Today at lunch I somehow found myself troubleshooting an intermittent issue with my CTRL keyboard repeating certain letters, usually the E key. This led me to a possible solution: update the firmware. Or more properly, flash the default firmware again.
I downloaded the appropriate files, ran the command and the LEDs on the keyboard turned off, as expected, the command reported Success! as expected, but then nothing else happened. The LEDS never came back on. I tried repeating the steps. I tried resetting the keyboard using a pin in the tiny hole on the bottom of the keyboard where the reset button lives. Nothing.
I then put it aside and started hunting for a replacement keyboard as my current setup really needs a backlit keyboard and none of my other thousand keyboards feature backlighting.
Tonight, I decided to try reviving the keyboard again. More failure followed. I pressed on, though, out of stubbornness or insanity. I decided to download the default firmware file again and it was then I noticed that somehow, I had not been using the default file. How this happened I can’t say. But I followed the steps with the fresh copy of the firmware, and it worked exactly as expected, allowing me to type this post.
I was already wound up over YASUUPSD (Yet Another Screwed Up UPS Delivery), so I suspect that played a factor.
I’m also reading A Complaint-Free World again to help keep my brain calm and relatively happy. We’ll see how that goes.
For now, I’m happy to have my zombie keyboard return to the land of the living.
As a footnote, I’m still looking for another keyboard, so I can have at least a backlit replacement ready to go in case the CTRL keyboard gets accidently tossed into a cement mixer or something.
Attempt #1: Kool Aid Attempt #2: Cooler Attempt #3: Containers. Hooray.
I pronounced the word “container” the same way, with the same inflection each time. This is why the reports that say Siri is better than Alexa ring false to me (or they are testing something else, like depth of trivia knowledge). When Alexa fails, it’s usually because it can’t process the command, either because I’m asking something impossible, or just phrasing it in a way that it’s not been programmed to recognize. It could be as simple as omitting a key word.
Siri is different. Siri will sometimes just fail completely, offering up a baffling “no internet connection” error when the internet is right there, or asking me to try again later because maybe someone at Apple has tripped over the server’s power cord again or worse, insisting that I have no such list to add an item to, after which I will ask Siri to show me that list and it does–then still refuses to let me add items to the list because it still doesn’t exist. But more often than these, Siri will misinterpret what I am saying, giving me Kool Aid instead of containers.
It does this often enough that it doesn’t surprise me. It doesn’t even bother me, really, I just accept that it’s part of the whole Siri experience. But Siri has been around since the iPhone 4S (2011)–it really should be a whole lot better than it is. Bad Apple.
First, I realize the ThinkPad X1 Carbon is a business class laptop and business class means expensive. But this pricing just seems silly.
I get newsletters from Lenovo (I have a 6th gen X1 Carbon) and they’ve just announced the 8th gen model, which uses 10th gen Intel CPUs. There’s a lot of generational stuff here. Anyway, I’ve modified part of the newsletter below to highlight my concern.
The thing, though, is what does that absurdly high (starting!) price of $3149 get you? It’s really just standard specs for any decent ultrabook:
8 GB ram
256 GB SSD
14 inch 1920×1080 non-touch display (not even 16:10)
You get a few minor extras like a fingerprint reader (which is pretty standard on ultrabooks now, anyway), the infamous red nub for navigation (which I find a mild irritant when typing), an alleged 19.5 hours of battery life (take this one with a huge grain of salt–like, jumbo salt), a promise of ruggedness (which I can verify from my model) and the rest is really just configurable options, like a privacy screen, touch display and so on.
Now, compare this to the just-updated MacBook Pro 13 inch model (the one with the 10th gen Intel CPUs). It starts at $2399. This is also a lot of money, but it’s $750 less than the X1 Carbon. What do you sacrifice for that?
No USB 3.0 ports
No Wi-Fi 6
Battery life rated at 10 hours instead of “19.5”
Heavier at 3.01 pounds
No shutter on webcam
Aluminum case will dent and scratch when treated roughly
What do you get over the X1?
Four Thunderbolt 3 ports instead of 2
Touch Bar (OK, some might consider this a negative)
13 inch display–smaller, but running at a higher resolution of 2560×1600 and at a more productivity-friendly 16:10 ratio
Wide color support
True tone (display can detect ambient light and adjust automatically)
Faster integrated graphics
16 GB ram (twice as much)
Ram is significantly faster
512 GB SSD (twice as much)
Faster CPU (2.0 GHz vs 1.6 GHz)
Really, unless you absolutely need Windows (which you can still run on the MacBook Pro, actually) or some of the privacy features, or must have Wi-Fi 6 now, the MacBook Pro is not just a better deal, it’s a significantly better deal.
