CRiSP Weblog

I recently bought one of these devices. I didnt really need it, but I wanted a larger version of my phone (Galaxy Note 2), for video watching. I dislike my mini ipad - it is a great device to hold, but the whole iOS experience leaves me very cold. That and the puny amount of RAM. Switching between 3 apps will force restart the apps since iOS cannot juggle the demands of only 3 apps in the 512MB of memory.

My phone has 2GB and can easily keep 5-6 apps open. So app switching is faster, because of the lack of a need to restart.

The Galaxy Tab S has a screen of 2560x1600. Although brilliant from a bragging rights, its difficult to appreciate what this means. What it means to me is that when I split screen apps, I can read the smaller fonts of info from web browser, IMDB, etc.

There is definitely some lag in the device. I attribute this to code which will synchronously try and connect somewhere. I rooted my device, put in an adblocker, but sometimes the delays are much more than just bad OS coding. Theres too many services all fighting to wake up and do things, and even with a quad core cpu, it hangs. I run a tool to monitor the CPU speed and when it is being sluggish, the CPUs are at their lowest clock speed (250MHz) which suggests externally waiting for something and not a CPU issue. I need to run more stuff to see whats going on, e.g. a network monitoring.

My major complaint with the Tab-S is its so big. I can easily hold the Galaxy phones in my hand comfortably, in such a way that my fingers cannot touch the screen. The same is not true of an 8" tablet. You either gingerly hold it from the sides, e.g. the end where the Samsung label is, because theres more room for your fingers, or the other end where the home/back/menu button is located. That end of the tab is bad news as the system sees you frantically pressing any/all of those buttons.

If you attempt to grasph the device with your fingers mid-screen, chances you are going to do something you regret (such as click on a link, or fast-forward a video). Very strangely, the one advantage of iOS is that it is such an unfunctional OS, that this does not happen with the ipads. If you are watching a video and use your fingers to grasp the middle of the screen, then nothing happens, because apple doesnt attribute any activity to touching the middle of the view area.

So, the one advantage that Android has (and MX-Player - brilliant video player) is actually a problem on a large screen device, because there is nowhere safe to hold the device.

I really dont know what is happening with the edge-less phones currently being touted. I dont know how you can hold one without having a very erratic user experience from the edges of your palm or fingers, just trying to hold the device.

Only time will tell.

My NUC decided to die tonight. After only a few weeks. Luckily, google helped me find the problem.

It had lost its mind/marbles. It couldnt find the root hard drive.

After fiddling in the BIOS, I found that resetting the defaults fixed the problem.

It is 2014. Issues with BIOS date back to around about 1990 or so - that was when one bothered to go into the BIOS and configure pointless items. Since then, stuff works. Thanks Intel. That really is poor software development - a 24x7 machine suddenly needing a screen to reset the BIOS settings.

Yes, I need to update the BIOS, but go search for BIOS updates for NUC, and be startingly confused by how many versions there are and advice not to use the latest one.

Why is the software industry going backwards? Its not just Intel. But every major software manufacturer is adding functionality and usability by actively removing it.

I keep watching the stats on requests to my rss feed. Google seems to like me, which is encouraging, and so do some other bots/trackers.

I see the occasional nasty connection trying to break stuff, and enjoy myself watching some of the attacks. I assume they are attacks but there may be a reason for some of them. Eg a Japanese person may be trying out a Unicode request, based on some indirect link from google, for example.

It did break a record today, and if this keeps up, I can start figuring out how to really handle high load. At the moment, the load is low, and even although the feed is written for speed of development, and not optimal cpu usage - its a great exercise for some future optimisations to really decide how to sustain higher rates.

I ought to give it a real name, since the P and Q pages are not really indicative of what the service is.

Definitely an interesting experiment.

BTW I have used 250MB of mobile bandwidth in 3-4 months (to my phone). I cannot believe how low my bandwidth is, now that all adverts and other HTML window dressing is removed from the equation.

Who needs 4G? This works at 9600 baud really well :-)

http://crisp.publicvm.com:3000