@boingbot
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/23/salmagundi/#dewey-102

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The problem is that when you write long, synthetic essays, they crowd out the quick hits. Back in May 2022, I started including three short links with each edition of Pluralistic, in a section called "Hey look at this" (thanks to @mitchw for suggesting it!):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/01/reit-modernization-act/#linkdump

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But even with that daily #linkdump, I still manage to accumulate #LinkDebt, as interesting things pile up, not rising to the level of a long blog-post, but not so disposable as to be easy to flush. When the pile gets big enough, I put out a Saturday Linkdump:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

All of which is to say, it's Saturday, and I've got a linkdump!

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First up, a musical interlude. I've been listening to #DJEarworm's amazing mashups since 2005 and while I've got dozens of tracks that shuffle in and out of my daily playlist, the one that makes me wanna get up and dance every time is "No One Takes Your Freedom," a wildly improbable banger composed of equal parts #ArethaFranklin, #TheBeatles, #GeorgeMichael and #ScissorSisters:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaboIeW1A_4

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I defy you to play that one without bopping a little. I think it's the French horn from "For No One" that really kills it, the world's least expected intro to a heavy dance beat.

Moving swiftly on: let's talk about fonts. I remember when @WIRED Magazine first showed up at the bookstores I was working at in #Toronto, and my bosses - younger men than I am now! - complained that the tiny, decorative fonts, rendered in silver foil on a purple background, was illegible.

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I laughed at them, batting my young eyes and devouring the promise of a better future with ease, even in dim light.

Now it's thirty years later and I'm half-blind. Both my my decaying, aging eyes are filmed with cataracts that I'm too busy to get removed (though my doc promises permanent 20:20, perfect night-vision, *and* implanted bifocals when I can spare a month from touring with new books to get 'em fixed).

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Which is to say: I spend a lot more time thinking about legibility now than I did in the early 1990s, and I've got a lot more sympathy for those booksellers' complaints about *Wired*'s aggressively low-contrast design today. I'm forever on the hunt for fonts designed for high legibility.

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This week, @kottke linked to #B612, a free font family "designed for aircraft cockpit screens," commissioned by #Airbus. It's got all the bells and whistles (e.g. hinting) and comes in variable and monospace faces:

https://b612-font.com/

B612 arrived at a fortuitous moment, coinciding with a major UI overhaul in @thunderbird, the app I spend the second-most time in (I spend more in #Gedit, the bare-bones text-editor that comes with #Ubuntu, the flavor of #GNULinux I use).

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A previous Thunderbird UI experiment had made all the UI text effectively unreadable for me, causing me to dive deep into the infinitely configurable settings to sub in my own fonts:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/UserChrome.css

The new UI is *much* better, but it broke all my old tweaks, so I went back into those settings and switched everything to B612, and it's *amazeballs*.

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I tried doing the same in Gedit, but B612 mono was too light for my shitty eyes, so I went back to #JetbrainsMono, another free/open font that has *8* weights to choose from:

https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/

Love me a new, legible font! Meanwhile, a note for all you designers: the received wisdom that black on white type is "hard on the eyes" is a harmful myth. Stop with the grey-on-white type, for the love of all that is holy.

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This isn't 1992, you aren't laying out type for Wired Issue 1.0. Contrast is good, actually.

Continuing on the subject of software updates: #Mastodon, the free, open, federated social media platform that anyone can host and that lets you hop between one server and another with just a couple clicks, has released a major update, focusing on usability, especially for people unfamiliar with its conventions:

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/09/mastodon-4.2/

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Included in this fix: a major overhaul to how you interact with posts on servers other than your home server. This was both confusing and clunky, and the fix makes it *much* better. They've also changed how sign-up flow works, making things simpler for newbies, and they've cleaned up the UI, tweaking threads, web previews and other parts of the daily experience.

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There's also a lot of changes to search, but search still remains less than ideal, with multi-server search limited to hashtags. This is bad, actually. Thankfully, we don't have to wait for Mastodon devs to decide to fix it, because Mastodon is free and open, which means anyone with the skills to code a change, or the money to pay techies to do it, or the moral force to convince them to do it, can effect that change themselves:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/

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Case in point: #Mastoreader, a great new thread reader for Mastodon:

https://mastoreader.io/

Every time that guy who owns Twitter breaks it even worse, a new cohort of users sign up. Not all of them stay, but the growth is steady and the trendline is solid:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/11/of-course-mastodon-lost-users/

It's the right call: while there are other services that promise that they will be federated someday, promises are easy, and there's world of difference between "federateable" and "federated."

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