Last night I had my PC running in Windows 11 and per usual, left both monitors on, with the screensaver running to blank the screens. Shutting the right monitor off would result in it acting flaky for up to half an hour before it would settle down.
This morning, the right monitor was acting flaky, anyway. I described the issue, which included the power button being ignored when pressing it. Jeff said that seemed funny and it occurred to me to try plugging in the power adapter from the other monitor. The “bad” monitor immediately sprang to life.
The fix is a $23 compatible (hopefully) power adapter, which should be here in four days. In the meantime, I’ve temporarily replaced one of the monitors with my old 24″ one and the part that bugs me is not so much the size/resolution difference (though 24″ seems really small now), but rather the colour/temperature difference. I’ve made enough adjustments to the 24″ monitor that now the 27″ looks funny.
I should probably just go outside for a walk.
But at least I don’t have a dying monitor, as once feared.
Maybe it’s also the secret futurist in me that hopes for a brighter, well, future.
A Dutch intersection that works for pedestrians, cyclists and motorists. At first glance it seems confusing, but look closer, then read the article below. It’s a great example of considered, thoughtful engineering–the kind we see too little of in North America. But here’s hoping we adapt the lessons from our European neighbours.
I don’t know. It seems to have started in the past week and everything feels just sluggish enough to notice and, thus, be irritating.
I am typing this in Linux Mint, using Firefox, which remains snappy and responsive here in neckbeard land.
The slowness is probably some obscure bug in the major patch that came out this fall, or one of the billion processes always running in the background going wonky. You know, the kind of thing that is all but impossible to troubleshoot these days. We may be back to the days when you just reformat and start all over again.
Linux is getting closer to all I need for an operating system. Just a few more things and I can leave Windows behind after using it for the past hundred thousand years.
I just need to figure out how to play Diablo 3 in Mint. I mean, choose a good writing app. Yeah, that’s it.
Maybe the cloud isn’t all that. A few years ago I got a Synology NAS and it works pretty well. All of my photos from my phone are backed up effortlessly and I can access them from mobile using Synology apps. I can easily backup my camera photos, too, if I took the time to set it up. Right now I pay for the family plan for Microsoft 365, so Jeff and I can each get 1TB of OneDrive storage and access to the Microsoft Office apps.
But Word still drives me crazy, its permissions often create problems where none should exist, and there are free alternatives, like LibreOffice and OnlyOffice. My next renewal is in April, I’m thinking I might go with the NAS and open source apps instead. I just need to be prepared to provide tech support for the inevitable friction from making the move!
Basically, I am feeling this urge to pare back everything to The Olden Days of Computing, where everything was mostly local and the internet was for cats. I’m not saying I want to go back to floppy disks, but some things were better way back when.
By way of Tom Scott, I came across MetroDreamin’, a site that allows people to design the transit system of their dreams anywhere in the world.
I was curious to see if anyone had done anything with Metro Vancouver, where the actual transit authority, Translink, has timidly expanded its rapid transit program over the last 38 years. And they had!
This is my favourite example, which includes tram lines and SkyTrain everywhere.
Here’s an image of the map for the click-averse, but the link above is better (and doesn’t require an account).
And a close-up of the dense section around Vancouver proper:
And not forgetting the legend that details the various lines, both existing and imagined:
I love this kind of stuff. It’s too bad this remains a fantasy, because there are a ton of good ideas here, but no political will (including the financing) to make it real. Metro dreamin’ indeed.
Better font rendering. This surprised me, but fonts look fuller and sharper.
Faster. Everything feels snappier, especially ordinary OS things like opening/moving windows.
The file manager does not regularly crash. Or crash at all.
So much more customization for the UI.
The panel (taskbar) can go anywhere, like in Windows’ olden days.
App and OS updates are handled by a single manager, making it simpler and quicker than Windows. Also, I choose when to install them.
A better bunch of built-in apps.
A better Mastodon app (Tuba) than anything on Windows (though not quite as good as some available on Mac).
Desklets, applets and extensions add a ton of optional convenience features.
There are aspects that aren’t as polished as Windows, I haven’t replaced all equivalent apps yet, and gaming is still not quite there, but at this point, the downsides of running Linux (I am still using Mint) are considerably less than when I first started tinkering with it. This pleases me.
One of my online gaming pals got a pet carrier for his puppy so she can get out and about (she can’t go on-leash as she is not yet fully vaccinated). The carrier comes with this instruction:
It makes no other reference to the magic stick.
UPDATE, November 4, 2024: The magic stick has been identified. It is, in fact, Velcro.
