Technology

The Reader View test

Of late I have been seeking out more personal blogs, yearning to return to the groovy days of a more personal internet, circa 1999-2005 (the latter being the year this very blog started). It’s great to see sites that are very obviously non-corporate and are not the result of some mildly-tweaked cookie cutter template. Even Pika recently announced the addition of background images to their blogging platform. Is this taking retro too far? Perhaps. But it’s fine, and I’ll explain why.

Sometimes a site doesn’t quite do it for me, visually. Taste is personal, and I admit I may not have the most refined sense of aesthetics out there. I’m no Steve Jobs. Then again, I also wouldn’t have thought a round mouse was a good idea, either.

The blogs that tend to miss for me usually do something like the following:

  • Text is too big. As I get older, I have become more tolerant of larger text, for obvious reasons, but that doesn’t mean I think body text on a website should be 30px (see below for example). There is something unpleasant about reading a paragraph that is set to the size of a headline.
  • Text is too small. Are you 21 and have the vision of a bald eagle? Good for you! But I am not you, and your teeny text makes me squint and sigh.
  • Text is too thin or light. This just makes the words harder to read.
  • Poor contrast ratio of background colour to text. This one is relatively rare, and even platforms like WordPress will warn you when you are combining colours that will make your words more challenging to read.

This is 30px text. Do not use this size for writing paragraphs about how fluffy and great cats are.

This is 11px text. Don’t do this, either.

And obviously don’t do this. (WordPress did indeed warn about this colour combo.)

For the most part, though, I am content to let people let their freak flags fly, and it’s because of Reader View. This is Firefox’s version of a feature most browsers have, letting you take the text of a page and giving you control over its appearance. I generally have it set to a monospace font (Consolas) against a light gray background. It gives the text a very neutral appearance, making it easy to read and focus on. It looks like this (snipped from one of the posts on this blog):

I’m not sure what makes Consolas work so well for me, but it does.

The test, then, is how quickly will I flip to Reader View on a blog? Will I start reading, then flip? Will I do it instantly? Will I actually not flip at all? My experience so far has been to flip about 70% of the time right away, maybe about 5% of the time I will flip part-way through, and the rest I will read the blog in its original styling. People like weird styling, it seems. Or maybe I’m just old. Either way, it’s ok, because of Reader View.

State of Linux (for me): April 2025 edition

Linux Mint is getting closer to being a replacement OS for me over Windows 11 and macOS whatever (the yearly updates are kind of meaningless now, it’s just a yearly dribble of new features no different from what MS does with Windows 11, just with a cute name like Sequoia attached).

But it’s still not there quite yet, which I’ll elaborate on below.

First, I’ll say this: Linux Mint (the distro I have been running for some months now as a third OS) is pleasant to use. It stays out of the way, it doesn’t constantly ask me to grant permission to everything (Macs are trending toward becoming the UAC nightmare that was the initial release of Windows Vista, sinking the user experience in favour of “security”). There are frequent updates, but they are handled with a few clicks whenever you decide to apply them. Most don’t require a system restart.

It has built in software bits like applets, extensions and desklets hat are easy to add (or remove) that help customize the experience in small, but nice ways. The look and feel of the entire OS is highly customizable. It loads fast, everything feels snappy.

At this point, the only things holding it back for me are the same as before:

  • Photo editing
  • Gaming
  • Journaling

Photo editing has improved and I’m experimenting with a few new programs there, such as Prima.

Gaming is also getting better, though having an Nvidia card complicates things a bit. Native gaming, when available, works great, and emulated gaming is also pretty good now. It’s not quite there, but it’s close.

Diarium (the unfortunately named journal app I use) I am running in a Windows 10 VM. The VM is a tiny bit laggy, but since I only use the app briefly in the morning and evening, it’s not a big deal. A native solution would be preferable, but seems unlikely, unless I switch to a different piece of software.

Still, I feel Linux Mint is closer than it’s ever been in terms of replacing the other OSes. If and when I get a new PC, I will likely turn this one into a dedicated Linux box and see how it goes on a rig that is 100% penguin-based.

Why you might be seeing more web apps (from Apple developers)

From here: The Dark Side of Apple Development: Why Developers Are Struggling On Apple’s Increasingly Hostile Platforms

Apple may be starting to see the consequences of its own actions. Every new platform it has launched in the last decade — the iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and now Vision Pro — has struggled to gain meaningful developer support. Why? Because developers are tired of being in an abusive relationship.

If I were starting fresh today, I wouldn’t build my business on Apple’s ecosystem.

Instead, I’d consider web development, where you can control your own distribution, pay no platform commissions and not deal with a mercurial gatekeeper. Or perhaps focus more on cross-platform development, so you’re not locked into a single company’s walled garden.

