I have surprised myself by sticking with light mode on the PC for more than an entire day.
Thoughts:
Text does look a little crisper overall
Things aren’t too bright, but I could probably turn my monitor’s brightness down a little
Discord’s implementation is bad. The background for text is pure white (#FFFFFF), which is silly. You can fix it by changing the colour–by subscribing to Nitro™ for $10 a month. $120 per year to have a nice off-white is a bit much. File Explorer also uses pure white. I may see if I can change that specifically.
In fact, more apps than I realized seem to use pure white, so I’m guessing this is the “accepted” default for Windows 11’s Light Mode. Some other application colours:
TickTick: #FFFFFF
Diarium: #F0F3F9 for the sidebar, #F3F3F3 for the main calendar view, #F0F0F0 for the individual entries
Thunderbird: #FFFFFF
Proton Mail: #F8F8F6
For funsies, here are the above-mentioned shades of white:
Today, after reading about someone launching a new text editor (one gets released approximately every ten minutes) and having it default to tiny text and dark mode, both of which were undesired by this person, I decided at long last to switch away from dark mode in windows and go fully light mode–no exceptions!
Well, except one: the browser. And really, my main browser Firefox just uses dark mode to make tabs and the address bar darker, but it helps set them apart from the actual page content below, which is a good use of contrast, in my view.
Actually, I lied: two exceptions! Any image editing program will also still use dark mode, because again, it better separates the UI from the content you’re working on.
So far, light is very bright. We’ll see how it goes. Apparently some studies say a light UI causes less eye strain, which seems a bit crazy to me, but I’m no eye-ologist. I will report back in a week or so, or when I give up and re-embrace the lovingly velvety darkness.
(I will also switch macOS to light mode, using the same exceptions there.)
Microsoft caught a lot of flack over its upcoming Recall “feature”, and the inevitable “Switch to Linux!” chorus started up again. Even though Microsoft is changing Recall in response to the immense backlash, a lot of people have decided they simply can’t trust Microsoft anymore.
I am somewhat on the fence, but it’s prompted me to update my Linux Mint install and maybe even get really nutty and try other distros. For the moment, I’m going to spend some more time in Mint and see how successfully I can work out some of the remaining kinks that have thwarted my previous efforts to embrace the penguin.
At the keynote for today’s WWDC24 launch, Apple revealed its version of LLM/machine language/AI stuff and is calling it Apple Intelligence, which will just confuse people, and when it doesn’t confuse people and goes sideways, Apple’s got its name stuck right there at the beginning to remind you who is behind the thing that isn’t working for you. It’s very Apple.
The keynote was pretty dull. Apple hits the same notes every time they do these and is leaning so hard into the Xtreme Craig Federighi stuff that it has gone from parody to self-parody to whatever it is now. After the prerecorded segment in which a bunch of people skydive into Apple Park, the camera drone zooms into Tim Cook on the roof of the building and saying, “Wow, that was so cool” with all the excitement of someone reading names from a telephone book (kids, ask your parents what a telephone book is).
There were a few things I liked:
Customizing icon arrangement on iPhone/iPad (and not forcing iPad owners to wait a year to get the feature), though it remains to be seen how much you can really customize it. Probably not as much as people will want.
The workout app on the Apple Watch finally acknowledges that there are days you might not complete your rings because you’re sick/hurt/on vacation.
Uh, I’m sure there was something else.
What I found most interesting is the limited pool of hardware that can take advantage of AI™. It will only work with an M1 or better SoC and last year’s iPhone 15 Pro/Pro Max models. I mean, I doubt I’d use it much, anyway. My phone is basically a camera and text messenger device.
Overall, some nice new things, unless you’re an iPad owner hoping for a dramatically overhauled and improved UI, in which case you are probably quietly sobbing right now.
I say this as someone who has owned an iPad Pro since 2017.
When the iPad debuted in 2010, Steve Jobs pitched it as a “between” device that could do things a smartphone could, and things a desktop computer could–but it could do them in a more convenient form. The activities included:
Browsing web pages
Reading magazines and books
Watching video
All of these activities require minimal interaction, so they are suited to a touch-oriented device. The iPad’s larger display–yet still eminently portable design–makes it superior to a smartphone for viewing web pages or magazines, though with more responsive designs and larger phone screens, this use case is not quite as compelling as it once was. It’s still better for watching video in bed than a laptop or phone, I’d say.
Jobs only lived long enough to see one iteration of the iPad, called, cleverly1Given Apple’s often byzantine and arbitrary naming schemes, this is not sarcasm!, the iPad 2. It refined what was in the original, but otherwise changed nothing. It was just a better iPad.
That changed a bit in 2012 when Apple introduced the iPad Mini. It was, quite literally, a smaller version of the iPad. This didn’t change much, but it did mean that consumers now had two distinct choices when buying an iPad: regular size or smaller.
