Penny Gadget

It's the last day of February and I've written more this month than I had in any month last year. Of course, I'd like to think I put more effort into my writing last year, favoring quality over quantity, whereas these last few entries have been an exercise in trying a sort of stream of consciousness approach, hence no real paragraphs (and only bold for the sake of tracking). I decided to splurge on some quality of life upgrades for my home setup. I decided to finally get that USB hub from Satechi, the one that goes under the Mac Mini so it looks just a little bit closer to the Mac Studio. This style of hub is technically older than the Mac Studio, so it's likely Apple took note of all the extra ports and SD card slot. I'm getting the hub because I want to free up some USB ports. My keyboard and mouse occupy the only two old school USB-A ports on the back, leaving me with only 4 USB-C ports and barely any devices that use USB-C. I got a special cable for my microphone and I've got a USB-C to lightning cable for when I need to charge the iPad or my phone. I need the extra USB-A ports from the hub because I also got a 3D mouse. It's the smaller, portable version of the one I've got at work, so I can work more efficiently in SketchUp. I won't get as many shortcut keys, but the important thing is smoother camera controls. I'll also get the benefit of a SD card slot rather than unplugging my keyboard and using the mouse to transfer files. Satechi also makes a small standalone adapter so I could use one of the free USB-C ports, but it's rather big and the ports are spaced relatively close together, so I'm not sure if it would fit properly. In any case, the hub looks pretty cool and I'll still have one USB-C port free in the back. It's kind of funny how much this reminds me of when I had my iMac. It only had two USB ports, but you could daisy chain the keyboard and mouse to leave one free, and that was typically used for the Zip drive. It was a solid little machine for how underpowered it was. Sometimes I wish I hadn't bought that Compaq Presario shortly after college. I wanted to play games and I wasn't sure how well the iMac would run OSX. Plus, Windows XP had come along and singlehandedly fixed pretty much every single complaint I ever had about Windows 98, so migrating made perfect sense at the time. I later tried out Linux (specifically, Linux Mint) until I found a Toshiba laptop at a decent price that brought me back to Windows. I later gave that laptop away to a friend because my Android phone became my daily driver. That phone stayed with me for a few years until I got my iPad. An iPhone followed that, and a short time later I got this Mac mini. I'd always wanted one, but the timing was never quite right. Now, it's 2 generations behind the current models, new processors and everything. I don't particularly care. I'll keep using it until I can't. Much like my iMac, even if it was underpowered, it was more than adequate enough as a word processor. My screen flicker hasn't cropped back up, so I can rule out some issue with the video output. That makes me happy. My keyboard makes me happy because of how it feels to type on. The iMac's keyboard was pretty good too. It wasn't mechanical, but at least it's not one of these damned chiclet keyboards that everything seems to be moving towards. It's why I don't really care much for laptops anymore; their keyboards are such inferior experiences. I watched some videos about the old Sinclair ZX81, and noticed for the first time it didn't have a proper space bar. It was essentially where the right shift key is. This is because the machine was never intended as a word processor. It was meant to be a gateway drug to introduce youngsters to programming and computer science. Code, as a rule, doesn't lend itself to the kind of writing I'm doing right now. It's more slow and methodical, with arguably more punctuation than spaces. Coding languages often using something called camel case. It's where there are no spaces between the words, but the first letter of each word is capitalized. There's also one called snake case. It's all lower case letters and uses underscores instead of spaces. The reason camel case tends to be preferred is because space can be at a premium, and it's more efficient to rely on capitalization to be readable. I didn't say it the last few times I wrote these, but in case you've been reading these, you have my thanks. Hopefully, you learned something, or maybe it at least briefly took your mind off of something you didn't want to think about. 

Goodnight, and good luck.