Do keyboards and tablets belong together?

 I have never been one to try to use a tablet as a quasi-laptop. For me, laptops are meant for creating content, while tablets primarily meant for consuming it. I have traditionally used my tablets primarily for reading books on the Kindle app, reading emails (but not writing them) and perusing the occasional Web page, usually linked to the aforementioned emails. One of the reasons I do not create much, if any, content on a tablet is because I hate typing with virtual, on-screen keyboards. One time, several years ago, I found a keyboard case at a thrift store that fit an old iPad I had, and while it worked just fine, I found I almost never used it, so it wasn’t worth the extra bulk. I eventually put the iPad back in its keyboardless case and set the keyboard case aside.

Since that time, I have settled on the Amazon Fire tablets as a tablet model that meets my modest needs without breaking the proverbial bank. I have now owned four of them and have never paid more than $70 for one. While the lack of a keyboard has been enough to dissuade me from doing more with my tablets than I do, that may have changed. I recently went down the rabbit hole of eBay and ordered a Logitech K480 multi-device bluetooth keyboard.

I have long been a fan of Logitech wireless keyboards and mice, especially those that use the Unifying receiver technology, allowing multiple devices to share a single USB wireless receiver. But for tablets and smart phones, Bluetooth is a better, if not the only, option. Having found Logitech products to be well-built and dependable, I decided it was the safest option for a bluetooth keyboard, especially when they can be had for considerably less than the cost of a generic keyboard case.

The K480 is considerably chunkier than keyboards incorporated into tablet cases, which may be less satisfactory for some users’ needs, but I find it works well for mine. Powered by two AAA batteries, there is little down time for charging. Just slap in a new set and you’re good to go. If you prefer a greener option, rechargeable AAA’s work just fine in it as well. According to the packaging, a set of AAA batteries will last approximately ten months in the device.

The K480 can pair with up to three different devices, so it can be the go-to keyboard for your phone, tablet and laptop at the turn of the three-position radial switch on the left side of the keyboard. Pairing is also easy. Just place the radial switch into the desired position, then press and hold either the PC or iOS paring button on the right side for five seconds, and the keyboard is discoverable by your device. Follow the device’s pairing prompts and you can be up and working in just a minute or two.

It will pair with Android, Windows, and ChromeOS devices, as well as Amazon Fire tablets, and most Apple devices. Pairing the keyboard with a laptop running Linux Mint was more complicated, but was ultimately successful after several attempts. I believe the issue was more with Mint than with the keyboard,

Similar in size to a compact laptop keyboard without a number pad, the K480 is comfortable to use and has a tactile response. The key caps are slightly convex instead of concave, which takes a bit of getting used to. One thoughtful feature is a rubberized groove above the keys, wide enough to hold most tablets in landscape orientation, somewhat simulating a laptop’s configuration. or both a tablet and a phone in portrait orientation, enabling one to switch between them at a turn of the selector switch.

At this point, I am favorably impressed with the keyboard, although its durability and longevity remain to be seen. I feel like a protective case is a good idea for taking it on the go, and I definitely plan to look into that.

I still don’t see myself using a tablet as a laptop substitute; in fact, I don’t have the necessary apps installed to do so, but it will be handy for those times when I might need more than a tablet, but less than a laptop.

Pros: Comfortable design with a groove to accommodate a tablet or smart phone. Easily switches between up to three devices at the flip of a switch. Runs on AAA batteries.

Cons: Bulkier and less portable than a keyboard case.

Bottom Line: A physical keyboard can be just the thing to expand the functionality of a tablet. The Logitech K480 is a solid choice if compact portability isn't a big concern.  

Meet the new tablet--same as the old tablet

 My Amazon Fire tablet is almost five years old, a proper antique by electronics standards, especially for cheap electronics, and although it continues to give good service, it has begun to show its age. It occasionally freezes up, requiring a restart to recover, and of course, the battery isn't holding a charge like it once did. Reading for about 45 minutes, as is my bedtime habit, can consume around a third of a full charge.

