Category: hardware

new iPad first impressions

I got my new iPad Air yesterday, so I thought I’d post some initial impressions.

The main issue with my old iPad was just that it was getting too slow. This new one definitely fixes that problem. Some of the apps on the old iPad had gotten ludicrously slow, including Twitterrific, which was taking several minutes to refresh my Twitter feed. That’s now back to normal, taking only a second or two. So the new iPad fixes the one big thing I needed fixed; everything else is gravy.

The old iPad was old enough that it didn’t have Touch ID, so having that on my iPad is new for me. There’s nothing unexpected there. I had Touch ID on my last iPhone (the SE), and, now that I think about it, the one before that (the 5s), so I’ve had it for a long time. (My new iPhone, of course, has Face ID instead.) I guess it’s nice having Touch ID on the iPad, so I don’t have to type in my passcode every time I use it.

The screen is 10.5″, so it’s a little bigger than the old one, which was 9.7″. Honestly, I can’t tell the difference unless I hold them up next to each other. The slightly larger screen doesn’t seem to make a noticeable difference in everyday use. I’m also assuming that the screen/display is technically better than the one on the old iPad. I haven’t really checked to see what’s changed on that, but I assume a bunch of stuff has. Nevertheless, I don’t really notice a difference in everyday use. I haven’t tried reading any comics on it yet though. I’m wondering if either the larger size or the “better” display results in a noticeably nicer comic reading experience.

This iPad supports the Pencil and the Smart Keyboard, but I didn’t pick up either of those. I don’t really have a good use case for the Pencil, though I’m curious about it. And I’d like to switch from my old Logitech Bluetooth keyboard to the Smart Keyboard, but I don’t really think it’s worth the money. (I only use a keyboard with my iPad occasionally.)

So, overall… meh. It does what I need it to do, lots faster than my old iPad. There aren’t really any mind-blowing new features or amazing improvements.

That’s probably the last big Apple purchase I’ll make this year (and hopefully there won’t be any next year). I replaced my MacBook about a year ago; I’m hoping that lasts another two years. (At minimum, I’d like to see it outlast Apple’s stubborn insistence on sticking with their butterfly keyboards. If it doesn’t, I may have to give up on macOS, at least as a laptop OS.) I replaced my iPhone and Apple Watch in December 2018. I’d like to see them both last at least until January 2021, and maybe well into 2021. I may pick up a pair of AirPods at some point, but I’m still on the fence about those.

new iPad Air

After dithering back and forth over the last few months about whether or not to get a new iPad, and which one to get, I finally broke down and ordered a new 10.5″ iPad Air yesterday. I got the basic 64 GB model, which is twice the storage of my old iPad Air, and should be enough for me, for now.

Ars Technica recently posted a fairly lengthy review of the new Air and Mini, and it’s largely positive. Most of the negative stuff either applies only to the Mini or isn’t something that I care about.

I bought my first iPad in 2010, my second in 2012, and my third (and most recent) in 2014. So I’ve waited a lot longer than usual to replace it this time. (And, heck, I bought that last one used, off eBay, so it’s really from 2013, I think.) The old iPad has held together for quite a while, but it’s really showing its age now. The battery life is pretty bad, and a lot of stuff on it is pretty slow. (I’m actually kind of surprised at how much stuff isn’t slow. But the stuff that is slow is getting to be a real pain.)

I’m using Apple’s trade-in program to get rid of the old iPad. They’re giving me $70 for it, which is just enough to pay for the AppleCare on the new iPad.

I’ll probably post some thoughts on it after I’ve received it and had a chance to use it for a few days.

Stumbling Through

I’m taking a scheduled day off from work today. My original plan was to go into NYC and see the new Tolkien exhibit at the Morgan Library. But I started feeling sick earlier this week. And it started getting really cold. Yesterday started out at 1° F, with a “feels like” temp of -12°. So I called in sick yesterday. If not for the weather, I probably could have stumbled through work yesterday and even made it into New York today, but it got to be too much. Today is a little warmer. It started out at 5° (at 6am), and is now up to 14° (at 10am). But that’s still cold enough that hopping on a train to New York seemed like a bad idea. So I’m cocooned in my apartment, trying to stay warm and comfortable.

