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.
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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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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Unix Data Compression Shootout
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 …
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Why I love Markdown
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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 …
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Responding to The Linux Cast's Vitriolic Diatribe
The Linux Cast is one of my favorite Linux youtubers, as he usually posts very interesting videos and isn't afraid to share his off-the-cuff opinions of things in the Linux world, yet is usually not toxic, unlike some of that space's more infamous members.
He published a slightly ranty …
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"Online" documentation should be offline
I'm noticing a troubling trend among FOSS projects, even terminal-only utilities: no manpages (or a 1-paragraph useless one), barely any help screens, and a link to a wiki site like a github page or "readthedocs."
The thing is, the whole ethos behind so many terminal utilities is a hearkening back …
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"Ableism" and the Linux Aristocracy
Being an armchair FOSS advocate, there are a lot of anti-FOSS arguments I've become quite used to seeing and answering. Some of them are honestly just pretty dumb:
eloquent_FOSS_apologia();
Well, I just don't CARE about that!
Well …
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How I Watch YouTube
I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, TuxJam the other day, and they were discussing ways to watch YouTube without the annoyances that Google has added to the experience, namely ads and the inability to download videos for later viewing (also, YouTube stopped letting you listen to videos …
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