How weird.
But good for Apple. I’ll be posting again about my own laptop possibilities again soon. I will not be considering an 8th gen ThinkPad X1 Carbon.
Today Apple released the updated 13 inch MacBook Pro. As updates go it was pretty tepid. The lower end version is essentially unchanged, still shipping with 8th gen Intel processors, but now with more base storage and the revised Magic keyboard. The magic part is that it’s not prone to fail like the butterfly keyboard. The higher end models include 10th gen processors, but are otherwise pretty much the same as well.
This has led people to speculate that another update is coming later this year, that may include a larger display and other niceties. We shall see.
The important thing here, though, is that with today’s update, Apple is no longer selling any laptops with the butterfly keyboard. From the introduction of the new MacBook in 2015 to today that means that users have been suffering through one of the worst keyboards to ever be fitted into a laptop for five years.
Watching Apple’s flailing attempts to fix the design (multiple times) was painful. And nothing could fix the actual typing experience that some loved, but many actively disliked, or even found uncomfortable (raises hand).
At long last, though, the butterfly keyboard is dead. Hopefully it has taken along with it the obsession with thinness over function that seemed to have Apple designers in its thrall. Yes, the butterfly keyboard was thin. It was also terrible. I still find it amazing that it made it into an actual shipping product (ironically that first product, the new MacBook, was killed after only four years).
Anyway, good job, Apple, for finally purging the butterfly keyboard. But next time don’t make your users suffer through years of a deeply flawed product, OK?
I’ve noticed a few glitches in Firefox lately, namely it sometimes doesn’t load my pinned tab on start-up (Gmail) or my default site (this very blog). It also seems less snappy than before. It’s possible these problems are related to extensions. For example, I use FVD Speed Dial to replace the new tab page with a pile o’ thumbnails for websites I frequent. I find this works way better for me than bookmarks because I can use two distinct visual cues to quickly choose the site I want: location of the thumbnail (they don’t shift around) and the actual look of the thumbnail (usually a miniature representation of the site). But I have so many of these that Firefox actually takes what feels like a long time to load up.
So last week I decided to again try Microsoft’s Chromium-based version of Edge. It now has Collections, which are basically parts of or entire sites that you can name and group together. I thought this might make a handy substitute for the speed dials and it actually is pretty nice.
But then, while doing work (actual paid work, as I’m still working from home) I noticed in Footprints (the system we use for managing incidents) it would not link knowledge base articles to tickets, requiring me to either not link (bad) or manually generate the link and paste it in (tedious). I just gave up and stopped using Edge.
There might be a fix for this issue and I can work around it, but I’ve reached a point in my life where I’m getting tired of fixing things that don’t work for reasons unknown, and workarounds aren’t that great, either. I want things to actually function properly, without a song and dance. I don’t expect perfection, but I do expect all the basics to behave as you’d expect.
So Edge has been kicked to the curb again. It’s too bad, in a way, because it is pretty snappy, and has some unique features (like the aforementioned collections). On the other hand, though Microsoft claims to care about my privacy, they are a giant corporation and while not as loose with ethics as Google (who basically inverted their famous “Don’t be evil” motto), I’m not sure I entirely trust them, either, as ads are definitely a part of their business in a way they aren’t for Mozilla (or Apple, but Safari sucks and it’s not on PC, anyway).
I’ll probably try Edge again at some point, though. The collections idea intrigues me. And the snappiness was nice.
Side note: For some reason have highlighted products in bold, in a wacky throwback to John C. Dvorak’s old columns in PC Magazine.
EDIT: I did try Edge again, just now (the morning after) and in a CBC News story there were big gaps in a story that I assumed were ads being blocked, but no, it was Twitter embeds. I verified that Twitter is the one tracker on the site blocked by default (by Edge), so I set it to allow tracking. It still won’t show tweets. On the one hand, it’s Twitter, so what am I really losing? On the other, if I want to see tweets, it should just work if I say, “Thou shalt allow tweets.” Even the usual routine of clearing cache and cookies, disabling ad blockers, restarting thew browser etc. has no effect. Edge, you stink!
