I'm going to be slightly contrarian and say that I like Discord. It's great to be able to get real-time help on a problem. And it is fun to see, again in real-time, what other people are working on and struggling with. In truth, Discord is no harder to sign up to than Slack, Matrix, Gitter, IRC, or whatever. And of course Open Source projects will follow the maxim of "go where your audience are". There's no point posting everything to MySpace when everyone's already on Facebook. Do I care…
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As part of my never-ending quest to banish this skeuomorph from the world… I was reading a fascinating eBook recently which was, sadly, designed to mimic a legacy / paper book. To the point where the authoring software had hard-coded in page numbers and forced them to be displayed. Here's what it looked like: There are two abominations here. There's no need to interrupt the reading experience by bisecting a page and displaying the page numbers. And there's no need to put footnotes at the a…
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I recently watched a brilliant documentary about the building of London's CrossRail system. It discussed many of the challenges involved with a "mega project" - and gave a little insight into what went wrong during construction. What struck me though, was how simple it seems to build an underground railway! Dig some tunnels Lay some tracks Done I mean, that's all it is when you get down to it, right? But, of course, even something as basic as digging a tunnel is hard. Sure, even the…
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I hope this rant is useful to someone... I have some shares leftover from an old employer. The sharesave account was managed by ComputerShare who are pretty crap. For some reason, ComputerShare have decided to migrate lots of their customers to an equally crap service called EquatePlus. I only found out about this when trying to log in to ComputerShare to do my annual tax return. It told me to bugger off to EquatePlus. Because sending proactive communications to your users is so hard... I…
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Whenever I start up Netflix, I'm asked if I want to create an account for my children. I don't have children. I don't want children. I find most children annoying - not yours, obviously, yours are lovely. But I resent being asked every single time whether my imaginary kids want an account. It's just annoying. I can't imagine what it is like for bereaved parents who have recently lost a child. Or for those struggling with fertility issues. That constant reminder every time they try to numb…
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My laptop ran out of space yesterday. Why? Useless ZIP files! I needed to download a Windows Virtual Machine in order to upgrade the firmware on a device (long story). The official Windows 10 VM is 20GB TWENTY GIGA-FUCKING-BYTES!!! It downloaded reasonably quickly - yay fibre! But I had to wait almost as long to unzip the bloody thing. Whereupon, I discovered that zipping the file - and it was only one single file in there - saved a whole 200MB. Yup, a 1% saving. As it happens, I downloaded …
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My date of birth is the 1st of January 1901. My phone number is 0000000000. My gender is decided on a coin flip. My country of residence is Afghanistan. And my Mother's maiden name is a random mix of upper-case, lower-case, numbers, and symbols. Well, that's what you would believe if you were any website I've registered for. If you're a free WiFi provider, you get random details. Unless you have a legitimate reason for needing my name and address, you'll find that I live in a desirable area of …
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/ləʊk(ə)lʌɪˈzeɪʃ(ə)n/ The ability to adjust a user-interface to the user's local language or dialect Because I live in the UK, I speak en_GB (English, Great Britain) rather than en_US (English, Simplified United States). Mostly, all dialects of English are mutually intelligible. Sure, the Brits love the letter U and the Americans stick a Z in every possible word. But we get along reasonably well. Except in Gmail. Here's my en_GB localised Gmail interface. Note how there is a folder calle…
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This a rant, written at midnight, after battling software errors. Set your profanity filters accordingly. I despair over the state of software engineering - specifically, stability. We seem to have lost the understanding that computers are there to do the hard work for us. And I don't think we ever believed in a user-centred approach to developer tools. The last time I developed an Android app all by myself was… fuck… Doughnut? Kitkat? Too long ago. Last week, I found a small open source And…
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I've never "got" the appeal of a Mac. But I have to use one for work. Here's a partial list of everything I cannot do on a Mac, but I can do on Ubuntu. These are all objective facts. These are things which either are impossible, or require adding unsupported 3rd party software - sometimes at a cost. Resize the system font I find the menu bar at the top too small. The only way to do this on MacOS is to lower the resolution of the entire screen! < p> Change the system font I know…
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Due to COVID19, I'm using a wide range of video conferencing services. Those of us who have work-supplied laptops usually have locked-down hardware. No unauthorised apps can be installed. That's not a problem for Google Hangouts - it just works in any browser. No need to install plugins or apps. Voice and video just work. But Zoom - one of the most used VC services - falsely claims that users need to install an app to use it. I've had frustrated colleagues express their displeasure that they …
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I was in need of a new laptop, so I bought a cheap ChromeBook - mostly because Amazon could deliver it the same day. Sadly, the trackpad was broken. Before I sent it back, I thought I'd try using a mouse with it. That's when I discovered that accessibility is very much a second thought for all the young and healthy people Google employ. I have RSI and use a vertical mouse. After decades of regular left-clicking, my index finger is worn out. So I use a thumb button to click. Changing the…
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