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Nintendo Direct

Not a great Direct to start the year. bold for things I'm interested in.

  • Xenoblade? No, it's just Smash. My interest in Smash is zero.
  • Famicom Detective Club: Very interesting, I'll be picking these up if they're not unreasonably priced. Pre-order is nonsense in a digital store.
  • Monster Hunter is offensive, trophy hunting innocent animals not for meat, but because you've encroached on their land.
  • Mario Golf: No interest, even tho I enjoy some golf games, largely because it's Joycon based and I have a Switch Lite.
  • No More Heroes III: "Save the world!" It's yet another NMH game, you do stupid chores in an "open world" with nothing in it, then fight in an arena, and literally jerk off with your blade to charge it back up. Plot means nothing here. Another Joycon game. Hard pass.
  • DC Super Hero Girls: FFS STOP MAKING THAT NOISE! The shrieking pitch of the characters aside, this is not for me.
  • Miitopia: Miitopia should be Nintendo's social network, shared world thing, if they had any ability to operate anything social. Instead it's now a bad JRPG. Pass, and despair.
  • Animal Crossing: New Horizons: Super Mario Items: OH YES GIMME! Especially the warp pipes, my house is up on a high cliff, separated from "town" by the river, so no villagers can reach it. But it also takes me forever to get home. So now I'll put one warp at my house, one on the far side of city center.
  • Project Triangle Strategy: The game is named for its genre, a rock-paper-scissors triangle, strategy game. With some of the most cliché dialogue I've ever heard in a game. Where it does show gameplay, it's kind of similar to Jeanne d'Arc without the cute character design, clever story, or deep tactical combat. If it turns out good despite first impressions, I'll reconsider.
  • Star Wars Hunters: Zero gameplay trailer. Buy it because you're such a Star Wars nerd despite the last 40 years of mostly bad Star Wars, or don't. Pass.
  • Hyrule Warriors: Ha ha no. Really dumb "action fighting" game with inappropriate Zelda skins. Almost any other game is better than this trash.
  • Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword HD: Interesting enough, and they seem to have adapted the Wiimote/Joycon controls to the Lite OK. I played on Wii and it was passable but not great; if you didn't, it's worth trying.
  • Splatoon 3: Zero gameplay trailer. A little bit of character customization in a shoot-em-up where that won't matter a bit.
  • Capcom Arcade Stadium: Free-to-start in-app-purchase arcade. I'm downloading it now. [later] So, some of the games at least are free, but you have to "buy" each one separately in the Nintendo eShop™. Ghouls & Ghosts has maybe the worst controls I've ever seen, I get tangled on diagonal jumps and die. It is sadness.
  • Bravely Default II: Looks fine, probably worth playing if you like this kind of thing. Pre-order, so can't tell now.
  • Knockout City: It's like Smash, but team-based. But it's not even Smash. Total pass.
  • Outer Wilds: You have 22 minutes… Stop. No. I hated Majora's Mask, will not put up with this bullshit in sppaaaaace. I want to lazily coast around looking at and doing things at my own pace, and the Sun exploding puts a crimp in my game style.
  • Plants vs Zombies: Adequate early iPhone tower defense game, long outlived its sell-by date, more of a touch interface game. Do not pay anything for this.
  • Samurai Warriors 5: I love samurai sword-fighting, and sort of like fighting games, but there's not much there, and the ridiculous superpowers ruin the historical fighting concept.

  • Ninja Gaiden: Master Collection: You are the legendary ninja Ryu Hayabusa… You fight giant crabs, because that's what ninja do, right? These are all fun games, "ninja" in name only, very stupid, but fun.

  • Stubbs the Zombie: Rebel Without a Pulse: Slightly funny joke is carried on way too long.

  • World's End Club: Very cartoony/Flash-animation endless runner with cutscenes. Not much game to the game.
  • Neon White: Very weird "flying cards shoot angels" game, with at least 3 art styles mashed together incoherently. Pass.
  • Legend of Mana Remastered: It's a great game, one of the prettiest action RPGs of the old times. I have it on iPhone, old graphics upscaled. I don't think I like the new graphics, the original pixel art was perfect.
  • SaGa Frontier Remastered: Great game, art update. Unlike Mana, I think the art could use an update; I'm not sure I like this, but it may be better.