I didn’t leave the apartment at all yesterday, and spent most of the day reading comics, listening to podcasts, and watching TV. I’m being a little more productive today. I actually left the apartment (to take out the garbage), and I’m currently working through my to-do list, getting some tax stuff organized and taking care of some other miscellaneous paperwork.

I was doing a lot of stuff on my desktop PC this morning, and it had been working fine, but it decided to crash again, about a half-hour ago. I thought I was going to have to reinstall Windows again, but after a few reboots, it came back up, and has been working fine. My faith in Windows 10 in general, and this PC in particular, is getting pretty shaky. I still really don’t want to have to buy a new PC right now, but I might have to. I have other things to worry about right now, so I’m going to hope for the best. But if it keeps crashing, I’m going to have to think about either getting a new PC or maybe giving up on Windows 10 and switching my desktop machine over to a Mac Mini or something like that.

Anyway, that’s not really what I wanted to blog about today. I had a few subjects I was going to cover. First, I was going to return to my comic book indecision post from late last year. The news that St. Mark’s Comics is closing got me thinking about that again, along with a couple of articles related to the DC Universe service. (Specifically: Young Justice sounds pretty good, and the comic book library associated with DC Universe is getting bigger.) I was never actually a regular customer at St. Mark’s, but it was a pretty well-known store in NYC. I still like the idea of supporting independent brick-and-mortal comic book shops, but it’s not really practical for me to do that right now, even with the shop that’s right across the street from me.

I’m also still not ready to switch to all-digital though. I’m going to hang in there with Westfield for a few more months, at least until the end of Warren Ellis’ Wild Storm series. After that, though, I may stop buying monthly books again. I’m looking at my pile, and I see that I’m about a year behind on some of my books. So I’m probably going to need to take a break.

I had a few other things I wanted to blog about, but I should probably stop now. It’s almost 11am, and I want to actually read a few comics today too. I read Christopher Priest’s run on Justice League yesterday, and I want to try getting through maybe a dozen issues of something or other today. I still can’t decide what though. And I probably won’t make it through a dozen comics today either. I’m actually feeling like maybe it’s time for a nap now.

a few more iPhone XR notes

I’ve had my new iPhone XR for a few weeks now, so I thought I’d post some follow-up notes on it. My last post on it was on New Year’s Day.

First, while it has been generally reliable, it did crash once. And it required a “force restart” to get it back up, via the procedure described here: volume up, volume down, then hold the side button. It came back up with no data loss, and it’s been fine since, but I hope that doesn’t happen regularly.

Headphones

On the headphone jack front, I’ve settled on using the Belkin Rockstar adapter in the car, using the $9 headphone jack adapter with my old Sony earbuds at work, and using the Lightning Earpods at home. The whole headphone jack thing got me thinking about headphones vs earbuds vs earphones and stuff like that.

I came to realize that the Sony MDR-J10 earbuds that I’ve been using at work for so long are almost perfect. I bought them many years ago, in a Staples Express in Penn Station NY, for maybe $20. They’re not made anymore, but it seems that they were popular enough that a used pair goes for $50-$100 now. They’re regular earbuds that don’t go all the way into the ear, and they have clips that fit behind the ear to hold them in place. So they’re comfortable and they don’t fall out.

Sony makes a similar pair now, the MDR-AS210/B, but it’s not quite the same design as the MDR-J10. I also haven’t found anyone that makes a similar design that includes a Lightning connector instead of a regular headphone plug.

I’ve been using the Apple “EarPods” at home, for listening to podcasts and audiobooks, and they’re not horrible. They’re not nearly as good a fit as the Sony MDR-J10’s though. (Specifically, the left ear is a good fit, but the right ear isn’t. I guess my ears aren’t both quite the same size.) I’m thinking about buying a pair of the newer Sony MDR-AS210/B earbuds for use at home, with the $9 headphone jack adapter.

