Welcome to the Lubuntu PC Retirement Home

Having a working computer, but no money to buy a Windows licence for it is as useful as owning a large garage with many cars, but no money to fuel them. This was the predicament I was faced with for quite some time. No, not the cars of course, but a handful of spare computers.

At one point in the last couple of years, I owned and maintained as many as five different computers in my house wherein my primary desktop and laptop always ran the latest version of Windows, and the next two, a slightly older version or a Windows Preview (beta) copy, and the last one, some distribution of Linux. Sometimes, I even had Linux installed alongside Windows for variety. I’ll admit I had great fun playing mix-and-match with all these OSes.

With Windows, there really isn’t much of a choice; one tries to buy the latest version of it and sticks to it for a good half a decade before it’s time to cough up to Microsoft again and that has been the mantra until quite recently. Linux however, being a different and open-source ecosystem, allows the user to choose from a variety of flavours and variants. And I had tried them all; Ubuntu (with the old GNOME and the new Unity interface), Fedora, MeeGo, etc., but never stuck with anything for too long. Every distro has its own quirks, so I could never place my finger on one of them and say, ‘This is the OS I want to use permanently.’ I found myself wanting to go back to Windows often because they all felt equally slow or limiting due to driver incompatibility or lack of apps. Until I tried Lubuntu.

Lubuntu is a lightweight Ubuntu distribution based on an LXDE interface. It’s designed to run easily on old and low-end computers with low memory, and I have a couple of old-timer PCs that just about run Windows with occasional hiccups. Ideal candidates then. Lubuntu is lovely to use because the interface is very similar to that of Windows, but is not Windows. Unlike Unity and GNOME that have an app-switcher bar on the sides and corners (which if I’m honest, can be putting-off at first), Lubuntu uses a simple and conventional taskbar at the bottom with a Windows Start-like button on the left, followed by shortcuts and running tasks in the middle, and finally the system tray icons on the right. This alone makes for a flatter learning curve for new Linux users.

My Acer netbook, which has struggled to run most versions of Windows and Linux mostly due to inadequate memory and driver incompatibility, works with Lubuntu as if it were an old buddy. And my old Windows desktop too feels completely at home with Lubuntu. There’s definitely some magic here.

Lubuntu serves me well for most of my everyday computing needs. Web browsing is taken care of by Chromium, the father of Google Chrome. It is identical to the current version of Chrome and runs apps like Hangouts for chatting, and Keep for note-taking. A pre-installed Mozilla browser is also available if you prefer the fox instead.
The default music player is Audacious, a simple yet powerful tool that’s so good I even use it on Windows sometimes. I have noticed the audio output through Audacious to be crisper when compared with the competition. The popular VLC media player too is available for download in the Lubuntu Software Centre.
Dropbox works just as well as it does on Windows, and that’s lucky because I use it very heavily. Thunderbird is the most popular email client on Lubuntu, but I haven’t really taken to it. I prefer Sylpheed for speed, although it may prove to be too simplistic for some when you actually use it. There are a few more email clients to choose from, however.
The LibreOffice suite does its best to mimic Microsoft Office, but may lack full file and feature compatibility with new Office files. In this department alone, I’d recommend using Office Online if you really want the Microsoft Office experience or something close to it.
Transmission is the default torrent client and I daresay it works just as well as its Windows counterparts like the uTorrent client.

After a few months of using Lubuntu, I found myself left with a surplus of Windows licence keys. I found Lubuntu to be a better match for my Acer netbook than the Windows that came with it. I also found it liberating to use a computer without so many updates being thrown at your face every now and then, and if you’ve used genuine Windows before, you’ll know that it can get sickeningly overbearing.

Understandably, Lubuntu may not be everyone’s cup of tea. At the end of the day, it still is a Linux and sadly, a Linux can never be your only OS. This is because, in the twisted world we live in, too many applications run only on Windows or Mac. If you’ve accidentally bought an iPod for instance, or if you want to Photoshop that lightning-shaped scar off your forehead in a picture, you’d be pretty helpless with Linux. Having been designed for low-resource usage, Lubuntu lacks finesse in its user interface design. Expect zero animations and clunky looking fonts and icons that you can tweak later on. However, if you do have a spare computer lying around and are willing to give Linux a shot, Lubuntu is a great place to start.


