Meow meow, kitty kitty meow meow, kitty kitty meow meow we love you… (To the tune of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang)

I wanted a cheap way to try out using a tablet to read music from at my amateur orchestra. I couldn’t find a large-screened affordable android tablet, but I got hold of a cheap 2nd hand Surface Pro 5, a Surface Pen (for making annotations on the music), and a bluetooth foot pedal (for turning pages).

I figured I’d try sticking Fedora on it, but even with the surface specific kernel installed, it did not seem stable. Waking it with the power button randomly stopped working entirely, seemed quite sluggish, that kind of thing.

Even if I’d got it working, there are basically no ideal options on Linux for music reading software. Other platforms have MobileSheets, enScore, etc. If the core OS experience had felt more robust then I was looking forward to trying to create one myself in Qt, but just to get something working I had to give up and stuck a LTS edition of W10 on it instead, which (sadly) does work great and seems very stable in comparison. This makes sense - it’s a very Windows-specific bit of hardware; I was just hopeful that it’s basically just a x64/UEFI device with a bunch of tablety peripherals, so Linux should be an option even if it’s missing a few features. But I can’t risk it blacking out or failing to respond in the middle of a concert.

Red Dwarf - Psirens (1993)

As KRYTEN and LISTER head for the cockpit, the airlock monitor fizzes on again and a SECOND LISTER appears on the screen.

LISTER 2: What the hell are you doing taking off when I’m still outside? Let me in.

KRYTEN double-takes between the LISTER inside and the LISTER on the monitor.

KRYTEN: I’m afraid, sir, you’re already here.

RIMMER steps down from the cockpit.

LISTER 1: He’s a Psiren – don’t let him in. LISTER 2: For god’s sake – I can’t hang on any longer. He’s the Psiren. Let me in! RIMMER: What do we do? KRYTEN: there’s no way to tell which is which. We have to let him in. RIMMER: That means we’ll definitely have one Psiren on board. A brain- sucking psychotic temporal lobe slurper. KRYTEN: There’s a fifty per cent chance we have one on board already. We can’t risk killing the real Lister. I’m letting him in.