drewcosten

[drewcosten]

If you’re new to Star Trek and want to watch every episode and film but don’t know where to start, here’s what I consider to be the best viewing order (the legend of series names is at the end of the post, and the years in which each section primarily takes place will be listed at the end of each line):

TOS Pilot The Cage (First Pilot, 2254)

TOS S1E3 Where No Man Has Gone Before (Second Pilot, 2265)

TOS S1E1-2 The Man Trap to Charlie X (2266)

TOS S1E4-S3E24 The Naked Time to Turnabout Intruder (series finale, 2266 - 2269)

TAS S1E1-S2E6 Beyond the Farthest Star to The Counter-Clock Incident (series finale, 2269 - 2270)

Star Trek 1: The Motion Picture (2273)

Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan (2285)

Star Trek 3: The Search for Spock (2285)

Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home (2286)

Star Trek 5: The Final Frontier (2287)

Star Trek 6: The Undiscovered Country (2293)

TNG S1E1-S6E11 Encounter at Farpoint part 1 to Chain of Command part 2 (2364 - 2369)

DS9 S1E1-4 Emissary part 1 to A Man Alone (2369)

TNG S6E12-15 Ship in a Bottle to Tapestry (2369)

DS9 S1E5-8 Babel to Dax (2369)

TNG S6E16-S7E1 Birthright part 1 to Descent part 2 (2369 - 2370)

DS9 S1E9-20 The Passenger to In the Hands of the Prophets (2369)

TNG S7E2-13 Liaisons to Homeward (2370)

DS9 S2E1-12 The Homecoming to The Alternate (2370)

TNG S7E14-20 Sub Rosa to Journey’s End (2370)

DS9 S2E13-21 Armageddon Game to The Maquis part 2 (2370)

TNG S7E21-26 Firstborn to All Good Things part 2 (series finale, 2370)

DS9 S2E22-S3E8 The Wire to Meridian (2370 - 2371)

Star Trek 7: Generations (set in both 2293 and 2371)

DS9 S3E9-12 Defiant to Past Tense part 2 (2371)

VOY S1E1-16 Caretaker part 1 to Learning Curve (2371)

DS9 S3E13-26 Life Support to The Adversary (2371)

VOY S2E1-12 The 37s to Resistance (2371 - 2372)

DS9 S4E1-10 The Way of the Warrior part 1 to Our Man Bashir (2372)

VOY S2E13-S3E1 Prototype to Basics part 2 (2372 - 2373)

DS9 S4E11-26 Homefront to Broken Link (2372)

VOY S3E2-16 Flashback to Blood Fever (2373)

DS9 S5E1-13 Apocalypse Rising to For the Uniform (2373)

Star Trek 8: First Contact (2373)

VOY S3E17-S4E2 Unity to The Gift (2373 - 2374)

DS9 S5E14-26 In Purgatory’s Shadow to Call to Arms (2373)

VOY S4E3-9 Day of Honor to Year of Hell part 2 (2374)

DS9 S6E1-11 A Time to Stand to Waltz (2374)

VOY S4E10-26 Random Thoughts to Hope and Fear (2374)

DS9 S6E12-S7E9 Who Mourns for Morn? to Covenant (2374 - 2375)

VOY S5E1-9 Night to Thirty Days (2375)

Star Trek 9: Insurrection (2375)

DS9 S7E10-26 It’s Only a Paper Moon to What You Leave Behind (series finale, 2375)

VOY S5E10-S7E26 Counterpoint to Endgame part 2 (series finale, 2375 - 2378)

Star Trek 10: Nemesis (2379)

ENT S1E1-S4E22 Broken Bow part 1 to These Are the Voyages… (series finale, 2151 - 2155, final episode set in both 2161 and 2370)

Star Trek (2009 movie, set mostly in 2258 in an alternate timeline known as the Kelvin timeline)

Star Trek Into Darkness (2nd movie in the Kelvin timeline, in 2259)

Star Trek Beyond (3rd movie in the Kelvin timeline, in 2263)

DIS S1E1-15 The Vulcan Hello to Will You Take My Hand? (2256 - 2257, back in the Prime timeline)

ST S1E1-4 Runaway to The Escape Artist (set in different years between 2239 and an unknown date in the distant future)

DIS S2E1-14 Brother to Such Sweet Sorrow part 2 (2257 - 2258)

ST S2E1-6 Q&A to Children of Mars (likely series finale, set in different, mostly unconfirmed, years between the early 2230s and 2385)

