alexdbird

5 ms·

1.
by alexdbird 1mo ago
And yet people have been impressed by my bespoke toaster
2.
by alexdbird 2mo ago
I've always wondered if this was the secret motivation behind it. I hated this bit of design when I switched from a smooth edged Thinkpad ~15 years ago. But I changed my typing posture for the better and it became a non-issue.
3.
by alexdbird 2mo ago
> to mask loading times and ease from one state into the other I'd expand on this: used well, they show the user than a state change is happening directly because of a particular action of theirs, and hint at how they might reverse
4.
by alexdbird 4mo ago
You can't deny it, mass is much more stylish in Latin ;)
5.
by alexdbird 5mo ago
My experience studying 'Computing and Electronics' - a combined degree - was that we could get practically any extensions or leniency we wanted by blaming the other specialism. To each the other was mistrusted and magic.
6.
by alexdbird 7mo ago
My work laptop is M3 and it needs to be because the security crapware makes some things literally 10x slower. Meanwhile my personal M1 is more than adequate for normal work.
7.
by alexdbird 7mo ago
This often tells you a key has been invalidated due to updated security logic.
8.
by alexdbird 7mo ago
Definitely don't make it too shallow either. People are forever jamming oversize books in ours and damaging the doors/hinges/catch.
9.
by alexdbird 7mo ago
In fact, the real crime of the Magic Mouse is how awkward it is to switch it between machines.
10.
by alexdbird 7mo ago
It's called the Action icon, a generalisation of its original Share meaning. It's used throughout the Apple ecosystem so knowing that's where actions live is not a big expectation. You've mangled the steps. You only pres
11.
by alexdbird 7mo ago
Honestly, as a user of the mouse, I think the main reason people talk about the mouse is bike shedding. Charging isn't a problem in actual use, but everyone sure has an opinion on it. There are plenty of contenders for 'worst idea
12.
by alexdbird 10mo ago
I personally like the status quo that PNGs don't encode orientation. I can dump PNGs when I'm debugging and I know I'm looking at the bits the same way up as the code is!
13.
by alexdbird 1y ago
> Home and End are mapped to C-a and C-e literally everywhere in Cocoa. Even in iOS, if you have a hardware keyboard attached! But Ctrl-a/e have come in with BSD, the more common Mac shortcuts are Cmd-left/right, which go to th
14.
by alexdbird 1y ago
Not having to think about it is just a nice little win every time. Abort is really very different from copy.
15.
by alexdbird 1y ago
Indeed they do, as they did 25 years, in OS 9. And they have F1-12, though you need Fn to use them unless you invert their function in settings. And they have a numerical keypad, as well as pageup/pagedown/home/end/delet
16.
by alexdbird 1y ago
Well, I won't cover all the same things the replies do there! I can empathise, as I always used a full size keyboard on Windows/Linux, and I chose Thinkpads and decent Dells where the extended key layout wasn't completely bas
17.
by alexdbird 1y ago
> reduced key availability Genuine question, what do you think is missing? I wish it was slightly easier to type a #. But OTOH it's /way/ easier to type accented characters (in either the fast way for regular use or the sl
18.
by alexdbird 1y ago
When I see someone calling the keyboard things like 'inane' I read 'not what I'm used to'. Personally I found the keyboard a breath of fresh air when I switched from Windows/Linux. The whole text editing experi
19.
by alexdbird 1y ago
We had dozens of 2013 MBP with discrete GPU mux where I worked. I bought one afterwards and used it until the M1 laptops came out, for pretty much everything you can use a laptop for. Never had or saw this problem in any of them, FWIW!
20.
by alexdbird 1y ago
This list isn't really selling it to me! Mmm, aluminium, yummy propylene glycol. The things you need from that list are Wheat flour (white), corn flour (starch), Sugar, Cocoa, Baking powder, Salt, Vanilla. I doubt carob adds anything t
21.
by alexdbird 1y ago
We are all vulnerable at some point. I'd even go as far as saying we all fall for something at some point. Even if it's something small the psychological effect can be large, and there can be a lot of shame, so many do not share t
22.
by alexdbird 1y ago
To be fair, we had a keyboard setup like that at school in the nineties. I can’t remember using it more than a handful of times though.
23.
by alexdbird 1y ago
I had a couple of these over the years. I ended up using specialist graphics cards to use them with a PC. The crude scaling built into the cards made old PC games and NES games gloriously blocky, on top of the gorgeous colours and blacks.
24.
by alexdbird 1y ago
Yup. I worked for a media company that made IP part of the access token for media playback. An absolute PITA for the mobile app, and made (reliable) background downloads impossible on iOS. A bad idea. They went out of business.
25.
by alexdbird 2y ago
The sensor was only needed to park spinning disks when the laptop was in free fall. Without the spinning disks they no longer fitted the sensor.
26.
by alexdbird 2y ago
We have ones made by Lexon. A non-radio-controlled version of this: https://lexon-design.com/en/product/flip-plus/ It's a nice concept, though the execution isn't perfect. The biggest flaw, which ma
27.
by alexdbird 2y ago
I often save things as PDF. The 'export as PDF' option in Safari creates a long PDF that I find much better for reference on screen than 'printing' to PDF. But the big flaw in this, especially for saving programming rela
28.
by alexdbird 2y ago
Those will still have a ceramic resonator in them, as they’re cheaper than a quartz crystal. Hard to imagine them being audible, but not impossible.
29.
by alexdbird 2y ago
3G was fine, without all these pesky people using it. It seems we need the extra capacity provided by newer Gs.
30.
by alexdbird 2y ago
You could still cheat. It’s not fresh in my memory but the correct page number was distinctive and the incorrect pages did not load instantly, so you could just press all the colours until you saw the right one!

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