Haven't had an active computer for years. Did everything off my phone. Same thing with M. We actually had to go somewhere to scan or print stuff, the luddites that we were.

M hit a website that she needed to fill a form that she could not do on her phone. And we are no longer around the corner from any place that we could use computers, we are in the sticks so the days of renting time were over.

M ordered a Lenovo Chromebook and an HP 4100E.

As you have seen me whine recently, got physical issues, and I was really toasted today. I should not have been allowed out of bed.

But there was a Chromebook and a printer to play with. I had to do it.

I didn't actually have to lift anything.

So anyway, M goes through the initial get to network tap tap tap set up. She proves she can web surf and get to that particular form and deal with it. Took her about 20 minutes from unboxing, all updates, log on to the web. M is not a technical person in the slightest. This was an impressive setup.

Further interaction with the device is pretty instantaneous.

I played with it for a bit. I've never used one before. It essentially feels like a larger version of my pixel phone with a decent keyboard that I can slap my trackball on.

Which has multiple windows, multiple desktops, and a very large touchscreen. I can talk to it and it takes complex dictation as well as my phone. But my phone has crappy editing controls so I'd much rather be using the Chromebook for document production. No I am not going to write the book. But M might. And her story is wilder than mine. We shall see.

Muscle memory allowed me to do alt-tab and swap around windows but I have to keep the little chart up for what all the other keystrokes are. When I initially learned Unix and vi I had a poster next to me of all the vi key combinations so it was always within my vision. I'm going to have to do that for the chrome keystroke

It came with a separate micro card that has 256 gig on it. I popped that in and it says found the storage and here you go.

So now it was time for the printer/scanner. I was dreading that. I've gone through printer hell many times.

I figured I should do the initial setup on my phone since I know my phone. There were absolutely no instructions other than scan this QR code to get to that page. And those instructions sucked is far as how shall I actually pull the tape out of this thing without destroying it. What are these doors? How does it open to clear a paper path? How do you change the ink?

The PDFs that claim to tell me these things refused to download. But they told me to install the HP printer manager on my phone and will take it from there.

So I did. Which said what printer do you got and we focused on the printer. Okay go click this button on the printer, wait, okay I see that printer. Okay here are various diagrams of what you need to physically do with that printer. Here's how to pull the tape out of this various slot.

5 minutes later I was printing from my phone.

Went through the same manager install program under Chrome but I needed to tell it the IP of the printer to set up a print queue. There might have been a different way but there was an option for an LP print queue so I figured I throw some data at it and see what happened. Perfectly formatted document out of Google docs. Okay that works.

Go grab a couple photographs. We've been paying real money to have old pictures scanned and sent to people. Speaking of which, wedding people, expect some pictures. M has gone on a picture frenzy.

Point and click through the HP manager program to the scan option, two minutes later I have a very nice high resolution scan of a photograph. Okay that works.


I'd like to exercise my brain a bit. There are multiple ways of running Linux in a sandbox within the environment. At that point I can get my development environment.

I like this thing.

So I have wireless desktop sharing to the big screen and most sites know about the Chromecast directly so at that point they'll send it just to the TV.

I like the walled garden. It's not that walled. It's got holes. But I'd prefer to use Google specific devices. My Google Pixel works much better than my Samsung did in regards to casting. But so far the Lenovo works fine as well.

Not my kind of crazy though. It's a $35 device. Give it a shot and find out that it solves a whole bunch of problems and be happy rather than sad.

I discovered the Chromecast when I rented an Airbnb when I moved to Colorado. It was simply part of the move-in instructions on how to access the TV and it simply worked and it was nice. As soon as I had my own internet space I bought one. Since that point, 4 years now, I've come to appreciate this tiny little device that cost almost nothing compared to every previous solution I ever tried.