EDIT, The Sequel: I switched over to the Mac mini to do some things and on a lark decided to try Edge because I am a glutton for punishment. Two things:
Twitter embeds are working on the CBC News site. Weird, but good.
Collections, which are supposed to sync across different systems, do not appear to be syncing, so boo. It may just be syncing slowly, though (hopefully not syncing into the depths to never be seen again).
Bonus third thing: I keep trying to spend more time on the Mac, because it’s where my main writing app is, and keep failing because I can never get mice working the way I want. This tasks me as Kirk tasked Khan. I’m hoping I get a better ending (than Khan).
EDIT, The Sequel to the Sequel: Tried a bunch of typical troubleshooting steps to get Collections to appear/sync on the Mac but no go. Alas. It is hard to turn off the li’l troubleshooter in me, but I will try for now.
While I was on the Mac I also tried the Logitech MX 720 mouse again, both on Bluetooth and with the receiver, after doing a firmware update. And it’s still kind of juddery and glitchy instead of smooth, noticeably worse than the Microsoft Sculpt mouse on Bluetooth, so this does appear to be a Logitech thing. Too bad the Sculpt mouse is so basic. Also I feel a bit dirty using a mouse with a dedicated Windows key on a Mac.
I’ll try yet again next week (update: on PC, that is).
I got a notification on my watch and like any well-trained modern technology user, I checked it out, to find this:
Nice indeed! There are a few issues with this, though:
I do not own an elliptical
I was sitting in my chair at the computer doing pretty much the opposite of burning calories. How many calories are consumed by using your eyes to read text off a screen? I’m assuming not many.
This raises the question of how the Fitbit Inspire HR, which was in my pocket at the time, somehow decided I not only did an impossible workout, but did it for 19 minutes. Normally there would be some semi-plausible explanation, like I was moving back and forth from one room to another, and it was misinterpreting that as exercise, but no, I was sitting still in a chair.
Now, I have tricked my Apple watch into thinking I did a few minutes of exercise by vigorously singing along to music with the headphones on, but that’s one of those semi-plausible things. With the Fitbit the only way I could have been less active is if I was sleeping.
It is a mystery, then, and a reminder that while technology can be great, it can also fall flat on its shiny metal face.
I got the ThinkPad because I a) hated the MacBook Pro’s butterfly keyboard and b) worried that it would fail out of warranty, leading to a $600-700 repair bill, given Apple’s insane (or insanely clever?) design that necessitates not just replacing the faulty keyboard, but basically half of the entire laptop.
Apple then started its keyboard repair program, which covers every model with a butterfly keyboard (this is every MacBook released since 2015, not counting the MacBook Air prior to its 2018 redesign). For four years after purchase, Apple will repair or replace a defective keyboard for no charge.
I bought the MacBook Pro in December 2016, so I am good for 10 more months, after which the cost of repair will again rise to about $700. Or maybe even more, because Apple has never been shy about raising prices.
This whole thing is further complicated by a couple of things related to my writing:
I went back to Ulysses, which is Mac-only
I still really hate the butterfly keyboard. I find it uncomfortable on my finger tips, and that’s even when I’m not applying my usual “fists of gorilla” approach to typing
I’m wed to macOS, but have begun looking for other writing app alternatives again, because the tool is really secondary to the writing itself.
But wait! In October 2019 Apple updated the 15 inch MacBook Pro to a 16 inch model and brought back the more traditional scissor switch keyboard. Instead of having half a millimeter of travel, it now has one entire millimeter of travel! I tried it out in an Apple store and it’s better, but it’s still not great.
The ThinkPad keyboard feels luxuriously deep and satisfying in comparison (my partner is using the ThinkPad now, as his $200 HP laptop is not running anymore so much as hobbling along intermittently).
So my current options are:
Hope that Apple comes out with an equivalent to my current MacBook Pro this year with a “good” keyboard and a price that is not any more outrageous that what it is currently. Rumors suggest the possibility of this is pretty good, but Apple is notoriously unreliable for updates on anything other than the iPhone and Apple Watch. And they have treated the Mac line pretty shoddily post-Jobs.
Get a Windows laptop and find other software to use. I’ve been trying out a bunch of new writing apps, as well as noodling around in some old standbys, like the perpetually-in-beta version 3 of Scrivener for PC. For the actual device, the Dell XPS 13 and ThinkPad (7th gen) both seem like strong candidates. The Surface Laptop 3 can be had for a decent price, too, and I’m not concerned about its relative lack of IO.
