I recently downgraded my screen - my ThinkPad is a 1920x1200 display - so I think John Gruber has got this a little wrong. There is much more to a screen than resolution, and even relatively low-resolution screens now look much better than they used to. It's not just about the number of pixels.
Dreadful misogynist and racist Vox Day, AKA Theodore Beale, has apparently lost $1m to a crypto scam while trying to crowdsource money for a right-wing superhero film. Just think, only a few years ago, that sentence would have drawn a blank look from everyone. What times we live in.
In case you're not familiar with Vox Day's oeuvre, he attempted to manipulate the ballot for the 2015 Hugo Awards to ensure only right-wingers got on the list and was a prominent supporter of Gamergate. He's an all-around piece of shit, and losing money to a scam couldn't happen to a nicer person. If you want to check out the deep cuts of his awfulness, We Hunted The Mammoth has you covered.
Chris Hynes (via Michael Tsai) tells the story of Apple Mail's first importers. I love stories like this.
Michael, by the way, is the creator of SpamSieve, which is still the best way to filter out spam on any Mac. I bought my copy when it first came out in (I think) 2006, and I am still getting updates now, which goes well above and beyond what anyone could reasonably expect from commercial software.
The cost of YouTube Premium's family plan is getting massively hiked up. Well, when you have a monopoly on video, that's what you can do. Of course, it's still "free with ads" if you want to put up with incredibly intrusive privacy-violating tracking.
Completely unrelated, an extension to gPodder allows you to subscribe to YouTube channels and automatically download new content, where you can watch it locally. If you do this, though, support creators by subscribing directly to them -- most creators have Patreons or other methods of giving them money while bypassing the egregious middleman that is YouTube.
One of Microsoft's cleverer things on Windows is creating both Windows Subsystem for Linux -- which lets you run Linux apps -- and Windows Subsystem for Android. You can guess what that does. There's now a public development roadmap for Android app support on Windows. What's nice about it is how it fills in gaps in the Windows app ecosystem, such as having a good Kindle book reader on Windows tablets. It's much more useful than the equivalent in the Apple world, where iPad apps can run on Apple Silicon Macs, mostly because the Mac app ecosystem is now so much strong than Windows.
Of course, it's out of date now -- things move pretty fast on Brexit Island -- but John Lanchester's article on "Thatcher Larping" is still an excellent read. You subscribe to the LRB, don't you? You should.
It's interesting looking through this piece by Cory from 2010 about why he wasn't going to get an iPad. I think some of it's proved wrong, but some are pretty prescient. In particular, I think the idea that the iPad's user interaction model was all about consumption was correct (although I didn't agree with this at the time). Enterprising users and developers have pushed the platform to be focused on creation too: Matt Gemmell writes and publishes novels on his. But it's pushing and hacking and so on. Apple has finally acknowledged that the hardware is capable of much more than that, but it is now struggling to retrofit a more powerful and creator-focused user interface on it -- and I think iPadOS 16 is the point when the bough breaks. Apple's best option would be to make the iPad more open, of course (at least as open as the Mac) but I get the feeling there is still something of a religious war internally about doing that.
Paul Thurrott has reviewed the ThinkPad X13s, the first ThinkPad running on an ARM processor. It neatly illustrates the biggest issue with ARM outside Apple: battery life declines as soon as you push performance up to levels comparable to Intel. Paul was getting only six hours from this machine, which is terrible.
Terence Eden writes some good advice about how to write a literature review. Having had to do one, I wish I had read this before I did it. It would have saved me a lot of pain.
As I mentioned yesterday, Ubuntu 22.10 is out; of course, I've upgraded. I had to reinstall Wine (the Wine version in Ubuntu's repo's is ludicrously old) as 22.10 removed my hand-installed Wine 7. Thanks guys. And Ubuntu is really pushing Snap still. I am not religious about this, but I want Snaps to be at least up to date, which is probably one reason they have posted on the Steam snap.
