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travel tech

Dani lent me his iPad for my trip. It has proven to be very convenient, aside from the auto-correct introducing some errors when I type. (I'll fix any that I've missed when I get home.)

My iBook crashed yesterday. I don't know what the problem is or if it can be fixed; it made a loud sustained whirring sound, not the klunk of a dying disk (at least for PCs), so I don't know if it's a disk error or something else. I couldn't figure out how to turn it off - no response to the mouse or keyboard, nor to the power button. I ended up popping the battery after things quieted down (so the disk wasn't spinning); no idea if that made things worse.

If I can't fix it I'll need to replace it with something. The iPad is nice so it might be that (with a real keyboard), if it has a real text editor and access to the file system. Does it? Is there an emacs port yet?

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I have an ipad. let me ask my resident tech guru that question. may i point him to this post?

Feel free, thanks. And I figure if there's an emacs for it he's likely to know. Unless he's a vi guy, that is...

AFAIK the ipad/iphone environment has no emacs port. Since GNU emacs contains a language interpreter (elisp), it will never be allowed into the app store. Besides, Apple still does not let you access the file system directly; every app has to provide its own file interface locally (like Keynote or GoodReader) or remotely (like Dropbox or Google Docs). I think people who want to do wordprocessing tend to use Pages and upload their documents to the iCloud (or sync with a laptop). It's a clumsy setup and one that geeks really wish Apple would fix.

One alternative you might consider is a remote-login app...there are many. They use SSH to give you terminal access to some unix machine on the network, and you can then run Emacs (or vi) through SSH to your heart's content.

Normally the power button brings up the dialog box that says "do you want to shut down", and if your computer hangs, then the dialog box never comes up. You can do a forced shutdown by holding the power button down for about 5 seconds. That can, of course, corrupt your disk, and force the system to do a filesystem check when it reboots, but such is life. Taking out the battery works too :)

Mac laptops can go into a high-whine mode when working hard on some processing...for me this happens if it does a BIG compile, or runs a big Flash game like Farmville. This is the fan speeding up to keep the innards from overheating, and it normally powers down when things cool off.

Best advice: try rebooting the ibook, and give it a long time to do its filesystem check. (It should show the Apple logo while doing this). If you can't get that far, take it to an Apple store.

I hope it's OK...my last Mac laptop had a similar death about a year ago...in the middle of our vacation in Nebraska :(

Thanks for the info. Alas, sometimes I want a text editor when I'm not online, e.g. during a trip, or a class where I want to take notes. So while ssh is a good idea for some cases (and I have the shell account already) it doesn't solve the whole problem. Know any other text editors for iPad? I do mean text - plain old ASCII, not RTF or some proprietary format. I've lost too many older docs to format obsolescence; text is safe. A workable editor also needs keyboard commands for cursor positioning for editing; trying to do that with my finger is slow and hard, hard enough that if I get close I just delete back and retype. That may be ok for LJ comments, but it's no way to live. :-)

Thanks! I did press and hold, but maybe not long enough. When I rebooted I saw, in alternation, the apple logo and a file icon. After about five minutes I gave up;based on this comment I'll try again and just let it run for a while.

I was downloading pictures from my camera (just for security) when it happened, so I guess that's kind of disk-intensive.

When I've had to enter text on my iphone, I've always used Apple's builtin Notes app, but that's a poor solution for doing real work (or even LJ comments :). A quick search reveals there are lots of text editors, and some are even free...but I've never tried 'em.
http://appshopper.com/productivity/kwrite

Yeah, importing photos can tax the machine if you've got a lot of pictures. (Iphoto spends lots of CPU cycles creating thumbnails and different sizes for each picture, so that iphoto's zoom feature will work smoothly). It should still have offered you the shutdown dialog, although it could be sluggish getting around to it. (Just like any other Unix machine :)

I'm not sure how long a filesystem check should take. The time for a filesystem check seems to be proportional to the size of your disk. I think it checks every 1024 bytes, so a 2MB drive will take twice as long as a 1MB drive. And hard drives getting bigger every year means the check gets slower. 10 min is not unusual these days.

If I recall correctly it's a 60G disk - not big by today's standards, but it's an older machine. With luck it just wants more time.

And while reinstalling an OS is annoying, I don't keep anything only on this machine, so I won't lose data. Fortunately I had already posted all my queued LJ posts; I was preparing to write more when this happened.

Hey, I didn't have much to add to this at the time (I have both but mostly just use the iPad for games and casual internet), but I just got this month's copy of Macworld, and the cover story is: 'iPad vs. Mac: which one is best for reading, writing, editing photos & more!'. Might be worth checking out!

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emacs on the ipad

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