For these reasons, I've had it in the back of my mind recently to look for a replacement. The good part was that since my old one still works, I could bide my time to find the best possible deal. Sometimes, such deals come unexpectedly, as was the case when I recently replaced my old tablet, without necessarily upgrading it; that is, I replaced it with a newer version of the same model when I discovered all Fire tablets were on sale for half off as an early Prime Day deal. 

A flagship Amazon Fire Max 11 had initially caught my eye, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that most of its flagship features, which would attempt to mimic the functionality of a laptop, albeit severely hampered by Amazon's locked-down operating system, was effectively overkill for my modest needs. This is especially true, since the accessories that maximize the Max 11's functionality, a keyboard case and stylus, add significantly to the cost without adding to any of the functions I use.

Fortunately, before I pulled the trigger on the Max 11, I noticed that the updated version of the Fire 10HD, which is a newer version of the model I have been using for the past few years, was also on sale for half off. That price was half the sale price of the Max 11 and much more appropriate for my modest needs, as I only ever use a tablet to read books on the Kindle app, read emails, but not write them, and view the occasional Web page.

 Because of these very modest requirements, I am able to live with Amazon tablets' locked down operating system, but If I wanted to use it for any sort of productivity tasks, I would need to be looking at an iPad. 

Amazon outdid itself with overnight delivery. I ordered it in the middle of the afternoon, and it arrived before dawn the next morning. That said, I was a bit peeved with the delivery driver, who chose not to carry it the last few yards to the front door, but instead to leave it at the end of the driveway, where it would have been all-too-easy pickings for a would be porch pirate since they wouldn't have to go all the way to the porch. This is especially concerning since I have recently had problems with outbound checks being stolen out of my mailbox. Fortunately, I got to the package before anyone else.

Unboxing the new tablet gave me a great sense of deja vu, in that it was so similar to the one I've been using, although there are some differences. The first one I noticed was the power and volume buttons were reversed so that the power button was on the left instead of the right, when the tablet is held in a vertical (portrait) orientation. On closer examination, I recognized the reason for that change. The front-facing camera was relocated to what would be the middle of the left side in portrait orientation, but would be top center in horizontal (landscape) orientation. This, coupled by the orientation of the opening splash, is a strong indicator that Amazon is pushing landscape as the default orientation for the tablet. Positioned in this way, the power button is at the top of the right side, which is a much more logical spot, at least for right-handed users. The relocation of the camera also resulted in the tablet being about a quarter inch shorter and maybe an eighth of an inch wider in portrait orientation.

Beyond these minor physical differences and somewhat upgraded specifications, it is basically the same as the tablet I already have. So what did I get for my money? The main thing is better battery life, by virtue of being newer, but also a little more RAM and a faster processor for better performance. 

Given the way I use a tablet, I have decided to keep this new one in a fairly stock configuration, at least for the time being, to see how that affects performance. I'm also on the fence regarding whether to add a micro SD card to increase storage capacity, as I have done with the three previous Fire tablets I have owned.  

Adding micro SD cards have produced mixed results. It made absolutely no difference on my first 7-inch fire tablet, which could only address the card as external storage. The Fire HD8 and Fire HD10 can address the card as internal storage, effectively making it a permanent part of the tablet. A malfunctioning card on the HD8 effectively bricked the tablet until I replaced it, but the second card eventually malfunctioned as well with the same result. The micro SD card has been much more satisfactory in the HD10. Last night, I found a brand new 128GB microSD card in a camera bag, and was on the verge of installing it in the new Fire tablet, but I ultimately decided to give it an extended test run without added storage capacity.

While this new tablet is largely an exercise in sameness, compared with the previous one, it does stand out in one particular area--performance. So far, this new tablet shows no sign of bogging down. Screens load almost instantly. There is almost no noticeable delay when moving between apps, or even going from page to page in the Kindle app.  

The one thing a tablet is better for than a laptop is reading a book  on the Kindle app. I can and have read on a laptop from the Amazon Website, but the experience is not as good, and finding the book I want is a nightmare. While I'm still a laptop guy for most productivity tasks--give me a physical keyboard and an external pointing device (I prefer trackballs) any day of the week--this new Fire HD10 13th generation tablet is a welcome addition to my tech stable. 

