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● 08.20.23

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● Gemini Links 20/08/2023: Letting Go of Computers and Dark Mode/Light Mode

Posted in News Roundup at 8:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

=> ↺ Curmudgeon

• I’m a genuine, bona fide curmudgeon. I even love the word.

• [...]

• That’s me to a tee. Funny thing is, I’ve been something of a curmudgeon for longer than I’ve been old. I’ve recently begun to realise that it’s my my curmudgeonly personality is the fire that powers many of my most intense creative efforts. I am highly opinionated and extremely stubborn. I’m also very non-confrontational. An interesting mix that leads to some serious passive aggression. Some of my most productive and weirdly enjoyable programming sessions are prolonged instances of my Angry Programming flow state: listening to metal and reprogramming the whole fucking system if that’s what it takes to get my way. I’ve lost days. It’s also strongly related to the oddly-tuned fight-or-flight reflex that caused me to whole-heartedly dive into emacs rather than submit to the evils of my macos work environment and to frequently entertain fantasies of fucking off to a shack in the wilderness (which in reality would no-doubt end with me starving to death because I’m a serial plant killer) because modern society annoys the piss out of me on almost every level.

=> ↺ First chapter going up soon

• Wanted to test out image embedding on this site so here’s a teaser of some cleaning. Translation for chapter 1 has finished and I should be able to get it cleaned/typeset in the next day. I forgot how much I enjoy the monotonous task of scanlating.

Technology and Free Software

=> ↺ Letting Go of Computers

• I have owned computers since I was ten years old, when my dad brought home a genuine IBM PC XT in 1983. They shaped my life and my thinking, even as they shaped the world at large. I loved the magic machines for a good many decades, but now I find much to regret, on both the personal level and in society at large.

• I’ve had to step away from computers, for two reasons. The first is aesthetic. Computing has become a kind of ugly necessity, in which the productive work we do must run in tandem with an endless arms race against corporate and criminal scum. Another firmware vulnerability, another third-party database breach, another search engine rendered useless by AI-generated SEO garbage. The walled gardens get tighter and smaller; the end-user profit squeeze more pronounced.

=> ↺ Dark mode/light mode

• Using light mode at night hurts my eyes, but when I first discovered how to set dark mode some fifteen-some years ago, it was difficult to automatically change back and forth. I would have to manually change every single setting. It was so tedious. So I left my devices on dark mode constantly, even though that actually strained my eyes in the daytime.

• And so I progressed until the present day assuming that it was still difficult.

• But it’s not! Not anymore! There’s just a little toggle I can select in Cinnamon to switch my system. And Firefox (well, Floorp, but same difference) automatically changes when I tell it to! And so does Sidebery! And Dark Reader toggles itself! And so does Discord, and so does the shiny Mastodon userstyle I installed, and I can make my custom Dreamwidth userstyle turn itself off when I’m in light mode, and I just discovered Sublime Text can also automatically switch between light and dark mode, and and and.

=> ↺ Nozzle Size

• I’m used to higher resolution being an expensive upgrade, so the idea of nearly double resolution for a few dollars took me by surprise.

• I’m talking about 3D printing. It was a couple of months after buying a 3D printer that I learned that you can buy different sized nozzles for the Prusa MK3S; that they’re so cheap as to be effectively free; and that while the default nozzle size is 0.4mm, it works fine with a 0.25mm nozzle—almost doubling the resolution.

• So! I ordered some nozzles: and most importantly, the 0.25mm and the 0.8mm nozzle.

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