You shouldn’t. What happens is that you implement a minimal feature set to get your website working. Then, next time you want to add something to the website, you realize a necessary feature is missing, and instead of updating the website, you spend your time implementing the feature. This happens over and over again and you lose interest in updating the website because it’s so much work every time.
Last time I tried, I found that even choosing a static site generator from the seemingly infinite list of options in 2016 was arguably more work than just building one. We tacked on a build pipeline for images and javascript at some point, but other than that I don’t think any features were added during the life of the site. There are certainly features it didn’t have, but that’s just the power of knowing your requirements up front, I guess.
Not to mention keeping your 3rd party SSG up to date. “Oh, I can’t post to my blog because _____ isn’t compatible with the current version of Ruby/Python/etc. Guess I’ll update it. Oh, now it’s obsoleted some config options I’m using, better learn what the modern equivalent is. Oh, looks like the theme I installed isn’t compatible, is there an updated version? No? Time to look for a new theme. Oh, now I remember I patched the old theme to add a custom feature and my pages won’t render without it; how do I port that patch to the new theme? Wow, looks like the theme engine changed a lot, I don’t recognize half these tags…”
The SSG doesn’t interact with the internet or any kind of untrusted data. Hence it’s totally fine to keep a VM or container image with the old working version of the tools forever and never update anything. :)
100% - I tried to get something done and was looking at hugo after a few years and it was quicker to write my own before reading up and making it work.
I’m not sure it’s fair to make a generalization about this. I found that building my own blog (not actually a SSG) in Rust with Axum and Maud was actually quite comfortable and ergonomic since I was able to lean on the existing tools that exist (Tower for any HTTP stuff, Comrak for markdown parsing etc).
It was a fun learning experience, and I think a blog is simple enough to be doable as a learning exercise, but complex enough to expose you to a lot of language features you might otherwise have missed.
My experience with using an off the shelf SSG is that everything was fine and dandy until I wanted to do something I felt was pretty basic but which I ended up spending hours and hours on trying to get to work before finally giving up. Writing my own would not have this problem. I would just implement the basic features I actually need and then not touch it again.
This isn’t limited to homemade SSGs though. I’ve had to write quite a bit of Ruby and understand Jekyll internals to get some plugins to work together and in the way I want them to work, and the solutions feel rather hacky and are verbose liquid templates. I’m fairly certain this takes less time than making my own SSG, but from experience it’s much less fun than making it yourself.
And if you want a feature that’s not yet supported in some SSGs like e.g. Hugo, you’re stuck because there’s no plugin system at all.
I don’t think this is the case for everyone. I’m sure there are edge cases, but if you simply need your SSG to render posts/pages/RSS you will be fine. The average “simple” blog rarely needs new features.
Yeah I’ve had my own custom blog site since 2008 and this has never happened to be once. If anything I’ve removed features I realized were unnecessary.
But it’s fun work. At least for me, as I don’t work in the web world normally. I wrote my own blog engine and over the 24 year history of my blog, there have been features I’ve added (like automatically cross posting to InstaMyFaceMePinTikLinkedSpaceTotWeBookGramTrestIn) only to remove later (when the API inevitably change). I’m not worried about the language it’s written in changing too much, as it’s in C.
In contrast, the rest of my website is a static site, using xsltproc (quite the retro-future approach). I wrote the XSLT back (as far as I can tell) around 2003-2004 and there was only one time I had to update it due to changes in xsltproc. I do not recommend using XSLT—it works, but boy, is it verbose. Way more than Cobol (and it’s a pure functional language, which is even more head exploding).
What happens is that you implement a minimal feature set to get your website working
FWIW I did exactly that for https://www.oilshell.org/ . I wrote a shell script that used Gruber’s markdown.pl (packaged in Debian) to put up a single blog post, and then an index.html that linked to it.
People actually read and liked the blog, which I was slightly surprised by, given that I knew many people had “written off” shell as a language to be learned.
So now I knew it was worth spending some time on, and gradually added features over the years. The anti-pattern is to “plan” the blog up front.
Then, next time you want to add something to the website, you realize a necessary feature is missing, and instead of updating the website, you spend your time implementing the feature. This happens over and over again and you lose interest in updating the website because it’s so much work every time.
That didn’t happen in my case. It’s not too much effort to use shell and Python to add new features.
It may not look like it, but the site is pretty deep now
I also deleted Google analytics a few years ago, and now use a pipeline of Python + R + JS + shell to make my own graphs. (the thing that is rotting here is the spam detection – there are so many undeclared crawlers these days)
It also has topic tagging, and OpenGraph metadata for Twitter/Mastodon etc.
I would say that if it were only Python, it would be too much work. I would maybe have given up on doing everything myself.
I would have fallen into the “programmer blogger trap”. This kind of code can be very repetitive and non-composable in pure Python.
But gluing everything together with shell makes it feasible. It’s just less code overall. And it’s faster to iterate.
I mentioned this Unix philosophy / multi-language / multi-process factoring here:
And to be fair it took me a long time to build up those skills – making a website is not trivial !!! I failed to make websites from scratch before, for sure. Multiple times. The benefit has to be worth the effort, as you say, and the effort is often high.
But now that I finally have one, I view it as an asset.
I plan to finally write something web-focused for my blog, but we will see if I can think of anything worthwhile. Other than that: I’ll be enjoying time with the family and getting back into Destiny 2 after being absent for ~5 months.
It’s worth noting that the reason VS Code support on *BSD is not great is because Electron only officially supports platforms that Chromium supports and Google refuses to allow patches to support *BSD to be merged into Chromium, even with active maintainers and people willing to pay for and manage CI infrastructure.
Family trip for the kids to visit their great grandfather again (it has been a long time). Later on I plan to update barf.bt.ht to support OpenBSD and MacOS by default, since my main machines are now running 7.3 :)
I’m really intrigued by this setup as someone who has mowed a lot the past couple years.
Is the reason you’re mowing nearly daily because you have primarily suburban (near the home) turfgrass? I try to mix it up by zone - leaving some areas tall to help with soil water infiltration and evapotranspiration.
Also, how ‘moddable’ is the luba? Curious if it could run bigger wheels/tires to handle rougher areas.
OP can probably give a better answer, but the way these robotic lawnmowers work is they skim a tiny amount off the lawn each day. That way they can avoid needing more powerful motors, bigger batteries and blades, more risk of collateral damage, etc.
My mower needs to cut roughly 1.2 acres of land split between the front and back of my property. So I cut them on alternating days at 70mm cutting height (which gives the grass sometime to relax).
There are several “no go” zones and smaller gardens sprinkled around the property as well (these areas we allow to grow wild).
As for mods - nothing would be officially supported or recommended, unless you wanted to void warranty. The Luba 5000 is already equipped with AWD, so you can throw quite a bit at it!
Still wrapping my head around the path the lightning strike took. Depending on the details, perhaps your house was spared? I get that the buried wire acts like a ground, but why did the lightning pick that path to the charger?
If the buried wire is insulated, which it probably is (apart from where the lightning initially struck and burned through it), then the easiest path for the lightning to take would be along the wire and into whatever it’s connected to. I imagine it like water (electrical potential) filling up a dry river bed with a dam at the end. The water will try to take the easy path even when there’s nowhere to go at the end of it. Once it’s filled up with as much as it can hold, then the water starts finding new ways to travel and will eventually work its way to ground. Good thing it was unplugged, tbh! I am no expert but could imagine it damaging circuit breakers and such on its way around one’s house. Hopefully not a fire risk, but certainly could be an expensive repair.
Once the potential appears on the buried wire, it will just vaporize the insulation and complete the circuit.
