Tuesday, August 02, 2016

In which we are a techie who cain't say no

I bought a Chromebook a couple of weeks ago during the Amazon Prime sale, an Asus C200. I was quite pleased when it arrived, and I enjoyed playing around with it, but the real test was at an offsite meeting for the DJ last week. The Cb was the only device I brought other than my iPad, which I brought as a backup just in case, and, of course, my phone. Okay, let me rephrase that. The Cb was the device I planned on using exclusively for the days of the meeting, to see how it would fare under fire. Needless to say, all a Cb can do is browser stuff, but in real life, what else is there? Or maybe more to the point, in real life, what can’t be done via browser? The only time mischief ensued was when we were sharing Google docs, and the email I use at the DJ is not the same as my Google ID, and I had to go through a few hoops to have multiple logins on the Cb. But I managed to do it. Overall verdict: I really liked it. Very lightweight machine, fast, with long battery life, capable of everything I needed to do. This will become my tabbing computer, although there is one drawback, in that you can’t just plug it into a printer. There are apparently conniptions one can go through to print, and I’ll try to sort that out, although simply getting someone else to print on their machine might be easier for those dreaded albeit inevitable paper ballots. Anyhow, this was my alternative to buying a new Macbook Air. I saved about $800. Of course, I have now sold my soul to Google, but I can live with that. They’re only getting what’s left over after my previous sale of same to Apple.

After meditating for ages about possible buying an iPad Mini, and saving a few hundred bucks there buying a Samsung Galaxy Tab 7-incher that I’ve become quite fond of (although, while admittedly it lacks the sophistication of the iPad, it nonetheless slaps down the Kindle Fire like the helpless schnook the Fire obviously is), I managed to drop my regular iPad Air so as to not only crack the screen but to leave it with sharp glassy ridges that can slice your finger as you swipe. Argggggh. I really can’t live without an iPad, so I replaced that yesterday with an iPad Air 2, which I can turn on with my thumbprint. Thus I ate up a lot of the profits from not buying the Mac, but you can’t win them all.

I think I mentioned somewhere over the summer that I finally upgraded my MacBook Pro to the latest OS, and it took, so even as I only probably drag it along in the checked baggage so to speak as a backup, everything is now up to date in my personal Kansas City when it comes to technology. I’ve gone about as fer as I intend to go.


Anybody need any tabbing done?


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