PIC S1E1-10 Remembrance to Et in Arcadia Ego part 2 (2399)

DIS S3E1-13 That Hope Is You part 1 to That Hope Is You part 2 (3188 - 3189)

LD S1E1-S2E10 Second Contact to First First Contact (2380 - 2381)

PRO S1E1-10 Lost & Found part 1 to A Moral Star part 2 (2383 - 2384)

DIS S4E1-13 Kobayashi Maru to Coming Home (3190)

PIC S2E1-10 The Star Gazer to Farewell (2401)

SNW S1E1-10 Strange New Worlds to A Quality of Mercy (2259)

LD S3E1-10 Grounded to The Stars at Night (2381)

PRO S1E11-20 Asylum to Supernova part 2 (2384)

PIC S3E1-10 The Next Generation to The Last Generation (series finale, 2401)

SNW S2E1-10 The Broken Circle to Hegemony (2259)

LD S4E1-10 Twovix to Old Friends, New Planets (2381)

DIS S5E1-10 Red Directive to Life, Itself (series finale, 3191)

PRO S2E1-20 Into the Breach part 1 to Ouroboros part 2 (2384 - 2385)

LD S5E1-10 Dos Cerritos to The New Next Generation (series finale, 2382?)

Legend:

TOS: The Original Series

TAS: The Animated Series

TNG: The Next Generation

DS9: Deep Space Nine

VOY: Voyager

ENT: Enterprise

DIS: Discovery

ST: Short Treks

PIC: Picard

LD: Lower Decks

PRO: Prodigy

SNW: Strange New Worlds

[drewcosten]

Don't ever let anyone tell you that you can't do real work from an iOS device.

[drewcosten]

It never fails. Every year, the so-called experts talk about how Apple is doomed. Fortunately, we have people like Daniel Eran Dilger to set the record straight.

[drewcosten]

My Ten Year Apple Anniversary

Ten years ago today I bought my first Mac. I grew up with Microsoft's Operating Systems (starting with MS-DOS 3.2 on a laptop with only floppy drives and a CGA screen, eventually ending with a generic Pentium desktop of some sort running Windows 2000), but getting tired of dealing with malware and adware, I decided to give Mac OS X a try. Apple had just recently switched to Intel processors, so I figured if I hated Mac OS X I could just install Windows on it using the new Bootcamp feature, and went ahead and bought the first-generation 17 inch MacBook Pro. Had I waited a few more days I would have been able to get the second generation Core 2 Duo model rather than the Core Duo model I ended up with, but I didn't know anything about the life cycle of Macs at that time. I'm still not a fan of the pre-Intel Macs or pre-Tiger versions of OS X (or macOS as it's once again being called), but I quickly came to love the newer Macs and I couldn't see myself touching another Windows machine voluntarily at this point. Once you go Mac, it truly is hard to go back. Still, ten years later, while I'm writing this on an Apple computer, it's not on a Mac, and I actually don't even own one anymore. Although I do still use a Mac at work, the only computer I personally own at this point is my new iPhone 7 Plus (unless you count an Apple Watch and Apple TV, which I also own and use daily). I've had a few iPads, beginning with the first generation model in 2010, but I also sold my iPad mini 2 earlier this week after realizing the iPhone 7 Plus had a large enough screen to replace it for me. About 15 years ago I thought of using a PDA such as as a PalmPilot or a Handspring Treo as my only computer, but today I'm truly able to use a pocket-sized super computer as my personal computer. My PocketMac, as I sometimes like to call my iPhone, is far more powerful than that first Mac I bought 10 years back, with twice the storage space (256 GB vs 120 GB), three times the memory (3 GB of RAM vs 1 GB), a far better processor (the 64 bit, quad-core A10 Fusion processor can stand up to the Intel processors in Macs that are a only a few years old, and is much more powerful than the 32 bit Core Duo processor of my first MacBook Pro), and, of course, a much nicer display (the Retina HD display with wide colour gamut is far superior to the screen on that Mac). Combine all that with the fact that this is a computer I'm able to take with me anywhere I go (even in the water for short periods of time if necessary, thanks to its water resistance), and also has a phone and a camera built into it (along with many other features a traditional computer never had), and I'm easily able to replace a regular Mac with my PocketMac for my personal computing needs. People made fun of Steve Jobs for using the term post-PC, but for non-work related activities, and even quite a few actual work-related tasks as well, it truly is a reality today for many people, and I'm happy to say I'm one of them. I can honestly say that the iPhone 7 Plus is the best computer I've ever owned, and yet I can't wait to see what else Apple has in store for us, so here's to the next 10 years of computing with Apple's amazing technology.

