Everything New Is Old Again

 Disclaimer: This post has not been sponsored by 8BitDo. 

I got a new keyboard. It's from the fine folks over at 8BitDo. Not only do they make some awesome controllers for the Nintendo Switch, but they also have some mechanical keyboards on offer. I'd been eyeing one for some time since Logitech, in their wisdom, decided to discontinue the G413 Carbon (and replace it with some pale imitations and alternates) and I was worried about the impending day when it would stop working. I have a backup for my mouse, but the closest thing I had to a backup keyboard was the Nimbleback I use with my iPad. It's a fine keyboard, but I want to keep it available to carry with my iPad rather than be tied down to the Mac mini. 

As for 8BitDo, this came in a few different flavors, the first two themed after the original NES and its Japanese counterpart, the Famicom. When I checked their site a few days ago, I found not only had they expanded the keyboard to include a number pad, but they had two other styles of the original, including a translucent green XBox themed one (which was very tempting with its early 2000's aesthetic) and the one I ended up buying, based on the Commodore 64. 

Put simply, and if you'll forgive the pun, it was love at first byte: The large print on the dark brown concave keycaps, the tan body, and all topped off with a rainbow sticker along the upper edge and a big, red LED indicating that it's on and connected.

For perspective, I was born in 1981 and my first computer in the house was an Apple IIgs circa 1986, which is the equivalent of having a brand new Porsche as your first car. I have no real nostalgia for the Commodore 64; I don't even think I'd heard of it until the 1990's. According to Wikipedia, it was discontinued in 1994. Needless to say, a IIgs and a C64 look nothing alike, and have even less in common under the bonnet. I saw plenty of other computers and typewriters that looked more like the C64 in terms of the color scheme, so maybe that's where my nostalgia lies. 

As for the typing experience, it's phenomenal, though the backspace key is a little difficult to reach as the whole keyboard as a substantial slope (it doesn't even have feet on the underside to prop it up). It is notably louder than my G413, especially the space bar, but that's due to it having tactile keys rather than linear. Linear keys, like those in the G413, have all the advantages of a mechanical keyboard switch, namely not needing to press the key all the way down for it to register the keystroke, with the added benefit of letting you subtly control the volume of the keypresses. If you press softly and deliberately, it's no louder than any other keyboard, including non-mechanical ones. Think of it like slamming a door or closing it slowly depending on your mood. As for the C64 keyboard, there's really no minimum or maximum volume, as each key emits a distinct click for each press. Another notable difference is the lack of a resonance. On the G413, there's a metallic clang with each keypress, especially the space bar. I'm not sure what causes this besides a lack of dampening in the housing. With the C64, no such noise, only the distinct plastic-on-plastic clunk of the keys, and I love it. 

If I ever fall out of love with it, it does give me the option of swapping out the key switches for any other variety of my choosing, which I'm almost tempted to do for the space bar. It just sounds so different from the other keys. Then again, it's technically two keys being pressed down instead of one, so maybe that's why it sounds different. 

Pardon the rambling. It's the hype of having a new keyboard. I've been in more of a writing mood than a drawing one of late. My art block that's plagued me over most of last year still hasn't left. I also rediscovered a website called Writer (from Big Huge Labs). It's a browser-based word processor/note taking app that offers a minimalist, distraction-free writing experience (which is a little ironic given it's on a browser rather than a standalone app). Its biggest perk is the ability to select the color scheme of your background and text, which I've set to values consistent with an old school amber display. 

It almost makes me wish my monitor were smaller so I could put it on its side like some vintage workstation from Xerox. I've learned recently that you can purchase iMacs without their stands, opting instead for a VESA mount, so you could conceivably orient it sideways. I only wish they came in colors other than their muted rainbow variety. If they made a brown that matched my keyboard, I'd go for that. I could have sworn they had a black one available, but maybe I'm thinking of an older model. There's a light silver one, not even Apple's enigmatically inconsistent Space Grey. 

I can respect Apple and Microsoft not giving users this level of customization in their respective word processing apps, Pages and Word. To be fair, they do have accessibility options to create a high contrast or inverted color version of the display that can kind of sort of recreate the experience of an old school monochrome display. Even the browser based version of Word gives you the option of a dark mode.

It never fails to impress me the evolution of the word processor, from something boutique to something pedestrian. It's like the influence of the Gutenberg press bringing literature to the masses, then mass market paperbacks, and now ebooks and web pages. The craft of writing belongs to everyone, and my goal in life at this point is to grow into an old man hunched over a keyboard, probably driving the neighbors in the retirement village batty with the clickity-clack of my mechanical keyboard some kid probably custom-built for me out of sympathy to the cause. Maybe they were forced to visit the home as some kind of community service or church program and took an interest in my setup. They continued to visit long after the program ended, checking to make sure everything still worked, swapping out key switches and waiting eagerly to see if I approve or not. One day maybe they'll come and get told the bad news that I passed away the previous night, found at my desk slumped over the keyboard mid-documenttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt....

