You’ve probably heard it too. Tablets will be the thing of the future, we’ll all have one, and we’ll all use them for everyday tasks. They’re already creeping into our schools, into shops, hospitals, businesses… They’re all over the place. But does that mean they will replace desktop computers?

I mean, when you think about it, these tablets are getting more and more powerful, and can do more and more things with them. In fact you can picture coming home with your tablet, slotting it into a sort of dock, in which then it acts like a normal computer. So it does seem like a future that could happen. There are Android tablets that do this kind of thing already, they slot into a base which makes them like a laptop, but it makes you wonder… if you wanted a laptop, wouldn’t you just get one of them instead of buying a tablet and a laptop attachment for it?

One thing that I do a lot with my computer is video, graphics editing and typing. These things really don’t mix with tablets at the moment, I’ve tried video editing on a tablet and it’s just painful and annoying and slow. Eventually your pointer finger gets ludicrously sore from all the precise taps and drags that you have to execute. In my opinion, even if tablets were incredibly fast, and could handle video editing easily, it still means a lot of finger wagging.

Graphics editing on a tablet? Pffft, get out of here. Yeah so Adobe has a Photoshop app for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch, but does it create graphics? No, it barely styles photos. Really you’d expect better. But again I can imagine if there were any decent graphics developing programs for the tablet, they’d be a similar hand exercise to making a movie.

Typing? Goodbye tablet. Yes you can buy keyboards that you can plug your tablet into, there are even ones that run over Bluetooth, meaning more things you have to charge up and fiddle with. Tablets are too annoying to type on, no matter what brand they are or what OS they run. Touch screens aren’t good for typing.

However, there are some things that tablets do that my computer doesn’t do very well. Making music is one of them, I find Garageband on the iPad to be better than the actual desktop program.

“But Ben, Garageband for desktop has far more instruments, effects panel, thousands more loops, way more music tracks. The iPad app is featureless”

Yes, but the thing about the Garageband app for iPad is that it’s cleaner, in my opinion playing the keyboard on the iPad is better than playing the keyboard on the desktop using the actual computer keys. Also in my case where I have a Windows computer, it’s also a better option than spending $50+ on a music making app. I’ve made WAY better songs on the iPad app than I ever have in the desktop app. The Garageband iPad app seems to sound better too.

Managing connections, I get quite a few newsletters, website comment notifications from this website and emails from YouTube telling me some dumb arse has made some mindless question about something that was already explained in the video. I also have Twitter and Facebook to take notice of. For this iFind that tablet devices are really good, far better than a computer. There’s no way I’d be checking my emails with my desktop computer on a camping trip. This is where the tablets shine, online stuff and playing games. I wouldn’t bother trying to use them for much else, it’s fun to have a go at making a movie on them every now and then, but for something like that it’s just not practical. Then again, when it comes to internet stuff if my computer is turned on that I’ll use it in preference to a tablet, because I get the full web, not this mobilized crap that 80% of websites are changing to these days. YouTube Tablet Version is a pain in the backside, you can’t edit your settings for your videos and don’t get me started on Mobile Facebook.

Anyways,

That’s my quite ridiculous rant for now.

To tell you the truth I only wrote this picture because I took a picture of an iPad awhile ago and I wanted to use it somewhere. So that was the inspiration for this post, apologies if it sounds unstructured. I thought it up as I went, unlike most my other posts where I already have a string of thoughts to include.

Til next time,

Ben.

Greetings fellow being,

It’s been yet again another procrastination Sunday.  Not too long ago I was debating about making a YouTube series where I play games… I know, exciting yes?  There’s definitely not a shortage of gaming videos on YouTube as it is, but I figure that this channel will give me an excuse to actually relax.  Normally I cut these entertaining things out of my life because I can’t justify using precious time on something that’s not productive.

Today I created the YouTube channel ‘Intelligic‘ which is where I’ll be making gaming videos. (It was only after I came up with this ‘brilliant’ name that I found out it shared similarities with an electronic cigarette manufacturer’s name ‘Intellicig’) I would have done it sooner, but I was hoping to just have one channel and upload everything to that channel alone, keep everything in the one place.  But instead it looks like I’ll be making separate channels… perhaps even a separate channel for vlogging.

Definitely not what I had planned on doing, but perhaps it’s the way I should be heading.

I hate Sundays, Friday afternoons are good, Saturdays are bloody fantastic.  Sundays are pure evil, they seem to go WAY too fast, and the list of things you had planned on doing is left untouched.  Very depressing.

Right, I’m off.  Burning DVDs to tick off one of my To-Do’s.

Ben,

Just recently I was browsing around on YouTube for videos that would provide me with an excuse to procrastinate, when I came across a video of that incredibly popular building-block game called Minecraft.

The video wasn’t someone building a house, or showing you the best way to kill the native wildlife of the game… they were showing the computer that they’d built inside the game. You heard me right, there are people creating computers from scratch inside a game, these computers work too! Some of the ones I’ve seen on there calculate math problems while others allow you to play games. If you’re in a hurry… you might want to just find an abacus, as these Minecraft computers can take several minutes to process the commands. Though considering the fact that these computers are made within a… computer, that’s perfectly reasonable.

How these people do it is by creating large frameworks with Red stone wiring which in the game is a material that can conduct an electrical current, the wire can be powered by red stone torches, leavers and other button’y devices.

Nonetheless, the result, after what I assume would be thousands of hours, is a working computer, it’s ridiculousness clever, and the way it works is by the wires being either on (charged) or off (not charged).

This lead me into the swirling thought paradox, because something so simple as “On” and “Off” is actually what runs all our technology, computers, our mobile phones, the technology in our cars, the way it works is by electrical currents being either on, (1) or off (0). Notice the numbers I put in brackets there? I’ll talk about that in a bit, but let me continue listing this stuff. With CDs and DVDs the laser shines onto the transparent material on the disk which makes it opaque, the disk drive makes patterns of dots across the disk which. When the disk is put into a disk drive to be read, if the light from the laser reflects on the shiny metal layer on disk it will register it as “On” or “1”and if it doesn’t shine back up to the laser it means there must be an opaque spot in the way, so the disk drive registers it as “Off” or “0”. Of course there are thousands upon thousands of little dots on the disk, which makes up the data that you view on your computer.

The music you listen to is the computer reading 1s and 0s, getting the data on where the wave forms in the music are and what their values are, and then playing it. Keeping in mind the entire computer itself is running of 1s and 0s as well! That’s where binary code comes in, which is a series of 1s and 0s, representing ON or OFF. The computer reads these, your mobile phone reads these, the entire internals of your technology read these. By turning the current on and off, the computer is able to work. It’s bloody astounding.

You could never think, that something so simple, ON and OFF, could be used to make something so complex.

Phew, until next time.

01000010011001010110111000101100

Learn more about binary code here.

Here might also help. =)