computing, again

I wrote a lot of words two years ago about the search for a computer for my daughter. That search
ended with a 12" Macbook running Chrome and a Raspberry Pi. They work fine for her, though
I wished for a machine that was a cross between the Macbook and a convertible Chromebook.

Apple introduced the iPad Pro in the meantime and they have even refreshed it once since. It may not be exactly a viable hybrid of the Macbook and convertible Chromebook, but it is probably at least the arithmetic mean of the two.

I dinged Apple in 2015 for missing WebRTC, WebMIDI, packaged web apps, and some other
Chrome goodies. Apple delivered on WebRTC and even has a thing they call multitasking now. My version of LOGO runs in Safari adequately and even works with the Apple Pencil.

Would I buy my daughter an iPad Pro today? No. It basically sucks at computering. Offline web apps still suck and web pages saved to the home screen aren't just the second-class citizens that regular web pages are -- they are some kind of third class entity. Safari is now happy to use the camera to take pictures of your credit card and auto-fill web forms for you, but has matched none of Chrome's progress in talking to fun things like little robots or craft cutting machines like those from Silhouette using WebBluetooth and WebUSB.

Fortunately, my daughter's rig will probably last another three years. I'm in the market myself now and I find that I want most of the same things a child should expect. I have been struggling with some vision problems and I can't decide if I should upgrade from my 13" Macbook Pro to a new 15" machine or get a smaller touchscreen machine that I can put my face closer to. I think I would love a convertible 13" Macbook Pro.

I already own a 9.7" iPad Pro with a Smart Keyboard. It totally sucks at computering. It's such a bad computer that it moved me to tears this afternoon. Its hardware is fantastic. LTE is seamless. Its keyboard is pretty great if you can learn to live without the escape key. Its speech-to-text is fantastic. Its web browser is easily in the top three. But it's just phenomenally user hostile. It hates me. I'm nothing more than a sack of meat capable of holding a credit card up to its camera. A Mac lets me drag a song out of iTunes and into Safari. iOS turns that drag out of Music into a hyperlink into the iTunes store. The iPad Pro is almost exactly the philosophical opposite of the One Laptop Per Child OLPC.

It's so bad that it makes me wonder if anyone left in Cupertino ever actually had a good computer. Are the Macbook Pros built to be good computers, or do they merely fail to prevent happy computing? An oversight, perhaps?

I think the right answer is to use Cordova to build a WebKit-based computing environment that supports all the missing pieces and the idea alone exhausts me. In the past, I could download a BLE-enabled browser for iOS, or a WebMIDI-enabled browser, or a WebRTC-enabled browser, or a Kiosk browser that revealed certain parts of the machine to Javascript but none of these let me build a machine with the I/O abilities of a Commodore 64 with BASIC and PEEK/POKE.

I don't have the answer yet, but I hope to by the end of 2018. I'm sick of hoping that somebody will take all this amazing hardware and decide to make a computer out of it.

fragile

We recently decamped to Woodley Park so that we could complete an overdue home renovation project. As we packed, I placed digital cameras and a microscope together in a box and labeled it 'optoelectronics' for the movers.

My wife crossed that out and wrote 'fragile'. Hers was the better label.

baby teeth

The plastic passenger's side door handle on my plastic 2014 BMW i3 is loose. I think that means it's about to fall out so that the permanent door handle can grow in.