Diary of a Lazy Dad

MacBook

Posted on by Ken Brooklyn

So, I recently inherited my kid’s 2017 MacBook, and I am really loving it. It is just a plain MacBook; not a Pro or Air; just a plain MacBook, and it weighs just 2 lbs. Very light, and it can do just about whatever I used to do on my Dell laptop. I love Dell and have been a PC person for years and still love PC’s. But since this MacBook became available, I decided to use it.I’ve always admired the look and solid feel of Apple products, so this was my chance to try it out.

I don’t do much media (photo / video editing) on this, and never did much on my old laptop, so I don’t need a whole lot of performance. If I can write some code and GIT push and deploy it, I am good. I also don’t need to compile huge programs on my machine at all. Plus, much of what I do these days, I do on virtual machines in the cloud anyway, so I just need to SSH into them and I am good.

 

I can’t think, at the moment, of what I can do on a PC laptop that I can’t do on this. Of course, there are a lot of software programs that are available on PC’s that are not available on Macs, but I don’t use anything these days that are only available on PC’s (I am increasingly depending on the cloud and FOSS).

 

The other major thing that makes this transition from a PC laptop to the MacBook easy is the Microsoft OneDrive. One great thing about my setup was that most of my important work files were in OneDrive, which was always synced between my desktop and laptop, so when I need to do work locally, it didn’t matter if I did it on my desktop (in my office) or the laptop (in the living room in front of the TV, or on the road). It turns out the MacBook OneDrive app works beautifully and seamlessly in syncing my Windows desktop files with the MacBook.

I am really digging this MacBook so much that if this ever has issues, I think I will upgrade to another MacBook; probably the MacBook Air, as performance is not so much an issue as much as lightness / portability for me.

 

Gyudon!

Posted on by Ken Brooklyn

When I lived in Japan, people asked me what I missed most about the U.S. The answer was usually, NY pizza, bagels with cream cheese, roast beef wedge with Russian dressing, cheap steaks etc. Things like that. Now that I’m in the U.S., one of the things I miss most about Japan is the beef bowl, or gyudon. They used to have a Yoshinoya in Times Square, NYC, for a while, but that closed years ago. 

I recently discovered that you can get this stuff in the frozen food section of a Japanese supermarket. This is probably not new, but just something I’ve noticed recently as  we have a Japanese grocery store nearby. 

This comes frozen; you just nuke it for 2 or 3 minutes (depending on brand) and put it over year own bowl of rice. It’s not cheap as it costs $7.00 or so, +/-, whereas you can get a Halal food cart dish for $6.00, and I think beef bowls at the restaurant chains in Japan go for 300 – 500 yen. 

Anyway, this is a great, quick, frozen dish that tastes great.

For those who don’t know, gyudon is an original Japanese fast food. There are big chains with restaurants all over the place. I used to eat there a lot, and they were usually packed with construction workers, cab drivers and other working class people, mixed in with salarymen, and broke college students like me. It’s very fast, tasty and cheap. 

I was going to say gyudon shops in Japan are as ubiquitous as fast food burgers are here in the U.S., but then realized there are 14,000 MCD’s in the U.S. (population 330 mn) vs. 4,000 gyudon shops in Japan (total of the top 3 chains: Sukiya, Yoshinoya and Matsuya, population 126 mn). 

Linux vs. Windows

Posted on by Ken Brooklyn

Every few weeks, I get really tempted to ditch Windows completely and switch to Linux (I have two desktops; one Windows and one Linux. My main laptop is Windows, and I install Linux on my old laptops and have a couple of Raspberry Pis). I love Linux, and most things I do, I do in a browser or with FOSS (free, open-source software) such as GIMP, Kdenlive, Inkscape etc. Linux is free, really stable and runs with very low overhead (compared to Windows). It never just crashes, and doesn’t go into those unpredictable 2-3 hour reboot/update cycles.

With Ubuntu, Linux recently doesn’t look all that different from Windows. Most casual users will be able to use Linux with no problem. I did install a Linux PC at a workplace where people who didn’t have any experience with Linux were able to use it without any problem.

PC’s are mostly used for web-surfing, getting on social media, emailing and things like that, most of which are done in the browser. So for those people, Linux should work fine. There is a need to work directly on the command line, though, even though that is not too hard. You can google what you need to do and just copy it. But some knowledge of bash might be helpful.

Having said that, sometimes I reboot my Windows machine and my keyboard doesn’t work. Or  the sound doesn’t work. And I have to go through all these steps, finding, uninstalling and reinstalling drivers and all sorts of things which may be too much for non-technical people. So it’s not like Windows is easy to run and maintain either.

At the end of the day, the problem for many with Linux is going to basically be software. My teen kid won’t go Linux as gaming is all Windows. If you are going to have custom-built, high-end gaming machine with the latest graphics card and want to play the latest games, you are going to do it on a Windows machine. Not Linux. Same with things like Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom and things like that, which are not available on Linux. I love GIMP and Darktable, but if you are a hardcore Adobe user, Linux isn’t going to work.

I can’t really think of any software I use that can’t be used on Linux, at the moment. I don’t play games, don’t use Adobe, and although I use Microsoft Office at times, I can do most of the same on Google sheets/Docs and with the Libre Office suite.

The only thing that is holding me back at the moment from switching is that Windows has become much stabler after Windows 10, and I am hooked into OneDrive. This allows me to work from my home PC and laptop seamlessly wherever I am. You can do this with Google Drive, DropBox and maybe Box, but I haven’t set anything up there yet. Anyway, one of these days I will probably make a clean break from Windows, but not yet.

Stuffed Grape Leaves

Posted on by Ken Brooklyn

So, I found this downstairs in our supermarket and decided to try it, and it is very good! I usually get this fresh at sahadis.com or Damascus Bread and Pastry Shop (both on Atlantic Ave in Brooklyn). I wasn’t expecting much from a canned version, but it is actually much better than I would have expected. Not quite as good as fresh, but pretty close.


Free Software

Posted on by Ken Brooklyn

I am a huge fan of free software. If you have old laptops, desktops, Raspberry Pi’s and other stuff lying around, we often want to use / revive them. And then you realize the OS is out of date (Windows XP anyone?), and you don’t want to dish out for another OS user license (well, you can use Windows 10 for free, unregistered if you want, with some limitations). Or you have something that works, but you need to do something with Microsoft office files, and you don’t want to spend money on another license. You can do a lot with Google Docs/Sheets and whatnot, but that can be slow and glitchy sometimes.

First of all, for old machines (and even some new ones), I much prefer Linux to Windows for various reasons. Anyway, that may come in a later post, but for now the two main reasons is that 1. it’s totally free, and 2. it doesn’t go into these long update-shutdown cycles which can be very annoying.

Anyway, here some free stuff that is really good.

    Photo editing: https://www.gimp.org/

    Video editing: https://kdenlive.org/en/

    Microsoft Office alternative: https://www.libreoffice.org/

    Drawing / SVG editing / graphic design: https://inkscape.org/

    Desktop Publishing: https://www.scribus.net/

All of these are completely free with no strings attached, and are pretty awesome. While they may not be as good as some of the things they replace (GIMP vs. Photoshop), they are pretty good and keep getting better. There are plenty of free tutorials online to learn how to use them too.

Also, all of these work on both Linux, Windows and Macs.