Until next time...
Vignesh

Cover Me While I Recharge

For a long time, I firmly believed that the mobile phone battery problem could never be solved. In the last five years or so, phones have been becoming increasingly hungry for power because they have been getting smarter, and batteries... well, they have only been becoming bigger, and not really any smarter. Until now.

A couple of years ago, Lenovo, who were still selling only computers at the time introduced their Power Bridge system in one of their X-series ThinkPad models (X240 I think) that allowed the user to swap the rear replaceable battery with another one while leaving the computer running. All they did to achieve this was add a small internal battery that could hold the fort while the rear replaceable ones were being swapped. A clever algorithm then ensured that the internal battery got charged first when connected to power, and then the replaceable one.

The setup seemed perfect to me. This, I thought was the way forward with mobile phone batteries as well - sell mobile phones with an optional second battery that you can keep charging and swapping as you go. Also, get rid of the back panel because it's always such a pain.

In my two years of owning an Xperia ZR, its abysmally poor battery life was pretty much the only thing I used to complain about. It was otherwise a great phone with a stalwart build and a neat camera. About a month ago, its battery almost fully gave out and I just had to let it go.

Enter the new Nexus 5X. It cost a fortune to buy it but I finally have it in my hands (‘hands’ because it’s too bloody big to use with just one). This phone has a very ordinary 2700 mAh non-removable battery, but the way it uses it and charges it is intriguing.

I’m a moderate, if not light user of my phone. My usage consists of some calling and texting and the occasional light reading and web-browsing. I seldom play games, and when I do, it’s usually a crossword puzzle or a word-guesser that barely saps any GPU power. The fully charged Nexus serves me a good day or two before asking me to plug it in again.

Most of this frugal consumption is thanks to its new software. The latest 'Marshmallow' release of Android features Doze, a system that slows down or shuts off background apps when the phone is being inactive for long hours. The result is a phone that’s fresher than I am when I wake up in the mornings. Then there's the display backlight that can automatically go from being as bright as the sun to as dim as a night-lamp depending on the amount of light around me. While this amazing dimming capacity is great for reading late-night text messages in the bed, it can sometimes get a bit annoying as the display becomes really dim even when I'm outside at evenings and need some more backlight.

The only thing better than its battery performance is its charging system. USB type-C has finally started to make its way into some production models and the Nexus 5X has it too. The fast charger provided with the phone makes use of type-C’s improved charging rate and can charge the 5X from around 0% to full in just over an hour. I’m told that it does not employ Qualcomm’s new Quick Charge 3.0 technology but that’s a remarkable charging speed nevertheless and it feels much quicker compared to the two or three hours my previous Sony used to take to charge fully. The plug’s flippable on both ends so there’s no swearing every time I plug it in groggily every morning.

So, there we have it. The way forward is quicker charging with better hardware, and smarter software that knows how to handle apps better. And I believe I am seeing some of the finest of it here with the new Nexus after a very long time.

Every time I plug it in, a line of text on the lock-screen that reads, ‘Charging rapidly’ is a subtle reminder of how things really are progressing with battery and battery-charging technology. I am glad that I am finally seeing some of it.

Sigh. All that said, my idea wasn’t so bad either you know. It could have worked. It could have been cool even. People could have gone around cocking and reloading their phones like guns in action movies until people actually  got hurt and the entire system got scrapped.

Oh, but wait! What’s this news I hear just as I’m about to end this post? Apple has just released an expensive battery pack for the iPhone 6s which encases the phone’s body like a regular silicone phone cover but with an obnoxiously large bulge at the back.

Aha!


Until next time…
Vignesh

ThinkPad For The Win

Of late, my electronic devices have been letting me down more than usual. They are either failing or falling apart. It's probably only a phase, but stopping for a minute and taking a long look at all the devices I use everyday has put me in a contemplative mood. Of all the devices I own, there are only a handful I can call a ‘worthy investment’ and maybe only one I can call ‘precious.’ 

So let's see, my Android-powered ASUS tablet has had this disease for some time now where it suddenly decides it doesn't want to work anymore and shuts right off, even if the battery is full, and the only way to revive it is to plug in the charger again and pray fervently while holding down the power button. 

