Weeknotes 2023 W49: Ultra-wide success

Quick bits:

• My burnout symptoms are slowly fading away, and I find myself able to think about work again. I’ll be back at work in a week’s time. I’ll need to have thorough conversations with my manager once I get back, so that this burnout problem can be addressed properly.

• It is cold and dark, but at least earlier this week, the snow reflected the sunlight and brightened things up. Still, the sub-zero temperatures made everything ice over, and out of necessity I had to skip most of my daily walks this week.

• This time of the year, with its sub-zero temperatures, makes me think again about a particular energy inefficiency: a cooled space (fridge) inside a heated space (kitchen) inside a cool space (outside). What a waste! It’s not the first time thinking about this, either: not even a year ago, I wrote about it in Week­notes 2023 W05: Fridge cleaning.

• My back and especially my neck have been stiff. So stiff. Maybe it’s the weather. It is probably the weather. Seems like the appropriate thing to assign blame to!

• When I paid for a coffee with Apple Pay the other day, I typed in “1” on the payment device, thinking that it would give a €1 tip. It did not: I tipped €0.01 by accident. Ouch. It felt like quite the accidental statement: I will tip, but literally the minimum I can. It took me hours to get over the embarrassment. I suppose I can never visit this coffee place ever again.

• I still don’t have a physical clock (been thinking about it on and off since I wrote about it in Week­notes 2023 W10: Booklet) but iOS 17’s new StandBy mode turns my iPhone into a clock, and it’s all I need. It’s so useful and so well-designed!

I created a “night” theme for my web site, inspired by the new iOS StandBy mode. It should be quite nice in dark environments. Give it a try: select it from the theme picker at the bottom right.

Creating the theme was remarkably easy. My web site is well maintained and making changes to it is pretty straightforward. I got the idea for a “night” theme one morning, and the implementation went live just after breakfast.

Because of the way I’ve built my web site, the theme also applies to all vector images (including the site logo), which automatically adjust color to match. It just works:

My new display, the Dell U3423WE, has arrived, and it’s mostly good. It is a good replacement for the broken LG 34WK95U, which I talked about last week.¹¹¹ See Week­notes 2023 W48: Ultra-wide failure. 

What I like:

• It’s not broken. Haha. Unlike the old display. Obviously this is good.

• It is a slightly curved display, which I find really makes a good difference.

• It has proper split screen support (or “picture-by-picture”). The old LG display also supported it, but it required at least one HDMI input; it couldn’t do Thunderbolt and DisplayPort at the same time. On the old LG display, the HDMI connection somehow didn’t support the native resolution either, making it pretty useless.

• It is very sharp. (It’s kinda in the brand name: Dell UltraSharp.)

What I don’t like:

• The resolution is lower than I’d like. I knew this beforehand — I went from 5120×2160 to 3440×1440 — but I’m still surprised. The difference is noticeable; the pixels are visible. The sharpness of the screen might even be a drawback. It’s something I’ll for sure get used to over time.

• Color reproduction is generally good, but goes way off when turning up the contrast too much. It’s not an issue as long as you keep the contrast well below 100% — I keep mine at 75% and it looks great.

• The UI renders considerably smaller on the native resolution, 3440×1440; this resolution is ever so slightly too high for my eyesight. I find myself using whatever UI or text zoom functionality apps provide, but it’s not a great solution.

  I am still annoyed at macOS not having a resolution-independent interface. Scaling the entire macOS UI up by 10% would solve a ton.

I made a loaf of bread! I hadn’t done that in quite a while.

Strangely, while it tasted great as usual, I did not enjoy it as much as before. Perhaps I am falling out of love with bread. Out of loaf with bread.

Entertainment:

• I watched season 1 of Only Murders In The Building.²²² Only Murders in the Building, written by Steve Martin and John Hoffman (Rhode Island Ave. Productions, Another Hoffman Story Productions, 40 Share Productions, 20th Television, 2021).  It’s surprisingly good: usually I am not a fan of odd genre combinations like this (comedy and thriller), but in this show it works. I’m on to season 2 now.

• Terminator: Dark Fate³³³ Terminator: Dark Fate, directed by Tim Miller, written by David S. Goyer, Justin Rhodes and Billy Ray (Paramount Pictures, Skydance Media, Twentieth Century Fox, 2019).  is good. Not particularly groundbreaking, but it’s a straightforward and entertaining action movie.

• I’m making slow progress with The Institute.⁴⁴⁴ Stephen King, The Institute (Scribner, 2019). 

Links:

• Plagiarism and You(Tube) (hbomberguy): Almost four hours?! Well, it’s worth watching nonetheless.

• HTML: The Programming Language: Cursed!

• The Embrace of Agency (Lawrence Yeo): Still not sure whether I want to call myself a “writer” just yet.