How Many Pixels Do You Really Need?
I was reading in Ploum's excellent blog yesterday about his history with Ubuntu, when I stumbled upon a lovely screenshot of his FVWM setup circa 2003, and it brought me back to a friendly, and long-raging debate with some fedifriends on the subject of pixels, namely, whether or not you can tell the difference between videos at various resolutions on various types of devices, and at what point do those pixels become wasteful?
While I am a fan of viewing high-quality 4k content up-close on a 4k TV for that really filmic feel, I still don't have any computing devices capable of displaying 4k or HIDPI content, not counting any phones.
I remember having laptops with resolutions of 640x480, 800x600, and 1024x768. Especially with the first two, if your eyes were young, you could see every pixel. Sub-pixel, even!
Not one pixel was wasted, and honestly, I have to wonder if we really need our modern high-resolution displays for anything. I'm not even talking about HIDPI here, just 1080p!
Looking at screenshots of linux desktops at what we would call today very low resolutions: I'm amazed at how much information they could display comfortably:
A screenshot of FVWM2 taken from the fvwm-ewmh sourceforge page
This was (originally) only an 800x600 screenshot! I scaled it up (nearest-neighbor) to prevent blurring when viewed on high-resolution devices. I think (other than the screen aspect ratio) it displays nearly as much information as most people view on their 4k monitors, unless they have extremely large monitors or very sharp eyesight.
That said, I'm not sure I'd elect to go back to 1024x768. Even 1366x768 (which is what I'm running on this BSD laptop) feels far more roomy.
Why You Need A Stack of Thinkpads
Modified image of a stack of thinkpads taken originally from https://old.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/17xf8kl/my_thinkpad_stack/
A lot of people experience vendor lock-in and outright "ecosystem captivity" because they've plunked down several grand towards pricey and shiny laptops from Apple, Microsoft (*snicker*), Samsung, or whomever. Such a …
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Desperately Seeking Preview.app
Preview.app shown in NeXTStep 1.0 courtesy of infinitemac.org
In yesterday's post, I talked about the things I do and don't miss about MacOS, mainly focusing on the global menubar search as the main positive from my experience with Mac OS X.
Looking over blog post ideas note …
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What I Do and Don't Miss About MacOS
Background and disclaimer
I was a Mac kid. I was lucky to have my own Mac at home (a relatively low-end one, but still) for most of my high school. And like most people, I do look at the past (particularly the retrocomputing past) with pretty strongly rose-tinted glasses.
But …
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My Favorite GUI Programs, Part II
Background
In yesterday's article, I went over the GUI programs that I enjoyed using over the years and remembered fondly. While I was going to go over TUI programs today, I realized that there's a category of GUI that straddles the line between GUI and TUI that deserved its own …
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My Favorite GUI Programs
Background
Yesterday, I wrote about why I loved the command-line, and one of my good Fedifriends commented that while he appreciated a good command-line program, he generally preferred GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces).
My personal history in computing started with what you might call command-line computers, although I think it's more …
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Why I Love the Command Line
I was going to post a much more serious blog post about anhedonia yesterday, but I didn't get to do so, as I was feeling... anhedonic!
One thing I do when I'm struggling to feel... anything (because I've spent way too much time feeling way too much, but that's a …
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Anker SoundCore P30i mini-review
Time for another little hardware review.
Background
I've been getting complaints that the small, inexpensive bluetooth earbuds (Skullcandy Dime XT/XT2) I had been carrying around for the past five years have pretty poor audio quality during phone calls (likely no microphone noise cancellation), so I started looking around again …
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Why I love vim
Disclaimer: I will be using the name/term vim in this blog post, but I actually mean any command-line editor based on or inspired by vi, or "vi-style editors." This includes the original vi, nvi (which IIRC was the basis of the vi that comes with the various BSDs), elVIs …
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My Approach to Online Notes
Note: When I say "Online" in this context, I literally mean "on a computer," vs. "on paper." This is the older, more classic meaning of the word, similar to "on-line documentation" (i.e., "on the computer," not "on the internet").
Background
I know a lot of folks like solutions like …
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