Words That Stay

Since 11 SEP 22 SUN, I've been keeping a journal of my medications. It started with keeping track of when I was taking Ibuprofen to help with some shoulder pain I was having. Later on, it extended to me tracking my symptoms while on my new medications. I went from Zoloft to Prozac and a mood stabilizer called Olanzapine instead of an anxiety medication whose name I don't remember because I rarely took it (it was designated "as needed"). We tried some other medications before settling on the Olanzapine, and the journal was used to track my symptoms and potential side effects. 

Originally, I used Evernote to create and update the journal. After some time, I became frustrated with how Evernote was performing. Frankly, there is no excuse in 2025 for updating a text file to have input lag. The file size wasn't even especially large by Evernote standards, yet updating it was a test of my patience. I could finish a sentence before the first word finished appearing. I wrote to Evernote about this and got absolutely no response. Between that and their price hike, I decided not to renew my subscription, only keeping it around as an archive. I moved the journal to Apple Notes on 01 SEP 24 SUN. I had some reservations about it because it didn't seem to have many of the same features as Evernote. 

When it comes to Apple software, a phrase you may hear time and again is how something will be simple and easy, but rarely if ever obvious or discoverable. For example, in my journal, each entry is headed by the date, and the rest of it is a series of bullet points, each followed by a timestamp. With Evernote, making bullet points is fairly straightforward; the icon for it is right there in plain sight. With Notes, the option to format your text that way is not exactly obvious. I felt silly having to look up how to make them. At this point, it's second nature, and one could argue growing pains come with the territory for any piece of software, even a note taking app. 

Note taking apps kind of baffle me the more I think about it. You'll find no shortage of debates online about what differentiates a note taking app like Evernote or Notion from a word processor like Microsoft Word or Google Docs. The closest thing there really is to a consensus is that a word processor is interested in what your text will look like when printed out, be it on physical paper or something more convenient like a PDF or an ePub file. Note taking apps, by contrast, are designed to help you get your thoughts down as quickly and painlessly as possible, making itself as malleable as possible to your stream of consciousness. On top of this, note taking apps add a number of quality of life features to help you organize those thoughts once you've committed them to text. 

This led me to something of a dilemma. There's an old saying that goes, "Never write down what you don't want spoken aloud in public." At the same time, a journal, by its very nature, is a record of your private thoughts, and there's nothing wrong with keeping it that way. Somewhere between these perspectives rests another quality of journals that nobody really likes to talk about, the fact that they have the capacity to survive you. 

Barring chucking it in the fire before you snuff it as the late Virgil requested (and was ultimately ignored), your journal is the very definition of an open book once your time has passed. It's like any other book on a shelf, able to be opened and read at another person's leisure, no real permission required. At worst (maybe best?), you were the sort of meticulous person who encrypted their journals by writing in some indecipherable shorthand or even a simple substitution cipher. Maybe you were one of those legends who developed a full language and your book can join the likes of the Voynich Manuscript. 

Of course, that's all assuming your journal is a physical book. 

Basically, with a physical book, the part about it surviving you is baked in to the medium. A digital file, by contrast, is somewhat more obscure, especially in this era of increased concerns over privacy in the face of large scale data leaks. 

One of the reasons I keep this journal, most entries of which are simply timestamps for when I took my Prozac and mood stabilizer, is for the sake of my doctors and counselor, so I could refer back to any date and time to aid recalling symptoms or changes in my behavior or whatever else may be relevant. In this regard, it's very helpful since I'm right there to scroll through it. However, what happens when I die? I don't expect anyone other than have the foresight to use my face or fingerprint to open the iPhone or iPad (respectively), much less know the PIN for when those means of entry fail. My Mac mini is old school, using a simple password for entry, and nobody knows that. These are all good things for security purposes, but leave much to be desired on the sharing front. The best I can hope for is to have enough time to blurt out a password or text a link to someone before my eyes close for the final time. 

Maybe I could leave some kind of puzzle-like paper trail for someone to figure out if they felt like going on an adventure, an adventure to discover when and why I stopped drinking coffee. Spoiler alert, it didn't play nice with my medications. 

Refresh Rate: A State of the Scroll

If you're new here, hello. If you're not new here... I'm sorry. Anyway, for those new here, my blog gets its name from one of my favorite H.P. Lovecraft stories, In the Walls of Eryx. It's not an especially well-liked story by Lovecraft fans, partly for being one of his few full-blooded sci-fi stories (broadly speaking, he was a horror writer), but also for its own premise creating a plot hole big enough for a spaceship to barrel through while twirling a cane. Without getting into a full synopsis of the story, it's about a guy trapped in an invisible maze. He makes several good attempts at trying to map his way through, but the maze is in a muddy swamp, making footprints impossible to follow as they get filled in almost immediately. He even tries using the mud to mark the walls of the maze only for it to slide down and leave the surface completely immaculate. 

