Category: gadgetry.

gadgetry.

A (potentially annoying) ode to the Surface Go.

My MacBook Pro died on the plane to WorldCon while I was halfway through the trip to San Francisco. I rebooted it to finish a software installation, and it plain refused to come back to life. I’ve been using Macs for twenty years, so I know all the tricks to reset the PRAM and the SMC and all the nerd stuff you usually do as a first-level tech support protocol, but nothing worked, so it had to be hardware-related.

I had some work to do in San Jose, and all I had with me other than a dead MacBook Pro was my iPhone, but that doesn’t cut it for a lot of the stuff I have to do on a computer. So I sucked up the local California 9%+ sales tax and bought a Surface Go at a local Best Buy to let me get some of that needed work done before getting home.

I’ve been effusive about the little thing on social media, but after a few weeks of ownership, I can only reiterate what I said about it so far: it’s a near-perfect travel computer. I already have a Surface Pro and a Surface Laptop for various uses, so I am well familiar with the Surface line of products, and I think that Microsoft has hit an absolute home run with the Surface Go.

Its biggest selling point is that it’s a full-fledged Windows 10 computer that’s almost exactly the same size and weight of a standard iPad. I’ve tried to use the iPad Pro as a travel work machine, but while it’s very powerful–and a fantastic content consumption device–it’s not deserving of the Pro moniker when it comes to creative work. Its biggest drawbacks are the operating system (a souped-up mobile OS without robust file management), and a lack of mouse support. If you’re a writer, and you’ve ever tried to copy and paste text just with your finger on that touch screen, you know what I am talking about.)

The Surface Go has the same portable convenience, but it offers full mouse and keyboard support. Moreover, the Type Cover peripheral is excellent, especially for a device with a mere 10″ screen diagonal. The Type Cover for the Surface Go has a backlit keyboard that manages to be eminently usable despite its smaller size compared to its bigger brother, the Surface Pro, and the glass trackpad is closer to the Apple trackpads than any Windows machine I’ve used.

The rest of the hardware doesn’t feel like a budget compromise over the Surface Pro either. The Surface Go is made out of the same magnesium, it has the same excellent build quality, and the kickstand (the killer feature of the Surface tablet line as far as I am concerned) is the same as on the new Surface Pro, with infinite adjustability.

The Surface Go also has a SDHC expansion slot, a USB-C port which lets you recharge the device from a power bank on the go, and compatibility with the great Surface Pen for on-screen inking. (I’m telling you that if Apple put out a device like this, the Cupertino faithful would hail it as design genius, the Second Coming of Jobs.)

If it has any shortcomings, it’s the short-ish battery life compared to an iPad or Surface Pro, but that’s completely ameliorated by the fact that you can just top it off from a USB-C battery pack on the road. Some people have also commented on the processing power because the Surface Go has a Pentium Gold chip instead of a Core chip like the more expensive models, but I am here to tell you that the Pentium Gold is plenty fast for the stuff I do with this device, which is writing novels in Scrivener and Word, browsing the web, and checking email on the road. This is not a rig for playing World of Warcraft or Fortnite (although it can play them at low settings), so I won’t hold that against the Surface Go.

What is the Surface Go in the end? It’s a tiny, iPad-sized Windows 10 machine that runs full-fat Windows apps and fits into any bag that can hold a regular iPad, and that’s a major accomplishment on Microsoft’s part. I use it all the time now whenever I am away from my full-sized desktop, and I think the kids are going to get the Surface Pro and Surface Laptop as hand-me-downs. If you are looking for a writing rig that fits into the smallest of bags while still giving you full Windows 10 desktop OS power, this little device is pretty much king of the hill right now.

books. capitalism. gadgetry. technology. writing.

Kindles, and stuff to put on them

Andrew Liptak over at The Verge included Frontlines in a list of thirteen sci-fi series starters to fill up that new Kindle you got for Christmas. I’m in some really lofty company there, along with James S.A. Corey, Ann Leckie, Linda Nagata, John Scalzi, and N.K. Jemisin.

