Is This The Android I've Been Looking For? (Or, Why Windows 10 May Matter Less Than Expected)

Something new appeared in the world of computing today that could change everything forever, and almost nobody noticed.

I'm not talking about Windows 10, which was launched today. True, its rollout did not receive nearly the amount of press that earlier versions of Windows have received in their premieres. But what I'm talking about has received no mainstream coverage at all, as far as I can tell.

This is it: a company you've never heard of began a Kickstarter campaign to help them launch a new line of personal computers.

This is why it could change everything forever:

• these new computers will run Android
• they will cost no more than $50.

The company is Jide Tech, started by a trio of Google escapees. Their Kickstarter campaign asks for $50,000. As I write this, at 10:38 p.m., the total pledged is $906,163.

This is their Kickstarter video:



Sweet, yes? Without mainstream media coverage, and therefore, without the vast majority of people having heard of them or their computer, the Jide Tech folks are on their way to $1 million.

And they have 30 days to go.

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The slogan, "Less can be more," is pure genius. It avoids the didacticism of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's original dictum, "Less is more," and replaces it with an inviting sense of possibility. It seems to say, "Come play with us. Let's find out how much less can be how much more."

Love it.

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I learned about the Remix Mini only by accident, in a search sparked by a story about Windows 10 written by Davey Alba for Wired, titled, "Windows 10 Launches Today, But We're Still Waiting For The Important Stuff."

In it, Alba notes, "...PCs are the past," and says, "For the desktop OS, the real test is not how well it stacks up with Mac OS X, but how well it pushes people onto Microsoft’s online services, including Office 365, and onto other devices." (emphasis mine)

Reading that reminded me that what I have really wanted for some time now, is not the ability to run Windows on a mobile device, but the ability to run Android - the OS for my other devices - on a PC.

I was already familiar with the "Android PC" sticks that plug into the HDMI ports of modern TVs, and I have experimented with BlueStacks, the leading Android emulator for PCs. But neither of those felt like what I was really after - which was, to make Android my primary OS. Toward that desired end, I had even considered making my phone (a Samsung Galaxy S3) my primary computing device.

After reading Alba's piece, a search for "Android for PC" led to the announcement of the Android-based PC, the Remix Mini.

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Being Android-based means that this new PC will offer a degree of compatibility with most of the world's smartphones that Windows can only dream of.

Having a cost of $50 or less means that...I can't even comprehend what it means. I think the impact will only be limited by the number of machines they are able to manufacture. If they are able to manufacture to scale, it could mean the end of the digital divide.

Then there's the form factor. Having enough of those cute little things come to market could change many, many people's definition of a computer.

I am writing this on a Windows 7 machine, which has been registered with Microsoft to receive Windows 10. I am now nervous about receiving Windows 10, so now I'm a little scared to turn my computer off, feeling certain that it will reboot to an entirely new computing environment. It might be a better computing environment, but the degree to which it will be different makes me nervous.

I would not be nervous about moving to an Android computer. I would keep the Windows machine around for running Quickbooks, but that may be about it.

Yes, I am already planning my transition.

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The Remix Mini is the second product that I know of that has appeared on Kickstarter this year that could undermine the computer hardware industry as we know it, by offering a computer for a destructively low price - by which I mean, a price so low that it destroys the reasons for paying much more.

The first? CHIP, The World's First Nine Dollar Computer. If I recall correctly, The Next Thing Co. also sought $50,000 in their campaign, which launched May 7. They received pledges for $2,071,927.

CHIP deserves more that I can say about it now. The point of this mention is - 2015 will be looked back upon as the year in which two separate companies came out of nowhere, raised more than $1,000,000 each, and began manufacturing computers using approaches to both software and hardware that went totally against what the big boys were doing.

I don't necessarily wish Microsoft, Apple, HP, Dell, Lenovo, or Acer harm.

But man, I wish these guys success.

Molehill, Mountain, Meaning: An Encouragement To Ecstasy.

This post is about a computer issue. And about an approach to dealing with computer issues. And about approaches to life.

It's 7:43 p.m., and I have spent hours today - HOURS - trying to solve a problem that isn't truly important. At no point did I consider it truly important. On the contrary, it seemed so trivial that I was slow to realize that it could take, and was taking, HOURS.

Here's the deal: I have an old 2GB flash drive that I wanted to place in service as virtual RAM, using a program built into Windows 7 called ReadyBoost. I had learned about ReadyBoost in a Tech Republic article, "10 Ways To Speed Up Windows 7."