I’m also curious about these Urbanears earbuds that I saw in the MoMA gift shop recently. The design is interesting and might be a good fit. (Or not. If I buy them, I should make sure they’re returnable.)

I’m still trying to avoid Bluetooth headphones and/or in-ear designs. I may eventually give up and try Bluetooth, but I’m resisting. I don’t want to add yet one more device with a battery that needs to be charged to my already-impressive list of devices with batteries in them. And the in-ear ones just don’t seem like they’d work well for me.

Cases

I’ve bought two cases for the phone, one a sleeve, and the other a silicone case. I ordered the sleeve first, but it only showed up yesterday, since it was shipped ground from Germany. (I didn’t notice that when I ordered it.) I initially tried using the phone with no case at all, but I found that the back was a little too slippery, hence the silicone case. That case does a good job of making it harder for the phone to slip out of my hands or fall off a table.

I’ve noticed that the screen on this phone seems to pick up a lot of dust (or lint or whatever) when I have it in my pocket, hence the sleeve. I like the idea of a sleeve, for a couple of reasons. First, for the screen protection. The second reason is a little subtle, but I like having the phone in the sleeve when I’m not using it; it makes it a little harder for me to pick it up and start fiddling with it when I should be doing something else. It adds just enough friction that it’s a little easier to ignore the phone.

Of course, the sleeve is too tight for the phone to fit when the silicone case is on it, so I’m going to have to work that out. I’ll probably go back and forth between the two for awhile.

I was amused to see that Apple is now selling a battery case for the XR and XS. The XR’s battery life is good enough that I shouldn’t need an external battery any time soon. Apple’s battery case is ridiculously expensive, at $129. But that’s Apple. There are third-party battery cases that only cost $35.

Yet More Windows 10 Grief

My desktop PC has been running fine since rebuilding it back in November. But today, something happened. I don’t know what exactly. I had left the PC on all day, having taken care of some bill paying and stuff in the morning.

I noticed early this evening that it seemed to be stuck in a reboot cycle, crashing every time it rebooted. Long story short, I had to use the “Reset My PC” option to reinstall Windows 10. That option lets you keep all of your files, but forces you to reinstall all of your applications. So that’s what I’ve been doing for the last few hours.

My best guess is that Windows 10 decided to install some updates during the day, when I was out, and something went awry that borked my Windows install. I haven’t seem any evidence of an actual hardware problem.

Since I’ve only just recently had to redo my setup, I still had pretty up-to-date notes and install files, so getting everything back was pretty painless. At this point, I’ve installed just about everything. It took about two hours total to reinstall Windows and all of my applications.

But I’m getting a little annoyed with Windows 10. It seems like there’s way too much that can go wrong with Windows updates these days, and there’s not really any way to control them, if you’re using a consumer version of Windows 10. I’m too deeply attached to the Windows ecosystem to be able to easily pull out and switch over to Linux, or anything like that. And I love macOS, but I can’t really go Mac-only either. (And the Mac ecosystem has its own problems.)

Anyway, here’s hoping that this box holds itself together for a while longer. After some of the expenses I’ve had over the last few months, the last thing I need would be to have to go out and buy a new Windows PC.

new Apple gear

I’ve been thinking about buying some new Apple gear lately. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about replacing my iPhone, iPad, and Watch.

My old iPhone SE is almost (but not quite) three years old. The battery life on it has been pretty bad lately. If I go through a whole day without getting a chance to recharge, it’s usually at about 20% by the end of the day. And if I use anything that drains the battery, like Uber, Lyft, or Apple Maps, it can drain down enough that it shuts itself down. (I had this problem one day during NYCC this year, where the phone was dead by early afternoon, largely because I’d used Uber to get to the con.) And it’s been getting noticeably slow lately too, in some apps.

The iPad I’m using now is an iPad Air that I bought via eBay in 2014. The battery life isn’t good, and it’s acting a little funny sometimes, but overall it’s still OK. I’d like to replace it, but it’s not top priority.

And my Apple Watch is a “Series 0” that I bought not long after I bought the iPhone SE. There’s really nothing wrong with it, but it won’t run watchOS 5.

