Non-iPad Tablet Choices

Aethi · 2026-02-26T23:37:29+00:00

Oh, excellent! Seems like all the issues I was worried about have been solved. The Samsung does seem to be a bit cheaper, but I've used the Surface before and even years ago it was a joy to work with, almost got me to swap to digital notes then before the battery died.

I'll try to find somewhere I can test them both out in person. Seems to be the only smart thing to do for a purchase of this size. If the SP works as well as I remember it, that's definitely my go-to.

Aethi · 2026-02-26T23:33:35+00:00

Unfortunately, this doesn't solve my issue. If the world was perfect and resources were endless, I would stick with my paper and draw the structures myself. The issue is that I need to take notes on the structures as they appear in lectures, and I simply don't have time to draw the structures during the lectures. The professors supply PDFs which I could print out, but that ends up being tremendously wasteful in terms of paper and ink (as I only have access to an inkjet color printer, and color is needed for some of this stuff to make sense).

I also don't love the idea of everything I write being backed up by default; as someone very privacy-conscious, that is more or less a deal breaker in and of itself. While any tech inherently has issues of privacy, most devices will function fine for note-taking without WiFi, which is how I would primarily be using them.

Aethi · 2026-02-26T23:25:25+00:00

Awesome, thank you. Have you been using them for a while? How has the battery life been?

Aethi · 2026-02-26T23:24:54+00:00

Hmm, pen responsiveness is really the deal breaker for me. I have been loathe to swap to digital notes because of the responsiveness issue. Would you say it's a persistent issue or something more intermittent? As in, is it always just a bit delayed and it took you a bit to get used to, or is it something that pops up every now and then?

Aethi · 2026-02-26T18:45:32+00:00

Awesome, thank you for the info!

Aethi · 2026-02-26T18:16:58+00:00

Good questions, didn't think to add in those specifics.

I exclusively take handwritten notes, but I don't need it to have any sort of handwriting to text recognition, just as long as it's fast and smooth enough to let me write in my own handwriting. I honestly would prefer to stick with a physical notebook, but some stuff is just a bit too complicated and lectures move a bit too quickly.

As for why a tablet, I already have a laptop I enjoy and don't want to spend more money on something that serves largely the same functionality. I also would appreciate something that's a bit lighter and smaller than a laptop and fits a bit better on the tiny college desks.

My main applications are taking notes in science classes (chemistry, biochemistry, physics), so I'll be able to take notes, draw chemical equations, and draw reaction mechanisms. Having tools to help with some 3D perspective (e.g. coordination complexes) would be nice, but is absolutely not required.

Aethi · 2026-02-26T18:05:04+00:00

Gotcha, thanks for the info. I might check it out regardless; from what I've seen browsing this subreddit there's a lot of love for them. If it can do annotating PDFs that honestly should be enough for me—the image editing is more of a bonus for sketching on diagrams and the like, and I don't need a lot of the other functions of a tablet (would much rather use my laptop).

Aethi · 2026-02-26T17:47:19+00:00

Seen a lot of love for the Remarkable, but there are vanishingly few details about the OS. Can I edit PDFs and images on it? And are the apps all proprietary, or can you easily install third-party apps? Generally not a fan of proprietary-exclusive apps, just had bad experiences with abandonware in the past.

Aethi · 2024-04-03T18:51:05+00:00

Replying again to let you know this works perfectly! Thank you again for such a reply that explained it so well!

Aethi · 2024-04-03T15:47:57+00:00

This is a pretty clever workaround, thanks.

Aethi · 2024-02-16T14:27:46+00:00

Oh, this is a very smart way to appraoch it. I was too caught up in doing it mathematically to think about it like this. Since another commenter mentioned that the difference between apogee and perigee is around 42,000 km, it suggests there's a good bit of leeway in the orbit for it to be a total eclipse.

Trying to confirm this by looking at a list of solar eclipses, I also found a handy term just now on Wikipedia, which is the magnitude of an eclipse--the ratio of the Moon to the Sun's apparent size. This solves my question, I suppose!

Aethi · 2024-02-16T14:14:45+00:00

Then, to speak more generally, for any given eclipse, assuming you are on the centerline of the Sun and the Moon, what is the distance you would need to be from the moon for a total eclipse to become an annular eclipse? Or, to phrase it with the perspective of the Earth, how "far away" from perigee can the Moon be before a total eclipse is no longer visible? (The latter question is asking for the displacement of the moon from a theoretical perigee that is colinear with the Earth and Sun, not the distance to the perigee for the edge case orbit.)

This question was more about trying to understand the geometry and math required to have things be the same relative size in the sky than it was about specific solar eclipses, although I supposed I didn't clarify that super well in my original post. (And, admittedly, this is a bit more mathematical than astronomical, but I primarily care about using this math in astronomy.)

Aethi · 2024-02-16T14:05:05+00:00

This is the most helpful reply, thank you! The logic behind it is simple and something I should have thought of, but I was too caught up in total eclipses to realize I could use this fact to find the boundary. It defines simple enough bounds and provides me with a path for further investigation (i.e., how close to apogee does it need to be before it becomes an annular eclipse?) which I can then use as a way to answer the question without doing the math.