ADDENDUM--As often happens, the acquisition of a new piece of technology sparks a second look at an older one, in this case an Amazon Fire HD8 tablet I had pretty much stopped using shortly after acquiring my previous HD10, which had replaced it almost five years ago. Just for fun, I charged it up and turned it on to find it was trying to work--not very well, but better than it was when I put it aside. 

This encouraged me to keep going, and after fiddling with it for a little while, including doing a factory reset, it's now working like it should. I was pleased enough with its revival that I ordered a new case for it, as the old one is in pretty rough shape, thanks to broken plastics at the corners and one of my cats using it as a scratching pad. At this point, I am seriously considering a factory reset for my older HD10 tablet as well.

Now that I have three functioning Fire tablets. I have to decide how best to use them. I don't really need that many, but I can certainly carry one with me while one the other(s) are charging. 

 

 

Ready to Trek!

Now that we're less than a month away from new episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds after a two-year hiatus, I find that anticipation is being tempered with the news that the end of the show is on the horizon. With season three set to premiere July 17 and season four in production, word has come down that season five will be the show's last, and it will consist of only six episodes, instead of ten, to give the series a total of 46 episodes. As a result, I am simultaneously anticipating SNW's return while dreading its eventual demise.

While I understand the reasons behind the delay, rooted in the double-whammy disruption of the writers' and actors' strikes that occurred just after season two was released in 2023, it still feels like a long time to wait. But then, we've had to wait longer between other installments. There was a four-year gap between the time the original Star Trek aired its last episode on NBC in the spring of 1969 and the animated Star Trek premiered on the same network in the fall of 1973, and there was a similar gap between the end of the animated series in the spring of 1975 and the release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture in late 1979. The subsequent feature films came out at roughly two-year intervals, up until the proverbial floodgates opened in the mid-'80s. 

Star Trek: The Next Generation was announced in September 1986, a couple of months ahead of the cinematic release of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and premiered on the small screen a year later. From the fall of 1987 until the spring of 2005, audiences were treated to the video equivalent of a 17-year all-you-can-eat buffet of Star Trek with overlapping TV series (TNG, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise) and feature films, beginning with Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and concluding with Star Trek: Nemesis. 

Audiences entered another four-year dry spell without new any Star Trek between the cancellation of Enterprise and the release of J. J. Abrams' Star Trek feature film in the summer of 2009. Again, the wait was on with a three-year gap before Star Trek: Into Darkness (2012) and four years until Star Trek Beyond (2016). No new feature films have been released to date, save for an ill-conceived Section 31 streaming movie in early 2025. 

But audiences had to wait less than a year following Star Trek Beyond before the CBS All Access streaming service (now known as Paramount+) brought yet another wave of Star Trek, beginning with Discovery in 2017, and quickly followed by the overlapping releases of Picard, Lower Decks, Prodigy, and Strange New Worlds, the latter of which was a spinoff from Discovery's second season. 

While not all Star Trek content has been to everyone's taste--I personally have difficulty sitting through an episode of Lower Decks and I don't care if the rumored fourth and final installment of the J. J. Abrams Trek films ever gets made--the dry spell between Strange New Worlds' second and third seasons has been anything but truly dry.  The flow may have slowed to more of a trickle, but looking ahead, I trust that the remaining 26 episodes of Strange New Worlds maintains the same high standards of the 20 episodes we have already seen, and that the upcoming Discovery spinoff, Starfleet Academy, will measure up to the best of its predecessors as it Star Trek boldly goes into its next 60 years.

 

The End of 10

In just over four months, on October 14 to be exact, support for Windows 10 is coming to an end. For the past few years, Microsoft has been pushing Windows users to upgrade to Windows 11 in preparation for this finality, and if your computer doesn't make the cut, then to buy a new one. But let's face facts. Computers ain't cheap, and just tossing your old one ain't good for the environment. But what if there were a better way? Actually, there is. It's called desktop Linux.

A campaign is now under way, called End of 10 to help users give their older, but still viable, hardware new life by replacing Windows 10 or older with the desktop Linux distribution of their choice.  End of 10 is focused on connecting users with the resources they need to make the transition to Linux. It does not push users toward any specific Linux distribution (distro), because Linux is always about choice. According to the End of 10 Web site, any computer purchased new since 2010 should be able to run just about any Linux distro and stay up to date for years to come. 

