Technology
- In my apartment, I have some light switches that are in idiotically placed. I also have several lights I wish had more than one switch. So the fact that I can easily place switches wherever I want, by just sticking a little button to the wall (or whatever), is very nice. And so is the fact that it’s trivial to have one switch control several lights, or have several switches controlling one light.
- I want nothing to only be controllable by my phone. But I do think it’s nice that I can use it to control my lights ā even when I’m not home. I also like that I can create automations, like turning off the lights when I leave.
- I really, really like to vary the colour temperature of my lights throughout the day.
- For reasons, I’ll touch on later, this is mostly about desktop browsers.
- In terms of privacy and security, I’m approaching this from a reality where 65% of people use Chrome. So in this context, vastly improving the privacy from that, is more interesting than saying someone is a gullible idiot if they don’t use a Tor browser. š So while I’m not saying those things shouldn’t be part of the discussion at all, I’d like to talk more about user experience and features than hardening if you catch my drift. 1
- Very simple ā In your head
- Simple ā A calculator (app)
- Medium to complex ā A spreadsheet app
- Why do you use the one you use now?
- What are your favourite (large or small) features? Please be very specific!
- I donāt love that Arc is built on Chromium ā as I think Google has more than enough power over the web as it is.
- Iām not against supporting any VC funded company ā but in combination with an unclear business model, I become more skeptical and worried if our incentives align. 2
š± Lead Paint Is Amazing
On “Usefulness” and “Harmfulness”
Why are people so down on putting lead in paint? I mean, as Wikipedia puts it:
Lead is added to paint to accelerate drying, increase durability, maintain a fresh appearance, and resist moisture that causes corrosion. (ā¦)
(ā¦) very popular with artists because of its density and opacity; a small amount could cover a large surface.
And about the alternatives:
Titanium white has far greater opacity and tinting strength than lead white, and it can easily overpower most other pigments if not mixed carefully. Titanium white has been criticised for leading to “chalkiness” in mixtures.
Zinc white dries slowly and creates a relatively inflexible paint film. Critics of the pigment argue that its use leads to excessive cracking and delimitation, even when used sparingly.
Why the hate for the great technology that is lead paint!?
Well, the answer is pretty simple: “Usefulness” and “harmfulness” are completely independent spectres.
I see this conflated a lot in discussions surrounding AI: People who are wary of the harm transformer models can cause, often also call them “useless hallucination machines”. And others, will respond to the claims of harm by pointing to the usefulness.
Yes, the iPad Pros Needed to Be Thinner
I won’t be buying the new iPads, as I’ll keep rocking my 11-inch 2018 (with Magic Keyboard). But one thing has been bugging me about the early coverage of the new models, that I wanted to address. 1
Because, when I watched the Keynote and saw that the new iPad Pro models were thinner and lighter, I immediately went “Nice!”. But I kept seeing (and hearing) comments like this, here exemplified by David Pierce (whom I really like!) on The Verge: 2
Basically, the point is, “Who asked for this? Why not make it thicker and increase the battery life?” Nilay (Patel) agrees with this ā but then, six(!) minutes later, answers the question: 3
So yeah, not a long time between them not understanding why they made it thinner and lighter, and complaining about it being too thick and heavyā¦
Game Changing CSS Trick (for Noobs Like Me)
OK, I just learned a brilliant CSS technique I wish I knew about much sooner! This is probably old news for most of you wizards out there - but maybe this little post can be useful for some fellow newbies?
This is one of my "Noob teaching noobs" posts. Some experts are excellent teachers - but not all. Hopefully, these posts can be helpful due to their layman nature, but please contact me if I'm misinforming!
Here are some examples of selectors I could see myself using:
h1 {} -> Styling Header 1 (h1) elements.
h1:hover {} -> Style when hovering h1.
h1::after {} -> A pseudo-element (like a line) related to h1.
h1:hover::after {} -> The pseudo-element when I hover over h1.
h1 a {} -> A link (a) within an h1 element.
h1 a:hover {} -> When I hover over one of those links.
