Ask Paul: April 9 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Here’s another great set of reader questions to kick off the weekend a bit early so we can enjoy this Spring weather.
Changes to mobile tech
drjohnnyray asks:

What do see will change (if at all) with your mobile tech and supplies as you start traveling again?

I guess I don’t see any major changes from a hardware perspective, at least for a while.

The big stuff, to me, is what I bring in my laptop bag: A laptop, obviously, plus my iPad, some headphones/earbuds, and so on. And I just replaced my iPad and headphones (with earbuds) so that’s mostly set, though I’ve been using mostly reading-based apps during the pandemic and will need to (re)install some video apps (Netflix, etc.). And I usually bring whatever laptop I’m currently reviewing, and I’ve got a backlog of that.

I was also looking at the gadget bag I travel with around the time of the recent D.C. trip, and I think it’s mostly there for whatever the next flight-based trip is. (We’re probably going to fly to Charlotte next month and then rent a car to drive our daughter home from school so we don’t need to drive in both directions back-to-back.) I adjust that on a trip-by-trip basis and at least I don’t need to worry about international adapters until late 2021 at the earliest. Probably later.

My bigger concern is about logistics/habits. I’m just not used to traveling, and whatever habits I honed over time are now rusty. I’m going to forget things and do things more inefficiently than I’d like. And the only way to really fix that is to just keep traveling.

On a related note, I was reading something recently about the seasons and how the pandemic really wrecked whatever happiness many people would normally feel during winter because they had already been cooped up alone at home for the previous year as it was. And I commented to my wife that I wanted to travel the hell out of 2021 so that by the time winter came again, I’d be happy to hang around inside at home for a few months.

And then I was like, screw that. I want to travel next January too. :)
WordPad
hrlngrv asks:

Partly in jest, whither WordPad? Or does MSFT prefer to hush up its existence because it's more than sufficient for term papers through American high school, so might eat into Office 365 Home subscriptions if more people remembered it was available?

I’m not sure that the current WordPad app has a big role to play today, but one thing that had occurred to me while working on the .NETpad apps in late 2019 and early 2020 was that it would be very easy to transition Notepad (or my own app) into a dual-purpose text editor that could handle both plain and rich text and maybe it could sport a toolbar or simplified ribbon when editing rich text. I know that’s blasphemous to some. But if Microsoft is going to update Notepad more often going forward, it’s kind of an obvious evolution. And the text editor in macOS (and, before, OS X) supports rich text ...

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