When I hear "stream" I think of piss.
You've got streaming audio, cloud repositories of millions of tracks, probably from more artists than you'd have time in a lifetime to fully appreciate, much less listen to a single time. This is as good as life gets, isn't it? Any song you want, on any device?
Wrong.
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I bought a Samsung 3 in 2013, and used it relentlessly for the next six years. That's a long time, but thanks to the now-banished feature of a replaceable battery, I was able to prolong its life by three years longer than other phones simply by spending fourteen dollars on a new battery when the original one began failing! Finally this year, the GPS started to fail and it seemed time to upgrade. Here's what I won, and here's what I lost by going to a new device:
Lost
* Goodbye, replaceable battery. Hello, planned obsolescence and forced hardware upgrades, plus all the environmental impacts that ensue.
* The old address book was simple and excellent; the new one is less useful with a tiny "search" button -- probably the first button you'll look for after starting it. Also, the new address book keeps trying to engage me: "Do you want to merge entries?" No, fuck off: I have friends who share a land line and they're not dupes, so stop asking. "Do you want to share your address card?" No, fuck off, and stop asking me multiple times per day.
* The old Notes app -- kind of a flagship app allowing you to use the stylus to take handwritten notes -- was better in a way, with templates and some tricks that gave it more flexibility. The new version is simpler and streamlined, but not as flashy.
* As a result of the big battery, this thing is much heavier than its predecessor, when we were still very concerned about weight.
Won
* A really big battery: I can go all day and into the next day before charging. The audacity of walking around all day with no charging cable instantly improves my street cred.
* The chip is much faster and more powerful and it's noticeable.
* As a result, now I can finally install Microsoft O365 and read work email! Wait, that might be a loss, now that I think about it.
* Much nicer camera, obviously. In fact, the old Note 3 took great photos but the Note 9 takes even nicer ones.
* The new stylus is far smoother and more comfortable -- very nice to write with.
About the same
* The Note 3 came installed with some non-deletable crapware: TripAdvisor, Peel Remote, some other shit I detested but was unable to delete. (For bonus points, TripAdvisor insisted on updating regularly). Those apps are now gone, but Samsung has installed some other garbage.
* I've still got a headphones jack. Suck it, iphone! Actually, categorize this one as pure win.
* I've still got a micro-SIM card slot I can stick a 4TB chip into containing my entire music collection. No streaming for me, no monthly music fee, and my entire collection belongs to me. Streaming is for suckers.
Conclusion
Well, you win some and lose some. The irony is that the Note 3 is still pretty serviceable, just not as a GPS, and so I still have it in use.
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My operating principle has always been: use the best tool for the job. Where computer work is involved, I insist on a good keyboard. In my case, it's the Kinesis Advantage keyboard, which is ergonomic, comfortable, and built to last. Read on about why I love it.
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The situation is as follows: you have a MySQL database that backstops your blog, and you'd like to output each database entry as an individual text file. Not as strange an idea as it seems - maybe you'd like to output whatever edits you made to already-published articles, maybe you'd like a bunch of text files you can use as a backup in case your relational database kicks the bucket. Whatever the reason, anyone who's ever written a blog will agree that significant time and effort goes into writing, and the risk of losing all that text is formidable and vaguely hair-raising.
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Read more: Backing Up a MySQL Database to Individual Text Files
On a lark, I decided to give the TypeMatrix keyboard a try, having passed it up earlier in lieu of the Totally Ergonomic Keyboard. At a hundred bucks, it was a low-risk gamble, and I am ever-more curious about interesting, innovative, or just curious keyboards. Someday we'll look back on the age of keyboards as a novelty that betrays our technological unsophistication, but that age isn't here yet, and for the moment we are still largely glued to our keyboards, so why not experiment?
Off the bat, a few observations:
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