Responsive Email

I was going to put together a post complaining about #email #newsletters that still assume you’re reading on a desktop and send out layouts that rely on a wide screen size and end up with 2pt type on a #mobile phone – you know, where most people read their email these days.

Then I stumbled on this #usability article by Jakob Nielsen.

From 2012.

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/mobile-email-newsletters/

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The funny thing is that #HTML is #responsive by default. In the very early days, it was *always* responsive except when you added preformatted text. Once you got a little more rendering capability (tables, images and image maps) you had people designing websites who were accustomed to fixed-size media, and the paradigm stuck.

Build for 800×600. Build for 1024×768. Hey, we have widescreen now. What do you mean the window isn’t always fullscreen?

And so on.

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Being able to apply relative sizes to everything, and being able to tweak the layout based on the logical screen size instead of physical pixels is an amazing improvement in the flexibility of anything formatted in HTML+CSS.

(And of course higher-definition displays, but a responsive layout can still make itself usable on some of those older screen sizes.)

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COVID, weird

It turns out the person I caught it from also tested negative for Covid during their illness…and then came down with actual Covid after they recovered. Fortunately they seem to be on the mend from that now too.

That means (a) whatever I caught from them wasn’t Covid and (b) we haven’t been around them in long enough that we don’t have to worry about it having been a Covid exposure too.

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COVID, confused

All three of our tests came back negative. So I don’t know what I have, but apparently it’s not COVID.

(One false negative, sure, but 3? Not likely.)

And now the kid’s mad that he has to go back to school on Monday because we haven’t tripped the COVID isolation protocol after all.

I’m kind of disappointed, weirdly enough. I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop for almost 2 years and thought it finally had, and dropped in a way that would do minimal damage to the 3 of us.

On the plus side, if it really isn’t COVID, I probably won’t need to isolate for the full 10 days, just until my symptoms clear up.

I probably should isolate as if it was covid, just to be sure.

Possibilities:
1. It’s not COVID, it’s something else. Even though the symptoms match and it’s massively surging in this area
2. I’m the only one who caught it and mine was a false negative.
3. They both caught it and have already cleared it out to the point of testing negative, and mine was a false negative.
4. All 3 tests are false negatives.

I’m really not sure which is most likely.

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Covid, food: Tonight’s dinner taste test

Tonight’s dinner taste test

Garlic: yes. Roasted potatoes: barely. Roasted radishes: delayed taste. Kale: yes. Carrots: no. Bell peppers & onions: kind of. Soy sauce: yes

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And dessert test.

Maple cream cookie: Similar to the chocolate chip cookie yesterday, where it initially didn’t taste sweet at all until after a few seconds of chewing. And fortunately I can still taste maple!

A 60% cocoa Ghirardelli square tastes like a 72%.

A mint-filled square tastes more intensely minty.

A sea salt caramel square tastes like salty chocolate.

covid, spice cabinet

So this is interesting. I can smell most of the dried herbs fine – oregano, thyme, dill, cloves. Rosemary is kind of faint, but I can pick it up.

Garlic is intense.

I can smell cinnamon but not nutmeg, which is odd.

And here’s the really weird one: paprika, ancho, black pepper, cayenne and ginger all smell subtly off from normal. Like when you get a chile that’s normally spicy but isn’t, and you can still taste the flavor but it doesn’t have the bite you expect.

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I also tried tasting a few sauces.

Ketchup and mustard tasted more sour than usual. Plain yellow mustard was too intensely sour.

Teriyaki tasted a little more like sweet & sour sauce.

Gochujang & caramel were both a little bit off, but I couldn’t quite place how.

Chocolate syrup was interesting, because I could pick up the chocolate taste before the sweetness, so it started out tasting like darker chocolate.

Covid, food: Weirdest thing is the taste/smell impact…

Got what is so far a mild case of what’s almost certainly covid, mostly fatigue & runny nose (yay boosters!).

Weirdest thing is the taste/smell impact. It hasn’t gone out completely, it’s more like taking an audio equalizer and readjusting the sliders so that some frequencies are barely audible while others are still normal. Umami’s solid, sour’s a bit blunted, sweetness is even fainter. At least food still tastes like food so far.

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And some of the fainter tastes do kick in after a while. I tried a chocolate chip cookie, and at first it was like eating a cracker or plain biscotti, but after a few seconds of chewing I could taste the chocolate.

And yes, I have considered experimenting with the spice cabinet…

Halloween

We set up a pair of take-one boxes on a table on the building’s front lawn, one with candy and the other with party favors. Then we took turns taking the kid around the neighborhood. Last ride of the giant Minecraft spider jockey costume before he outgrows it.

I was amazed at how many families were out. More than most years. We ran out of both candy and toys.

I guess it’s a reaction to everyone staying home last year.

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Ugh…my home computer clearly needs some hardware help.

Ugh…my home computer clearly needs some hardware help. No Man’s Sky isn’t the only game causing it to shut down under load.

I guess it’s time to figure out whether the power supply needs to be replaced or I just need to blast a couple year’s worth of dust bunnies off of the CPU fan.

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Actually it can’t be that long, I replaced the graphics card last summer just before the chip shortage started driving prices sky-high (damn that was lucky timing), and I’m sure I would have cleaned it out at the time.

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I really liked Outer Wilds

In response to a post about “chill games”

I really liked Outer Wilds. A space exploration game that starts in a forest, where you can toast marshmallows on multiple planets, the whole system is in a time loop, environments change drastically between the early and later parts of the loop, and you find other astronauts by listening for the music they’re playing.