Raspbian from the Keyboard

Doing some maintenance and setup on my RasPi4, I struggled to find keyboard shortcuts. Where I did find them online, they were slightly obsolete or just not correct for my keyboard.

Some of these are specific to my Rii keyboard/trackpad combo, which has a Fn key and F-keys are "under" the media keys and arrows. A normal keyboard doesn't need to type Fn.

Key Effect
Ctrl-Alt-Fn-Del Shutdown menu
Ctrl-Esc System menu
Alt-Space Window menu
Alt-Fn-F2 Run Program dialog
Alt-Fn-F11 Fullscreen window
Alt-Tab Cycle windows
Ctrl-Q Quit most programs
Alt-Fn-F4 Kill any program
Ctrl-Alt-Arrow Left/Right packs window to side, Up fullscreen, Down not-fullscreen.
Ctrl-Alt-Fn-F1-6 Virtual Console 1-6
Ctrl-Alt-Fn-F7 GUI

I love Ctrl-Alt-Arrow keys now that I know them. It's not quite Ratpoison or other anti-mouse window managers, but it's so handy on a small screen.

If you use virtual consoles, I cannot recommend highly enough learning to use screen, so you only need to remember that one of them is open, and can restore that session in any terminal later.

I still don't know what the Chromium program menu key is, it won't tell me and the docs are useless. I loathe that every Linux program chooses a different place to put menus. It shouldn't be allowed.

Useful Shell Commands

  • lxterminal: Standard Terminal
  • omxplayer: Audio/Video player
  • scrot: Screenshot, dumps into ~ in format Y-M-D-HMS_REZ_scrot.png (which is terrible, but whatever, man). I can't generate its printscreen keycode, supposedly I can edit openbox config to add a keycode for it. Later. I can always run scrot from the Run Program dialog, or sleep 10; scrot from lxterminal and switch windows.
  • gpicview: Image viewer
  • mousepad: Simple GUI text editor. Has line numbers, paren matching, and different themes, so if you don't want to use GVim or Geany, or nano or vim from Terminal, this is nice and starts nigh-instantly.
  • leafpad: Shitty Gtk text editor. You should hit Ctrl-Esc, Preferences, Main Menu Editor, Accessories, Text Editor, Properties. If it says leafpad, change that to mousepad.

I don't have Dropbox on it, and that'd be awkward anyway, so I'm still pondering how to easily get files off it. sftp or scp works, but I'd rather have a general-purpose, auto-syncing share folder.

What I'm Watching: More Suspicions of Mr Whicher

  • Murder In Angel Lane: Mr Whicher is now a "private inquiry agent", dicks not yet having been invented, and searches for a missing girl in a story about uncertain paternity and jerks with knives. Obvious villain is obvious, but the multiple visits to the insane asylum are nice; for a Victorian bedlam it's pretty cushy.

★★★☆☆

Note that the historical Mr Whicher was still a police officer at this time, and moving up in authority in London.

  • Beyond the Pale: The English are, it should be noted, monsters. The conquest, rape, and robbery of India over centuries is one of the greatest war crimes of history, every English is blood-stained clear through. The Sepoy Mutiny was the first try of the Indians to seize back their country, which took nearly a century. And that's what this oh-so-happy episode is about.

"Out there in the hills, we lived like kings. No one to censure us, no one to disapprove."

The fantastical element of this episode is that any English cares. That Mr Whicher will stand up even a little bit for the Indians seeking vengeance for a truly heinous crime. And the resolution requires even more empathy and compassion that I don't buy from them. The premise could've gone really dark and given something like closure, but instead it whimpers out.

Also, the lighting/color grading in this one is terrible, it's just black and yellow, sometimes black and cyan for variety. Everyone looks jaundiced, and you can't see any of the action. Even the outdoors scenes are so fake-overcast (but not actually overcast) they look like day-for-night shots. Impossible to guess at the hour.

