Links and Thoughts (LnT) 2: 9 May 2014
Grand Funk Railroad – I’m Your Captain
Good Morning.
Business: (I’m tagging this one ‘business’ because I wasn’t sure how else to pitch it: OS? Platform? Computing?)
“Mainstream Chromebooks.” You never thought we’d be discussing Mainstream ChromeOS Anything, now did you?
The world’s largest PC maker now wants to sell you a Chromebook: Lenovo’s first mainstream Chromebooks start at just $279 : The Verge
ChromeOS doesn’t have the user-base of Android, and Chrome “apps” and extensions still need a lot of work — something about the form-factor and ‘vocabulary’ (for lack of a better word) of smart phones makes apps work on that platform in a way that doesn’t translate to bigger screens and web browsers — which to me is very odd, since even confined to a browser the laptop/desktop environment has a lot more potential and broader (dare I say it) application that can’t be matched by a 4” or even 7” screen.
ChromeOS (and its physical manifestation, the Chromebook) is an admission, or a realization, that very few of us need to run Photoshop or even Office on a daily basis and that from email to Facebook to Netflix, most computer users are spending 98% of their time in a web browser anyway. Without the need for compu-horsepower to run Call of Duty or Autodesk applications, you can get away with cheaper, underpowered chips — and when you combine that with plasticky cases and keyboards, and best-of-2010 (or maybe 2009) LCDs, you can push out a stand-alone web browser for under $200. (this widespread cheap-in-a-bad-way perception of Chromebooks is why Google put out the Pixel, of course. Not that anyone could afford one.)
With Samsung, HP, and now Lenovo on board, though, a Chromebook is starting to look viable. And as time goes on, the capability of Chrome apps and extensions will only grow. (finding the good stuff in the Chrome Web Store is another matter entirely, though. *Ugh*. That place is a swamp of bad implementations, spammy-and-spammish-seeming crapware, four year old early-adopters that are now sadly out-of-date and nigh-unusable, and other kruft that needs some serious curating. You listening, Google?)
Additionally: I still think Google should have pushed chromeOS for tablets, rather than android — especially on a 10” screen — but whatever. they make more money than I do.
A Chrome OS tablet? Don’t hold your breath : SlashGear
Gaming:
“We all knew it was coming, but Nintendo unleashed the bad-news bonanza late last night: It won’t make the 55 billion yen (about $520 million) profit it initially forecasted for this fiscal year, but instead it will lose about 25 billion yen ($240 million) due to weaker than expected sales of pretty much all of its products. It lowered this year’s sales forecast for the Wii U console from 9 million units to 2.8 million.”
Nintendo Loses Heaps of Money, Slashes Forecasts. So, What Now? : Chris Kohler, 17 January 2014, Wired
Nintendo is bleeding cash (it still has $10 BILLION or so in the bank, so this isn’t all gloom-and-doom) but with console generations now stretching into 7 or 8 years, losing out on a platform evolution (like, say, the Wii U is getting it’s rear-end whooped by PS4 and Xbox One) means losing out on a decade’s worth of profits and, more importantly, mindshare. When the gamers stop caring, you might find yourself shipwrecked on the shoals next to Dreamcast, Neo Geo, and 3DO.
As stated, though, Nintendo has a mound of cash — and a convenient ATM:
“Nintendo’s surprise reveal of Pokemon Alpha Sapphire and Pokemon Omega Ruby was a bit vague to say the least. The company described the 3DS games as a ‘fresh take’ on Game Boy Advance entries Pokemon Ruby and Pokemon Sapphire, while a brief press release mentioned things like a ‘new adventure’ and a ‘spectacular new world.’ So, just what are these games? Step in Satoru Iwata to clear things up, or at least a little bit. In today’s financial briefing, the Nintendo president described the games as ‘full remakes,’ which at least removes some of the confusion if not a lot of it.”
