Tech Topics

adventures without alexa

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 2 Comments

In an earlier post, I talked about Alexa, Amazon’s “intelligent personal assistant.”

Alexa was not an ideal fit for me as an “intelligent personal assistant,” but I figured I had limited options. If you’re not on an Apple product, you don’t get Siri, and if you’re not on Windows you don’t get Cortana (well, you can get Cortana for Android, but I gather it’s not really the same). And for some reason saying, “OK, Google,” to get things done just makes me feel silly.

But it turns out there are other options. Indigo is an “intelligent personal assistant” that runs on various platforms, and so far it seems much more satisfactory, at least for me.

1. It can do the thing that Alexa can’t, which is set a reminder for a task — as opposed to alarms and “to do” lists being completely separate. I can be walking down the street and say, “Remind me at 5pm to pick up my laundry,” and a reminder will pop up at the appropriate time. I like that.

2. Indigo will play the music that’s on my phone. Alexa is all about the streaming music, so if I tell Alexa to play a song by Taylor Swift, I’m likely to end listening to a Taylor Swift song that I don’t actually like. Indigo will play a Taylor Swift song that I have on my phone, which is, by definition, a song that I like (or why would I have it on my phone?).

3. Indigo is willing to address me in a British accent. That’s a feature I didn’t even know I wanted until I found it in a menu.

Plus Indigo does the other stuff — waking me up in the morning, telling me the weather, giving me the news, putting things in my calendar.

So, so far so good.

adventures with alexa

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 2 Comments

(Wow, it’s been a while since my last post, huh? Sorry about that. There should be another one in a day or two.)

 
Well, “adventures” is probably a little strong for my experiences with Alexa so far.

I have no desire to own one of those devices that listens to everything you say, waiting to hear a key word. I talk to myself a lot, and nobody needs to be listening to all that.

But now Amazon has rolled out Alexa, its “intelligent personal assistant,” to its tablets, so I’ve been experimenting a little. On the tablet, Alexa doesn’t listen all the time (it would kill the battery) — you have to press a button.

So far, the best use for me seems to be weather reports. I press the button, ask what the weather will be today, and I get a reply in words, plus a display on the screen that gives more detail. That’s helpful.

I can also ask her/it to set an alarm, and that works fine.

I can put something on my To Do list, but I can’t set a reminder for it. The To Do list and the alarm are completely separate, unfortunately. I’ve already sent feedback about this, so maybe it will be fixed at some point.

She (let’s call it “she”) can also do web searches and look things up on Wikipedia. If I say, “Good morning,” she greets me in return and tells me a (possibly) interesting fact.

If I ask about her quest, she tells me that she’s searching for the Holy Grail.

I think there’s a way to get her to say that she’s Inigo Montoya and she’s about to kill me, but I’ll leave that to people who are more entranced with The Princess Bride than I am.

So, useful (or at least entertaining), for a few minutes in the morning, but that’s about it.

So far.

there’s really nothing like paper

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 5 Comments

I’ve been working, on screen, on the story I’m calling “Providence” (which is definitely not going to be the title), and finally, after some technical difficulties (described below) I printed out what I had so far.

And immediately saw all sorts of things to fix and change. Things I never saw in all the time I looked at it on screen.

The technical difficulties

I considered the question of computers before I went on my recent trip. My laptop is really too heavy to carry comfortably (no car = a lot of walking). I considered, as I have several time before, buying a lightweight Chromebook, but I didn’t. Instead I bought a very portable (it rolls up) keyboard for my tablet.

And then, when I got settled in at the bed & breakfast, I found I had the tablet and the keyboard, but not the extremely necessary and fairly obscure connector that, well, connects them.

I couldn’t easily locate a replacement where I was, so I broke down and bought a (cheap, light) Chromebook. On which I’m writing this, as a matter of fact. Quite a successful purchase.

So far, I have only one complaint, which is that it doesn’t — in any way that I’m used to — print. It has a USB port, and I can plug in a printer, and it even seems to recognize what the new peripheral is, but it won’t print to it.

Some research revealed that this is, in fact, how Chromebooks “work.” To print with one, you have to have a wireless-enabled printer (maybe that’s not the correct term — in any case it’s something I don’t have) and then you “print” to some sort of cloud thing and then the print job makes it to the appropriately-connected printer.

Which seems like a silly way to print to a printer that’s about a foot away from the computer.

Conclusion

Which is why it took a while to get around to printing the story, but the clarity it led to was worth the effort and the wait.

anniversaries, and small screens

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 3 Comments

I started this blog on August 21, 2005, so that’s eleven freakin’ years ago. 741 posts.

