It’s almost symmetrical! I thought it was worth mentioning. Like hummus.
Here are some other pointless date posts:
A few of you have reported that my dark mode theme no longer works automatically. I haven’t made any changes, so I was surprised.
I set my Mac to dark mode and refreshed the site in Firefox, and confirmed that it’s still showing the light theme. Safari and Vivaldi work, so it must be an issue with a recent Firefox build.
Apologies if you’re affected by this; I do try to take accessibility seriously. I’ll check if it affects other OSs and file a report.
Everyone knows setting up a new phone or tablet with an anime or Star Trek hostname and wallpaper is part of any rational setup process. But I was in for a surprise when making a pixel-perfect crop for my iPad Mini 6: a downright bizarre aspect ratio.
According to Eugene Belinski’s excellent iOSRef.com, most iPads use an aspect ratio of 4:3, all the way back to that first lead slab that Steve sat on a couch with. This gets pretty close to a standard A4 sheet of paper, which makes these devices great for reading.
The current iPad and iPad Pro still ship with 4:3, as did all the previous Minis and earlier iPad Airs. But things started getting weird a few years ago; the 4th generation iPad Air’s 1640 × 2360 gives it the aspect ratio of 16:23. This is the first iOS device that requires two significant figures on each side to express.
Another significant figure is James Taylor. You’ve got a friend, as he’d remind us.
Not wishing to be outdone, I noticed the current iPad Mini 6 has a resolution of 1488 × 2266. Some sites like GSM Arena erroneously refer to this as 3:2, but it’s taller and narrower, almost closer to an Android tablet in dimensions.
This also explains why manga and PDFs on this device have horizontal letterboxing. It’s like they took the original iPad Mini and added a bit more resolution on the top and bottom.
Last Saturday I mentioned that CD-ROMs made me feel like I was living in the future as a kid. Today, it’s the fact that I was able to have another vaccination for a disease we only knew about a few years ago.
Medical science is amazing.
In today’s installment of things you already know unless you don’t, there are a few tools you can use to losslessly optimise and reduce file sizes of various image formats. Yes, even lossy formats have some slack.
Glenn Randers-Pehrson’s pngcrush:
$ pngcrush -reduce -verbose $IN.png $OUT.png
Timo Kokkonen’s jpegoptim:
$ jpegoptim --all-normal --verbose $IN.jpg $OUT.jpg
Eddie Kohler’s gifsicle:
$ gifsicle -O3 --verbose -i $IN.gif -o $OUT.gif
Jeff Schiller and Louis Simard’s scour:
$ scour -i $IN.svg -o $OUT.svg
I have a glorified shell script that invokes the right optimiser depending on an input file’s extension. Every file that ends up here goes through one of these.
It’s funny to think about video sites serving terabytes of content a second, and here I am shaving a few kilobytes here and there from your downloads on my silly little blog. But every bit (hah!) helps.
Real Engineering produced another excellent video, this time about carbon taxes. Citing two MIT studies, he discusses the economic impact our carbon gluttony is having on the world, especially on those who can least afford it. He then explores four scenarios in which a carbon tax is introduced, and how it would affect a more rapid shift to lower-carbon fuel sources.
If we assume the video portrayed these studies fairly (and there’s no reason not to, Real Engineering is one of the most well-cited YouTubers I’ve ever watched), the scenarios result in natural gas playing a significant part in our future energy mix. Natural gas emits far less carbon per joule than competing fossil fuels, and isn’t as susceptible to changes in weather that renewables like wind and solar are.
This uncritical approach to natural gas has coloured a few of Real Engineering’s videos, but I fear it’s misplaced.
Natural gas isn’t an ally in our fight against climate change; or at least, it comes with plenty of its own problems. It’s far more potent (albeit shorter lived) as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Even if burned cleanly, its extraction, processing, and delivery unavoidably leaks it in significant quantities, to say nothing of the threats posed by fracking.
It should be left in the ground, naturally and efficiently sequestering the carbon it’s held for millions of years.
I’d be far more interested to see studies that compared the climate impact of replacing coal and oil with another fossil fuel, rather than a blinkered view of carbon emissions. Because like my own glowing reviews of my site here, I’m seeing a lot of unchallenged assumptions.
Every Monday without fail, except when I fail, I regale readers with a musical interlude titled with a name I stole from our university’s anime club blog: Music Monday.
Today we go back to 2010 and one of my favourite Jack Johnson songs. No good with faces and I’m bad with names is among the most relatable lyrics I’ve ever heard.
Pamela and I had a fun chat on Mastodon last week about clothes… a sentence I never thought I’d write. We both agreed that clothes shopping was the worst, and wondered why stuff doesn’t just last forever.
They say high school were supposed to be the best years of your life, though the uniform was probably among the only good things about it. I didn’t have to worry about what I’d wear for five days a week; it was all sorted. My year 12 jersey was about the only variation I had to worry about, and even then I forgot it half the time. Each morning it was a white shirt, khaki coloured slacks, and some awful socks. Done!
(The flat, green skirts the girls wore would have been even simpler, especially in the ironing department. But then they had to wear these awkward shirts with an extra seam, so I guess we balanced out in the end. Yay mid-2000s international schools in Singapore)!
I knew plenty of people who hated uniforms on account of feeling so stiff and uncomfortable in collared shirts… as opposed to collared greens which nobody should have been wearing in the first place. Wait, damn it, I should have told Jae Yun and Laura that’s what they were wearing! Why am I only witty either by mistake, or a decade or more after it would have been funny?
Anyway I can empathise, but their utility in not having to decide weighed higher for me. Even today I wear collared shirts and chinos as my default outfit for work and personal outings, to the point where friends ask me why I’m wearing work clothes on weekends.
The remainder of my clothes are t-shirts from podcasters, now that I think about it. Those go under cardigans or open jumpers when the weather gets colder, or if I have to sit in aircon all day. Weirdly, I also realised they’re all blue as well… I wonder if that was by chance or it was my subconscious not wanting to make decisions?
It’s another reason I envy Bertie Wooster from P.G. Wodehouse’s books. Having my own gentleman’s gentleman to take my measurements and buy flattering clothes for my body type would be amazing. Especially if I could wear this fabulously dapper stuff. Yuki from the Suzumiya Haruhi universe had it right when she wore her uniform on weekends.
There are plenty of things I want to think about and research, but clothes are not one of them. 12-year old Ruben was right to be bored on those family shopping trips.
We were going through more stuff this afternoon, and found this cute souvenir from our second-last Japan trip in 2018, when I was travelling for AsiaBSDCon.
I clearly wasn’t prepared for the photographer! And who could ask for a better byline at the top there?
Now I know what you’re thinking: Who plays CDs anymore? And on a Windows for Workgroups machine!? These are legitimate questions that deserve an answer.
If you launch Media Player or Creative CD, you might get this error:
CD not inserted into drive or CD Audio MCI driver not installed
To solve:
If all goes well, you’ll get this confirmation notice:
Redbook CD Audio Configuration
One CDROM drive was detected. Installation is complete
I haven’t ever had to do this before. My hunch is that I installed Windows before setting up SHSUCDX (an MSCDEX replacement). Had that been done before, Windows may have already installed the driver during setup.