Geek on Two Wheels

My good friend Allen over at antipode has recently decided to say a few words about the new Firefox 3 address bar.

I, for one, agree with him. I love it, and have gone to relatively great lengths to keep it.

An obvious rebuttal to the nay-sayers is that URLs don’t always share the same prefix as what is actually available at the address. And, although I’ve become trained to memorize the former instead of the latter, it always annoyed me that I had to.

gianttip? cad-c? apfo? No, what I want are “Order of the Stick“, “Ctrl-Alt-Del Comic“, and “One Piece Manga“.

In this day and age, I don’t want to care that the URL is moofs.com instead of moof.com, or .net, or actually baz.co.tv/content/random/moof—what I want is “Clarus the Dogcow“, and it’s about time computers started doing what we mean instead of what we say.

Old habits are hard to break, but there are some habits worth breaking. Should we all go back to driving flywheel-less manual transmission cars with no power steering, too? (Me, I prefer paddle shifters)

Due to a rather untimely misfortune, I am currently shopping around for a new laptop to replace my beautiful yet bricked Thinkpad R51. Naturally, I’m opting for another Thinkpad, as I am horribly addicted to their solid construction, excellent reliability (not talking about the power module: la la la la la, not listening!) and fairly solid Linux support.

Unfortunately, IBM has sold off its PC division to Lenovo, and, as is usually the case with such acquisitions, the overall service suffers. In this case, the culprit is Lenovo Canada’s website.

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I just can’t seem to get enough of this Nintendo DS thing.

Not moments ago, I noticed that the charging light on my borrwoed DS is turned off, no doubt indicating that the device is now fully charged, just waiting for me to pick it up and play another few rounds of Meteos.

Now, this meaningful indicator thing may not appear to be a big deal, but I’m sure we’ve all had our share of recharging devices where we, the user, had to spend effort to find out whether or not that device still needed charging. For example, the charger that came with my used cellphone has an red LED which turns on when it is plugged in, regardless of the amperage that is actually going through the thing: a completely useless indicator, other than perhaps seeing if your wall plugs are indeed giving you power.

The DS, on the other hand, only needs to be glanced at. If the orange light is on, it’s charging; if it’s off, it’s good to go.

Kudos Nintendo—kudos.

Joel Spolski seems to be writing a series on usability, and the first draft of the first article, Introduction to Great Design, went up today. Should hopefully prove to an useful or at least interesting read.

Turns out setting the PPI setting in X properly does a great deal in improving the consistency of text sizes while browsing the IntarWeb. I should have taken the effort to do this when I first started tweaking xorg on my laptop.

goSFU is no longer a garbled mess of 3-pixel-high text, as well as a few other sites I visit.

Some websites, on the other hand, have began to display huge texts, much to my bewilderment.

This will likely change my attitude towards web design yet again…