Several years back now I had a netbook I bought, I think on Black Friday. I had a Lenovo ThinkPad at the time and it was heavy and awkward; I wanted something I could just tuck under my arm and open up and write on, and get on the internet if I wanted to. I called the little gadget "the Mouse" and it was handy to take on vacations when I didn't need to do any high-power computing, just keep up my blog.
But eventually the Mouse aged out and the Windows updates pretty much filled up its tiny SSD. The last straw was when I couldn't get the micro SD card I'd bought to supplement its memory out of the slot it belonged in. I finally wiped the hard drive and placed it in the recycle box.
Lately I've been inundated on Facebook with ads for "distraction-free" writing. Apparently for writers, laptops are now "out" because it's simply too easy for you to get distracted by social media. I see ads now for "distraction free" writing devices like the "Freewrite" which cost as much as a laptop. I mean, they're neat little gadgets; one even folds up, almost like a little purse. Wow.
Last week when we were in BJ's I saw the little Chromebook, which is almost "tuckable" under the arm. Usually when I get a laptop I strip almost everything off it anyway; they put such junk on them: music players, games, etc. So if I got the Chromebook, stripped off the excess (except Chrome, which I could use for synonyms or other story research), loaded Calmly Writer on it (I still had one more use of the license, and there was a version for Chromebook), it could pretty much be a writing-only machine.
And it's pretty much worked out that way, although I don't see where in the heck Leo Laporte gets off saying it's easier to use. Maybe it's because I'm used to Windows machines, or maybe because people just use these out of the box just to get online or read e-mail. Whatever. When I tried to load Calmly Writer it said I had to put in some code into the Linux kernel first. When I did that, it said the program didn't work on this version of Linux, and that I should update Linux. When I tried it just kept going round and round! Finally the Chromebook itself loaded some updates, and only then Linux would load its updates, and then I could put in the two lines of code that made it okay for Calmly Writer to load. Once I had that loaded, I tried to make a folder to store my writing. Eventually found out the folder had to be in the Linux folder to work.
Alas, Microsoft OneNote, which I use for cross-platform transfer of stories, does not work on a Chromebook, because Microsoft removed their support for Chromebook. We love you, toooooo, Miss Hannigan! So I'm reduced to relying on a thumb drive again.
On the other hand, I used it to write when James had his infusion and it worked quite well; it's smaller and lighter than the laptop, so easier for me to work on my lap while I sit in his chair. I had a small contretemps with it trying to get it to connect to Kaiser's wifi because Google is effing overprotective and refuses to go to unsecured pages; it didn't even want to load Facebook because it said "my credit card numbers and other data" might be endangered. Thank you, I know that, and I shouldn't have to suffer for morons who would offer that info on Facebook. (My tablet also has this problem with Kaiser's logon page; it's maddening. You can't even click something that says "Yes, I understand the dangers; let me go to the next page anyway.")
Need to see if I can find a downloadable thesaurus...
Labels: gadgets
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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at
6:01:00 PM
