Rubenerd

Laptop bags have a special place in my life and memory. They’ve always been there during tough times, when I was studying overseas, when travelling, going to work, or even just making my daily trips to coffee shops to write. I haven’t had that many bags, given my odd attachment to the ones I end up getting.

The first bag I ever remember carrying daily was a beautiful brown and white wool backpack my dad brought back from India. I didn’t have a laptop at the time—those were still unusual and expensive in the 1990s!—but it hauled my books, tapes, Little Bear, my monochrome Palm III PDA, and my Australian Geographic all-in-one gadget with a ruler, magnifying glass, and kitchen sink. It was usurped by my official school bag when I started year 7 and needed to carry textbooks all the time.

I used a large orange Crumpler shoulderbag after graduating, because it could fit my then-new 15-inch MacBook Pro. It was durable and copped a lot of abuse, especially when I started studying in Adelaide and basically lived out of it. There are probably photos of me from 2006-ish here with that bag on a Starbucks table, or an airport waiting room. My right shoulder twitches at the thought of how much weight I used to subject it to, but having it slung on one side did mean I could easily grab stuff out of it while I had it it.

The bag I’ve probably used the most is a smaller High Sierra backpack I got on special, right before Clara’s and my first trip to Japan. It was a boring black and grey, but it was solidly built and has withstood being stuffed to the point of bursting. I still have it for smaller laptops.

Which leads me to my current Arena Tote Backpack I bought specifically for Covid times. I wanted a bag that could tolerate being regularly washed when I have to take the train, just as I do with my clothes. This one was heavily discounted owing to being discontinued, and the fact it was designed for the rigours of chlorine water boded well for my very specific use case.

It’s already my favourite laptop bag I’ve ever used!

It’s hard to tell from photos, but it’s made of squishy wetsuit material, like a swimsuit but thicker. The lower quarter has an additional layer for repelling water and not absorbing nasties, which will be good for sitting on train seats. You can also use the straps that hang from the front to use it as a tote bag. I also love that it’s a bit more of an unusual design, which makes up for its otherwise boring colours.

But the most important consideration: it’s super comfortable. I mean it, it feels like I’m being hugged as I walk around. It starts out flat, unlike my High Sierra bag which is still chunky when empty. The shoulder straps are thick and well-padded with plenty of slack for tightening around your back. It sits flat against my back with a 16-inch MacBook Pro or a ThinkPad T550 stashed in what I’m using as a laptop compartment, and it has a few other waterproof pockets elsewhere for my little Ricoh GR III camera and my daily-carry pouch of adaptors.

Thus far my only complaint is there isn’t much padding on the bottom, so you have to be careful putting it down if you have a laptop in it. I’m thinking of adding a bit of my own inside just in case.

It’s a shame Arena don’t make this bag anymore, all their new ones that I can see just look like regular, boring, non-descript chunky backpacks. But this experience has taught me to venture out a bit more when looking for things like this; I wouldn’t have expected in a million years for my favourite backpack to come from a swimming store! Who knows, maybe the next one will be from a Korean barbecue chain, or a place where you get couches reupholstered.

Speaking of Jim Kloss of Whole Wheat Radio, he noted my penchant for discussing migraines on Twitter last year, and shared this article series on Nature:

Most people would describe a headache as a dull pain, a feeling of pressure, perhaps accompanied by a stiff neck — an inconvenience, but not something requiring medical assistance. However, the more than one billion people who experience migraines and cluster headaches have a very different understanding. For them, a headache is a much crueller condition. Attacks strike repeatedly, each one capable of delivering unfathomable pain that lasts anything from minutes to days. These primary headache disorders are no mere annoyance — they are debilitating conditions which the medical community must do more to alleviate.

There’s some great content in these posts, including the most lucid and accurate description of visual auras I’ve ever read. I know I’m trouble when I start having kalidoscipic vision along my periphery. That sounds like a band name.

I got migraines at least once a week as a kid, which mercifully became a once or twice a year occurance. But I’ve had a marked increase again since early 2020. Obvious external anxiety aside, if anything I’m healthier now, so I’m not sure what it is.

I can’t tell you how much joy these characters bring to our lives. Except, I just did!

I used to do this back in the day when Twitter was down. Now I’m posting my scatterbrain thoughts here instead while I’m on a Twitter holiday.

• Uh oh, I went to Gong Cha and Clara went to Share Tea for boba. There be disruption in the force!

• Made it through a bottle of Listerine Coconut and Lime. Nice for a change, but not my cup of tea. Because it’d be toxic drunk like that.

• Times I’ve instinctively reached for Twitter since I started this break: lost count after 12. Gulp.

• Think like a reductive cynic: Microsoft released the Polaris source on purpose to drum up interest in Windows.

• First three words iOS suggests I start my sentences with: Hey, Yeah, The.

• Pretty sure a CAPTCHA I just had to complete confused ducks for cars.

• I count the hours that I lie awake. I count the minutes and the seconds too… ♫

There’s so much I miss about the late Whole Wheat Radio, but one thing in particular was its vast knowledge base of musicians, albums, genres, regions, interests, and more. It was one of the largest online repositories of music knowledge, and easily the largest collaborative wiki dedicated exclusively to independent artists. Modern wikis with their gaudy designs and wall-to-wall advertising have yet to usurp it in sheer utility, approachability, and depth.

In exchange for helping add metadata, images, and templates to the wiki, the proprietor Jim Kloss graciously afforded me leeway to also use it to share research into the best ways to listen to music as well. I’d been an iTunes user since the first generation of iPods on classic Mac OS, but soon realised there was a world of console and GUI players for all sorts of platforms and devices one could use; some of which even resembled my beloved Winamp.