Below are six great reasons, in no particular order, for upgrading an existing computer to Linux instead of replacing it with one that runs Windows 11:

• New life for older hardware--Each new iteration of Windows or Mac OS comes with new, more stringent hardware requirements that not all existing computers can meet. Replacing the existing operating system with a Linux distribution can help keep existing computers running productively for longer, effectively negating manufacturer-imposed expiry dates. 
• Greater privacy--Most operating systems have spyware and adware included at no extra charge, and usually without the ability to opt out. These allow hardware and software manufacturers like Microsoft, Apple, Google, and others to keep tabs on users, monitor their computing activities, in order to better target ads, and essentially commoditize their keystrokes and mouse clicks. With Linux, users are in charge, controlling exactly what is shared.
• More choices--With Windows, Mac OS or ChromeOS, your options for customization are largely limited to what the manufacturer offers you. The  look and feel of the OS are largely locked in before you ever open the box. The exact opposite is true with Linux, which offers a dizzying array of distros and interface options. For many users a huge part of the appeal of Linux is the ability to configure it exactly how you'd like it. After all, it is your computer. 
• No subscriptions required--Commercial software from the likes of Adobe, Microsoft, and others, are increasingly moving toward subscription models that require users to keep paying in order to use the software. Linux distributions and application software are free and open source, meaning whatever you download and install is yours. You don't have to keep paying for it to use it; in fact, you most likely won't have to pay for it at all. You have free use of it in perpetuity, for as long as your hardware can run it.
• It does what you need it to do--The vast majority of computer users only really need a couple of applications: a Web browser, email client, and office productivity suite. All of this is available for Linux, and in many cases is bundled with the operating system. In many cases, titles like Chrome, Firefox, and Thunderbird may be familiar to users, while LibreOffice may be less so, even though it is also available free for Windows and Mac OS. Installing LibreOffice on your existing computer is a great way to become accustomed to it before switching to Linux.
• It's better for the environment--Being forced into frequent hardware upgrades is, quite frankly, a waste of resources. It's much better for the environment to keep your existing computer running and out of the landfill for as long as possible, and with Linux, it can stay up to date for much longer, and will potentially run better with the lighter system requirements of most Linux distributions. And as a bonus. It's also better for you wallet.

In keeping with the End of 10 ethos, I have intentionally kept this discussion distro agnostic. I strongly believe one should choose what's right for them, and thus I am not recommending any particular distro, beyond stating that I have settled in on Linux Mint, which meets my needs quite well, and acknowledging that your mileage may vary. I have discussed this at length in earlier entries, so I do not feel the need to repeat it here. 

That said, I do understand that having such a vast variety can be confusing, and maybe even a bit intimidating for many.  The article "Which Linux Distro Should You Choose: A Complete Guide to Help You Decide" From Linux Start may be helpful, even though I feel it is a bit Ubuntu-centric and gives Linux Mint short shrift. 

As you begin shopping for the perfect desktop Linux distro, it will be helpful to take your top few candidates (at least two) for a test drive. You can do this by downloading and copying them to a bootable USB drive. You can then boot your computer from the USB drive to explore that Linux distro without affecting anything on your computer's internal drive. Use the steps below to get started:

1. Get your computer ready--Before you boot into Linux, you will need to make a couple of changes to your computer's BIOS settings. First, you will need to turn Secure Boot off. This setting on Windows 10 and newer computers prevents it from booting into other operating systems. Second, you will need to change the Boot Order so that USB comes first. 
2.  Get your USB drive ready--One of the easiest ways to create a bootable USB drive is with the Rufus formatting utility. Just plug in the USB drive, launch Rufus, and follow the prompts. You can even let Rufus handle the BIOS changes above and download the desired Linux distro, if you want it to. 
3. Restart your computer--Once you have the ISO file for your desired distro on the USB drive, you're ready to start exploring Linux with a simple restart. At this point, you're running Linux from the USB drive, so things might be a little slower than normal (use a USB 3.0 drive and port for best results) but you're not affecting anything on any other drive. 
4. Install Linux--Once you're satisfied that you've found the right Linux distro for your needs, you're ready to install it on your computer, using the installer application on the desktop. The installation process is usually pretty straightforward. Just follow the prompts and make a few choices along the way. The first choice you will need to make is whether to do a clean install, which will erase your internal drive and install Linux as the only operating system, or make it a dual-boot system, which will create a separate disk partition for Linux and then you will choose your desired operating system on startup. Either way, please make sure you back up any files you want to keep before installing Linux. 