If you've already spotted the plot hole, give yourself 3 points. If you're having a little trouble, don't feel bad; I didn't spot it until someone pointed it out to me, long after I'd written fan fiction for it. Here's a hint, at one point our hero tries digging under the walls to no avail. So, the wall goes down into the mud. Isn't it going to leave an impression? It's invisible, not incorporeal. At any point, our hero can literally see the entirety of the maze's outline in the mud. 

Ironically, making the floor mud instead of something solid like stone was probably meant to cover up a potential plot hole of our protagonist being able to properly mark his path on the floor. The mud, however, only really kicks a can down the road. That said, this doesn't seem to spoil anyone's fun. It certainly doesn't spoil mine. 

The story is told in a first-person narrative, the events being recorded on what is called a Decay-Proof Record Scroll. 

Said scroll is never described in any great detail beyond it being metallic and also "revolving" implying it might be cylindrical. It is called a "scroll" after all. On that note, isn't the idea of Amazon calling an electronic book a "kindle" a little weird? Granted, they don't mean "kindle" in the literal sense of starting a fire, more in the sense of inspiring awe and wonder. Nonetheless, I can't help but think of an episode of Red Dwarf wherein the leads contemplate the ethics of burning books in order to keep warm while marooned on a frozen celestial body. 

I've had my Mobiscribes for about two weeks now, and my impression of them remains positive. As of this writing, I have two of the black and white models, one to keep at home, the other for work (brought home on the weekends to charge, if necessary), and I actually have a third one on the way. It's the color model, and I'm curious to see how it looks. I should point out that the reason I've gone on this little shopping spree is that the tablets are steeply discounted on the Mobiscribe website for the holiday season. Even at their full prices, they're still the most affordable e-note option compared to the ReMarkable or the anything from Onyx Boox. 

Much like In the Walls of Eryx, the Mobiscribe isn't a particularly well-liked e-note offering, with tech blog Good E Reader calling the color version the worst eReader of 2023. To be completely fair to them, they are exceptionally thorough in their reviews and, as much of a cliche as it sounds, truly have their finger on the pulse of the electronic paper space. Onyx Boox's offerings in particular are no slouches when it comes to specifications and performance. They're essentially Android tablets that just so happen to have an electronic paper display instead of LCD or OLED. Of course, just because you can run YouTube on it, doesn't make it watchable. The refresh rate of an e-paper display is glacially slow compared to the 60 or 120 hertz of an iPad screen. As for the Mobiscribe, while its specs are definitely not on the level of an Onyx Boox, they don't need to be. 

When it comes to e-paper devices, the guiding philosophy behind them is digital minimalism. They're not as full-featured as an iPad, but that's the whole point. All you're supposed to do on an Amazon Kindle is read books. Even the ability to stream audiobooks through them is practically an afterthought. I can run Android apps on my Mobiscribe, but the results have been borderline laughable. Even something low key like Google Keep (a sticky note app) is unusable beyond reading the notes I've already posted there. Of course, why would I need Google Keep when the Mobiscribe has a note taking experience baked in that's optimized for the hardware? Sure, having my notes immediately available in the Google ecosystem is great, but is it always necessary? Even getting Google's Play Store up and running on the Mobiscribe is an obstacle course. It even comes pre-loaded with an instructional PDF on how to do it, complete with a "cheat code" for speeding it up. The best way I can describe the process is: when you think you've messed up, that means you did it right. 

It's certainly been refreshing, and made me realize how absolutely spoiled I am on Apple and even Amazon products that simply work right out of the box with little to no input on my part. 

Early E-Paper Exposure, OR: Adoption Atrocities

We notice things that don't work. We don't notice things that do. We notice computers, we don't notice pennies. We notice e-book readers, we don't notice books. -- Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

I can't find my copy of Salmon of Doubt, so I paid a penny shy of two dollars for the electronic version on Apple Books. I didn't bother looking up the Kindle version because buying books through Kindle on an iPad is a pain. Besides, I've read Salmon of Doubt cover to cover and at this point I'm only referencing it more than reading it. This highlights an advantage of ebooks over their paper predecessors: the ability to search the text with keywords. 

Sadly, another resource of Douglas Adams' wisdom and insight appears to have become lost media. His BBC Radio 4 series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Future, which has an episode devoted to eBooks, cannot be listened to because it uses RealPlayer and nothing uses that anymore. At least, nothing I have uses RealPlayer anymore; according to their site, they've gone Windows only. 

