The inevitable has happened. Edythe-II decided to give up the ghost about a fortnight ago, and I was stuck in a strange position of not having a portable machine to get [some] things done.
I was, by no means, completely machine-less, since there's always Elysie-II to fall back on. But it is different---Elysie-II was built to be a gaming machine, and as a result, had much of the set up favouring that of playing games than actual working. Explained simply, it meant that the set up was more amenable to having wonderful visuals and large-ish text over the tiny text that I would use for ``work''-related manipulations.
The failure of Edythe-II came very suddenly. The night before, I suspended her and went to sleep, and by the next morning, it was no longer possible to wake her up. I tried various combinations of power/power button manipulations, but none of them were working. In the end, I had to go back to technical support because it is fast becoming apparent that there was a hardware issue that I had no chance of resolving on my own.
Later tests confirmed that it was a motherboard issue, and the price in replacing it was high enough that it didn't make any sense for me to do so when I can triple the amount and get a brand-new replacement with three more years of warranty (Edythe-II's warranty was just expired by 2 months, which led to the really crazy high price for the replacement).
So, what is Edythe-III?
She's a Fujitsu S937, Intel Core i7-7500U, 8GiB RAM (8GiB soldered, going to get a 16GiB RAM stick to max it up to 24GiB) with Intel HD Graphics 620. Her form factor is almost identical as that of Edythe-II, but with ``worse'' display (instead of 2560×1440, we're looking at 1920×1080), and ``better'' storage (Crucial 525GB SSD as primary storage as opposed to the original 1TB HDD---it was an upgrade that I decided to get because I realise that many things that I was doing had a lot of disk I/O, and so having an SSD is likely to improve the performance). Writing and compiling are the primary tasks that I do on the Edythes, so an SSD would make everything run much better. The original HDD is not tossed into the bin---it is going to live its life in the modular bay HDD kit to act as secondary storage for when I intend to sit down somewhere and stay plugged in (i.e. less need for the modular bay battery).
Thus, after three years of glorious Unifont use for the console, I'm back to using the Proggy series or even the Tom Thumb-esque font. I haven't actually managed to successfully convert that into a form that Windows can use, so I'm likely to be using Proggy (8×8) or some 5×7 font instead.
My biggest pet peeve is that I am literally stuck with Windows 10 with no reprieve. I did my best to reduce the amount of suck it could generate, but I have no idea just how much of it I managed to avoid through careful reading and adjusting of the underlying configuration settings. Classic Shell is a definite must, but even then it seems to act a little buggy with regard to the start menu.
Only time will tell.
And that's all I have to write about for now. It's really says something when the only times I have a ``proper'' blog entry is when something bad happens.
Showing posts with label edythe-ii. Show all posts
Showing posts with label edythe-ii. Show all posts
Thursday, August 31, 2017
Thursday, February 02, 2017
Goodbye Eirian-III
I've had Eirian-III for quite a while now, and it is with great sadness that I'll have to retire this tablet.
I've had Eirian-III since January 2013, and she had always been my go-to for any of the coloured stuff and comics. Each time I travelled, it was Eirian-III that I lugged along instead of Edythe, Elyse or Eileen. Much good times were had.
But today, it was deemed the day where Eirian-III has to be retired. Her battery wouldn't charge, and upon closer examination, was already swelling up, a sign that things weren't going well.
And so, retired she shall be.
I'll always remember the times that Eirian-III had provided me with much needed entertainment that cannot be gleaned from the ``pure'' e-ink readers that her sisters were (Eirian, Eirian-II and Eirian-IV). Much fun was had watching Twitch streams on her as well. And geocaching with tools running on her, including oversized maps that make it easy to look ahead.
It will all be consigned to the past now.
Will I get a replacement for Eirian-III? I don't know, and I don't really think so. While great, Eirian-III has never been my standard workhorse---she ran stock Google Android with all its... flaws. Her coloured LCD was great for comics, but I'm no rabid comic devourer. She did follow me through great works like Neil Gaiman's Sandman, One Thousand Nights and A Night, Watchmen and V for Vendetta, not to mention my own compendium of web comics for easy reading. But are those enough reasons to consider getting a replacement? I don't think so.
