Pebble Is Dead - What Now?

The last we all heard of Pebble, they had funded a successful KickStarter campaign to get the new version of their smartwatches out. They had the Pebble 2, Pebble Time 2, Pebble Round 2 in the pipeline. I was waiting for my Pebble Time 2 to arrive any second – the Pebble 2 had already been shipped.

Yesterday, I received not one but three updates. As Pebble put it, “due to various factors […] Pebble is no longer able to operate as an independent entity.” So they shut down operations. While Pebble gear is still available on Amazon and other sites, Pebble itself is not selling any more inventory, nor updating their products. Software is not going to be updated, either, and after a while the Pebble app is going to die, when the first OS incompatibility hits, best guess about a year from now.

Ubuntu on an ASUS Chromebook Flip

Ah, yes, my glamorous life of jet-setting and international travel! OK, so I barely managed to fly out to ski resorts this year, and instead of flying first class, business class, or any class at all, I had to make do with budget airlines and seats so cramped, my knees routinely touch the seat in front of me. Particularly annoying when you have a six-year-old in front of you who is bored to the point of kicking the chair during the entire trip.

DYMO LabelWriter 4XL on Ubuntu

Call me a freak: I don’t like writing on envelopes. I dislike the way it feels when you push on an envelope already stuffed and sealed, I don’t like making a mistake and having to unseal and restuff. And let’s not even talk about the days when you have to send out a bunch of mailers – thankfully that’s become less common these days.

So I got myself a Brother label printer. It’s one of those dual purpose printers you can use to label, say, an envelope, but you can also print the address on an envelope. The problem: I had to enter every single label by hand, print it, and then go on to the next one.

Samsung UD590 4k Monitor and Kubuntu 14.04

I confess I had an itch. Even in my dual monitor setup, I never seemed to have enough visual real estate. If I had the Android development UI full screen on one side and the emulator on the other, it took only a single konsole shell to fill up everything I had. Then I was left without space for instant messaging, writing, emailing, etc.

It’s common year 2014. There are 10 inch tablets with 2560×1600 resolution (Google’s Nexus 10 and Amazon’s Kindle Fire HDX 8.9″). Why shouldn’t there be a monitor with a resolution higher than that? I mean, what’s the point of having a 30 inch screen if it displays exactly as many pixels as your 10 inch tablet?

SparkFun Arduino Pro Micro and Linux

Lately, I’ve been working with Arduinos. If you don’t know what that is, it’s essentially a way for anyone to build their own intelligent hardware. There is a microcontroller (essentially, a really small and underpowered CPU), infrastructure to support programming it, and a series of ports that can be connected to sensors, motors, and the like.

The Arduino has two major advantages that catapulted it into consciousness: it is open source, which makes it really easy to debug and extend; and it is exceedingly well-documented and reliable. That means that your projects will typically be hindered by your soldering and plugging skills, and not by figuring out how to work around some limitation of the IDE or software libraries.

Kubuntu 12.10 Quantal on a Samsung Series 9 (NP900X3D)

I had been following Ultrabooks for a while, but they seemed constantly overpriced. I loved the form factor, but the aesthetics and better hardware didn’t seem to justify a 100% increase in price. Especially since I am not really short on laptops.

Something about the Series 9, though, was different. It was faster, lighter, thinner, and had a better screen resolution than other Ultrabooks, and those were my requirements to a tee. It also runs Windows 8, which I hadn’t used before, and I needed a test machine.

Brother HL4150 Color Laser on Linux (Kubuntu Natty)

Summary: WOW! Five Stars!!!

I’ve had mixed luck with printers under Linux in the past ten years. Some of them would not work ever, others worked just fine, and a third kind worked some or most of the time, but you could never count on them.

It used to be the case that printing on Linux depended on the standards used. Printers that internally used PostScript would work the best, GDI printers not at all, and most of the HPGL language printers would have some functionality available. Once printers went from parallel to USB, things got worse until Linux caught up.

Acer Aspire 1 (Linpus 8GB SSD)

This is the first laptop I buy that comes with Linux preinstalled. Unfortunately, it’s a relatively unknown distribution, and I will have to replace it with Kubuntu – but otherwise it’s amazing to see thing finally moving in the direction of economic logic.

The Aspire 1 is a netbook, which by now defines a very clear category in the market – a category that is oddly much more consistent internally than other notebook segments. We have a small form factor (screens are 10" or below in diagonal, weight is typically under 3 lbs), an attention to productivity vs. gaming, and the adoption of standard operating systems (Linux or Windows XP, mostly).