From an ad Google sent out today for their new Pixel Tablet, where they’re plugging it as a hub for controlling “smart home” devices. At first glance, it looked like she was about to smash it with a hammer.
I suppose that says something about my attitude toward IOT?
(At second glance, it looked like a hummingbird sculpture on a post. At third glance I realized it was a houseplant.)
This doesn’t seem to be a very common problem, given that when I searched for it I only found a single result on Google, but in case someone else out there runs into the same issue, I thought I’d write it up so they can find it.
I tried to register a Wacom Intuos drawing tablet. The way you do this is you open the Wacom software and click on the registration banner, which then opens your default web browser to the registration page on Wacom’s website, pre-filled with a serial number and some authorization token. If you’re already logged into a Wacom account, it should just register it immediately. Or you can create an account first.
The problem: I got a banner at the top with the error, “Profile ID Missing.” I went back to the Wacom Desktop Center, which popped up the registration banner again. Clicked again. Same problem.
wacom register "Profile ID Missing" was a German-language review review on the Amazon.de listing for an Intuos tablet. “Was zum Teufel ist eine Profile-ID?” They solved it by uninstalling and reinstalling the Wacom software, and for whatever reason, the registration link worked that time.
Before I got to that point, I tried something I didn’t think would work: I clicked in the URL bar on Firefox and hit Enter, causing it to reload the page. (I forget whether I’d already tried hitting the reload button.) Weirdly enough, it worked, and it registered the tablet. Finally!
It’s weird to look back on all the posts I made agonizing about whether or not to buy a netbook.
It was never anything I would have used on a regular basis, and I knew that (which is why I never went through with buying one). It would have been something I used on trips, mainly conventions, and only to overcome the shortcomings of late 2000s smartphones.
Mainly: photos and typing.
It’s still painfully slow to type anything of length on a phone, but tablets have emerged since then and are a lot easier to type on. Hybrids like the Surface Pro and add-on keyboards make it even easier.
Touchscreens have solved the crappy trackpad problem netbooks had.
Faster phones and cell networks, and a more mobile-friendly web, have made a lot more things possible directly on the phone.
Netbooks, meanwhile, are pretty much forgotten, at least in the form they existed in at the time. Chromebooks are doing OK, at least in schools, but they aren’t quite the same thing. You’d think “netbook” would refer to something more like the network-dependent Chromebook, but it typically referred to the tiny form factor of a mini-laptop.
Looking back at the Tori Amos signing that I mentioned in the series’ first post: These days I probably would have taken the pictures directly on my phone and posted to Instagram within minutes. As for the blogging, I might have powered through on the phone and added the pictures directly, or I might have done so on the tablet and added the pictures that would already have synced from the phone over WiFi.
I wouldn’t carry a laptop of any size around the convention floor, that’s for sure. And I probably wouldn’t bring one on a short trip at all unless I was planning on working during the evenings.
For short posts, I’m actually more comfortable sitting on the couch and writing on my tablet than firing up my computer and sitting at my desk. This is something I discovered during NaBloPoMo. My workflow typically went like this:
What would send me to the computer are the things that are difficult to do on a tablet:
I’m not sure how much of that is the couch and how much of that is the fact that I’ve been putting off upgrading my home computer in favor of the devices I use more often. I finally replaced the ancient Nexus 7 with a Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 a few months ago. (It’s awesome!) It’s FAR more responsive (the Nexus 7 was basically a proof of concept, and doesn’t deal with modern software very well), so I can actually use it for stuff.
Plus it turns out even at 8″, a 4:3 screen has a much better balance of onscreen keyboard and text area than the 8:5 screen did. Being able to see more of your document, even a little, has a surprising impact on how comfortable it is to write it.
The Nexus 7 Android tablet has been discontinued in favor of the Nexus 9. (via Slashdot.) I’ve had a Nexus 7 (2012) almost since the beginning, and while it’s showing its age, I’ve been trying to stretch out its lifetime, because I actually do still use it on a regular basis.
Most of what I do these days with it is reading. Email. Books. Comics. Feedly. Pocket. Some photo management and searching. My four-year-old plays games, most of which run fine once they’re up but they take forever to load. I’ve also started introducing him to photo editing apps like Pixlr and Aviary. I used to do more typing and web browsing on it, but it’s just gotten so slow that it’s actually faster to pull out my phone or go over to a computer. Katie doesn’t use it much at all because she has a Note, which is almost into tablet territory already. (She’s not alone. Since the iPhone 6S came out, Pocket has noticed that people with both tablets and phones use their tablets a lot less often if their phones are larger.)
But the 7″ tablet form factor is perfect to keep with you at the breakfast or lunch table, or kick back on the couch.
The thing to remember about the Nexus 7 is that the original release was a proof of concept. There were android tablets before, but the market was still considered something of a joke compared to the iPad, and Google wanted to prove that (a) there was a market for a good Android tablet, and (b) there was a market for a tablet larger than a phone and smaller than an iPad. The iPad Mini didn’t exist at the time, and Apple was still ridiculing the concept.
It succeeded. But they made some mistakes with the hardware that were corrected in the 2013 model. Unfortunately those mistakes have made the first edition notorious for slowing down.
Mine was getting close to unusable around the time Lollipop was released, and upgrading finished the job. Fortunately wiping it and doing a fresh install cleared up a lot of the problems, though as I’ve added more apps, it’s continued to slow down. Chrome is too slow to use, and while Firefox is a little faster, I basically can’t surf the web on the tablet anymore.
But for a core set of apps, it’s still useful. I’ll read/reply to email and skim Feedly in the morning at breakfast, saving items to Pocket to read later. Then at lunch I may read a book or catch up on those saved articles. Since Gmail and Pocket both work offline and sync in the background, I can still use them in places without WiFi. Mobile data would be nice, but offline+sync makes it less critical, and I’ve saved a few hundred over the last three years by not having an extra data plan.
I am going to have to replace it soon, but I can’t decide what with. I don’t want the larger size that the Nexus line is moving toward, and while I’ve been looking at Samsung’s Galaxy tablets, the models I’ve tried all feel a little too small or a bit too big. I don’t want a 10″ tablet, and I don’t want a giant phone. I want a device that’s just big enough to read a full comic book page on it, but still small enough that it feels like a paperback book.
Note: I didn’t actually post this when I wrote it. I’ve backdated it to the original date because it’s no longer timely, but I wanted it online so I could link to it.
