Id really like people to stop telling me that not voting for evil is evil. There is no such thing as harm mitigation anymore, hasn't been for easily 25 years if not more. The fact that you hold your nose to vote for the "lesser evil" then are surprised by the person you voted for getting scoobie doo revealed as just as evil year after year makes you just as bad. Decades of voting for the lesser evil has got us here.

#randomRant

Last year was the last edition of the hard dance festival nearby. Sadly, the same shit with a different name is happening this year again. Three days of hearing tchun-tchun-tchun until 1am.

I really don't understand what people find in that kind of music, or why it has to be so loud I can hear it from 2km distance (yes, I know wind direction has to do with that too).

Even worse, I don't understand how that is allowed to take place in a big park/forest/nature area.

#RandomToot #RandomRant #RantToot

I am quite a big fan of the Garmin Etrex series. They're light. They run on AA batteries. They have zero reliance on a mobile signal, apps, updates or whatever.

But damn, it's soooo underpowered. The model line desperately needs refreshing with a new SoC, and a slightly bigger and higher ppi screen (another 1cm would be perfect, and maybe 800x480 res).

Much as everyone moans about the UI, I think it's fairly intuitive and everyone knows the layout, so I think just reskinning it for legibility but keeping the same design principles would make sense.

And FFS, just buy Gaia maps from Outside. Use their tiles as the standard accross the board for all Garmin devices, and use their app ecosystem and web UI to replace the cluster of ducks that passes for whatever abomination it is Garmin summoned from the pits of early 2000s car satnavs.

#Bushwalking #Garmin #RandomRant

#RandomRant #WebDev #UX

I think I am growing increasingly annoyed and frustrated with all the so-called “responsive designs”. 😬
From a user-experience perspective, especially on desktop, using the UI is just: awful. 😬

You resize your window by a few pixels, and whoops!, the whole page structure suddenly gets completely mixed up: elements unpredictably appear or disappear, get resized or/and moved to the other side of the page, the font size suddenly doubles, etc. just because you happened to cross an invisible threshold that a drunk designer arbitrarily decided would separate two different page structures! 🙃

You don’t need to resize a window after the page is opened to see the effect: if you just happen to go to a website you are used to with a slightly smaller browser window than what you use most of the time, the positions of the interface elements might have completely changed compared to what you are used to, and you’ll need some time to look around to find where that damn table of contents or navigation bar went to!
This makes the interfaces harder to memorize and “learn”, because the elements positions are never the same, and although all of this follows some rules that the designers felt were “logical” (from their point of view), these rules are unknown to the user, obscure, sudden and invisible.

And those rules are totally illogical and arbitrary, based on the designer’s intuitions, not the user needs when they actually use the application in their specific situation!
If I am resizing the browser window in which I browse your three-columns website to make it smaller by a few pixels, it’s probably because I feel that the current size is too big, and that a slightly smaller size for the main (central) column will be large enough for my use current use. Or else I would not be resizing it to make it smaller, would I?
But because I crossed an invisible threshold, you decide to suddenly remove a whole column from my page, and suddenly expand the main one to fill the now empty space! Well then, that expanded column is suddenly becoming bigger by a few hundred pixels, which is much bigger than what I expected it would become when I thought that it was OK to reduce its size (because I was resizing the window to make it smaller 😒)!

Suddenly changing the page organization and structure of the page according to invisible and unpredictable rules makes it impossible (or much harder) for the users to customize the applications to suit their needs, even in the most basic ways (I mean, resizing a window! 🙄), because they can only predict the result of resizing the window with the page structure and design that is currently visible, not a totally different structure that the page might suddenly and unexpectedly switch to!

Compare this to the experience with desktop applications (including web browsers themselves): controls and UI elements never jump around or get mixed up simply because the window is resized! A sidebar doesn’t decide on its own to become a bottom bar after the aspect-ratio changed!
The elements always remain in the same position and size.

OK, the size of some elements/columns can be automatically adjusted depending on the size of the window, but this is all predictable to the user, and the rules are easy to understand instinctively (ie. “this column has fixed size and this other column takes the rest of the available space” is obvious as soon as you resize the window once). The result is always predictable.
And if at some point the user feel that the size of a column or element becomes too narrow or too big, they can almost always easily decide to resize it themselves, with a draggable handle. Takes only seconds.

Depending on the complexity and customizability of the application, you can sometimes move and reorganize different parts of the interface and controls with drag and drop (sidebar, bottom bar, toolbox, etc.), and sometimes you can only toggle them, or only resize some element in a single direction, etc. but in all cases those elements remain in the position you put them and keep the size and visibility status you decided, unless you decide to move them yourself explicitly.

This is how usable and non-frustrating interfaces should be, not some unpredictable mess where controls play hide-and-seek or decide to jump to the other side on the page whenever you least expect it. 

Having to put on music to drone the children playing outside because they are extremely loud and grating on our nerves.

#Rant #RandomRant

#randomrant i grew up in the “no means no” date-rape awareness era. I remember a time when people said to find the person with power you find the person who can say yes. Well, corporatism changed that. Now only the powerful say no…but what really gets me is this…
You want everything on your burger?
Yes but I don’t want onion.
🙄do that’s a no

HOW HARD IS IT TO SAY NO?