Category: Editorial

and a second post

whbeebe

It took a little while to for me to figure out, but I couldn’t figure out how to set the title for a post. For the first few times I published from Google Docs, I had to open the WordPress Gutenberg editor to add the post title. Then, while looking around at the Docs page, I found where to put the title of the document I was working on, which corresponded to the title of the post. A problem it turned out was easy for me to figure out.

The other issue I’m still having is seeing every post category I’ve ever added to my blog. For whatever reason it will list them all, in alphabetical order, until it reaches Photography, then it stops. If I want to put this post in my WordPress category then I have to open the Gutenberg editor and add it. This isn’t all that big a deal, as the plugin will only save the document as a draft on my blog, not publish it. If I want to publish it then I have to do so from within the Gutenberg Editor. Part of the new workflow.

As for adding contents such as images and code fragment examples, I haven’t a clue how to do either. These are the capabilities enabled by the classic editor, which I have grown to depend upon after years of use. Now, there are new habits to learn and old to unlearn. For example, the insertion of a screen capture of the Debian shell running on the Debian 10 virtual machine.

This is what I was talking about earlier, the ability to do a lot more than just use the Chromebook as just a Chromebook. For a geek like me this opens up a lot of potential. I won’t go through the steps to enable this feature as it’s a part of Google’s on-line documentation. But for those of you who are wondering how I took that screenshot, I used Shift + Ctrl + Show windows. That shows a menu at the bottom of the screen, and I selected Take window screenshot.

Here’s another screenshot, this time of crosh (Shift + Ctrl + P).

crosh (Chrome OS shell) is different from the Debian shell, which is bash. Why we have two, I can’t answer. The commands are different, even those that are the same name in both shells. Free is an example of this. The human-readable flag, -h, will work on the Linux shell version (in which free is a separate application), while you have to type –human for the crosh version. The bash terminal is instantly familiar to me while the crosh shell requires a lot of help and hand-holding, and doesn’t appear to be nearly as capable as a command-line shell.

Well, let’s see what happens when we post this.

here we go again

whbeebe

I’m writing this post inside Google Docs, using a new-to-me Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 Chromebook. I’ve had it for just 48 hours, and in that short amount of time I’ve enabled a Debian 10 Linux VM for Linux development and support, as well as some other features unique to Chromebooks. I may cover that in some later post. Based on my very limited experience so far, I’m quite pleased.

To start with I purchased this Chromebook from Costco because it was on sale for $400. I also purchased it because this Chromebook is using an Intel core i3 tenth generation x86 processor. I’ve been exposed to less expensive Chromebooks, nearly all of them running on some ARM processor variant, and each one was less than an ideal experience. The only ones that were any good to me all had Intel processors in them, usually an older Pentium class processor that is this decade’s equivalent of the Celeron processor from days of yore. If I’ve learned anything working with ARM-based systems it’s that ARM for general computing can’t hold a candle to Intel/AMD at any level. It appears, based on hearsay, that the only ARM-based processor that can keep up with Intel, let alone challenge it, is Apple’s M1 processor. I have yet to experience any Apple computers with that chip nor do I wish to pay Apple’s premium for a computer that is under further control of Apple Central. Yes, I say that as an Apple product consumer.

Other Lenovo features I found entrancing were the 8GB of memory and the 128GB SSD built into the machine. One other feature is the high quality build of this Chromebook. It is at least as good as a Macbook Air, at considerably less cost.

I decided to write this rambling post because of a comment by John Scalzi (yes, that John Scalzi) who wrote on whatever a while back that he used a Chromebook to do all his writing. I figured that anyone who writes as much as he does, and seems to make a good bit of money as he has from it, probably has the experience with writing tools to make an informed recommendation. I went out and installed the WordPress Google Docs plugin, and so here I am. I’m also trying this method of posting because WordPress is hell-bent on removing the classic web-based post editor at the end of 2021, and because all my other attempts to write with various apps under iPadOS on iPads have come to naught. Those iPad failures are in part due to the poor keyboards that have to be bought to use with said iPads. A Chromebook has both keyboard and mouse pad built in. There is nothing that can beat an integrated notebook, neither Apple with its iPads nor Microsoft with its Surfaces.

So here I am trying my hand at using tools I’m already familiar with for different purposes, being repurposed to write on my blog. I won’t make any wild predictions of success, because when I have I’ve had to go back and say that didn’t quite work out the way I wanted it to.

But anyway… here we go again.