I've been watching this dev build in "public" (on Discord) for nearly a year now and it's great to see the final product finally launch. If you've played Slow Roads before, and enjoyed the concept, you might like the new, massively overhauled version.
It's got to the point where I now don't buy anything off Amazon because I believe that if I give them any CC details they will try and charge me for AWS services I'm not using. You think I'm joking.
Your comment made me wonder if any of my old AWS accounts were charging me after I shut everything down. Come to find out they have been charging me ~$2 for the last 24 months.
Honestly working as a back-end Web dev is kind of a dream job just because you have these stack apps that are super fast, super stable and do exactly what they say they do. Nginx and PostgreSQL are typical examples, and I consider Redis one as well.
I love this video for a number of reasons besides just general coolness. Specifically, the problem of the excess voltage caused by the oxide "skin" - and its solution (whack some fat resistors in there) - demonstrates a few really curious and often difficult to explain elements of engineering really well:
1. The problems you end up having won't be the ones you expect to have.
2. It's easy to shy away from burning time on better diagnostics, but the amount of time you'll waste by not doing so is often greater.
3. Sometimes you need to step out of the room and talk it over with a colleague who's not working on the same project.
The fact that this same problem plagued every iteration and it wasn't until it was fixed that the project turned from "banging head against wall" to "how cool is that" just adds so much to the video.
I love this and I am so pleased he got it working.
A friend of a friend is a forensic linguist. It's her party trick! When she meets someone for the first time she'll chat to them for a bit then suddenly say where they're from. She can often get it down to the individual suburb, if from UK, or the specific region of another country. She can also tell you where you moved from and to, where you studied, etc. Suffice to say fun for everyone involved.
The idea of software being eternal is rubbish, not least because software isn't its code but its "identity" which comes down entirely to the actual use of language (including all the branding and marketing, all the live demos and discussions over drinks after conferences).
The words "Napoleon Bonaparte" have a referent in the real world, just not in the present - does Napoleon Bonaparte exist? Usually we instead say he "existed".
Incidentally, this is why I agree with the author that criteria 1 and 4 aren't actually necessary for non-existence of a piece of software. Even if lots of people, authors or otherwise, remember a piece of software, the software is gone once it can no longer be said to be used anywhere. In that case we would say that the software "existed".
To be fair to the author, I actually think desktop icons is a problem that no desktop manager has ever solved, and I think the reason is because it's not solvable in a user friendly way. The problem is that desktop icon arrangement can mean different things to different users: some people are just arranging their icons in a one dimensional list that's wrapped, while others are arranging theirs in clusters (top left is for system, top right is for documents, bottom left is for personal/games etc), while yet others are arranging theirs in columns and so on - how these are supposed to change on resolution change is different per each use case. When I switched to dwm on desktop I felt freed from a problem I had literally just always had.
If you let the user arrange their icons in the preferred shape, for each screen resolution they use, and save that, the problem is solved. As the article describes.
The bug described in the article was the icons being moved around without user input, and then their wrong/unwanted location saved as "user preferred icon arrangement". Which sounds like an obvious bug in hindsight.
> If you let the user arrange their icons in the preferred shape, for each screen resolution they use, and save that, the problem is solved.
Users normally place their icons using a given, single resolution, so that would only give you one initial saved icon position. You need some heuristic when the user first changes resolution with that icon present on the desktop.
My screen realestate changes several times a day. My work daily driver is a laptop that has a built in screen of a particular resolution. In the office it plugs into a dock with one monitor that has a different resolution than the built-in display. When I take it home and plug it into a dock it has two external monitors of different resolutions.
Icons need arrangements in each combination of monitors, resolutions, and scaling. So that when I'm sitting at my desk in the office I have a consistent experience of icon location. When I'm at home and have different screen layout, I can have a different icon layout suited to that screen layout and everytime I plug the dock in at home I should get the same arrangement that I had yesterday. If there's a new icon that has never been placed in a particular desk setup, drop it anywhere.
> My screen realestate changes several times a day.
Does it change often enough that an absurd like 20s update-time would impact you?
Anyway, the article has plenty of reasons to save more than 1 resolution as "user-defined positions". But not a lot of them, probably 2*n^2 for n monitors is more than enough.
Oh wow I get it now - this is the proto-yo-yo. When I was a teenager a toy called the "yoho diabolo" had its moment in the sun as the must-have of the day. Of course, diabolos are much older than that - "yoho" was presumably a brand that figured out how to sell them to first decade era teenagers. I wonder if these string tops come back into fashion like that periodically.
I actually quite like it. Really clean, easy to see all the important elements. Lovely clear legible monospace serif font.
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