By @edent · documentation Open Source rant watchy · 14 comments · 350 words · read ~8,263 times.
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, […]
Continue reading →By @edent · ebook epub HTML rant · 750 words
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 […]
Continue reading →By @edent · rant · 4 comments · 350 words · read ~228 times.
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 […]
Continue reading →By @edent · rant · 6 comments · 350 words · read ~3,490 times.
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 […]
Continue reading →By @edent · childfree moan rant tv · 10 comments · 550 words · read ~1,465 times.
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. […]
Continue reading →By @edent · rant tech web · 4 comments · 250 words · read ~331 times.
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 […]
Continue reading →By @edent · rant · 6 comments · 450 words · read ~1,189 times.
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 […]
Continue reading →By @edent · gmail google i18n rant · 10 comments · 300 words · read ~8,058 times.
/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 […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Open Source rant · 21 comments · 1,100 words · read ~17,314 times.
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 […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Apple linux mac rant · 35 comments · 450 words · read ~28,465 times.
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 […]
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