What to do with an old iPad 2

Staying at home has made me look for new ways of spending my time.

Two ways.

I had been thinking of what to do with old abandoned devices, and I had been playing piano after a long interim.

The two came together.

I could use the old tablet for sheet music at the piano.

That would allow me to rediscover and maybe revive what I had half-forgotten from the past. Maybe learn something new.

The process of doing just that resulted in some discoveries.

I needed first to create a library of sheet music.

I went to the Internet Archive to download some fakebooks, a process which reacquainted me with the wonders of the archive. No cost and an abundance of free media of all kinds. We all use it for too little.

I downloaded two huge fakebooks to iBooks.

I then printed out a few items and then decided to simply to use the iPad screen for sheet music rignt on the piano.

I then decided to add a few functions to the iPad in between playing.

The iPad 2 cannot run newer apps.  I reset the iPad to factory with as few apps as possible to avoid slowing things down.

Most can be done with the browser anyway.

But nowadays we need to be able to stream video and prefer to use voice input.

The old iPad did a good job with YouTube streaming but at first I could not dictate to the browser.

I could not load the chrome browser and Safari did not support voice.

A big downer.

I wad stunned to find a simple solution from an unsuspected source. Microsoft Edge provided voice browsing.  A solution from Apple's competitor!!!

I could also have installed Dragon Dictate but I did not try it.

So the old iPad 2 could be made to work just fine if a bit on the slow side, well worth the effort.

Don't get me wrong. The new iPad is a bargain for its speed and updated apps.

But the only important thing I could not do with the old iPad was to dictate into Google Docs. I do that with my iPhone anyway.

Maybe I could have done that with Dragon Dictate. No matter.

Anyway, don't give up on your old iPad!

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