Technology

All the fonts

The diary program I use for my journaling is Diarium (yes, I’ve talked about its unfortunate name before). It’s available on pretty much every platform, save Linux (and web). Unlike many people, I don’t write in the diary on my mobile devices, so I’m usually using the Windows or Mac version. Both have slight differences in UI, but generally work the same.

One key difference is fonts. The Windows version lets you use any font you want. I am using the new MS Office font, Aptos, because I like the way it looks. The Mac version only offers a small subset of fonts and I have no idea if this is just the default setup for any Mac program and easier to program or what, because other apps, such as Affinity Designer, will show you all fonts.

My point, though, is that when a program gives me a choice of fonts, I want access to every font available. If I want to write my journal in Papyrus or Comic Sans, let me! The Mac version of Diarium won’t let me and it makes me sad. 🙁 (I would use Aptos there, too.)

Anyway, this is my plea to app-creating wizards and gnomes: Always let the users choose from any fonts they have installed. It’s the nice thing to do. Also, make a Linux version, or at least make the Windows version behave nicely under Linux.

That is all.

The Culling: LinkedIn

I realized I hadn’t used my LinkedIn account for many years, and rarely at all.

I came to this realization because news began spreading today that Microsoft decided to use everyone’s LinkedIn accounts to train generative AI–by opting people in without telling them.

So with a few seconds of reflection (all that was merited), I closed my account. In two weeks it will be permanently gone, or perhaps “gone” because I have zero trust that these big tech companies actually purge data or honour the requests made by users.

Lifehacker story: LinkedIn Is Using Your Data to Train AI (but You Can Stop It)

And now, a cat:

Cinema Mode vs. Racing Mode or White vs. Yellow

To the uninitiated, the title may make no sense. To me, it’s two of the preset display modes for my Asus monitors. The one that sits to the left has also seemed brighter and the whites whiter (now I sound like a laundry detergent ad) and for a long while I just left it all alone because both monitors were using DisplayPort and had the exact same settings.

Both used Racing Mode, which provided the least objectionable selection of gaudy, oversaturated colours. Or so I thought. On a whim, I selected Cinema Mode on the more yellowish monitor on the right and lo, the whites now look like they’ve been bleached to heck and back, just the way I like! I made a few other tweaks and now both monitors, using different settings, look roughly the same.

The real issue is likely either some fault in the right monitor, either something ultimately unfixable, or something not easily fixable, like the calibration being off. But for now, both monitors look the same(ish) and that’s good enough for me!

As a bonus (?), colours in Cinema Mode are a lot more…intense. Not necessarily oversaturated, but let’s say they pop a lot more. And I kind of like it. Maybe I’m becoming a more colourful person.

Non-ironic Big Brother Quote of the Day

From a techbro billionaire, of course. In this case, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison:

“Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on,” Ellison said, describing what he sees as the benefits from automated oversight from AI and automated alerts for when crime takes place. “We’re going to have supervision,” he continued. “Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report the problem and report it to the appropriate person.”

Because there’s no way a 24/7 surveillance state wouldn’t be abused by those in power. No way at all!

Story on Ars Technica: Omnipresent AI cameras will ensure good behavior, says Larry Ellison

How to make me feel old: Random quote from the internet edition regarding email

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.

Making Firefox faster (by confronting my bookmark addiction)

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 cannot confirm

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.)

A review of my current domains

Or, How I Am Really Reluctant to Let Things Go.

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 have no takes on today’s iPhone 16 phone keynote/ad/whatever

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
  • THE END

Mars!

I read Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy newsletter and you should, too! Because science is fun and outer space is neat.

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.

The difference 26 MHz used to make

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.