A bit of Pro Bowl day writing

All right I sat down and wrote something here today. It was a bunch of prose about how my Pixel 7 Pro smartphone is not working properly, but it was something. Today is a day where sitting on the sofa and spending some time writing was inevitable. I’m waiting for the NFL AFC–NFC Pro Bowl to start. So far today I have not ended up trying to figure out what will one day replace this Pixelbook Go chromebook. I had been considering the HP Dev One which is now sold out. Installing a different operating system on the Pixelbook Go did not seem to be intuitively derivable. 

I’m seeing a lot of advertisements for pizza today. My interests however happen to be a little bit more geared toward chips and salsa. None of the advertisements focused on that category of food. 

It is interesting that they have the Manning brothers coaching the pro bowl teams. In just a couple minutes the game will start. To be fair about it I was really curious what a flag football game would end up being like for the pro bowl.

Considering a bit of considering

Right now, at this very moment, I’m working on Substack post 88 of 104 and starting to consider moving that effort out of Google Docs and over to Microsoft Word as well. At the moment, that move has not happened just yet as I’m still writing some of that content on my Chromebook and I’m not a big fan of the Office 365 online version of Microsoft Word. I really got used to using Google Docs and the experience it provides. Now I’m writing out of the desktop application while sitting at my main computer running Windows. That means that for the most part my writing has become something that happens at my desk in my office and not on the go or anywhere outside of my desk. Given that most of the writing I end up doing happens in the morning and is during my scheduled blocks of time that works out well enough. Right now, I’m pretty far ahead of the Friday publishing schedule again. Week 82 just went live and the next 5 are ready to go already. That means that the entire introduction to machine learning syllabus is now draft complete. I do plan on going back and reading it again from start to finish and doing any final edits.

Probably the principal thing that is keeping me from moving completely out of Google Docs and over to Microsoft Word is that the final version of The Lindahl Letter that gets published does not contain the Tweets of the week or the links to things that are included in the Substack newsletter. When I go back to format the content for final publication, I have been removing those two sections. That is certainly something that could be augmented moving forward where any links or content being shared is put into the main body of the post to avoid having to use those two links only sections or I could just include them in the final product as well. Based on the statistics I have available to me it does not appear like that content is really consumed very much by people. People tend to read the prose at the top of the post and are not opening the email to see what Tweets I have enjoyed the most that week. Maybe the reason those got included was purely indulgent on my part which is interesting as an aside to consider.

After finishing up that syllabus I’m interested in working on some more research note type efforts where I’m really digging into the relevant scholarly articles as well as covering topics within the machine learning space. That is the goal of my Substack efforts moving forward. Of course, I broke that trajectory with my first set of writing efforts from the week 88 content. I’m probably going to need to reconsider the topics listed from 88 to 104 to make sure that they are ones that could support solid research notes. I’m not sure if they will end up getting converted over to Overleaf and eventually published that way, but that would be the general idea of what needs to happen moving forward.

It seems a new Pixelbook is really coming

The new Pixelbook 2 seems to be going through FCC review under the codename Atlas. It might even be a more affordable version of the device. I’m buying it either way. The build could be affordable or super premium. Either way works for me. My ASUS Chromebook is missing some keys and needs to be replaced. Writing on my Pixel 3 XL is challenging. Typing is different than working with an on-screen keyboard. It might be the rate of input or perhaps the thought required that makes the difference.

Ugh… when is the next Google hardware event?

Today in the middle of watching This Week in Tech (TWIT) episode 723, I started wondering when the next major Google hardware event is going to be held. Right now, I just spent some time learning about the new HP Chromebook 15 that seems to be a very compelling sub $500 dollar mobile computing option. My next piece of mobile hardware is probably going to be the Google Pixelbook 2 (or whatever they end up calling it).

I’m in the market for a new Chromebook

Here we go again with some technology related challenges. My ASUS Chromebook flip C302 now has had two separate keys fail on it. The number 5 and 6 keys are not working at all. Both keys have been taken apart and I messed with them several times. None of that worked out. Right now I am working on a Google Docs file on my Pixel 3 XL smartphone typing on a Bluetooth keyboard. That could be the new normal for some time. This is one way to go about writing and it could be the path forward. It is for sure the lowest cost path forward given that I already have the phone and the Logitech Bluetooth keyboard. Maybe that is enough to seal the deal and drive me to writing on my phone. I had tried this before for a few days and it did not work out very well.

This time around might be different. I just went into the keyboard settings and turned off the onscreen keyboard when the physical keyboard is connected via Bluetooth. Just making that one change increases the amount of screen open to viewing words by about double. Maybe that will help make this more interesting this time around. My plan is to go back to writing for over and hour a day. Most of that writing time will happen at night right before bed. For better or worse that writing window has always been the best way to go about producing a large amount of words. This is one of those times where thinking out loud is probably the right way to go about things.