Rubenerd

It’s time to invoke Betteridge’s Law of Headlines here, because the answer is a resounding no!

Steve did a great video back in January debunking this idea. There are plenty of objectively bad products. There are ones nobody should even accept as giveaways. Heck, there are ones you couldn’t pay me to take!

I see this paraded out to justify everything from service-level agreement (SLAs) breaches, to caveat emptor. An unstable platform sold as rock solid, or a fire hazard sold as a computer case, is false advertising regardless of the attached price.

I guess tacking on a “sometimes” to that platitude isn’t as punchy. Wasn’t that an Erasure song? Oooh sometimes, the truth is harder than pain inside…!

Technology Connections learned something from can openers:

This can opener has lead me to ask a pretty deep question. What else might we be using, or doing, in day-to-day life which we just assume is how things are and never question?

I think it’s very normal and useful to be cynical towards what purports to be technological progress. There are plenty of instances where tried-and-true simple techniques are, frankly, fine, if not superior. And a lot of what we’re sold as new, and exciting, turns out to be a gimmick… if we’re lucky. It’s very easy to overcomplicate things in the name of the new. Understandably, that can make us skeptical of innovation, full stop.

The trouble is though, we make the assumption that there aren’t improvements to be made, you may never look for them, and you can miss a lot of progress that’s happening around you while you aren’t paying attention.

I’ve caught myself in this feedback loop a lot. I predict that a new technology, framework, device, or piece of software doesn’t improve anything, introduces its own problems, and comes from people who’s motivations and ethics don’t align with my own. Unfortunately, my reservations have been proven right so many times that it’s hard to break out of cynicism as a learned behaviour.

For all its foibles, technology has also made huge and positive leaps in progress in plenty of areas. I don’t appreciate it, because I’m worrying about something else. I’ll bet there’s a ton of stuff that could make my life better, easier, or more fun, but I’m blinkered to it.

I’ve started calling myself a cautious optimist. Maybe calling it out will reinforce it.

When market forces lead CD Baby to wrap up, I felt pangs of concern for people who’s livelihoods depended on independent distribution. I redirected my money and links to Bandcamp, though I feared we were just delaying the inevitable there too.

I saw the news that Bandcamp has been bought my Epic Games. I know little about them, but my gamer friends burn with loathing for them which doesn’t bode well. I do know they’re dabbling in NFTs, which illustrates they have no interest in independent creators, instead opting into the redundant, planet-burning grift.

I’m starting to think we can’t rely on the private sector for distribution like this. We need to establish a trust of some sort, or a non-profit. This is too important a project to leave up to the whims of people who’ll cash out. What that would look like, and how it would work across a global audience base, I’m not sure. But I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

I say this as a technical person: we badly need to treat our artists better. I’m beyond tired of people in my industry screwing over those who make our lives worth living.

Via Wikiquote:

Let me offer you my definition of social justice: I keep what I earn and you keep what you earn. Do you disagree? (1) Well then tell me how much of what I earn belongs to you (2) - and why? (3)

1. Yes. You presuppose we earned all that we kept. We didn’t. Acknowledging this doesn’t invalidate the effort we also contributed to our circumstances.

2. Whatever it costs to nurture the society that made our earnings possible, which belongs to us.

3. Because anything less is dishonest for those with ethics, and still counterproductive for the selfish.

There’s no such thing as a self-made person, unless we invent human cloning machines.

Last Sunday I talked about running FreeBSD and Kubuntu on the same machine. I originally ran Steam games on Debian, but decided to move to Kubuntu during my last upgrade cycle. Steam officially supports Ubuntu’s Long Term Support releases, which makes my life easier.

But then I remembered KDE Neon, released by the KDE team themselves. The alternative distro is also built on Ubuntu LTS, but includes rolling releases of the latest Plasma desktop and tools. This seemed like the perfect combination for someone who wants a stable, supported base, but the latest desktop goodies.

Installation was simple, though I wish it included OpenZFS as an option. I used the manual partitioner so I could use LUKS and XFS instead of ext4. You can ignore all of this if it sounds French.

Booting into KDE Neon didn’t feel much different from Kubuntu, or even FreeBSD with KDE. It’s that familiar Plasma desktop, with all the integrations working out of the box for sound, Wi-Fi, screen resolution adjustment, suspend/resume, and swapping audio sources. I still find it funny that macOS refuses to let you adjust volume over HDMI, but the PulseAudio of OSs can.