So to my faithful device, thank you for your service, and thank you for your patience with a fool like me. Your absence will be felt in time to come.
I've had Eirian-III since January 2013, and she had always been my go-to for any of the coloured stuff and comics. Each time I travelled, it was Eirian-III that I lugged along instead of Edythe, Elyse or Eileen. Much good times were had.
But today, it was deemed the day where Eirian-III has to be retired. Her battery wouldn't charge, and upon closer examination, was already swelling up, a sign that things weren't going well.
And so, retired she shall be.
I'll always remember the times that Eirian-III had provided me with much needed entertainment that cannot be gleaned from the ``pure'' e-ink readers that her sisters were (Eirian, Eirian-II and Eirian-IV). Much fun was had watching Twitch streams on her as well. And geocaching with tools running on her, including oversized maps that make it easy to look ahead.
It will all be consigned to the past now.
Will I get a replacement for Eirian-III? I don't know, and I don't really think so. While great, Eirian-III has never been my standard workhorse---she ran stock Google Android with all its... flaws. Her coloured LCD was great for comics, but I'm no rabid comic devourer. She did follow me through great works like Neil Gaiman's Sandman, One Thousand Nights and A Night, Watchmen and V for Vendetta, not to mention my own compendium of web comics for easy reading. But are those enough reasons to consider getting a replacement? I don't think so.
So to my faithful device, thank you for your service, and thank you for your patience with a fool like me. Your absence will be felt in time to come.
Wednesday, October 01, 2014
Keyboard Adventures
Time for more asinine writing. If this isn't your sort of thing, I suppose it is a hint to move on with life and wait for the next non-whiney post.
Still here? Cool.
I'm just looking for an excuse to exercise the new Happy Hacking Keyboard Professional 2 that I ordered from EliteKeyboards (see link). It seems like an exercise in excess, considering that I already have the HHKB2 Lite version, but the need to use up the SGD600 worth of ``Flexi'' benefits was the main force behind the choice of purchase. And by a strange coincidence, the one day before the delivery was supposed to be done at my place, my HHKB2 Lite mysteriously decided to suicide. The hardware could not be detected by the machines that it was connected to, and it was frustrating and confusing for a while. In the end, I had to break out the potato keyboard that came with my workstation, the flimsy-feeling Dell keyboard that was still mint in box. Typing with that potato was harrowing, and I was glad that I had brought along Edythe-II to do most of the typing on with regards to the work that I was doing---I will talk about that in a bit.
That the HHKB2 Lite suicided was an excuse on its own to take it apart for a much needed washing. The keys and the tray itself had accumulated nearly five years worth of skin flakes, hair and what not, and it felt more hygenic to send them all through the wash while I was taking apart the keyboard itself in an attempt to figure out what was the reason for its inoperability. From what I can tell, it seems that the controller card was not broken---it was more likely that there's a short in the USB cable that was set up to connect the keyboard controller to the computer itself. I stripped the cable out, and now I will need to get hold of a multimeter and other electronic/electrical tools to confirm my suspicions. If proven correct, perhaps I can resurrect the HHKB2 Lite by rewiring the connector cable.
My experience with Edythe-II has been quite interesting lately. As you may already know, Edythe-II's native screen resolution is 2560×1440 over a 16:9 screen 13.3" large. That's a pretty high PPI right there (I'm too lazy to do the math to find out just how much it is, but I think a back-of-the-envelope calculation yielded something to the order of 220+ PPI). I hadn't been using her at the native resolution thus far---something about the Windows 8.1 ability of ``rescaling'' the font size and what not that ended with the display being used at what was effectively 2048×1152. I had tried the native resolution on the get go, but I think my eyes hadn't figured out how to focus on it yet, and the rescaled resolution was more comfortable.
Until recently that is.
Now I operate at the native resolution, and holy cow it's awesome. Four 78+ columns of text windows for coding on a screen that is no larger than an A4 piece of paper---actual bliss. That alone though was not the only reason why operating at the native resolution was a good thing.
You see, I have discovered a couple of Windows keyboard shortcuts that had changed the way I operate the machines forever.