Overall, he had a fairly complicated opinion about ePublishing. Many possibilities, but all depend on the execution. Adams left us in May of 2001, long before Amazon became the powerhouse we know it as today. At that time, eReaders were very niche devices only made by a handful of companies, the biggest of which was Sony. Strangely, though, none of the other electronics giants seemed at all interested in competing with Sony on this front. For all intents and purposes, it was them and Rocketbook. 

Sometime between 1997 and 2002, when I was working at a local Target's electronics counter, someone asked if we had any eReaders. His had packed up and, the way he made it sound, left his library completely inaccessible. I felt really bad for him. There was nothing we could do; I don't even think we had our PDA's stocked at that point, and no one was using any of those to read eBooks. I think about that guy every now and again, especially when Amazon releases a new Kindle or I see a review of some other eReader on YouTube. He was an early adopter, and unfortunately paid the worst possible price for it. Looking back, I would have assumed he could at least read the files on his desktop or laptop. Otherwise, how would he have gotten the books onto the reader? Nonetheless, it had to be frustrating. I hope the frustration is long behind him and he's happy with whatever eReader he's gotten for himself now. 

Mac mini-er

OR:

Pint-Sized Port Problems 

I’m not one for New Year’s Resolutions. I don’t think I ever have been. Something I did learn recently from YouTuber and podcaster CGPGrey was that instead of a specific goal, try having a theme for the year. For this year, I decided it would be the year of upgrades. It sounds like an excuse to spend money, but bear in mind I make a very strong distinciton between a purchase and an investment. After all, the keyword is “upgrade.” For starters, I upgraded my iPad because I wanted more storage. I bought a new bed. I got some furniture. The biggest investment has been a water softener. I also had to get a new toilet, but that was more spur of the moment, though nonetheless qualifies as an investment. 
Now, I’m debating how much farther to take my upgrades. Specifically, I’m looking down from the monitor and right above my keyboard to the very device I’m using to write this. I have a 2018 Intel-based Mac mini that I bought as a housewarming gift to myself in April of 2020. It only began showing its age this year while I was working on Inktober. I decided to work entirely in SketchUp for this year, work on my shot composition and 3D modeling skills rather than ink and paper. During that time, I realized just how slow and cumbersome a task as simple as rotating the camera can be for the little gray box. Simply put, six years is a lifetime for a desktop in this climate, especially considering the massive paradigm shift Apple took by abandoning Intel processors in favor of something homegrown. That homegrown solution is now on its 4th iteration with the M4 processor. 

My first Apple Silicon device was my new iPad Air, which features an M1 processor. Even though it’s an Air and not a Pro, it runs circles around my old 10.5-inch Pro’s A10X Fusion chip, so I’m very interested to see what it’s like on a desktop. 
I wasn’t expecting Apple to announce a new Mac mini anytime soon. I’d already scoped out a new mini and even a Studio in case I was really dead-set on future-proofing myself. It’s about a thousand dollar difference between the two and double the RAM (the mini caps out at 32GB while the Studio has 64). 

As for the new M4-based Mac mini, I find myself rather ambivalent. For perspective, I’ve been an unapologetic fanboy of the mini ever since its debut in 2005. The only reason I didn’t get one is because I had it in my head that I wanted to play some PC games, so I settled for a Compaq Presario. Comparing the two, the mini looked positively space-aged. It was hard to believe a full desktop was in that little 7.7”x7.7” chassis. Sure, small form factor PC’s weren’t especially rare, but they were typically marketed towards business applications, not general consumers. It’s puzzling to me how much criticism the mini would get in later iterations for not making very many drastic hardware changes. On the whole, before the M1-based minis, the biggest shift in hardware specs came with the removal of the optical disc drive. Even with the Apple Silicon upgrade, it was still the same 7.7 inch square. For my money, I was still impressed. 

Speaking of removing hardware, I should get to what’s got me so ambivalent about the newest M4 Mac mini. In reducing the chassis size from 7.7 inches to 5, a few notable compromises had to be made. Key among these is the complete and utter absence of USB-A ports. The classic, bulky rectangle that had exploded onto the scene in the early 2000’s has now been completely replaced by USB-C. I’m bothered by this because my keyboard and mouse setup is still firmly in camp USB-A. Technically, Apple has only gotten rid of one port, as the M4 mini has 3 USB-C ports in the back and 2 in the front. Previous models had 4 USB-C ports and 2 USB-A ports in the back. 