I didn’t realize Blogstatic has an 8-day free trial, but it does! I have two days left on mine, and while I was initially enthused about it, because it seemed to tick so many boxes, I find it has some issues:
I don’t particularly like any of the few themes it offers
Customization is rather limited
I don’t want to go deep into the plumbing to modify a theme more to my liking
Limited image support (no lightbox or click-to-enlarge support that I can see, though it’s possible I’m just a big dummy and am not seeing these things)
Some of the editing interface is a bit confusing (which is something of a burn, when you consider how cluttered and messy WordPress’s editor is)
This means none of the following sites I’ve tried have really hit everything I want:
Pika
Bear
Scribbles
Posthaven
Blogstatic
Write As
Possibly others I’m forgetting
All of the above are perfectly fine (or even great) for posting text, but I also want to post photos and drawings, so image management is important, and they all fall short in some way when it comes to that. I am sad.
I still have a Ghost trial to experiment with (kinda pricey), and there are other sites I’ve probably overlooked. Doing searches for WordPress replacements yields a lot of stuff designed for SEO/commercial interests, not just little sites for hipster bloggers not looking to be a content farm.
I will report back with more on this hopeless quest soon™.
In the meantime, here is a cat blogging furiously.
UPDATE, the next day: The firmware update indeed showed no progress when I checked in the morning, so I unplugged the keyboard, plugged it back in and it appears to operate exactly as before--with one exception. Apparently Windows (or me, unwittingly) had changed the default for sound to one of my monitors, instead of the headphones. I corrected this and the knob is now adjusting system volume as before.
In other words, all the time I spent on this last night could have been managed in a few seconds. Technology is grand.
Sometime in the last few days I noticed the knob on my Keychron Q1 keyboard was no longer working. It normally lets me adjust system volume up or down, which is kind of handy. I can program it to do other things, too, but this was always good enough for me.
I was puzzled as to why the knob suddenly stopped working. It seemed to be OS-independent, but the rest of the keyboard worked fine. In fact, when I adjusted the knob, Windows would still report the volume control working–except it really wasn’t working, it was just showing as if it worked, while doing nothing.
I decided to check the keyboard mapping software to see if something was amiss and it said I could not program the knob because my firmware was too old. This didn’t really explain why it had worked fine before, but whatever. I decided to update the firmware.
The firmware process consistently failed at the same point. I did some internet sleuthing and finally came across a video from Matt Birchler–yes, the guy in my dream who I talked about squircles with–and watched his three-year-old video, which revealed a DFU reset button under the keyboard. This finally allowed the flashing process to start.
It has not finished. It has probably been 25 minutes since it started. It looks like this:
As you might guess, I am afraid to do anything to interrupt, but I also suspect it will look like this if I leave it overnight. But I’m going to do that, anyway.
For now, I have plugged my old CTRL keyboard back in, with its much firmer Halo keys, which I still find easier to type on, though they don’t have that silky smooth feel of the Keychron’s. It also has no knob. But this also means it has no knob that can fail and lead me down a rabbit hole that might lead to me bricking a rather expensive keyboard.
Last night I had a dream featuring Matt Birchler. I have never met Matt. He is a celebrity of sorts in the Apple tech scene, who has a YouTube channel (A Better Computer), a blog (Birchtree), a podcast (Comfort Zone) and probably half a dozen other projects. He writes articles for various tech sites. He also has an unrelated full-time job in UI/UX.
He is a busy guy.
I came across him via his blog and follow him on Mastodon, where much of the former Mac community from Twitter has migrated to.
One of his passions is UX and design (which works out well for him, because it’s also his job). In the dream, we are hanging out in a living room (?) somewhere and discussing design, as one does. Specifically, we are nodding in agreement over how circles provide more space for information over squircles (the rounded-off square icons you see everywhere on Apple devices these days). This is, of course, nonsense. Literally the opposite is true, but in the dream we were right, and the world was wrong.
Then I suggested we play something on “Game Center” on an Apple TV nearby and the dream ended, or at least my recollection of it did.
I’m not a big squircle fan, so I think the dream was just trying to accommodate that. Thanks, subconscious!
UPDATE, October 10, 2024: I manually updated after checking this morning and finding the phone had not updated on its own yet again. I kind of wished I'd waited, though, because I'm curious if the phone would have never updated again without me forcing it.
For the past few days, my iPhone 12 has been sending me notifications about an impending iOS update. Just make sure the phone is locked and has enough power, and it will happen automagically, it says (this is the state my phone is in when I plug it in to charge every night as I go to bed).
It never happens.
But like a scene from Groundhog Day, the notification keeps repeating, promising an update tonight.
Maybe tonight will be that night.
Update Scheduled. I believe you, iPhone1I don’t believe you at all, you dirty filthy liar!
In previous times, I’ve always ended up tapping Update Now, but this time I think I’m going to wait and see what happens if I don’t intervene. I’m feeling adventurous! Updates on the update soon™.
