4DX Movies

I just experienced my first 4DX movie in Seattle. I saw Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. If you don't know what 4DX movies are they are like a two hour 4D ride (ala Star Tours etc). The seat moves with the action so you feel like you are falling, flying, running etc in sync with the action on the screen. It blows air on you, and your legs, shoots water mist on you, and flashes lights along the perimeter of the theater.

Some of the action is very convincing but the fight scenes can be overwhelming as the seat jostles you around. By the end of the movie I just wanted to relax. It felt like the movie was overloaded with action, maybe in a normal theater this wouldn't be the case, I'm not sure. The more subtle effects were cool. Flying or sweeping scenes were great and really pulled you into the movie. Other times however it was actually kind of distracting and took you out of the movie, back to reality.

It would have been cool to have it blow warm air - there was a lot of lava that would have been perfect for such an effect. All in all it was worth it. I would say try it once, you should experience it. However I'm not sure I'd do it again. Maybe with a mellower movie. A horror movie might be cool to see in 4DX.

My Favorite Ignored Divers

I spend a decent amount of time perusing watch forums, doing image searches for watches, scrolling through Pinterest watch feeds, and talking about watches. It is safe to say I have a passing interest in them. If you follow my articles at all you know I enjoy all kinds of watches. I have a cllection of cool looking 'space age' watches. Sadly some of them only LOOK cool. cool half of them are sitting dead due to insanely rapid battery depletion, or dead dead - apparently due to rusted contacts. But they look like they came out of yesterday's future.

Ultimately, however, dive watches are my one true watch love. There are other styles I like, but nothing like dive watches. I have a couple Citizen dive watches, and they are beautiful. Nearly every Citizen I've ever seen is really good looking. But my current taste is classic and minimal. I am constantly looking around for great minimal classic dive watches.

I love the look of some of the older Submariners.
Minimal face, dot indicators, minimal hands (I prefer sword hands to the Mercedes hands), clean bezel, flat sapphire  crystal (A nice bevelled edge is cool), date optional, no cyclops.

This love of traditional divers started with the first topic of this article. While it isn't entirely ignored, plenty of articles mention it, but I think it coupd always use more exposure:

Seiko SKX007

The 007. This was is classic. Sure it's no Submariner, but it's just as traditional. It is affordable, mine was less than $200. It's tough and handsome. The face is properly minimal, the lume is decent, the second hand is beautiful. It is reasonably accorate. The movement is a workhorse. And it's ISO certified! The only gripes I have with the 007:

I prefer minimal hands. The arrows bother me a bit.
I also prefer watches on the larger end of the standard sizes spectrum, and the 007 is a bit small for me.

My issue with the 007's size is what brought me to the last topic of this article. This watch truly is ignored. I have seen numerous, articles mentioning Orients, Steinharts, even Invictas, when discussing traditional and homage divers. I've only seen this next watch in a couple places. It was compared to the Steinhart Ocean, and it got a mention in a Watchuseek thread...

Armida A2

The Armida I own is their lower end model. 200m resistance, NH35 movement, no drilled lugs. But it holds its own, in fact I have a difficult time choosing between the Armida and my Marathon GSAR (Which is at a much higher price point). It is everything I was looking for in a minimalist traditional diver. Armida's really deserve more mention. I love the way my Armida looks, and feels. The only gripes I have with the Armida is:

I would prefer 300m resistance.
I wish it had drilled lugs like its higher end relatives.
While I do like Seiko movements - they have reputations of being tough workhorses - the higher end movements ARE more accurate.

UnitE!

I am still working through the ins and outs of Unity3D and the more I learn the more I love it. As it becomes less and less of a black box its elegance and simplicity, coupled with the power of this game engine is impressivr to me.

Maybe Unity is not unique. I've only tinkered with various GE's in the past, never really dug in too deep. Back then I was all about the graphics and just wanting to move the visions in my head to a world I could move around in. I was impatient. So to ve fair to other GE's, you rock too.

Anyway, back to Unity...
 

As much as I am a VIM-for-everything person, I think the tight integration with Mono/Visual Studio was wise. The real time debugger and code completion make life SO much easier for people with less C# / Unity scripting experience. And from what I've seen the scripting docs aren't too bad.

