Bananas, wireless charging, and plastic paper...

Bananas, wireless charging, and plastic paper...  Feeding banana slices to our five dogs is one of my daily joys.  We've been doing this long enough now that the dogs have integrated it into their notion of what a day is “supposed” to be.  They even know the particulars: the “proper” time to receive their daily banana slices is while my tea is steeping.  They watch for this, and when the see the right cues they start getting excited.  One or two of them will usually go sit by the island where we stash the bananas, and stare fixedly at them, occasionally glancing at me to see if I'm paying attention.  If I should do something wrong, like, say, sitting down to drink my tea without having dispensed the bananas, they'll be all over me with the sad looks, the touches for attention, etc.  Very effective, they are! :)  When I finally (from their perspective) walk over and pick up two bananas, then they really get excited!  They'll surround me while I'm at the sink peeling the bananas, always in the same relative positions.  Cabo will be behind me, grabbing at my belt; Mako and Miki to my left, Race and Ipo to my right.  Then I take the peeled bananas over to the biggest section of clear floor in our kitchen, which (so far as the dogs are concerned) is The Place of Banana Dispersal.  There I stand with my back to a cabinet, and the dogs array themselves before me in a semicircle – again, always with each dog in a particular place.  Then I cut slices, a quarter inch or so thick, and toss them out in sequence to the arrayed canines.  The way they react, you'd think I was tossing out chunks of steak!

We're still learning all the new features on our iPhone Xs.  One of those is the wireless charging.  I got two wireless chargers, and Debbie and I each have one on our nightstand.  They work.  I'm not sure how quickly they charge, but they do what we care about: put a phone with an empty battery on the charging stand at night, and in the morning when you wake up it's fully charged.  I'm a little surprised just how convenient I find it.  I used to fuss about every night searching for the end of the charging cable, often having to untangle it from other wires nearby.  Probably one night out of five I'd forget it, and have a half-dead phone the next day.  The little connector was fiddly; you had to align it just so before pushing it in, and it was easy to mistakenly slide the connector between the phone and the case.  With the wireless charging, I just put the phone down on my nightstand and it gets charged.  There's no careful alignment needed; setting it down pretty much anywhere on the charger works fine.  It's a little thing, but quite nice...

I was a Kickstarter supporter of the Remarkable tablet.  I got mine a couple of months ago, and I've been using it daily ever since.  These folks got enough things right about this that for the very first time I have stopped using paper-and-pencil for anything.  The “feel” of it is the most important part they got right.  Unlike any other electronic device I've ever tried sketching on, this one really does feel much like paper, right down to the scratching of the “pencil” tip over the “paper”.  It isn't perfect, but it's darned close, and close enough.  A second thing they got right is simplicity.  Using the table is not like using a drawing program, which is what every other device I've ever tried did.  Instead, these folks made it work as much like paper as they could.  You choose your drawing instrument (pencil, felt-tip, pen, etc.) and a few details (like the line width, angle of the pencil, etc.) and then you just use their stylus as though it was that instrument.  That's it!  You've got essentially an infinite number of pages to work with in the device's memory.  The best part, for me at least, is I can send any sketch I want to keep to a file on my Mac.  So, for instance, if I sketch out an electronic design I can zap it to my Mac and print it out.  Very nice!

I'm a big sketcher, though I can't draw anything that anyone would ever recognize. :)  In my recent work on the Sisyphus table software, I've made probably 100 or more sketches.  Generally these have been geometry problems that I'm trying to figure out how to solve with trigonometry.  It's much easier for me to understand the problem when I can visualize it, hence the sketches.  I don't save any of these – I make the sketch, I write and debug the software, then I just delete the sketch.  In the past when I worked on software like this, my desk would be surrounded by discarded, crumpled paper – something my workmates used to tease me about.  Those days are now gone...