Mark Damon Hughes blogs about tech and everything else
90% legit, however the only canned craft beers I can get locally are Irish Death, Fremont Brewing, and Maui Brewing, none of which are that small and regional; you have to be canning a lot for cans to be cheaper than bottles.
Obviously it's a great honor to be sacrificed to Ninkasi.
Regular goofing-off workflow: Playing music in iTunes. Use Feedbin to find blog posts with video, song, or podcast I want to play. Open these in tabs. Pause iTunes with fn-F8. Click on the play button on a media page.
Except now, that's not what happens. The media control buttons will affect Safari, and iTunes keeps going. And since TunesArt doesn't work, I have no easy way to tell iTunes to shut up except to tab into it, find the pause control, then back to Safari where the video's still going.
I don't see any way in Safari or iTunes or System Preferences to tell it "media buttons only control iTunes". INFURIATING.
I've done almost all writing in BBEdit with MultiMarkdown for quite some time, but with a new version of Pages and new Mojave, thought I'd give that a try for a little writing project.
Dark Mode helps enormously at making it a "distraction-free" environment; the controls and background are much less obtrusive when actually writing. It performs well, never lags out, which is a problem with many programs when I get to typing fast.
The ability to customize a theme by just changing it, and then hitting Update and having it cascade thru the file, is very nice; it's like an easier CSS.
That's about the end of the good parts.
The default blank document theme of Helvetica Neue everywhere is so bland and monotype, I can't imagine even IVE-1138 writing in this and thinking it was acceptable. I miss when software shipped with some personality, because this is not it.
Apple's spelling checker has always been wonky, but it persistently objects to the use of "their". I felt like I was having a senior moment, "is that the right way to spell a word I've used millions of times?". It is. Pages is just a broken machine.
The actual controls are inscrutable. You can find a few basic styles on the style sidebar, but for example adding a superscript? Hidden in menu Format, Font, Baseline, Use Superscript which you then toggle on, type, toggle off. No way I can see to just select text and make it a superscript. You can change text colors easily, which I would rarely want to do, but changing background, say for zebra-striping a table, is hidden under Layout.
Altering a table's size and columns was unreasonably hard. I probably wasted 15 minutes fighting with this, before just copying the tables to BBEdit (which made them tab-delimited), pasting back, and setting tabstops for an unfrozen caveman-style typewriter table.
Making a document 2-column is under Layout, but setting page margins is under the Document sidebar, so adjusting layouts takes a lot of back and forth. When setting a page footer, I hit tab thinking it'd move to the next footer tab, but instead it added a lot of space and made it impossible to change the footer under it; I had to undo until it went away.
The toolbar has a laughably small selection of tools in it, no obvious way to make something like the Word markup ribbon; say what you will about how ugly that is, it's efficient for simple formatting.
I succeeded in writing a short, fairly attractive pamphlet, but it took me twice as long as with MultiMarkdown. I think it'd be very frustrating and slow to use for a longer book.
★★★☆☆
I'll have a way to release the project pretty soon.
This is pretty exciting.
So, I've been following this WoW Classic thing a while, since in 2016 when the Nostalrius, RIP and Elysium private servers let me play classic "vanilla" World of Warcraft again; I was frustrated by bugs, and basically couldn't use airships or ships because they'd drop me halfway in an out-of-level zone or the ocean, but it was interesting to have a version of WoW that didn't suck. As previously, I played an Undead Mage; that or Warlock seems most likely when Classic goes live. I am what I am, which is an evil sorcerous corpse.
Crendor and ClassiCast have done excessively exhaustive dialogues of what they want from Classic, which is a super-conservative "No Changes!". I'm much more moderate about this. If they add achievements (added in Lich King), pet battles (added in Pandaria), barbershop (added in Lich King), and use new models (added in Warlords of Draenor), I'd be fine with that; those improve the game without changing any balance. Dungeon/Raid Finder wouldn't bother me, I likely wouldn't use them, since I loathe PUGs (pick-up groups, not tiny inbred dogs), but they're a boon to people in no guild or a small guild that can't organize those things. The actual gameplay should be like the last patch of Classic, or the last patch of Burning Crusade when/if they add that content.