My favorite reads this year were the Broken Earth trilogy books by N.K. Jemisin, and the Expanse novels by James S.A. Corey (fellow Wild Cards writers Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham). The Expanse is just a rollicking good military-ish SF opus (although more Firefly than Battlestar Galactica as far as military detail goes), and the Broken Earth books are an eclectic and original post-apocalyptic melange of fantasy and SF that is very much its own thing.

With the sixth Frontlines novel out in two weeks, the series stands at over 600,000 words. If I wrote epic fantasy like George R.R. Martin or Brandon Sanderson, that would be maybe two books instead of six, so keep that in mind when you hear people bitching about release spans between books.

Speaking of Kindles and such, here’s my Christmas purchase this year:

That’s a Kindle Oasis 2, the new waterproof model with the 7″ e-ink display. I had the original Oasis, but surrendered it to Robin pretty much as soon as it arrived because it’s far more suitable for one-handed reading than her old Paperwhite. The new one is heavier than the old model, but the extra screen real estate is great, and it doesn’t need an add-on battery cover to get decent battery life anymore.

I find that I read far more on a dedicated e-ink device than on a tablet. My attention span does not get taxed with notifications and alerts, and there’s no way to check email or Twitter on a Paperwhite or Oasis. And it’s much easier on the eyes than a backlit tablet screen.

 

gadgetry. the munchkin wrangler gear whore labs.

honey, i shrunk the phone.

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Just before I went to Europe last year, I upgraded my phone from an iPhone 5 to a 6 Plus. Having read the reviews online (and having taken big swigs of the marketing Kool-Aid), I figured I could use the Plus to combine the jobs of both tablet and phone in one device.

After a year with Apple’s phablet, I have to conclude that rather than combining the best aspects of phone and tablet, it combines their drawbacks much more noticeably: it’s too big to make a convenient phone, and too small to make a decent tablet. I was constantly put off by the size when I used it as a phone–reaching icons on the other side of the screen was awkward, even with my big hands and Apple’s little home button double-tap sliding-of-the-screen trick. And when I tried to use it as a tablet substitute, the lack of screen real estate didn’t really let me use it efficiently. I also managed to bend it ever so slightly, enough that the phone would not sit level on a desk even face-down, and putting it into a protective case made a huge phone even larger and more cumbersome.

So I finally admitted defeat and traded the 6 Plus for an iPhone SE. My wife had the regular 6, so I was familiar with the size and handling, but it didn’t fit me all that well either. I think it’s Apple’s insistence on making the phones both very thin and round the corners at the same time, so the whole thing feels like a slick, skinny river stone. (Robin dropped hers on numerous occasions and had the screen replaced once.) And I have to say that I’m pretty happy with the smaller phone again. It’s much, much easier to use with one hand. And I find that I am now using the phone for phone jobs again, and don’t try to force it to be a tablet. If I need to dash out a text or a quick Tweet, I can do it on the phone. For anything else, I can get the iPad or laptop out, and get the job done more efficiently than trying to make it work on the not-quite-a-tablet iPhone 6 Plus.

Oh, and the Apple Watch really comes into its own when you use it with a smaller phone like the SE. With the Apple Watch’s ability to reply to texts or take quick hands-free calls, I can just about leave the phone in my pocket all day. If something pops up on the watch that requires a quick response, I use a canned reply or dictate one. And if it requires more than a sentence, I wait until I can get to the iPad or laptop, and no longer pry the phablet out of my pocket to peck out an email on it.

The phablet makes sense for some people, and I know that some of my friends dig theirs a lot. It didn’t work for me, because I generally use specialized devices for specific jobs and no longer try to do the technological Swiss Army Knife thing.

gadgetry. technology. the munchkin wrangler gear whore labs. writing.

it’s a tablet! it’s a laptop! it’s a dessert topping!

I have a severe case of technology ADD. When it comes to hardware, I sometimes impulse-buy shiny things just to try them out and see how they fit my workflow. Sometimes they look and work better on the store shelf or in the YouTube review than they do in actual real-world use, and sometimes they exceed even my rosy expectations.

Here, for example, are the two devices I’ve been using for work on the go. On the left is a 12″ MacBook, one of the new thin ones that came out this spring. On the right is the Surface Pro 3, Microsoft’s ambitious tablet that is marketed as a sort of hybrid device, a tablet that can also be a laptop replacement.