The user edition of KDE Neon comes on an ISO that’s almost half the size of Kubuntu, given that Plasma packages would be stale and need upgrading anyway. It also doesn’t come with a bunch of applications, but they’re easy enough to install with the graphical Discover application, or the pkcon(8) terminal utility. You’ll want to use the latter over apt-get(8) for most tasks, including updates.

I’ve only been running it for less than a week, but thus far I’m impressed with the polish, stability, and ease of use. I also like that I see those Plasma updates come through soon after reading a blog post or changelog about a bug fix or new feature. As much as I’d prefer to be using FreeBSD everywhere, KDE Neon has made desktop Linux attractive enough a proposition that I enjoy using my game machine again. That’s no small feat! Mostly because I wear US size 11s.

If I had only one other quibble, it’d be that I wish it came with more KDE applications by default. KDE Neon could be a real showcase of what the KDE ecosystem has to offer, especially for those who’ve “tried Linux” before, but don’t know about Kate or Kdenlive, for example.

A blog is whatever you want it to be; it’s why they’ll always be better than social networks. But broadly speaking they’re collections of writing sorted chronologically with titles, publish dates, categories and/or tags, and RSS feeds for subscribing in an aggregator.

This formula is a big part of what made the Blogosphere™ so successful in the early days. We could own, control, and present our writing in whatever way we wanted, but there was enough common structure and layout that you could easily grok whichever blog you came across. I don’t think this is appreciated anywhere near as much as it should be; we talk so much about accessibility from the perspective of web standards, but rarely do we acknowledge consistency.

I’m not sure if Tumblr were the first to do this, but at some point in the late 2000s content management systems began to offer additional structure and visual optimisations for different post types, instead of assuming every post is textual.

These seem to be the most common ones:

• Text. Like a traditional blog post. The only type with a mandatory heading, and body text. Also acts as a fallback type if one isn’t defined.

• Images or video. These would have an optional caption and no heading. Some CMSs differentiated between a single image/video and a gallery type, where images are presented in little thumbnails or tiles.

• Quotes. These could be considered text, but the heading is the only element. Usually rendered in larger text with curly quotes.

• Tables, figures, or source code. These would be considered the primary post element, with the title serving as a caption.

I’ve resisted the urge to have different types of posts thus far. My shows are just regular posts with additional metadata and enclosures for podcast clients to slurp up. Even posts imported from my old Tumblr from back in the day were also just converted to text.

But I’m tempted to give it a try. Often times posts with a single quote don’t have much meaningful information in their titles. Either that, or the title could easily contain the entire quote, rendering the body text pointless.

I think my American friends would consider this a bit Inside Baseball, but I think taxonomies are interesting. Every other type of printed media optimises for certain types of content, why not blogs?

I’ve seen an infographic floating around with a suggestion on how you can help people. I’ve converted into text:

1. Go to Etsy.com
2. Type Digital File in the search box
3. Choose the button All Filters
4. Scroll down and find the Shop Location category
5. Choose Custom and type Ukraine

The result: in front of you are all the digital products of Ukrainian sellers. There are patterns, SVG files, and more. All of these products are automatically delivered to your e-mail, the seller does not have to post anything.

Slight correction there: the assets are available to download

Brilliant idea! Here’s a low-res version of a photo I just bought from Pavel and Anna in Cherkasy:

Update: People are also booking Airbnbs lodgings without staying. Another great idea.

Sorry Baelz, a more important one beckons! 🧀

I’m still on a self-imposed social media break, but wanted to wish my dear friend Amehhhhh~~~ a happy birthday. By putting that here, I’m sneakily @mentioning her in the title while still keeping Twitter at arm’s length.

I told Seb, another friend of Clara’s and mine, that I had a dream that a bunch of us had rented a giant serviced apartment in Osaka and were exploring Japan for a month. Amy had specifically talked me out of buying a CRT oscilloscope from Nipponbashi, only to blow it all on V6 and BanG Dream fans. Every part of this sounds like it’d be so much fun iRL.

At the risk of sounding dreadfully sappy, is a phrase with seven words! WAH! Happy birthday, and thank you for still being our friend despite my reclusiveness of late. Dinner and coffee this week? Not on me, as in… damn it. I’d absolutely wear this spectacular item if I weren’t already so clumsy!