.page-content h1:hover {} -> When I hover an h1 that’s within .page-content.
Put into context, I could do:
Make a Click Wheel Mode for the Apple TV Already!
In this week’s episode of the excellent Hemispheric Views podcast, the hosts discussed features they’d (more or less seriously) like to see make a return in their technology. One of the picks was the Click Wheel, which Apple, in the infamous Apple Watch reveal, mentioned in the same sentence as other great input methods, such as the mouse, multitouch screens and the š«Digital Crownā¢ļøš«.
Still, it’s mostly forgotten since then ā but actually almost got some love when they updated the Apple TV remote.
Now, I’m actually one of the dozen of people who didn’t mind the previous Apple TV remote (the one on the left in the image above). Still, I agree that the new one is an improvement. But what’s really bothering me about the new one, is that they’re so close to making it great.
What if the Floorp Icon Actually Looked Like Piano Keys?
Floorp is an interesting Firefox fork, with a questionable name and logo.
Yesterday, someone on Reddit, posted “Floorp’s logo looks like piano keys”. And here’s the thing: I’ve been thinking the same, but at the same time there was something wrong. I’m not a pianist, but I’ve played with them enough to notice the problem. Let’s rotate the Mac icon, and compare with an actual piano:
The “double-sized” black key to the right was the culprit! 1 However, notice that there sometimes is two white keys next to each other. (This will be important later.)
But this made me think: What if the logo looked like a piano?
š± Why Smart Bulbs > Smart Switches
I really like my smart light setup ā and later I will write a guide on how I set it up. (I promise!) But in this post, I want to explain why I think smart light sources are a better option than smart switches (with regular light sources).
(Click here to go to the TL;DR!)
Some notes on costs
Smart lights ain’t cheap. And while I will argue that I don’t think going for smart switches is that much cheaper than smart light sources ā my main focus is on what gives the best smart light experience. And then it’s up to each person to evaluate what feels “worth it”, or even possible, to them and their budgets.
I also think the experience is way better if you get the consistency of having (more or less) every light in your home be smart ā so keep that in mind as well. I’m not arguing against those who say “Yeah, I only wanted these four lights to be smart, and then it was cheaper to go for a couple of smart switches”. What I am arguing against is those who say going for smart switches is better than smart light sources ā and hopefully giving some valuable insights to those who haven’t decided yet.
Why smart lights at all, though?
To me, there are three main reasons (in no particular order):
The two approaches to smart lights
š± Some Quick Mastodon Client Reviews
One of my favourite things about Mastodon, is that, as opposed to most other social networks, the service is completely open for other developers to make their own clients. And this has lead to a remarkable ecosystem of third-party options.
Now the official ones, are pretty mediocre (especially the web app, IMO) ā but I like this prioritisation. They could’ve sacrificed precious dev time to make their own clients great ā but this would have to come at the expense of improving the core service. And the only thing we would gain, is “another great way to use Mastodon”.
“How good are the default apps?” is a far less important question than “How good are the best apps for Mastodon?”. Also, what’s a good app isn’t the same for everyone ā so why on earth should there only be one client (like Instagram, Facebook and, now, X)?
If you’re new (or old) to Mastodon ā don’t be afraid to test different clients! They can be used in complete parallel ā so you could just download a bunch on your phone, and log into each of them with your username. And then you could just “main” one of them for a couple of days (turning on notifications on that one, for instance), and then move to another one.
But let’s get to the main point: Some quick reviews of some of my favourite clients!
Anyone Else Feel Like They Should Use Firefox
… but Still Struggle With It?
This post was originally (and still is) a forum post on the MPU forums. I have two concrete question blocks I’d love feedback on, which I will present during the post. I would love to hear from you, either over at MPU, as a comment to this post on Micro.blog, via Mastodon, or email. š
I’d like to talk about browsers! And people are of course welcome to comment whatever they want ā but some notes on what my intentions for this discussion are:
OK, let’s go!
Ethics are always difficult to discuss. Because while I think everyone should be mindful of the small things we should do to improve things, people have different priorities and possibilities. And where should we draw the line while consumers in a problematic system? Like, I should probably use a Fairphone over an iPhone even though it’s worse, right? How much worse should I accept? How hard should I pull away from things like Facebook or X?
