The first step in the journey to digital comics is to figure out what you’re going to read them on. These days, the answer is pretty much going to always be “a tablet”… but which one?
I had a quick look at the market back in late 2011 and here’s how I made up my mind. First, I focused on the main ~10 inch tablets of the market. This included, for instance, the Motorola Xoom, the Asus Transformer and the Apple iPad 2.
I recently got an iPad (more on this later), and with it I got the much hyped smart cover.
I loved the simplicity of it, and how quickly you can take it off and put it back on again… However, I quickly realized that I probably had more dust on the screen while using that thing than if I didn’t have any cover at all. Among the problems I had the infamous “dust lines” — those three lines you get on the screen at exactly the same spot as the cover’s folds.
The problem was pretty obvious: the natural way to fold the cover, and the way Apple advertises it, is as follows:
But this results in the following situation:
The iPad rests on the folded cover as expected, but the outer faces of that triangular stand are the faces that go against the screen when the cover is closed! They would therefore pick up dust and other particle directly from the table and all around, and put them back onto your screen as soon as you walk away… I don’t know where Steve Jobs used to go with his iPad, but my house is not always spotless clean, and neither are any restaurant tables or office desks that I want to put my iPad on.
An easy workaround for this problem is to fold the cover the other way:
This way, the faces that go against the screen are actually inside the triangular stand, where they’re very unlikely to pick up any dust. This way of folding is a lot less intuitive, but once you get the hang of it, you can actually close and open it as fast as before. I haven’t had much dust on my screen ever since I started using this technique.
There’s just one big caveat to this workaround: it doesn’t work with the “stand up” mode.
If you look closely at the picture above, you’ll notice what’s wrong: gravity alone can unfold the cover and make your iPad fall down on the table. In my case, the magnetic strength of the cover is barely enough to counteract the iPad’s weight and make it stand on its own, but the slightest touch can make it crumble down like a house of a couple of very expensive cards. However, I don’t care because I’ve never felt the need to use that position so far.
As you probably already know, Amazon’s tablet, the Kindle Fire, was announced a few days ago. Priced at a pretty amazing $199, its purpose is more focused than your general usage tablet like the iPad or the Xoom: it’s specifically designed for consuming content like books, music and video (preferably through Amazon’s own services, of course). Although it will probably be possible to install some other apps (through Amazon’s AppStore) to do some email and chatting and gaming and what have you, it will probably be more limited than on those bigger tablets, and will likely be only advertised as the last bullet point on the list of specs, if at all.
Now you know what else was priced around $200 and was useful mostly for consuming content like books, music and video? Yep. The Archos 70 I got last year for $249 (I got it on a discount, it was normally at $279).
Oh sure, Archos may not have been advertising their product like that. They may have advertised it along the lines of:
The most awesome Android tablet ever! Do everything you want! Web browsing! Videos and music! Email!! Games!!! Video chat!!!! This is so awesome we’re running out of exclamation marks!!!!!
Being a long time Archos user, I’m used to their bullshit and I know how to read through it. It usually translates to:
It’s rubbish at everything, especially anything web-related, but it can read any fucking video format in the universe, doesn’t come with any bullshit iTunes-like sync program, and is so much cheaper than the competition.
And as I stated last time, that was just perfect: I only wanted a good portable media player, and maybe a nicer way to read my Instapaper clips. But, of course, everytime somebody saw my small cheap looking tablet, there was a good chance the discussion would go like this:
Well it looks like Amazon found a lot of people like me out there because the Kindle Fire’s product story is exactly what I was looking for a year ago. Well… apart for that one small detail about data freedom, because I’m not sure exactly how easy it will be to get your own content onto the device, without necessarily going through Amazon (especially since most of their content is not even available outside of the U.S. anyway).
At least I’m very happy to see someone try to move the market into a slightly new direction instead of spitting out confusing all-purpose Android tablets like everyone else.
I have a ReadyNAS NV+ at home to store most of my data and I’ve been pretty happy with it so far… except for one thing: although it’s running a flavor of Linux that you can access as root user (if you installed the EnableRootSSH add-on), you can’t do everything you would normally do with a Linux box.
First, like most pre-2010 consumer grade NASes, the NV+ runs on a sparc CPU, so there’s a lot of packages you don’t have access to unless you recompile them yourself. And that’s fine, if you know you’re going to waste your whole evening figuring out weird broken dependencies and compile errors. But, second, there’s some custom stuff in there, I don’t know what it is, but it basically prevents you from even upgrading to newer versions of some of the packages you do have access to. This means: don’t run apt-get upgrade on an NV+.
Let me repeat that: don’t run apt-get upgrade on an NV+. Ever.
What happens when you do it is that you lose SSH access, the web administration interface stops working, some of your network shares become inaccessible, and half of your left socks magically disappear. I know, I did it twice in the past (yes, I’m stupid like that).
In both cases, I was lucky enough to recover from my mistake by performing an OS reinstall. It keeps all the packages, add-ons and configuration settings you had before, and only resets the admin password to netgear1 or infrant1 (depending on the version of RAIDiator you had installed), so it almost works again right away afterwards. The downside is that if what fucked up your NAS was one of those add-ons or packages, you wouldn’t have any other option than to do a factory reset and recover your data from a backup (you at least have daily automated backups, right?). But in my case, I think it was one of the OS libraries (like glibc or something) that was causing the issue so that’s where I got lucky. Twice.
Those are the only problems I ever had with that box, so overall I’m still happy to own it. The X-RAID that comes with it makes life a lot easier (you can hot-swap disks, and you can mix different disk sizes), and the machine is small and pretty quiet (my external backup disks are louder). Unlike my media center PC, I wouldn’t have much fun trying to build my own NAS, I think.
…but DON’T RUN APT-GET UPGRADE!
A couple months ago I made a new addition to my home entertainment setup: a little wireless keyboard named “Rii”:
It’s a lot more practical to use than my previous Logitech wireless full size mouse and keyboard combo because it’s so easy to grab, do something quick, and toss away (e.g. restart a program, copy or move a few files, type a search query, etc…). Obviously it’s not as good if you want to do anything that takes more than a minute, so in that case what I do is use my living room laptop (a Macbook Pro that’s always sitting on the coffee table) to either remote desktop into the HTPC or control it with Synergy.
Thanks to Eddie for showing me this little gem!