#Venus and #Jupiter #conjunction! Right now!
#stargazing #astronomy #planets #BlueSky #photo
Followup: I got a better photo using the good camera and tripod after I got home
Tag: TODO: Consolidate
Microforests LA!
Their guide to planting #microforests in the LA area is live!
https://www.lamicroforests.com/
If I lived somewhere where I had a big enough yard and could choose how to use it, I would be all over this.
#nature #LosAngeles #gardening
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/
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.
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.)
None of these complaints is inherent to the structure or functionality of Twitter…
Picking up on this again briefly:
None of these complaints is inherent to the structure or functionality of Twitter, Instagram, Facebook etc. They’re deliberate UI design choices to optimize for the company’s targets. A third party client could bypass it all (which of course is why they don’t allow those).
Similarly, Mastodon and Pixelfed and so on *could* implement UI like this, but they don’t. The project goals aren’t engagement at all costs. And each instance can have its own goals.
Someone could add an ATTENTION-GRABBING EXPERIENCE on top of the Mastodon or Pixelfed code.
And those of us connecting with different software wouldn’t be affected.
Or they could write an app that adds it! Though I’m not sure many people would consider that an improved experience.
Then again, people do use Yahoo mail. 🤷♂️
IMO there are two sensible ways to handle granular push #notification preferences:1. Use the system’s …
IMO there are two sensible ways to handle granular push #notification preferences:
1. Use the system’s per-app settings for all of it. (Tusky does this, even putting your per-account preferences in the system UI)
2. Use the app’s settings for all of it, and let the system just be an on/off toggle for what you’ve chosen in the app (like it was before the system had UI for it)
And while I’m griping about Instagram, why the heck are the detailed notification preferences split …
And while I’m griping about Instagram, why the heck are the detailed notification preferences split between the app and the system notification UI?
That’s terrible design.
Well, if it’s intended for usability, anyway.
If your goal is to make people see more notifications, though… 🙄
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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…
I confused the iNaturalist identification AI with some random snapshots
I confused the #iNaturalist identification #ai with some random snapshots from a trip up into the mountains a few years back.
Normally it’s pretty good at narrowing things down to a family or genus. In this case, I was aiming for scenery and family snapshots at the time, so they weren’t exactly ideal for plant IDs even cropped.
It’s on the level of “A flock of sheep on a hill” for an empty landscape. I wanted to ask it how many giraffes were in the picture!
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.
Telling Firefox to open Lagrange for Gemini links
Response to a question about telling Firefox to open Lagrange for Gemini links
I don’t remember exactly how I set that up, but I’ll see if I can configure a fresh profile and write it down this time!
What I remember: I either pasted a gemini: url into the Firefox URL bar or clicked on an actual hyperlink to a gemini: url and it asked what application to open it with.
Firefox also has a per-website security setting on whether a website is allowed to open links in other protocols.
Yeah, that’s basically it. Paste the URL into Firefox, choose the application (either from the list or from the file picker), and check the “always…” box. Then gemini: links in web pages will open the confirmation box and you can click always-allow per site.
(It won’t work on Mastodon, unfortunately, because Mastodon doesn’t turn gemini: URLs into links.)
I’ll write this up on the #gemini capsule too!
—
Here it is: opening #gemini links in your preferred client from Firefox.
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.
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.
On Wandering.shop
Expanded on K2R: Ya-who? Flickr and Tumblr Were Lucky!
Overheard during Zoom Mad Libs…
Overheard during Zoom Mad Libs:
Teacher: “I need an expression.”
Student: (unintelligible)
Teacher: “An *appropriate* expression.”
Overheard: “Alexa, tell ____ I’m not talking to her!”
Overheard: “Alexa, tell ____ I’m not talking to her!”
Kid did NOT want to log onto school this morning. He eventually did, but he …
Kid did NOT want to log onto school this morning. He eventually did, but he was really mad about it. I just walked by his room and he’s taken the cardboard stand-up of Spark that he & his mom made for Pokemon Go fest and set it up to block the door like he’s guarding the entrance.
Fortunately, Spark is considerate enough to wear a face mask per pandemic recommendations.
Of course my 2000th observation posted to iNaturalist would be the Goodfeathers…
Of course my 2000th observation posted to iNaturalist would be the Goodfeathers…
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/58559107