It is important to note that different distros require different levels of setup and configuration after they are installed. One of the reasons I like Linux Mint is it requires minimal setup, and can be done without entering commands in the Terminal. It found my WiFi network automatically, needing only my WPA password to log in, and then found my networked printers and automatically configured them, making the whole process very quick and painless, which was a huge plus in my book.  

It is my sincere hope that this article and the embedded links will help make the option of transitioning your existing computer to Linux a little less intimidating, whether you make the jump now or when support for Windows 10 ends on 14 October. You have four months to explore and try out the available options, and there's no time like the present to get started.

 

2025: A Dishwasher Odyssey

I think it's a pretty common experience to take home appliances for granted—as long as they continue working. Such was the case with my dishwasher. 

I am now on the fourth dishwasher, and the first brand new one, since I moved into my house eleven years ago. There was a decrepit Kenmore from probably the late '70s or early '80s in place when I bought the house, but it was incredibly noisy and didn't drain very well, so I picked up a second-hand Whirlpool Quiet Partner II to replace it, which gave good service, but looked awful. The white plastic was badly discolored and didn't fit in aesthetically next to the black and stainless stove. 

A few years later, I helped a friend's mother by installing a new dishwasher in a house she was moving into. The old dishwasher, a black, contractor grade GE Nautilus worked fine, but didn't have all of the modern features she wanted. After I installed the new one, she gave me the old one. I stuck it in my storage building for several years, until another friend needed a dishwasher, I gave her the white Whirlpool and installed the black GE in my kitchen. I came to regret that decision, but decided to roll with it.

This was a challenging installation, with a stubborn leak on the coupling for the water supply line, but I got it sorted, and the GE dishwasher served me well, albeit noisily, for about three years, but it eventually got to where it wasn't getting the dishes clean and wouldn't fully drain, leaving murky, smelly gray water in the bottom. 

I tried cleaning the water inlet and outlet, but the net result was somewhat cleaner dishes and clearer, less odoriferous water standing in the bottom. Realizing it was only a matter of time before it got gross again, I decided it was time to shop for a new dishwasher. 

My first, and as it turns out only, stop was a Lowe's Outlet near my house. This store sells mainly returned and scratch-and-dent appliances at steep discounts off of suggested retail. I lucked up and found a black Whirlpool dishwasher that had been returned, but was undamaged. I considered checking other retailers, but I decided the price was good enough that I might regret it if I came back later and it was gone, so I pulled the proverbial trigger. 

Having installed four dishwashers at this point, I felt reasonably confident in my skills and abilities, and with the help of a friend, who has a small SUV (There's no way it would have fit into my sedan), I took it home the next day and began the installation process, naively thinking it might take me about three hours. Boy, was I ever wrong!

The old dishwasher fought me coming out, and in looking at the new one, I discovered I was unprepared for the installation. Whereas previous dishwashers I had installed made electrical connections by twisting leads together with wire nuts, this one was fitted with a cord, and thus requiring an electrical outlet under the counter. Also the water inlet had a different fitting, more like those used on washing machines, requiring an adapter from the existing 3/8-inch copper line.

I briefly considered removing the cord and making the electrical connections the old fashioned way with wire nuts, but I concluded that installing an outlet wasn't all that complicated, so I got the pieces, along with the water line adapter, and modernized things under the counter. 

The outlet was the easy part. The water line adapter gave me trouble. I got it into place without too much difficulty, but it continuously dripped water where the 3/8-inch copper line attached to the adapter. After multiple attempts to fix it, I raised the proverbial white flag of surrender and called in a professional.

