Up to Main Index                           Up to Journal for October, 2017

                    JOURNAL FOR TUESDAY 24TH OCTOBER, 2017
______________________________________________________________________________

SUBJECT: Chromebook update, new Intel i5 machine, lighting
   DATE: Tue 24 Oct 23:42:02 BST 2017

Recently things have been quiet on the WolfMUD coding front, mainly due to the
inconveniences of real life. Therefore, I thought I would provide an update on
a few things.

A few people have been asking how is the Chromebook doing? You may remember I
recently purchased four Acer Chromebook R11 CB5-132T for myself and several
family members. They are touted as being simple enough to give to your mum yet
secure.

When first powering up one Chromebook the initial update went into a restart
loop. Another one went into a restart loop after a few days due to a play
store service crashing. In each case the screen would flash black and go to
the login page in a loop. To sort the problem out a powerwash was required. On
two of the Chromebooks they started only charging to 92%, then started
charging normally again, then glitching again. The Chromebooks also seem to be
highly schizophrenic with apps not knowing if they are laptops or tablets,
independent of mode they are actually — i.e. tablet mode with the keyboard
folded under the screen. This produces very weird results when using some
websites and Android apps. There is also the stream of “how do I do this?”, or
“this app isn’t working!” I get from family.

So much for fire and forget, family friendly devices. Bare in mind that the
other family members all have Android tablets and smartphones, which they
seldom have problems with, and yet they still need help when it comes to
Chromebooks.

The Chromebooks themselves are lightweight, about the size of a slim pad of A4
paper and nice to use in laptop or tablet mode. The screen is descent, but
highly reflective — which I don’t like. The battery life is really good
lasting 8-9hours or more. The play store and Android apps work okay. There are
some issues with some apps, but I guess this will gradually improve.
Performance is good, plays video well.

For myself the low contrast, grey legends on dark grey keys makes the keyboard
useless in low lighting — for example at night with a lamp beside me. The
keyboard is also weird and I find it clumsy to type on when programming. I’ve
used a Happy Hacking keyboard with US layout for two decades and switching to
a UK layout is mildly annoying. However the tiny left shift key, large control
key and awkward combinations for page up/down, home, end and the function keys
are more of a pain. Also, why no F1-F12 legends on the multimedia keys? Even
tiny ones in the corner of the keys would be useful. I continually find myself
counting along the multimedia keys to find the function key I want.

I have not put my Chromebook into developer mode. The risk of someone hitting
the space bar accidentally and wiping everything is unacceptable. If I want to
mess about with the firmware I believe it’s possible to force the Chromebook
to always boot into developer mode but I don’t have the time to mess around
with firmware. Instead I’ve been using the Chromebook as a remote terminal via
the Secure Shell extension.

My personal take on the Chromebook, why Chrome OS? What does it add? The only
thing I can come up with is multiple windows for apps and the browser. I’ve
seen several articles on the Internet recently saying that a Chromebook is the
best of both worlds — laptops and tablets. Overall I think the Chromebook
would be much better, and provide a better user experience, if it just ran the
latest Android — with the updates provided by Google.

In other news, I’ve finally managed to swap my main desktop over to the newer
Intel i5-2000 machine. Only had to migrate about a million files. I also took
the opportunity to installed Debian testing from scratch and then apply my
customisations. The machine has 8Gb RAM — double the memory of my previous
machine. It also has two 1Tb drives in a RAID1 configuration. Now I just need
the time to use it.

As for WolfMUD, I’ve been implementing a visibility attribute — but I’m not
very happy with it. I’m going to try reworking it and see if I can get it into
shape for the next release still. However I think it’s going to take some
serious cogitating to make it work how I want. Whatever happens I’m still
going to try for a release — with or without working lighting.

Only 7 days left till Halloween… /\oo/\

--
Diddymus



  Up to Main Index                           Up to Journal for October, 2017