If you've never messed with Unity, check these links:

Unity's Home Page

Unity's Resume

Ink Love

I am currently doing some illustration side work. I am doing digital images so I'm using Inkscape. It's been a while since I've used it, so I've forgotten just how great Inkscape is. I am very obsessive when working with graphics. Everything is within its proper layer. Every object is properly named. Where applicable objects are grouped - and of course the group is named. I do a lot in the XML dialog. I like to arrange my objects in the stack from this dialog. I also do most of my object selection from the XML dialog.

Of course the object dialog is also my friend. I use it often to lock or hide objects. This is also the dialog I use to name objects, I can do so in the XML dialog but it is more tedious there. It's much easier in the object dialog where I don't have to touch my mouse to get it done.

I am definitely no expert. But I do love me some Inkscape.

What You Should Be Reading 2017.02.07

VIM as an IDE
My VIM is utterly barebones. My vimrc just sets expanded tabs, defaults folding to indentation mode and sets line numbering and special characters to visible. But it is amazing to read about what can be done with plugins. VIM truly is the best editor evar.

Via Safari Books Online

Duck Duck Go vs Google
I use Duck Duck Go every day, at home and at work. This breakdown of some of Google's creepery should convince you to join us :)

Via Quora

All My Keyboards

There are a lot of keyboards on my phone. Most of them are there because I do unconventional things on my phone - like using VIM in GnuRoot. Because of this I need keyboards with keys such as Escape, or Tab (Although I just realized / remembered GnuRoot has an Esc special key so many of the keyboards can go away.

But before I start uninstalling I'll share with you some of the developers' keyboards I've tried so far.

Behe Keyboard
This one makes me sad. It is a free open source keyboard. It has Tab, Arrow keys, and even F1-F12 keys. But at least with T-UI, the keyboard doesn't work. When I type keys nothing happens. So for now I'll have to uninstall it.

Perfect Keyboard
This is a great keyboard. The keys are easy to hit and you can make it super minimal. It has a Tab key but no escape so I haven't used it much. I did buy it though. Now that I have the GnuRoot Esc key remembered, I'm giving it a go, in fact it is the keyboard this is being written with.

Hacker's Keyboard
This one has ALL the keys, but only when you are in the correct layout. That layout mimicks a standard desktop keyboard, but unless you are on a large keyboard, good luck hitting the keys you want.

Super Keyboard
This one has a Tab key but it looks like an interface from a 1990s video game. If that is what you are after, definitely use this one.

Fit Adventure Begins

My wife bought me a Fibit Ionic for Christmas. She's well aware of my frustrations with the lack of support for the Smartwatch3, and the horrible task of developing Android apps. I really have no idea how professional Android devs do it. I was doing the simplest of tasks and in spite of months of effort, failed to get a single watch running on the Smartwatch3. I'm sure it's just me although I was working on numerous boxes, fresh Linux Mint boxes, fresh Kubuntu boxes.

Before getting the Ionic I read a bit about developing for it. Javascript, Json, Svg based. So it should be nice and easy to create the watch layouts etc.

After getting the Ionic I looked further into it. The development studio is web-based so that alleviates the local dev env setup headache that android studio was until I got to know it. I created a watchface from the template. The project was so much simpler than Android projects - which makes sense since my target is one device and one device only... so far.

There's no emulator. Another headache removed - but a problem if you don't own a watch yourself. I don't mind testing on my Ionic. Sadly it seems the only way to use your watches is to load it in the studio and run it. Then your watch is set to that watchface until you change it. Switching watchfaces in general will be a nightmare as Fitbit adds more to their firmware and eventually their store. Hopefully they add a 'my watchfaces' or way to favorite apps and watchfaces.

Anyway, my first day with the Ionic I had successfully coded a terminal style watchface. A couple days later I successfully built a binary watchface. It has a settings companion but so far I've been unable to figure out how to access it, hehe.

The Ionic is more limited than a full on smartwatch but so far I really like it... And it looks super scifi - especially with my binary watchface :)

Keyboard Power!

I know I have written about command-based launchers before, as well as other topics mentioned below - but I just realized how thorough my migration into the terminal is. I spend nearly all my computer time in terminals, Windows command prompts, VIM, GnuRoot. Even my phone's default launcher - T-UI - is a terminal. I launch phone apps etc by issuing commands.