[drewcosten]

This article is so true. The only thing I use my MacBook for now is work and playing Minecraft, and as soon as Minecraft Realms comes to Pocket Edition I’ll only be using it for work. For pretty much everything else I use my iPhone (I rarely even use my iPad anymore, although it’s still nice for videos).

[drewcosten]

Most people don't actually need a PC

Thinking back to my teen, and even early adult years, very few people had a PC (defined on this site as a traditional desktop or laptop computer, be it a Windows PC or a Mac) in their homes. Over the years this has changed of course, and it’s hard to imagine any home on any given street here in the western world without at least one PC sitting on a desk somewhere, even if it’s just a cheap netbook, with many households having at least one PC per person living there.

The interesting thing is, I can see us returning to the old ways of most homes having no PCs at all, and I can see this happening in the very near future. This is because, simply put, most people just don’t need a PC at home.

The PC was, and still is, a wonderful tool for many people, and until recently a completely necessary tool, considering it was the only one available for our computing needs. If you wanted to quickly type a letter or look up a fact or find a location, the all-in-one, Internet-connected PC was generally the best tool for the job.

The truth is, however, that most people just don’t need all the horsepower and abilities of a traditional computer at home anymore. Really, most of us will never write a computer program, design a new device in AutoCAD, alter images in Photoshop, or create a complicated spreadsheet in Excel, at least not while we’re at home (and, honestly, probably not even at work as far as the majority of people go).

That said, most of us still want to be able to read and write emails, chat with our friends online, update our resumes, watch videos, quickly look things up, and just surf the web in general while at home. Up until a couple years ago, the traditional PC was the only way to do all of these things, which is why we all have at least one laptop or desktop somewhere in our homes. Today, however, an expensive PC is no longer necessary to accomplish any of the simple digital tasks that most of us want or need to do. A $399 iPad is all you need in order to do any of these things, and some people don’t even need a tablet computer to live a perfectly satisfactory digital lifestyle outside of the office if they have a decent smartphone.

For the vast majority of people, today’s Post-PC technology really is more than enough to do everything they want or need to do online, and the few times they might really need a PC outside of work, there’s the local library or Internet cafe they can pop into for a few minutes of desktop computer time. But even that will become less necessary as time goes on, as there’s almost always “an app for that” these days, or will be soon as Post-PC technology gets more powerful.

If you think this sounds unrealistic, consider the fact that I not only wrote every post on this blog using only my iPad and iPhone, I’ve built whole websites using only my iPad and iPhone as well, so a traditional computer often just isn’t needed, even for some of the seemingly more complicated computing you might want to do from home.

Of course I fully realize that many of the people who would read an article like this are probably the sorts of people who do require more powerful computers for their jobs than an iPad, and might even need that computing power at home more often than not. Still, even among those of us who are power users when it comes to technology, many of us are finding that we’d prefer a better adjusted work-life balance than what we’ve become accustomed to, and not having a PC at home to tempt us to do “just a little more work before bed” might be a good thing for some of us.

As for the rest of society, more and more people are going to realize very soon that they don’t need to spend their money on a traditional computer when they discover that the computer in their pocket (the one that also makes phone calls) is more than enough for what they need to do on a day to day basis, and those people who might want a bigger screen than a smartphone has will likely go for a tablet computer rather than a more bulky PC they just don’t need anymore.

[drewcosten]

I don’t actually know how this is determined or what it means for Apple (other than some good publicity). Still, congratulations to my favourite tech company!

[drewcosten]

From 9to5Mac: “New in iOS 7 is the ability to make FaceTime Audio calls. FaceTime Audio works internationally and works on a Wi-fi network, or on a cellular connection.”

The fact that we can now make voice-only FaceTime calls from our iOS devices (and likely Macs when OS X 10.9 comes out this fall), even over cellular networks if you’re on a new enough device, is one of the best features of iOS 7 in my opinion.

[drewcosten]

Pretty much the only thing I use my MacBook Air at home for these days is backing up my iOS devices to iTunes and backing up my pictures to iPhoto (though I still use a Mac mini for 40 hours a week at the office). Still, considering the fact that "Apple is earning nearly as much from its Mac platform as Microsoft is from Windows" (as Daniel Eran Dilger puts it in this article), I don't see the Mac disappearing from Apple's hardware lineup anytime soon.