The new shortcuts that I discovered were the Windows + Left Arrow, Windows + Right Arrow and Windows + Up Arrow commands. Windows + Left/Right Arrow will automatically resize the window to take up the entire height and half the screen width, either left or right, while Windows + Up Arrow will maximise the window. This means that in a crude way, there is an easy means of performing tiling with Windows. This also means that I don't have to fiddle with the mouse to adjust the actual size of the windows when I want to code and refer to the documentation at the same time. Combining this with the X-Windows style mouse of achieving focus by hovering instead of clicking meant that my overall operability of the Windows operating system just shot through the roof.
Alright, I am done with the simple stuff that I want to write. Going to post this up and carry on with work once again.
Till the next update.
Still here? Cool.
I'm just looking for an excuse to exercise the new Happy Hacking Keyboard Professional 2 that I ordered from EliteKeyboards (see link). It seems like an exercise in excess, considering that I already have the HHKB2 Lite version, but the need to use up the SGD600 worth of ``Flexi'' benefits was the main force behind the choice of purchase. And by a strange coincidence, the one day before the delivery was supposed to be done at my place, my HHKB2 Lite mysteriously decided to suicide. The hardware could not be detected by the machines that it was connected to, and it was frustrating and confusing for a while. In the end, I had to break out the potato keyboard that came with my workstation, the flimsy-feeling Dell keyboard that was still mint in box. Typing with that potato was harrowing, and I was glad that I had brought along Edythe-II to do most of the typing on with regards to the work that I was doing---I will talk about that in a bit.
That the HHKB2 Lite suicided was an excuse on its own to take it apart for a much needed washing. The keys and the tray itself had accumulated nearly five years worth of skin flakes, hair and what not, and it felt more hygenic to send them all through the wash while I was taking apart the keyboard itself in an attempt to figure out what was the reason for its inoperability. From what I can tell, it seems that the controller card was not broken---it was more likely that there's a short in the USB cable that was set up to connect the keyboard controller to the computer itself. I stripped the cable out, and now I will need to get hold of a multimeter and other electronic/electrical tools to confirm my suspicions. If proven correct, perhaps I can resurrect the HHKB2 Lite by rewiring the connector cable.
My experience with Edythe-II has been quite interesting lately. As you may already know, Edythe-II's native screen resolution is 2560×1440 over a 16:9 screen 13.3" large. That's a pretty high PPI right there (I'm too lazy to do the math to find out just how much it is, but I think a back-of-the-envelope calculation yielded something to the order of 220+ PPI). I hadn't been using her at the native resolution thus far---something about the Windows 8.1 ability of ``rescaling'' the font size and what not that ended with the display being used at what was effectively 2048×1152. I had tried the native resolution on the get go, but I think my eyes hadn't figured out how to focus on it yet, and the rescaled resolution was more comfortable.
Until recently that is.
Now I operate at the native resolution, and holy cow it's awesome. Four 78+ columns of text windows for coding on a screen that is no larger than an A4 piece of paper---actual bliss. That alone though was not the only reason why operating at the native resolution was a good thing.
You see, I have discovered a couple of Windows keyboard shortcuts that had changed the way I operate the machines forever.
The new shortcuts that I discovered were the Windows + Left Arrow, Windows + Right Arrow and Windows + Up Arrow commands. Windows + Left/Right Arrow will automatically resize the window to take up the entire height and half the screen width, either left or right, while Windows + Up Arrow will maximise the window. This means that in a crude way, there is an easy means of performing tiling with Windows. This also means that I don't have to fiddle with the mouse to adjust the actual size of the windows when I want to code and refer to the documentation at the same time. Combining this with the X-Windows style mouse of achieving focus by hovering instead of clicking meant that my overall operability of the Windows operating system just shot through the roof.
Alright, I am done with the simple stuff that I want to write. Going to post this up and carry on with work once again.
Till the next update.
Wednesday, June 11, 2014
Excitements
I know, I know. I copped out again after having taken a four-day break of some sorts and reverted to using six-word stories. It's not as though I had deliberately planned for that---I was trying to deal with a silly tension headache while simultaneously trying to contain all manners of excitement and trying to keep a level head in this ever increasingly hot weather, the kind where one immediately feels muggy just from stepping out of a cold shower.