Some of you may be saying, “but they make adapters” and that’s where I have to give Apple a lot of credit for how they implemented the new ports. They're vertical instead of horizontal. On my current mini, virtually every port is occupied, including all four USB-C ports. The last USB-C port, though, is a bit of an odd duck because of a convoluted workaround needed to let me use one of my favorite peripherals. My 3D mouse that I use to move the camera in SketchUp has a wireless dongle. It’s USB-A. As there are only 2 USB-A ports on the mini and both are occupied by a keyboard and mouse, I had to get an adapter to let me plug it into a USB-C port. You’d think, “Okay, problem solved. What’s wrong?” What’s wrong is that the adapter is too wide to actually fit on the back of the mini thanks to the other devices plugged into them. This led me to kill two birds with one stone. I bought a hub that rests under my mini, plugs into that last USB-C port, and gives me 4 USB-A ports, 1 USB-C port, and two memory card slots. The 3D mouse’s dongle is plugged into the adapter and into that one USB-C port.

“Okay…” You’re starting to ask, “If it’s got four USB-A ports, why not plug the dongle into one of those?” And that’s a good question. I tried doing that at first, but my 3D mouse has a problem. Sometimes, the mini forgets that it’s plugged in and if I start up SketchUp, it doesn’t wake up and give me a leg up on my 3D modeling game. So, I have to unplug the dongle and plug it back in berfore I can use it. Unfortunately, Satechi, the company that made the USB hub, made the USB-A ports really, really tight, so un/plugging it requires a very firm commitment from the user. Meanwhile, un/plugging the USB-C port is super easy. 

Speaking of Satechi, I guess I’m waiting to see how they handle the new mini’s design. If they make a hub that works like my current one, I may go for the new mini after all. They’ve got their work cut out for them. For one, on the old Mac minis, the only vent is on the back. The new mini has a vent on the bottom, so any hub would have to work around them. Additionally, instead of the power button being on the back right corner of the chassis, it’s on the bottom left rear corner. 

Without a hub, I'll just have to take stock of exactly what I need to keep plugged in. Maybe that can be part of next year's theme. 

Amp Up Your Dental Game

I got a new toothbrush, and I really like it, but it has a design choice I feel very conflicted about. It’s rechargeable, which is a step up from my previous one that used a AAA battery (though you easily got more than 6 months of life out of it), but it charges through USB. Not only that, they didn’t bother including a wall adapter.

Here’s what you need to understand about USB: the only consistent standard across all USB ports is that they deliver 5 volts of power. If you know anything about electricity, you know that’s only a third of the equation. Amperage is another third and arguably the most important. You’ll see it on your wall adapters, in that really small print that’s only one shade lighter or darker than the rest of the housing. How they list it may be a little hard to decipher, but you’ll generally see something along the lines of “5V/1.0A.”

Before we move on to explain amperage, let me give you a more real world scenario involving batteries. You’ve probably only had to replace the batteries in your TV remote every few years, and chances are you’re using something like Rayovac, a brand that’s not exactly known for high use applications compared to the Coke and Pepsi of the battery world, Energizer and Duracell. If you’re old enough to remember portable CD players, you know those things went through AA batteries before the end of the week. Obviously, a portable CD player is a very different device than a TV remote, which is practically an overengineered flashlight. It’s not constantly running while you’re watching TV. Both devices can run on a pair of AA batteries, but the CD player uses more amps than the remote.

Needless to say, an electric toothbrush is not a portable CD player. It’s not power hungry, hence a AAA battery lasting several months in my old toothbrush. Even the rechargeable cell in the new one isn’t exactly a hog. In the case of rechargeables, amperage is an indicator of how quickly something can be charged. You might be thinking, “What’s the big deal? It charges faster, so get a wall adapter with a higher amperage.” However, as an old fable once told us, slow and steady wins the race. The race, in this case, is the overall life and longevity of the battery. Without getting into the chemistry of Lithium-Ion celled batteries like those in your smartphone, the first 80% or so of your battery being charged seems to happen pretty fast, even with a fairly slow charger like one rated to 1A. That last 20% though is often going to be a bit slow by comparison and that’s also when you’re probably going to notice your phone getting a little hot. When you pour water out into an empty glass, you slow down and ease off the pour as you get near the top of the glass in order to avoid spilling. That’s more or less what’s happening in that battery when it’s charging.

Now, here’s the problem, the faster you charge your battery, the more strain you put on the whole system because you’re more likely to “spill”. For a time, I was using a wireless charging pad for my iPhone 12 mini. Wireless charging pads, in my view and with the benefit of hindsight, are terrible devices that nobody should ever use ever and you’re an awful person for insisting otherwise. It takes a lot of energy to transmit the electricity wirelessly than through a simple cable, and a lot of that energy is wasted in the process. Despite this inefficiency, this particular wireless charging pad was charging my phone really quickly. Between this and an issue with an app running in the background when it wasn’t supposed to, my battery’s health began declining and my phone wasn’t lasting through the day. It would literally drain in about 4-5 hours of moderate use. Even setting it down on a table overnight would leave it dead by morning. I hadn’t had the phone for very long, so upgrading through my cell carrier was out of the question. I was outside my warranty window as well, so I couldn’t rely on that. I had to pay out of pocket and take my phone to an Apple Store (because mailing it in would have taken weeks) to have the battery replaced. Really, taking it there was the bigger hassle than the 40 dollar cost for the procedure. Since then, the battery health is declining again from routine use, and all despite charging it the old fashioned way with a 5V/1A charger, the little white cube that came with one of my older iPhones. Apple doesn’t make this little cube anymore, and now all of their chargers list the wattage, leaving you to figure out the amperage. To be fair, newer iPhones have more sophisticated charging circuitry in them and can handle faster charging operations if one so desires.