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Todo: add link from review

Huh, Verizon has sold Yahoo and AOL. For half of what they paid for them…

Huh, Verizon has sold Yahoo and AOL.

Verizon sells AOL and Yahoo for about half of what it paid

For half of what they paid for them. 🤦‍♂️

To a private equity firm. 😬

Flickr and Tumblr REALLY lucked out that Verizon put in the effort to look for a photo-sharing company and a blogging company to sell them to instead of just muddling along with no idea what to do with them until they just wanted to unload them.

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Expanded on K2R: Ya-who? Flickr and Tumblr Were Lucky!

Waiting at home for a video link is in some ways better…

Waiting at home for a video link is in some ways better than waiting at the doctor’s office, because you’re *home*, but there’s always that nagging suspicion that the email with the conference link has been lost and they’ve been waiting for you to connect for the last 10 minutes and will just move onto the next patient.

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It has now been an hour since the front office called to do check in over the phone. No message has arrived with the link to video chat with the actual doctor.

*yawn*

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So it turns out the zoom link was buried in a message from way back when I scheduled the appointment, and they marked me as a no show. Rescheduled with another doctor at the practice who has an open slot this afternoon.

The appointment info in their portal said that directions would be sent in a message…but not that they already had been.

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Wild and Domestic Mallards

Mallards, Pintails, and Allies

While some cities have only closed playgrounds and sports facilities at their parks, Manhattan Beach has closed them all outright. Polliwog Park has a large pond year-round that attracts ducks, geese and coots, plus gulls and pigeons stopping in. The park has been literally wrapped in caution tape for a month, and the ducks that normally stay in and around the pond have come out to the edges by the sidewalks where people can still walk by and feed them.

Domestic mallard on iNaturalist
Domestic mallard On iNaturalist
Wild mallard iNaturalist
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This is fascinating: A college theater production of a rarely-performed classical Greek tragedy was interrupted …

This is fascinating: A college theater production of a rarely-performed classical Greek tragedy was interrupted by the pandemic.

It’s been transformed into a one-night only automated performance featuring video clips of the actors (each sheltering in place at home), collected by TikTok and iMovie and assembled by the director to be shown in an empty theater.

No one on stage. No one in the audience. A tragic story no one will see.

#theater #drama

No one will ever see this play, and no actors are coming either. But the show will go on.

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Seeing a lot of these signs in front of restaurants

Seeing a lot of these signs in front of restaurants when I go walking in the neighborhood.

Most people have been really good at maintaining social distancing while out. The group in the distance seemed to all be one family.

Except for runners. Runners passing me from behind (where I can’t see them to move out of the way myself) have a 50/50 track record of dodging around vs. just zooming past at a distance of a foot.

kelsonv: Seeing a lot of thes

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This bike path was closed…

This bike path was closed in response to too many people going outdoors to the same places, creating the crowds that the closures of bars, restaurants and retail stores were trying to avoid in an effort to slow the virus spread. It doesn’t seem like it would be that hard to keep six feet apart along most of it. It runs through a fairly wide greenbelt under those transmission towers. Only two short sections have fences along the sides (as seen here) to block off a landscaping project. Which is probably on hold now.
This bike path was closed in response to too many people going outdoors to the same places, creating the crowds that the closures of bars, restaurants and retail stores were trying to avoid in an effort to slow the virus spread.

It doesn’t seem like it would be that hard to keep six feet apart along most of it. It runs through a fairly wide greenbelt under those transmission towers. Only two short sections have fences along the sides (as seen here) to block off a landscaping project. Which is probably on hold now.

On PixelFed.Social
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covid/california lockdown changes

Earlier in the week, a lot of people in the LA area tried to go hiking, or to the beach, or otherwise outdoors to the *same places*. Which ended up creating the crowds that the shutdown was supposed to prevent. 🤦‍♂️

So cities, counties and the state have closed a bunch more parks, beaches, hiking trails and bike paths. It’s still OK to walk in your neighborhood as long as you keep your distance, but destination-based going outdoors is mostly off the table now.

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There’s a large botanical garden up in the hills that’s still open – for now. They’ve instituted an appointment system to limit the number of people inside at a time. I’m debating trying to go this weekend while it’s still possible.

Last time I went for a photo walk or a hike in anything resembling more nature than a patch of weeds in someone’s lawn was March 8. It feels like a year ago.

On the plus side: still employed, didn’t give anyone else the flu, and don’t seem to have caught covid19 (yet).

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Found a note from one of the neighbor kids for the 9YO, written in chalk

Went out for a walk this morning. Found a note from one of the neighbor kids for the 9YO, written in chalk on the sidewalk in front of the house: “Hi ___! From ___”

Saw several more as I walked around the block. Apparently he wanted to say hi to all the kids he knows.

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Finally recovered enough from the flu to get out for a walk in the neighborhood (while that’s still an option).

Finally recovered enough from the flu to get out for a walk in the neighborhood (while that’s still an option).

I think this first bird (possibly a goldfinch?) was trying to practice social distancing, though the crow in the third photo seems to be doing a better job. The house finch was such a bright red that I thought it had to be another kind of bird until I looked at the photos.

#photo #birds #nature #finch #HouseFinch #goldfinch #crow

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Goldfinch(?) on iNaturalist
House Finch on iNaturalist