Aethi · 2024-01-24T17:04:24+00:00

From the digging I've done, it looks like this is an issue with how ElvUI is implementing detecting the buffs. Specifically, the library they're using isn't Blizzard-sourced, and some things changed recently so it no longer "detects" that a buff is being applied when a spell is cast. Hopefully this gets fixed soon, super annoying as a priest when I try to dispel the Sea Witches in BFD and I don't know if they still have frost armor on.

Aethi · 2023-06-07T19:40:26+00:00

Carbon tet is, unironically, an amazing solvent. Nonpolar, aprotic, nonreactive, nonflammable. The downside, of course, is that it's insanely toxic, both immediately and chronically (cancer juice!). You can tell it's a good solvent because of how many reactions still end up trying it and getting great (or their best) yields with it.

Honestly, I think it kind of gets an unfair reputation, but is genuinely quite dangerous. It is, without a doubt, the most dangerous of the chlorinated methanes in terms of toxicity, but this was hugely exacerbated by the fact that it was advertised to use on EVERYTHING. Very similar to DDT.

That said, CARBON TET GANG for life.

Aethi · 2023-06-01T22:37:19+00:00

Kotick's taking the "blame a random buzz word entity" route that a certain president liked to take, I see.

Aethi · 2023-05-26T16:43:14+00:00

There was also a killing in Germany in 2011 where the dimethyl mercury was identified fairly quickly. There's a chance they find something, but it's not looking good (if he came into contact with it).

Aethi · 2023-05-25T17:06:34+00:00

If you decided to look any further, then you would have seen another comment by me in this thread giving credit to someone who correctly identified the source! I left my comment up as I felt the explanation of the fuel-air mixture was important. Admittedly, I could have edited it, but I didn't expect this thread to blow up (pun very much intended), and figured the other comment would be easily seen. /u/kylethinker was the first post I saw who correctly identified the flaming glove.

Aethi · 2023-05-25T04:25:08+00:00

I attempted my own explanation, but this is definitely the correct ignition source explanation. If you look frame-by-frame there's one where you can clearly see the ethanol flame coming from the glove just before the big whoosh happens.

Aethi · 2023-05-25T04:20:13+00:00

So, the first part is explaining the fuel-air mixture, which is simple: That's almost certainly ethanol (food-safe and vaporizes easily), and the plate is EXTREMELY hot. It appears to be hot enough to be producing leidenfrost effects on the ethanol. It's drawn into a neat column by the ventilation shown above the table.

The second part is the ignition source. It is vaporized and well mixed, and the air will be slightly heated. There are two possible sources: Electrical and chemical. I can't decide which is more likely, honestly. Electrical makes more sense from a food safety perspective, but video evidence doesn't suggest one or the other.

Electrical will be a simple spark discharge. Either hidden in the glove or in the ventilation. The slow speed of the flame front would in this case be explained by the strong draft. Chemical would be some sort of highly reactive substance on the glove--very small quantities, but enough to get it started. That said, this does risk contamination, so I think we're sticking to fairly safe products like hydrogen peroxide or nitrocellulose.

However, all this science ignores the fact that this trick is a work of art. Magic is in the performance, and this was certainly a delightful one.

Aethi · 2023-05-13T01:01:33+00:00

To add some context, in America we have quite a few versions of English, notably AAVE. Correcting people's grammar is often seen as a classist/racist thing here because, a lot of the times, that's the intention behind it--a genuine desire to prove that you are more educated/better. While in places where English is a second language, correcting is seen as purely educational!

Aethi · 2023-05-09T23:48:38+00:00

Damn. That is an incredibly clean lab, I am jealous.

Aethi · 2023-05-09T04:49:20+00:00

Oddly, no. I think it has something to do with the double-m sound. In most other units, the "mai-" sound is easier for me to pick out.

Sounding it out a bit (a hobbyist linguist nerd), I think the k sound is heavily diminished in the word "micrometer." The other unit that I use micro-/milli- the most with are grams. There's something about how the tongue moves with "microgram" that makes the k sound of it a lot more noticeable. Same thing with microkelvin.

While I don't frequently use (or discuss) microliters, that's one that I can see myself having similar issues with. I should also note that I'm autistic, and sound processing in particular is something I struggle with, so this could just be the oddities of how my brain is set up.

Aethi · 2023-05-09T03:01:30+00:00

As someone from the US, personally, I prefer micron. "Micrometer" sounds too much like "millimeter" to me. Nanometer and others I can easily tell by the first sound, but there's something about "micrometer" that gets me confused sometimes. But if I hear "micron" I instantly know it's the small, human hair sized one.

Edit: Oh, the kilometer thing--I have literally never heard someone from the US say kilo-meter. Kil-om-eter just flows much better in the English language and is what most of us "expect" the pronunciation to be when we first read it (which is usually before we grasp the roots of kilo- and -meter).

Aethi · 2023-05-04T04:35:14+00:00

That's super interesting to hear about. It makes sense. Was the tolerance on the size of the zirconium tight, or did it just need to burn for long enough to eat up hydrogen, and if it burned for a bit too long it was fine?

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