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.
The Mad, Joyful Chaos of the Creative Process
After yesterday's unhinged, painfully cathartic threnody of a post, I really wanted to post something short, light and enjoyable. I was considering writing down my thoughts on my favorite TV show, The Good Place, but that would have taken altogether much too long, so that is going to remain a …
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Where to now?
I debated whether or not this should be a "toot" (status update), or a proper blog post.
Like one time before, I am going to allow it to be something in-between. An off-the-cuff blog post, not quite as structured and agonized over as a proper blog post/article, but more …
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Why Do We Blog?
A few days ago, I was reading someone's blog (I don't remember who)* that was talking about the art and the "why" of blogging (or it might've been in a chat conversation, I'm not sure). I had been thinking of posting something about it, because when I told someone IRL …
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Songs to Improve Your Mental Health
Background
I'd be fooling myself to think that I could be the first person on the earth to note music's incredible ability to heal and salve the tormented human soul. My own journey with music is, well, unsurprisingly, about as old as I am. Most everyone on one side of …
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The Scenes that Made Me: Lars and the Real Girl (2007)
Lars looking on wistfully while ingesting his sister-in-law's retort to his rant
Video clip
Content warning: this post unavoidably and briefly touches on some "mature" topics
If you had told me six months ago that one of my favorite movies of all time would be a bout a man who …
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The Scenes that Made Me: Star Wars
Luke looking wistfully out at the dual sunset on Tatooine as The Force Theme plays hauntingly in the background, beckoning him to his grand adventure
Having grown up in the 1980s, one thing random friends would often ask me (actually what family friends would ask my mom) was: "Has he …
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I really wish the Fediverse had more permanence
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 …
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A Toast to the Prolific ones
I wanted to take some time out today to acknowledge some folks on the fediverse that are remarkably prolific, just for fun.
Prolific blogger — Rubenerd
Oh holy moly. This fella has words. Lots of words. Many very fine words. Just look at bro's output for 2024:
~ $ curl -s https://rubenerd …
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Blog Questions Challenge: TV Shows Edition
I keep finding more of these blog challenge questions, and I totally love them.
This one comes courtesy of Andreas' blog.
Like Andreas, I'm not a big TV watcher. I think I formally quit watching TV in 2003. I did watch a few things on Netflix and Amazon Prime over …
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