Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

Computer's haunted? Always has been.

Sun, 01 Sep 2024 21:29:43 GMT

Last week my mom and I determined that I should find something other than Skype to use for us to talk because we're both finding it clunky and unsatisyfing lately. The last few weeks my video hasn't shown up for them (which I consider a blessing but which my mom always complains and sulks about) and there are regularly problems on their end which I think are more about their resistance to learning anything about how to use their iPad than they are about Skype itself, but Skype probably isn't helping.

I promptly forgot about this, asked some people on the internet a couple days ago and got unsuitable answers (no I will not be using Facebook Messenger or Signal for this!), forgot about it again until this afternoon, and of course D mentioned an easy, familiar and obvious (or should have been obvious) solution to me.

But then my camera was still misbehaving. And even trying the built-in webcam on my laptop rather than the one plugged into my external monitor/USB dock made no difference.

D got involved and found out several mysterious things, and ended up concluding that external webcam was not only hecked up, which he'd suspected for a while, but was also so cursed that once it had been plugged in it didn't even allow the built-in webcam to work.

This is bizarre but consistent with work buying me the most random IT peripherals -- to be fair they don't need to care about what the webcam is like on Linux because I use Windows for work. But since I just replaced a keyboard that was losing its space bar functionality, and a new mouse is being ordered at the same time as the webcam because the scroll wheel is intermittently failing, I am seeing a pattern here.

After all this work and fretting, of course I didn't hear from my parents at all. I could have spent my evening doing something fun!

But it is nice to feel like my computer has a chance of being less haunted soon.

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[311/365] new laptop!

Sun, 07 Nov 2021 21:42:33 GMT

I am typing this on a new laptop! New to me, it's refurbished. As an early birthday present it's a pretty brilliant one. It's tiny and versatile while my old one was heavy and cumbersome.

I'm trying out KDE for some accessibility features I wanted to try but a) I'm not sure it does any more and b) I am really struggling with the interface being different to what I'm used to. I should probably stick with it longer than a few hours before losing all hope.

Ive got new hardware to get used to too, and why are all keyboards different? why is touchpad input so consistently inconsistent? will I ever get used to the fact that this is my first laptop with a touchscreen (I also kinda hate touchscreens but it will help with my constantly-losing-the-cursor problem I think??)?

Maybe it is just too many new things at once.

I'm still delighted with the laptop though; the old one was chosen for me by uni so I didn't get any say in it and I always hated it. This could not be more different.

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[347/366] rhubarb!

Sat, 12 Dec 2020 17:05:01 GMT

Here's a fun game I got from jesse_the_k

Comment on this entry saying Rhubarb!, and I'll pick three things from your profile interests or tags.
Write about the words/phrases I picked in your journal and link back here. Spread the love

The three I got were

linux
narrativium
extelligence

This shows that I haven't looked much at or changed my list of interests in quite some time, probably a decade or so? The three I've been asked to talk about are all things I was keen on in my twenties.

Linux will probably have been on this list since I first started having a LiveJournal back in 2002. That was around the time I started using it, my boyfriend having made it sound so appealing. It was Slackware in those days, mostly maintained by him too but I did learn a lot (including how many problems could be fixed by googling error messages and copying stuff I didn't always understand into the terminal.

I went to precisely one local LUG (Linux user group) meeting in college, where I met someone from a nearby town who was amazed to find a girl who used Linux. I still tend to get along pretty well with Linux people (technically currybeer is part of manlug, Manchester's Linux users group) but I am not really one. Partly I drifted away from knowing even as much as I did (which was never a ton) when Linux got a little easier to use (I switched to Ubuntu pretty early on) and when I started living with Andrew who finds this all a lot easier than I do so it seems most efficient to outsource that.

I'm back to using Linux again after years of Windows for uni, and it's nice to see the inbuilt accessibility options like magnification and screenreading have improved a lot since the last time I bothered to look, some years ago.