Joystiq
##
Today’s Book Recommendation is Naked Statistics by Charles Wheelan — Nathan Yau recently revisited this book over at flowingdata.com and I thought I’d do the same (especially with the paperback available, as opposed to the $27 hardcover). Speaking of Dr. Yau, he’s written two books himself — if you like the nifty maps and graphs folks link to and gush over all over the internet, you should check out Visualize This and Data Points to see how the datamages put ‘em together.
##
Diary entry for 9 May:
I’ve been examining my media diet recently, as well as my writing process. The two tie into each other, actually — especially when blogging.
— aside: and by blogging I’m also referring to the act of using twitter, tumblr, and (to a much lesser extent) google+ – ‘microblogging’ in the parlance.
Even using folders to organize them, I find there is very little use to a browser bookmark. Bookmarks are obviously a necessity (unless you like typing in urls for the sites you visit every day) but for making notes and citing references in longer posts, it’s messy and still too easy to lose something. Worse, I occasionally find a month-old (or even a week-old) link and I have to stop and ask myself: well why did I bookmark that?
There is, of course, an app for that – several in fact. I’m looking at Google Keep (because google; despite my snark above I’m invested into chrome/android/and most-things-google) but leaning more towards OneNote or Evernote. I’m researching the issue — actively researching, as of yesterday, as opposed to the back-of-the-mind-itch that it has been for the last six months.
Oddly enough, I do my writing in a text editor these days — completely giving up on LibreOffice Writer, LibreOffice having replaced OpenOffice which in turn replaced MS years ago. I think the last time I used MS Office was on my last desktop system (which I built myself); I’ve never installed it on any laptop that I’ve owned. So, um, twelve years ago I switched to open-source office? [edit: I made the switch with the first release of OpenOffice, 1.0, back in 2002 .] I still use Calc, as spreadsheets are a thing that are quite handy (to me) though for some of my projects I really should switch over to SQL or some other database implementation. (The now-neglected manga database has 10,000+ titles in it, just as an example)
I switched to a text editor, um, six years ago? …some of my oldest novel notes are in a .odt format (and spreadsheets; I’m that kind of author *chuckle*) so I know I used to write in Writer at least up to 2006 (when the OpenDocument standard was introduced) but I also have a very solid memory of writing for both ComicSnob [defunct] and Rocket Bomber exclusively in a text editor. My other notes and writing slowly but naturally followed suit.
Over time, it also became natural to write using mark-up language [em, strong, links, et al.] from the first draft — which further ossified and codified my process, now solidly entrenched in a text editor. [neither a recommendation nor a paid endorsement, I use Notepad++ – which has some features that really only apply to coders — but I do some of that, too]
Anyway, back to what I was saying about bookmarks:
I can either manually extract pull-quotes and build links in-real-time, as I browse, and file those in appropriate drafts or notes .txt documents — which is of course the better, more conscious method that I should always default to — or I can click the little star in the omnibar up top in Chrome, and maybe remember to select the correct bookmark folder while I’m at it.
You can guess which I do more often. Sometimes the first step in a draft is just going back through my bookmarks and figuring out what I was thinking. A regular reader (all dozen of you; and thank you) might have noticed that my analysis posts are link-and-quote heavy, going back a year or so.
I don’t know if switching to (for example) OneNote would help the process, though Microsoft would certainly want me to think so. I also found some glowing testimonials/tutorials online espousing the use of Evernote + Scrivener.
Like I said: I’m looking into it. I have to wonder, though, after years of working in a text editor, will I be able to make a switch? In an odd way, Notepad++ has become my Smith-Corona – a fetishistic part of my process. Different laptops and keyboard layouts come and go, but Courier Monospaced black in a plain white window remains constant.
This ended up being much more about my process, and not so much the media diet; something for the next entry, I guess. —M.
[subscribe: rss – twitter]
[bookmark these: http://www.rocketbomber.com/category/links-and-thoughts/]