So, all manners of excitement huh. I'll bet some of you who are reading this are wondering just what kind of excitement are there. Well, allow me to enumerate briefly. Over Friday and Saturday, I was half-expecting a text message from a friend who was to inform me of the details for a planned blind date that she thought would be an interesting fit; such a date was planned to occur on Sundays, hence the wait with half-expectations. There were some... complications with respect to the original plans that she had made with her boyfriend over this girl, but we'll just leave it as such for now and not talk about it. Over Sunday I was excited for the arrival of Edythe-II as well as the watching of the new X-Men movie with Moo, Paul and his wife. Those were the main excitements that were keeping me up and making me feel too tired to give a damn about writing.
Of course there are more interesting things that have occurred in between. After nearly a month of running computations and ahem hosting, I finally could reboot Elysie-II back into Windows to play a bunch of games over the weekend. One of the games that I had wanted to start on was Unepic. I had heard of interesting responses from KK about this a long time ago, and had gotten the game from GoG some time back, and I was finally going to give it a go. Man, it was totally worth it. It had a rogue-like sort of feel, very similar to Rogue Legacy for example, except that there isn't any perma-death. So the pressure was actually off the game play and learning-by-dying, which actually gave a little more time towards the small puzzles and the hilarious dialogue. I won't spoil it any further, but considering that I had only played a quarter of the game by this point, there really isn't much else that I can say about it. The platforming felt a little stilted though, the manoeuvrability of the protagonist is surprisingly mediocre---it was impossible to say move in a direction and change weapons at the same time. This also meant that cool platforming tricks like side jumping up a platform immediately above the one that the protagonist was standing on was basically impossible.
I had also started on Bioshock, and suffice to say, the horror ambience was starting to get to me. I'm starting to wonder if I'm not really a fan of the horror/survival genre. Most of the FPSes that I play and particularly enjoy are those that involved relatively fast action, with lots of heroic moments, like Borderlands 2 or even Serious Sam. Deus Ex: Human Revolution actually took me a while to get to to complete it, and till date I still haven't completed Doom 3 and Quake II despite restarting on them every few months. Hell, I don't even play Left 4 Dead 2 anymore. But that's probably a slightly different story.
Oh right, Edythe-II. She's a Fujitsu S904, Intel Core i7, 8GiB RAM (4GiB slotted and 4GiB soldered, going to get an 8GiB RAM stick to up to the maximum of 12GiB) with Intel HD Graphics 4400 and a 1TB hard drive. And those aren't the real reason for me getting her. The answer lies in the form factor---13.3'' screen with a resolution of 2560×1440. Well, screw the fact that she is running Windows 8.1 Pro and therefore has a useless Metro UI and the whole App marketplace concept as well as the touch-screen mechanism. That the screen has so many pixels at such a density meant that I could literally use GNU Unifont as the default coding font for all my terminals without having to sacrifice the total character cell count, as opposed to using the Proggy fonts series. This doesn't sound like much, but really, GNU Unifont is more useful than the Proggy series in that it is pan-unicode in nature, which makes things much more coherent when mixing multiple languages. GNU Unifont has the added advantage of actually being taller than its width, something that is false for the Proggy series (they were all 8×8 compared with 16×8 and 16×16).
More pixel space also means that using tools like Scrivener and FL Studio become more viable, something that I will be doing a lot from this point onwarrds. I have two novels that I want to write (more like three based on NaNoWriMo standards, but no one is counting). I had heard of Scrivener and was contemplating its use in organising more complex novels as compared to the slice-of-life stuff that I had been beating out time after time, and bswolf gave what I would consider a glowing recommendation for the tool since he was using it to organise his own novels. But on a small screen, Scrivener doesn't show off its prowess that well, and so Edythe-II was obtained.
Anyway, this week is a short one. Soon YT will be back in town for a meet up, which is good because I have someone more sane to talk to that isn't related to work, and Brian is actually in town right now, but I will only be dragging him all over the bloody place come Friday where I had taken leave just for that. And with my proposed architecture for an access control service approved in principle, things are just getting peachy.
Now, if only that blind date were to occur, and I have some luck and meet someone who is compatible...
