Posts by cheveron 70 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Sep 2012
I love the 12" iPad Pro. I also loved my old PowerBook 165. So I got WASDkeyboards.com to make a custom mechanical keyboard for my iPad. No batteries required and it works with the screen in vertical mode too. https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=2785426364831905
If on the other hand it is entirely emulation, then outputting to HDMI may not be so expensive, depending on the chip used.
The biggest expense with HDMI is licensing the thing. The original Vega is an ARM SoC, 16 meg of RAM and 64 meg of flash storage. There's no kernel. It's a bare-metal emulator, and it's using almost all of the capacity of the SoC. Vega+ may take a different approach though.
I recently went into an Apple reseller and was quite shocked at the pathetic looking keyboards and mice they make.
The last decent keyboards and mice Apple made had ADB connectors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Extended_Keyboard
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Desktop_Bus_Mouse_II
I'm sure el Reg had a recent article about another writer sticking with WordPerfect because it has a better workflow (I still use a manual typewriter for the first draft when I'm writing fiction). As I understand it there is a version of WordPerfect available as part of WordPerfect Office for current MS operating systems. On the Mac I may have to dig out version 3.5e again and see if I can get it working under SheepShaver.
The one I have is an old model. This is the current model. http://www.jessops.com/online.store/products/84531/show.html
It can handle negs and slides and the software has settings for different film types. The reason it is cheaper than equivalent scanners from Nikon is that it doesn't include a powerful computer for image correction. But it will scan at a higher resolution than a flatbed and I find PhotoShop is a perfectly adequate substitute for the image correction engine. It just takes longer.
One advantage of the digital revolution is that it is possible to pick up used film cameras and lenses that I never would have been able to afford in the past. I have a Nikon FM2 and selection of Nikkor lenses. I use Fuji film, long may they keep making it. I stopped using a darkroom a long time ago though. I can still get one hour film processing where I live. But then I have my own dedicated negative scanner (good resolution but not much image correction) and finally PhotoShop. I'm happy with this setup and the results I get. And it didn't cost me a fortune as I was a student when I bought my copy of PhotoShop.
I live in Britain, but I like my bacon crispy. Most people I know cook bacon in oil, but I prefer to cut the fat off and gently heat it until it melts and then cook the bacon in its own fat. You need to get the fat really hot before you add the bacon and then adjust your cooking time depending on how crispy you want it.
My daily drive is a 2010 MBA13. I went for a build-to-order with 256GB SSD, 4GB of RAM and a 2.13 GHz Core 2 Duo. It still feels pretty nippy, even in comparison to a recent MBP. But the keyboard is terrible. It's weak and flimsy and I think next time I buy a laptop I'm going to go for something a bit more rugged.
I learned BASIC from reading the keycaps on a ZX Spectrum Plus. It got me into programming. I went on to learn C. Then when emulators took off I taught myself Z80 assembly language. When I went back to university I learned Java. I think BASIC did what it set out to do, which was to give non-technical people an easy entry point to get computing tasks done. I think the modern equivalent is probably spreadsheet programming. I don't think it's as rewarding though.
I've noticed corrosion on my V-Sabatier knives since my wife has been putting them in the dishwasher. I can't say if they are getting dulled by the process as she also sharpens them regularly with a grinder. I'm willing to believe stainless is more hygienic, but it won't hold as keen an edge as non-stainless. After sharpening with a pocket whetstone, my sailmaker's knife will cut through eight layers of flax sail cloth without much effort. I can't get the same edge on my rig knife, but then it has to deal with salt water.
In the US patents could be applied for within 12-months of disclosure. In the rest of the world the patent must be applied for before disclosure. Once you've told the world about your great idea it cannot be patented. As I understand it, the US patent system now works this way as well for new patents.
I agree. Most MacBook Air users probably aren't running a virtual Windows desktop and wouldn't care what CPU they were using as long as their apps all worked (although that would noble anything running on Cider). Switching from x86-64 to ARM64 would probably mean higher margins for Apple.
I know Symbian is dead but my phone does at least one thing the other main smart phone don't. Swype (missing from Windows Phone and iOS) or offline HERE maps (missing from Android and iOS). As MS is not acquiring HERE, I hope the offline version makes it to Android, or that Apple or MS adds Swype to their OS.
During a sojourn in New Zealand I worked at the Ministry of Youth Development (http://www.myd.govt.nz), a sub-ministry of the MSD. I was impressed by the concerted effort to engage with young people and provide them with a better future. Other nations could learn a thing or two from New Zealand. The privacy concerns are reasonable, but if relecant data sharing can improve people's lives then it's hard to argue against it.
I did an A-level in comp sci back in the early 1990s. We were using Xenix on a network of 386s and as there was no Pascal compiler installed on the system our tutor reluctantly taught us C. We did our editing in vi. We did a little bit of assembly coding. I remember covering CISC CPU architecture, networks and databases (I think we had an Oracle 5 site license) in a fair amount of detail. With this knowledge of UNIX, a real-world programming language and relational databases I went on to do a degree in journalism.
I'm told it's really trivial to torrent movies in HD before they are released. People I know who do this think I'm mad for waiting until the DVD is massively discounted and paying £3 for a film. I'm no saint though. I'll hold my hands up to using a VPN to watch region-restricted content like iPlayer (when I'm out of the UK) and Hulu (when I'm out of the US).
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