A Fine Vintage of Sass

Fri 18 July 2025

Just now, I was doing what all great bloggers do when they run out of (easily) actionable blog post ideas:

I got around to cruising my RSS feeds!

To be fair, there are many wonderful bloggers that keep up with their RSS feeds and dutifully read and comment on all their friends' blogs.
Unfortunately, I am not one of them. ADHD, or something. This brain does not drive in a straight line, ever.
Probably a bent axle, no idea.

But anyway, while cruising some very nice blog posts, I came across one by the still astoundingly prolific Reuben Schade which contains what is, to me, THE quote of the Year:

UX at Apple gives me reverse imposter syndrome!

Dear God, what delightful sass. 😂 As I haven't played with Mac OS X* at length since High Sierra, I can't really comment on the UI/UX of the latest MacOS, but I trust what I'm hearing from others about the regressions of the UI, particularly from those who are designers and app developers.

* Yes, I still write the X (sometimes). I don't know why. Curmudgeon.

Another one:

But I can't remember the last time I walked past the local Apple store and wondered 'huh, some of that looks interesting'.

Man, that reminds me of the time when Apple shuttered all of their stores in my part of the city back in 2019. So, one day after that, I found myself at the mall, and there was no Apple store to browse randomly at. So what to do? I went to the Microsoft store!! (Shock, horror!).

While the OS (Windows), is obviously laughably bad, the hardware design of the various devices (some by Microsoft themselves, some by Samsung and others) was actually really, really nice! Inventive! Creative! More than just the same old Unibody MacBook chassis with minor variations for over a decade. I will say that since then, the industrial design of the iPads has been amazing to see, especially with their keyboard cases/stands. Very sci-fi-looking to me as an outside observer. But they are, of course, obscenely overpriced, and locked down with a more-than-just-proprietary OS, iOS. I mean, iPadOS. Whatever they're calling it this week.

Another gem:

The only thing, the only thing going for Apple since 2015 is that they haven’t been Microsoft, so I can run Office without Windows that has also slipped into the realm of absurdity. But Liquid Glass now puts us back in the deep, dark period of Vista, an OS that was designed in direct response… to Mac OS X!

Hilarious. Although to be fair, XP was the first, and wholly inadequate response to Mac OS X. Even the name had an "X" in it! But yes, Vista is what Microsoft accomplished with five more years of development, millions of dollars, and an army of engineers. 🤭

I would also have to say (depending on your exact workflow), you really don't even need Office anymore. LibreOffice can't do exactly everything MS Office does, but it's getting really darn close for me, and I exchange .xlsx spreadsheets with someone who is a relative master at Excel, regularly.

My own journey away from the fruity kingdom was catalyzed by 1) Apple deciding to no longer support my iMac, and 2) myself accidentally baptizing my beloved 2014 MacBook Air in hot tea in 2019. This caused me to rely on the cheapo used Thinkpad X200 which I bought "just for writing" as my daily driver. While I found that while there were some minor kinks to work out, I really, really loved being on Linux again.


100 Days to Offload 2025 - Day 40

Category: Humor Tagged: 100DaysToOffload ADHD Computing Humor Linux Non-religious post Polemic Writing


Some thoughts on Android launchers, or, The Need For Spatial Regularity In Touch Interfaces

Sun 13 July 2025

Background

I've used android as my main mobile OS for about four and a half years, and used it previously for about a year and a half before then. In total, I've spent eight and two thirds years on iOS, and six and one third years on Android (so far …

Category: Tech Tagged: 100DaysToOffload ADHD Bible Computing FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Non-religious post Productivity

Read More

Unix Data Compression Shootout

Fri 23 May 2025

I wanted to try a new-to-me compressor, lz4, but it turned into a full ADHD-fueled file compression shoot-out:

Dang, lz4 is crazy fast!

Data/setup

The corpus is a 2.29 GiB uncompressed tar file consisting of several years worth of GPS data in various plain-text formats.
The computer is …

Category: Tech Tagged: 100DaysToOffload ADHD BSD Computing FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Linux Non-religious post Productivity UNIX Unix Tips

Read More

I really wish the Fediverse had more permanence

Sat 10 May 2025

One of the things I hear people on the Fediverse celebrate is its incredible transience. There's no one big central network, so posts have nebulous reach throughout the network, depending on how well-"connected" your instance is, and many people set posts to auto-delete after a set period of time …

Category: Life Tagged: 100DaysToOffload ADHD Beauty FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Federated Services Life Linux Loss Non-religious post Non-technical post Philosophy Social Media

Read More

Why I love Markdown

Fri 11 April 2025

...
...
...
Because it's cool! But first, a brief history of writing in the digital age!

Some History, or: I have ADHD and we're all aboard the unnecessary detail traaaaaainnnn!......

The very first computer I had at home was an Apple ][+ that my mom rented for a computer class in university. The …

Category: Tech Tagged: 100DaysToOffload ADHD Computing FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Hobbies Humor Linux Non-religious post Philosophy Productivity Retrocomputing UNIX

Read More
Page 1 of 2

Next »