Using ReadyBoost involves having the computer write information into a cache file on a flash drive. The program offers the option of dedicating the flash drive solely for that purpose, and that's what I wanted to do. Doing that would involve moving any information that I cared about off the drive, then formatting it - a process I executed with four other flash drives with no problems (ReadyBoost can support up to eight devices to provide up to 256GB of cache memory).

And this is who I am: I'm not the true geek, the guy who would have read up on ReadyBoost back in 2010 (assuming that he was dealing with Windows at all in 2010, as opposed to OSX or Linux). I'm the guy who discovers it five years later, and thinks, "Cool! I can finally do something with all some of these flash drives I have lying around." (Don't even ask me about floppy drives).

So, I get four flash drives up and running with ReadyBoost, adding some 28 gigs of cache to my machine. Then I get to this guy:

...it's a no-name drive that I picked up years ago as a piece of swag at some event or another. At some point, I used it to back up some files, which still reside on it, and which I was prepared to delete.

Except that I couldn't. When I tried to, I got an error message saying that the drive is write-protected. 

I have no idea how it became write-protected, but I thought that would be a minor issue. Surely, when I switched over to my administrator account, I would find a software toggle - a button, a check box - that would let me turn off the write-protection, right?

Wrong.

After poking around everywhere I knew to look, I launched into the Web to see what wisdom it would yield, being certain that others had encountered and solved this very issue. (And that, friends, is what the Web is good for. Truly.)

Turns out, there's tons of info about this issue. First up, a piece that appeared on PC Advisor's website just days ago, by +Jim Martin, clear and nicely detailed. It essentially offers two options: first, editing the Registry; then, if that doesn't work, using a command-line utility called DiskPart that has been long been a part of Windows.

The geek wannabe in me got something of a thrill from the opportunity to dive tiptoe into the Registry, but was frustrated when the tweak didn't work, but then got a new warm fuzzy from opening a terminal window with cmd.exe...

Ah, the joys of the command line - the sense of power, the call to precision, the...

Wait. What???

"DiskPart has encountered an error"? How in the world can a lowly flash drive defeat DiskPart??

WHAT IS GOING ON???

This story is getting long in the telling; imagine how much longer it was in the living.

Back to the Web, then. I came across a recommendation for a program called Restore, from Patriot Memory. I downloaded it, ran it, and it responded with, "Device Not Found."

Then I saw that someone else had a good experience using WinZip to clean a write-protected flash drive. I followed that person's steps. I did not get that person's results:

ARRGGHH!!! I KNOW, I KNOW!!!

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And this is where it stands: I spent something like four hours today on a problem that I expected to solve within 10 minutes. On the one hand, a pat on the back to me for persistence, and for taking a fairly disciplined approach to seeking a solution by simply walking through a series of options. That's a geeky, hacker-ish way to go at it, and as a geek wannabe, I'm kinda proud of myself for taking that approach.

More than that, I think today's activity provided me a good example of how to deal with problems generally. I have always tended to avoid problems, or to operate in denial of them, or to let them paralyze me, or to get upset about them - none of which responses helps to solve them. I consider the approach I took today to be a step in a better direction - one that I would do well to replicate in future.

But I would have done even better to have stepped out of my own head sooner. Since ecstasy, as I've said before, is the state of standing outside oneself, I'm going to give us all a verb for the act of stepping outside oneself: ecstasize. I would have done better to have ecstasized sooner, to have stepped out of my own head enough to say, "This problem is not worth this amount of time right now."

By not making that evaluation, I allowed a molehill to become a mountain today. I started off not considering the problem to be truly important, but ended up acting as if were. And now, at 9:21, the sun's long gone, and I want to dredge the most useful meaning I can from that mountain before heading up for dinner. And I think it's something like this:

The ability to ecstasize - to stand outside of oneself at any given moment - is hugely valuable. Once you're outside of yourself, it becomes easier to evaluate, not only your circumstances, but your own behavior and thoughts and emotions. And then, to change direction instantly.

Or, to render alliterate advice: ecstasize your mind, evaluate your circumstances, your actions and your state, then excercise your will to choose change.

All of that can happen in minutes, if not within seconds, with no physical effort, and with who-knows-what potential benefit. Today's meaning, today's lesson, is that I need to start, now, ecstasizing more - indeed, to begin forming the ecstasy habit. Because...

...better is never more than a thought or two away.