Anti-depression

Stuff that made me happy, which is a lot scarcer than the opposite.

Contents

December 51 Unix Era

November 51 Unix Era

  • macOS is the best general-purpose Unix desktop, made for the power user. And now, with their top-tier hardware…​ why’d I bother even considering using Windows for anything? Windows is such a joke, and I feel bad for having invested my time in it past month. Linux DEs are likewise laughable—​GNOME in particular has resorted to become a wannabe macOS a while ago, they’re just copying everything.

    Of course, there are some bad aspects to owning an MBP, too, such as the metal body that wants to remove all warmth from your poor hands. Luckily, I can use it docked to my monitor.

  • Apple has shown me that monospace fonts can be rather nice, e.g., Monaco. Part of it is that high DPI screens require thicker stems. And now I have nicer fonts on my Linux installation, too.

  • I used to be sceptical of ‘programming fonts’ with ligatures, but Fira Code is oddly geometrically pleasing. Which could not be said about configuring Fontconfig to force Qt Creator to pick the Retina style. Occasionally the ligatures match where they shouldn’t, though.

  • So macOS does support Unix-style window moving, after all.

  • https://github.com/MonitorControl/MonitorControl

  • macOS has extremely good in-system support for dictionaries, just press Super-Ctrl-D and the word under the cursor is taken from the system’s "display server". It doesn’t quite replace sdtui, for that there’s some work to be done.

  • I wanted to try using 4000K lighting for a change, and with that I needed to adjust my display’s white point from D65 to match the new environment. Since my BenQ PD3220U turns off its uniformity compensation in its ‘User’ mode and hence looks like cheap garbage, with unbearable ΔE values, I decided to do this with X11 gamma tables—​having a 30-bit X11 visual, I do not expect any noticeable information loss by way of compression. And I’m happy to have found a pre-existing tool to do exactly what I was set out to achieve. macOS has similar functionality built-in, though it took some work to figure out that it sets its ‘zero’ temperature at 4100K. It all works out fairly well, except the transitional periods, which could use some environment sensing.

  • GitHub repositories have Atom feeds. Commit diffs aren’t included, but it’s still a nice feature.

  • https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots/-/merge_requests/3333

  • Rittenhouse has had a more or less just trial.

  • https://github.com/phw/peek feels like magic. Doesn’t work with DefaultDepth 30, though.

  • https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange makes me happy on a deep level, despite.

  • The Exif standard is hosted on www.cipa.jp. Wąska, wielce wilgotna…​ cipa. Jak piosenka!

October 51 Unix Era

Our eyes have a visual point of view of like 160 degrees. But what I’ve got here is about 25, and on a cellphone it’s pathetic. So this is completely wrong. 100% wrong. Wrong in a really big way. If you look at the first description that Engelbart ever wrote about what he wanted, it was a display that was three feet on its side, built into a desk, because what is it that you design on? If anybody’s ever looked at a drafting table, which they may not have for a long time, you need room to design, because there’s all this bullshit that you do wrong, right?

This is why experienced programmers have big multiple screens. They’re working on something where the result is going to be fit on one screen, but you have to have all this other stuff, it’s like when you make an arch; it’s not just piling up the bricks, you have to put this whole scaffolding up. You have to hold everything together until you get the keystone in place. And virtually all of the productivity tools that I’ve seen, I’ll just say, "all" because I haven’t seen all of them, but the ones I have seen, they just completely don’t understand this at all. They’re all about this idea, which most programmers have that’s wrong, is that you’re going to write the program the right way. Nothing’s going to be wrong. The whole idea is to make a fucking mess. And if you look at the way Disney artists do things, the whole thing is messy. This is something anybody in the arts knows completely about, and hardly anybody in computing knows anything about. But in fact, it’s a key factor in building a good interactive development environment.

September 51 Unix Era

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