My ten year old Sony Hi-Fi stereo system is plagued by a different sort of disease. It is incapable of playing CDs or cassettes, but that’s completely fine; no one really does that these days anyway. But I should still be able to use it for its banging amplifier and speakers, right? Wrong. The entire control panel on the face of this system is crotchety; press the power switch to turn it off and it will display the time; try to switch the function mode to aux-in and it will play the radio at max volume. I am not joking about this one. It is barking mad!

It was my father’s birthday a while ago, and I had bought him a ‘Kinivo Bluetooth receiver’ for his car. I had done my due research prior to buying it and most online buyers before me seemed happy with it. I was wrong again. It turned out that, while the Kinivo could handle calls and music playback quite decently, getting it connected first to do all those things was hard. Did I say hard? I meant nigh impossible. Every time you turn the car on, it will attempt to connect to already paired devices as if it were for the first time. And once you've got your phone(s) connected to the thing, don't ever turn the car off, because if you do, you'll have had it. You see, to start the engine, the starter-motor kills power to all ancillaries for just a few seconds, till the engine is cranked up and running, and those few seconds of black-out are enough to wipe the Kinivo's memory clean. What a total pile of garbage.

But in comparison, that really is nothing, trust me. You need to know about this other contraption I have called the ‘Belkin Network USB Hub’. This dreadful piece of work, quietly ensconced under my WiFi router for the last several years, is supposed to connect USB devices like printers and flash-drives over LAN so I can access them from any of my computers wirelessly. In all its miserable life, it has managed to do no such thing; and if it all did, it had done it for no longer than a few minutes. Plagued by driver issues, the Belkin Network USB Hub could never hold a steady connection with a USB device for more than a few minutes. File transfers were abysmally slow, and print jobs rarely ever finished. To make matters worse, Belkin has never updated the driver for it, which means that since the days of Windows XP (for which it was designed), it has been becoming increasingly more useless; not to mention its incompatibility with today’s Android and iOS mobile devices.

My first world problems are seemingly endless. I could prattle on all day long about my HP all-in-one that simply cannot print a single document without mucking things up, or about my Philips home theatre that switches on loudly to an untuned radio station every time I change channels on my TV. But tech woes; we’ve all got them. Even if it looks like the simplest device in the world, like a remote control, it simply won't just work the way it should. It will drive you mad. Actually, a remote control is a terrible example; that is the first thing to die with any remote controlled device. Damn those little plastic boxes of evil!

It's times like these that I look down at the computer I’m typing on and think to myself, “Everything in the universe ought to be built like a ThinkPad.”

Good ol' T60

One of the two ThinkPad computers I own is an IBM T60 that’s nearly ten years old now. It served half its life as my father’s official computer at work, and the rest with me as my personal. In all its life, I have seen that machine fade away slowly, but only in appearance. Functionally, the T60 is still as steady as a rock. It has comfortably run OSes as old as Windows 2000 and as new as Windows 10, with a few Ubuntus in between. It started out life with less than a gigabyte of memory and now has around two and a half of it. Storage was a sixty gigabyte hard drive for the longest time, until I replaced it with a solid state drive of the same capacity some years ago for faster boot speeds.

Sure, some of the letters on the keys have faded away, the battery only lasts an hour these days, and the surface of the lid is so heavily scratched it resembles a well-worn airstrip, but on the whole, the T60 has survived the test of time a lot better than any other machine I have owned.

I will need a whole new blog-post just to explain the brilliance of this machine’s design. So let me, instead, just say that everything about it is extremely well thought-out, intuitive, and more importantly, tough and built to last. It’s no surprise then that a ThinkPad is the only kind of computer allowed on the International Space Station.

At this point, it may look like I’m being unfair in comparing the ThinkPad to a Kinivo Bluetooth receiver, which is a lot like comparing a legend like the Boeing 747 to a cheap radio clock, but no; I’m not being the least bit unfair. I have a fan on my desk that is as old as I am and to this day, works like a charm. All I’m saying is, we shouldn’t have to put up with rubbish gadgets. 

Oh well, I can never have them all, I guess. Then again, if my existing electronic devices didn't actually suffer from sudden memory-loss, heart-attacks, or hysteria every now and then, I’d never get to realise how magnificent my ThinkPad is.

Until next time...
Vignesh

Not-So-Instant Messaging

Without doubt, instant messaging has come a long way in the last decade. If I stop and think about it, back then, it was still something I sat by my desktop computer and had brief scheduled ‘chat sessions’ and then turned off the internet, but now they’re on my mobile phone chiming and dinging every few minutes even in the ungodliest of hours about a funny picture I’ve received. 

