War of the Jarls
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@dkf said in War of the Jarls:
@Parody said in War of the Jarls:
if they'd unified on Bluetooth and started including Bluetooth on the motherboard
A lot of motherboards are in what's a good approximation of a Faraday cage.
My MB has a Bluetooth receiver (emitter? both?), and it's basically like a dongle that protrudes out of the back. It very much look like if I had plugged a dongle from another peripheral in a USB port. So I guess at least they gave some thought to the Faraday cage effect.
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@Zerosquare said in War of the Jarls:
For a long time, Bluetooth was not a great choice for a wireless keyboard or mouse: compared to other solutions, it was was more expensive and more complex to implement, and had worse latency and energy usage.
I remember a Microsoft BT keyboard with exactly those issues. To combat the increased energy usage, the keyboard would go into a low-power/standby-ish state, where the BT transmitter got turned off. It would turn on again automatically on the first keystroke, and set up the connection again. But if one sat down at the keyboard and started typing right away, the first few keystrokes would typically get dropped.
Latency in general was quite unreliable. I remember that some amount of typing would get "buffered" and then appear with a noticeable delay later at the machine. Definitively not good for any gaming, but even for just normal typing, it was kinda annoying.
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@cvi I once tried a BT mouse (at work). I think I survived about a week before I said fuck-it and just bought a "real mouse" with my own money.
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@Parody said in War of the Jarls:
I imagine if they'd unified on Bluetooth and started including Bluetooth on the motherboard (like they did with USB) they'd also do something to make them work at the BIOS/UEFI level.
Even if they did, it would never be able to connect fast enough to get into the bios menu. Or, worse, it would wait until the keyboard connected before continuing to boot.
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@dkf said in War of the Jarls:
@Parody said in War of the Jarls:
if they'd unified on Bluetooth and started including Bluetooth on the motherboard
A lot of motherboards are in what's a good approximation of a Faraday cage.
Just like onboard WiFi, one solution is to stick the necessary antenna(s) or antenna ports out the back. I freely admit that, in this unlikely hypothetical with roots in the late 90s, there's a little bit of handwaving to say that they would have come up with solutions. Even if the only effect was to reduce the number of laptops with unused Bluetooth and a dongle permanently taking up a USB port it would have been an improvement. (I've seen plenty of those over the years.)
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@cvi said in War of the Jarls:
I remember a Microsoft BT keyboard with exactly those issues. To combat the increased energy usage, the keyboard would go into a low-power/standby-ish state, where the BT transmitter got turned off. It would turn on again automatically on the first keystroke, and set up the connection again. But if one sat down at the keyboard and started typing right away, the first few keystrokes would typically get dropped.
Yeah, I've learned to hit Shift a couple times to make sure a wireless keyboard is awake and the batteries aren't dead before typing.
My favorite wireless keyboard was a Logitech keyboard/mouse combo from before the 2.4 GHz/Bluetooth era. The mouse broke early on but I used the keyboard at my guest internet/workbench table for many, many years. It worked decently for (late 90s/early 2000s) gaming, a pair of AAs lasted forever (given the light usage), and it was nice to be able to set it anywhere and free up a bunch of space when I needed to open up a machine.
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@SirTwist said in War of the Jarls:
The advantage of those dongles is that they show up as a keyboard and mouse and therefore always work, even before the OS is loaded.
Most UEFI implementations I've seen seem to support any BT keyboards and mice, so that really doesn't make a difference anymore.
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@hungrier said in War of the Jarls:
Even if they did, it would never be able to connect fast enough to get into the bios menu.
That's also not an issue anymore, since you now usually have to explicitly reboot to UEFI anyway. POST screens are a thing of the past.
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@hungrier said in War of the Jarls:
@Parody said in War of the Jarls:
I imagine if they'd unified on Bluetooth and started including Bluetooth on the motherboard (like they did with USB) they'd also do something to make them work at the BIOS/UEFI level.
Even if they did, it would never be able to connect fast enough to get into the bios menu. Or, worse, it would wait until the keyboard connected before continuing to boot.
Modern PCs have that problem anyway:
My laptop has a dedicated "enter UEFI setup" button on the side protected by a pinhole.
Fun thing is that it needs a very thin tool to press, luckily I was able to repurpose one of those ancient Media Emergency Ejection Tools to press it.
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@JBert said in War of the Jarls:
My laptop has a dedicated "enter UEFI setup" button on the side protected by a pinhole.
I thought my convertible tablet got you there if you held Volume Up at startup, but no, it's F2.
Fun thing is that it needs a very thin tool to press, luckily I was able to repurpose one of those ancient Media Emergency Ejection Tools to press it.
Back in Junior High and High School I kept a Mac Disk Ejector handy. In theory it could also be used to help my fellow students remember to eject their 3.5" floppies before turning the computer off, but the teachers frowned on that.
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@Parody said in War of the Jarls:
Back in Junior High and High School I kept a Mac Disk Ejector handy.
I'll give you the //gs, but I didn't think the //e supported 3.5" disks?
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@Unperverted-Vixen said in War of the Jarls:
@Parody said in War of the Jarls:
Back in Junior High and High School I kept a Mac Disk Ejector handy.
I'll give you the //gs, but I didn't think the //e supported 3.5" disks?
All of the Apple ][s can use 3.5" drives if they have a controller that supports them, any needed ROM updates, and enough RAM. The IIc and IIgs lines came with compatible hardware. Your typical school IIe with the 80 column card and 128k of RAM should be fine once it gets a controller.
At that time my high school only had IIes and IIgses along with a couple of Macs in the Library. All of the IIgses (and the Macs) had 3.5" drives, but only some of the IIes scattered around had them. I put together a bootable AppleWorks 3.5" floppy with some extra add-ons I'd gathered from the teachers and the other computer geeks; I used it for writing papers on the IIes. We also did a brisk trade in IIgs games since we were allowed to use the lab after school.
