The Surface Pro 3 I bought in December is working well, but the specific SKU I own is limited mainly by the 4GB non-expandable RAM. As I stated in my original post, I was using it as a low-investment test of how practical this form factor is as a primary mobile computing device, and I’ve…
The Surface Pro 3 in 2020
My travel kit until recently has been a 13″ MacBook Pro (work computer), a ThinkPad T460S UltraBook running Ubuntu (personal computer, mainly used for email and also running Quicken inside VirtualBox), and a 5th-generation iPad (an unwise impulse purchase used primarily for watching movies inflight). Naturally, all the chargers and various other cables and so…
A short honeymoon…
Four months ago I was pleased to have put together a reasonably useful gaming system from mostly junkbox components plus an ancient Goodwill chassis. Unfortunately, on Monday June 24th I noticed that the machine was running extremely slowly. It should be noted as a matter of interest that this occurred after the PC had been…
To a starving man, a crumb is a feast
I don’t read much poetry, or many plays. I’m a prose guy; I like to read prose, and I like to write prose; other modes of exposition chafe and irritate me. (I really wish the Divine Comedy was in prose…). One of the very few poems I remember is The Mouse, by Elizabeth Jane Coatsworth….
Old iPad, New Linux – Utility or Futility?
I work for a company that has been developing mobile software for ~10 years. As such, every so often Engineering decides to clean up and recycle all the old, totally unsupported dev phones; in the same vein, many people in the company (including myself, if we’re going to be honest) are tech-forward frequent-upgraders and also…
Huh. That was easy.
If I believed in New Year resolutions, I suspect I’d have to add one right now: “Don’t overthink things in 2019”. As this short tale will demonstrate, I just narrowly avoided going down a very deep, branching rabbit hole in search of something that was right in front of my nose. To give you the…
Asset Dump: C2018000014
This is a “raw asset picture dump” post. It is a fairly un-annotated dump of pictures taken while archiving a vintage asset. Click any picture for the full-resolution version. The title indicates the asset catalog number. Raw notes for this asset: “No cleaning performed except light dust removal on PCB. Power LED bezel loose; rubber…
Asset Dump: C2018000013
This is a “raw asset picture dump” post. It is a fairly un-annotated dump of pictures taken while archiving a vintage asset. Click any picture for the full-resolution version. The title indicates the asset catalog number. Raw notes for this asset: “Black screen. Chips dated late 1983 (8344 typ). Yard sale sticker “Commodore keyboard $300…
Asset Dump: C2018000012
This is a “raw asset picture dump” post. It is a fairly un-annotated dump of pictures taken while archiving a vintage asset. Click any picture for the full-resolution version. The title indicates the asset catalog number. Raw notes for this asset: “Occasionally gives correct FG/BG color screen with random colored text garbage, usually just black…
Asset Dump: C2018000011
This is a “raw asset picture dump” post. It is a fairly un-annotated dump of pictures taken while archiving a vintage asset. Click any picture for the full-resolution version. The title indicates the asset catalog number. Raw notes for this asset: “Not cleaned. Rear pillar between user and serial ports broken off. No video, red…