★★☆☆☆

Just one more of the series to go, hopefully it goes out on a higher note.

Nanorogue2 in BASIC

I've completed my BASIC 10-Liner contest entry, download on itch.io or find the latest version here:

Just shove the disk (.atr) in Atari800MacX or any other compatible Atari 800XL emulator, disable BASIC and hit reset, it should boot up into the launcher:

Where you can read docs or source:

And play the game!

So, the source for my first pass was manually-packed down, and I couldn't really fit everything I wanted in there, or switch to text-graphics mode. With some rethinking, and a better source editing tool, I could… So I wrote a filter program "Basic2List.py" that removes comments & blank lines, joins up everything after a numbered line with colons, lets me insert binary codes with \xFF escapes. It still looks a little dense, because I have to manually use abbreviated statement names or remove spaces, I'd like to make it smart enough about BASIC source to do that itself.

But it lets me turn source like:

5   POKE731,1       // noclick
    GR.1            // 20x20 wide chars, 40x4 regular
    SE.1,13,15      // palette 1 to gold
    W=20            // world size
    DIME$(27),M(W,W)    // E$() encounter table, M() map
    //RRRZZZD$$..........#######>
    E$="\xF2\xF2\xF2\xFA\xFA\xFA\xE4\x04\x04\xAE\xAE\xAE\xAE\xAE\xAE\xAE\xAE\xAE\xAE#######\x3E"
    H=10        // Hit Points
    L=1     // Level
    // G=0      // Gold, default value
    ?"NANOROGUE BY MDHUGHES"

into:

5 POKE731,1:GR.1:SE.1,13,15:W=20:DIME$(27),M(W,W):E$="RRRZZZD$$..........#######>":H=10:L=1:?"NANOROGUE BY MDHUGHES"

(except the RRR... are inverse & graphics chars)

See the Atari BASIC Quick Reference Guide to learn the abbreviations and some of Atari's peculiarities. And it's running in Turbo Basic XL which really helped the program size, so I was able to squeeze in stairs!

Last time I was using the compiler, and that worked but it distorted my sounds, and I couldn't make LAUNCHER.CTB run NANOROG2.CTB! So if I just left them all uncompiled (but tokenized) .BAS files it works fine.

The only down side is it's stuck in easy mode. I'd love to have a difficulty which increases the GP to Level Up, and makes monsters hit harder (but not reward more), but that didn't quite make the cut.

Generally I'm pretty pleased by this!

The ZX Spectrum (non-Next) port is turning out to be hard, it lacks a few things and doesn't have ELSE, either, so I don't know if it can be done.

What I'm Watching: Suspicions of Mr Whicher

Not "The Witcher". This is on 'zon, "The Murder at Roadhill House", there are 3 more episodes so far. Based on a 2008 book by Kate Summerscale.

Period 1860, in a crappy English village of Wiltshire, a family awakes to find a missing child (called a "baby" and kept in a crib, but he's nearly 4), and when he's found dead, early Scotland Yard is called, they send a sad-faced Paddy Considine as the improbably-named but historically real Mr Whicher, though the actor doesn't fit the character well:

Whicher was reportedly described by a colleague as the "prince of detectives".[2] Charles Dickens, who met him, described him as "shorter and thicker-set" than his fellow officers, marked with smallpox scars and possessed of "a reserved and thoughtful air, as if he were engaged in deep arithmetical calculations".[2] William Henry Wills, Dickens's deputy editor at Household Words magazine, saw Whicher involved in police work in 1850 and described him as a "man of mystery".
—wikipedia

The start's very slow, and often uses voice-over repetition to pad out scenes that would just be Paddy walking around looking at things. Later in the first ep, they send along a sergeant, "Dolly" (William Beck), which helps with dialogue, though he gets vanishingly little character development. The local authorities are unhelpful, hostile, closed-minded fools you'd expect of the still-medieval backwater English.

