~ Tangents – Page 11

Google is the New Microsoft

May 14, 2015 By Mark Leave a Comment

Two days ago I went to log into Gmail and found that the login screen I had been using for, what — an entire decade? — was suddenly behaving differently. Now, as a longtime web user I’ve been taught that any time something seems phishy I should make sure that what I’m seeing is actually what it purports to be. That is in fact the lesson all large web companies preach — be vigilant!

The problem, of course, is that the level of criminal sophistication perpetrating such deceptions keeps growing, to the point that almost anything seems possible. How do I know that someone hasn’t figured out a way to show me the appropriate URL, then redirect my traffic or keystrokes to a hostile server? I mean, I’m a reasonably sophisticated web user, but that only means I’m that much more aware of what I don’t know.

As it turns out, the change to my Gmail login ritual was not only initiated by Google, it was rolled out on the sly without, ironically, so much as an email that a change was coming. Meaning I had to get on the internet to find out that other users around the country and around the world were being confronted by that same autocratic change before I knew it was safe to log into my Gmail account.

Somewhere in the high-tech bowels of Google a group of very highly paid people got together and decided that they would roll out a new login scheme which requires twice as many clicks as the old scheme, that they would do so without giving notice to anyone who used that scheme, and that they would give no reason for doing so. That is exactly how the world ended up with Windows 8, and a whole host of other Microsoft initiatives to win market share and own technology spaces in complete disregard for its customers.

I suspect that the Gmail change has something to do with Google’s recognition that the world is going mobile, but the real story here is the contempt with which Google views its users. That is in fact the signature moment in any tech company’s life cycle — the one where current users are considered to be, at best, nothing more that a population to be exploited, and at worst, a hindrance to corporate goals that have completely diverged from the products and services being offered and utilized.

In terms of righteous indignation this barely qualifies as a 2, so I’m not suggesting anyone leave Gmail, but simply that you take a step back and get your mind around the contempt that any company would have to have in order to suddenly change the portal to your email account. Because those are the same people who have said they are not reading your hosted emails, or personally identifying your web traffic, or doing anything else you wouldn’t want them to do because they promised they wouldn’t be evil.

Update: It occurred to me last night that the new Gmail requirement that users click on two separate screens in order to log in, instead of only one as before, may have been initiated as a means of encouraging people to stay logged in all the time. While presenting as an initial annoyance, once users gave in and complied it would strengthen Google’s brand association with email products and the user’s reliance on same, preventing people from migrating to other platforms for chat and video, etc. The downside, obviously, is that it would actually make Gmail accounts significantly less secure if an always-logged-in device fell into the wrong hands.

— Mark Barrett

The Best Monitor / Display for Text

May 10, 2015 By Mark 59 Comments

A few weeks ago, just before my keyboard died, my monitor momentarily flickered ever so subtly between displaying white as full white and white as soft pink. It happened so quickly, and the change was so faint, that at first I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. Fortunately, a day or two later the same thing happened, allowing me to determine that the monitor itself was hinky.

While I have no qualms about opening up a keyboard to see if I can rectify a problem, or just about any other gadget you could name, I draw the line at messing around inside devices that contain potentially lethal capacitors. Combine that reticence with the flickering I had seen, and the low, staticky hum that had been building up in my monitor for the past year or two, and it suddenly seemed prudent to once again peruse the state-of-the-art display offerings available in the market before the very device I would need to rely on to do so failed completely.

(There are all kinds of things that can go wrong with a computer, and the most maddening aspect of all of them is that those issues immediately make it impossible to access the internet, which is where all the solutions are. If your operating system locks up you need to access another computer to research the problem. If your monitor dies you need to have another display on hand in order to order a replacement, which you would not need if you already had one on hand. Speaking of which, even if you use an add-on graphics card, the motherboard in your computer should always have its own graphics chip for exactly that reason. If your card dies — and graphics cards are always dying, or freaking out — you can still drive your monitor and access the web.)

As was the case with my venerable old keyboard, I was not at all surprised that my monitor might be at the end of its useful life. In fact — and you will no doubt find this amusing or absurd — I am still using a second-hand CRT that I bought in the mid-aughts for the lofty price of twenty-five dollars. While that in itself is comical, the real scream is that the monitor was manufactured in 2001, meaning it’s close to fifteen years old. Yet until a couple of weeks ago it had been working flawlessly all that time.