Spend any time on social media, and you’ll come across people using the rhetorical tactic of facts over feelings when dismissing someone’s perspective. I’m certain I used it as a teenager too. Assuming we use the public’s definition of feelings and not the clinical one, it’s a false dichotomy.

I can see where people are coming from here. Facts are inalienable, provable, and set in stone. Feelings are borne of an emotional state. Saying three fours are twelve is a fact, and someone saying it feels like thirteen doesn’t change this.

But most of the world isn’t defined so neatly. When we talk about economics, or politics, or even software development, we’re just as much making ethical, moral, or emotional judgements on the best approach to something. You can say one library is factually smaller than the other, but as many decisions are made by what language, or framework, or application the developer (or her manager) likes using. The preponderance of programming languages and methodologies speaks to this.

Someone’s emotional state is also a fact. Ukranians have rallied around their president in light of the ongoing Russian invasion because he makes them feel empowered against the odds. Morale is a key and decisive fact in winning conflicts, though it’s entirely based on feeling.

There’s altogether too many people feeling that facts can exist in isolation. Maybe if we were Vulcans we could, and I’m sure there are stoics who’d like to see more of that. Certainly I’d like to see a more evidence-based approach to government legislation and business processes. But it doesn’t change the fact that we’re imperfect, fleshy sacks of humanity who are driven as much by our hearts as our minds. Acknowledging this fact need not blind us to reality.

The Covid pandemic is another perfect example. We all lavished deserved praise and respect on cleaners, retail staff, nurses, doctors, and medical researches, but without artists creating the shows, manga, music, and games we all enjoy, I can tell you those months of lockdown would have shattered me. Medical professionals let us live, and artists make us want to.

Invariably people wheel out facts over feelings to shield themselves from further argument, when really it’s simple projection. Their smug bluster, or being in it for the lulz belies their own anxiety or fears about an issue. Maybe they feel threatened, or have had their own negative experiences. This is why, for all their pretence of cool calculation and aloof bemusement, the best way to approach people like that is with empathy. That’s both a fact, and my feeling.

Astute readers among you noted the screenshot from my 2022–02–22 post was clearly taken on a classic, pre-notch iPhone.

I inherited Clara’s iPhone XR when she upgraded to an iPhone 12 last year. I used it as my personal phone for half a year, and made the iPhone 8 my work phone. It was an interesting experience, but confirmed my suspicions that the 8 (and the SE that shares much of its design) is a better phone. I went back to the 8 as my personal device, and pulled my old 6S out of retirement for work calls again, the difference was that stark.

We all tend to review things after upgrading, so we forget the limitations of older devices, or are eager to validate our expensive new purchases. I didn’t pay for this XR, and I used it in parallel with an 8, so I got a much better idea of real-world use.

Precise is the closest I can come to describing the iPhone 8. Every interaction with it feels crisp, sharp, and well-executed. It’s hard to describe or quanitfy, but the XR, and every newer Apple phone I’ve tried in store that uses the new rounded-corner and notch design language, feels floaty, clunky, and imprecise by comparison.

This is most obvious when unlocking the phone or using Apple Pay. I can unlock the 8’s TouchID as I bring it out of my pocket in one motion, either to use an application or pay for something. FaceID is simply slower, and using it to pay for trains was hilariously bad. It was also, till recently, redundant when wearing a face mask, and I thought the idea of buying an Apple Watch just to unlock a phone was ridiculous.

People told me I’d get used to the notch on modern iPhones, but six months in and I still haven’t. There’s no escaping the fact there’s an ugly, weirdly-rounded chunk taken out of the top of the screen. Apple could have made this better by having a black bar with indicators for time and signal strength, but they leaned into it instead. Even modern Android phones, which have traditionally aped the iPhone in the most shameless ways possible, tend to look better. If that’s not an indictment of modern iPhone design, I don’t know what is!

When I’ve said Apple’s modern handsets are a hodgepodge of design compromises, this is what I meant. In the service of removing a single button, everything from UI to industrial design took a hit.

Maybe I could have got used to the XR and later-generation iPhones had I used them exclusively, but using the 8 alongside it was a constant reminder of what iPhones used to be. They don’t have the elegance of webOS, or the utility of Symbian, but they’re good enough.

An SE with an LCD (we can only hope!) will probably be my next phone, so I can use the 8 as my work phone. I guess the advantage now is that I’ll also be able to justify their cost.