I’m trying to understand the initial ingress. I’m trying to understand how the buried wire links to the home electrical system and to the charging station.
If it hits the power lines, depending on how recently the panel has been updated, the surge suppressor should handle it, but I don’t know if surge suppressors can take a direct lightning strike. The internet says, and I believe it, that surge suppressors will do nothing for a lightning strike.
Lightning is a fun subject and I wish I knew more about it. Thinking through it, if the lightning struck ground near your wires, that is enough. Basically the current is flowing radially through the wet ground at the point of the strike and it encounters the wire which is just a nice section of low conductance and it pulls more of the current through it.
Maybe worthwhile asking around if you need a lightning rod on your house.
We do have a 40 foot satellite antenna that holds a few dishes / devices. The lightning didn’t care about this at all and the electrician said it was most likely because of how wet (basically flooded at the time) the lawn was.
I challenge you to visit a webpage or web app with a hamburger menu and try to navigate solely with your keyboard and screen-readers (or better yet - try these on mobile!).
I use iOS devices all the time and haven’t noticed any trouble using menus.
Is this article by one of those mouse-hating I-only-use-keyboards people?
I wasn’t? That was an additional point added alongside users forced to use keyboard navigation and screen readers due to disabilities. But I would still personally say that designing interfaces for those without the means to run JavaScript (for any number of reasons) DOES fall under the realm of accessibility. Fallbacks exist and far too often I see this excused away based on the idea that “everyone runs JavaScript”.
The first section of the article defines “the core problem” as being accessibility. The section ends with:
Now try the same test with JavaScript disabled… Yikes.
The exclamation is somewhat ambiguous, but in context, it implies that support for users without JavaScript is a prerequisite for accessibility. If that’s not what you meant, can you clarify?
I was just meaning that as an additional oversight for hamburger menus in general (most implementations fail on JavaScript-disabled browsers/devices). But I still stand by the fact that not supporting those with JavaScript disabled is an accessibility issue.
Accessibility is the practice of making your websites usable by as many people as possible. We traditionally think of this as being about people with disabilities, but the practice of making sites accessible also benefits other groups such as those using mobile devices, or those with slow network connections.
That’s a straw man. It does not take 100 MB of JavaScript to build a hamburger menu on a website. Hyperbolic annoyance with a perceived overuse of JavaScript on the web does not support the author’s argument that hamburger menus are inherently inaccessible.
Accessibility should not be used as a shield from which to make attacks on JavaScript as a whole. There are many ways to make a mess of accessibility on the web. JavaScript is just one.
Fairly straightforward (I’ve used Ubuntu a ton throughout my career, so I have some baseline). Obviously things will never be quite as low resource and the apt package manager lags behind apk.
Interested in what makes you not like tiling window managers on a 4k display! I started using a tiling window manager when I got a much larger screen, as it made laying out windows easier for me
I agree with this. I can’t read lines that never wrap, so if a window is 2k pxs wide, that’s way too much. There’s a reason that typographers prefer to wrap lines at 2-3 alphabets.
Think of it this way: most monitors are a little bigger than a sheet of paper, or maybe two sheets of paper. 4K means we can have big monitors, which are closer to the size of an actual desk. We still want to work on two sheets of paper near the center, but the rest of the desk is not wasted simply because our attention is not focused there. That’s where we put things that we expect we will need.
At the same time, if what you want is just two sheets of paper, you can use that monitor setup as well.
@tdarb thx for posting this. If you do not mind I have a question.
I have several Lenovo W520 laptops
I wanted to install newer wifi 6 network cards, but it is not letting me (erroring out during boot).
What can be done to bypass this ‘competition locking out’ mechanism and still install the newer wifi card?
The card I am trying to install is based on Intel AX210
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09CDFV2CL
Should I look for a pin to cover it with electrical tape on that card ?
You have to patch the BIOS or switch to coreboot. With the later, you can update your W520 with an Ivy Bridge CPU (like a W530) which will make it a very nice system indeed.
As kev009 mentioned, you’ll need to flash your BIOS with a whitelist that will allow new WiFi cards or use coreboot. The tape itself will be ignored because the system will still initially “call” the incompatible card.
The framework is designed to be very thin, which makes it much more difficult to repair than an X201. It’s really too bad they went this route instead of prioritizing user serviceable parts as the primary design principle.
Thin is a feature for me; the laptop fits with my other laptops in my bag. I’ve not found the thinness to hamper my efforts any time I’ve opened the case (rare but I’ve e.g. upgraded the speakers to the higher quality ones).
Design constraints are not bad things, and the thinness makes it so nobody bats an eye when I pull it out. It’s expected that modern laptops be light and easy to transport, it’s unusual that they also are able to be repaired (ship of theseus style perhaps) by the end user.
It makes “repairability” about “you want me to give up my sleek devices” instead of “just choose the right devices and life gets better.” The values we hold dear will lose if we don’t do them well enough to promote them to people who are not convinced.
I switched away from the Mac ecosystem because I wanted something that I could upgrade over time (amongst many other reasons). I think reminding folks that computers should be user-serviceable and -upgradeable, without being ugly bricks only a dork would use, is cool.
When people see my Framework (13) they see a thin, light laptop, with an unusual logo. The modular ports are always fun for demos, and most folks are at least somewhat interested in the Framework’s ability to be upgraded, which is in stark contrast to Apple’s philosophy. Yeah, I run Linux, yeah I miss some of the good third-party apps that are MacOS-only, but not having to buy a whole new laptop in two years is worth it. Great conversations.
I also used to carry around around older ThinkPads, too: absolute thicc black chonkers. The only conversations those things raised were folks giving me shit because I was lugging around a heavy, ancient-looking beast.
I switched to Mac hardware for the opposite reason. I used to build my own desktops, but I kept running into things like needing to upgrade the motherboard to upgrade the CPU, needing new RAM to go with the new motherboard because it didn’t support the old kind, and then needing a new graphics card to actually get the benefits of the other bits. I have a NAS that is a box I assembled and in my last upgrade only the case and disks remain the same. That’s a reasonable trade for a NAS because the disks are its main reason to exist and so upgrading them separately from everything else is nice.
The main reason that the new Apple laptops feel fast is that they have carefully scaled everything to avoid bottlenecks. If you upgrade any one part, you’re unlikely to get much more performance, you’ll just see bottlenecks elsewhere. I’d rather have a machine that lasts a long time (I’m probably going to replace my MacBook Pro soon, it’s 10 years old now) than one where I can keep upgrading bits but need to ship-of-Theseus it to actually see a significant benefit.
That makes sense, but there does exist a world where you don’t have to buy the top-of-the-line laptop and use it for a decade. While I may upgrade my Framework to an AMD chip (partially because I can and partially for the increased battery life), I can also not do that and just increase the RAM and SSD size as-needed. That may not be as finely tuned as an Apple machine but I’m not going for “fastest bus throughput” there, I’m going for “I don’t have to buy a new laptop to double my RAM.”
To each their own though, I was about that Apple life for a few decades and they treated me well!
While I may upgrade my Framework to an AMD chip (partially because I can and partially for the increased battery life), I can also not do that and just increase the RAM and SSD size as-needed.
If you do, I’d be really curious to hear how well it works for you. It’s been almost 20 years since my daily work machine was one where I could upgrade components piecemeal. I suspect a lot has changed in that time, when the RAM technology that different CPUs supported was completely different. I upgraded the RAM in my PowerBook (largely because Apple charged insane markup on SO-DIMMs), but suffered from multiple motherboard replacements because the solder kept coming off on the DIMM slots but for newer machines (including the NAS) I’ve just bought the maximum that the motherboard supports, even when the RAM has been upgradable.
