Technology
- One million seconds ā 12 days
- One billion seconds ā 31 years
š± The Ethics and Principles Behind My Blog
I donāt really use read-it-later apps. But if you do, check out Omnivore! I agree with this review.
Open-source, great text-to-speech, iOS, Android, Mac and Web.
Great day! Spent literally 11 hours intensely not getting #KMonad to work on my #Mac. š
This is as far as I got. šš»
(Or, previously I got one step further, and got Ā«Encountered error in KeySource: [Cannot translate from mac keycode: (0,0)]Ā» instead)
Oof, the Boardsource Lulu looks pretty sweet! (And the Lily58 doesnāt look too bad either.)
Does anyone have any experience with either of these? āØļø
#Allheimen #MechanicalKeyboards
My Ergonomics Voyage: Part 1
Prologue, and the first steps
Iāve been a nerd my entire 34-year-long life. So naturally, much of it has been spent in front of computers using keyboards, and Iāve never experienced any discomfort related to this.1
I donāt know if itās due to my age, or just the fact that Iāve worked even more than usual on keyboards, but lately, Iāve started to notice discomfort. Especially in my left hand, but a bit in my right as well. Luckily, thereās nothing anywhere else, and itās not that bad. But I want to take action to try to stay ahead of it.
A bit about my current situation
The last couple of years, Iāve been working mostly in my small home office, which was OK, but not great. Just a couple of weeks ago, I finally got my own (external) office, so the situation has improved. However, Iāve been stupid, and also worked quite a bit on my laptop on our kitchen table lately.
Hereās my current office setup:
Good things about my setup
š± Wallpapers for Home.app
Here’s a remake of backgrounds from this thread that I made since the links were dead. These were inspired by u/rzalexander and made with free illustrations from illustrations.co. I’ve tried to adapt the illustrations to iOS 16’s new home app, so that the text and icons are visible.
I’ve also made companion backgrounds for use with iPad and Mac. Since those windows resize all the time, using two tone and illustrations was a no-go. So they are just one colour backgrounds (I have one using the dark colour and one using the light one. I’ve used the latter).
Machines, AI, and the Most Important Question in the World
Message from 2024: I wrote this post in the spring of 2023, as AI tools were pretty new. Iāve since landed on the principle of not using AI generated images on my blog. This post has two images like this, but as itās critical of the models (and explains a bit of why I currently donāt want to use them), Iāve let them be.
First, a very simplified history lesson:
For a large portion of the human existence, technology (often in the shape of machines or tools) has replaced manual labour, and led to increased productivity. The printing press replaced monks writing books by hand, looms evolved to include less and less manual laber per unit of fabric, the telegraph reduced the need for mail carriers, and photography really hurt Big Portrait Painting. Usually, the technology doesnāt completely replace the professions it affects. For instance, you can still get a tailored suit ā but itās a minor part of the clothing industry, and mostly reserved for the wealthy. The old turns into niches, hobbies, crafts and/or art.
Here are some of the positives from this:
š± Why 4k ā 5k
And what Apple means when they say Ā«RetinaĀ»
Iām pretty sure the Apple Studio Display is overpriced. Still, the discourse after its announcement has been plagued by people not quite understanding the difference between 4k and 5k on a 27-inch display. Itās just one kay difference ā why canāt you just buy a 4k screen thatās cheaper, brighter and/or has a higher refresh rate? Why do some Apple fans crave this extra kay so much??
Marc Edwards, of Bjango, wrote an excellent piece on this, and I especially like the visual examples of 4k vs. 5k on macOS. **Ā As a maths teacher, I find this problem interesting, and here I will bring some light to this issue the way I would to a high school class.** Perhaps this makes it easier to understand why the issues Edwards highlight appear.
Whatās in a kay?
To narrow things down, Iām mostly going to look at 27-inch screens with a 16:9 aspect ratio (so no super-wides here!). Letās compare the three most normal resolutions at this size: 1440p, 4k and 5k.
Humans are notoriously bad at comparing large numbers. Every day, thereās a new tweet trying to help us understand the difference between a million and a billion, by reminding us that:
So, itās forgiven that people think 4k and 5k are pretty close. However, 5k resolution has _a lotĀ _more pixels:
