When a bunch of people make the effort to email a reply, that’s properly old-school and gratifying all at once.
— Craig Grannell, writer
Email is old-school. I’m sure people said the same thing about physical letters written with feather quills plucked from the carcasses of the dinosaurs they hunted for sustenance after a time, too. And it’s also true email has been around since (checks Wikipedia) the early 1980s (though for most people it was more like the mid 1990s, which still makes it around 30 years old).
But there is that tricky passage of time effect and how a year once felt like forever, and now it feels like a blip and that makes email old-school, something The Kids regard as quaint as they invent new slang on a daily basis on TikTok or whatever the next social media platform will be (the old people will stay on Facebook, which will eventually have more accounts from the dead than the living and will not result in a materially different experience).
BTW, I now use email mostly to get a few select newsletters, because it’s easier than having to go through a bunch of bookmarks. It’s relatively uncommon for me to write an actual email message. That would be old-school.
I have used Firefox as my primary browser on every platform for about the last hundred years. I’ve dabbled with others:
Edge
Chrome
Vivaldi
Brave
Opera
Safari (on the few platforms it supports)
Arc (Mac version)
DuckDuckGo
Various Firefox forks, like Librewolf and the new Zen Browser
And way back in the olden times I was an Internet Explorer user. I know, I know.
I always come back to Firefox because:
It works for me, and I’m comfortable with it.
Mozilla is one of the few companies out there with a non-Chromium browser engine and I think it’s important to fight against having a single engine largely controlled and maintained by Google, a company I think is heading in all the wrong directions. Mozilla is also not moving in a direction I like, but lesser of evils and all that (I am keeping an eye on Zen browser, though, more on that in a future post).
There always seems to be some feature or design quirk in the other browsers that grates on me, and somehow the things in Firefox that grate do so at a level I’m willing to tolerate.
But recently, Firefox had been getting sluggish–noticeably so. Recent updates had added browser tab previews (which other browsers have and which I enjoy, but consider non-essential). I thought this might be the culprit, so turned it off. No change. I tried clearing out the cookies and cache (the browser equivalent to turning it off and back on). Also no change.
It occurred to me that my bookmarking habit (bookmark everything) had been getting a bit out of control recently. I use a new tab extension called NelliTab. It presents your bookmarks as large icons, lets you re-order them (within their respective folder), and allows you to collapse or hide specific folders. It’s great because I’m a visual person, and it allows me to create a visual grid of bookmarks I can use with muscle memory. But as I mentioned, I have a lot of bookmarks and maybe the extension was getting bogged down.
Reluctantly, I disabled NelliTab and went back to the standard Firefox new tab page, using four rows of sites, pinning the ones I visit the most. And it worked! Firefox is now back to behaving normally.
I may eventually go back to NelliTab and see if a truncated version of the bookmarks (hiding most folders and creating a small list of most-visited ones) may solve the issue there as well. For now, I’m happy to have the browser performing smoothly again. And, you know, sometimes a little change is good, too.
Plus, it shows me the current weather conditions. I don’t need this, but I like it. I am weird.
I got presented with this dialog box in Windows 11 today. I can confirm it left me unsure on how to proceed.
(I also confirmed that at least the current version of Windows 11 I’m running gets a bit snaky with programs if you leave them open and running for long periods of time.)
I saw this on Mastodon (I am sure it’s been making its rounds on all the socials for some time) and it reminded me of the domains I have let go in the past. None of them were dropped for financial reasons–back when I dropped a few of them, the cost of renewing was as low as $10 a year.
But there’s a psychological weight to holding onto something you (secretly) know you’re never going to use, and so I let them go. I am currently paying for five domains right now, which is not a big number in the grand scheme of things, but seems like a lot of domains for one random dude to have.
Let’s see where they stand!
creolened.com. This domain! It’s been running as a WordPress blog since February 2005, so its 20th birthday will be coming up soon. This is the one domain I actively use.
stanwjames.com. This is my name and it’s a domain. If I was advertising for a job or something, I’d probably slap something on it. I have occasionally thought of moving everything from creolened.com to this domain, but ultimately I don’t have a compelling reason to do so.
gumgumpeople.com. Currently a bare-bones WordPress site. I may do more with this in the next few years. Even if I don’t, I’ll keep it around (hee hee).
gumgumgames.com. This is idle, but could be used if I ever finish a game.
doodlingsandnoodlings.com. This was meant to be a place for my writing and drawing (sort of a more focused version of creolened.com), hence the name, but I never quite put together a plan for it. Also, I regularly forget if doodlings or noodlings comes first. This is another maybe for future use.
All of my domains, then, are currently safe, even though most will still remain idle. But you never know, the future is unwritten and all that jazz. Maybe I’ll start posting cat pictures to all of them.
I feel kind of dumb, because it took me far too long to realize:
These canned (pre-recorded) keynote events are just long ads for Apple products and services, nothing more.