I wouldn't put Linux on a list of things I'm interested in today, to some extent because it gives an inaccurate impression of what I actually know or talk about, but partly because it also attracts "fossbros" -- FOSS as in an acronym for free and open-source software, a thing not limited to Linux but overlapping with it, and bro as in the most pejorative sense of the word. To the point where several people I know in Mastodon see someone mentioning Linux in their profile as a reason not to accept a follow request or engage in conversation with someone. Fossbro culture thinks all problems can be solved with their preferred software and doesn't value things it doesn't know as much about, such as any kind of social or cultural problem which it will inevitably overlook by failing to appreciate that there are aspects of life that are not best understood by a white, male, abled, cishet subgroup.

Narrativium and extelligence both reference the Science of Discworld series of books, which I loved so much when I first read them.

Narrativium was such an important idea to me that the first time we dated (and occasionally even afterward) Stuart would call me "narrativium girl." They articulated a power of storytelling that has enchanted me ever since. Narrativium is the element that permeates everything else and makes stories work.

Dragons breathe fire not because they have asbestos lungs, but because that is what dragons do. Heroes only win when outnumbered, and things which have a one-in-a-million chance of succeeding often do so.

People will often believe a good story rather than anything else, which I thought was exciting and endearing in my twenties and am finding increasingly infuriating and terrifying in my thirties.

Extelligence is, as you might guess, contrasted with intelligence. The writers of these books, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, say that if intelligence is the knowledge and cognitive processes in an individual's brain, extelligence is the information available to a culture that can be readily accessed on external media, be that folk songs or nursery rhymes or books or video games or whatever.

One of Cohen and Stewart's contributions is the way they relate the individual to the sum of human knowledge. From the mathematics of complexity and game theory, they use the idea of phase space and talk about extelligence space. There is a total phase space (intelligence space) for the human race, which consists of everything that can be known and represented. Within this there is a smaller set of what is known at any given time. Cohen and Stewart propose the idea that each individual can access the parts of the extelligence space with which their intelligence is complicit.

In other words, there has to be, at some level, an appreciation of what is out there and what it means. Much of this ‘appreciation’ falls into the category of tacit knowledge and social and cultural learning. As an example, a dictionary may contain definitions of many words. But only those definitions that can be understood by the reader.

I liked this idea of connecting people to the collective potential of what their society could offer them, and what they could offer it. I included "intelligence" on my interests list, for basically snobby reasons (I was a horrible snob in my twenties...and before...and no doubt since, though I'm trying to be better about that), so I wanted "extelligence" to be there too.

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[293/366] Hyperlegible

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 19:07:37 GMT

The other day, mother_bones told me about a "hyperlegible" font the Braille Institute in the USA has developed. Even in my day of Terrible Computer, I managed to download it and change the font on Firefox. I was pretty impressed: refreshing the page made it look like the words had popped out at me.

Legibility is so interesting to me. It's more art than science: what's more legible for one person will be The Worst for someone else, and that's especially true for visually impaired people. It's really interesting (for me, anyway) to read about what they changed and why: recognizability, differentiation, exaggeration, removing ambiguity, so much thought went into increasing distinctiveness and recognition.

Anyway, seeing me struggle with the terrible computer inspired diffrentcolours to put Linux back on it for me, so my brief university-mandated foray with Windows is basically over! (I've kept it around since I won't get the thousands of pounds of software back again and some of it is actually useful, but I'm not actually in need of it very often.) We had a look at the accessibility stuff these days (which turns out to maybe be a little more impressive on his KDE setup than my current one which is GNOME...) and it really has come on a long way: definitely enough to be worth switching to for everyday stuff. I'm impressed at how well magnification is integrated; I haven't used the screenreader a lot yet but it seems okay). And it was actually only about as annoying to change the system fonts on GNOME as it was on Windows! So now everything is nice and legible for me here. I'm just sad I can't figure out how to use this font on my phone.

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/home/holly

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 13:26:17 GMT

Today I am finally able to transfer the little life I'd created on my old laptop -- the music and essays and Firefox settings and desktop wallpaper, everything -- to this new laptop I got a whole month ago.

As I type on the new one, i watch the old one out of the corner of my eye, reveling in the rare-for-me pleasure of watching lines of text scroll up and off the screen as stuff happens with quiet efficiency and blessedly little input from me.

Neat little orderly lines listing the items of my home directory, which -- however quirky or haphazard or forgotten or invisible I may find them -- are reassuringly linear and equal here in the terminal window.

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