Replacing the CPU wasn’t a significant win for me in any machine since the end of the Socket 7 era (and even then often didn’t give the maximum speedup until I upgraded the motherboard and RAM as well).
I used to upgrade disks a lot and the jumps from 1 GiB to 20 GiB and 40 GiB were each accompanied by running out of disk space before I could afford the bigger disk, but my personal and work laptops (bought 7 year apart) both have 1 TiB SSDs and that hasn’t been a space constraint for me. With the growth of cloud storage for cool storage, I suspect that my local SSD will gradually become more a local cache than a truly local filesystem, which reduces the pressure further.
You can upgrade the SSD in Macs (I’ve replaced the battery in mine and that involved removing the SSD is vastly easier), but I’ve not felt the need to. The 1 TiB disk was expensive back then, but now it’s one of the cheaper options. I stopped running VMs locally a while ago, but I can imagine wanting a 2+ TiB disk if I had a bunch of VMs on my laptop.
capitulating to thinness fetishism because losers gave you shit for your thinkpad is the opposite of cool; it reflects a lack of confidence. the “cool” approach would be to hold the course if you really believe sacrificing cooling and repairability is not objectively worth fitting 1/4” more of who-knows-what in your backpack. if your principles crumble in the face of marketing-induced irrationality expressed by random people, maybe you don’t actually believe in them.
I know I shouldn’t feed the trolls, but here I go anyway.
capitulating to thinness fetishism because losers gave you shit for your thinkpad is the opposite of cool; it reflects a lack of confidence.
Or alternatively, as was the point of my comment, understanding that different users have different wants and needs might be a reasonable thing to do; as well as understanding that locking repairablity and longevity together with devices and laptops that most folks do not want to use only pushes folks away.
if your principles crumble in the face of marketing-induced irrationality expressed by random people, maybe you don’t actually believe in them.
If your principles require you to post inflammatory, ideological creed, you may want to reconsider your approach.
I don’t think it’s cool to associate thick computers with being a dork, or to assume ordinary people would be unable to overcome thinness fetishism if they understood the objective tradeoffs.
Your perspective seems to partially adapt Apple’s mindset, giving up some repairability for the sake of attracting customers while offering no objective benefit. That’s not necessarily wrong–Apple is extremely successful after all–but it suggests a pessimistic view of human nature, and is certainly not cool. IMO compromising principles for the sake of adoption at least requires some empirical justification, e.g. some evidence that there are non-dorks who use the Framework laptop, which is far from obvious to me.
Another feature is that they actually need to sell laptops, and in this day and age selling something as thick as an x200 is just not viable. I think it’s amazing what they’ve pulled off in a form factor that still looks like a ‘modern’ laptop.
Yeah exactly. I have a Logitech C925 on my home desk setup, because I like having an HD camera with FreeBSD and Linux support. But with my ThinkPads I know that when I’m away from my desk, I don’t have to cart it around with my and plug in every time I want to make a video call.
Honestly the lack of an integral webcam is the one design decision on the Reform that I don’t understand. It’s 2023 and much of the tech world is hybrid or remote; being able to make a video call from your device is table stakes.
I’m curious as to how you mean this. I’m a happy Framework daily user, but now that I think about it I’d take a slightly thicker model in exchange for an externally replaceable battery. Aside from that I can’t think of anything I’d categorize as a tradeoff between “serviceable” and “thin.”
Although I do miss my Macbook’s amazing trackpad and software support for same.
Aside from that I can’t think of anything I’d categorize as a tradeoff between “serviceable” and “thin.”
I’ve built probably two or three hundred keyboards by hand. Any individual piece could break on that board and it would be at most a 20 minute repair; more like 5 minutes for the majority of the parts. Most of those 5 minutes would be waiting for the soldering iron to heat up.
Last weekend I had to replace a key switch mechanism in a Thinkpad. Luckily it was an old Thinkpad from 2011, so it still had key caps which were easier to remove, but replacing the switch mechanism was difficult; I had a spare donor board in my closet, but I had destroyed three different switches in the process because the miniaturization process had made them so fragile and tiny. Something which would have been trivial on a larger device required tweezers and a magnifying glass.
So I would say that the X201-era Thinkpads are already making significant sacrifices to repairability in favor of miniaturization. I’ve also replaced the fan on a couple of these models, and it’s already very difficult to get it reseated precisely within the tolerances which will allow the case to close back up the way it’s supposed to. I have never even attempted to repair a super-thin laptop, (I’ve been avoiding them for what I hope are obvious reasons) but it is no great leap to assume that miniaturizing it even further would reduce these tolerances even further. Plus you have trade-offs like the RAM or the battery being soldered in, because it’s just a simple fact of engineering that connectors which allow modularity take up a lot of space.
Plus you have trade-offs like the RAM or the battery being soldered in, because it’s just a simple fact of engineering that connectors which allow modularity take up a lot of space.
That’s something fantastic Framework addresses. Their batteries and RAM are modular, despite being so thin! See, being thin doesn’t require all of these trade-offs!
But I wouldn’t want to try and repair a single key-switch on that keyboard, I agree.
Hmm, so in the case of the Framework the individual key switches aren’t easily replaceable either (to my knowledge).
I’ve also replaced the fan on a couple of these models, and it’s already very difficult to get it reseated precisely within the tolerances which will allow the case to close back up the way it’s supposed to. I have never even attempted to repair a super-thin laptop, (I’ve been avoiding them for what I hope are obvious reasons) but it is no great leap to assume that miniaturizing it even further would reduce these tolerances even further. Plus you have trade-offs like the RAM or the battery being soldered in, because it’s just a simple fact of engineering that connectors which allow modularity take up a lot of space.
For what it’s worth these jobs are all straightforward on the Framework, despite it being thin. The fan module is four captive screws so you don’t lose them and the forum is full of people doing things like comparing different heatsink pastes for the sake of it (i.e. pulling the module on and off constantly). The RAM is as simple to replace as laptops from the 90s, and the battery is three screws (also captive).
I’ve repaired a lot of laptops (including a classic ThinkPad and a couple of modern super-thin ones). I was expecting this Framework to be more repairable than the super-thin ones, but was still pleasantly surprised when it got here at how it was nicer to work on than my (high) expectations. Especially small things like how almost every screw is captive so you can’t lose it, but you can still remove a screw if it somehow gets damaged. They’ve really thought about repair aspects in the design.
Huh, what do you find lacking about the Framework’s trackpad?
I use a modern MBP for work and a Framework at home, and while other PC laptops’ trackpads have seemed noticeably deficient to me, I consider the Framework’s trackpad on par with the MBP’s. Am I missing something though?
To be fair, I could just be experiencing Wayland’s (or KDE’s or Gnome’s or whatever’s) trackpad support being less than stellar, which I gotta say the MBP has traditionally been stellar++.
Huh, what do you find lacking about the Framework’s trackpad?
I find it really hard to go back to mechanical trackpads after using force touch ones. The ones that are hinged are really infuriating - I shouldn’t have to apply more force at the top than the bottom. I can’t tell what kind the Framework is using, however.
Genuine question, which repairs are made more difficult by the Framework’s lack of thickness?
I got a Gen12 Framework last month and I’m super impressed with its potential repairability, so far. Replacing the display hinges looks potentially fiddly as you have to work around the cables, but on a lot of thinkpads you have to take a bunch of other stuff out instead.
(I’ve not owned an X201 but have owned an X61 and an X230. I loved them and I still have the X61, almost got convinced to do the X62 upgrade on it instead of buying a Framework. However glad I bought a Framework!)