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I save all my work to two different cloud services, OneDrive and iCloud Drive, both of which are installed on both machines. Both devices are very close to each other in hardware specs, and they are marketed as competitors to each other. The MacBook has a CoreM CPU, 8GB RAM, and a 256GB SSD for storage. The Surface Pro 3 has a Core i5, 8GB RAM, and a 128GB SSD. The Mac runs MacOS X, the Surface runs Windows 10 Professional, both full desktop operating systems. They are both under two pounds in weight. (Without its type cover, the SP3 is quite a bit lighter.) Once you add in the SP3’s keyboard cover (which is really an essential add-on), they are similarly priced.

Now, I’m a big fan of Apple hardware, and their laptops are without a doubt the best laptops on the market. They are meticulously designed, aesthetically pleasing, extremely well put together, and running a pretty bomb-proof OS. But when it comes to overall flexibility in day-to-day use, the Surface Pro 3 has it all over the MacBook. It’s a tablet by format, but it’s full-power hardware running a desktop OS, essentially an Ultrabook in slate form. Click on the keyboard cover, and it becomes a laptop (albeit one with inferior keyboard and trackpad compared to the Mac’s.) Take off the keyboard, and you have a tablet, with the OS automatically reconfiguring itself for tablet optimization. It also has a touch screen, and there’s an active pressure-sensitive pen stylus that can be used to draw and write on the screen (and the Surface’s e-ink implementation and palm print detection are the best I’ve tried on any device.) And you can click it into its docking station and use it as a desktop system with external mouse and keyboard. For sheer flexibility–the ability to use it in whatever way fits your workflow best, and switch modes on the fly as needed–there’s simply nothing out there that comes close to touching the Surface Pro 3.

To be sure, the MacBook makes a better laptop than the SP3 in laptop mode. The kickstand requires more real estate on an airplane tray or desk than the base of the MacBook, the keyboard isn’t quite as stable or nice to type on, and using the SP3 directly on your lap isn’t as natural and stable as doing the same with the MacBook. But the MacBook can’t be used in tablet mode at all, and it has neither touch screen nor stylus. And as a tablet, the iPad makes a better one for media consumption because it’s lighter and has longer battery life, but the SP3 blows the iPad away when it comes to processing power and connectivity. (You can run Photoshop or Scrivener on this thing, and play some Diablo III or World of Warcraft when you’re done.)

Which one is more fun to use? As a laptop, the MacBook is really hard to beat, but that’s the only way you can use it. The fun with the SP3 comes from being able to do more with it. I can have it in its dock and use it as a desktop system. I can sit at the table with it in laptop mode, type away at an email, then pick it up and take off the keyboard as I hand the whole thing to Robin so she can read the reply. I can sketch or take handwritten notes on it as it’s propped up against the steering wheel while I wait for the kids to get out of school. Or I can sit in the recliner and read news or flip out the kickstand to get some more work done if I feel like it. They set out to design a tablet that can capably serve as the One Device That Does It All, and I have to say that after owning and using one for a good while, they are pretty damn close with the Surface Pro 3. It’s not going to be a solution for everyone, but I really enjoy using mine, and it works very well for me.

castle frostbite. gadgetry. new hampshah. the munchkin wrangler gear whore labs. weather.

winter boots for the grand marnier.

We moved to Castle Frostbite in December of 2007. The Castle has a driveway that is dog-legged and at a 5-percent incline that increases to nine or ten percent at the very top of the driveway, in the least convenient spot possible.

I’ve been driving Grand Caravans since before we moved up here, and those are front wheel drive only. Every year when our driveway gets its permanent winter layer of snow and ice, I’ve had frequent issues with making the driveway run from bottom to top, even with new winter tires, and I’ve had to park at the bottom of the driveway a lot.

This year, I finally decided to spring for a set of these puppies:

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Those are Finnish Nokian-brand studded snow tires. As you can see, they have little tungsten carbide studs set into the treads, for bite on icy surfaces.

