The Art Of Not Asking Why

Rossmann is a New Yorker who started his own computer repair business and came to fame by creating videos showing and teaching Mac repairs while rambling about Apple screwing their customers. What makes Rossman different is that his repairs actually work (his business has been profitable for about a decade), his videos are highly educational, and his passion leads him to legal battles as a right-to-repair icon in courts around the country.

Yesterday, I watched and enjoyed his video “Piracy is completely justified":

Rossmann tends to get passionate and goes into long ramblings accompanied by strong language and finger gestures, so here’s the gist: He subscribed to Netflix to get access to a show in 4k on a new fancy TV set and ended up getting a much worse experience than he would if he just pirated the show. He provides proof showing that when he blocked his smart TV from accessing the internet (for which he has good reasons), he could only get 720p.

When I started watching Fallout on Amazon Prime the other day on my TV, I had to put up with wasteful Ads (I’m a New Yorker, and ads tend to be about cars and green grass). On my computer, on top of the ads, I had to turn off my VPN, and I couldn’t get rid of the black borders around the picture since it wasn’t cropped correctly for my ultrawide screen. I have iina, an excellent MPV-based player, which can fix the cropping issue while providing other helpful features, but that requires access to the show files, which are blocked and locked by Amazon, of course. If I were to download Fallout somewhere, I’d get the highest resolution experience, the right cropping and format for my screen, no ads, and probably better audio quality while at it.

Back to Rossman’s point: I’d get a better quality for pirating the show and not paying a dime. His clip further points out that even the service quality for pirated material today comes with better out-of-the-box experience and (surprisingly?) support than you’d get from Netflix, or in my case, Amazon. The bottom line is that you pay for a worse experience.

Going back and forth trying to build a blogroll page, which I talked about Tuesday. The issue is with creating a shortcode for it in Micro.blog’s Hugo code.

It should be a rather straightforward process, but it doesn’t work as it should. I’m waiting for more feedback.

The Blogroll is now up…!

I couldn’t sleep so I’ve made some tweaks to the blog in the Archive & Search page. Most of these are documented in the CSS file in my repository.

You might have caught it in the screenshot from my post yesterday: a little G icon at the top of my Safari browser. Well, it’s true; I paid for my first month. I ran out of the free 100 searches in a matter of days, hardly enough to give it a real test drive.

So far I have been busy setting it up and bugging their support (in Discord of all places). I am curious about their FastGPT, an integration of chatGPT into their search results, and I wasn’t sure how to get it to work. It’s good that I asked because I learned some important things.

Kagi’s support is quick and responsive. A staff person was chatting with me and spent time answering my grilling question about their somewhat misleading advertising (unlimited FastGPT seems to only apply to the $10 tier, but this is also true for the $5 tier - as long as you don’t run out of searches). It left me with a good impression at the end.

Kagi is complex and has many tweaks that are not obvious immediately. For instance, I learned that FastGPT is the same as the “Quick Answer” button available on the search results page in Kagi, and you can integrate it with your search seamlessly if you end your search query with a question mark, which will give you a summary from FastGPT right the top of the results. This is a smart way of integrating it quickly without shoving AI in your face like the way Microsoft does with Co-Pilot, which you need to actively turn off (and then it still sticks out annoyingly right under your search bar - but we can file it under “normal Microsoft behavior” and move on). It will take me some time to learn about things and see if it’s worth the investment.

If you have any tips or other blogs and videos that helped you catch on with Kagi quickly, feel free to share!

You know, Compact Tabs on Safari are not half bad. I remember they caused an uproar back when they were first introduced, when I wasn’t using a Mac nearly as much and when I did, I used Chrome.

Today, I turned Compact Tabs on while looking at my blog, and I like the look:

There are other things that are nice too, like the tabs shrinking and expanding depending on the number of them you have open, or the arrow keys for back and forward a page on the browser getting out of the way if you don’t have a page to go back or forward too. This is a nice design idea.

Sure, it takes some time to get used to, and I can imagine the tabs getting crushed together is not ideal for power users who have 100 tabs open, but Safari is not my workhorse: for that, I have Edge with its vertical tabs, which works well.

This is yet another thing that makes the switch from Arc easier.

New Day, a new reason to scratch my head. This time, User Agent Stylesheet on Safari. It overwrites my CSS and makes my title bold. (This is now fixed, thanks to Christopher Kirk-Nielsen! see below)

Here’s my website’s title on Firefox, Edge and Arc (Chromium-based):

… And here’s my website’s title on Safari:

The issue seems to be rooted in something called “User Agent Stylesheet,” which, from my understanding, is a user-browser-made CSS stylesheet that comes on top of the website’s CSS and overwrites it. My website is not the only place, by the way. Certain websites I visit also seem to have too much of a font-weight, though most are fine.

It makes sense to adjust certain visual elements to the user’s liking, and I can stand behind that. Your browser, your rules.

However, I didn’t know this thing existed. I have no idea why Safari thinks I’d like all <H1> tags in bold and where to find this setting to get rid of it.

The fix: define the desired font-weight.

Why: I did not define my bold-weight for the site’s header because it looked fine as long as I used Arc and Firefox. Safari is a bit special, and it decided that since this looks like a header, it should probably be bold. With the font-weight defined, it uses what it’s told.

As I’m working on a Blogroll page, I moved the search 🔍 function to the Archive page, where it belongs with the rest of the TAONAW stuff with help from @sod . It still needs some tweaking to look better there, but it works nicely. Go ahead, search away!

This is just a geek announcement that my exploration into FFMPEG the other day paid off: a screencast of 27 minutes and 2.8 GB shrunk to 75 MB. Yep. It’s a bit fuzzy but still very readable and easy to follow. I 💙 FFMPEG.

I wrote about trying out blogrolls last week, and the technicalities of how to customize blogrolls on Micro.blog are in my notes, in case you’re interested. I’m satisfied with how it looks on my archive page, and I want to create a dedicated blogroll page on the blog. But what’s a blogroll anyway?

Wikipedia explains it as “A list of other blogs that a blogger might recommend by providing links to them (usually in a sidebar list),” but I prefer indiweb’s explanation: “A blogroll is a list of other sites that you read, are a follower of, or recommend.” They have a dedicated page with more technicalities (follow the link above).

For me, a blogroll is a list of blogs (personal websites maintained by one person about their lives and what they do) that I visit often (I read every post they write or every other post) and publish content regularly (once a week at minimum). Popularity doesn’t really matter, though I find that most people I read regularly are pretty popular around these parts of the web: if you read my blog, you’re probably familiar with the “usual suspects” on my list.

In my opinion, that’s because these folks write often, and they write about interesting things. As a matter of fact, I have some form of undiagnosed dyslexia (I’m pretty sure of it), and I don’t remember people’s names easily. I’ve been following Kevin Quirk for months before I realized he’s actually one of the creators/admins of Fosstodon, believe it or not.

Right now I’m looking into creating a dedicated blogroll page on my blog. There are a few ways to go at this, and I’m asking around the Micro.blog support forum for some leads as well. We’ll see how it goes.

Helldivers 2’s So Big It’s Taken Over A Small Town

In a post to the Helldivers subreddit, the user—who goes by the username Kaleon—shares that they have bumped into people talking about Helldivers 2 all over the place. They have overheard everyone from the local butcher to their barista talking about the game, and apparently even seen a Helldivers bumper sticker in the wild.

This game is the biggest thing since WoW, if you’re asking me. It will get there. I am not sure why it’s that good and that addicting, but it is. Now if you excuse me, I gotta spread Democracy over here.

You know what. This is not a bad way to ask for tips. I’m enjoying this.