In this post, I will compare two very specific chat clients that I think have made a big impact in the way we chat now and have evolved tremendously in the last couple of years - Hangouts (formerly Google Talk) and WhatsApp. They are also the chat clients I use the most. In the following paragraphs, I shall briefly introduce the two apps and try to analyse their pluses and minuses until I am left confused without a clear winner. 

Google Talk was a free, minimalistic chat client for Windows PC that released in 2005 and could, apart from the obvious messaging function, handle some basic internet calls and perform file transfers. It was easy on memory and unobtrusive in behaviour. When Android released some years later, Talk was available as a native app on Android and worked quite well.

Slowly but steadily, internet became more easily accessible and mobile phones grew smarter, and the concept of SMS slowly faded away to make way for internet-based IMs. Among the many that surfaced, WhatsApp released in 2009 and stood out like the iPod of chat applications for smartphones. WhatsApp has since then been growing in popularity and user base (900 million active users as I write this post). It is now one of the most downloaded chat apps on any mobile platform. WhatsApp is practically free to use if you’re living in India. Although the yearly subscription rate is some fifty rupees, my service has been automatically renewed for free the last four years. Bless them for that.

Google, realising the need to fight back, unified all their chat services (Talk, GMail chat, and Google+ chat) thus ending that nasty confusion, and created one single chat service, Hangouts.

Hangouts was rubbish to begin with. It was no longer available on Windows as a standalone application, but instead on their Chrome browser as an extension that needed Chrome to be running all the time. This dirty move à la Microsoft, forced everyone to switch to their memory-hogging Chrome browser. The Android version of Hangouts was no better either; existing Talk profiles were converted to Google+ profiles that no one wanted and the app itself was dreadfully slow. Hangouts had killed everything that was good about Talk; the speed, the simplicity, and some really useful features like the Translate Bot that did some super quick language translation.

I was deeply displeased with Hangouts for the longest time. It was only after a year or two that Google took notice of all its flaws and began to fix them one-by-one. Hangouts received a new lease of life when Google decided to scrap the flawed Chrome extension for a much improved Chrome app that ran independently of the Chrome browser. The Android app too has come a long way now, but is still not strong with the basics - speed and reliability in message delivery has always has been Hangouts' Achilles heel and remains to this day a big annoyance. 

WhatsApp uses a telephone number for user identification, unlike Hangouts that needs a GMail address, and that has its limitations. You see, a telephone number is usually considered personal and is given away only with the giver’s consent. WhatsApp has axed that concept because anyone with your telephone number can add you to a group without your permission, and a group on WhatsApp can have as many as a hundred participants. So if you have been added to a group by an acquaintance with whom you shared your number, your number is still visible to every participant in that group. Yes, even the ones you didn’t want to share your number with.

The modern-day Hangouts is really quite clever and intuitive in some ways. Let’s say you've received a text that reads “Where are you?”, or something along that line, Hangouts will place a button below that so you can share your current location easily. In group conversations, it will show small favicons of the participants to indicate till where each participant has read. So, it has these nifty little features that sets it apart from the rest; and you can tell it's a Google product. Oh, and did I mention that it supports animated GIF images?

But all this is still not the reason why Hangouts trumps WhatsApp in terms of versatility and convenience. It is simply because Hangouts is truly a cross-platform and more importantly a cross-device app. I can arrive home texting on my Android phone or tablet and continue the conversation on my PC or Chromebook seamlessly without missing a single message. If I mute notifications on one device, they stay muted on all my devices. But what if I had an iPhone or Mac? It's cool. Hangouts is available on iOS and Macintosh. But what if I had a Windows Phone? Well, nope, sorry. That’s one platform on which you won’t find Hangouts, or most of the other Google apps, in fact. Let’s just say Google and Microsoft aren’t the thickest of friends in that respect.

WhatsApp is purely meant for smartphones and can support only one telephone number on one device. On that account alone, I think WhatsApp is considerably handicapped. On the plus-side, WhatsApp excels where Hangouts falls short. If there’s no internet connectivity, Hangouts will simply throw its hands in the air and give up and you’ll be left hitting resend until your message is finally gone. And in a place like Bangalore, where I live, finding internet signal on your phone is like finding water in a desert. WhatsApp, I believe is more successful in getting messages across even with poor internet connections. This is probably one of the reasons why WhatsApp is so famous in India; it just works.