Those things are purest, darkest magic. My FWD minivan trucks up that icy incline now at least as well as Robin’s 4WD Jeep Cherokee. I don’t know why I didn’t try those out earlier…oh, wait, I do: they’re twice the price of regular snow tires. But man, are they ever worth the extra coin. Not only does the car have traction on ice like it’s asphalt in summer, but it stops much better on iffy surfaces as well. I haven’t spun a tire since I got the Nokians. TWO ENTHUSIASTIC THUMBS UP from the Munchkin Wrangler Gear Whore Labs.  AAAAA++++ WOULD SHELL OUT HALF A MORTGAGE PAYMENT AGAIN.

gadgetry. Uncategorized writing.

it printed in cuneiform.

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That monstrosity is a Brother WP-1 word processor. I recently found this picture online, and boy, did it trigger some memories.

I got one of those babies in the late 1980s, when I was just out of high school. I kept it throughout my four years of military service, and it got dragged to every duty station where I spent more than a few weeks. And “dragged” is the right word here–it was an all-in-one unit with an amber-and-black CRT, a floppy drive, and a daisy wheel printer, and it weighed probably close to forty pounds. (It did have a convenient carry handle, so it was somewhat portable, but let me tell you that this thing was no MacBook Air. It tested your commitment. You really had to want to write if you chose to take your word processor the weight of a car battery with you.)

I filled up many a 3.5″ disk with my early attempts at Fictional Noveling, let me tell you. And I only got rid of the trusty Brother when I got my first PC, a 486 DX2-50, which had Windows 3.1 and Microsoft Word on it.

Man, I’ve been at this writing thing for a while. I already had dreams of making this writing thing a profession when I was still in high school. And it only took 25 years of pounding away at the keyboard!

gadgetry. history. technology.

bow & arrow.

Back when I went to community college in Tennessee, I took archery as one of my P.E. classes, and found that I really enjoyed it. Ever since then, I had plans to get a bow of my own and shoot it regularly, but we didn’t have the space in Tennessee, and other priorities got in the way after we moved to New Hampshire.

Last year I finally bought a decent bow and ancillary equipment, and started flinging arrows again. It’s a recurve bow with no added equipment–no sights, fancy arrow rest, or bow-mounted quiver. I like the low-tech aspect of it, and it’s more of a challenge to get good with what’s essentially just a length of springy wood and a string.

I often take it out when I’m waiting for the school bus, and shoot at the orange bag at various distances. I try to empty the twelve-arrow quiver three or four times before the bus drops the kids off at the bottom of our driveway. It’s interesting just how precisely you can shoot an arrow off a fairly simple bow with a little bit of practice. And archery is one of the sports where you can see rapid improvement with frequent practice. I’ll notice when I haven’t shot a bow for a few weeks–the arrows tend to go a little wider than usual–but get back to it for a day or three, and you can pop that bag eleven out of twelve times at 30 yards and feel like some bad-ass middle-aged Robin Hood again.

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First session after a month and a half without any practice. Half an hour later, they were all reliably in the bag again.

capitalism. gadgetry. technology. writing.

clickity-clack.

The Apple Bluetooth wireless keyboard that ships with new Macs is very sleek and stylish, but it doesn’t stand up to hard typing. It has minimal key travel, lacks a Delete key, and the tactile feedback is so-so at best. For checking Facebook and writing emails, it’s OK, but folks who have to drum out thousands of words a day need something a little more industrial.

I’ve been a long-time fan of the old IBM Model M, the clicky battleship-grade keyboards from the 1990s. I still have three or four of the old things, and all of them are working. With every passing year, however, it gets more difficult to make them work with modern PCs. Not only do they require PS/2 adapters, but they also draw a lot of power through the USB port, and most PS/2-to-USB adapters will not work with a Model M correctly. Also, using them with a Mac requires remapping of the Control, Alt, and Option keys, which are backwards on a Mac, so that’s a bit of a hassle. {Also, the Model M has the old PC standard Ctrl and Alt keys, whereas the Mac has Control, Option, and Command keys, which means you’re always one modifier key short when you use a Model M with a Mac.)

