🌱 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.
A Simple Embroidery Design
There’s a first time for everything
My wife has received an embroidery book from her grandma, and wanted to give a little gift to her from it. She liked this heart in it - but wanted to make it large enough to be able to write “Mormor” inside of it. 1
She has a lot on her plate, so I wanted to help. So here’s my scaled up adaptation.
I'm working on adding lazy loading to the images on this site - so I thought a little thing like this would be a nice way to test it. Please let me know if you find some image bugs!
The app and process
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?