I'd totally be up for getting a "Virtual Ticket" for Blizzcon just to try the demo, except it's $50! That's like, a case of beer and a bottle of whiskey, which is a far more entertaining weekend (please drink more responsibly than me). Minecon on Saturday is free; it's not a real convention anymore (I went to Minecon Vegas back when the audience was much more adult). How the fuck does Blizzard justify $50 for some videos?! So anyway guess I'll just watch Youtubes of the demo when they come out.
During my long dark OS install time, I did something I never do: I browsed the iOS App Store, which is full of F2P garbage. Installed Lineage II, since that looked the least terrible, "played" up to level 15. It autoruns and autofights quests, there's nothing to actually do except pop open loot boxes, and you get free top-tier gear right at the start so if you open & equip it, you instantly win all fights.
Character customization consists of choosing from 3 hairstyles, and there's a shop to buy a couple more which look identical, and hair dyes; I was able to give my dude a dark purple ponytail instead of generic oatmeal-colored ponytail, but he otherwise looks like every other dark elf.
There's infuriating chat spam everywhere, and announcements of random people in zone winning loot boxes, scrolling over the main display; I turned off every notification and it was still there.
It's not even a fucking game. Uninstalled.
My standard for games isn't that high: Once a day I log into DanMachi: Memoria Freese (probably not much longer, I've got max level on all my main chars, can win PVP against everyone except the whales, no reason to keep going until S2 of the anime gets converted into game story, probably 2 years away), and spent a year playing Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp which has even less mechanics, but scratched my item-collecting/room-decorating itch. I'm perfectly fine with gachapon, as long as 1) It's fair with stats listed right by the button, 2) You can progress without paying real money; I'll pay some real money voluntarily if they don't force me, I delete and get angry if they try to rob me.
SIGH. When is Elder Scrolls: Blades coming out?!
Hit F12 and no Dashboard appeared. Had to run Dashboard.app manually to get it to exist, and then F12 worked again. Added it to my Login Items, dunno if that's needed but shouldn't hurt.
The total neglect of this incredibly useful widget screen is baffling to me. I have weather, Deliveries tracking, stocks, Organized calendar/appointments list, PCalc, and iStat on a single screen. Used to have a nice meditation/tea timer, but it got broken a couple OS updates ago.
Took forever to convert my drive, but seems functional in a single pass.
Dark Mode is kind of comically simplistic, especially the grey border around everything. It's better than the previous white room/transparency theme, but it shows that Apple designers don't understand how dark themes work yet. BBEdit's dark theme and Atom with Material UI look far more professional.
Apple's decided to nag me about disk space (about 60GB free):
Stack Overflow has some solutions.
TunesArt is crashing, and there's no update yet. Irritating. I miss Sophie's Coversutra.
Fucking Safari. In pursuing somewhat more secure extensions, they just blindly uninstalled all the extensions I used, including uBlock Origin. The only uBlock in the Mac App Store is ancient, tracks you, and sells whitelisting to fucking marketers. Criminal scumbag. I have Aral Balkan's Better Blocker installed, but that mostly attacks trackers, doesn't let me grab blocks of HTML per site to delete. FUUUUUCK.
Guess I should find out which mission-critical software I use isn't compatible now. And at some point rebuild MacPorts, that'll be fun/contribute to global warming.
Backed up. Mojave install started. Going from Sierra, skipping High-as-in-420 Sierra entirely because it didn't support Fusion Drive. Let's see if Apple got it right this time. Excited for Dark Mode to match my Atom theme, clothes, coffee, and outlook.
TES: Legends finally gets its new-developer update! It might be playable now!
Update on Steam … update again because that update needed an update … binary not found. OK, look in the local files, it's renamed "app.app", which is stupid. Click, error.
Current Status: TES Legends is currently undergoing maintenance.
I mean, it's Bethesda, so I'm lucky it didn't clip thru the floor and fall out of the world.
Maybe tomorrow.
And more from the same channel. A few tracks rock out, a few are too much jazz or disco for my taste, but mostly pretty great light JPop. I ain't always gotta be blasting industrial noise, you know?