WhatsApp can’t do video calls but it can do voice calls over the internet, and while it’s probably not Skype-good in terms of quality, it works OK for the most part, which is more than I can say for Hangouts because Hangouts will send itself into a tizzy if you attempt voice or video calling. Upon dialling, all the devices will start to ring and won’t stop even if you have answered or rejected the call. Hangouts has decent call quality, but the app is so badly made that it will show you as still connected in a call long after you’re through with it. The call button on Hangouts is one of those buttons you just never should press even by accident; just try to ignore its presence on the chat screen. On PC, you'll have to install a plugin on your browser to make it work. In short, you're better off with Skype for serious video calling.

So, do we have a winner?

Hangouts is really the one I want to root for because it doesn’t tie me down to one device and has some cool features, but it lacks some basic skills when the going gets tough. I think it’s safe to say that Hangouts is an app that’s at home when you’re at home. No really, it’s true, because in a perfect world, where you’re connected to WiFi and the internet’s steady, Hangouts is comfy around itself and will behave the way it should. Step outside, and Hangouts will start to struggle; sending messages will be a pain, leave alone pictures. Well, that’s probably the case with the city I live in. Elsewhere, Hangouts should still work fine. 

WhatsApp is a much newer product that has only one small purpose, and it fulfills it well. I like to think of WhatsApp as a modern replacement to SMS, and the reason I say that is because, in its rather short history, I have seen WhatsApp grow from being something so basic and so SMS-like to being what it is today. Features like message archival, read receipts, calling, voice messages, and even instant picture capture were added to it much later in its life while these weren’t new concepts outside the WhatsApp world. I also think that WhatsApp, as a design, is so saturated now that it has no space to grow. Much like the city I live in, WhatsApp now feels congested and every update and fix it gets seems unplanned and makeshift. For example, WhatsApp Web, a feature that was added recently attempts to mirror the conversations on a computer monitor for easy reading and typing. It is seemingly cumbersome because you have to go to the trouble of entering a URL in a browser and scanning a QR code to make it work while ensuring a stable internet connection on your phone as well as computer. It is not a substitute for a proper PC client by any means.

At the moment, I'm afraid I really can't decide on a winner, but if I simply had to pick, it would be Hangouts. This old-timer from Google has come a really long way, and I think there's still a lot of room for growth and improvement. 

Frankly, I think the direction in which all IM clients should be headed in the future is harmony. You should be able to use any IM you prefer while still maintaining the type of ID and chat protocol you want to use. You should be able to chat with someone who is on Facebook Messenger even if you aren't on it and use only WhatsApp. I’m told such a universal app is quite difficult to engineer, and I suppose that sort of unification will come with its own limitations. Oh well, I guess you can't please them all.

Until next time…
Vignesh

Windows 10 - Things Cortana Can't Fix

I usually use Google Docs to type my blog post drafts out. It’s simple and free, and saves automatically. What’s more, I can continue writing my post from anywhere, thanks to the Android tablet version of the same.  

Right now though, I am writing this review on my trial copy of Microsoft Word 2016, hitting Ctrl+S religiously after every sentence. And why is that? It’s because the new Windows 10 update has debilitated my laptop’s WiFi card. Yes, a recent bug currently affecting thousands of new Windows 10 users including me, is going around limiting WiFi access. I have tried a few Google-search-recommended quick-fixes, but I’m yet to rectify it fully. With an intermittent internet connection, it is hard to use Google Docs as it runs online for the most part.

Not a very promising start, is it?

I first downloaded Windows 10 when Microsoft announced its Windows Insider Program some ten months ago. It was a public beta programme, in essence. Previously, I had downloaded and tried the ‘Preview’ versions of Windows 8 and 8.1 and thought I’d continue the tradition with 10 as well.

Having constantly monitored changes to the UI closely, build after build, when Microsoft released the final build (#10240) a week before the official release date, I was a little taken aback. It felt incomplete somehow, or maybe it was just my expectation to see a lot more in the final release because that’s how it was with Windows 8. At any rate, I began to familiarise myself with it and over the last few weeks, here’s what I’ve noticed.