Whicher's not quite a modern, scientific detective, but he tries. And he's a bit moody, especially between cases he's as useless and dissolute as Sherlock Holmes; which is probably a modern back-adaptation from Arthur Conan Doyle's 1880s books.

The pacing is glacial, much plot happens off-camera, and an early version of spinning-newspaper headlines. Very little time is spent on backstory outside of the main suspects; I wonder if the book goes deeper, or if this is all there is.

Still, it's a good enough mystery, Whicher's worth watching, what-cha.

★★★½☆

10-Line BASIC Contest

Let's go back to the 1980s!

So I knocked down a tiny subset of my already tiny BASIC demo program, NANOROGUE, and plan to make 10-line versions for Atari 800 and ZX Spectrum. Getting it running on desktop in Chipmunk BASIC was trivial. Just a little ANSI for screen positioning.

Initially I just used standard Atari BASIC, and that worked fine, if very very tightly packed, and not fast… but the lack of an ELSE statement left me with an 11-line program, I wanted to end with 50 ... :GOTO 20:ELSE:GOTO 20:ENDIF but had to move it to a new line. Very frustrating. So I'm using an enhanced BASIC, which is allowed for the PUR-120 tier, for one command.

Being "compiled" (to bytecode, don't expect miracles) and making AUTORUN.SYS easier than my own utility is nice. TBXL is at least a 1985 tool; though at the time I was using the "official" BASIC XE cartridge instead, which had similar features, and mainly moving over to Action!, 6502 ASM, and C. But for retrocomputing it's fair game.

Making a TBXL executable & bootable disk is a little fussy.

  1. Make a blank floppy ATR (emulator disk format), format it, put Atari DOS 2.5 on it or whatever you like (from DOS 2.5, H to write DOS files). This is your program disk. Like TRON, everything you do will be encoded on it, and losing it will subject you to immediate deresolution.
  2. Turbo BASIC XL disk in D1, program disk in D2. Control menu, Disable BASIC, Cold Reset (Sh-F5). You should see a red load screen, then READY. Check you're in TBXL by typing DIR.
  3. Write your program. I recommend writing BASIC as LST files in a desktop editor, then Cmd-E "Edit an atr disk image", click "Atari/Mac Linefeed Translation", "Import Files From Mac". In BASIC, ENTER "D2:FOO.LST". RUN to test it. But if you like living the '80s lifestyle all the way (or using non-ASCII chars, which are annoying to work with), you can work entirely in TBXL.
  4. Save your program tokenized: SAVE "D2:FOO.BAS"
  5. BRUN "D1:COMPILER.COM", now swap D1 and D2 (Cmd-D, click the swap buttons; you want your program disk in D1!), hit 1, pick FOO.BAS, save as AUTORUN.CTB. Swap disks back (you want your program disk in D2!).
  6. Ctrl-D, J for Ja (yes) to go to DOS-XE. COPY D1:RUNTIME.COM D2:AUTORUN.SYS
  7. Now put your program disk in D1, reset, and it should come right up into your program, then prompt for Dos, Run, or Load when it ends. Nice!


So resuming work on NANOROG, I get:

The only down side is this tiny version has a very slow redraw, it renders the entire screen each move, instead of just fixing last/new positions. I'm pondering changing it to graphics 1 (wide text, 4 colors) and poking screen memory which is probably faster than printing. I made some acceptable bleeps and buzzes with SOUND commands; I'm a poor sound designer, but I get there with some trial and error.

Anyway, next week's task is the ZX Spectrum version. Speccy BASIC is pretty good, so I expect I can knock that out quick and without all these shenanigans.

Blues Brothers Saturday Music

What I'm Watching: "the little things"

Let it always be known that I dislike everyone imitating e e cummings. Write in all caps. And I don't like leading articles in titles; "Little Things" is a better title. The entire credits are in lowercase, and I hate it.

