Kehvarl

I have a few e-ink based readers, and I just picked up an x4. Honestly, it's kind of fun. It fits in my pocket with my phone, it has clear and readable text, it has fairly comfortable buttons. Will it ever be my sole e-reader? Nope. Do I see myself continuing to use it to grab a book from the Project Gutenberg OPDS feed, to read whenever I'm in decent light and not doing something? Sure.

This seems to have a lot in common with how the Nabu computers worked, especially the continuous loop of programming to get around the fact that you couldn't upload data back to the cable company. Really cool!

The makers of Pico-8 just released a fantasy desktop called Picotron, and it's rather amusing. Not really a suitable daily-driver yet, though.

My last mac was a Powerbook g4 12 inch with OS 10.3 Panther, but for some reason I clearly recall the 10.0 wallpaper being the one it came with and the one I stared at for years. The proper 10.3 wallpaper doesn't look familiar at all.

Back in 2003-2007, I worked for a home builder who vertically integrated and went for maximized modularity. In '05 we expanded our truss yard to 2 large presses and 4 automated saws, and added a wall-framing yard what worked the same way as the truss yard. Add in that they bought a concrete company to do the slabs, and a 2-story house could go from pour to sheeting in 35 days. Plumbing, electrical, and finishing jobs could take as little as an additional 30.

Since the parent company dissolved them in '08, I haven't seen any of the other subsidiaries using the same techniques or scheduling, and it's always rather surprised me. They invested literally 10s of millions of dollars into us figuring out how to make it all work, then trashed the knowledge.

As my displays have gotten larger, I've found I want my windows to take up less and less of them. I may occasionally full-screen something, but it always feels incredibly difficult to deal with. As primarily a Windows user, I've more than once wished I had a "fit to content" button like Mac's.

Just another instance of different users having different patterns.

If I have a proper cleaning cloth and some cleaning spray handy I'll use that, otherwise I'll just use my shirt or a clean microfiber cloth. Even with that abuse, the coating on my lenses tends to last roughly 2 years. I've never managed to cause enough scratching on my lenses to bother me before it was time to see about getting new ones anyway.

For me, I prefer to keep my screen brightness at 50% or so. In that case a glossy screen is just a distracting mass of reflections, where a matte display is pleasantly usable. Color accuracy isn't an issue for anything I deal with, so the more comfortable appearance of the matte display is a clear winner.

For my digital-artist friends, they do prefer the over-bright glossy displays since it's actually a critical need for their process.

Unless you're on Windows 11. In which case you need to get into task manager and end the network login task before you can continue with a local account.

The biggest problem with this stance is that far too often those middle-managers or other customer interfaces understand neither the customer's actual needs nor the programmer's needs.

Every successful project I've been part of has required me to meet directly with the customer and understand what isn't working. Asking someone else to ask the customer for a specification just leads to the wrong solutions being solved or an endless stream of feature requests that make no sense in isolation.

If you tell the customer "It's down" or "Down for maintenance" you will absolutely get some who tell you "Just turn it on for me and give me my ice cream". If you tell them "It's broken" then you don't get that.

Even though it's a valid distinction, I'm not sure it's one that's valuable to the interaction being described.