THE NEW ADDITIONS

The Start Menu
The much missed start menu is back and unmissable on the new Windows 10. While it’s nice that it’s once again back to being a ‘menu’ and not an entire screen for desktops, I still think the placement of the menu items are not well thought-out. The venerable Windows 7 had the power button in a corner that made it easy to locate, but here, it just sits in the middle of  the rest of the items on the left column. On the right column, by default, a bunch of preinstalled apps (News, Stocks, Sports, Candy Crush, etc. that you’ll never use) appear first, under the name ‘Life at a Glance.’ So if you have just updated to 10 and are trying to find an app that you installed in 8, you’ll have to scroll past all this junk to find it. Maybe that’s why there’s that obnoxiously large search bar on the taskbar.

The Taskbar
Noticeably, this is the most evolved bit on the Windows desktop. The new additions are the task view button, the large search bar, a shortcut to the new Edge browser, new system icons borrowed from the Lumia phone series, and an ‘Action Centre’ icon. The notification toasts are a little annoying as they keep peeking in and chiming to draw your attention to every little unimportant update (when a file updates on your Dropbox, for example). The bubbles that popped up quietly earlier were just right. Also, the entire taskbar is now all black with white text on it, something that can grow sore on your eyes quickly, or maybe that’s just me. Luckily, you can colour it.

The Action Centre
The Action Centre that previously maintained security information now shows past notifications and some quick settings. I can’t understand why you’d ever want to see expired notifications like ‘USB drive ejected,’ and the system tray icon turns white indicating new notifications even when there is nothing new. The quick setting buttons at the bottom, which look like the only form of replacement for the retired Charms bar, by default show buttons like 'Tablet Mode' (even when you’re on a desktop), and 'Quiet Hours' which may prove useful in time. On the whole however, I find the Action Centre is almost unnecessary.

The Lock-screen
The rather subtle lock-screen that existed previously now has a slightly new layout. The user icon is now circular, a shape that has caught up with Google as well. The clock on the lock-screen shows time in 24-hour format even if you have set it to 12-hour and changes back to 12-hour only after you have logged in. The default wallpaper is shown while logging in and doesn’t look like it can be changed easily. Windows Hello can log you in using face or fingerprint recognition and I can confirm that fingerprint recognition works well most of the time.

Cortana
Sadly, Cortana, the personalised digital assistant integrated with the search bar isn’t available for India yet. One can always change the location to US or UK to try it out though. I shall reserve my comments on it till I have had the chance to try it out for a month or two.

THE UNDERLYING PROBLEMS

No matter how much Microsoft pushes Windows 10 as a whole new beginning for Windows, it still feels only like a minor update, like how the 8.1 was to 8, and frankly, a lot of undue yet anticipated ballyhoo has been going on of late; this is mostly likely because for the first time, the upgrade is free for many users.

I’m not saying that just because it doesn’t look a whole lot new; Windows releases seldom do. Windows always has and still does maintain its signature desktop feel by having those eponymous windows and that familiar taskbar. But what it’s still missing is the much-needed harmony between the new tablet apps and classic dialog boxes. It’s so clunky to have to keep switching between interfaces.

Ever since the release of Windows 8 where it acquired a whole new interface for tablet devices (the tiled start screen, the new app store, etc.), Microsoft has been trying to mesh both the (tablet and classic desktop) worlds together, and has been failing badly. It seems that with Windows 10, their effort to achieve that harmony still continues. For example, you still have Settings and Control Panel as two different portals to tweak the same settings. This was one confusion I expected to be rectified in 10.

Microsoft’s idea this time around is to get as many users as they can on the Windows 10 bandwagon, and that means that anyone with a licenced copy of Windows 7 or 8.1 can upgrade to 10 for free. This clever move seems to be aimed primarily at 7-users who are still reluctant to update because of how strange 8 was, what with the removal of the famed Start button and the introduction of the Metro UI that made it desktop-unfriendly and confusing. Microsoft wants to wipe that stigma away and let its customers know that Windows is now a refreshed product that's now equally at home on desktop and tablet devices.

Microsoft's heart then, is clearly in the right place, but if they really want to make this work, they're going to have to meet their customers halfway, because right now, users trying to clean-install Windows 10 on their PCs are faced with several activation errors. 