How is it that 1990 is a period era? Yeah, it's 30 years ago, and they only have pagers and big CRT monitors, but it's post Cold War, LA is a shithole… it's not clear if this is before or after Rodney King, but nothing really changed. You could set this in the present and it'd be unchanged. Apparently the script was written in 1993, and took 26 years for someone's slush pile to get low enough for this to be produced.

The starting scene is annoying, car drives past a girl driving her car at night, then she pulls into a deserted diner to try to shelter, then runs into the desert, instead of just driving on. That's kind of repeated multiple times, with victims being killed because they were stupid, or just let their guard down. Blaming the victim, instead of building up the killer.

A working sheriff's deputy Joe "Deke" Deacon (Denzel Washington) does an evidence run to LA, hangs around and gets involved in local serial killer investigation. Which is a lot like his backstory investigation that burned him out. Denzel lays out some rules for how to be a bad cop, and immediately breaks them himself.

The LA sheriffs are mostly awful. Rami Malek (the whiny millennial with the bug eyes from Mr Robot), Chris Bauer (Tony Sobotka from the bad season of The Wire), Terry Kinney as a Christfucker captain. Rami's trying to learn something from Denzel, but he's barely even there, a mannequin being pushed around would have more presence. The coroner (Michael Hyatt, the black lady with the very male honkie name, you may remember as Bri Barksdale on The Wire and from Nightcrawler) is essential to the actual plot, but she gets only a couple of scenes. Jared Leto, my least favorite person in film, is skanky but not really menacing, obviously fucking around stoned most of the show. I will say, he gets what he deserves for the first time since American Psycho; it doesn't pay off having to watch this film, but it's something.

Unbelievably slow. Over 2 hour movie, one crime scene in detail, another seen on the edges. No real suspects. Slow police work leads nowhere. What we do find out about is Denzel's backstory, but only through flashbacks, very tell-not-show.

Completely misses a chance to reference The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly "There's two kinds of people in this world, those with loaded guns, and those who dig. You… dig."

★★☆☆☆ — absolutely a waste of my time.

Portable Computing Devices

"Dr Ed Morbius"[sic] posts The Case Against Tablets and one of the most unusable tables I've ever seen (too much data with no affordances, and Diaspora's design crops anything complex). But the premise is interesting, especially as I'm considering my next wave of new hardware. He's just going about it the wrong way (no, really, Samsung of the exploding batteries is bad? Tell me more news.), and then frustrated he can't succeed by going the wrong way.

So, luggables have been around since (counting only devices usable by the general public) Osborne I (1983, 10.7kg), tablets since Kyocera Kyotronic 85 aka TRS-80 Model 100 (1983, 1.4kg), laptops since Toshiba T1100 (1985, 4.1kg). It's been possible to have handheld computing since at least the Apple Newton MessagePad (1993, 640g), and Palm Pilot 1000 (1996, 160g). I've used but didn't own most of those, mind, just a Sharp PC-3, Psion, slightly later Toshiba and IBM laptops I hated, a bunch of Palm devices. I read many ebooks (Baen's early CDs of ebooks were great! Pity they mostly ship right-wing milsf these days), and 160x160 2-bit grayscale is not ideal. I have, as they say, seen some shit.

These days, the choices of hardware are a little better, thousands of suppliers, almost all of which fit into a few categories:

_ iPhone iPad Apple M1
Laptop		 Android
phone		 Android
tablet		 Microsoft
Surface		 Cheap
Windows
Laptop		 Pricy
Windows
Laptop
Price mid-y mid-y hi-r low-g low-g hi-r mid-y hi-r
Weight/Bulk low-g mid-y hi-r low-g low-g to mid-y mid-y hi-r hi-r
Battery hi-g hi-g hi-g mid-y low-r mid-y mid-y low-r
Performance hi-g hi-g hi-g mid-y low-r to mid-y mid-y mid-y hi-g
Security hi-g hi-g hi-g low-r low-r mid-y mid-y mid-y
Books low-r hi-g mid-y low-r hi-g hi-g low-r low-r
Video mid-y hi-g hi-g mid-y hi-g hi-g hi-g hi-g
RSS/news sites mid-y hi-g hi-g mid-y hi-g hi-g hi-g hi-g
Social media hi-g mid-y low-r hi-g mid-y mid-y low-r low-r
Online shopping low-r mid-y hi-g low-r mid-y mid-y mid-y hi-g
Reference hi-g mid-y low-r hi-g mid-y mid-y low-r low-r
Videogames mid-y mid-y hi-g mid-y mid-y mid-y low-r hi-g
Writing low-r mid-y to hi-g hi-g low-r mid-y mid-y to hi-g hi-g hi-g
Programming mid-y mid-y hi-g low-r low-r mid-y mid-y hi-g

