Technology
- Security
- This is important, both for the people inside and outside the car!
- … but it’s not the only factor, of course.
- Features
- Size, range, etc. — things you can do with it.
- Comfort, and sense of quality
- This isn’t about what you can do with it, but how it feels to do them. In a car, this could be sound (or lack thereof), looks, driving experience, how it feels to open and close the doors, and other small, and large, things.
- Price
- Maybe this shouldn’t be here — but when picking a car, it’s often about getting the most features, comfort, and security for the price.
- (“Quality” can also be interpreted as how fast it breaks, which could also be included in the cost of owning the vehicle.)
- Sometimes Apple will make something more private because they hope it will be a selling point. I don’t mind that at all! That’s “just as nefarious” as them making something good because it will sell.
- Other times, Apple will make something more private that just so happens to benefit Apple and harm their competitors. A good example here, is them locking down the NFC chip on iPhones. (Here’s a good post discussing this.)
- And sometimes they’ll do something that benefits them even though it’s bad for their users' privacy. For instance, they don’t mind tracking us to serve us ads, as long as they’re the ones doing it.
- 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 — 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. 😛 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 → In your head
- Simple → A calculator (app)
- Medium to complex → A spreadsheet app
- Why do you use the one you use now?
- What are your favourite (large or small) features? Please be very specific!
🌱 What Makes Telegram Great
Chat apps: Part 2
People, myself included, will endlessly discuss the features and details of their favourite apps for email, calendar, task management and note-taking. But “no one” talks about chat apps — even though many people probably use this type of app even more. I recently wrote about this here, and that I think it’s a bummer that chat apps mostly rely on one of two things: Military-grade security, and lazy lock-in.
I, of course, get why it is like this: Network effects, and switching costs, are of course much higher with chat apps than other apps. A less reported on part of the EU’s Digital Market’s Act (DMA) is actually trying to do something about this, with the demand for chat interoperability! Matrix is also working on this.
However, as someone who’s used plenty of chat apps, one really stands out, in terms of quality and features — and that’s Telegram. I also regularly use iMessage and Messenger (in addition to a bit of Signal and WhatsApp) — and those feel like such a let-down by comparison. This post is me giving concrete examples of why. 1
This is not an endorsement of Telegram, nor the people behind it, though.
(By the way, click here to skip the preamble.)
When Was the Last Time You Heard Someone Discuss the "Quality" of a Chat App?
Chat apps: Part 1
What constitutes a “good” car? (Yes, “car” — I’ll get to chat apps, I promise!) If I were to answer for myself, I’d split it up into three factors (with one added as a bonus):
Luckily, the car market is pretty competitive — so there are plenty of options. And you don’t have to buy the same brand as your friends and family! But I want to compare it a bit to chat apps, and both the market and discussions surrounding them. Because even though most of us use chat apps numerous times every day, I’d argue both the market and discussions are lacking.
To me, it seems like most apps only have one of two value propositions —
even though I’d say all the factors from above applies to chat apps as well: Security (and, the connected, but separate, Privacy), Features, Comfort and sense of Quality, and Price. (The way we pay for chat apps is often with “personal data” and “viewing adds”.)
The first proposition is good ol' “Lock-in”
🌱 Some Scripts for Native Tagging of Markdown Files
One thing I like about Markdown is the way the files are just plain-text files, that can be opened and read in different programs and contexts. As much as I can, I try not to lock down my content, or workflows, into specific apps. But I still want to use nice apps! So sometimes I have to jump through a few hoops to make things interoperate. I’ll go into more detail on my workflows later — but I thought I’d share some scripts I use in one piece of the puzzle.
First, here’s what they do:
What I want is to be able to tag things in the different programs I use, and then automatically apply native Finder/Files tags to the files themselves. If I want to make three tags called “Bass guitar”, “Music” and “Effect pedals”, I would write #Bass guitar# #Music #Effect pedals#. (Notice how the multi-word ones also end with a #.)
The scripts come in three different flavours:
Does Apple "Care" About Our Privacy?
This post was originally a Mac Power Users thread.
One of the questions that started a discussion, was (paraphrased) whether Apple “cares about the privacy of its users”.
