Gold, Frankincense, and Purr…

by Bryan

11 comments

1 Steve on Stella\'s ipad { 12.25.14 at 11:15 am }

Merry Christmas, Bryan!

2 Bryan { 12.25.14 at 12:17 pm }

Merry Christmas to you, Stella, Esther, and Lily!

3 Steve Bates { 12.25.14 at 8:34 pm }

I love the C-style-quoted apostrophe. iPad drives me friggin’ nuts! I need some sort of portable device, but iPad ain’t it for me…

4 Bryan { 12.25.14 at 10:32 pm }

I have the Logitech Bluetooth keyboard with mine, so it’s a bit easier, but Apple doesn’t want to trouble people with choices.

Oh, because you changed your name for those two attempts, they got dumped in moderation. I only rescued the first.

5 Badtux { 12.27.14 at 9:14 am }

Apple’s own Bluetooth keyboard works reasonably well for the iPad, but nothing beats a laptop with a real keyboard. Luckily even the $398 specials from Wal-Mart have enough power for most people’s purposes. I mean, who needs more than a quad-core 2.0ghz AMD processor to run a web browser, word processor, and email client?

6 Badtux { 12.27.14 at 9:15 am }

BTW, it always amuses me that the War on Christmas people often have nativity scenes like this one in their homes. Jesus is a cat? Really? And they see no contradiction between that and their insistence that this is the season for Jeeeeezus? Heh.

7 Steve Bates { 12.27.14 at 4:36 pm }

Sorry about the double-post, Bryan. I figured out that I was not a registered user under that name only after I posted the second one and neither one showed up… doh!

I’ve seen somewhere that there will be an Ubuntu-based tablet in 2015; maybe that will feel familiar… or maybe I’ll finally do what I’ve planned for a long time, namely, get some sort of mid-priced System 76.

BadTux, that’s what I tell people who quiz me about what laptop they should get: “What do you plan to do with it?” and “What are you willing to spend?” Those two questions should just about cover it for most non-developer users.

8 Steve Bates { 12.27.14 at 4:47 pm }

Oh, I forgot: Stella’s iPad was not a Christmas present; it was a bribe from her employer a few months back to enable her to do some aspects of her job from home. With her unanticipated surgery about a month ago, she uses the iPad, her home computer and a VPN connection to do things that involve no direct personal contact. (I’ve long since learned to shut my mouth in our shared office-at-home when she’s working…)

9 Bryan { 12.27.14 at 10:21 pm }

Actually, Badtux, I use a $300 duo core laptop that I bought when my main box died to carry me over until I built my new box. It does everything I need to do when the big box is tied up. It is slow but half of that is the WiFi connection. The screen is almost twice as big as the iPad and it has a decent keyboard. The iPad is handy for a quick check on the weather, and required for the FaceTime video calls that my brother wanted to have. With the keyboard you can live with it if you don’t do any interesting computer things, like programming.

Oh, I’m surprised when I see any kind of Nativity set at the homes or churches of the fundies. They don’t seem to be into the Christmas decoration spirit.

No problem, Steve. I could see what happened and there was one extra click involved.

It is amazing, Steve, how many people say they want a computer, but don’t seem to know why, or what they will do with it. That makes a recommendation a bit of a problem.

The FaceTime thing is something my sister-in-law uses a lot in her consulting business. It cuts down on her travel time to offices. She is a heavy iPhone/iPad user.

10 Badtux { 12.28.14 at 9:06 am }

We never use Facetime in our business because of the way it handles firewalls. Basically, you can have *one* Facetime device behind a firewall. More than that, and it gets confused and routes incoming Facetime conversations to the wrong iDevice. Clearly for a business where there may be multiple conversations underway at any given time, that won’t work. We use Skype, mostly, when we need these kinds of conversations. Skype also has the advantage that you can send screen shots via Skype if you need to show the customer exactly what you are talking about.

11 Bryan { 12.28.14 at 3:50 pm }

My problem with FaceTime is that it is Apple specific, which would eliminate my customer base. It wasn’t my choice and didn’t cost me anything, so I’ll use it when necessary.

Everything behind a firewall has a specific internal IP address, so it should be able to discriminate, but it wasn’t considered in the phone-based design.