pro arrived today. I spent a little time poking around on it after dinner and am now typing this post up on it. I didn’t go in with crazy high expectations since I’m fairly experienced with working withLinux on the desktop with much more powerful hardware supporting it.
Here are my day one impressions so far:
1. It isn’t crazy fast for desktop-ish use so far. I’m running the Manjaro version that comes preinstalled on it and using KDE as my desktop environment and it doesn’t feel quite as responsive as my other machine but, of course, my other machines are for the most part i9 class processors with enough RAM that I scarcely even touch my swap partition so that comparison should surprise absolutely no one. For $200, it’s fucking great and it does everything I would expect and a whole bunch more. As long as you’re not expecting your inexpensive machine to miraculously hit Mach 1, I think this is a surprisingly great desktop experience. It probably won’t be my daily driver for heavy lifting tasks but it runs Chromium with the required gazillion tabs open, Guake, and a few other small applications without any noticeable difficulty.
2. Again, for the price, the hardware that you touch and interface with externally feels on par with some of the better Chromebooks. The screen is perfectly workable and clear. The keyboard is chicklet style and doesn’t yield at all when you’re typing. Trackpads in Linux have always been a bit of a sore spot for me since I tend to experience a ton of phantom clicks when text editing that are probably more the fault of the window manager/DE than the hardware but this one feels comfortable to use even with the constant fear that the cursor is going to magically move three lines up at any second. The trackpad is buttonless and requires a fair amount of force to generate a click which makes things a little louder than I’m accustomed to but those clicks are muted plastic thuds instead of the gunshots you’ll normally hear from cheap trackpad hardware.
3. Every other person has mentioned that the case is a complete fingerprint magnet and I cannot disagree with that assessment. After two hours of handling it looks like I simultaneously devoured a bag of potato chips while doing so with nary a shirt tail to wipe my freakishly oil covered hands on. This is not something I consider important but it becomes apparent pretty quickly that the pretty black case otherwise unadorned by a single logo is never going to look pretty again without swabbing it with an alcohol pad.
Anyway, those are my admittedly superficial impressions from the first couple hours of actually using this little beast. I’ll likely post more thoughts on it a little further into actual use. The very short review: It won’t ever be a primary machine for me but it’s a bit of a miracle in its price and quality bracket. The KDE battery widget says I still have eight hours of remaining battery life after using this laptop for around 45 minutes. I’d say that’s worth your time and money if you want to try something apart from the pack.
Here are the things that drifted dreamily across my sleeping browser while I was working on something longer and more substantial to post here. Pinboard keeps all of that stuff from disappearing and is worth every penny that I pay for that service.
1. Gizmodo threw down a sarcasm laced guide on how to avoid showing your coworkers your junk on Zoom that is hilarious but should not need to exist. The catalyst was a reporter for the New Yorker jerking off during a Zoom call which even if you think your camera is off is the very worst idea that you’ve ever had. Vice has the more explicit version of this story and I really hope that ‘Zoom dick’ doesn’t become a term that we remember fondly from those dark days in 2020.
2. Not even Microsoft wants you to use the new Edge browser apparently because if you try to download it with a sane browser then you end up being redirected to the local copy on your computer that you’ve thus far never opened on purpose. I don’t have a Windows machine handy to test this out right now but I will later tonight just to take my trip on the hilarity-go-round along with everyone who is actually trying to download this ill conceived aberration. No browser that is remarkable only for being less terrible than the old version of Edge should be this difficult to obtain.
3. I would agree that the press that Trump sees so blatantly biased against him is actually giving him the idiot questions because he’s a hostile idiot and seemingly can’t handle a question necessitating an answer longer than a single sentence. I’m assuming he’s also wired as fuck on Adderall and his stem cell and steroid cocktail. Stimulants, fragile arrogance, and generally having the least experience dealing with the details of daily life of any president in history lays some great groundwork for his eventual Darwin award. Well, probably not unless he’s confronted by a particular scary ramp but I’m hoping the rubber/glue ratio reverses itself and he can be the lucky recipient of some of that ‘locking up’ he enjoys yelling about.
4. Chaos Ink is good hypnotic fun in your browser. I tinkered around with it for 15+ minutes which is more than I can see for most web things that serve a definite purpose these days.
Most of the music that really resonates (ha!) with me is guitar driven. This is also generated through a guitar with an insane amount of signal processing and other stupid guitar tricks to produce experimental nightmare music that, for me at least, goes somewhere definite sonically:
I’d love to see what the signal path for this rig looks like.
I really enjoyed this guide on answering questions in a helpful way because I answer so many questions in a given day and, these days, through more avenues than I have in the past. I always try to give equal attention to either a question about something technical in my workplace as I do someone asking about which Chromebook to buy for their child who has now been learning at home for more than half a year at this point. I think this guide is a good very litmus for whether or not you’re being an asshole when asked a mediocre question by giving you some somewhat obvious (if you’d thought about what you were going to say instead of just spitting out whatever popped into your head) tools to better your participation in the troubleshooting process. I have the habit of casting everything as a troubleshooting process because that my actual marketable skill. I think in this case it is very much a collaborative effort to troubleshoot an issue just not as linearly as I’m used to.
It’s something worth considering because if you’re getting a proper question posed after doing a little bit of prep work before passing it on to me then I feel like I’m being met half way between let me Google that for you dismissiveness and a question so specialized in an area where my knowledge might be lacking and will have to do more research than you would to learn how to even begin looking for an answer. I’m always happier with the amount of effort I have to make if I feel like the person asking the question has done a little bit of pre-work. I’m not even sure if that preparatory business necessarily helps the process but it makes me feel like I’m another piece of helping someone find an answer instead of just a convenient sucker to pass the thinking on to. Cynical? Yeah, a little but I think it’s at least defensible given the tendency of people in general to throw up their hands in surrender when confronted with something that isn’t immediately familiar.
I’m going to categorize this one as a ‘Don’t Forget’ as well and keep the link handy for those days when questions are coming in at a relentless pace and I forget that people aren’t doing it because they’re clueless jerks. People are asking me because they’ve tried and weren’t successful or they aren’t even sure what exactly they’re even looking for.