Really the only time I'm reaching over for my mouse is when I have to do something on a website that uses JS in such a way that QuteBrowser's mouseless tools don't work. Or sometimes my workday tools like Outlook, Skype etc require some mousing.

I love being able to work without having to interrupt the flow to reach over and mouse around, then go back to typing. - This is why I dislike Apple's OS's, I was never able to get away from having to mouse to do nearly everything. Last time I was on a OSX, I couldn't even close dialogs etc w/out mousing. I tried Escape, nope. I tried tabbing to the Cancel button to hit Enter, nope. It was so frustrating. Of course it was probably that I just didn't know how to configure my OS, never the less my first impression was made.

All hail the keyboard!

On my phone I enter the first few letters of the app I want to launch, hints show up (The tab key is sadly buried in most mobile keyboards) and I touch the one I want. - Or I can be really hardcore and just type the full name out.

On my personal boxes I set up my global hotkeys to use Krunner as my launcher. I type the first few letters of the app I want and tab down to the desired result and hit enter. Or in some cases I just launch from the terminal, and have some bashrc entries to make this even easier (As in the case of Reaper which I run via Wine).

On my work boxes I have shortcuts in my home Dir. These allow me to enter the shortcut's name into the run prompt.

So on every machine I have, I kick off apps, not by clicking an icon etc, but by entering text into a launcher or terminal... that is - when I need an app outside the terminal.

I love it.

Tis the Season for Horror... Always

Thanksgiving is over so now it's Christmas time! I love me some Christmas. I loves taking the mrs and the cubs to the big city for snowflake lane. Getting peppermint mochas and wandering through a mall, Christmas music in the background. The lights, the snow, the carolling.
 

And the movies. I love Christmas movies. I love the classics, the new old classics, and the new new classics. And of course - Christmas Horror movies! Below are a few of my favorites:

Krampus
This is a new tradition in my family. I love how it isn't a horror movie at all... and then it is. My fav of the genre.

Rare Exports
This one hails from Finland. It's gritty and down to earth. It is super creepy and so well done. I'd say it's nearly tied for first.

A Christmas Horror Story
ACHS is an anthology of Christmas horror. They are all told together, so you get to see each story unfold together as opposed to telling one, then the next...
It's dark and well done.

IRC On Your Phone

If you're like me, you miss the good old IRC days. If you don't know, IRC is a powerful and refreshingly utilitarian social network that has been around forever.

While MySpacers were blinging out their homepages with horrible gifs that tanked everyone's AOL dialup, IRC was quietly doing its thing.

When the 'get rich by blogging' thing happened, IRC was still there doing its thing.

While Facebookers politick and generally piss each other off, IRC is still alive doing its thing.

If you're sick of bloated apps and websites hosing your CPU and or battery, ditch those social feeds and jump on the text-only IRC networks. I'll talk more about IRC itself in the future. Here I just want to give you some tools to get you started IRC'ing on your phone. I've only used a couple different tools on my phone so I will start with those. Surely in the future I will be sharing more.

For the Faint of Heart
(In other words, the sane ones)

AndChat for Android is a great IRC client. I tried a couple others but AndChat seems to be the best, so far, at keeping and re-establishing IRC connections. The connection is the roughest part when using IRC on your phone. Its interface is clean and clutter free. You can set up multiple saved servers and auto join channels etc. I am kind of a basic IRC user so I haven't explored its other tools. I just do my work manually, in IRC.

For the Nerds
(me)

IRSSI. I love me some IRSSI. It is a console based IRC client that has been around forever. It's powerful and can be extended with scripts. Minimalists can run it without any tweaks etc and enjoy its scant interface, but I believe it can be tweaked to have more GUI elements. I'll have to research that.
It isn't going to be native to your phone so you're going to have to find another way to run it (This is - in part - why I say it's for nerds). I personally use GnuRoot Debian and install IRSSI via apt, just like I would on a desktop.

Enjoy checking out IRC. And watch for future IRC topics!

5 of the Best Freewares Evar

I have to have my little utilities. A stock, freshly built machine is nice but it doesn't take long for me to miss my usual set of tools. Listed below are five of my all-time favorites.
 