The Who’s Listening page would show where people were in the world, and which client they were using to stream music from the site. These would be auto-linked using wiki syntax to a page about that client; presumably so you could learn more about how to use it. I soon discovered that I could listen with an obscure or unusual player which would appear with red text, indicating a page for it didn’t exist. I’d use that link to create a new page about the player, how to download it, which OSs it supported, how to add Whole Wheat Radio stream feeds to it, and with a few screenshots of it in action.

I shamelessly exploited this loophole to create dozens of articles, and in the process learned about new devices and players. I didn’t go as far as to fudge a useragent, but I was amazed sometimes at what a player would present itself as. My old man streamed WWR in his car during trips between Singapore and Kuala Lumpur using an obscure device that returned a UUID of all things. iRandom!

Eventually Jim decided the site needed more focus, and many of these articles were deprecated in favour of content specifically about artists and their music. It was the right call, given the site had evolved away from its core mission in tangible, unproductive ways. I still have all the screenshots in my archives though, I should share more of them one day.

Everyone I follow on Twitter is awesome, and it’s my primary form of contact for so many friends. Heck, I got to know my long-term partner Clara from using it. But the news is all a bit much.

Once more, if I need to ask whether social networks are good for me or not, and feel the need to announce my departure, I probably already know the answer.

Cheerio, feel free to reach out via email.

Popup windows were one of the biggest scourges of the early web. They seemed to popup—heh—overnight, with even reputable sites throwing them in our faces, and even sneakily hiding them behind our active browser window so we’d see them later. It got so bad that an entire industry of popup blockers surfaced, and browsers like Phoenix and Opera touted their native popup blocking as a key feature when compared to IE.

We’re living through the same thing now, only I’d argue it’s even more pernicious. Popups are now done through CSS and JavaScript, making them much harder to detect and block. They screw up the flow and order of text on a page, making them bad for accessibility. And once again, web designers and executives are still under the misguided idea that they’re not only tolerable this time around, they’re desirable and reflect well on the sites that employ them. On certain narrow metrics that disregard users, they probably are. But they’re a disaster as an industry trend.

(It reminds me of the old adage about enterprise software not being bought by the people who have to use it. That obervation has haunted me since).

I tweeted an especially bad example last year from CityLab, a blog I used to love reading. It started life as a category on the Atlantic’s site, before getting its own site, then being spun off entirely. They were then bought by Bloomberg, and the UI has gone downhill since. Take a look:

There is so much to unpack here. The UI isn’t great to start; the irrelevent black navigation bar forces actually relevant links behind a meatstack icon, which research shows is a bad idea for discoverability and functional usability. The heading takes up too much space. It employs that antipattern of Sign In being less noticable than Subscribe. Links use the same colour as body text, making them difficult to distinguish. The links to the side of the Bloomberg CityLab text aren’t centred correctly. I could go on.

But the most egregous design antipatterns are so bad, they overlap. The first is a banner ad that takes up almost half the screen, obscuring the entire article. Then a popup for a newsletter appears before you even get a chance to dismiss it. All it was missing was a chatbot icon in the corner with a notification and a red unread message bubble.

Once again, I have to take great pains here to say that this situation isn’t necessarily the fault of web developers. Print publications have fared especially poorly in their transition to digital, and we’ve devalued journalism to the point where previously-reputable outfits have to take out half-page adverts to plead for money. These are symptoms of a broken system, and until that’s resolved these shenanigans will only keep getting worse.

How’s about signing up to our newsletter though? !!!AGREE!!! disagree.

Brad Chacos reported for PC World yesterday:

Ever since Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 30-series and AMD’s Radeon RX 6000-series graphics cards launched last fall, the overwhelming demand and tight supply, exacerbated by a cryptocurrency boom, has caused prices for all graphics cards to go nuts. Brace yourself: It looks like it’s about to get even worse.

Reporters, I emplore you again, don’t say last fall. It doesn’t apply to half the planet. He’s referring to Q3 last year, for those of you below the equator.

I lost the original tweeter, but the best response I saw was someone saying there may be a silver lining here: expensive hardware may motivate efficiency.

Last year I raved about Derek Muller’s video on Penrose Tilings, something I’d been fascinated by since I was a kid. He just did it again, and it’s beautiful. Take some time this morning to watch it if you can :).

I’ve still yet to make my way through all the comments people sent in the last couple of months; I wanted to thank you all again, and to let you know I’ll get to them soon!

But I wanted to address one from Matt Chase in the UK who sent me a long, heartfelt message last night. Among his concerns was why I’m not discussing Covid here as much as I used to, especially given it’s still ravaging parts of the world, and given it’s arguably the biggest current news story of our time after climate change.

I did talk about it fairly often back in March last year from my own narrow perspective. Australia and New Zealand have had flareups, but we’re still anomalies. The UK had more new cases yesterday than we’ve had since the pandemic started, and my friends in the US keep sharing heartbreaking stories and reports. Other parts of the world are doing even worse.

I’m not sharing more stuff about it for three reasons. I’m not qualified to discuss it beyond lived details, and there’s already enough misinformation lies out there. It’s also a coping mechanism; this blog was first and foremost supposed to be something I like writing, and would enjoy reading if I came across it.

Is it a copout? Probably. But the final reason is I want this place to be a break from it. I hope this doesn’t come across as insensitive.

Matt also asked why I don’t do more anime reviews like I used to. If I want this to be a place where one can take a break, challenge accepted! I started watching Konosuba on a recommendation from a friend, and it’s just the right amount of silly energy we all need right now. And all that news coming out from Type Moon!? Stay tuned!