Put simply, if you’re the sort of power user who upgrades their phones every 18 months or whatever your carrier offers, the life and longevity of your battery probably isn’t going to crop up until you’re in the market for a new one anyway. So, for these people, faster charging methods may be more practical. If, however, you’re a moderate user and/or the kind who likes to hold onto their phones until the duct tape holding the glass back together rots away, the two most important numbers you need to know are 5 and 1, which are voltage and amperage, respectively.

So, back to my toothbrush*. It’s using the slowest charger I have, which is going to be fine for it. As for my iPhone 12 mini, I’m just going to start charging it by plugging it into my Mac.

*I should mention in the interest of full disclosure that this toothbrush utilizes wireless charging. That is to say, wireless charging isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but coupling it with fast charging is an utter waste of energy on a phone or comparable device. It’s certainly a waste on an electric toothbrush, hence going the slow and steady route.

Quoth the Elephant, Nevernote

Someone on Threads asked whatever happened to blogging. I thought about it and remembered how after Richard Wright wrote Black Boy and Native Son (among many other works) he learned about haiku and wrote several thousand of his own. That’s kind of what I feel like has happened with blogging in light of social media. You’re able to more or less do the same thing as a place like Blogger or WordPress, but it’s more concise and direct. There’s engagement and dialogue (for better or for worse) With blogging, that still exists, but it’s somehow on a different scale. Some will write comments, while others will write blog entries of their own responding to that original post.

I’ve had a few ideas for longer form entries like I used to, but I simply haven’t had the energy to do any deep dives of late. So, I’m writing this instead.

I’ve decided to part ways with Evernote. I’ve been using them since 2009 back when I had a Windows phone. Back when I had multiple devices from different companies, it was great. A note started on one could be finished on another and they’d all sync up and talk to each other.

Since 11 SEP 22 SUN, I’ve been using Evernote as a journal. I was having some shoulder pain that was severely limiting my normal range of motion, so I used it to keep track of my pain as well as note when I took any Ibuprofen. As time went on, I used it to document when I took my medications, namely my antidepressants and mood stabilizer. The latter makes me a little drowzy, so I have to be careful when I take it. If it’s too early, I fall asleep on the couch and disrupt my normal sleep schedule. If it’s too late, it’s harder to get up in the morning.

In addition to keeping tabs on my medication, it was also a general sort of journal, sporadically documenting the various goings-on in my life, sometimes acting as an aid for me to track my depressive cycles and try to rationalize what I was feeling at the time. It’s easily the longest journal I’ve ever kept (not counting Blogger, which has no real regularity to it) and Evernote was great for updating it. Then, it stopped being great.

Despite only being text, updating it became extremely tedious and slow, especially using the mobile app. The desktop app wasn’t much better. According to Evernote, the file is only a few hundred kilobytes, a far cry from the 200MB max size they say a note can be on a subscription plan. I wrote in to their customer support, but received no reply. Couple this with their price hike (70 to 130USD) at the start of the year for me, and it’s a lot of goodwill down the drain. As for what I was paying for, their scratchpad was finicky to use, not always syncing between devices, and other times when it would sync, it would double-paste whatever was written from one device to another. This eventually got fixed, but sometimes it would still slip. Their worst offense in all this, really, was their pushing of AI features. You bump up the price, struggle to handle a 200kb text file, barely handle syncing on the scratchpad, and now you’re telling me to use the AI features? Finish this candy bar before you go unwrapping another. It’s just poor management, chasing trends rather than focusing on and leaning into your strengths.

Meanwhile, Apple Notes seems to have gotten better, if only by comparison. Before, I always felt like it was fighting me. I’d use it on occasion, but I simply didn’t like using it. Now, though, it seems so much more polished, keeping in line with the Apple fan adage, “It just works.” Besides, now that all of my devices are Apple, I don’t need Evernote’s best feature, which was being a middleman among the devices. In fact, I wrote the draft for this entry in Apple Notes rather than Evernote. I don't plan on migrating my stuff from Evernote on any grand scale, only as needed. As an experiment, I started my meds journal as a new document, then copied and pasted the old one into the new space. No lag on the desktop, but we'll see how it holds up in morning with the mobile app. If Notes has similar issues with large text files, at least I'm not paying an annual subscription to have it not work. 

