Tony's Stuff

  This New Thunderbolt 4 Hub Is Almost Perfect but My Desk Is Still a Hot Mess Neatness is highly overrated and I love the Ejector Anthony Lawrence Photo by Author of my messy desk In our old house we had an eight foot wide custom-built desk in a spacious basement office. We often had three computers and a printer with plenty of room to spread out paperwork. I had another desk on the other side of the office, a large bookcase, and plenty of shelves to store office supplies. We have none of that now and it’s all my own damn fault. We moved In 2005, we moved to a retirement community. It’s the kind of place where you buy the home and rent the land. The homes are “manufactured homes”; they get delivered in two parts and are put together on top of a crawl space on site. We are on a wooded lot with a nice deck, they take care of the mowing and snow shoveling while we practice retirement. I was concerned about the size of our new home, but I carefully measured our old place and found tha...

  It’s Not Your Fault Computer Software Is Hard to Understand and Use Don’t blame yourself for poor design Anthony Lawrence Photo by Author “I just don’t understand this computer stuff!” How often have you heard someone say that? You know what? I made a very nice living for over thirty years fixing “computer stuff” and often struggle to understand it myself! It’s not my fault and it’s not your fault either.   Computer stuff can be confusing, hard, difficult, and downright stupid.   There are two main reasons for that and the first is unfortunately the most prevalent: bad design. Bad design I bet you can think of many things you’ve used and maybe still use that are designed badly. A can opener that is hard to clean, a pot with handles that get too hot to touch, medicine warnings too small to read, a car with poor side visibility? You could probably add hundreds of things if you thought about it long enough. The same is true with computers. Do you remember the early cell ph...

  Wireless Charging is So Wasteful, Right? USB-C is Better! Or is it? Anthony Lawrence Too many cables — photo by author Cables, cables, everywhere. Aside from what I’ve shown in the photo above, I have a similar rat’s nest of dissimilar cables in another part of the house: Lightning, USB-A, USB-C, USB Micro and Mini , and more— it drives me nuts. Feeling similar pain, the European Union wants to   force all tablets, cameras, headphones, portable speakers and handheld video game consoles   to use USB-C charging connectors. As I am plagued by my cables, you might expect that I’d be an enthusiastic champion of this idea and would love all my devices to be USB-C. Nope. Forcing manufacturers to use USB-C is idiotic. USB-C is not the bee’s knees Like Lightning, USB-C has no right-side up requirement. You can’t plug it in upside down. That’s nice, but in dim light or when you cannot see the charge port at all, both Lightning and USB-C can be difficult to insert. That’s annoying...

  Yes, You Really Can Learn to Code and It Won’t Hurt Your Brain Very Much At All But no, this probably won’t get you a programming job Anthony Lawrence Photo by Author I think it’s unfortunate that so many people see writing computer code as something ordinary mortals cannot comprehend. They think that coding is the exclusive domain of geniuses, that ordinary people might as well bang their head against a brick wall because that would hurt less than learning to code. Actually, it’s much worse than that. Some people can be professional programmers. Some of us can be physicists, NFL quarterbacks, Michelin chefs, prize winning authors, and so on. Most of us have less lofty ambitions because our innate blessings were more like corner diner leftovers than a gourmet feast. Some people say that we all have a special talent. Sure, if that makes you happy. Mine is knowing happy talk when I hear it. But people who aren’t NBA stars can lob a basketball toward the net and even hit it now and ...

  What If We Had a Folding Phone That Didn’t Fold? Because I think a folding phone is kinda dumb Anthony Lawrence TECHNOLOGY “Folded iPhone” Photo by author It seems that Samsung has pretty much solved all its folding problems, so the rumor mongers expect that Apple will soon follow. Gawd, I hope not! Well, I guess as a stockholder, sure, some people want folding phones and are willing to pay dearly for the privilege of finding an excuse to unfold it in front of their jealous/fawning friends, so okay: make a folding iPhone, charge a lot of money for it, and I’ll collect the (literal) dividends. But man-o-man that whole concept makes me draw a very deep breath in preparation for saying something very offensive. It’s not the money. It doesn’t need eff-you money now and they will get even cheaper. Not so cheap for Apple’s take because you know whatever they sell is still going to be pricey-pricey. Bigger! It’s not that I dislike large screens. If my iPhone could look like an iPad and ...

  What Was Apple Thinking When They Decided to Offer a $4.99 Apple Music Subscription? Anthony Lawrence Marketing Maybe rethink that one? Screenshot by Author Part of Apple’s October 2021 announcements was that they are now offering a $4.99/ month Apple Music subscription. That’s cheap, but there’s a big catch: it’s voice only. It took me a beat to realize that they meant Siri only. That is, with this subscription you can’t browse Apple Music or search by typing in songs or artists; you’d have to ask Siri to play what you want. Plainly this is intended to help sell HomePod Minis, though Apple didn’t say that you couldn’t use it with your phone or iPad. $4.99 is a lot less than the ten or fifteen bucks most people pay Apple or Spotify. There’s another catch too: the $4.99 subscription doesn’t get you   spatial audio, lossless, playlists, and more . My instantaneous reaction was “Good luck, you’ll need it!” I have read too many stories of people who were frustrated when trying t...

  How Close Are We to Peak CPU and What Does That Mean for Apple and Microsoft? The power of the new Apple chips is far more than most of us need — or is it? Anthony Lawrence Photo by author I imagine that a few people at Microsoft and Intel watched Apple’s presentation on the M1 Max and M1 Pro CPUs with sinking stomachs. Both the spiel and the specs felt like one sledgehammer blow after another. A headline at the very geeky Anandtech site read   “Apple Announces M1 Pro & M1 Max: Giant New Arm SoCs with All-Out Performance”   and Rene Ritchie’s Youtube review called it a “Game Changer!” and said, “These are monsters!” So, extremely fast CPUs with low power consumption. Someone else remarked “This kills the Surface Pro”. Does it? Does it even threaten the PC market? I don’t know. Certainly, if you want that much power.How many of us need that? I certainly do not; I don’t even need the power of the M1 MacBook Air I’m typing on right now, though that’s the lowest power c...