Apple then blew things up when they introduced the original iPad Pro in 2015. This had some refinements, but mostly it was bigger, going from a 9.7″ display to a 12.9″ one. Apple muddied the waters by later introducing a 9.7″ iPad Pro, which really wasn’t much better than the standard iPad Air available at the time (also a 9.7″ device). Apple “fixed” this by junking the Air (for a while) and bringing in a new base model iPad that stripped away things like the laminated display, but also dropped the price to a mere $299 (the original iPad sold for $499). The Pro models also supported a stylus, the Apple Pencil.
Does anything in the above paragraph look like a carefully-planned, long term strategy? Because it is not. It is Apple deciding one thing (“We need an upscale iPad so we can charge a premium price”) and then shuffling everything else around to make the line-up work. The early iPad Pros, apart from supporting Apple Pencil–an arbitrary limitation that was lifted a few years later, when Pencil support was added to all the myriad iPad models–didn’t really do anything that the base model couldn’t do. They looked a bit nicer, they sounded a bit better, they ran faster (not that you could really notice).
It was the Apple Pencil support that got me to buy that 10.5″ iPad Pro in 2017, then to move to the 12.9″ model when it was new in 2020 (I still use it today). It seemed like a way to get a Cintiq-like device, but (surprisingly, given Apple) for less than an actual Cintiq would cost. (This year’s iPad Pro models have reversed that, as Apple leaned much more into making the Pro model “premium”–even though it still can’t do anything more than a $300 iPad you can grab at your local Walmart.)
When I bought the 12.9″ iPad Pro in 2020, I got it from Apple directly and paid $1167. That’s pricey! The equivalent 2024 version is $1799. That’s silly.
But the price is not the main reason the iPad Pro is silly. You were probably wondering when I was going to get to this.
The silly part is: No one needs an iPad Pro. I don’t, you don’t, Apple doesn’t. Apple started the line to generate more revenue, and now they’ve jacked prices because Apple is in one of its greed-driven, “squeeze them for everything” phases (the last time was in the mid-90s). But in the drive for more money, Apple has boxed itself in, adding bits and pieces to iPadOS (which, let’s be serious, is just iOS with a different sticker on it), trying to make it work more like a laptop, with split screen, Stage Manager, a Files app (which started terrible and has stayed terrible since its introduction). But it is still marred by terrible memory management, arbitrary restrictions, a lack of utilities, and turning one or two click operations on a PC into a maze of steps, swipes and taps that sometimes just fail at the end, forcing you to start over.
It’s a mess and it’s a mess because Apple made a fundamental error in 2015 by introducing the iPad Pro. They got greedy, they made a mess, and in almost 10 years have failed to clean it up. WWDC 2024 is tomorrow, and Apple will probably make a few more token gestures to fixing iPadOS. But I don’t think they can.
The basic iPad experience is fine. Apple should refine what is there now to work better.
But here’s my advice for a company regularly valued at $2-3 trillion:
Keep the base iPad, Air and Mini. Lose the suffixes. They are all iPads now, differentiated only by size. If they insist on a cost-cutting base model, call it the iPad SE.
Kill the iPad Pro. Yep, kill it! No more iPad Pros! Continue to support existing models for 5–7 years.
Introduce a Mac tablet that runs a touch version of macOS. Include optional support to run a virtualized iPadOS.
Now you have a truly professional-calibre touch device. Yes, I’m basically asking Apple to re-invent the Surface Pro, but with Apple’s level of polish and precision.
The iPad Pro is just not going to get better, software-wise, without major surgery on the operating system that Apple will never commit to. So they shouldn’t. They should just give up and put out touch-based Macs instead.
After tending to some caching devilry, I seem to have gotten my site back up and mostly functional. It is still in flux, but for now the changes are such:
No more colour! Well, very little colour, but it’s mostly a sea of light gray. This will get tweaked.
The broad layout of content/sidebar remains. This, too, will get tweaked further.
While the layout is pretty much the same, the mono-colour means all the fancy rounded edges have been obliterated. I kind of miss them. I will ponder.
Archives and Categories have been demoted and Recent Posts removed.
Font Resizer is gone, as are the thumbnails for various links.
The links are now in a tidy little list, using Font Awesome icons with a li’l bit of colour (except for the Mastodon elephant, because there’s no non-political FA icon that is not political, and I couldn’t get the FA Mastodon logo to render for reasons).
Typography is unchanged (for now).
The logo has been made bigger and centred (and given a bit more space between it and the content).
With everything at least working, I will spend some time contemplating what I like and what I will change before diving in and probably wrecking everything again. Excelsior!
I did a silly thing last night. I decided to revamp the site, spontaneously, into something much more stripped down and streamlined. I didn’t intend to finish it the same night, but I’d get a lot of the planks in place, so to speak.
While I did this, my internet connection went down, because there are evil gnomes at Telus who know the worst time to make my connection fail.
Anyway, the main change was moving from content/sidebar to sidebar/content–simply switching the sidebar to the other side, and re-organizing the content in it. I also switched to a more muted colour scheme.
Everything looked pretty good. I hit Publish and…every widget in the new sidebar disappeared. I rebuilt it and in the preview it looked good. I hit Publish and again, all widgets gone.
