Ambient Irony

I'm in the future. Like hundreds of years in the future. I've been dead for centuries.
Oh, lovely, you're a cheery one aren't you?

Tuesday, August 30

Smoothmouse + BetterSnapTool

I got myself a very nice iMac late last year - Core i7, 32GB RAM, Radeon 395MX, 1TB SSD, and the 5k Retina HDR display. It's just about the best desktop PC you can get.

However... The mouse and keyboard handling in MacOS sucks compared to Windows. MacOS only has mouse acceleration control; the base tracking speed is fixed and very slow.

That means that you have to keep picking up and moving your mouse because the speed at which it tracks is variable. And since the menu is always at the top left of the screen, you tend to move your mouse more than on Windows, which just exacerbates the problem.

Also, my workflow 99% of the time involves two windows side-by-side. On Windows, setting that up is just a keystroke; on the Mac it's just a complete mess. You can do it, but it's unnecessarily complicated and hides the menu bar and the dock, so the moment you set it up you end up hiding the tools you normally use all the time.

After trying a couple of other options (Steermouse and MagicPrefs) I gave Smoothmouse a try. It has an option that says "make my mouse work like Windows" which... Makes your mouse work like Windows.

There's another couple of apps called BetterTouchTool and BetterSnapTool. BetterTouchTool does a whole bunch of stuff for mouse and keyboard management; BetterSnapTool only handles snapping windows based on mouse or keyboard commands (which are completely configurable).

BetterSnapTool is on the Mac App store, costs just a few bucks, and works perfectly. It's eleventy billion times better than the idiot crap that Apple came up with.

I've been tending to use Kei, my (older, slower) Windows machine instead of Taiga, my (shiny, new) iMac because of these niggling UI issues. And now they're fixed.

The only remaining issue is that I'm running VMWare Fusion on Taiga with Windows 10 and Ubunutu 16.04 instances. Each VM has 8GB of RAM allocated, meaning that half my memory is gone the moment I boot up.

The 2015 iMac supports up to 64GB of RAM - but because Apple idiotically used DDR3 rather than DDR4 (even though DDR4 is supported by the CPU), upgrading beyond 32GB costs about three times as much as it should, so I've been putting that upgrade off.

But apart from that, it's pretty good. I just hit Ctrl-left-arrow or Ctrl-right-arrow and it goes Zip! Full-screen Windows 10. Zip! Full-screen Ubuntu. Zip! Back to MacOS.

Meanwhile, Smoothmouse and BetterSnapTool both get the coveted Does Not Suck award.

Update: Can't get VMWare Fusion to use both monitors. Or, well, it does, but the guest OS is mirrored across them at a resolution selected by throwing chickens at a bingo card.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:14 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1 It's time for Apple to give up the single menu bar. It made sense when the GUI (and computers in general) was a new concept to the masses and screens were small. It doesn't make sense on 21+" retina displays in 2016 when even my grandparents in their late 80s use smart phones. Worse, Apple doubled down on the menu bar in El Capitan by forcing it on to every display and hiding the control to remove it from secondary displays under "Mission Control" with a check box titled "Displays have separate spaces". WTF Apple?

Posted by: Ken in NH at Wednesday, August 31 2016 01:51 AM (GYeaQ)

2 Yep. On a notebook, and maybe even on the 21" model, a single menu bar isn't that much of an issue. On a 27" screen, it's a constant nuisance.

One thing I like is that Microsoft Office for Mac blatantly ignores the Apple UI guidelines and gives each window its own menu bar, the way Doug intended.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, August 31 2016 02:16 PM (PiXy!)

3 Apple had a good point originally about the placement of the menu bar. The top of the screen is prime UI real estate, because you whip the mouse at it, and it will stop at the menu bar (On Windows, you end up in the title bar, or nowhere useful.). With the Mouse Acceleration, a quick, hard gesture could send it there.

Having the menu bar attached to the inside of a window that can be any size takes a lot more care and precision on the part of the user to hit the target.

On the other hand, Windows really screwed up with some of their text box handling routines. Forex, on the Mac, clicking in the blank space below the paragraph will take your cursor to the end of the text. On windows, it will take you some point in the middle of the last line above the mouse's X position. And hitting the arrow keys while there's a text selection did much more sensible things (And don't get me started on Windows and auto-extending text selections in ways you don't want to when you're holding shift.... Maddening!)

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, September 01 2016 12:13 PM (5Ktpu)

4 On a small screen, and particularly on a small low-resolution screen like the original 512x342 Mac, a single unified menu is the only sane choice. (The Amiga did the same thing.)

On a 27" 5120x2880 screen, though, it's ridiculous, and the mouse acceleration settings that you need to make it at all accessible screw up every other mouse function.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, September 01 2016 03:38 PM (PiXy!)

5 To put it another way, as monitor sizes have grown, the top of the screen has remained beachfront property... But now it's beachfront in Alaska. Which... Oh, hey, $35,000 for 20 acres...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, September 01 2016 03:43 PM (PiXy!)

6 Yeah, they may as well right click and give you a pop-up of the application menu....

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, September 02 2016 10:59 AM (5Ktpu)

7 Why not send email to the customer service? May be they can help you solve the problem?

Posted by: casinocheating at Friday, September 02 2016 03:26 PM (msUZZ)

8 Your new spammer hit me, too.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Saturday, September 03 2016 05:26 AM (+rSRq)

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Saturday, August 27

Dear Netflix

Glitter Force is not a "Netflix Original". It's a bastardised version of season nine of Pretty Cure.