I’ve never played with a Framework so I don’t have direct experience. I agree with the other response that the Framework is a little too thin (not to mention expensive!)
And yet the person who wrote this used something other than the browser’s default layout for their page.
And put a bunch of links to tools they used to build the page. And a “Donate” link. And a bunch of other things that are not the pure, brutalist content-and-content-alone that is the logical conclusion of the post.
So: “Fuck your brand!” I don’t care about your wiki or your donation page or the software you used or any of that other stuff, so I’m going to come barging in and yell obscenities at you unless you do things my way. I am, after all, the user, and therefore I trump all of your preferences. “Period.”
Right?
This kind of post reeks of entitled arrogance, of demanding that everything be done your way, no exceptions..
But maybe, just maybe, my little corner of the web is mine, thank you very much, and I’ll do with it as I please. Some of our greatest booms in web literacy and and web technology literacy have come from places like Geocities and Neopets and Myspace that just let people experiment and make their own pages that might look nice or might look bad or might be goofy or cringy or a thousand other adjectives but it’s MY page, look what I can make it do! and that’s an unbelievable hook and even one instance of it is more empowering of users than any million bland homogenized utilitarian pages the author of this post might ever produce.
Fair enough. I was leaning more towards web applications / big brand “marketing” websites, but I think it could certainly apply to personal sites as well.
This kind of post reeks of entitled arrogance, of demanding that everything be done your way, no exceptions
Well, more as in the “user’s way”. As it should be. By having all your custom fonts/assets you’re essentially telling me it has to be your way - no exceptions. Goes both ways.
I will say that there is certainly more power in the “readers” corner (extensions to disable, blockers etc) but it doesn’t mean one shouldn’t be a little considerate…
Well, more as in the “user’s way”. As it should be. By having all your custom fonts/assets you’re essentially telling me it has to be your way - no exceptions.
No, as a web author all I can do is suggest. It’s up to your user agent, taking into account your configured preferences, to decide what to actually show you.
And you’re still not getting my point: I’m a user, and I don’t like your site. That means, by your stated values, it’s time for you to get busy making changes to your site to tailor it to my preferences. So why are you here arguing with me, instead of working on making your site be what I want it to be?
I was expecting to read about how the cheap hardware with open source firmware can be set up with all the features of expensive mesh networks, but that’s not what it was.
I don’t like expensive mesh networks because (a) expensive (b) tend to require special proprietary control systems (c) which often want logins and other privacy-violators. So I buy $40 wifi routers that are known to work well with DD-WRT/OpenWRT and set them up as follows:
all wifi radios set the same SSID
turn off 2.4GHz on the AP nearest the kitchen (microwave fun)
channels are set by hand for minimum overlap
NAT, firewalling, DHCP and DNS are turned off
Cat5e runs to the nearest switch port (three switches: office, den, living room, all interconnected)
Five of these cover the house and the back yard nicely. No meshing. No outside-the-house dependencies except power.
Recent versions support 802.11 r, k and v, but not on all radios. Support is necessary on both ends. If you aren’t active while moving from one ‘best’ station area to another, none of them are needed.
TP-Link Archer C7 with OpenWRT is great.
If you have a home server running a VM with OpenWRT and dumb Access Points from Mikrotik is fun and can cover easily cover multiple rooms/area/house.
AVM‘s FritzBox have DSL/Cable/LTE Modem or Fiber included had quick stable but expensive.
That sounds pretty great. Do you have a wiki/post breaking all of that down? Or least have solid suggestions for cheap routers? Sounds very interesting.
Most of my routers are TP-Link Archer C7, which are routinely on sale in the US for $45 each. If I see a sale on some new plausible router, my criteria are:
at least one gigabit ethernet port, preferably 4.
one for uplink to a switch, the others for local devices that I might want to position there
802.11ac and n on 2.4 and 5Ghz bands
the most usable protocols as of early 2023 – machines that were new in 2010 onwards use n, machines new in 2015 onwards use ac. ax has been out for almost 4 years and is still uncommon except on the newest phones and laptops.
known good firmware from dd-wrt or openwrt in the most recent stable release
It’s reasonable to get everything set up well on machines that don’t have open source firmware, even if they don’t support an AP mode, by carefully turning off all the things I wrote about before and avoiding the ‘WAN’ port.
I don’t trust any of these things as firewalls for outside connections, strictly as access points.
I’m glad you’ve found a workflow that really works for you, but I’m confused about how it seems like you’re citing the advantages of switching to dwm as much as to giving up your external monitor.
Also, your point about being a designer and trying to mimic the setup most of your users have is very valid, but I’m also concerned that you’re voluntarily opting in to a kind of tunnel vision with regard to configuration that could hurt the accessibility of your designs.
I’m blind in one eye, low vision in the other with fine & gross motor impairment and difficulty crossing the midline. I have to work REALLY hard to find an environment where I can get work done on a laptop. A nice large screen is much easier for me.
Will your designs function properly on my large screen with my cartoonishly huge fonts? :)
I have a 43” monitor for work. This is mostly because I have a tendency to hunch over my desk. With a display that big, I set the text size to something nice and large and have to sit back to have everything in my field of view.
I went with the ASUS ROG Strix 43” VA panel (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B099PJ8SPT) because all the other 43” IPS panels I tried had ghosting when displaying light window panels on a dark background (including Dell P4317Q and LG 43UN700-B 43).
I actually have two for different offices, both Dell but different models (bought three years apart). They have some ghosting around the edges but they’re so big I don’t usually put anything I care about right on the edge of the screen. I’d probably care more if I were the one paying for them, but they both render text in terminals well and that’s 90% of what I care about in a work monitor.
Great to hear from alternate perspectives and difficulties users face that are hard to “reproduce”. I find in my work that the larger displays/resolutions tend to be the most “optimized” since I work within a design team (who all mostly have cutting-edge displays). Most times I feel as though low-res, smaller devices are an afterthought. Throughout my career I’ve heard a lot of “just squish and stack everything down on smaller screens…”
Interesting perspective, I too stopped using an external monitor when switching to a raised tablet setup and while there’s a few moments of frustration I’ve lived with it.
From a UX design perspective, the thing I’ve occasionally had to do is zoom way out in the browser to test how a site looks on someone’s super big monitor.
“proudly showing off its 1366x768 display” props to managing on this, I don’t think I could do it and feel like I depend highly on a hiDPI tablet/laptop monitor, but enjoy your reasoning here.
Would you consider sharing this on https://reddit.com/r/ergomobilecomputers ? I’ve encountered a many “maximalist” perspectives and love hearing other ways people work.
Agreed that my switch to 1366x768 is fairly extreme - probably not something I would force on everyone (use what makes you most productive!)
Thanks for the link to that subreddit, now I’m going down an entirely different rabbit hole… I’ll certainly share my post there (so long as it doesn’t come across as spammy etc.)
You shouldn’t. What happens is that you implement a minimal feature set to get your website working. Then, next time you want to add something to the website, you realize a necessary feature is missing, and instead of updating the website, you spend your time implementing the feature. This happens over and over again and you lose interest in updating the website because it’s so much work every time.
Last time I tried, I found that even choosing a static site generator from the seemingly infinite list of options in 2016 was arguably more work than just building one. We tacked on a build pipeline for images and javascript at some point, but other than that I don’t think any features were added during the life of the site. There are certainly features it didn’t have, but that’s just the power of knowing your requirements up front, I guess.
