Fascinating stuff. You should give it a view.

The number one activity I undertake on computing devices is creating graphics. 3D modeling, animating same, web stuff, what have you. I long since realized I was sick and tired of being tied to a computer desk, though, and wanted something fresh that didn’t involve unplugging, lugging, and plugging every time I undertook a change of venue. I reasoned there had to be something better, and I was right: I discovered the concept of the “portable graphics workstation.”

Imagine a laptop. Okay, now make it a Really Big laptop. Give it a 17″ screen, a full-sized keyboard (with number pad), and make it weigh about ten pounds soaking wet. Power it with a real multi-core processor (not some mobility wannabe), a kick-ass video card (or two), lots of drive space, and a battery that might last 45 minutes on a good day. Now you’re talking!

It’s still a “laptop” in that you can, really, hold it in your lap and work–but that’s not its forte. For a rig like this you just want to be able to fold it up and schlep it to wherever you plan to work without having to do more than unplug the power cord. If you really, really need extra screen real estate you can even plug in an extra monitor (and use both), but for most purposes a 17″ screen really does work well.

The down side? What if you just want to curl up in the papasan chair and surf the web? How about sitting up in bed getting off that last forum post for the night? Yeah, still kind of big and clunky. Mobility is relative.

What did I decide?

I wanted in-one-hand mobility: I wanted a smart phone. Not to talk to people on, heaven forbid! I hate yapping on the phone. I wanted to be one of the cool people who could be sitting at a table in a restaurant and looking up something on Wikipedia to settle a question. You know: a special kind of nerd.

Being the right kind of nerd, I settled on a nice Blackberry Curve. Push email, proper buttons, geek cred, an account at crackberry.com…I was all set! Once the first flush of connectivity faded, though, chinks began to appear in my geekly suit of armor. The web browser was, well, lame. The screen was really, REALLY small. Memory issues kept a tight rein on what cool apps I could install.

What really sealed the deal was the realization that what had become one of my favorite winding-down activities at the end of the day, sitting up in bed reading various content on the device (and often responding to same), was causing some interference in the domestic tranquility department: the clicking of the keys was waking up my wife, who is a light sleeper. Once sufficient time had elapsed on my existing contract it was time to find a replacement!

What to get? I had some limitations: my contract with my existing carrier (AT&T) was still in force, so jumping ship would require shelling out more money than I was willing to spend–not to mention the fact that I (gasp!) like AT&T and have bad memories of a time when Verizon was my land line carrier. Touch screen “keys” rather than actual buttons seemed the only viable option (the irony of this fact was that real buttons was a selling point for me when I first selected the Curve; go figure), and as a bonus it appeared that a touch screen interface pretty much assured a lot more screen real estate to be had.

Okay, all things considered it seemed a no-brainer: become seduced by The Dark Side and embrace the iPhone.

Man, was I ever happy with my choice. Sure, you couldn’t install anything not Approved, but that list was so damned huge it really didn’t feel confining at all. Memory? Tens of gigabytes, all of them at my disposal. I could load the thing up with so many apps the screen would explode, and it wouldn’t even break a sweat. Browsing the web? Killer. Sure, no Flash, but I could forgive that one faux pas. Nice, big screen (or so it seemed after the Curve) and, once I disabled the sound effect, keys that were utterly, blissfully silent.

I had taken my first step towards joining the Sith. Somewhere, in one of the deepest realms of Hell, Steve Jobs cracked a tiny smile.

Of course you know what happened then…

Sure, I let my laptop languish for all but the tough graphics jobs, taking out my new toy and reveling in being able to stay connected without lugging El Grande around with me. I loaded it up with apps that I might, just maybe, use some day. I found fun games that made good use of the screen real estate and the slick touch interface. I made my first blog post sans “real” computer. The iPhone became (apart from special occasions) the last thing I touched at night and almost the first thing in the morning. “Just checking e-mail, be right down.”

Eventually, predictably, my new way of life settled into a groove. Also as predictably, I realized all was not joy in Mudville. See, with all those fancy graphics applications I use come lots of fancy user’s manuals. These days most of them come in PDF format on disk; saves money and shipping, as well as shelf space. On the laptop I could just fire up a window and refer to the manuals as needed–but I wanted to be able to read them whenever and wherever. Could the iPhone handle PDF? Heh, “There’s an app for that.” Or a dozen. Not a problem. No, the problem came with the fact that software manuals generally have illustrations. Lots of them. Illustrations that look fine until you try to view them in a screen that fits in your pocket. Zoom and pan all you want, it’s just not all that satisfying.

Another seed was planted.

Ever used the “mobility” versions of various web sites? Some of them are pretty good; others, not so much. “Crippled” seems harsh, but apt. One hallmark of the Safari browser on the iPhone is its ability to handle pretty much any standard web page (and a few non-standard ones) in its own right, so you don’t necessarily need the mobile page–but try telling the web server that. Often as not the iPhone rats you out that it’s a mobile, and you get stuck with the distant relation of the page you really wanted. Oh, and did I mention the screen size?

Yeah, that screen that was so much larger than the Curve’s began seeming cramped. Dissatisfaction, greed…to the Dark Side these will lead you.

I resisted, at first. When the hype began I told myself I wasn’t interested. I found reasons to consider it flawed…incomplete. “Wait for the new, improved versions,” I told myself. “First generation is always trial and error, and there will be others to compete.” I told myself I was happy with my chosen tool of Connectedness To All. I thought I was doing so well.