Still, I’m at least trying to try ā and as the browser is perhaps the most used app, the choice of it is among the things I’m thinking about.
And here’s why I feel like I should use Firefox:
The Case for Soulver, and an App Between a Calculator and a Spreadsheet
The iOS counterpart of Soulver 3 just released ā and is being discussed a bit over at the (excellent) Mac Power Users forum.
This post is (mostly) an answer to the following post there:
Soulver is a fun app to do simple math, but it is no substitute for a spreadsheet. Can it do any of this Numbers - Function list - Apple (AU)?
Can it graph data?
So I would buy it again if it was cheaper, but $35 for the Mac app plus another $34 for the iOS apps is definitely not worth it to me. Iāll keep using my free, constantly improving Numbers app.
Plus it took 5 years to finally recreate the iOS apps? Seriously? Why would I trust this developer after borking a perfectly good iOS app and taking so long to finally add it back to the App Store.
I think you’re misunderstanding
ā¦ what Soulver is trying to be,
even though you mention “a fun app to do simple math”.
When discussing solving math problems, different complexity levels make us turn to different tools. I’d say it usually looks something like this:
Input wanted!
In principle, I think I should use Firefox… So I’m digging deep to see if I can make it not-bad! š
So, my question to those of you who use a (desktop) browser:
A Very Good All-Round Game Controller, With One Major Flaw (for Me)
A quick review of the 8BitDo Ultimate Bluetooth Controller
I mostly play boring strategy šļø games that are just as good to play with a trackpad as anything else.
But every so often, I’ll play something that’s best played with a controller. That’s usually on my Switch, where I’ve used the joy-cons with a charging grip ā but that’s never been great. Also, my joy-cons have started to driftā¦
So I wanted to buy a single controller that could fit all my use-cases, and my choice fell on the 8BitDo Ultimate Bluetooth Controller šļø. And it’s a great controller, with many smart features. But did you know that a controller can support 2.4 GHz, Bluetooth, Switch, PC, Steam Deck, Android, iOS and iPadOS, but not support macOS?? Well, I didn’t.
š± A Shortcut for lite-youtube-embed
YouTube embeds take up way too much on a site - so luckily someone has made lite-youtube-embed.
āRenders faster than a sneeze.ā
Provide videos with a supercharged focus on visual performance. This custom element renders just like the real thing but approximately 224Ć faster.
First you have to include some CSS and JS on your site. 1 And then when you want to embed a video, you could just add this piece to your post/page:
<lite-youtube videoid="CItvhGl__Mk" playlabel="Play: Beatenberg - Wheelbarrow (Official Music Video)"></lite-youtube>
This will embed the video, but over 200x faster - nice!
However, you have to manually add the videoid and the video title.
And theyāve also made a variant named āPro-usage: load w/ JS deferred (aka progressive enhancement)ā, which I think is even more optimised. But then you have to add all of this:
<lite-youtube videoid="CItvhGl__Mk" params="controls=0&rel=0&enablejsapi=1" style="background-image: url('https://i.ytimg.com/vi/CItvhGl__Mk/sddefault.jpg');">
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CItvhGl__Mk" class="lty-playbtn" title="Play Beatenberg - Wheelbarrow (Official Music Video)">
<span class="lyt-visually-hidden">Play Video: Beatenberg - Wheelbarrow (Official Music Video)</span>
</a>
</lite-youtube>
Why I Donāt Love Web Apps
And a call for help
I absolutely get why companies make web apps instead of native apps. Why juggle tons of platforms and languages if you donāt have to? Furthermore, being on the web makes you free from platform gatekeepers!
It can also benefit users, by giving the same experience everywhere, making more software cross-platform and accessible on more niche platforms, and more.
And if a developer has 100 hours to develop a client for their service, the user experience very well might be better if they spent all of it on a web app, instead of spending 25 hours on four different native clients.