Not to mention keeping your 3rd party SSG up to date. “Oh, I can’t post to my blog because _____ isn’t compatible with the current version of Ruby/Python/etc. Guess I’ll update it. Oh, now it’s obsoleted some config options I’m using, better learn what the modern equivalent is. Oh, looks like the theme I installed isn’t compatible, is there an updated version? No? Time to look for a new theme. Oh, now I remember I patched the old theme to add a custom feature and my pages won’t render without it; how do I port that patch to the new theme? Wow, looks like the theme engine changed a lot, I don’t recognize half these tags…”
I’ve been down that road several times.
The SSG doesn’t interact with the internet or any kind of untrusted data. Hence it’s totally fine to keep a VM or container image with the old working version of the tools forever and never update anything. :)
An advantage of a statically compiled SSG is you can just keep the binary around forever.
Sure, but that’s a bit inflexible.
I’d much rather have the whole compiler environment snapshotted in a container or VM image because then I can make changes to the SSG.
100% - I tried to get something done and was looking at hugo after a few years and it was quicker to write my own before reading up and making it work.
I’m not sure it’s fair to make a generalization about this. I found that building my own blog (not actually a SSG) in Rust with Axum and Maud was actually quite comfortable and ergonomic since I was able to lean on the existing tools that exist (Tower for any HTTP stuff, Comrak for markdown parsing etc). It was a fun learning experience, and I think a blog is simple enough to be doable as a learning exercise, but complex enough to expose you to a lot of language features you might otherwise have missed.
My experience with using an off the shelf SSG is that everything was fine and dandy until I wanted to do something I felt was pretty basic but which I ended up spending hours and hours on trying to get to work before finally giving up. Writing my own would not have this problem. I would just implement the basic features I actually need and then not touch it again.
This isn’t limited to homemade SSGs though. I’ve had to write quite a bit of Ruby and understand Jekyll internals to get some plugins to work together and in the way I want them to work, and the solutions feel rather hacky and are verbose liquid templates. I’m fairly certain this takes less time than making my own SSG, but from experience it’s much less fun than making it yourself.
And if you want a feature that’s not yet supported in some SSGs like e.g. Hugo, you’re stuck because there’s no plugin system at all.
I don’t think this is the case for everyone. I’m sure there are edge cases, but if you simply need your SSG to render posts/pages/RSS you will be fine. The average “simple” blog rarely needs new features.
Yeah I’ve had my own custom blog site since 2008 and this has never happened to be once. If anything I’ve removed features I realized were unnecessary.
But it’s fun work. At least for me, as I don’t work in the web world normally. I wrote my own blog engine and over the 24 year history of my blog, there have been features I’ve added (like automatically cross posting to InstaMyFaceMePinTikLinkedSpaceTotWeBookGramTrestIn) only to remove later (when the API inevitably change). I’m not worried about the language it’s written in changing too much, as it’s in C.
In contrast, the rest of my website is a static site, using
xsltproc(quite the retro-future approach). I wrote theXSLTback (as far as I can tell) around 2003-2004 and there was only one time I had to update it due to changes inxsltproc. I do not recommend usingXSLT—it works, but boy, is it verbose. Way more than Cobol (and it’s a pure functional language, which is even more head exploding).FWIW I did exactly that for https://www.oilshell.org/ . I wrote a shell script that used Gruber’s markdown.pl (packaged in Debian) to put up a single blog post, and then an
index.htmlthat linked to it.People actually read and liked the blog, which I was slightly surprised by, given that I knew many people had “written off” shell as a language to be learned.
So now I knew it was worth spending some time on, and gradually added features over the years. The anti-pattern is to “plan” the blog up front.
That didn’t happen in my case. It’s not too much effort to use shell and Python to add new features.
It may not look like it, but the site is pretty deep now
I rewrote the TOC generator once (it used to be JS, and is now static) - e.g. the yellow box http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2023/06/narrow-waist.html
I wrote a separate Flask + JS tool to make these little story link boxes, and then I copy and paste into Markdown - http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2023/06/narrow-waist.html#appendix-blog-backlog
I wrote a separate tool in PHP to serve resized images, to save bandwidth - http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2023/06/surrogate-pair.html
I also deleted Google analytics a few years ago, and now use a pipeline of Python + R + JS + shell to make my own graphs. (the thing that is rotting here is the spam detection – there are so many undeclared crawlers these days)
It also has topic tagging, and OpenGraph metadata for Twitter/Mastodon etc.
I would say that if it were only Python, it would be too much work. I would maybe have given up on doing everything myself.
I would have fallen into the “programmer blogger trap”. This kind of code can be very repetitive and non-composable in pure Python.
But gluing everything together with shell makes it feasible. It’s just less code overall. And it’s faster to iterate.
I mentioned this Unix philosophy / multi-language / multi-process factoring here:
https://lobste.rs/s/r2jawd/avoid_load_bearing_shell_scripts#c_xelmvc
And to be fair it took me a long time to build up those skills – making a website is not trivial !!! I failed to make websites from scratch before, for sure. Multiple times. The benefit has to be worth the effort, as you say, and the effort is often high.
But now that I finally have one, I view it as an asset.
Except this also happens with SSGs you didn’t write, and then it’s even harder.
I plan to finally write something web-focused for my blog, but we will see if I can think of anything worthwhile. Other than that: I’ll be enjoying time with the family and getting back into Destiny 2 after being absent for ~5 months.
Spending some time with the family, stacking my winter supply of wood and deep diving further into Ruby/RSpec
I don’t know if it helps or is a better experience, but FreeBSD has VSCodium in ports: https://www.freshports.org/editors/vscode/
It’s worth noting that the reason VS Code support on *BSD is not great is because Electron only officially supports platforms that Chromium supports and Google refuses to allow patches to support *BSD to be merged into Chromium, even with active maintainers and people willing to pay for and manage CI infrastructure.
I should mention that in the article for sure! For me I prefer sticking to OpenBSD (I’m stubborn) - so I need to default on hacks 😛
do you also own an electric car and heat your house with a coal furnace
No electric car but my house is heated with propane and wood ;)
it’s always something isn’t it
ahh, I was hoping it could help with the port to OpenBSD. if not, that’s fine :)
Family trip for the kids to visit their great grandfather again (it has been a long time). Later on I plan to update barf.bt.ht to support OpenBSD and MacOS by default, since my main machines are now running 7.3 :)
I’m really intrigued by this setup as someone who has mowed a lot the past couple years.
Is the reason you’re mowing nearly daily because you have primarily suburban (near the home) turfgrass? I try to mix it up by zone - leaving some areas tall to help with soil water infiltration and evapotranspiration.
Also, how ‘moddable’ is the luba? Curious if it could run bigger wheels/tires to handle rougher areas.
OP can probably give a better answer, but the way these robotic lawnmowers work is they skim a tiny amount off the lawn each day. That way they can avoid needing more powerful motors, bigger batteries and blades, more risk of collateral damage, etc.
My mower needs to cut roughly 1.2 acres of land split between the front and back of my property. So I cut them on alternating days at 70mm cutting height (which gives the grass sometime to relax).
There are several “no go” zones and smaller gardens sprinkled around the property as well (these areas we allow to grow wild).
As for mods - nothing would be officially supported or recommended, unless you wanted to void warranty. The Luba 5000 is already equipped with AWD, so you can throw quite a bit at it!
Still wrapping my head around the path the lightning strike took. Depending on the details, perhaps your house was spared? I get that the buried wire acts like a ground, but why did the lightning pick that path to the charger?
If the buried wire is insulated, which it probably is (apart from where the lightning initially struck and burned through it), then the easiest path for the lightning to take would be along the wire and into whatever it’s connected to. I imagine it like water (electrical potential) filling up a dry river bed with a dam at the end. The water will try to take the easy path even when there’s nowhere to go at the end of it. Once it’s filled up with as much as it can hold, then the water starts finding new ways to travel and will eventually work its way to ground. Good thing it was unplugged, tbh! I am no expert but could imagine it damaging circuit breakers and such on its way around one’s house. Hopefully not a fire risk, but certainly could be an expensive repair.