Arriving the next day, his initial assessment was that the water line needed to be soldered to the adapter, but when he came back two days later, he had a different, and slightly more expensive, plan to replace the 3/8-inch line with a modern, flexible one. This solved the leak easily, but he couldn't get the adapter to connect to the dishwasher. Since he was tired and getting toward suppertime, he came back the next morning with a helper, who had a better idea. He pulled the dishwasher completely out from under the counter, double-checked the electrical and drain line connections, and attached the water line, all in about ten minutes. 

So, a week after purchasing the dishwasher and six days after bringing it home and starting the installation process, I was finally able to load it up and run it for the first time. After becoming accustomed to the noisy GE dishwasher, the new Whirlpool was surprisingly quiet. Standing in the kitchen, I could hardly hear it run. Even better, upon checking the dishes this morning, they were super clean, even those that had sat out on the counter for a week without being rinsed, and there was no water standing in the bottom. 

Although I am very pleased with the new dishwasher, the one thing I don't understand about it is the logic of hiding the controls on the top of the door so they're obscured by the countertop. This makes no sense. To me, it would be more logical to have the controls on the front. Had I not had a clearance issue with an adjacent cabinet door, I would have left it out an inch to make the controls more accessible, but that would have prevented one of the cabinet doors under the sink from opening. That feature notwithstanding, I'm quite satisfied with the dishwasher and am hopeful it will last a long time, although I am fully aware that these days, "durable goods" is often a contradiction in terms.

A Preference for Physical Media

I read an interesting article the other morning about the rise and fall of CDs, and it got me thinking about physical media as a whole. I began collecting vinyl LPs when I was in college in the '80s, got my first VCR just before the end of that decade, bought my first CD player in 1990, and my first DVD player in 2004. To this day, I tend to accumulate music and movies more rapidly than I can view or listen to them. And while I do make use of streaming technology, primarily for TV viewing, I have never been tempted to rid myself of physical media. 

Like many people of my generation, I focused primarily on vinyl in my adolescence and early adulthood, but I also made extensive use of cassettes, transferring favorite albums to that more portable medium for in-car listening, and copying things for and from friends. And of course, there was that ever fun pastime of creating mix tapes. I fell for the snob appeal of high bias cassettes like the Maxell XLII and TDK SA, and thus I would seldom buy prerecorded cassettes. For the money, I always preferred vinyl. 

I saw my first CD in the summer of 1983, when a classmate in a business writing course gave us a presentation on this new technology. He was also a part-time DJ for a local radio station and was very enthusiastic about how CDs were poised to revolutionize music, but surprisingly, although I saw them in stores over the following years, I didn't know anyone who actually had a CD player until after I had graduated from college, and I didn't get one until several more years after that. Frankly, I was afraid it would lead to yet another obsession, which it did.

I was still living with house mates back then, and when one moved in with a Pioneer six-disc CD player, and I quickly came to appreciate their clean sound and convenience in a diminutive package that seemed to embody the best of an LP and a cassette. 

Within a year or two of acquiring my first CD player, I made the conscious decision to close out my vinyl collection to concentrate on the newer, shinier medium. I didn't get rid of them and didn't replace most of them with CDs, but I stopped acquiring any additional vinyl. That was the spring of 1992, as I finished my second semester of graduate school. It was also at a point where CDs had surpassed both vinyl and cassettes in popularity.

A few years later, I acquired a CD burner for my computer, and around the same time, I got a 12-disc CD changer for my car, which together virtually eliminated the need for cassettes. It also was greatly convenient in that I didn't have to swap out discs going down the road. I could play through all twelve discs a couple of times before I got tired of them. A few years after that, I went through a period of financial struggle, during which I fed my music habit by checking out CDs from the local library and burning copies. Later, I began to discover online repositories like the Live Music Archive, which gave me even more access to fresh music without having to shell out for CDs. For several years, I was primarily burning my own discs, and ultimately branched out to doing the same with DVDs. For more than a decade, my purchases of prerecorded music dropped to almost nothing.