Until now, I haven’t really come across a good up-to-date replacement for the Model M. I’ve tried a bunch of mechanical keyboards made for gaming, but they’re a bit too bulky and specialized, and not really made with lots of heavy typing in mind. They have lots of superfluous features and usually take up about as much desk space as a family-sized pizza. The ones I found that were less frilly didn’t quite have the right feel to the keys. None of them had a clean design and the satisfying clicky action of the old Model M.

And then I found this one:

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Typist Nirvana, now in glossy piano black.

That’s the Das Keyboard, specifically the Professional Model S for the Mac. They also make a PC version, and a stealth model with no lettering on the keycaps for you touch-typist show-offs.

Yeah, it’s pretty pricy, but for a writer, it’s the main interface with the PC and by far the hardest-used part of the whole system. It makes no sense to save on this particular part of the machine.

The Das Keyboard has Cherry MX Blue key switches, not the expensive-to-make buckling springs of the original model M, but they have the same sort of satisfying clicky sound and tactile feedback. 

Typing on this thing is an absolute pleasure, it looks good, and it works with any system that has USB ports. There are two USB ports on the side for thumb drives and mouse dongles and such, and it’s refreshingly Spartan in design—no neon lights, rows of Macro keys, volume wheels, or built-in laser projector and weather station. Just a glossy black chassis with the standard key layout, and that’s it. 

It’s not a gaming keyboard, and it has no other frills. (The key caps aren’t even illuminated, which seems to be a standard feature on high-end keyboards these days.) The Cherry MX Blue switches are not quite as noisy as the buckling springs on the Model M, but they still make enough of a racket that you’ll keep your spouse or roommate up if you use the keyboard anywhere near the bedroom. But for hard typing, there’s nothing better on the market right now. Plus, you know, it has a German article in front of “keyboard” which automatically imbues it with Teutonic engineering mojo.

If you type a lot, and you can’t stand the shitty $10 that came with your computer (or the $50 picture-of-a-keyboard they ship with macs these days), do your hands a favor and look into one of these. They’re the closest you’ll get to the old Model M clicky monsters without requiring any adapter voodoo or eBay adventures. The Das Keyboard Professional Model S gets two enthusiastic thumbs up from the Munchkin Wrangler Gear Whore Labs.

capitalism. gadgetry. horseless carriages.

meet the new frostbite one.

So I got to upgrade the long-in-the-tooth Dogevan last week. I was briefly flirting with the idea of downsizing and going with a Mazda5 or a Mistubishi Outlander, based on their ability to serve as a six- and seven-seater respectively in a pinch.

In the end, however, I decided on getting…another Grand Caravan.

Here’s the new Frostbite One, a Dodge Grand Caravan R/T:

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(Chicken sold separately.)

It’s pretty tricked-out, being the top trim of the Grand Caravan line. It still seems silly for Dodge to use the hallowed R/T (Road/Track) label for a seven-seat box on wheels, but it does make some concessions to sportiness, as far as that’s possible for a minivan. The suspension is a little more firm (the R/T has a dual-shock setup), and the color scheme is decidedly monochrome with the smoke-colored headlights and fascia. 

It’s not a Challenger R/T, but compared to the old Dogevan, this thing flies. The old one had a 170HP V6 bolted to a four-speed automatic transmission. This one has a 283HP V6 bolted to a six-speed. You won’t be taking on any Porsches with it, but for a vehicle of its size, it can haul a respectable amount of ass. You put your foot down hard on the accelerator on an on-ramp, and things will happen. And it gets roughly the same gas mileage as the old engine thanks to the more efficient transmission and newer engine tech.

This is the new workplace:

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All leather, with more hidden storage compartments than a Corellian freighter, and with the navigation package that was at the top of my wish list. Not sexy, but comfy and convenient. It makes the old van look very frumpy in comparison.

The kids have a DVD screen in the back that pops out of the ceiling, and wireless infrared headphones so the adults in the front seats don’t have to listen to the fourth straight on-the-road showing of Frozen. And there’s an I/O panel in the bottom of the B-pillar that lets you feed the onboard entertainment display via HDMI or composite cables:

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It even has a 110V outlet right underneath, so you can plug in a gaming console to keep the kids busy when you run out of movies. We didn’t have that kind of luxury when I was a kid, no sirree. We had rocks! And we was thankful!