Why would I want to watch a 90+ minute ad?
Even if I wanted to, there are reasons not to:
Everything is incremental upgrades (which is fine, just not exactly exciting).
Things that aren’t upgrades, like services, are inherently uninteresting to showcase. I actually don’t even know why Apple is in TV and movie production, other than the C-suite has an insatiable appetite to make more money, and will greenlight anything that is tangential to Apple’s vision/mission/whatever.
Apple’s keynote presentations have grown trite, predictable and overlong.
Everything can be summed up in an article that takes five minutes to read.
Because the events are just pre-recorded segments massaged to within an inch of their virtual life, there’s no chance of something going wrong to keep things interesting, like when Face ID–the signature feature of the new iPhone X–literally failed onstage the first time it was demonstrated.
So no hot takes, no medium-warm takes, no cold takes, nothing of that from me.
Well, except a summary, because I like lists. Here’s what Apple showed:
iPhone 16
iPhone 16 Pro
AirPods 4
Apple Watch Series 10 (it’s thinner!)
AirPods Max (and AirPods 4) now connect via USB-C
“Apple Intelligence” ad nauseam, from what I can gather
Today’s edition (linked above) includes a shot of Mars taken from the Mars Express explorer, which launched in 2003 and is still working and sending back shots like this one.
I like it so much I’ve made it my desktop wallpaper and am finding excuses to close windows, so I can see it. I love the clarity and the two standout details–the cute little moon of Phobos and the gigantic Olympus Mons volcano, which is about twice as high as Mt. Everest and around 600 km wide.
As I said, space is neat.
Here’s a 2K version. The newsletter has links to versions that go all the way up to 6K.
Click to embiggen, because you will want to embiggen this.
When I got my first PC in 1994 (30 years ago!) I had to choose between Intel or AMD for the CPU. I chose AMD because their Am486 DX-40 CPU was both faster than the 33 MHz Intel equivalent, and cheaper. Win-win!
It served me well for several years.
Around the same time, a friend of mine, flush with money earned by working on the railroad (all the live long day) also got his own PC, but because he was Mr. Moneypants, he got a tricked out Intel 486 CPU running at 66 MHz.
We both had the game Crusader: No Remorse, which came out in 1995 and remains one of my favourite PC games of all time, despite having a shall we say, somewhat inelegant control scheme.
You can’t see any in the screenshot below, but if you look at the flashing red light on the wall, it’s about the same size as fans you would see spinning away in the game, as fans do. And this is where I saw that 26 MHz could make a big difference–on my friend’s PC, the fans spun smoothly. On mine, they hitched, like the wiring in them was funky or something. It made me a bit sad, and a little jealous.
Crusader: No Remorse (1995). Not shown: The million exploding barrels littering most levels.
Today, 26 MHz is about as relevant to CPUs as the first horseless carriages are to today’s electric vehicles, but back in the 1990s every new processor (save budget models) brought significant, noticeable speed boosts. It was in that environment that tech sites like AnandTech flourished, and I can see why it and other similar sites are dying off now–today, most people buy laptops and just deal with whatever it has when it comes to gaming (unless they are hardcore enough to seek out gaming laptops), or you have the enthusiast/gamer market where people aren’t looking for all-around good systems, but ones that can excel at playing very demanding games, cost oodles of money and have enough lights on them to be seen from space.
But yeah, for a time, if you wanted smoothly spinning fans in your games, a couple of hundred dollars more could buy you that.
Specifically on why it may be me, and not social media, though to be fair, Facebook is still a raging dumpster fire.
Facebook:
Anyway, as I opined to Nic today while talking about it, I think it really comes down to social media now just being a form of entertainment (and more nominally, for news and information) and I prefer to get my entertainment through other means, so a little social media goes a long way.
Or maybe I just suck at finding good people and things to follow.
Either way, cutting back on it will give me more time to draw. I’m going to draw something right now, then post it, right here! In the next post.
As I’ve mentioned before, the only social media I really use anymore is Mastodon, but even there I’ve retreated mainly into the role of lurker, occasionally liking or boosting posts, and sometimes replying. I rarely create a post, and it’s mainly because I don’t really know anyone on Mastodon. On Facebook or Instagram, there are people I know–family or friends. I originally used FB like many people, to keep in touch with these people.
Toot be or not toot be
Facebook is a massive dumpster fire now, so while there are still lots of people there who I know IRL1I dislike the term “In Real Life” but can’t come up with anything better., I don’t care to keep in touch with them because I tend to keep my distance from dumpster fires.
Instagram was mainly where I posted bird photos, but I’ve pretty much stopped doing that and IG is a dumpster fire, too, it’s just a slightly smaller bin.
But as I pick and choose who or what to follow on Mastodon, I find myself asking more and more, what is it I’m looking for? Have I turned into a U2 song? Have I still not found it? Am I looking for something I will never find?