The monitor is a 19″ Viewsonic A90, and I can’t say I’ve ever had a single complaint about it. It replaced my beloved old Sony Trinitron G400, which borked one day without the slightest hint that something might be amiss. Scrambling to get myself back in freelance mode I scanned Craigslist and found a used monitor that would allow me to limp along until I found a better permanent solution. Eight or so years later here I am, still using the same A90. (In internet time, of course, those eight years are more like eight hundred. Not only were LCD’s, and later, LED’s, pricey back then, yet quite raw in terms of performance, but you could also reasonably expect to use Craigslist without being murdered.)

Between then and now I have kept track of changes in the price, size, functionality and technology of flat-panel monitors, and more than once researched display ratings with the thought that I might join the twenty-first century. Each time, however, three issues kept me from pulling the trigger.

First, while all that snazzy new technology was indeed snazzy and new, relative to CRT technology it was still immature, requiring compromises I was not willing to make in terms of display quality and potential effects on my eyes. Having always been sensitive to flickering monitors, I was not eager to throw money at a problem I did not have — or worse, buy myself a problem I did not want. (As a general rule, putting off any tech purchase as long as possible pays off twice, because what you end up with later is almost always better and cheaper than what you can purchase today.)

Second, at the time I was primarily freelancing in the interactive industry, which meant I was working with a lot of beta-version software that had not been fully tested with every conceivable display technology. Using lagging tech at both the graphics and display level meant I could be reasonably confident that whatever I was working on would draw to my screen, at least sufficiently to allow me to do my part.

Third — and this relates somewhat to the second point — one advantage CRT’s had and still have over LCD/LED displays is that they do not have a native resolution:

The native resolution of a LCD, LCoS or other flat panel display refers to its single fixed resolution. As an LCD display consists of a fixed raster, it cannot change resolution to match the signal being displayed as a CRT monitor can, meaning that optimal display quality can be reached only when the signal input matches the native resolution.

Whether you run a CRT at 1024×768 or 1600×1200 you’re going to get pretty much the same image quality, albeit at different scales. The fact that I could switch my A90 to any resolution was a boon while working in the games biz, because I could adjust my monitor to fit whatever was best for any game while still preserving the detail and clarity of whatever documents I was working on.

While imagery is and always has been the lusty focus of monitor reviews, there is almost nothing more difficult to clearly render using pixels of light than the sharply delineated, high-contrast symbols we call text. Because LCD/LED monitors have a native resolution, attempting to scale text (or anything else) introduces another problem:

While CRT monitors can usually display images at various resolutions, an LCD monitor has to rely on interpolation (scaling of the image), which causes a loss of image quality. An LCD has to scale up a smaller image to fit into the area of the native resolution. This is the same principle as taking a smaller image in an image editing program and enlarging it; the smaller image loses its sharpness when it is expanded.

The key word there is interpolation. If you run your LCD/LED at anything other than its native resolution what you see on your screen will almost inevitably be less sharp. While that may not matter when you’re watching a DVD or playing a game, interpolating text is one of the more difficult things to do well. Particularly in early flat panels the degradation from interpolation was considerable, making anything other than the native resolution ill-suited for word processing. [ Read more ]

Requiem for a Keyboard

May 3, 2015 By Mark 1 Comment

A week or so ago I was bashing away at my keyboard when I suddenly began producing g’s that looked like this — ‘g — and h’s that looked like this: -h. Having spent a fair amount of time working with computers I knew there were various reasons why my keyboard might suddenly become possessed, none of them even remotely exciting. Because those multi-character glitches were crippling my ability to type, however, I quickly set about diagnosing the cause.

Occasionally, when my mind is firing faster than my fingers can move, I’ll accidentally enter a key combination that performs some automated feat I did not intend to perform. Worse, because I don’t know which keys I hit in which order, I won’t know if some preexisting configuration was altered that will trip me up later. If I’m lucky the result will be something obvious, as happens from time to time with Google Mail, which seems to delight in auto-sending messages before I’m through with them. And of course there’s the perpetually irritating StickyKeys feature, which, as far as I know, exists only to remind me that my left pinky is loitering on the shift key while I’m thinking about what I want to type.