During this time, the music industry was changing. CD sales were slumping, both with the rise of streaming and digital downloads, and the unexpected resurgence of vinyl, sales of which have now slightly overtaken those of CDs. Ironically, this trend has led to a resurgence of CD purchases. I began frequenting a used bookstore that also sold music and movies. In the age of Spotify, many people were jettisoning their physical media, and this store was continually overrun with slow moving inventory. It wasn't that it was bad stuff, quite the opposite, there was just too much for them to handle, so many CD and DVD titles are sold for a dollar or two, making it possible to buy a whole stack of discs for the price of one new one. It's probably a good thing that the store has moved out of town, and I can only visit it once every few months, instead of averaging three or four visits a month. 

I've slowed down on my media acquisitions these days, and that's probably for the best, and while I do subscribe to SiriusXM in the car, mostly for safety reasons, so I don't have to change out CDs while driving, I definitely prefer a physical disc over a digital copy. Without that commercially packaged physical artifact, I just don't feel like I truly possess it. That disc is mine and no one can take it from me. The disclaimers on Amazon's Kindle books tell the full story. All I have there is a license to access that content. It can be taken away at any time. Compare that to my late father's 78 rpm records that I have inherited, some of which are now more than a century old. Now, that's staying power!

Section 31: The most un-Trek of all

Star Trek: Section 31, the first ever Star Trek telefilm dropped quietly on Paramount+ yesterday and after watching it twice, I'm still trying to figure out what to make of it. 

 Set in the time period between Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country and Star Trek: The Next Generation, Section 31 is centered upon Philippa Georgiou, the former empress of the mirror universe, last seen in Discovery, departing through the Guardian of Forever for points unknown to throw in her lot with Starfleet's Shadowy Section 31, a group charged with maintaining the integrity of the timeline. 

My initial take on this movie is it's the least Trek-like of any Star Trek I've ever seen. It does not focus on Starfleet, is not set on a starship, and does not revolve around any familiar characters, beyond Georgiou, who is interesting mainly because of her moral ambivalence. Is she a 'good guy' or a 'bad guy'? Sometimes, she's both. The only other familiar character is a younger Rachael Garrett, who viewers first met as captain of the USS Enterprise, NCC 1701-C in the Next Generation episode "Yesterday's Enterprise". 

Beyond that, the storytelling is a bit disjointed, and lacking those feel good moments, however fleeting, that make one feel like they're coming home to someplace familiar. At best, Section 31 resides on the very periphery of the familiar, and a huge part of what doesn't work for me here is that I never came to feel strongly about any of the characters. I never became invested.

It actually took two viewings for me to grasp what was supposed to be a major touch point in the movie, that it was a redemption story for Georgiou's character. To say more on this would be a spoiler, so I shall refrain. What was far more obvious, especially at the film's conclusion, is that it was setting the stage for future Section 31 projects, and that is perhaps also a way in which it falls flat. Like the pilot episode for a series, it spent too much time introducing characters and situations, and not enough time on substantive plot.

Originally conceived as a spinoff series from Star Trek: Discovery, it was finally re-imagined as a made-for-TV movie, possibly the first of several, dependent of course, on the success of this first one. Frankly, I'm on the fence about whether I want to see any more Section 31 movies. 

For me, the original Star Trek offerings from Paramount+ have been quite a mixed bag. Picard and Strange New Worlds are both excellent, representing the best of what Star Trek has to offer, as was the animated series Prodigy, which got handed off to Netflix for its second season. While the story arc included a setup for a third season, there has been no word whether that will happen, and the longer it drags out, the less likely it is to happen. Discovery was uneven at best, although when it was good, it was very good. It just had more than its share of forgettable moments. And the series I wish I could forget completely is Lower Decks, which is just too low-brow for my tastes, to the point that I have to watch it in very small doses. I am relieved that it is in its final season. It will not be missed, at least by me. 

Having watched Section 31 twice--I don't know that I can do a third viewing right now--it feels like it falls on the spectrum somewhere between Discovery and Lower Decks. The only thing I'm actually less excited about is the fourth J.J. Abrams feature film. The first one from 2009 was enjoyable, but the two sequels were both pretty awful. I'll gladly take quality over quantity, thank you very much.