Figure out the things you care about, and pick whatever has the most green, maybe yellow, avoiding red cells. Now you know what to buy.

What do you actually care about?

  • Price: You do largely get what you pay for in this category. Apple's devices aren't really much more expensive than equal hardware, but they never ship anything in the bottom price category. They do gouge on the top memory prices, which is unpleasant. But any Apple device will last for years longer than Android or a cheap PC, and have good resale value. The incredibly low prices on Android stuff is tempting, but it's a trap ("get an axe").
  • Weight/Bulk: These days almost everything's under 2kg like a good sword, but holding up an iPad over your head in bed is very liable to fall and break your nose; this is one place where a phone or phablet is superior. Obviously holding a heavy laptop up is incredibly dumb, and they're completely useless while moving, standing, etc., can't be propped up anywhere, are just always in the way.
  • Battery life: It's easy for manufacturers to lie about this, but if you run a real workload, you quickly see how wasteful any x86 PC is. Everyone else, it comes down to power management.
  • Performance: Only matters for Videogames and maybe programming. But Apple's been putting absurdly powerful CPUs and GPUs in their mobile devices, A12 is essentially the same as the M1 in the new Macs. Only the fastest AMDs or Intel are even competitive, and those burn too much power to be good mobile devices. Benchmarks are hard to compare exactly, but: anandtech on A12Z puts it pretty high against laptops. 2 years later, that's the SOC that's now in the lower-end iPhone and iPad.
  • Security: I'm not trying to be biased here, but if you are concerned with security at all, you really only need to look at those first three columns. There's just no alternative at present.

    Only a fool would trust anything running Android, they often ship with malware, everything in the stores is contaminated and has ridiculous lists of permissions, and they stop updating at "EOL" which may come as soon as it ships, rarely more than 6-12 months later. Do not put anything of value or interest to others in your Android device.

    Microsoft wants to be good at security, but is functionally terrible at it. They live in an open sewer of constant attacks, and have cardboard walls of bad software. Your mobile device may be pwned and all your files crypto-ransomed the second you connect it to the Internet. MS monthly updates sometimes wipe drives or lock you out, those are just from the last year, I'm sure they'll fuck up new ways this year.

    One can, one supposes, install BSD or Linux on a laptop, but that just makes it unusable for most of the tasks below.

    You know who actually seems able to keep secure borders? The walled Apple garden. Other than nation-states getting physical access to an older device, and if you're not stupid enough to turn on iCloud backups for things you need to stay private (iMessage!), you are almost entirely safe on iOS or Mac OS.

The tasks you might reasonably do with a portable computing device are:

