Drawing on Tumbler

Monday, January 23, 2023 · Permalink

More Tumbler. Copied over my Neovim and Krita configuration. I still have pending to setup a Git repository for my dot files.

Anyway, Krita works. And I persevered on drawing and trying other tablet modes. While, yes, the X200 Tablet’s pressure levels are terrible (you have to push hard in order to register strokes), I think it’s usable with my fixed-width art style. And, yeah, handwriting is far better and legible when writing directly on the screen.

Two things I didn’t consider:

One, the screen is now closer to my eyes, which means I need to use my glasses. I tried in a second session without glasses and it was acceptable. No issues with that. I use my smartphone without glasses mostly anyway.

Second, the ergonomics of drawing on the screen and trying to use the keyboard at the same time is uncomfortable. I tried transforming to tablet mode and relying on the on-screen controls. Everything’s doable albeit a lot slower. Tapping with the stylus on the Undo button, or having to pick the Pan or Eyedropper tool is a lot slower and cumbersome than hitting hotkeys. But, it’s usable. I just have to be more patient.

So, for lazy, hobby drawings, it’s OK; but definitely not for professional, paid work.

A rotating Tumbler

Sunday, January 22, 2023 · Permalink

Resuming work on Tumbler, configuring all those little things I never got to set up properly. Like the automatic rotation triggered you swivel the screen to tablet mode. Or toggle the screen orientation with the screen button.

I also setup Onboard, on-screen keyboard that looks pretty cool! So Tumbler is cool to use now.

I wish I had an SSD disk, no matter if it’s small, to make it really fly.

Hibernation shortcut works!

Saturday, January 21, 2023 · Permalink

Tumbler’s hibernation shortcut is now working! Turns out the event was being catched by XFCE’s Power Manager. It was set to «Do Nothing» so there was a conflict there. That explains why it worked intermitently. Now it works, yay!

Opened Tumbler, I cleaned it a bit and was curious to see if I had the WWAN radio installed. A SIM port is there and I see connections in place, but no, there’s no radio adapter inside. Oh well. What would I do with it, anyway? I can’t even use Tumbler on the road, its battery is completely dead. Also, Tycho has a WWAN card and I’ve never used it.

Gave a look at Tumbler’s Bluetooth adapter, maybe I can put it on Tycho? Nope, they’re different models. Oh well.

Resurrecting Tumbler

Friday, January 20, 2023 · Permalink

I had the unusual itch to boot up Tumbler, my Lenovo Thinkpad X200 Tablet. I’ve set up hibernation because… don’t know, I want to move it around and since it’s battery is dead, having hibernation working is a good, useful thing.

I can’t get the Fn+F12 key shortcut to work. It’s strange. When doing acpi_listen, the event triggers, but if I try again, it does not. It works intermittently. If I lock the screen with an ACPI event, it seems to reset. Not sure.

Anyway, while it would be great to have the shortcut working, it’s not a big deal.

Now you’re burdened with power

Thursday, January 19, 2023 · Permalink

My Samsung Galaxy A13 smartphone has an 8-cores processor at 2GHz, 3 gigabytes of RAM and an ARM Mali-G57 950MHz GPU.

And yet, WordPerfect for DOS was zillion of magnitudes faster than editing a WordPress blog post in this thing. How have we regressed so much?

Wednesday, January 18, 2023 · Permalink

I wish my web server were in the corner of my room:

First there’s the feeling of “I made that!” which leads to the feeling of “I can make all kinds of things!” You will definitely get that more when you install the software on the web server yourself, and also when you copy over your own hand-coded text files. (The web is just text!)