Weeknotes 2023 W48: Ultra-wide failure

Quick bits:

• The feeling of burnout is still going strong. In fact, it seems to be getting clearer by the day how burnt out I really am.

• I missed the fact that last week­notes¹¹1 Week­notes 2023 W47: Closed in  was also my two-year week­notes anniversary. That’s quite a while already!

• I bought Things 3. Up until now, I didn’t have a central to-do app, and it’s been a pain. I believe this piece of software, which I got at a discount, will help. If all goes well, it will make My plaintext logging approach obsolete.

• As I’m writing this, Berlin is covered in a pretty carpet of snow. It’s sunny, and it’s so nice and bright!

• I added citation support to my web site, so now I can e.g. properly cite The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations²²2 Georges Polti, The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations (Franklin, Ohio: James Knapp Reeve, 1924).  by inserting [@Polti1924] in my text. The heavy lifting is done by citeproc-ruby.

My ultra-wide display broke. The LG 34WK95U now has a big column of dead pixels off-center right, just over two centimeters wide, with some discolored columns around it as well:

This LG 34WK95U display has given me a ton of trouble. For the money that I paid for it — €1150 — I expected far higher quality:

• The display crashes regularly, and the only way to fix it (that I’ve found) is to unplug the power cable and plug it in again. This is what I did right before the strip of dead pixels arrived.

• The power cable plugs in perpendicular to the back of the screen. This, along with the power cable requiring quite some force to plug in, makes it quite difficult to plug in the cable without exerting some force on the display itself. It’s possible that this caused the dead pixels. A better design would allow the cable to be plugged in from below, similar to how the Dell monitors do it.

• It takes a long time (about 10s) for the MacBook Air to recognize the display.

• This thing has severe image retention problems! If you leave a bright window on a dark background open for too long, you’ll be able to see the ghost of the window on the dark background for the next five to ten minutes or so. This is maybe the problem that has annoyed me the most.

• The left-hand and right-hand side of the display occasionally have different color temperatures (colder/bluer and warmer/redder).

• The brightness across the screen is not always consistent. On a dark background, moving the cursor across the screen occasionally lightens the background around the cursor.

As is hopefully clear from the problems I listed above, I cannot at all recommend the LG 34WK95U, despite its superficial niceness (ultra-wide with very high DPI at 5120×2160). My experience has been so bad that I’m wary of purchasing any LG products in the future.

What is next? I’ve ordered a replacement: the Dell U3423WE: also ultra-wide, though with a lower resolution (3440×1440). The downgrade in resolution is likely fine; my eyes aren’t good enough to justify sticking with such a high resolution. Besides, it seems that only LG makes these ultra-wide high-DPI screens, and, as I mentioned before, I am avoiding LG now.

Looking at alternative displays and screen resolutions made me realize that macOS is not resolution-independent. Until now, I had assumed it was, and just never looked into how to make use of it.

The only way to zoom in, or make UI elements bigger, is to switch to a different resolution. But most of the resolutions aren’t a good fit for the display, and will end up being blurry, because for sharpness, the selected resolution’s pixels need to map nicely onto the physical pixels.

In macOS’ System Setting, there is the option to change the text size (also called “preferred reading size”), but from my experience, many apps don’t honor that. Apps built with web tech (like Electron) have an advantage here, because zooming web apps is trivial and always works.

Entertainment:

• I (re)watched A Most Wanted Man.³³3 A Most Wanted Man, directed by Anton Corbijn, written by Andrew Bovell, John Carré and Stephen Cornwell (Lions Gate Films, Film4, Demarest Films, 2014).  Still good — I love intense thrillers like this.

• I am making progress with The Institute.⁴⁴4 Stephen King, The Institute (Scribner, 2019).  My heart’s not quite in it. I’m about halfway through it, and it really is a slow burn.

  I found what I believe is a grammatical error as well: in the book, the construction “for awhile” is used multiple times, which would need to be either “awhile” (no “for” and no space) or “for a while” (with “for” with space). But it’s not consistent: “for awhile” is used 22 times, and “for a while” is used once. Odd!

Links:

• Home (Olu Niyi-Awosusi): Olu writes about what it means to feel at home on the Internet, and I find it quite relatable!

• The Allergy to Uncertainty (Lawrence Yeo)

• No feature (iA, via via Jim Nielsen): Good take on AI. Quote: “A writing app that thinks for you is a robot that does your jogging.”

• Zabaleta’s Law (Russell Davies): A nice illustration of Goodhart’s law (“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”). I’ll need to remember this for when I’m back at work.

• Every Indie Game (Alasdair Beckett-King): Alasdair understands indie games.

Tech links:

• The beauty of finished software (Jose M. Gilgado): Hear hear! Nanoc has been getting infrequent updates lately, because it is pretty much finished.

• File over app (Steph Ango): It’s the philosophy I’ve been following!

• Examples of Great URL Design (Jim Nielsen)

• Testing in Go: Golden Files (Ilija Eftimov): I hadn’t heard of this approach to testing before, and it seems sensible. I might use this in Ruby going forward too.

• Why We’re Dropping Basecamp (Will Sexton for Duke University Libraries): Good!