Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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David Weinberger wonders how many pixels you need in your digital photos and suggests a space-conserving approach. I'd probably take the opposite "all you can get" approach. Why? Bad experiences. I have too many old scanned images which were 'good enough' back then and aren't anymore, now that I have a larger screen. Or imagine you want to make a collage for a friend with images of them. You'll have to crop the images for that and always find that the bit you're interested in isn't as good as you want it to be.

With the low prices of CD-Rs these days, why not copy the images from the camera, name them, burn them and then reduce their quality to whatever is sufficient or adequate for their current use. There'll still be a backup copy and no regrets for whatever other use may come up. Just don't take any shortcuts. It will go wrong. Somehow reminds me of how we were keen on using the fastest MP3 encoders (I think AudioCatalyst, it was) back in the days when encoding an MP3 would take aged. The consequence – files sounding bad even to the untrained (my) ear.

Bliss: Man and dog have been loving the Iraqi information minister (currently down by popular demand) recently. Even our old-school old-world daily claims he's writing for them on their satire page yesterday (hilarious) and today (not all that funny).

Genres: There are many different kinds of music and people have constant problems classifying them. If you have tried to find a certain record in a record store sorting the records by 'genre' you'll know what I'm talking about as people hav different opinions on what genre certain bands are. And – of course – snobbery and even hatred between devotees of different genres is widespread, although hardly anybody knows what they're talking about. And if they are, different people are not talking about the same things.

This problem and me go back a couple of years when I challenged Jörg to tell me what Crossover is. Needless to say, I never got a satisfactory explanation, but through experience, I am now more at ease with that specific genre and know how to recognise (and judge) it. These days, many people are talking about Hardcore (uh-oh, I might lose my Google-existence now – rock'n'roll lifestyle anyone?) or Emo music, and Richard pointed me to a site 'explaining' Emo. While being informative, it also shows that all the sub-genres are not very meaningful if you're not really into that kind of music. Also, they've got a fair bit of hate mail for their site. Well done.

Crumbs: What to do if you see a web site say Your browser does not support cookies. OR Your browser/system is set not to accept cookies. Please change your settings and enable/accept cookies and refresh the browser to proceed. We apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused you.? What's the point of being able to turn off cookies in this case. Tarred and breadcrumbed, they shall be.

Cool: via Mark Pilgrim, a very good use of Flash, with an animation to Tom Lehrer's "The Elements". Gotta love it. DocSearls has a link to NASA films on eating and drinking in space. Once more, you just have to love NASA's websites. So much on there. Really good materials. The benefit of having state agencies with educational bits in their agenda.

Analysis: I just ran our server logs through analog and saw that the latest release of UnicodeChecker has been downloaded more than 1000 times by now. I guess the user base is growing slowly with time. I'd have expected an increase of our other applications going along with that, 'collateral downloads, so to speak. But that's not the case. Probably a consequence of Versiontracker keeping people from visiting the site. The percentage of Windows downloads of Ballerburg is down to about 30 (from 60) since my introduction of a special warning for them.

Favourite search terms for my blog are "Mando Diao" – even though I still didn't manage to praise their CD here (and its hit 121 on Google – are people desperate or what?), many things containing "lyrics", "ebay archives" (hm?) and five hits for the quite specific "threesome watch huge -cum -erotic -porn men -golf girlfriend" (#36 for that).

Single most popular browser for the whole of our site in the past month is Mozilla/4.7 (Macintosh; I; PPC). What's wrong with you people? Next I'm asked to take a stick and beat you. Then there's a lot of Googlebot coming (1400 hits – I thought it only came round once a month). Most popular browsers are MSIE, Netscape and Safari with a ratio of about 12:4:3. Two thirds of the Safari hits are v60 the rest is newer versions. No wonder Apple was annoyed. And what kind of program identifies itself as Java1.4.0_03? Most popular user agent for my blog. An aggregator? Enough curiosity.

Calculator: Screenshot of collapsed calculator.Everybody who ever used OS X's calculator knows that it is appallingly sluggish. This seems to be caused by it highlighting the buttons while you're using the keyboard. Pressing the window's 'maximise' button collapses it with the buttons hidden. It's small and quick then.

Mouse wheels: Following one of Matthew's comments I thought about my ambivalent relation to scroll wheels: I disliked every scroll wheel I used so far – be it the one on the mouse that came with my graphics tablet or those on other people's computers. Yet, I really like the 'mouse as scroll-wheel' feature in uControl. Why? I think it's not the scroll wheel per se I dislike but the fact that all the scroll wheels (I used) don't scroll. They don't move things around continuously, they only let them 'jump' around. I find that irritating. I think I once saw a tool that claimed to enable the very rightmost bit of your trackpad as a scroll wheel (no extra keys needed). But I can't find it anymore. Any leads?

Typos: There are couple of words I cannot type properly (besides the obvious typos here) 'test' is one of them (usually rendered as 'text'), 'Post' another (of course turning into 'Porst') and, most embarassingly 'Sven' (seen in lovely variations such as 'Sevn' or 'SVen').

April 12, 2003, 19:34

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Trackback “More is Better” from NSLog();:

I agree with Sven-S. Porst in his rebuttal of Dave Weinberger (who thought his 2.1 megapixel images were 830MB) on the issue of whether to…

April 13, 2003, 21:34

Trackback “2003/04/17 10:54” from 2lmc spool:

screen resolutions

April 17, 2003, 12:03

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