I’ve been looking at the iPhone XR, but I haven’t been really enthusiastic about any of the current crop of iPhones. They’re all too expensive, too big, and none of them have headphone jacks. But, well, I decided to give in and buy an iPhone XR today. I ordered it via the Apple Store app on my old phone, for pickup at my local Apple Store. I got the “(Product)Red” 128GB version. We’ll see if I can get used to the size and the lack of a headphone jack. The total price, including AppleCare, the $9 headphone adapter, and a Belkin Rockstar adapter (so I can use headphones and charge it at the same time), came to just under $1000. Which seems like a crazy amount of money to pay for a phone. But oh well. I’m too old and set in my ways to switch from iOS to Android, so I have to pay that Apple premium.

And a friend dropped by today with a Christmas present for me: a new Series 3 Apple Watch! So now I have that taken care of too. The Series 3, physically, is pretty much identical to the Series 0. I haven’t done enough with it yet to tell whether or not it’s any better than the Series 0, in any noticeable ways, but I’m happy to have it, and to now be running watchOS 5.

Setup on the iPhone XR was a little painful, but could have been worse. It took several tries to activate it with Verizon. And, since it was running a slightly older version of iOS than my SE, I had to set it up as new, update iOS, then restore from backup. Setup for the Watch was comparatively easy. It paired with the new iPhone easily, and restored from the previous Apple Watch backup pretty quickly.

Over the next few days, I’ll have to see if I can get used to carrying and using a larger phone. The XR is significantly bigger than the SE. While the larger screen is nice, it’s a bit harder to hold than the SE, and it’s noticeably heavier. I haven’t put it in a case yet, and I’m not sure if I’m going to; it looks nice as-is, and I don’t know if I want to add to the weight. (I’ll probably write a cranky follow-up post about the phone in a few days…)

Windows grief, part two

TL;DR: I got through all the steps in my previous post, and now have a semi-functional Windows install.

After getting all the data off my desktop PC SSD, I re-mounted it in the PC, using a different SATA cable, and tried some stuff. The drive was still not bootable, and attempts to repair it were still completely unsuccessful. I did manage to boot from a recovery USB drive that I created via the Dell site. None of the repair options that I could run from that worked, but doing a fresh install of Windows 10 does seem to have worked. At least, it’s working so far.

I’m copying some files back to it right now, while also letting it download Windows updates. That’ll keep it busy for an hour or two. Then, I’ll see if I can reboot and install the updates. If that works, then I’ll look into copying more files back and installing some software. Getting it back to where it was will probably take all week, assuming it holds together and doesn’t start blue-screening again.

If it does keep working, then I have to say that I’m not at all sure what was wrong in the first place. It almost has to have been a software problem. It wasn’t the SATA cable, or the port. If it was either of those, I would have had more luck with it prior to the nuke & pave reinstall. There’s probably no point in speculating too much at this point. I’m just going to keep pushing forward with it, and see how far I get.

Windows grief

The SSD that I installed in my desktop PC a couple of months ago has been working fine. Up until yesterday.

I got a random blue screen error yesterday, while working on the PC. I’ll leave out most of the details, but things went downhill from there. I tried a bunch of stuff, including a chkdsk /f (which didn’t help and probably didn’t finish), SpinRite (which crashed), and various Windows 10 recovery options. Nothing worked.

And I’d recently reformatted the old drive that the SSD replaced, since the SSD was working fine. And I had deleted the old backup of that old drive, so I could make room to do a full backup of the SSD. Which I tried, but couldn’t complete. So I don’t really have a good, full, backup.

This morning, I pulled the new SSD from the desktop computer and mounted it externally on my ThinkPad. It’s been working fine there, and I’ve been copying stuff off it with no problems. Of course, the ThinkPad drive is 500GB and is about half full, while the desktop drive is 1TB and there’s about 400 GB of stuff I need to copy off of it. So I’m shuffling around some old drives so I can copy the files off of the SSD. Copying everything might take up most of the day today.