Once the potential appears on the buried wire, it will just vaporize the insulation and complete the circuit.
I’m trying to understand the initial ingress. I’m trying to understand how the buried wire links to the home electrical system and to the charging station.
If it hits the power lines, depending on how recently the panel has been updated, the surge suppressor should handle it, but I don’t know if surge suppressors can take a direct lightning strike.The internet says, and I believe it, that surge suppressors will do nothing for a lightning strike.As I heard it once. The lightning has flown ten thousand feet to find you. Do you think a half inch air gap will stop it?
My house was luckily fine. The lightning hit directly on the lawn in my backyard. Even my electrician was surprised with what happened.
I’ve recently seen similar cases online with these wires. Maybe the material is very conductive? I’m no expert on any of this…
Lightning is a fun subject and I wish I knew more about it. Thinking through it, if the lightning struck ground near your wires, that is enough. Basically the current is flowing radially through the wet ground at the point of the strike and it encounters the wire which is just a nice section of low conductance and it pulls more of the current through it.
Maybe worthwhile asking around if you need a lightning rod on your house.
We do have a 40 foot satellite antenna that holds a few dishes / devices. The lightning didn’t care about this at all and the electrician said it was most likely because of how wet (basically flooded at the time) the lawn was.
My mutt inspired email client has a sidebar by default: https://meli.delivery/
Nice! aerc-mail also has a sidebar by default.
I use iOS devices all the time and haven’t noticed any trouble using menus.
Is this article by one of those mouse-hating I-only-use-keyboards people?
I was referring to using screen readers on mobile devices (though to be fair I could have written that more clearly). A great read on the issue/research case study: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/screen-reader-users-on-mobile/
Please don’t conflate accessibility with the ability for a website to function with JavaScript disabled.
I wasn’t? That was an additional point added alongside users forced to use keyboard navigation and screen readers due to disabilities. But I would still personally say that designing interfaces for those without the means to run JavaScript (for any number of reasons) DOES fall under the realm of accessibility. Fallbacks exist and far too often I see this excused away based on the idea that “everyone runs JavaScript”.
The first section of the article defines “the core problem” as being accessibility. The section ends with:
The exclamation is somewhat ambiguous, but in context, it implies that support for users without JavaScript is a prerequisite for accessibility. If that’s not what you meant, can you clarify?
I was just meaning that as an additional oversight for hamburger menus in general (most implementations fail on JavaScript-disabled browsers/devices). But I still stand by the fact that not supporting those with JavaScript disabled is an accessibility issue.
https://www.kryogenix.org/code/browser/everyonehasjs.html
Assets not loading due to connectivity limitations and corporate or personal preferences are not the same as accessibility.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Accessibility/CSS_and_JavaScript#css_and_javascript_are_accessible
When your site requires 100 MB of JavaScript, it’s inaccessible to people who have a slow internet connection or are on a limited data plan.
That’s not what’s generally mean by accessibility.
Do those people matter less just because they don’t have a physical disability?
I’m not making a value judgement, just pointing out that you’re using a term of art in a non-standard way.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Accessibility/What_is_accessibility
That’s a straw man. It does not take 100 MB of JavaScript to build a hamburger menu on a website. Hyperbolic annoyance with a perceived overuse of JavaScript on the web does not support the author’s argument that hamburger menus are inherently inaccessible.
Accessibility should not be used as a shield from which to make attacks on JavaScript as a whole. There are many ways to make a mess of accessibility on the web. JavaScript is just one.
What’s Debian like, coming from Alpine?
Fairly straightforward (I’ve used Ubuntu a ton throughout my career, so I have some baseline). Obviously things will never be quite as low resource and the apt package manager lags behind apk.
Interested in what makes you not like tiling window managers on a 4k display! I started using a tiling window manager when I got a much larger screen, as it made laying out windows easier for me
I find that it is almost too large? I find my eyes jumping around, where “floating” allows me to keep everything together near the center of my view.
I agree with this. I can’t read lines that never wrap, so if a window is 2k pxs wide, that’s way too much. There’s a reason that typographers prefer to wrap lines at 2-3 alphabets.
Sounds like the issue is about the size of the display and its distance from your eyes, rather than the resolution?
Think of it this way: most monitors are a little bigger than a sheet of paper, or maybe two sheets of paper. 4K means we can have big monitors, which are closer to the size of an actual desk. We still want to work on two sheets of paper near the center, but the rest of the desk is not wasted simply because our attention is not focused there. That’s where we put things that we expect we will need.
At the same time, if what you want is just two sheets of paper, you can use that monitor setup as well.
For anyone interested, I made a Jekyll theme based off Tufte CSS: https://et-jekyll.netlify.app/
It includes minor changes for dark mode, tables, side notes on mobile/small screens etc. (see all HTML element examples here: https://et-jekyll.netlify.app/et-jekyll-theme/)
I use sourcehut pages for all my projects (also my personal blog). Nothing but great things to say about it.
@tdarb thx for posting this. If you do not mind I have a question. I have several Lenovo W520 laptops I wanted to install newer wifi 6 network cards, but it is not letting me (erroring out during boot). What can be done to bypass this ‘competition locking out’ mechanism and still install the newer wifi card? The card I am trying to install is based on Intel AX210 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09CDFV2CL
Should I look for a pin to cover it with electrical tape on that card ?
You have to patch the BIOS or switch to coreboot. With the later, you can update your W520 with an Ivy Bridge CPU (like a W530) which will make it a very nice system indeed.
As kev009 mentioned, you’ll need to flash your BIOS with a whitelist that will allow new WiFi cards or use coreboot. The tape itself will be ignored because the system will still initially “call” the incompatible card.
What do you think about the framework laptop as a spiritual successor to these ThinkPads?
The framework is designed to be very thin, which makes it much more difficult to repair than an X201. It’s really too bad they went this route instead of prioritizing user serviceable parts as the primary design principle.
Thin is a feature for me; the laptop fits with my other laptops in my bag. I’ve not found the thinness to hamper my efforts any time I’ve opened the case (rare but I’ve e.g. upgraded the speakers to the higher quality ones).
Design constraints are not bad things, and the thinness makes it so nobody bats an eye when I pull it out. It’s expected that modern laptops be light and easy to transport, it’s unusual that they also are able to be repaired (ship of theseus style perhaps) by the end user.
who cares if someone bats an eye because your laptop is a few mm thicker than “normal”?
It makes “repairability” about “you want me to give up my sleek devices” instead of “just choose the right devices and life gets better.” The values we hold dear will lose if we don’t do them well enough to promote them to people who are not convinced.
if we sacrifice repairability in order to appeal to ultrabook enjoyers, that value has already lost.
I switched away from the Mac ecosystem because I wanted something that I could upgrade over time (amongst many other reasons). I think reminding folks that computers should be user-serviceable and -upgradeable, without being ugly bricks only a dork would use, is cool.
When people see my Framework (13) they see a thin, light laptop, with an unusual logo. The modular ports are always fun for demos, and most folks are at least somewhat interested in the Framework’s ability to be upgraded, which is in stark contrast to Apple’s philosophy. Yeah, I run Linux, yeah I miss some of the good third-party apps that are MacOS-only, but not having to buy a whole new laptop in two years is worth it. Great conversations.
I also used to carry around around older ThinkPads, too: absolute thicc black chonkers. The only conversations those things raised were folks giving me shit because I was lugging around a heavy, ancient-looking beast.
