Usually I draw all the dumb crap that appears here and elsewhere with the big version of the older Wacom Bamboo, which I think was called the Wacom Bamboo Create. It does everything I need and I didn't really want a fancy Intuos or anything, because I'm pretty lousy at drawing so crayons would work just as well. I did want a Cintiq, but $1000 is a lot of money for digimal crayons. I got an original-model refurb Surface Pro for $280 though, and I actually like it a lot. I still wouldn't wanna use anything but a Mac for real life stuff, but the Surface Pro is a great "SketchBook Pro terminal" in the same way that my gaming PC is a great "Steam terminal".



 

The hardware feels really nice, the pen aside (I got a Wcom Bamboo Feel stylus to replace the bad pack-in). It's not as nice as modern Apple stuff, but it is almost as nice. Generally, it's pretty much exactly what I'd hoped it'd be. Cheap way to get a Wacom pen on a screen.

There are a couple problems. When drawing for a while it becomes apparent that a) it gets pretty hot (although the fans are barely audible), and b) even after calibration, the digitizer accuracy in the corners — say within 1 cm from the edges — isn’t great. Both of these issues are things the Surface Pro 2 goes a long way toward fixing, with Haswell and the newer digitzer… but considering this thing was $280, and the cheapest Pro 2 I could find was that $490 one, I don’t think that either is necessarily a problem serious enough that I’d pay $200 to fix (the Pro 2 also gets solidly better battery life, of course). As far as the CPU goes, it doesn’t actually exhibit stylus lag — that’d be awful (apparently the SP3 with the N-Trig digitizer does) — it just gets pretty warm. SketchBook Pro hits the CPU a lot, and certainly makes my 2013 MacBook Air heat up and spin its fan to at least 60%, so the Surface isn’t alone.

I haven’t done a lot of research, so there may be some trick to calibrating the stylus for the edges that improves things. I did the Wacom driver’s built-in calibration routine, but I’m never really sure about those. It’s the ol’ “tap the target” deal that would be familiar to any Palm III/V user, and I’m always worried that I didn’t hit the target properly, or was holding the stylus funny, or something. Looks like you can at least brute-force Windows into taking more calibration data — the Wacom driver has just four points in regular mode, or 24 in its special “edge calibration” mode. So I'll be screwing around more with that when I have time, but it's not super-crucial, since it's only the edges where the calibration is iffy anyway.

Pretty cool, on the whole, especially considering it’s 2.5 years old and counting. It kind of makes me regret that I'm not a Windows person, at least until the point I have to jump out of SketchBook and use Windows. Anyway, highly recommended if you too are looking for a ghetto Cintiq.

Eyyy it's this ol' guy, from the first junipermonkeys.com in 2002. Pixel fonts all over the damn place.

I have a business idea on which the ground floor has available space: smartwatches for ennui.



It uses advanced motion detection and all that junk to measure the user's listlessness and dissatisfaction with the state of their life. Like the Apple Health thing, or Fitbit, but for people that are into more than all that jumping and leaping and running about business. So it records all this data, and — the word "gamify" having been run solidly into the ground at this point — it rewards your sadness with a series of achievements.



Using Bluetooth it can sync with the wearer's phone to collect enhanced statistics like "Quantity of Cup-of-Soup Bought" and "Hours Spent Driving Aimlessly". I think this device can revolutionize the sort of modern emptiness that epitomizes modern Quebec. And it can revolutionize your emptiness too, American investor. Let's aggregate our co-marketing strengths to do the stuff. Ennui Watch. www.partybutts.club, my tree fort, eight o'clock. Bring a Chinese OEM and a copy of AutoCAD. Together, we can own and operate the dream of every human, which is to have a data center inside an old missile silo, and have lots of blinking lights in there.

Norwegian Forest cats were prized for their hunting prowess, even serving as mousers on Viking ships. Given natural skill like this, it comes as no surprise to me that yesterday Ollie managed to successfully stalk and catch his very first gummy worm — natural enemy of the hunting cat. He then forgot where the gummy worm was and retired for an evening of prideful cleaning of his own ass. Truly, a credit to his ancestors.

"Dare we endear ourselves to these modern tunes?"

“Sirrah! There is no choice, for we have already become Modern. Do tell sir, by what other means would thine hairstyle have so deftly reconfigured itself before my very eyes?"

“Gads and damn! Tell me, spirit, tell me how my hair has done this to itself. By what power — I say — what is this hair now called.”

“Sir, your hairstyle is now a ‘faux-hawke’.”

"Damn that modern music, and damn the Associates Jonas! Tell them... tell them... I love them."

It is the age of SOUND!

I didn't know putting cinnamon rolls in waffle irons was a thing. Why did I have to get married to learn it was a thing. Life could have been so simple. My waffle iron and the Pillsbury doughboy and me, hangin' out.

Join me or die! Can you do any less?

I think a good app would be called “TROOPS”, where you tap your phone whenever someone was in the army and it goes “Thank You For Your Service™”. People who say stuff like that a lot are a market ripe for disruption.

It's easy to monetize because the target customer likes novelty, so you can sell a lot of new voices. And what underemployed 20-something wouldn't appreciate a good patronizing from Batman?

And then you have a $4.99/mo Liberty’s Hammer membership where it adds “…and God Bless America™” whenever the app talks.