Since it looks like the drive isn’t actually dead, that probably means that either: (1) the drive cable in the PC is bad, or (2) there’s something wrong on the motherboard of the PC. It’s also possible that there’s some other weird problem that I can maybe fix by doing a full reformat of the drive and reinstall of Windows 10. But I don’t think it’s a Windows problem; if it was, SpinRite likely wouldn’t have crashed, since that’s running from a boot CD. If it’s the drive cable, that’s an easy problem to fix. If it’s a hardware problem on the motherboard, then I need to figure out if I want to try to repair an out-of-warranty Dell desktop PC or just punt and buy a new one.

So my next step, after making sure I’ve got a good copy of all the data off the drive, is to mount it back in the desktop PC, with a new drive cable, and see what happens. If it works, I’ll probably try another chkdsk /f and, if that works, then I’ll breather a sigh of relief and get on with my life, I guess.

If it doesn’t work with the new drive cable, then I’m not sure what I’m going to do. I’ll try a few hardware troubleshooting ideas, and maybe I’ll get lucky. If it’s just a bad SATA port on the motherboard, then I can just use a different one. But if I can’t figure it out, I might decide to buy myself an Intel NUC kit, and transfer the drive and (maybe) memory to it. If I do that, I’ll have to buy a Windows 10 license too, I guess, but overall it should still be more affordable than buying a whole new PC.

Blog posts like this one might not communicate a lot of useful information to anyone, by the way, but I find them to be worth writing, since they allow me to organize my thoughts more than I would otherwise do. I was listening to a podcast yesterday that mentioned rubber ducking, and I guess that’s what I’m doing here, basically. So I don’t know if this post will ever help anyone else, but it helped me.

SSD upgrade, part two

I finished my SSD upgrade last week. (Here’s part one and part zero of the SSD saga.) The bracket showed up in the mail, so I opened the case up, took out the drive cage, screwed everything together, buttoned it all back up and… it all worked. It took me a while to figure out how to orient the bracket in the cage, but once I figured that out, it was easy enough.

The old spinning hard drive is now a secondary drive, and not giving me any problems. I’ll probably reformat it soon so I can use it as a backup drive. The new SSD is working great. The machine boots faster and loads programs a lot faster.

I’m not sure why I held off on doing the SSD upgrade for so long. I know my excuse is that I was waiting for prices to come down on 1 TB SSDs, but I could have done this a year ago, and they wouldn’t have been that much more expensive, really.

Oh well. I’m hoping this upgrade will help me keep this PC usable for a few more years. I don’t want to have to replace it any time soon.

SSD upgrade, part one

Amazon’s same-day delivery got me my new Crucial MX500 SSD at around 6pm yesterday. It came in minimal packaging: no screws or cables or anything useful, just a 7mm to 9.5mm spacer (which I don’t think I’ll need). I found a spare SATA cable in my random cable box. And I managed to figure out a somewhat questionable way to mount it in my PC case with a single screw, temporarily. If it was actually an old-fashioned spinning hard drive, this would be a risky way to do it, but for an SSD, it should be fine.

The PC recognized the drive with no issues. I then installed the Acronis software from Crucial and cloned my old drive to the SSD. That took about two hours. (I’d assumed it would take much longer. And it probably would have, if I’d hooked up the drive via USB instead of mounting it internally.)

After that, I opened the PC case back up, unplugged the old drive, and plugged the new drive into the SATA 0 port on the motherboard. After that, I buttoned it back up and booted it. Surprisingly, everything worked. I’m really suspicious about that, since these things rarely go without a hitch. But hey, maybe I got lucky, just this once…

The next task is going to be mounting the drive correctly, with the bracket I ordered yesterday. So I’ll probably do that Monday night, or at some point during the week. And after that, I’ll hook the old drive back up, reformat it, and start using it as an internal backup disk. I’m hoping to do that next weekend.

So far, the drive seems to have done what I’d hoped for: The machine boots faster and everything loads much faster. If I don’t hit any snags, I may actually allow myself a moment of satisfaction and perhaps even happiness! (Well, maybe not happiness.) I’m hoping that this upgrade allows me to hold onto this PC for a couple of more years. I’d like to see it last until 2020 or 2021 maybe.