I switched to Mac hardware for the opposite reason. I used to build my own desktops, but I kept running into things like needing to upgrade the motherboard to upgrade the CPU, needing new RAM to go with the new motherboard because it didn’t support the old kind, and then needing a new graphics card to actually get the benefits of the other bits. I have a NAS that is a box I assembled and in my last upgrade only the case and disks remain the same. That’s a reasonable trade for a NAS because the disks are its main reason to exist and so upgrading them separately from everything else is nice.
The main reason that the new Apple laptops feel fast is that they have carefully scaled everything to avoid bottlenecks. If you upgrade any one part, you’re unlikely to get much more performance, you’ll just see bottlenecks elsewhere. I’d rather have a machine that lasts a long time (I’m probably going to replace my MacBook Pro soon, it’s 10 years old now) than one where I can keep upgrading bits but need to ship-of-Theseus it to actually see a significant benefit.
That makes sense, but there does exist a world where you don’t have to buy the top-of-the-line laptop and use it for a decade. While I may upgrade my Framework to an AMD chip (partially because I can and partially for the increased battery life), I can also not do that and just increase the RAM and SSD size as-needed. That may not be as finely tuned as an Apple machine but I’m not going for “fastest bus throughput” there, I’m going for “I don’t have to buy a new laptop to double my RAM.”
To each their own though, I was about that Apple life for a few decades and they treated me well!
If you do, I’d be really curious to hear how well it works for you. It’s been almost 20 years since my daily work machine was one where I could upgrade components piecemeal. I suspect a lot has changed in that time, when the RAM technology that different CPUs supported was completely different. I upgraded the RAM in my PowerBook (largely because Apple charged insane markup on SO-DIMMs), but suffered from multiple motherboard replacements because the solder kept coming off on the DIMM slots but for newer machines (including the NAS) I’ve just bought the maximum that the motherboard supports, even when the RAM has been upgradable.
Replacing the CPU wasn’t a significant win for me in any machine since the end of the Socket 7 era (and even then often didn’t give the maximum speedup until I upgraded the motherboard and RAM as well).
I used to upgrade disks a lot and the jumps from 1 GiB to 20 GiB and 40 GiB were each accompanied by running out of disk space before I could afford the bigger disk, but my personal and work laptops (bought 7 year apart) both have 1 TiB SSDs and that hasn’t been a space constraint for me. With the growth of cloud storage for cool storage, I suspect that my local SSD will gradually become more a local cache than a truly local filesystem, which reduces the pressure further.
You can upgrade the SSD in Macs (I’ve replaced the battery in mine and that involved removing the SSD is vastly easier), but I’ve not felt the need to. The 1 TiB disk was expensive back then, but now it’s one of the cheaper options. I stopped running VMs locally a while ago, but I can imagine wanting a 2+ TiB disk if I had a bunch of VMs on my laptop.
capitulating to thinness fetishism because losers gave you shit for your thinkpad is the opposite of cool; it reflects a lack of confidence. the “cool” approach would be to hold the course if you really believe sacrificing cooling and repairability is not objectively worth fitting 1/4” more of who-knows-what in your backpack. if your principles crumble in the face of marketing-induced irrationality expressed by random people, maybe you don’t actually believe in them.
I know I shouldn’t feed the trolls, but here I go anyway.
Or alternatively, as was the point of my comment, understanding that different users have different wants and needs might be a reasonable thing to do; as well as understanding that locking repairablity and longevity together with devices and laptops that most folks do not want to use only pushes folks away.
If your principles require you to post inflammatory, ideological creed, you may want to reconsider your approach.
I don’t think it’s cool to associate thick computers with being a dork, or to assume ordinary people would be unable to overcome thinness fetishism if they understood the objective tradeoffs.
Your perspective seems to partially adapt Apple’s mindset, giving up some repairability for the sake of attracting customers while offering no objective benefit. That’s not necessarily wrong–Apple is extremely successful after all–but it suggests a pessimistic view of human nature, and is certainly not cool. IMO compromising principles for the sake of adoption at least requires some empirical justification, e.g. some evidence that there are non-dorks who use the Framework laptop, which is far from obvious to me.
Another feature is that they actually need to sell laptops, and in this day and age selling something as thick as an x200 is just not viable. I think it’s amazing what they’ve pulled off in a form factor that still looks like a ‘modern’ laptop.
To be fair the MNT Reform project has remained afloat.
Nobody floats the idea of the Reform being issued as a corporate laptop
The point is that it’s viable.
The only reason I wouldn’t use a Reform for work is the lack of a webcam.
Oh, they just recently released a compatible webcam actually! https://shop.mntre.com/products/mnt-reform-camera :)
That … doesn’t really count ;)
What? Why not, because it’s a separate thing you have to carry around?
Yeah exactly. I have a Logitech C925 on my home desk setup, because I like having an HD camera with FreeBSD and Linux support. But with my ThinkPads I know that when I’m away from my desk, I don’t have to cart it around with my and plug in every time I want to make a video call.
Honestly the lack of an integral webcam is the one design decision on the Reform that I don’t understand. It’s 2023 and much of the tech world is hybrid or remote; being able to make a video call from your device is table stakes.
having an excuse not to enable video can be a killer feature for some :)
Fair enough. I’m one of those people who prefers having my video on and being able to see others, but I’d never make it policy.
I’m curious as to how you mean this. I’m a happy Framework daily user, but now that I think about it I’d take a slightly thicker model in exchange for an externally replaceable battery. Aside from that I can’t think of anything I’d categorize as a tradeoff between “serviceable” and “thin.”
Although I do miss my Macbook’s amazing trackpad and software support for same.
I’ve built probably two or three hundred keyboards by hand. Any individual piece could break on that board and it would be at most a 20 minute repair; more like 5 minutes for the majority of the parts. Most of those 5 minutes would be waiting for the soldering iron to heat up.
Last weekend I had to replace a key switch mechanism in a Thinkpad. Luckily it was an old Thinkpad from 2011, so it still had key caps which were easier to remove, but replacing the switch mechanism was difficult; I had a spare donor board in my closet, but I had destroyed three different switches in the process because the miniaturization process had made them so fragile and tiny. Something which would have been trivial on a larger device required tweezers and a magnifying glass.
So I would say that the X201-era Thinkpads are already making significant sacrifices to repairability in favor of miniaturization. I’ve also replaced the fan on a couple of these models, and it’s already very difficult to get it reseated precisely within the tolerances which will allow the case to close back up the way it’s supposed to. I have never even attempted to repair a super-thin laptop, (I’ve been avoiding them for what I hope are obvious reasons) but it is no great leap to assume that miniaturizing it even further would reduce these tolerances even further. Plus you have trade-offs like the RAM or the battery being soldered in, because it’s just a simple fact of engineering that connectors which allow modularity take up a lot of space.
That’s something fantastic Framework addresses. Their batteries and RAM are modular, despite being so thin! See, being thin doesn’t require all of these trade-offs!
But I wouldn’t want to try and repair a single key-switch on that keyboard, I agree.
Hmm, so in the case of the Framework the individual key switches aren’t easily replaceable either (to my knowledge).
For what it’s worth these jobs are all straightforward on the Framework, despite it being thin. The fan module is four captive screws so you don’t lose them and the forum is full of people doing things like comparing different heatsink pastes for the sake of it (i.e. pulling the module on and off constantly). The RAM is as simple to replace as laptops from the 90s, and the battery is three screws (also captive).
I’ve repaired a lot of laptops (including a classic ThinkPad and a couple of modern super-thin ones). I was expecting this Framework to be more repairable than the super-thin ones, but was still pleasantly surprised when it got here at how it was nicer to work on than my (high) expectations. Especially small things like how almost every screw is captive so you can’t lose it, but you can still remove a screw if it somehow gets damaged. They’ve really thought about repair aspects in the design.