I was one of them. I've used Windows long enough to know that when it updates to a newer version, there are bound to be a few inexplicable bugs and lags that can only be fixed by performing a clean-install. So I, like many others hoped to clean-install 10 on all my devices. But I also knew that a clean-install wasn’t possible because it would require me to have a dedicated product key for 10. So I first updated Windows to 10, and then chose to do a reset. The reset feature, an option that reverts Windows back to factory settings, went awry and my computer was stuck in a limbo until I decided to install 10 using a USB drive anyway. And that’s when Windows refused to activate my product, and made me climb the upgrade-ladder all over again from 8. Calling Microsoft support about this was as helpful as talking to a brick wall; at least you don’t have to redial a hundred times to get through to a wall.

Climbing this ladder is an arduous task - Windows 8 itself is an upgrade from Windows 7, so the licence key confusion begins right there, and there are countless little updates and patches that must be installed before getting to 8.1. And then you can download 10’s installation wizard and wait another few hours to reach the top. My point is that if activation has gone wrong for you, you simply have to go back to Windows 7 or 8, whichever you bought, and slowly clamber up to 10. I have had to do this on four of my computers, and I am thoroughly miffed by the whole experience.

Why should I be doing this? Why can’t the reset function just work? Why should I be juggling around old installation discs and product keys just to claim my free upgrade? I assure you there is nothing more turning off than Windows setup showing you those artificially pleasant one-line progress updates one minute, and an equally short error message the next. The whole Windows setup is easy-breezy as long as it’s showing a message like, “We’re getting things ready for you,” but the minute you see an error screen with just one error code to go on, that’s when you know it’s time to pull out another computer and Google that error code. Oh wait, that was your only computer? Too bad. Hope you’ve got a smartphone.

So even after some three years of employing the ‘upgrade’ scheme to update Windows versions, it still is a pain to go through. Aside from the UI integration that is still a hit or miss, Cortana and the new browser and Windows Hello are the only notable additions. All things considered, Windows 10 is still only so-so. To make matters worse, Windows 10 is quite buggy from what I read and experience. Many device drivers seem to be incompatible, my nVidia graphics driver and the aforesaid WiFi card being one of them. A month or two of injecting the necessary patches should have these holes fixed.

I started out writing this post on Microsoft Word because my WiFi card was misbehaving, but now, after a squeaky-clean-install of 10, things are back to normal and I am back to Google Docs.

Until next time...
Vignesh

The Point of No Return (An Ode to Science)

ODE

It’s a mixed bag of emotions that one generally feels
Seat upright, and all strapped in
Safely still resting on the ground, the three sets of wheels
For a few, first-time jitters within

I speak of course, about this winged metal tube called an aeroplane
Shiny and imposing, man’s fine creation
Oh how magnificent she looks, though not all feel the same
Some flying out on business, some on vacation

Soon enough, the levers will be pushed all the way forward
Vibrations will creep into every seat and window pane
Nothing much to do as you feel yourself being pressed backward
Cutting the air swiftly through warm shine or cold rain

Here comes the moment when we let the wild machines loose
All that man has made, taking centre stage
Some eight hundred souls aboard this beast, with everything to lose
All bound temporarily to this steely cage

Hurtling down the tarmac at speeds unstoppable, from one end to the other
All to escape the monotony of running and instead fly like a bird
Soar to the skies or stop now, if you’re having second thoughts, and go no further
But linger not in between, for ‘tis the point of no return, I’ve heard

Rest assured however, should you feel scared, for all of it has been tried and tested
Lady Luck is accompanying you on this ride
So go ahead and join the ten thousand other metallic birds in the skies uncongested

Science is most definitely, on your side
 

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EXPLICATION
 

Hi,

I am fascinated by anything that can fly; I always have been. I love watching birds and aeroplanes of any size fly by in the sky. It fills me with a sense of awe and envy. The sight also fills me with amazement because up there in the skies, there’s a lot more space to move about; I love the feeling of not being shackled to the ground all the time, and of course, there’s that splendid view of a bird's eye that I will never tire of.

Since my ode may not have been fully successful in conveying all that I wanted to, I thought I should break it down as well, and luckily, I am a little better at that... So here goes…

“It’s a mixed bag of emotions that one generally feels
Seat upright, and all strapped in
Safely still resting on the ground, the three sets of wheels
For a few, first-time jitters within”

Flyers feel a range of emotions just before takeoff. Some thrilled like me, some bored and tired of it, some sleepy, and some nervous because it’s their first time. For now, the airliner is still safely resting on the ground that we know so well.