A Random Anecdote About Perspective

Once upon a time, when the Syfy Channel could spell, they had a show called Trailer Park. As the name implies, they showed old sci-fi and horror movie trailers, typically from the 1950's and 60's. At the end of each episode they'd have some commentary from one of a rotation of guest speakers. His job was to offer a sobering perspective or witty insight into what we'd just seen on the show. I think it was an episode about apocalyptic movies where he offered this little story about a physicist giving a lecture on the sun. 

My memory is a little fuzzy, but here's the best I can do at retelling it. 

A physicist was giving a lecture on the makeup of the sun. At one point, he explained that in 5 billion years, the sun would expand to a red giant, possibly consuming the earth in the process, if not at least making life intolerable for whatever would survive. He was interrupted by someone in the audience who seemed rather panicked when they asked, "How soon!?" Thinking he'd maybe given out the wrong number, he restated, "5 billion years." The audience member breathed a sigh of relief and explained, "I'm sorry, I thought you said 5 MILLION years." 

Peddle Meddle

This recent kerfuffle around Tesla's Cybertruck and its accelerator pedal coming loose and jamming in the footwell of the vehicle has reminded me of something I read about John Delorean and the production of the iconic DMC-12 that would take Marty McFly backwards and forwards in time. 

The story goes that during preproduction, ol' JZD was trying every chance he could to cut corners on design and testing, trying to retain as much of his original vision as possible. His logic was that Lotus (who were helping in the production) frequently skipped a lot of steps that the larger automobile manufacturers make, especially in design and testing. Basically, if it was good enough for Colin Chapman, it was good enough for John Delorean. 

Finally, someone challenged him. He explained that the reason why Lotus can take a more seemingly more cavalier attitude to design and testing is that they're typically only making a few hundred examples of a vehicle at most. If they find a flaw really late in production, including coming off the assembly line, they can fix it right then and there and repeat the steps for every vehicle that comes off the line. Delorean wasn't making a few hundred DMC-12's. He wasn't making a few thousand. He was making tens of thousands in one of the most sophisticated assembly lines of its time. If it was found that a wheel arch was too narrow or, let's say, the accelerator pedal came loose and got stuck in the footwell, that's a repair you're going to have to repeat tens of thousands of times. 

The worst part about what's happening with the Cybertruck is that even some of the repairs aren't going so well. They're using 3D printed jigs to reattach the pedal with a Phillips-headed wood screw, and some of the examples that have gotten back to customers have the screw misaligned. They're literally botching the repairs despite having all the necessary tools for what is quite possibly the laziest, most half-assed repair anyone could do for a vehicle. 

Bear in mind, I'm not one of these "I told you so" types. I had legitimate faith that Tesla would succeed. After all, it managed to do what I thought would be impossible in my lifetime, and that's make electric cars cool. For perspective, I used to drive a Nissan Cube, and I got asked once if it was electric. Considering other vehicles like the Toyota Prius and the Nissan Leaf, nobody was expecting a an electric car like a Tesla to come out of the concept phase. That it's turned out to have more than a few smoke and mirrors behind it isn't surprising, like exaggerated ranges and the safety of its battery packs in collisions. What is surprising is that not only did they cut corners on the adhesive holding the accelerator in place, but the design of the footwell was such that the pedal can get jammed. 

Sadly, another thing that's not surprising is that there are those who are still defending Tesla in light of this recent event. Something needs to change. Someone needs to challenge the rule over there and tell Delorean he's not Lotus. 

Everything Pro is New Again

Top: iPhone charger. Left: iPad Pro 10.5" (2nd Gen.) charger. Right: iPad Air (5th Gen.) charger.

After much shopping around and even deeper thought, I decided a few days ago to upgrade the iPad Pro I've had since late 2017 early instead of waiting until after October. This was when B&H (where I was getting the iPad from) was closed for Passover and Apple had just announced its upcoming iPad event on the 7th of May. 

I had my sights on an iPad Pro, my thought process being that after Apple would announce its new range of allegedly expensive iPad Pros, people would be snatching up existing models like it was a run on the bank. Granted, this iPad Pro, with its full terabyte hard drive, was going to carry a significant cost. Put simply, though, if the rumors are true, this terabyte model would have cost the same as a baseline new iPad Pro with maybe 128GB of storage. 