The right sidebar seemed OK, but as soon as I touched it, the curse spread to it, but not as fully–for some reason the last widget was retained, and all others wiped.
My database is quite old–it dates back to 2005, when I started the blog, and I’ve already covered how it won’t properly display all emoji because of some old-timey character set issues. So I’m thinking that perhaps the outage may have corrupted a janky database into something even jankier. But I do not know for certain. I am a humble word-spewer and doodler, not a web developer.
I am pondering now. I’ve added a few things to the right sidebar again, and these few things seem to be sticking for the moment. We’ll see how it goes.
I am sad. 🙁
But I also have renewed my hatred of WordPress. >:( (actual emoji for being angry will not display)
Today I came across this wonderfully horrifying blog post about someone using AI (an LLM1Large Language Model, or as I’ve seen some people call them, a very fancy parrot to be precise) to write an email to a friend. Why a friend would do this to another friend is a very good question, because it seems terrible and awful.
The post is filled with great lines, though, one of which forms the title of this blog post, which was generated by LTF2Less than Ten Fingers typing, which is the way I’ll always roll, I think technology.
I made a note to revisit my February 13, 2024 post about nostalgia and how some things were better in the long ago days of the 1970s, in which I reflected on how life moved slower back in the olden times. I made the note in case I had any new insights to add later. Thinking about it some more, there is one thing I allude to it when I mention a smartphone without reception as a way of escaping the always-connected feeling of life today. And that is the phone, and how we communicated with it (or didn’t) back then.
In 1975, we had a phone in the house. It was mounted to the wall in the downstairs hallway and had a long coiled cord that allowed it to reach partway into the adjacent kitchen, if it was a long call, and you wanted to sit down. 1975 predates any other phone technology–you dialed numbers using an actual rotary dial (at the time you could leave off the first two digits, so you only had to dial the last five, saving some wear on your fingers. Compare to today where there are so many numbers they had to add two new area codes to BC and you now have to dial not just the seven digits number, but also the area code and 1 at the start). Voicemail did not exist in the consumer space and even answering machines weren’t adopted back then, though they did exist in nascent form. This meant that you had one way to contact a person in real time: Call them on your medieval rotary phone and hope they were home. If they weren’t, you just had to try again later, or maybe hope to run into them at the local grocer or something. As a kid, I never called much, I just walked to someone’s house or one of the usual haunts, or we’d pre-plan at school (face to face during recess, lunch or an especially boring class).
Being unable to instantly and always communicate and especially knowing someone who had a lot of 9’s in their phone number (this was a thing) resulted in a certain kind of isolation, but it was never perceived as such. You just had your own little part of the world, your friends and neighbours had theirs, and you made specific, conscious choices to have them intersect. And if you couldn’t reach someone on the phone, you’d just do something else, like read a book, or go bowling.
I’m not advocating going back to rotary phones to recapture some lost magic, they were pretty awful (push button phones were genuinely exciting when introduced), but having that level of removal from everyone else, where we existed as communities, but smaller, more intimate ones, is something I look back on fondly, not with any sense of “we had to walk uphill both ways in the snow” old-man-yelling-at-clouds bitterness, just in appreciation of the quiet it brought. I think of kids growing up today with smartphones practically embedded into their hands, and it does not appeal to 10-year-old me at all. And I was a tech nerd! Maybe that part is a little old-man-yells-at-clouds.
Last night, the Garmin scale flashed a battery symbol in its display, a sure sign that the batteries were needing to be replaced soon. Very soon, as it turns out, as the scale promptly died right after. I did not have the four required AAA batteries needed to revive it. But popping out the old batteries and popping them back in revived the scale one last time. I stepped on, and it insisted I had gained over five pounds overnight.
I did not gain five pounds overnight.
I will get new batteries today and convince my OCD that it’s OK to have a one-day gap in my weight this one week.
And yes, in the olden days this wouldn’t be an issue, because back then scales didn’t need batteries. Such is modern life.
I feel like “AI” always needs to be in quotation marks, because while it is clearly artificial, there is no apparent intelligence involved. It’s all just an elaborate guessing game based on a giant pool of answers that could be accurate, inaccurate, made-up, sarcastic, or some enticing combination.
Google is now rolling out an “AI Overview” in its search results, a furthering of its efforts to keep everyone on its search page (to show them ads and make $$$), with the side effect of killing off the rest of the web as all other sites slowly starve for traffic, revenue and everything else.
It is easy to find examples of this overview being hilariously and sometimes dangerously wrong. Google appears to be fixing the most egregious examples, no doubt by coming across them in their own searches and then fixing the results manually (ie. with an actual human). If this is their plan, they are going to need a lot of humans.
Here’s just one story from Ars Technica and one screenshot (below) illustrating the whole big pile of nonsense. I really don’t think this is going to improve over time in any significant way. Since this is Google, I’ll go further and say AI Overview could eventually end up in their graveyard along with the hundreds of other things they’ve killed.