The old Dogevan served us without any trouble for almost eight years, which is why I leaned toward another. Also, I have gotten spoiled by the utility of the full-sized van. Haul seven people or 150 cubic feet of cargo, or any combination thereof, with seats that disappear in the floor at the flick of a lever, and a cargo bay that lets you transport a tall stack of standard 4×8 drywall or plywood sheets if you have to.

If this new Dogevan serves us half as well as the last one did, it was worth the purchase. And just to make sure I don’t get stuck with any random gremlins, I also got the lifetime Mopar bumper-to-bumper warranty with it. 

Now to roll my pennies for that supplemental fun vehicle to put into the garage next to this thing. They do have a lovely flame-orange Challenger R/T sitting on the lot…

capitalism. gadgetry. technology. the munchkin wrangler gear whore labs.

new paperless typewriter.

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That’s the new word-banger-outer here in the Castle Frostbite Novel Factory, a 13″ MacBook Pro with Retina display. (I usually work longhand and then transcribe stuff every chapter or so, but the current deadline means that I have to skip a step and write straight on the computer.)

I had a MacBook Air last year, but I sold it to a friend. It was a perfectly cromulent machine, and shared many of the great properties of its successor, but it was a little too thin for me. In particular, the keyboard on the Air is slightly but noticeably more shallow than that on the Pro because there’s less vertical space for key travel, and with my typing style, I tendedtomissthespacebaralot. The new one doesn’t have that issue for me, and it has that fabulous Retina display.

I keep using Mac portables because they offer me a few things that Windows laptops (even the nicest ones) don’t:

  • I like the design and the hardware, especially the great keyboards, and the glass trackpad is simply the best in the industry by a fair margin. The friction is just right, it’s easy to clean off, and all the gestures just work. I’ve never used a Windows laptop with a trackpad that comes even close to those on the MacBook Pros and Airs.
  • I run Scrivener, and the Mac version of Scrivener is one version number ahead of the Windows version. It’s not a great feature disparity, but enough to make me pony up the Mac premium. (For example, Mac Scrivener lets you write toward a deadline and keeps a running word count that calculates your daily quota to meet that deadline. Small thing, but something I use all the time.)
  • Macs hold their value better and have a longer usable service life. I replace PCs in about half the time I get out of my Macs.
  • I think Mac OS X is still better than Windows, and it won’t run on anything but a Mac,of course. In addition, I can run both MacOS and Windows on a MacBook Pro via Boot Camp, which makes it more flexible than a Windows laptop.

I have to say that this MacBook Pro is seriously the nicest piece of computing hardware I’ve ever owned. The Retina screen is just pin-sharp, and there’s a major difference in quality between it and a non-retina display. Text looks like it’s been painted on with an ink brush, no visible pixellation at all in any resolution. Combine that with the far better text anti-aliasing of MacOS vs. that of Windows, and there’s simply no comparison when it comes to the way text looks on screen. When you spend hours and hours looking at words on a screen, stuff like that becomes a compelling factor for purchasing decisions.

The battery life is insane. Apple specifies “over 9 hours” for the battery, but with the brightness dialed down to 50-60% and just word processing going on, it routinely clocks 11-12 hours. That’s nuts for a pro-level machine with a Core i5. It’s just the perfect blend of power, portability, endurance, screen size, and hardware build quality, and I’m quite glad I decided to pick one up.

(Quick hardware census from the Super-Secret Writing Retreat: two of us with MacBook Pros, and five with Windows laptops of various brands. Two of those five PCs were Lenovo ThinkPads, which are really nice machines and probably the brand I would buy if I couldn’t get my hands on a MacBook Pro. Great keyboards, and they managed to retain that distinctive “bento box” square black design from the IBM days.)

The hard drive in the background is a LaCie Porsche Design 2TB USB 3.0 for TimeMachine backups and media stuff. Thunderbolt drives are a smidgen faster, but two to three times as expensive, and I don’t need the extra little bit of speed for incremental TimeMachine backups.

So there you have it: I’m not an Apple fanboi. I am an informed consumer with particular preferences.