  • Books: Cannot be read comfortably on a small screen, or landscape laptop. Needs a good document management program. On iOS, there's Readdle Documents, which is a great storage/reading hub for almost everything. On the Mac, I use Murasaki to read epub, except those in Apple Books. On Android, I've found ReadEra and Simple File Manager do that well, are pleasantly minimalist, and are not apparently run by criminals out to rob you, unlike 99% of Android software. I guess on Windows you can just keep things in folders and click on them? As noted every time I have to use Windows, I don't know how people use that.
  • Video: Not ideal on small screens, but I've found almost everyone has caught up now. Everyone has players for all the major streaming services, can play web video fine. Android file management of videos is awful. Windows seems OK at this. The real losers, tho, are BSD and Linux laptops; they can't do any DRM video without jumping thru excessive hurdles. I've been fighting this off and on for a decade with my side terminals, and mostly end up playing video on the Mac desktop instead.
  • RSS/news sites: Relies on having a big screen for 2-pane or 3-pane view, and good RSS reader. I use Reeder on mobile, and Feedbin on desktop; there's inferior but functional apps on other platforms.
  • Social media: Doomscrolling is best done at arm's reach, where you can instantly push home or just throw it away to get away from it. You need a camera attached, so I don't consider laptops suitable at all. Can you imagine someone holding their laptop over their lunch or up for a selfie?
  • Online shopping: Requires multiple tabs, note-taking, preferably a spreadsheet. On the latest iPads, you can split-screen a notepad or Numbers and a browser, which definitely helps, but a laptop or desktop works best here. I don't know how you would even do this on Android, where programs rarely keep their contents when hitting Back a bunch of times.
  • Reference: Here I mean on-the-spot "what's the answer to X?". Mostly checking wikipedia or Memory Alpha. So just a tiny bit of typing in search, maybe poke at a couple followup links, not extensive reading. 12 years ago I started doing this with my Treo, and it was addictive. This is an ideal use of a smartphone, every second that passes until you can Kirk someone with your online knowledge, it becomes less interesting.
  • Videogames: All mobile devices suffer from shitty controls. Cheap computers suffer from shitty GPUs; these days mobile GPUs are better. Macs don't have as many games as Windows, the official hybrid Excel/Call of Duty OS, but it's fine. The whole category shouldn't exist, we should just play games on the Switch or consoles, but it persists. Go play catch with your dog, it's more fun than poking at a tiny screen.
  • Writing: Long-form writing depends on screen, keyboard, and editor. There's plenty of BT keyboards for every mobile device. The original iPad had a keyboard dock stand which I bought with mine, and used until I got a better one; I now mostly use a Zagg keyboard with it, or just type on-screen. The current low-travel keyboard cases for Surface, iPad, etc. are kind of awful to type on, but they're very portable. Laptops will always win here, you can sit upright at any table and type ergonomically, and still have functioning hands in a decade. Even with an external keyboard, I find phones too small to compose much text on.

    The editor situation is more complex. I love Editorial (by the author of Pythonista), and it's great for writing text in Markdown, and is scriptable. Pages is fine for short, pretty documents, but it's incredibly slow as your document gets long, and very fiddly when you adjust layouts. There's dozens more on iOS, of varying quality. MS Word runs on iOS, Android, and something called "weeendows"; it's mildly awful but standard. I've found no native Android writing programs that weren't hate crimes, but I'm not super motivated to try every one.
  • Programming: As noted in Programming on your Phone, there's only a few good environments for iOS, but Pythonista is so good it makes up for a category. I've now seen a few Android programming environments, and they're comically, hatefully bad. Surface would be fine, except it's Windows; the only way to dev on that crap is a giant IDE that really needs a high-end desktop computer. Again you might put BSD or Linux on a laptop, but now it's useless for anything else.

I don't rank Drawing, even though that's a very important task for some people, because I'm not qualified to evaluate it; I can draw stick figures and collage art/"memes", but is the Apple Pencil super great? Maybe. What do the others have? No idea. Apparently MS reinstated MS Paint to their program store?

In hardware, I ignored e-ink readers because I find them unusable; a 2-4 second lag when flipping pages or trying to type anything is just unacceptable. We have cheap, low-power, high-refresh-rate LCD screens now, there's absolutely no benefit to e-ink. If you can stand it, fine, but I have no idea how to evaluate a thing I can't even look at.

(my table's not ideal because WordPress fights me; writing this in BBEdit/multimarkdown, I had the column labels rotated 90° with CSS, but for some reason WP positioned them wrong! I could render the HTML and paste that in, I guess, but then it's not easily editable later. And the margin of my site theme is a pain; I keep threatening to rewrite the style sheet entirely. Also, I'm aware there's colorblindness, but safe colors for them look awful to everyone else; so read the -r -y -g labels.)