Thereās also a bunch of terrible native (or ānativeā) apps. One example is phone apps that simply are terrible web wrappers that just want to be able to track and notify you more than they can in a web browser. 1
When I say that I prefer native apps, I donāt mean that there are no great web apps (like Figma) or bad native apps. My point is that the ceiling of the latter is higher, and that all the best apps Iāve tried are native.
OK, I just spent way too long on something unimportant (again):
I bring to you: smooth linear clamp() scaling, but with increasing something as you decrease the screen width!
From 1rem to 3rem: clamp(1, -0.5rem + 6.67vw, 3rem)
Ā«BackwardsĀ» (video): calc(clamp(-3rem, -4.5rem + 6.67vw, -1rem) * -1);
Now that Iāve gotten my CSS like I want it, Iāve started the total rewrite. š
Now I know what I want to be variables. And thereās too many ideas in the design, as I through every idea out there while making each element. But now I know which ideas I like the most, and will keep.
The thing I like about being a noob, is that itās fun to see quick progress. Stuff I wrote two weeks ago seem stupid now. š
Chromium and Nested Backdrop-Filters
If youāre like me, you sometimes get these small (often technical) problems, that you work on for so long ā and you refuse to surrender.
I had this with CSS a couple of months ago:
I had a menu, that had transparency and blur, and then I also had a submenu that I wanted to have the same. But the submenu just. wouldnāt. blur!
It works perfectly in Gecko and WebKit ā but after countless hours, I found the problem: If an element has a backdrop-filter, Chromium wonāt let its children have it as well. 1
I had to design around it, and moved on with my life.
A few moments laterā¦
I recently moved to Micro.blog. And one day I was scrolling down my timelineā¦
Then I opened the submenu:
There it was ā the same bug! Iām not alone!
The fix
āļø š± To SigmaOSā CEO: This Is What I Donāt Like About Arcās Direction
I really, really like the Arc browser. But as I alluded to in this post, I have some reservations regarding it, and donāt feel like itās going in a direction that I like. In the post, I said that I might try SigmaOS again ā and I am. 1
I mentioned this in their community Slack, and their CEO, Mahyad, asked me what about Arcās direction I donāt like. I must say, the dev team seems very active, nice, and open to input! So this post is my reply to his question.
(And hereās a link straight to the TL;DR at the bottom.)
Hi, Mahyad ā and thanks for asking! I wrote a blog post called Ā«I Just Want A Nice Browser!Ā», which might give you a hint, heh.
And let me also say that Iām a bit worried about your direction as well ā but Iāll come back to that. š
Two fundamentals I donāt love, but that I donāt need to go too much into
My main issue, though, is regarding AI
You know that trick companies do now, where they write helpful (or Ā«helpfulĀ») articles that people search for, and then you end up on a car companyās website when searching for how to change a tire?
Well, that kinda backfired for SigmaOS today, as I was trying to figure out how to install a custom search engine on itā¦
I Just Want a Nice Browser!
Two sad browser stories
Iāve followed the Spicy Takesā¢ļø surrounding the Arc Browser recently, that started in the Ruminate podcast and went on to the MacStories Weekly Issue 408.
And I agree with most of what John Voorhees is saying, and also Matt Birchler, who said: Ā«The Browser Company feels gross to me right nowĀ».
Much of it is about ethics and AI. In general I agree with them, but this subject wonāt be the focus of this post. (Iāve written more about AI here and here.)
Instead Iāll tell my browser story, and explain why both Arc and Firefox makes me sad.
š± AI Is Just Different
The discussion around the ethics and legality surrounding AI has been a constant the last year ā and itās culminating in some important trials thatās coming up.
I wonāt go into the entire thing here ā I just want to focus on a specific argument that I often hear when it comes to the way these large models are trained. It oftes goes something like: Ā«But how is this different from how humans have always been learning and iterating on previous knowledge?Ā» or Ā«The information was available on the open web, so it can be used for anything!Ā».
I think these are terrible arguments.
Humans are allowed into shopping malls.
However, thatās simply not an argument for that cars should be allowed there as well ā whether they’re driven by a human or autonomous.