Finally even becoming a content creator, on a platform like YouTube, seems like a more stable way to make a living these days.

The reality is that Apple’s development ecosystem has become a high-risk, high-maintenance environment. New developers looking for a sustainable career path would do well to consider alternatives that offer more control and fewer headaches.

I think the iPad has done better overall with support than stated here, as there are some notable iPad exclusives (such as Procreate1Yes, there is Procreate Pocket for the iPhone. No, I don’t count it., which is quite literally the only reason I keep my iPad), but if you go by the last five years or so, it hits closer to the mark. As Apple continuously fiddles with the iPad’s UI and how much (or little) the iPad is meant to do, devs have started to shy away from making exclusive apps for it.

I happen to also agree that the yearly update cycle is bonkers and serves no one but Apple. So Apple will continue to go with them, introducing new bugs that never get fixed, releasing new software that never gets fleshed out or is forgotten, all while keeping the eye on the main prize: services, which Apple makes a ton of money on, while offering poor value and uneven reliability (iCloud, iCloud Drive) to its customers.

Basically, Apple is too big to need to worry about developers–or customers. If iPhone sales dropped by 50%, they’d still be selling hundreds of millions of them. Captive market. Their focus now is on an insatiable drive to make even more money, because that’s what giant publicly traded tech companies do. And with a corrupt regime in power in the U.S. Apple will be happy to play them to get what they want, regulations, environment or customer needs be damned.

If Apple had leadership with a moral compass aligned to what they claim to believe, things would be fine. But instead we have its CEO donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, as close to a straight-up bribe as you can get. And it will make no difference unless they keep offering fealty to the king. Maybe they will. Probably they will, and they’ll become ever-more corrupt and uninterested in doing what is right or best, and simply in doing what will extract the most money from the most people.

What I’m saying here is this: Don’t buy Apple products. Don’t support them, don’t believe them. Yes, every tech company is pretty much evil these days, so you have to sometimes choose the lesser evil. Apple is no longer one of the lesser evils.

This concludes my 2025 Apple Rant. Unlike Apple, I do not intend to roll out a new rant every year. But hey, you never know.

BeOS icons: It’s the Zaxxon angle

On Mastodon, someone linked to a full set of icons used in BeOS, an OS that tried to make a splash late in the 20th and early 21st century, failed, but still lives on as Haiku.

You can see the icons here: BeOS icon pack

I really like them. Warm, slightly cartoony, psuedo-3D. It’s the latter that one of my interweb gaming pals described as “the Zaxxon angle”, which is a great way of describing it. Today’s icons in Windows, macOS, and most Linux distros are generally flat, with maybe some slight bevelling or something to hint at 3D, but nothing is close to what BeOS did. And that’s kind of a shame to me. It’s not just nostalgia, either. The icons are distinctive and have style, they feel of a piece, not just random whatever.

Plus, giant eyeball!

And books:

Eye Saver Mode OFF

Looking at the specs for one of Samsung’s Odyssey S9 ultrawide monitors, I noticed this particular feature:

This seems to imply that if you have Eye Saver Mode OFF, your eyes will not be saved. They will be lost. Why would you not want to save your eyes? Apparently, real gamers do not need to concern themselves with such things. Their eyes are like eagles or something. Until they hit 40, after which they retire and switch to Eye Saver Mode ON1Eye Saver Mode reduces blue light and brightness, so I guess if you’re playing a very blue-lit game, you best be prepared to sacrifice yourself for maximum deets, or whatever the kids are saying now that we’re a quarter of the way through the 21st century..

Also, the G9 is a 49″ ultrawide monitor, which seems absurd until I realize it would take up less total desk space than my two 27″ monitors. The curved screen still weirds me out, though.

Fsaturing the curved screen that weirds me out.

A reminder that outer space is very cool and weird

This is in Phil Plait’s newsletter today, and it’s too beautiful and weird not to share. You can view it on the original site with full text here: Spying a spiral through a cosmic lens

This new NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope Picture of the Month features a rare cosmic phenomenon called an Einstein ring. What at first appears to be a single, strangely shaped galaxy is actually two galaxies that are separated by a large distance. The closer foreground galaxy sits at the center of the image, while the more distant background galaxy appears to be wrapped around the closer galaxy, forming a ring. 

Check out Phil Plait’s newsletter here: Bad Astronomy

Capturing the zeitgeist, April 2025 AI edition

I saw this on Mastodon and it is perfect. Context provided below.

Context: A few weeks ago, OpenAI released an update that allowed people to generate images, including in specific styles, if they so chose. One of those styles is Studio Ghibli, after the well-regarded Japanese animation studio. This, predictably, led to a bunch of people turning personal photos into pseudo Ghibli images, but others used the style for less tasteful purposes, to showcase terrorism and other violent acts.