I think it’s possible, and the broader implication is that maybe social media is just not for me. Maybe it never was, and it only became obvious once I’d retreated from most, but not all, of it.
On Mastodon, I follow a few people ‘n things:
The hashtag #sketch
A few tech people (skewing to Apple, just because there’s so many of them)
The hashtag #linuxmint
A few political people or people who post about technology/politics
A few others I’ve discovered along the way, due to their photography, or just their writing on assorted topics
Generally, this gives me a decent mix of stuff that doesn’t get too bogged down in any one area. #sketch is lightly used, so there’s never too many posts to go through. Half of the ones for #linuxmint (and ther aren’t many) are in languages other than English, so I could probably drop that tag (I tried following #linux for a time, but it gets too much traffic, as one might expect on a nerd-centric platform like Mastodon). The others are a mixed bag.
Mastodon itself is fine. Some people are Very Serious or get easily offended. Some seem to easily offend others. It’s probably picked up some of the worst parts of Twitter, but has fewer tools for people to manage who can interact with them and their posts. Improvements are allegedly coming, but it’s been almost two years since the exodus from Twitter and now Bluesky, which is effectively a Twitter clone, but more “fun” is picking up users while Mastodon treads water. There seems to be a level of crankiness on Mastodon that I’m noticing more, probably related to the above-mentioned lack of tools, or related issues.
I don’t care about which site is more popular. Mastodon is big enough for me, but more often now, I find myself just scrolling through and feeling unsatisfied. There are jokes and cogent observations and talk about the Fediverse, and it’s all fine, but…unnecessary? I think the only thing I’d really miss are Chris Silverman’s bizarre and utterly fantastic Apple Notes sketches, and I can always check the notes.art site for those.
Then I think about the last time I lost myself in a sketch. It’s been a while. And I wonder if I’m just passing time scrolling and scrolling, and getting very little out of it. So maybe it’s not even Mastodon, it’s just me falling into a lazy habit and unwilling (so far) to escape out of it.
I used to visit AnandTech semi-regularly for some time, but in the past few years had checked in less often. The site was staying the same, but I was becoming less hardcore about PC stuff. I just wanted something that would work until I was ready for my next system (my current PC is a little over five years old, and the one it replaced ran for about seven years).
While editor Ryan Smith notes the publisher’s generosity in allowing the site to operate as it wanted, what he also says by implication, is that the generosity came to an end. AnanaTech apparently didn’t want to become another SEO-driven content mill, and so it gets shut down.
The good news? The site itself is being kept up (for now–I am skeptical Future PLC will stick to that) and its forums, which date back to 1999, will be kept running (see my skepticism above). But as of today, it’s now a legacy site. It becomes a part of history, part of the past, still worthy of keeping and remembering, but now an artifact, an exhibit of what once was.
The final edition of AnandTech, August 30, 2024.
But we still have Blue’s News! This was my home page for years when I was gaming all up in the hizzy in the last 90s/early 2000s. And it still looks exactly the same. Also, I no longer have a home page.
You’ve seen them, usually when people are on stage in some kind of televised conference setting, sitting in comfy-looking chairs and chatting with each other while wearing wee boom mics that have flesh-coloured pieces of foam on the tips instead of the usual black. Like this one below, which I grabbed from a current Ars Technica article:
To me, it just makes it look like the person has a large skin growth either on or hovering weirdly just above their face. It’s unsettling. To me.
UPDATE, August 26, 2024: The solution to the drive issue was to run a scan on the C: drive, which fixed errors and allowed Linux Mint (and presumably Ubuntu) to once again access the drives.
The complication: In both Linux Mint and Ubuntu, my two main Windows drives (both NTFS) are producing errors and can’t be mounted (accessed). Digging around, there are a number of possible reasons. The easiest to test was that Windows was hibernating and preventing the Linux systems from accessing them (I am simplifying here because I’m the guy buying Linux for Dummies in 1999). I shut down (rather than restart) the PC and rebooted into Mint.
This brought back the secondary Windows SSD, but the primary (C:) drive still produced the same error. My research revealed a few other things to try, which I will do the next time I boot into Windows (I’m typing in Ubuntu at the moment).
But this weird inconvenience (it hadn’t happened until just the other day and I have no idea what triggered it) made me realize the best way to run Linux is (in order from best to least, uh best):
On a completely separate machine
In a virtual machine (VM) — if you’re just noodling around
On separate drives
On a partitioned drive
I am using option #3, which, until this glitch, has worked reasonably well. I’ll still tinker with things as they are, but I am now convinced the best way is to just run Linux on a completely separate PC, which I currently don’t have. I have parts, and could cobble together something, but it would not be great. The better solution would be to convert the current PC 100% to Linux after getting a new PC for Windows 12 Ad Edition or whatever. There is no timeline for such a thing, however (my PC dates back to 2019 and still runs everything I need without issue).
But for now, I continue to tinker and hammer down the lumps that keep popping up in the Linux carpet.