So, all manners of excitement huh. I'll bet some of you who are reading this are wondering just what kind of excitement are there. Well, allow me to enumerate briefly. Over Friday and Saturday, I was half-expecting a text message from a friend who was to inform me of the details for a planned blind date that she thought would be an interesting fit; such a date was planned to occur on Sundays, hence the wait with half-expectations. There were some... complications with respect to the original plans that she had made with her boyfriend over this girl, but we'll just leave it as such for now and not talk about it. Over Sunday I was excited for the arrival of Edythe-II as well as the watching of the new X-Men movie with Moo, Paul and his wife. Those were the main excitements that were keeping me up and making me feel too tired to give a damn about writing.
Of course there are more interesting things that have occurred in between. After nearly a month of running computations and ahem hosting, I finally could reboot Elysie-II back into Windows to play a bunch of games over the weekend. One of the games that I had wanted to start on was Unepic. I had heard of interesting responses from KK about this a long time ago, and had gotten the game from GoG some time back, and I was finally going to give it a go. Man, it was totally worth it. It had a rogue-like sort of feel, very similar to Rogue Legacy for example, except that there isn't any perma-death. So the pressure was actually off the game play and learning-by-dying, which actually gave a little more time towards the small puzzles and the hilarious dialogue. I won't spoil it any further, but considering that I had only played a quarter of the game by this point, there really isn't much else that I can say about it. The platforming felt a little stilted though, the manoeuvrability of the protagonist is surprisingly mediocre---it was impossible to say move in a direction and change weapons at the same time. This also meant that cool platforming tricks like side jumping up a platform immediately above the one that the protagonist was standing on was basically impossible.
I had also started on Bioshock, and suffice to say, the horror ambience was starting to get to me. I'm starting to wonder if I'm not really a fan of the horror/survival genre. Most of the FPSes that I play and particularly enjoy are those that involved relatively fast action, with lots of heroic moments, like Borderlands 2 or even Serious Sam. Deus Ex: Human Revolution actually took me a while to get to to complete it, and till date I still haven't completed Doom 3 and Quake II despite restarting on them every few months. Hell, I don't even play Left 4 Dead 2 anymore. But that's probably a slightly different story.
Oh right, Edythe-II. She's a Fujitsu S904, Intel Core i7, 8GiB RAM (4GiB slotted and 4GiB soldered, going to get an 8GiB RAM stick to up to the maximum of 12GiB) with Intel HD Graphics 4400 and a 1TB hard drive. And those aren't the real reason for me getting her. The answer lies in the form factor---13.3'' screen with a resolution of 2560×1440. Well, screw the fact that she is running Windows 8.1 Pro and therefore has a useless Metro UI and the whole App marketplace concept as well as the touch-screen mechanism. That the screen has so many pixels at such a density meant that I could literally use GNU Unifont as the default coding font for all my terminals without having to sacrifice the total character cell count, as opposed to using the Proggy fonts series. This doesn't sound like much, but really, GNU Unifont is more useful than the Proggy series in that it is pan-unicode in nature, which makes things much more coherent when mixing multiple languages. GNU Unifont has the added advantage of actually being taller than its width, something that is false for the Proggy series (they were all 8×8 compared with 16×8 and 16×16).
More pixel space also means that using tools like Scrivener and FL Studio become more viable, something that I will be doing a lot from this point onwarrds. I have two novels that I want to write (more like three based on NaNoWriMo standards, but no one is counting). I had heard of Scrivener and was contemplating its use in organising more complex novels as compared to the slice-of-life stuff that I had been beating out time after time, and bswolf gave what I would consider a glowing recommendation for the tool since he was using it to organise his own novels. But on a small screen, Scrivener doesn't show off its prowess that well, and so Edythe-II was obtained.
Anyway, this week is a short one. Soon YT will be back in town for a meet up, which is good because I have someone more sane to talk to that isn't related to work, and Brian is actually in town right now, but I will only be dragging him all over the bloody place come Friday where I had taken leave just for that. And with my proposed architecture for an access control service approved in principle, things are just getting peachy.
Now, if only that blind date were to occur, and I have some luck and meet someone who is compatible...
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