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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Monocultures Considered Harmful or: Why Linux Nerds Should Give BSD and Other "Weird" OSes a Try
In yesterdays's article, I described the benefit of having a large supply of physical hardware to try different OSes on. Now I would like to talk about why it's important to run more than just various Linux distros (although just trying different distros is a great way to start broadening …
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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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Random updates
Ironically, this isn't intended to be a "filler" post, but more of a fill-you-in post, as I've actually decided to stop trying to do "100 Days to Offload" this year.
I still technically have enough time left in the year to do it, but then I'd just be slamming the …
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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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Just a quick note...
...to let you all know why I haven't been blogging for the past couple weeks.
After many years of fighting with illness, and multiple organ failures, my mother passed away peacefully last Tuesday night.
I'm doing ok, overall, but haven't had much motivation to write. Everything is still very surreal …
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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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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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