Then came the day when a co-worker brought one to work. Yeah, you knew already of which I speak, didn’t you? Sleek, shiny, wonderfully light and portable, and. That. Screen. That wondrous, full-page-sized screen. It begged you to touch it, to interact with it, to pull up page after page of techno geekitude in full-sized (and colorful) glory.

Did my eyes begin glowing red at that point? I’m not sure. All I know is I had to have it, my Prrrrreciousssssss.

Yeah, I did it: I bought an iPad. I willingly donned the shackles of Apple fanboi-dom and took my Soma like a good Citizen. Do I regret it? Hells, no. It’s a great device–calling it “magical” is hyperbole but it can be life-altering, just as the iPhone was. I’m doing daily tasks on it that were once done on the phone or on the laptop, and the experience of doing those tasks has been universally pleasant. It can’t fit in my pocket like the iPhone, but the screen real estate more than makes up for the slight decrease in portability. Some activities that on the iPhone needed “an app for that” can simply be performed on the full-featured web browser–just like a “real computer.”

Jobs, you demon, you finally got me.

Hell, I use “Google” as a verb…don’t you?

On the other hand I passed on Wave, and will pass on Buzz. I’m not opposed to them, really, I just don’t care. I don’t do meetings I can possibly avoid and, as for Buzz, well, “We’ve already got one.”

Is Google on the path to being another Big Blue Meanie? Another Microsoft? They have become frakken huge and mayhap a bit arrogant, haven’t they? That might help explain this fun little segment I ran across today over on YouTube. Watch, enjoy, and fear not. They pledged to “do no evil.”

Right?

This baby stops comment spam in its filthy tracks, my friends. You need to get a (free) WordPress API (they tell you how to do it, it’s easy), then you install the plugin…done. It works so well that after about a month of testing I removed moderation from my comments! In roughly three months of use it’s stopped nearly a thousand spam comments, and has only allowed one questionable posting through.

I mean it: Akismet works!

The only down side I’ve run across is the occasional false positive. Some of my guests have left legitimate comments with links included, and maybe one in ten of those gets nabbed. I find it no chore at all to review the spam queue before I nuke ‘em and make sure nothing good is in there.

On your WordPress plugins control page just search for Akismet and take a decisive stand against comment spam!

See, web pages are coded in a special programming language, much like any software (okay, let’s not get bogged down in the semantics of markup languages versus compiled and interpreted code and all that, shall we? It’s not germane to the point, here). The problem is, when you learn this language the people who are in charge of creating and maintaining it tell you that certain program instructions will result in web browsers displaying things in a certain, predictable way.

Except for Internet Explorer.

You can buy into conspiracy theories that Microsoft wants to control the language and so interprets it in their own way, expecting to force everyone else to conform to their version by sheer power of market share. You can jump on the “Microsoft is run by a pack of idiots” bashing bandwagon and assert they’re just too stupid to understand the standards, so are unable to conform. Or you can just throw up your hands, utter blasphemous curses, and try to hack out code that will work in their crippled and ill-constructed browsers while simultaneously working in other, correctly-constructed ones. You could even do all three, and/or make up a few alternative activities for fun while you’re at it. I suggest drinking heavily during such an enterprise.

For everyone who knows the pain of which I speak, here is a fun graphic I ran across today that sums things up all too knowingly:

Graphic created by Alan Foreman of Poisoned Minds.

“ATM Trap” theft in progress (PDF)

So, beware! If you use an ATM that sucks in your card, and it appears to be confiscated, follow the steps in the document.

My friends, I’m here to make your next foray into geek giftdom an experience you can actually look forward to! It’s obvious that you, unschooled in the ways of geekdom, don’t read the right web comics, so I’m presenting the User Friendly flowchart that will make you a geek’s hero (click image for a larger version):

Now that you are suitably grateful to have this onerous task lifted from your shoulders, feel free to visit the font of geek wisdom at its source:

User Friendly, The Comic

For instance?

Instead of clicky-button controls for things like volume control, CD ejection, media control (what? your laptop doesn’t have play, fast forward and rewind buttons?) and all that other stuff, mine has touch-sensitive capacitance controls. It’s the same idea as the ubiquitous touch pads, taken to another level of fancy-it-up-because-we-can. Well, today mine suddenly stopped working. About the same time, the tap-to-click function on the touch pad also went south–though at the time I didn’t realize the two events were related.

I got on the phone with Dell tech support (well, I’d been told my model Alienware machine had to go through Dell for such things, though in the end that turned out to be a load), and here’s a side rant: I had to run the gauntlet of no fewer than three obsequious functionaries, each one of whom asked me for the same damned information. Why don’t these people type in this stuff and pass it along to the next obstacle on the course?

Anyway, once I finally got to the Alienware guy with the tech-related flow chart to read from instead of the administrivia one, we went through a ritual of remove battery, unplug, hold down the power button, and so on. Reverse, rinse, and Glory Be: that fixed the problem.

Which was?

It seems this laptop, over time, can build up a “residual charge” in the frame. That translates to screw-with-capacitance in how-can-this-annoy-me parlance. By discharging everything, the balance was restored to The Force and all was again well.

So, tell me again why we can’t just have buttons?

Sometimes I leave my machine in the state I want to find it in come morning, and I’m getting sick and tired of waking up to browser crash notices and windows I’ve left linked for convenience being gone.

Guess I need to revoke some au-tho-ri-teh.