Oh, and... Every app below is cross platform.

VIM
I use VIM for EVERYTHING. Notes, development, everything. If I'm stuck on Dohs it's probably the first thing I install. On Nix, I make sure I've got the GTK variant so it interacts with the clipboard correctly. If you eschew VIM for NEOVIM etc, cool. Either one.

Double Commander
The very next app I install after a rebuild is Double Commander. I don't even know how many years I've been using this file manager. It's been a trusted companion for a very long time. It's snappy and has all the features I need. Most important, I can hide ALL of its UI elements, even the tabs. If I'm not doing file work in the console, Double Commander is what I'm rolling.

CopyQ
This powerhouse clipboard manager is fairly new to me but it has proven itself so far. It has replaced Ditto on Dohs and Klipper on Nix. It has far better organizing than Ditto and doesn't use that second clipboard in Nix, you know the one that stubbornly copies selected text etc.

Jreepad
I just recently started using the Java version of Treepad again for bookmarks / notes. I like its minimal UI and it's more powerful than using a browser's bookmarks manager. I like treeviews so Jreepad makes sense for me.

Qutebrowser
This one is also newer to me, but since I love VIM, a VIM web browser is a no brainer. And unlike Vimperator which is a Firefox plugin, its host isn't constantly breaking it.

Qutebrowser > *

As I have mentioned before, I love VIM, therefore I like making everything look and act like it. I ditched Chrome, going back to Firefox just so I could run Vimperator and have the browser's entire GUI go away - tabs and everything. But I'm always a bit nervous about Firefox releasing updates that break Vimperator and other plugins. So periodically I'll poke around and see what my options are.

I've tried Vimb but so far have been unable to get it to install - make whines about a missing req - I read up on it, try the various solutions people suggest... SPLAT same error.

In the past I've seen Qutebrowser mentioned in threads etc and I believe at one point I tried installing it. Apparently I didn't try very hard. I just got it installed and running. First impression: YES!

Changing settings are nice and painless, and inherantly persistant. This is really nice, even though it isn't very VIM-ish. In this regard Vimperator is much more 'in the spirit' but whatever, I'm lazy, I'll take it! Nearly everything is pretty straightforward for the VIM/Vimperator user. It did take me a bit to figure out how to open new tabs. It looked like :tab-clone was the only option. Thanks to IRC I found out you can to :open -t and leave the URL off.
Tab switching is different in QB, good old gt command is there, but it doesn't simply cycle through or go to the number you may have entered before entering gt, it requests a tab number from you, displaying your options. This is not a problem once you realize T will cycle forward through the tabs.

So far the only thing I DO miss from Vimperator is the bookmarking. Bookmarks were more powerful in Vimperator (From what I know so far and have seen in the docs). But no matter, I need to have my bookmarks synced anyway so I'll probably continue to use FF for my bookmarks.

Qutebrowser is amazing so far!

In Defense of Square

I have a shelf full of futuristic or retro-futuristic watches. A couple 01theOne AniDigi watches. One with a black X and one with a blue/green X.  A crazy 01theOne binary watch. Nixon Comp, Rip Curl, etc.
One thing in common with all of these watches: They are all square.

So when I decided to add a smartwatch to my scifi collection I wanted a square one. As you can imagine my options were limited. I ended up getting the steel SmartWatch3 for a great price. And I love it. It looks futuristic and square is perfect for code/console watchfaces.

As a watch guy, I personally don't understand round smartwatches. Why buy a watch that pretends to be a 'real' watch? But to each his own. It IS interesting to read reviews of watches like mine. The comments are filled with the likes of:
"Not round, so don't care."
There are TONS of round smartwatches, why get down on one of the very few square ones? At least companies are bold enough to try them.
I say get a smart watch that is conducive to an actual screen. I say get a smartwatch that knows what it is and isn't trying to be what it isn't.

I say be square.

It's Time to Get Out the Big Guns

If you hate trackball mice, you're gonna want to skip this post. It will be very painful for you.

I have been using trackball mice pretty much as long as I have been using computers. I started with the Logitech Track Man. That was my go to. I had one for every computer and laptop I owned. And it's a work horse. I have NEVER had one die.

