Essays on usability, programming, and other nerd topics.
I just read this post from Marcin Wichary's Unsung, where he points out a peculiar macOS dialog box that shows boolean toggles in four different shades of grey: Marcin offers some improvements, but the actual problem is fundamental to macOS: these types of toggles are bad UI controls and should simply not exist. I think toggles originated on iOS, where they replaced checkboxes. I suspect the…
I've updated some things in the last few years. Now's as good a time as any to link to them. bookfeed.io bookfeed.io is an RSS feed for book releases. I'm not sure why, but Google Books' search results have become increasingly unreliable over the last year. I've added openlibrary as a second source, and I combine the results from both. I've also added an .ics renderer, so you can now show book…
The Pragmatic Bookshelf has all of their books at half price [^except] until December 1st using coupon code "save50". They're DRM-free and compatible with any ebook reader. [^except]: All of their books except for The Pragmatic Programmer . Here are some of their books I've read recently that I enjoyed a lot: Hands-on Rust and Advanced Hands-on Rust . Rust is a difficult language to wrap your head…
Yesterday, I saw this video on YouTube by DJ Slope, a videogame youtuber. The very short version is that YouTube is deactivating all of his services and deleting his channel. He suspects they are doing that because he uploaded a file to Google Drive that triggered an automatic account deletion. This isn't the first time something like this has happened. Here is a case from 2022 where CSAM…
I've never spent a lot of time thinking about daylight saving time. It's a thing that annoys me once a year and makes me happy once a year. I never gave it much more thought than that, other than to kind of vaguely think that it seemed pretty stupid, and having the impression that this was a commonly held belief. A few weeks ago, I read Craig's weeknotes , where he wrote: My social feeds have been…
As has happened with my Fold 3, after about a year of using it, my Fold 4's screen started to delaminate,[^delaminategate] so I had to send it in for repairs.[^why] When looking for a cheap replacement phone to use while my Fold 4 is away, I noticed that the Surface Duo is now available for around 400 bucks, so I picked one up. [^delaminategate]: I guess technically, the built-in screen protector,…
Over at Tobias Bernard's GNOME Blog , he writes about a new approach to tiling window managers. Window management is probably the single worst aspect of current operating systems, and his ideas for how a modern tiling window manager might work are extremely compelling to me. See also: Bluetile . If you require a short url to link to this article, please use https://ignco.de/804
Yesterday, a friend sent me a screenshot of an Instagram story from mordlustderpodcast asking for an intuitive explanation of the Monty Hall problem (which, as I found out, is called the "Ziegenproblem", or "goat problem", in German). The basic problem is this: You're in a game show. You have three boxes in front of you. One of them contains a win (let's say the key to an expensive car), and two…