A Lovely 10C Site!

The announcement of the discontinuation of the iPod has made me very nostalgic for mid-2000s Apple: bright, colourful designs that popped and made you feel a bit of magic every time you sat in front of the computer.

The days before flat design (shudder).

I have often wondered though whether the more bland style of design we see today was inevitable: the loud designs of Aqua and XP would be too fatiguing in an era when most have lost the distinction of being online and being offline; those people need UIs that blend into the background rather than UIs that try to make you feel something special.

I get the impression this 2013 Mac Pro handles JS-heavy stuff faster than the M1 Macbook Pro.

Not that Excel is a great experience on Mac locally or in the browser when it comes to shared files: locally, even moving between cells can take a few seconds; in the browser, it's little better.

Terrible experience overall.

The problem with having a headache during the day is that I inevitably get a burst of energy when it clears — at night.

@matigo Sound treatment is woefully underdone in most dwellings.

// @variablepulserate

matigo.ca.

@variablepulserate Take your voice down as low and soft as it'll go, you'll end up with a croaking sound that…kind of sounds like low-frequency humming from an electrical line…. Vocal cords aren't vibrating "normally" in this position. There seems to be more women than men who speak with a lower-than-average-for-their-body voice — I've heard it suggested somewhere that it's related to assertion of power.

The Brummie accent actually was a consideration when I was looking at Birmingham and Manchester. I think I could find a way to live with Mancunian English, given a nice enough house with sufficiently sized gates to keep them all out.

// @hazardwarning

variablepulserate.10centuries.org.

@variablepulserate Definitely keeping an eye on freehold properties in the UK. I don't think prices are coming down anytime soon though.

variablepulserate.10centuries.org.

My dream life over the last year or so has been what I once saw described on Hacker News as the "Victorian gentleman": enough passive income to be comfortable without necessarily being extravagant, spending my time working on productive hobbies that might or might not bring extra income, being with friends, taking long walks….

It's amazing, really, how much growing up in one of the world's most expensive cities has shaped my perspective — the idea that that's an impossible dream, that I'll be grinding away until I'm too old to be hired just to afford a single home, etc.

Whereas I'm actually in a situation where I could, in theory, go to somewhere like Birmingham and buy a small-ish apartment almost without a mortgage….

@matigo That really sucks. Let me know if I can help.

Is there nothing to be gained from filing a police report? A lot of this sounds legally very grey at the least.

// @phoneboy @variablepulserate @hazardwarning @joeo10

matigo.ca.

@jussipekonen Had no idea that was a thing…unfortunately that must motivate a lot of people to actually decrease their security practices just to lessen the inconvenience.

// @matigo

jussipekonen.10centuries.org.

Had been wondering for weeks why MS Teams didn't recognise my microphone connected via the Steinberg UR44.

Just found out the reason today: MS Teams lets you select the input device, but not the input channel. It seems to be hard-coded only to accept Input 1. Since my microphone was connected to Input 2 (of 4), no sound was getting through.

Sigh.