But after so many years of using it I just felt like a change. Maybe something with a scroll wheel / mechanism. So reluctantly I tried other trackballs. I went with an Elecom. I liked its all black coloring. It's a great little mouse and so far is serving me well.

But I wanted to try the big balls. After all I'm on the computer all day every day, maybe I should get a power user trackball. So I saved money and bought the Ferrari of trackballs, the Kensington Slimblade. It truly is a beautiful mouse. And I can't believe how smooth it rolls. The ball truly glides. The scrolling mechanism works but is not ideal when scrolling through very long files. It is definitely my current favorite.

I didn't want to have to carry the Slimblade around back and forth between work laptop and home machines, so I decided to get another big ball mouse. I almost bought a second Slimblade but decided to go with Clearly Superior's L-Trac (The all-black, not the glowing ball). I must admit I was very unhappy with this mouse at first. It was as expensive as the Slimblade but compared with the Slimblade it felt like a $30 mouse, not the approaching $100+ price range. The ball movement was rough. Zero glide. You cannot remove the ball without completely disassembling the mouse (This DOES make it great for packing around, although it is a huge beast), and it just doesn't look as cool in person.
But I use it with my work machine and in time the ball movement has loosened a little, to where it isn't distracting. And I have to say, the scrolling! There it DOES glide. Scrolling through huge files is cake. So I've come to enjoy this trackball also. It's still no Slimblade, but a solid #2.

Eloquent Book, Sir

Over the years my areas of interest in the world of coding has shifted dramatically. Web development is what originally hooked me. I could build a public stage for whatever art or writings I came up with. From there I became fascinated with application development, building little text editors and goofy utilities etc.

I wanted to learn C++ so I could make 'super' applications but all the tutorials were console apps - eww - I wanted to make super cool GUIDs etc.  Basically I wanted to compete in the Olympics before I had learned to crawl.

Fast forward nearly 20 years...

Now I'm far more interested in the back end. How things work on a lower and lower level. Web development and graphical UIs do not interest me. Ironically everything I do in my free time is UI-less, running in the console.

I am not terribly interested in C++ I prefer the portability of Java, plus it's real easy to run my Java console apps in gnu-root on my phone.

But career-wise I'm shifting into web services, APIs etc. So I have to dust off good old Javascript. During a web search for whatever js question I had, I bumped into Eloquent Javascript. So I got the book and started reading it. I've only read a few pages but already I can say I love this book!

It is as entertaining and inspiring as Life With Linux is! In just a page or two it brings the developer dragon within you to life. We'll see if this continues throughout the book but so far I really like Marijn Haverbeke's writing style. Any book that gives a binary application as its very first example is top shelf in my opinion.

You can read the book here:

Eloquent Javascript.

Do You Even Android, Bro?

Android. I am going to be brutally honest here. I can't stand mobile OS's. The idea that an OS has been specifically designed to keep me from utilizing a device that I paid a lot of money for - and continue to pay service fees to use is disgusting.
Sure there's security etc to consider. But laptops. No the heart of it is ensuring we are locked into our carrier. Anyway, as you will find out in future posts, it drives me crazy.
But this article is about the Android Studio. AS is by far the most frustrating IDE I've ever used.
About a year ago I bought a Sony Smartwatch 3 with the metal bracelet. It looks super retro-future-sci-fi. I love it. And I was excited to build my own watchfaces for it. So I grabbed Android Studio and spent hours looking for examples and trying to figure out the basics. I got it down enough to make what I wanted. I created a nix console-looking watchface: TerminalTime and a grid of squares watchface: Central Mother.
After about a half a year I wanted to do some improvements to them. I launched AS and it wanted to update itself. Cool, I like rolling the most recent stuff. So I did the update. Aaaand that was the last time my watchfaces ever ran. Or ANYTHING in AS for that matter. I have wasted so many hours removing, reinstalling, deleting virtual devices, creating new virtual devices, building watchfaces using the new project wizard. So many hours scouring forums and contacting Google. Hours and hours and hours, trying to do the most basic thing you could possibly do in AS. Create a watchface project and run it (Without changing anything in it first). I can't get the  project AS created to run in AS.
It's maddening to not be able to modify my own watchfaces because of some dumb IDE. I'm sorry but I hate AS.