travel tech

[cellio]

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?

Comments

[alfiechat.livejournal.com]

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

emacs on the ipad

[arslan-ibn-daud.livejournal.com]

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.

mac woes

[arslan-ibn-daud.livejournal.com]

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 :(

[alice-curiouser.livejournal.com]

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!