It’s early, so I’m not really leaning in one direction or the other yet. On the one hand, Ulysses is a really nice app. On the other, I resent having to pay a subscription for it (the updates have clearly not been enough to warrant the cost, which I’ll go into in a separate post). I’m also not a huge fan of macOS. It’s fine and for writing it does everything I need, but I am both extremely comfortable with Windows 10 and really like some of the native features of Windows (it may come as no surprise that windows management is really good, where in macOS it is just short of a disaster).
Anyway, I’m typing this on the MacBook Pro now and my finger tips are starting to hurt, so unless I switch to voice dictation, I am going to end this post here. More to come!
Today Microsoft released the new, Chromium-based version of its Edge browser. Chromium is the open standard that Google uses as the basis for Chrome, so while some think that Microsoft has essentially caved in and started using a reskinned version of Chrome, that’s not true. In fact, Microsoft will now have direct influence over the future of Chromium, helping to reduce Google’s oversized leverage.
Chromium Edge also doesn’t include all of Google’s data-collecting services, too–an important distinction.
While I have used Firefox for a hundred years and will use it for a hundred more, long after I’ve become a floating head in a jar, I am interested in seeing what an actual competitive Microsoft browser looks like. I’ve installed it on my PC and will also install it on my MacBook Pro and mini. I’m going to try sticking with it for a solid week to see how it feels vs. what I’m used to in Firefox.
Realistically, I don’t expect to keep using it, but you never know. I’ve previously used Chrome and yes, Internet Explorer, as my main browsers in the past, so I’m open to change.
Here’s a few things I already like (some of these are common features to most browsers, others are more unique):
Pinned tabs
Pinned sites on the taskbar. I find this more useful than I thought.
Reading mode
Being able to use Chrome extensions from the Chrome web store (MS’s store is a bit sparse)
The pretty backgrounds you can opt to get on the new tab page
The new tab page customization options
Nice-looking dark mode
Generally speedy, though these are early days. Er, hours.
UPDATE: The new tab page only lets you have a maximum of seven “top sites.” This is fantastically dumb and basically a deal breaker for me. I then spent most of the evening looking at other new tab extensions, but they all had features missing or other issues, such as:
Ugly as all get-out
Kind of skeevy (usually requiring an account)
Locking basic functionality behind a monthly subscription (lol)
Lacked customization (icon sizes, etc.)
Focusing on widgets and other things over presenting a list of sites
I did a search hoping there might be a way to have more than seven top sites on the official new tab page, but my results yielded nothing. I was using Bing, though.
Microsoft’s first attempt at wearable hardware looked more like a prison experiment.
Which is pretty much a perfect summation of how the device looked. Too bad Microsoft never kept developing it, because I think, like the Surface line, they would probably have nailed it after a few iterations and the thing was loaded with sensors. Alas.
The internet is aflutter over the announced price for adding wheels to the new Mac Pro. They cost $400 ($480 Canadian). The jokes, of course, write themselves.
Could these $400 wheels on a $6,000 computer turn out to be a surprisingly reasonable value?
No, of course not. They’re wheels. I’m pretty sure the fourth wheel will start wobbling in a few years just the same as any cart-like wheels would.
The only weird part is these ludicrous transportation units or whatever Jony Ive might call them (if he still worked at Apple) stand out against some actual reasonable things Apple has done recently, like upgrading the 15 inch MacBook Pro to a 16 inch model without raising the price (though it ain’t exactly cheap to start with), and actually dropping the price of this year’s equivalent to the iPhone XR while improving the specs.
The price doesn’t actually bother me as the Mac Pro is very much in the “maybe if I win the lottery” category and it probably still sucks for gaming. But given Apple’s track record with Macs (inconsistent at best, a disaster of neglect and quality control issues at worst), if I were one of those so-called pros who wants a pro-level machine, I’d be casting back to 2013 when Apple released the last Mac Pro.
It didn’t receive any updates in 2014.
Or 2015.
Or 2016.
Or 2017.
Or 2018 or 2019. It was, in fact, never updated. Apple essentially killed it the day it was released, they just never formally announced its death until four years later, then they continued to sell it for two more years before finally re-inventing a basic, modular PC that optionally comes with $400 wheels.
What I’m saying is if you want to get a new Mac Pro, keep in mind that what you unbox may be the exact same thing you might unbox in six years. And it will be the same price, too.