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, changed his avatar on X to a “Ghiblified” version of himself. A lot of people–rightly, I think–took this as being Altman’s way of saying AI companies can appropriate (steal) art and art styles as they see fit and no one can stop them. It’s at the heart of much of the criticism of AI: that the output it produces is largely built off of stolen works, that the companies behind AI simply don’t care (or even feel entitled to the stolen works) and comes at great cost to the environment, too1Some of these costs are coming down, but it ain’t exactly efficient yet..

But yeah, for a beautiful moment in time, we turned everything into a Ghibli studio movie.

The original New Yorker cartoon, which also remains perfect:

The Culling: OneDrive

A dramatic photo of clouds I shot over the Fraser River.

I have not just turned off OneDrive on my Windows 11 PC, I have uninstalled it! All of my files, photos and electronic doodads are now stored locally and/or on my NAS, until such time that I choose to store some of them “in the cloud” again. And if I do, that big fluffy cloud will not be floating over the hellscape that forms the current political realm known as the United States.

I ponder, but for now, I’m all local, baby. And you know what? It actually feels kind of good. Not even retro (though it definitely has a retro vibe, as well), just…nice. I never really needed cloud storage before, it was just a perk. And now that it’s gone, I’m perfectly fine with that.

I don’t like troubleshooting anymore

And yet I do. And yet I must, because the machines we use that are “smart” or “advanced” are designed by humans, and we are imperfect, and the devices we make are in our own image.

But in olden times I actually kind of enjoyed hunting down a solution to an issue, fixing it, and basking in the glory of the fix.

Today I just want things to work, so I can look at more cat pics.

I think both viewpoints are valid.

But I prefer more cat time today.

Here’s one now:

Hot dust

A while back, I noticed my Mac Studio getting quite warm, even when idle and with only a few simple programs running. I checked the back, which has a billion holes to blow out generated heat, and it seemed fine. I was puzzled. My solution was to just turn my Mac off and stick to the PC. Switching back and forth is a bit of a pain, anyway, and it gave me time to mull over how Apple’s IOS-ification of macOS is not really a good thing.

Generally, the Mac is just not as fun to use anymore.

Still, I eventually devised a simple plan: I would use a super-strong vacuum to pull out any ingested dust through those billion little holes, then see if the Mac’s high temperature improved (by getting lower). To prep the Mac, I unplugged everything from it, picked it up and DEAR GOD WHAT I SAW WHEN I TURNED IT UPSIDE DOWN.

Normally I take photos of everything, but I think I was so shocked this time I forgot.

You see, the Mac Studio handles cooling with fans that draw air in from the bottom, then blow the hot air out the back. You might be thinking, “How do you pull air in through the bottom when it’s, like, the bottom?” And it’s because the Mac Studio actually sits on a big round foot that is surrounded by somewhat less than a billion holes. It looks like this:

Not mine, my desk isn’t that fancy.

When I turned over my Mac Studio, those holes were covered in a thick layer of dust. If dust could be encrusted, I would describe it as encrusted. It was coming off in clumps.

As mentioned, I was too shocked/appalled to take a photo, but here’s the Swiffer duster I used to take the initial layer of dust off:

I suffer eternal nerd shame for this.

Anyway, today I’m going to try powering on the Mac Studio and see if it doesn’t overheat because actual airflow is happening again.

Nerds, dust your computers!

On Ideological Purity

I saw this blog post linked on Mastodon and Joan Westenberg does an excellent job on summarizing what I am trying to achieve, in part, with what I call The Culling–trying to rid myself of as much reliance on, and use of Big Tech as possible, while understanding it’s impossible to completely escape all of it, unless you go live in a mud hut and hunt squirrels or something.

Link: On Ideological Purity

Relevant quote:

But the point isn’t perfection. The point is intention.

You don’t have to be all or nothing. You don’t have to make every decision a moral battlefield. You don’t have to sever every tie to every compromised system – and you sure as hell don’t have to do it overnight.

You have to engage. You have to stay aware. You have to keep questioning the default.

For me, I:

  • Still use YouTube (Google)
  • Still own an iPhone (Apple), though admittedly it is four generations behind the latest
  • Still blog on WordPress (whose owner has been on an erratic and misguided crusade over the past year)
  • And so on

I am glad to be done with Meta, I have no plans to buy future Apple hardware, and I’m dropping all Microsoft products, save for the operating system of my PC (Windows 11) because Linux is not quite there yet. It’s ongoing and it can be a pain, but in the end it gives me clarity and I feel more in control, less spied on and, maybe, just a little more content in a world that seems to want to snatch all contentment away and eject it into space.