photos
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Though the red is bad UI/UX, because it doesn’t work well for people with colour-blindness. ↩︎
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I say “remind” because I learned Spanish at school, my beloved is a linguist, and our daughter is learning it, so we knew really. ↩︎
This is what rhe trees in Hackney are looking like this spring.
#prisma with the “Thota Vaikuntam” effect. #thotavaikuntam
Mandatory Options
Where I’m working at the moment we’re using a tool called Splunk for some log file viewing and analysis. I hadn’t come across it, though apparently it’s quite well known.
So wanting to know a bit more about it, I thought I’d have a run through of their tutorial. To do that you have to sign up for an account. That’s fine, it’s free, there’s no obligation. I’ve signed up for plenty of things.
Except… well, look:
That little “Yes, I want to receive…” checkbox looks like a fairly standard opt-in. The kind we always opt out of. But look at it. Look at its reddish border. The asterisk. These are fairly standard1 ways of indicating that a field is mandatory.
A mandatory opt-in checkbox.
A mandatory option.
After grabbing that screenshot I closed the page. How not to get people to sign up.
Some More Bitface Thoughts
Something I forgot to mention yesterday was that I thought the “bitface” term was useful not just to refer to people who manipulate bits for a living (or hobby) — programmers, like myself. It can also work to discuss anyone who makes digital content: websites, blogs, podcasts, videos, photos, and so on.
We’re all moving bits around. We’re all labourers at the bitface.
New Year lanterns in Chinatown, London.
Rezillos Gig
To the 229 venue on London’s Great Portland Street last night, to see the Rezillos, about whose reformation I’ve written before, here. I didn’t go to see them back then, so last night I put that right. I had never even heard of this place before, but apparently it’s been around since the sixties. Nice place: good sound system, and fair beer (though the Punk IPA was off).
We had a support band called the Tuts, who are three women from Brighton, and the first band I’ve instantly fallen for since Savages.
Those are they. Check them out if you can.
And then we had the support band that I knew about in advance: Spizz Energi, who are a similar vintage to The Rezillos, and with similar SF-related sensibilities — at least as far as a couple of songs go. But on the night — and after the Tuts — they were actually quite dull.
But the Rezillos killed it. They were utterly fantastic. Eugene was playing guitar for the first song or two, which surprised me, but he soon put that away and just sang, along with Fay, of course.
My only slight regrets were that we didn’t get “Thunderbirds Are Go” or “Teenbeat.” But all the other top hits were there.
I realised as I was there that I only ever Instagram from gigs these days. Gig-gramming, I hereby christen it, though I expect I’m not the first.
So good. So fuckin good. #Rezillos
Finally, the Rezillos. “Can’t Stand My Baby” is the opener.
Still not the Rezillos. Everyone’s sharing kit tonight, which is very 77. Spizz Energi onstage.
Not actually the Rezillos, but the Tuts, my new favourite band.
The Strange Case of the Lost Reply
I’ve tried various email clients on iOS, but for quite a while now my favourite has been Dispatch from Clean Shaven Apps. As well as the many integrations and efficient handling of archiving and deleting emails, I like it because it is one of the only apps that lets you order mail in the One True Way.
Which in case you’re wondering is oldest at the top. Newest at the top is fine for blogs and similar news-based things, but it’s not right for anything else. Call me old-fashioned, but that was the default in Eudora and probably in Mutt and Elm and all those too, and it was and remains the best way.
Even Outlook lets you order it oldest-first. Though disturbingly few people take advantage of it.
Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that today Dispatch let me down. I was typing a reply on my iPad this morning. The reply composition window looks like this:
I did something — I’m not sure what — that made the composition window slide off to the right. Part of it was still visible, so I tried tapping on it. And it disappeared.
There was no prompt, and nothing in my drafts folder. All that I had typed was gone, like tears in rain.
I’ve just been trying to reproduce it, and I can, up to a point: if you slide the compose window to the right it goes off out of the way, like this:
Which is actually quite useful, because it makes the compose window non-modal and lets you interact with your other messages. But somehow something can go wrong, even though I can’t make it happen now.
Not the end of the world. I retyped the mail. But that’s not good enough, Dispatch. You have to be able to trust your email client.
Surely There's a Better Answer Than That?
For one reason or another we wanted to remind ourselves1 of the Spanish word for “south.” I like to ask Siri for that kind of thing, because speaking to your phone is just easier than unlocking and typing sometimes. And Siri is not bad. It quite often gets the right answer for this kind of thing.
Not so much there, though.
So it correctly understood my question; but instead of feeding it to Google Translate or another translation service, it sent it to Wolfram Alpha, seemingly. And that came back with intriguing answer that the Spanish for “south” is “about 99027 people.”
Seems like an unwieldy way to specify a compass direction.
Getting Rid of Offensive Publications in Apple News Widget
This is not a “How To” article, it’s a “How Do I?” one. I’ve been googling (or duckducking) to try to find the answer, but to no avail yet.
Take a look at this screenshot:
Note that those “Top Stories” include headlines from the Sun and Sky News. Two publications whose names and words I do not want to see polluting my iPad or iPhone.
But I can’t find any way to get rid of them. The widget details are linked to the Apple News app, and in the app itself you can specify preferences, but it doesn’t seem to affect what appears in the widget.
So if anyone has any idea of how to influence what appears there, please drop me a comment, or tweet me a link or something.
And yes I know I could disable the widget and/or delete the app, but I quite like the idea of it, in principle at least. And yes, I also know that avoiding the views of publications I dislike is only going to increase my own bubble effect. But you’ve got to have standards. I could cope with the Telegraph or even the Times (though I’d prefer not to). But the Sun? Come on.
Starry Comandante
Cubana. Service slow but food v nice.
The Captain sings.
The Damned on stage.
More Penetration.
That’s Penetration on stage at Brixton Academy, supporting the Damned.
Harry Potter play today! (Also mixing up the fandoms.)
From the fierce heat of the autumnal South of Spain, back to properly-autumnal London.