Huh, what do you find lacking about the Framework’s trackpad?
I use a modern MBP for work and a Framework at home, and while other PC laptops’ trackpads have seemed noticeably deficient to me, I consider the Framework’s trackpad on par with the MBP’s. Am I missing something though?
To be fair, I could just be experiencing Wayland’s (or KDE’s or Gnome’s or whatever’s) trackpad support being less than stellar, which I gotta say the MBP has traditionally been stellar++.
I find it really hard to go back to mechanical trackpads after using force touch ones. The ones that are hinged are really infuriating - I shouldn’t have to apply more force at the top than the bottom. I can’t tell what kind the Framework is using, however.
Genuine question, which repairs are made more difficult by the Framework’s lack of thickness?
I got a Gen12 Framework last month and I’m super impressed with its potential repairability, so far. Replacing the display hinges looks potentially fiddly as you have to work around the cables, but on a lot of thinkpads you have to take a bunch of other stuff out instead.
(I’ve not owned an X201 but have owned an X61 and an X230. I loved them and I still have the X61, almost got convinced to do the X62 upgrade on it instead of buying a Framework. However glad I bought a Framework!)
I’ve never played with a Framework so I don’t have direct experience. I agree with the other response that the Framework is a little too thin (not to mention expensive!)
And yet the person who wrote this used something other than the browser’s default layout for their page.
And put a bunch of links to tools they used to build the page. And a “Donate” link. And a bunch of other things that are not the pure, brutalist content-and-content-alone that is the logical conclusion of the post.
So: “Fuck your brand!” I don’t care about your wiki or your donation page or the software you used or any of that other stuff, so I’m going to come barging in and yell obscenities at you unless you do things my way. I am, after all, the user, and therefore I trump all of your preferences. “Period.”
Right?
This kind of post reeks of entitled arrogance, of demanding that everything be done your way, no exceptions..
But maybe, just maybe, my little corner of the web is mine, thank you very much, and I’ll do with it as I please. Some of our greatest booms in web literacy and and web technology literacy have come from places like Geocities and Neopets and Myspace that just let people experiment and make their own pages that might look nice or might look bad or might be goofy or cringy or a thousand other adjectives but it’s MY page, look what I can make it do! and that’s an unbelievable hook and even one instance of it is more empowering of users than any million bland homogenized utilitarian pages the author of this post might ever produce.
Fair enough. I was leaning more towards web applications / big brand “marketing” websites, but I think it could certainly apply to personal sites as well.
Well, more as in the “user’s way”. As it should be. By having all your custom fonts/assets you’re essentially telling me it has to be your way - no exceptions. Goes both ways.
I will say that there is certainly more power in the “readers” corner (extensions to disable, blockers etc) but it doesn’t mean one shouldn’t be a little considerate…
No, as a web author all I can do is suggest. It’s up to your user agent, taking into account your configured preferences, to decide what to actually show you.
And you’re still not getting my point: I’m a user, and I don’t like your site. That means, by your stated values, it’s time for you to get busy making changes to your site to tailor it to my preferences. So why are you here arguing with me, instead of working on making your site be what I want it to be?
I was expecting to read about how the cheap hardware with open source firmware can be set up with all the features of expensive mesh networks, but that’s not what it was.
I don’t like expensive mesh networks because (a) expensive (b) tend to require special proprietary control systems (c) which often want logins and other privacy-violators. So I buy $40 wifi routers that are known to work well with DD-WRT/OpenWRT and set them up as follows:
all wifi radios set the same SSID
turn off 2.4GHz on the AP nearest the kitchen (microwave fun)
channels are set by hand for minimum overlap
NAT, firewalling, DHCP and DNS are turned off
Cat5e runs to the nearest switch port (three switches: office, den, living room, all interconnected)
Five of these cover the house and the back yard nicely. No meshing. No outside-the-house dependencies except power.
Interesting. I’m curious, do you know if Openwrt supports anything for handover protocol as you move from one client to the next?
Recent versions support 802.11 r, k and v, but not on all radios. Support is necessary on both ends. If you aren’t active while moving from one ‘best’ station area to another, none of them are needed.
Which routers are you using? What do you recommend?
TP-Link Archer C7 with OpenWRT is great. If you have a home server running a VM with OpenWRT and dumb Access Points from Mikrotik is fun and can cover easily cover multiple rooms/area/house. AVM‘s FritzBox have DSL/Cable/LTE Modem or Fiber included had quick stable but expensive.
That sounds pretty great. Do you have a wiki/post breaking all of that down? Or least have solid suggestions for cheap routers? Sounds very interesting.
Most of my routers are TP-Link Archer C7, which are routinely on sale in the US for $45 each. If I see a sale on some new plausible router, my criteria are:
It’s reasonable to get everything set up well on machines that don’t have open source firmware, even if they don’t support an AP mode, by carefully turning off all the things I wrote about before and avoiding the ‘WAN’ port.
I don’t trust any of these things as firewalls for outside connections, strictly as access points.
I’m glad you’ve found a workflow that really works for you, but I’m confused about how it seems like you’re citing the advantages of switching to dwm as much as to giving up your external monitor.
Also, your point about being a designer and trying to mimic the setup most of your users have is very valid, but I’m also concerned that you’re voluntarily opting in to a kind of tunnel vision with regard to configuration that could hurt the accessibility of your designs.
I’m blind in one eye, low vision in the other with fine & gross motor impairment and difficulty crossing the midline. I have to work REALLY hard to find an environment where I can get work done on a laptop. A nice large screen is much easier for me.
Will your designs function properly on my large screen with my cartoonishly huge fonts? :)
I have a 43” monitor for work. This is mostly because I have a tendency to hunch over my desk. With a display that big, I set the text size to something nice and large and have to sit back to have everything in my field of view.
I went with the ASUS ROG Strix 43” VA panel (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B099PJ8SPT) because all the other 43” IPS panels I tried had ghosting when displaying light window panels on a dark background (including Dell P4317Q and LG 43UN700-B 43).
What make/model do you use?
I actually have two for different offices, both Dell but different models (bought three years apart). They have some ghosting around the edges but they’re so big I don’t usually put anything I care about right on the edge of the screen. I’d probably care more if I were the one paying for them, but they both render text in terminals well and that’s 90% of what I care about in a work monitor.
Great to hear from alternate perspectives and difficulties users face that are hard to “reproduce”. I find in my work that the larger displays/resolutions tend to be the most “optimized” since I work within a design team (who all mostly have cutting-edge displays). Most times I feel as though low-res, smaller devices are an afterthought. Throughout my career I’ve heard a lot of “just squish and stack everything down on smaller screens…”
Interesting perspective, I too stopped using an external monitor when switching to a raised tablet setup and while there’s a few moments of frustration I’ve lived with it.
From a UX design perspective, the thing I’ve occasionally had to do is zoom way out in the browser to test how a site looks on someone’s super big monitor.
“proudly showing off its 1366x768 display” props to managing on this, I don’t think I could do it and feel like I depend highly on a hiDPI tablet/laptop monitor, but enjoy your reasoning here.
Would you consider sharing this on https://reddit.com/r/ergomobilecomputers ? I’ve encountered a many “maximalist” perspectives and love hearing other ways people work.
Agreed that my switch to 1366x768 is fairly extreme - probably not something I would force on everyone (use what makes you most productive!)
Thanks for the link to that subreddit, now I’m going down an entirely different rabbit hole… I’ll certainly share my post there (so long as it doesn’t come across as spammy etc.)