“I speak of course, about this winged metal tube called an aeroplane
Shiny and imposing, man’s fine creation
Oh how magnificent she looks, though not all feel the same
Some flying out on business, some on vacation”

The modern airliner is inarguably one of man’s greatest creations. It is capable of flying hundreds of passengers to different continents every single day. It is also shiny and gracefully streamlined in appearance, although there are many who look at it as no more than an everyday tool that helps them go about their business.

“Soon enough, the levers will be pushed all the way forward
Vibrations will creep into every seat and window pane
Nothing much to do as you feel yourself being pressed backward
Cutting the air swiftly through warm shine or cold rain”

Quite soon, the aircraft will be cleared for takeoff and the thrust levers will be pushed forward to apply forward thrust. The jet or propeller engines will receive fuel and begin to scream and the entire plane will start to buffet about, and push you back against your seat, and accelerate briskly whatever the weather.

“Here comes the moment when we let the wild machines loose
Like a grand orchestra, taking centre stage
Some eight hundred souls aboard this beast, with everything to lose
All bound temporarily to this steely cage”

Here, ‘wild machines’ refers to the combination of all the bits that make this flying beast work the way it should; the colossal engines, the numerous electrical and mechanical moving parts, the computers, etc. Takeoff is a crucial section in a flight, and now all of them must work as planned. Its continual success is comparable to a well-rehearsed musical orchestra.
A typical Airbus A380 jumbo plane can seat around eight hundred passengers. The last two lines of the stanza gently remind us of the number of lives involved in this endeavour.

“Hurtling down the tarmac at speeds unstoppable, from one end to the other
All to escape the monotony of running and instead fly like a bird
Soar to the skies or stop now, if you’re having second thoughts, and go no further
But linger not, in between for ‘tis the point of no return, I’ve heard”

No matter how well we think we (man) have mastered the art and science of aviation (which we have quite well actually), there will always be something left to chance. There are brief moments during a flight when the cockpit crew becomes passengers as little or nothing can be done to change things around them. For example, during takeoff, the speed beyond the 'V1' mark is sometimes called the point of no return. It is called so because beyond that point, takeoff can no longer be aborted and rotation (pulling the nose up and climbing) is imperative. While it possible to perform a climb with one failed engine or even a tyre blowout, it is in these moments that we feel scared and hope everything works as designed.

“Rest assured however, should you feel scared, for all of it has been tried and tested
Lady Luck is accompanying you on this ride
So go ahead and join the ten thousand other metallic birds in the skies uncongested
Science is most definitely, on your side”

The same feelings of doubt and fear, only multiplied tenfold, must be felt by astronauts that are strapped into rockets headed for space. More so, probably, during the early days of space exploration when things were less routine and the risks were higher.
Luckily, commercial aviation is by no means strange to man. It has been a routine affair for several decades now, and to this day remains the safest way to travel. 

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SOME THOUGHTS

An ode is composed primarily to take the time and acknowledge the beauty and value of a person or object, and that by itself, is a beautiful thing to do. So I decided to write one of my own in an ‘irregular’ style in dedication of aeroplanes and science.

It is likely that although my ode started out in appreciation of this wonderful flying machine, it may have turned a little dark while pointing out the risks involved in takeoff and landing and may have soured the mood. It was never meant to be that way. It was merely meant to point out the brief moments in any scientific endeavour, even in one so commonplace as this, where man has little or no control and can only sit and observe while what he has built works its magic.

Some of the machines that man has built is designed to work tirelessly everyday without faults, and yet every time I watch them work, a strange feeling of awe comes over me. I love the feeling just before a takeoff; for those few minutes, I am reminded that all that that is about to ensue is a result of what man has been building and perfecting over tens of  years. Amidst all differences like religion and race and culture, man has united to build something so wonderfully useful and beautiful, and that’s what really matters.

In these moments when you have no control and yet everything is completely under control, it is easy to see how science (if I may call it that) becomes something you ineluctably start to believe in no matter what kind of person you are.


Thank you for reading my first ode and its obnoxiously long explanation.

Until next time...
Vignesh