The more I thought about it, though, and the more I looked around at other iPad models, I came to the realization it may not be as good of an investment as I was previously thinking. My current iPad Pro has 64GB of storage, and in the 7 or so years I've and it, I've taken up 41GB of it. Most of this consists of drawing applications. I have a few games, but I think the largest file size on any of them is 2GB (and there's less than a half-dozen in total). Overall, I'm very deliberate and intentional with how I use my iPad. It's a drawing device, not a communication device like my iPhone, and not a multimedia workhorse like my Mac mini. I don't like having all my eggs in one basket, another reason I decided against splurging on a higher-end iPad Pro. If I really needed something for, say, editing videos or 3D modeling, I'd just upgrade my Mac mini, which I may well do at the end of this year depending on how I feel when the time comes. I prefer a mouse to a stylus when it comes to 3D modeling, anyway. 

Then there's how the iPad range has evolved from 2017 when my second generation iPad Pro was the fresh face in the crowd. At that time, only the Pro series offered support for the Apple Pencil. After using a number of third party styluses over the years, I can say with certainty that the Pencil is the best of them, and it made the iPad Pro worth its asking price. Now, all of the iPads offer Pencil support. I'm still waiting for, at the very least, Pencil support on an iPhone Pro model, but that may well never happen. I wouldn't want a Pro line iPhone anyway. Pro has become a very flimsy word with Apple. When the iPad Pros were new, you got Pro features, such as the aforementioned Pencil. Nowadays, a Pro iPad still has a number of "exclusive" features, but one of those features is storage space, which makes the whole offering feel a little bit... unbecoming, for lack of a more tactful term. Like I said, my iPad Pro is 64GB, which was the lowest amount of storage available at that time. I wasn't bothered by this as it not only kept the price down, but I was only going to be using it for drawing anyway, and as a rule, drawing apps aren't very resource intensive. However, even being careful with what I put on the tablet, I knew this wasn't going to be sustainable, that I'd eventually run out of space. 

With my iPhones, I have a rule to double my storage with each upgrade, as I'm way less choosy about does or doesn't get installed on it. My current iPhone, a 12 mini, has 256GB of storage (I don't remember my previous iPhone 7's storage. I only think it was 128). Many iPhones go higher than that (512GB) before we have to start adding Pro or Max to their numbers. As for iPads, any model that's not a Pro only has 2 sizes available, 64GB and 256GB. I was worried this would fill up quickly, but then I remembered those posts on social media that compare just how much a billion is compared to even a million. They usually use grains of rice or counting seconds, but you get the idea. 

Taking that as a starting point, I made a graph to put into perspective just how much 256GB is compared to my current 64GB, and how much my 41GB after 7 years to build up actually was in the grand scheme of things. 

The iPad Air is a strange entry in the iPad series. I'm not even sure Apple knows exactly what it's supposed to represent. When it first launched, its claim to fame was being thinner and lighter and more powerful than other models of iPad. This was long before the Pro series came out and the price of the standard, adjective-less iPad was going down into the budget-friendly range. Against its more premium Pro compatriots, I suppose you could say it's the premium device without the premium price. It still has Pencil support and the display is actually slightly bigger than my 10.5" Pro model. Supposedly it's not as bright, but it's by a factor so small and in a unit of measure so poorly understood, I wouldn't have known if it hadn't told me. Speaking of the display, the other trade-off is that it's not as smooth and flowing as a Pro model. I'll save you the block of technobabble and just say that the screen of an iPad Pro refreshes at a rate of 120hz (pictures a second) and so animations look smoother than a typical refresh rate of 60hz, which is what other iPads and most displays you've seen in the wild have on offer. 

To put this in perspective, and at the risk of gushing about iPads, even the very worst iPad screen is better than most high-end premium Android-based tablets. Samsung has some models that come close, and the Surface lineup from Microsoft is a damn good competitor, but dollar for dollar, the displays on iPads are leagues above everyone else. Android tablets can be had for pretty cheap, but the display is always the biggest corner that gets cut, especially in the overall resolution. 

For perspective on that, a Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite has a total resolution of 2000 by 1200 pixels and goes for about 250USD. A current (10th generation), adjective-less iPad has a total resolution of 2360 by 1640 in roughly the same size screen as the Galaxy tablet, and starts at around 330USD. That's fairly close and it's taken a long time to get to this point. There's other differences to consider, and I don't pretend for an instant this is a perfect 1:1 comparison, so take the numbers with a grain of salt. The point is, in terms of a digital drawing experience, there's fewer compromises on the iPad and you do get your money's worth if you're willing to pay that little bit extra. 

I've only had my iPad Air for a day as of this writing, and I honestly can't tell the difference in displays between it and my old Pro. I wouldn't care anyway. Similarly, I don't care that the camera's not as good as a current Pro offering because I don't take pictures or shoot video with my tablet anyway, except maybe to snag a quick reference for while I'm drawing, and I'm just as likely to grab my phone and use Airdrop to send it over. 

As for the 7th, I'll certainly watch and see what Apple's got on offer. I'm bound to use up 256GB eventually.