Well, one more now.

Hey, pretty cool.

I know I missed the actual anniversary, but I missed it by less than usual. I think last year I missed it completely, and that was the tenth anniversary.

Oh, well.

 
cellphones and novels

On another subject, I’ve realized that the problem with doing a lot of writing on a phone, at least for me, is not the keyboard. Practice helps with that.

What practice won’t help with is the size of the screen.

In general, other than jotting down a few notes, my phone doesn’t show me enough for me to write more. A tablet does, even a small one, but not a phone.

It was helpful to figure that out. It may be different for other people, but everybody has to figure out what works for them.

i find television confusing

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 4 Comments

I haven’t watched television in — as far as I can remember — twenty years. Something around that anyway.

I own a TV set — an old one, not the modern flat kind — and it’s started to develop problems. I use it to watch DVDs, and now there are a couple of areas of the screen where the colors are off.

(Sometimes I do watch TV shows on DVD, mostly Firefly, Nero Wolfe, and Ellery Queen.)

So, time to replace the set, right? But the problem is that TVs have got a lot more complex since the last time I bought one. There are all sorts of different connectors now (I don’t even know what HDMI is, and apparently it’s already passe). There are also various ways to get video from a tablet to a TV set, and I don’t understand any of them.

Plus, TVs mostly seem to be monstrously huge now. I really don’t want to have a TV that’s going to be the biggest thing in the room.

But mainly I don’t want to have to devote a lot of time and brain power to learning about a damn TV set. I think that, for now, I’ll tolerate the color problem (at least until it gets worse…). And for the movies I have on my tablet, I’ll survive without “throwing” the video to a larger screen.

I enjoy learning technical stuff, when the subject is something I’m actually interested in. TV, not so much.

after after deadline

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

Well, this (slightly) disrupts my weekly routine.

For years, every Tuesday morning I’ve gone to the New York Times website to read the After Deadline blog, which described the Times’ style sheet (and all the mistakes they made in grammar, usage, and style that week).

But now it’s been put on hiatus. Sigh.

Where am I going to get regular reminders about danglers, singular/plural disagreements, and so on?

I’ll have to console myself with the monthly Chicago Manual of Style Q&A, and the Comma Queen videos at the New Yorker website.

 

In other news, I’ve talked before about the Fast & Furious movies, but I’ve been seeing them more or less in reverse order. I’ve made it back to Fast & Furious (#4), which is okay but not as good as the three which follow it.

#3 (Tokyo Drift) is supposed to be okay but not great. There are apparently a few people who think it’s the best of the series, but that’s very much a minority opinion.

Nobody thinks #2 is the best of anything, and plus it has a really stupid name (2 Fast 2 Furious) –so that’s definitely one to skip.

But I thought I should see #1, The Fast and the Furious, so I just watched it. It’s pretty different from the later ones, which are much more about heists and global espionage. This is much more down-to-earth, involved with illegal street racing and robberies of consumer electronics.

But it introduces some of the key characters in the series, and it was fun to realize all the scenes in the later movies which refer back to the beginning. The whole ending scene of #6, for example. is a series of references to a scene in this one.

And, as somebody who writes serial stories without a plan, it’s fun to see a series where the whole thing is obviously being made up as it goes along, as opposed to, for example, the Marvel movies, where the interlocking plots are planned out years in advance.

 

One more thing. As I’ve reported before, I’m mostly in an Android world these days — the main thing I use the Windows computer for is moving audio files around. But the Bluetooth keyboard I have is not entirely satisfactory. A bit too small, and if I stop typing for too long (you know, to think about what I’m going to write — certainly not to watch a YouTube video or anything like that) it loses the connection and I have to tap a key a few times to get its attention back.

So, I’ve been imagining what it would be like to use a real, full-size USB keyboard. Then I realized that I have a connector that would work — a full-size USB to mini-USB cord that I bought once in a failed attempt to get a flash drive to work with a tablet.

Well, I thought, worth a try. Maybe I’d get one of those notices about having to download a driver or something.

So, I plugged the keyboard into the connector, and the connector into the tablet, and started typing. It worked right away. I plugged a mouse into the keyboard, and that worked, too. I’m typing on it now.

Then, as an experiment, I tried a flash drive instead, and that worked, too. I guess the newer version of the operating system has features that they’re not promoting.

This often happens — the new features they promote the most enthusiastically are the ones I don’t care about, and the ones in the small print get me really excited.