Speaking of which, Pretty Cure is up to season 13 with no signs of slowing. Unfortunately only the first season is worth watching unless you're a girl between the ages of five and ten. With the second season they narrowed their target audience, and since then their targeting has become laser-precise. But on the fourth hand, the franchise is a massive commercial success, so I can't exactly blame them for that.

Season one - the real Pretty Cure - was directed by Daisuke Nishio, who also directed the little-known Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z. It's a lot more action-oriented than the later seasons, and that would go a long way to explain why.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:26 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 133 words, total size 1 kb.

Benzalkonium Chloride Contraindicated For Gregor Samsa's Kitchen

So, there was a cockroach in my kitchen the other day, and I didn't know where I'd left the bug spray, but if I went looking for it the roach would be sure to make its escape while my back was turned.

So I grabbed what was at hand - namely a squirt bottle of Dettol Healthy Clean Kitchen surface spray - and spritzed the filthy insect with it.

Whereupon it promptly gave up the arthropod equivalent of the ghost.

Huh.

The spray is a 0.1% solution of benzalkonium chloride - the same antiseptic found in Dettol and Bactine - and supposedly more-or-less harmless, safe for use on food preparation surfaces. The oral LD50 in mammals is given as 240mg/kg, so it would be easier to kill yourself by drinking low-alcohol beer than this stuff.

Unless you're a cockroach.

Also, my floor is very clean now.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:19 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Tuesday, August 23

Hot Chips 28

The annual Hot Chips conference is on right now, where chip designers and manufacturers highlight new and upcoming produces, like Arm's new 2048-bit vector supercomputer CPU, Samsung's DDR5, GDDR6, and HBM3 memory (the latter will deliver 16GB of memory and half a terabyte per second of bandwidth in a single package), IBM's Power 9 architecture, AMD's Zen, and Intel's... Skylake. Which came out a year ago, but whatever.

I went looking for more details on some of the presentations, and now I'm hungry.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:33 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 86 words, total size 1 kb.

Sunday, August 14

Kabaneri Of The Iron Fortress

Completely implausible. These people are so dumb the zombies would starve to death.

It moves right along, and the production qualities are great, but dumb as a box of rocks.

Update: And every time you think it couldn't get any more stupid, it does. I went to see what other people thought of it, and this was the first review I found:

Watching Kabaneri is like watching a 5-car pile-up on a busy intersection. It's devastating, but hard to look away from. With each plume of smoke breathes a new fiery furnace of stupor; divulging deeper into new unforeseen territories of shit writing. Where other shows simply crash and burn, Kabaneri decides to push forward with a broken axle and the power of irrationality to combust its engine. It's a wondrous, smoldering pile of fecal matter on wheels. A beautiful travesty captured in frame by uninspired creators, seeing just how close they could pass their hand over the surface of unoriginality without being scorched by the heat. And trust me when I say that Wit Studio got their hands pretty fucking close. Had they gotten any closer, we'd be naming this 'Shingeki no Kabaneri: Schlock Edition'. To say they're cashing in on an existing fanbase would be an understatement. These motherfuckers took the cash-cow home, milked it dry, then butchered it for any remaining morsels that they could scrape together. Kabaneri isn't just below average, it's the residual excrement that resides at the bottom of the barrel.

The author goes on at some length, but I suspect you get the idea.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:35 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Saturday, August 13

Oboontoo 2

So, I've done six Ubuntu installs so far this week. Two on Virtualbox on Windows (desktop and laptop), one on VMWare Fusion on Mac (my shiny Retina iMac), one on OpenVZ on our development server, one on AWS EC2, and one on KVM*, upgrading from 14.04. None yet on bare metal, but that's coming soon.

And... Basically, all of them just worked. Ubuntu 16.04.1 gets the coveted Doesn't Suck award.

* I'm moving mu.nu / mee.nu to virtualised dedicated servers - basically, small servers running just one virtual machine each. The virtualisation makes administration much easier, which means that the servers are much cheaper. I can get a full quad-core server with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD for the price of a 4GB low-end instance in Amazon AWS. About 20% slower than a bare metal server (or OpenVZ on bare metal, which has near zero overhead), but about 50% cheaper, so I can just get twice as many.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:00 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 162 words, total size 1 kb.

Bluescreenbird Of Unhappiness

Windows 10 has a new and much more cheerful blue screen of death.

You're still dead, though. That hasn't changed.

Update: Usual story:

C:\> bootrec /RebuildBcd
C:\> bootrec /fixMbr
C:\> bootrec /fixboot

Though why it should be necessary for me to do this is another question entirely.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:17 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Wednesday, August 10

uWSGI

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:50 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Tuesday, August 09

Options

root@yuri:~# uwsgi --help

...

more...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:05 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 8031 words, total size 84 kb.

Ooboontoo?

I've been using RedHat-based distros of Linux since 5.1. Not RedHat Enterprise 5.1, which came out around 2007, but the original RedHat 5.1 from a decade earlier. I use CentOS 6 and 7 - the free distribution of RedHat Enterprise - for production, because I know where everything is, and can go straight to the right config file to fix any issue, rather than crawling through Stack Overflow looking hints.

But I really like Ubuntu 16.04. I'd tried a couple of earlier versions and they were mostly fairly blah, but this one shows a lot of improvements. It's fast, the UI is clean, it has good container support and ZFS, and the code repos are comprehensive and up-to-date.

I've ditched Bash on Windows for now, because it's very, very beta, and replaced my old CentOS Virtualbox VMs with a new Ubuntu one. So far, so good.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:44 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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