Sadly, this was a thing even before the web, let alone social media. There’s always been people for whom the vacations didn’t even “happen” unless they get to go on incessantly about them when they come back, ideally subjecting you to two hours of photos that mean very little to you. They derive little enjoyment from actually being there, they take it from showing it others…

For some people life is not worth living without external validation. Sad.

Jesus! Fucking! Christ!

As someone who fears bugs and is browsing Lemmy before going to sleep, my nightmares thank you, good sir!

I have been reading it and it is indeed quite good. The setting in which it takes place is nice as well. Recommended!

Fantastic. I had no idea the Z80 survived to this day!

1643 day streak here, and it still looks like it’s going to die on me any second now. I guess it was just an icon change (but… why?!)

I’ve used these guys. Fast, courteous and acceptable price. Still, unless you live in Portugal, I don’t think it will help you much. Might give you an idea of what to look for, though!

GASDA

There are companies specializing in document management. One of the services they offer (besides archiving, secure destruction, etc.) is scanning books and creating high-quality pdfs of their contents. This is usually a (semi-)automated process that uses a machine that opens the book only as much as necessary, to try not to even damage its spine. I’ve used it professionally and can vouch for this kind of service, even if I cannot really recommend you a particular provider, since I very much doubt you live near me, in Europe. Still, I’m pretty sure you can find one close to you if you search.

This will only take you halfway there, by producing a good quality pdf version of the book that you could share with others. To go the extra step of OCR’ing it, proofreading, adding the links, would need something else…

I read the first book in the series and found it… nice, but certainly not up to all the hype. Is it because it is just setting things up? Does it get better, more compelling, in subsequent books?

How about, instead of spending millions on marketing and exercises or graphical virtuosity that do nothing in terms of playability, innovation and fun, focusing on what matters and do games where $70 still turns a huge profit?

At this stage, apart from my medication, I worry the most about my devices and chargers. Everything else, from toiletries to clothes I can buy if it turns out I forgot it and really need it. That lowered my stress with packing significantly (and I am not forgetting more things because of it).

Alan Dix’s book (aptly named “Human Computer Interaction”) is quite good, even if somewhat old by now. HCI is an actual academic discipline with, yes, tons of theoretical and empirical results that govern what a good UI should be. Many of which are indeed grounded in psychology, others in physiology, etc (what we call Human Factors). There is a whole special interest group of the ACM just about it: SIGCHI.

Do not confuse this with fashion/trends/taste. These change, resulting in widely different possible flavors of UI over the years. But the underlying principles are the same.

Another thing to remember is that the fact that Apple, Google, or someone else implemented an UI in a certain way doesn’t mean they are following best practices and guidelines. Novelty sells, even if at the end of the day it does a worse job of things…

Edit: added link to SIGCHI

This is actually a thing. When learning calligraphy, it was one of the exercises we did. If you have good enough control of your hand and pen, then all strokes should be the same length, slanted the same way, and separated by the same spacing. When you manage this apparent “unreadable” thing, it means you nailed it!

The example below comes from this site (not mine)

I wish that would work. My Epson was always on and the ink kept drying. After it clogged the print head once too many times and I could not fix that in less than 10min, I just gave up on the piece of crap. I now go to a print shop to print what I need which, admittedly, nowadays is just a couple of times a year.

Nice try, Guybrush!

A rifle scope that can see through walls.

Nicely Done! How did you do the eyes and mouth? These are a challenge to me. My default World be to sew some felt to it, but I hate sewing…

While I’m not entirely sure wat it actually means, the message you get on that site right now might be the reason (some kind of experiment gone wrong artificially inflating the numbers):

I was creating an implementation for the activity pub instance service transfer, but it seems to have spread far. We are very sorry to those who have experienced inconvenience.

All temporarily used data has been removed and all data has been removed. The figures in the data will soon converge to zero.

I trawled unintentionally.

Is federated authentication being considered for the future? The federated model of the fediverse is great, but it runs into problems when instances “die”, you want to access different servers as they federate with different things, etc. leading to the need of having multiple accounts. If there were a decentralized network of auth servers, could use the same credentials everywhere.

99% Invisible - An excellent design/architecture podcast

20k Hz (“twenty thousand hertz”) - great show about the audio that pervades our daily lives, from notification sounds to movie special effects, passing through game sounds, sound history,etc.

Imaginary Worlds - in their own words, “ a podcast about science fiction, fantasy and other genres of speculative fiction”.

All three are done by professionals in their respective fields, exceedingly well researched, and with superb production values.

The problem is that the concept of “user of a site” is still a thing. There should just be “fediverse users”. Everything gets federated, why not user credentials? Then it would not matter if you register on site X or Y. It would be the same. What we need is a federated identity service. It would still be completely decentralized, dependent on no single server, and much more resilient to server shutdown, defederation, etc.

Edit: typos