I think these are some important nuances to Apple’s decisions surrounding privacy:
And the billions they accept from Google, to make their search the default in Safari, is another example of the latter.
If Apple really cared about our privacy, they would, of course, choose a default that doesn’t track us — like DuckDuckGo. And it feels a bit hollow when they’re like “Yeah, we care about your privacy — but not like not-accept-$20-billion-for-free-care, you know!"
So, while I do think “privacy” is an argument for choosing Apple products, I think they’ve proven that they don’t care about our privacy. Whether that matters, is a different question! ☺️
(This discussion also spurred me to write about my search engine of choice, Kagi.)
🌱 My Search Engine Is Perhaps My Favourite Tech Service
There’s a lot of talk about Google Search these days — and how AI is affecting the search quality. Parts of the algorithm even leaked recently, showing that they’ve actively lied to the public. And the general discussions surrounding whether Google is getting worse, has been going on for way longer. But I’ve sidestepped this whole thing…
A while ago, in my quest to use less stuff from the largest tech companies (and due to privacy concerns), I used DuckDuckGo for over a year. But while I liked the design, I found myself having to type !g, and go to Google, to find what I was looking for.
Then I tried Neeva (RIP). And I liked that I didn’t have to scroll past ads, but the Norwegian results were terrible.
However, for the last two years, I’ve used Kagi Search — and ever since, it’s been one of my absolute favourite tech products. And yesterday they published a blog post called What is next for Kagi?, which I liked, and that spurred this post.
I like being the customer
Micro.blog's Amazing New Reply Feature
Both Micro.blog, and the Fediverse at large, sometimes feel like they’re just a few puzzle pieces away from being really great. And recently, Micro.blog added one of those pieces!
Because, you could already follow my blog, via the username @havn@micro.blog, on things like Mastodon. And if you saw one of my posts on your timeline, you could comment on it directly. However, it was a bit difficult to comment on it from the website here. But look at this beautiful piece as the bottom of my posts now:
And when you click through one of the links, you get sent back to the post and can add your comment.
🌱 Why I Use Fastmail
A couple of months ago, I “recruited” a friend to use the e-mail service Fastmail. And today, in a group chat, I “bragged” about me getting paid a sweet 50 cent (like it’s my birthday) for this! 1 🙌🏻
One of my friends, obviously very impressed by my business acumen, asked “Well, what’s your pitch for Fastmail?” — and this post is my answer to him! And if I’m lucky, I’ll get a whole dollar next month. 🙏🏻
Lovely Attention to Detail
I love unnecessary details. I know that, for many people, this has about zero value. But even if it doesn’t serve a function (and there is an argument for the example in the video below having a function), small things like this simply brings joy. For instance, my mom’s car is nicer than mine - and one of the small things, is that the thump you get when you close the door, is so much nicer! And software can give this feeling as well.
Two quick tips for apps (that I’ll write more about later) that has excellent feel: Bike and Paper
I mean, just look at the way the text moves in Bike! 😍
🌱 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. (…)
(…) 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 — 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 heavy…
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 💫Digital Crown™️💫.
Still, it’s mostly forgotten since then — 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?
🌱 Why Smart Bulbs > Smart Switches
I really like my smart light setup — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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
🌱 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) — but I like this prioritisation. They could’ve sacrificed precious dev time to make their own clients great — 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 — so why on earth should there only be one client (like Instagram, Facebook and, now, X)?
If you’re new (or old) to Mastodon — don’t be afraid to test different clients! They can be used in complete parallel — 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. 🙂
I’d like to talk about browsers! And people are of course welcome to comment whatever they want — 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 — 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 — 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. I’ll 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
… 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! 🙊
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 🖇️ 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 — but that’s never been great. Also, my joy-cons have started to drift…
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 🖇️. 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.
🌱 A Shortcut for lite-youtube-embed
YouTube embeds take up way too much on a site - so luckily someone has made lite-youtube-embed.
“Renders faster than a sneeze.”
Provide videos with a supercharged focus on visual performance. This custom element renders just like the real thing but approximately 224× 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 they’ve also made a variant named “Pro-usage: load w/ JS deferred (aka progressive enhancement)”, 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>