Notices by 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account (thorthenorseman@octodon.social), page 85

I follow Applied Science on YouTube. He has a lab in his basement, complete with chemicals, a welder, a kiln, a vacuum chamber and a fully functional electron microscope. When he tries out a process, he always provides the recipe, because everyone else also has a lab in the basement, right?

When you order parts for an electronics project on eBay, the boring parts always arrive first.

@SuperFloppies https://octodon.social/@thorthenorseman/100754124104043628

If most external monitors support DDC/CI control of brightness and contrast, like Wikipedia says, why aren't there GUI widgets in every OS to control that? It's silly that I have to download an app in order to do such a small thing.

I read an article in the news about how the Norwegian kroner rate has suddenly started tracking the Swedish kronor rate instead of the oil price, after some changes in the market affected both currencies simultaneously and the trade bots latched onto it, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If the stock market was an MMO game, the bots would've been banned a long time ago. We can't have bots in control of the market. An auto-pilot should take you to your destination, not choose it for you.

@skypage As for my bedtime environment, there's a Philips Hue light in here to, configured to an extremely low candle colour temperature and running at half the normal brightness; my sleep light. There isn't much I can do to reduce blue wavelengths from my iPhone except putting Night Shift to the lowest colour temperature it permits and using a very dim display, so that's what I do.

@skypage Except I don't really sit in complete darkness. My computer is in the living room, lit by Philips Hue lights which fade to warm white at night, and I want my monitor reduce its brightness and match the colour temperature of those lights, mainly for reasons of comfort.

@skypage I actually have a sensor that measures the colour and brightness of the daylight entering my living room. I use it to control my Philips Hue lights. In a perfect world, I could make it control Night Shift and my monitor's backlight brightness.

@skypage So I looked around for monitors with a software controllable backlight. I was thinking that the best possible way of doing this type of feature is if the monitor balances the blue and yellow LEDs in the backlight, because that way, you don't need to manipulate any pixels, and you retain full 24-bit colour. Didn't find a monitor like that, but did discover that you can at least control the brightness of the backlight.

@skypage I had gotten tired of navigating the menus on the BenQ every night. It didn't do anything automatically, so it was a bit of a pain to use. When I found the Night Shift in macOS today, I gave in. The BenQ would also remember a backlight setting for you though, which was nice, because the screen does get awfully bright at night, even with the colour temperature filter on it.

@skypage Yes, but for a while now, I've been using the built-in Low Light Mode on my BenQ monitor instead, plus the built-in Night Shift on my iPhone. I also recently discovered that macOS High Sierra has Night Shift as well, so I quit using the Low Light Mode on the BenQ. I was using it instead of f.lux in the hopes that it would do clever things to the backlight instead of squashing the RGB range.

Biggest mistake I made when I bought a new monitor a couple of years back is that I went for a 2K monitor instead of a 4K monitor. You don't get Retina mode in macOS with a 2K monitor, so unless you buy a huge one (which I didn't), your UI is going to be tiny. The way macOS does UI scaling is with virtual pixels (to retain software compatibility) and it can only do so at integer ratios—thus the 4K requirement.

@forteller I'm sure someone wrote a Python/shell script for that, if not a GUI widget. This stuff runs via DDC/CI and I bet it's already supported.

I remember trying to request a feature in an app on social media once. Long before the representative from the company showed up, my request was criticised by other users of the app, who basically told me that I shouldn't want the feature, in a very judgemental way. Eventually, a representative showed up and said: Sorry, but we aren't going to fix it. (In other words, they weren't sorry.) When the *other customers* try to deny you what you want... Yeah, it's hard to love people sometimes.

Apple forum threads always have that one guy who says one of the following things:
- You shouldn't want to do that.
- You should submit a feature request to Apple.

Protip: There are widgets that let you adjust desktop monitor brightness in software:

https://github.com/the0neyouseek/MonitorControl

https://github.com/emoacht/Monitorian

https://www.engadget.com/2018/09/17/twitter-algorithm-timeline/

Twitter is reviving the chronological timeline.

> > Does there not exist some ridiculously parallel equivalent of Bresenham or Wu?

> Sure—it's trivial. Draw some bounding geometry and calculate the Euclidean distance to the line. Shade accordingly. The trick is finding that minimal bounding geometry.

Line drawing. Euclidean distance. OH! You just project each fragment on the line, measure the distance and use clamp() and mix() for the alpha. That's so damned clever. I wish I was smart enough to have thought of it.

Being a network admin in the 90s:

"The server is down? Oh well. I wanted a newspaper, a coffee and a walk anyway."

Being a network admin in 2018:

"My cocaine, Thor. Where is my god damn Internet cocaine? I don't see any cocaine here, Thor. Give me my COCAINE!!! GOD DAMN IT WHAT HAVE YOU DONE I NEED IT FOR FUCKS S"

@Ricardus I notice a lot of little mistakes when I hear Norwegians speaking English. It's usually nothing terrible, but it's often enough to make me cringe. Not everyone gets a good *grade* in English even if they did take it in school. When I say fluent, I mean that people can speak it without awkward pauses, and I'd add a "native" level above it for people who speak it at the level you'd call "fluent".