Because there are so many default key combinations that come with any word processing software, to say nothing of the keyboard software itself, and because it’s possible to invoke such macros by accident — including changing the output of specific keys — my first diagnostic act was to uninstall both Intellitype and the keyboard driver to see if that solved the problem. Which it did not.

My next concern — which grew rapidly — was that the errant behavior I was seeing was the result of a virus or malware. After running scans for both, however, my machine was deemed clean, which meant, almost certainly, that I was having a hardware problem.

My keyboard of choice is the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 (MNEK4K), which also has, I believe, the longest name in the history of keyboards. The model flaking out on my desk was the most recent incarnation of the same split-board device I had been using for close to twenty years, since just after the MNEK4K debuted. It was at least six or seven years old, had seen regular use almost daily over that time, and given how loose and clicky the keys had become I wasn’t particularly surprised that it might have reached the end of its useful life. (Conservatively, total key presses on that board easily topped ten million, with the bulk taking placing on the most-used letter keys. Speaking of which, years ago the A, S, D and arrow keys lost their labels due to repeated use, and the M key only displayed the upper-left corner of that letter.)

As with any keyboard, from time to time a key had gotten stuck, so that was my first thought in terms of mechanical failures. Close inspection turned up nothing obvious, however, so my next idea was that six or seven years worth of wayward hairs, lint and food debris might be causing trouble I could not see. And that meant I would have to open up the board.

Now, if you’re not used to taking things apart, the idea of opening up a keyboard may seem fraught with risk. Fortunately, I had two things going for me. First, I’ve taken a lot of things apart over the years, from computer tech to automobile engines, so I have some familiarity with the procedures and practices involved. Second, my keyboard had been out of warranty for years, meaning I could hardly make things worse. If I didn’t open it up I would have to by a new one, and if I broke it by opening it I would have to buy a new one, so there was literally nothing to lose other than time and a little DIY dignity. [ Read more ]

Single Color Text on a Full Gradient

April 9, 2015 By Mark Leave a Comment

Speaking of graphics software, by pure chance recently I ran across the obvious and thus embarrassing solution to a problem that has vexed me for quite some time. Not only have I wrestled with this conceptual beast on multiple occasions — and lost, even after spending hours using imprecise or generic keywords, thus inevitably drowning in the sea of noise that is rapidly rendering search itself almost useless — but I’ve known for several years that I would have to slay said beast in order to design a graphic for a book I was working on.

Thankfully, said book has proceeded at a snail’s pace, giving the world time to help me despite my obliviousness. (That I came upon the answer by mere happenstance is disheartening given the implications for other aspects of my future, but still — I’ll take it.)

The problem arises when trying to show a single text color across a full background gradient. While it’s likely in practice that such a problem would occur on a page featuring many words, here’s an example using a single word in black text against a full gradient from white to black:

As you can see, on the right side the black text is swallowed by the black background. Just as obviously, switching to white text only shifts the instigation of the problem:

The temptation on a page with many spread-out words would be to switch text colors midway through the gradient, but at best that’s a hack. The simple and elegant fix — which it pains me I was unable to arrive at on my own — is to add a contrasting border around the text:

And here’s the same solution for white text, using a black outline:

If completely bounding your text seems heavy-handed, here’s a slightly offset version that is still readable but also conveys a sense of mood:

The solution also works for two colors, assuming sufficient contrast:

As to how to implement such changes in most graphics programs, the simplest workflow seems to be duplicating the text, changing the color in the copy, then slightly expanding or shrinking one copy until the two can be arranged one on top of the other, thus revealing a consistent border. In Inkscape, however, because all text can be either stroke or fill, you can simply change the fill to one color and stroke to another.

If you’re a total beginner, here’s a GIMP video and one for Inkscape. If you have a little experience with GIMP, here’s a shorter video.

(Note: the current version of Inkscape is 0.91. Prior to version 0.91 the previous stable release was 0.48.5 in July of 2014. Inkscape version history here.)

— Mark Barrett

DIY Cover Design: GIMP vs. Inkscape

April 6, 2015 By Mark 1 Comment

The first (and so far, only) two book covers I designed were done with GIMP. I got great help from Joleene Naylor on the first cover, and managed to flounder my way to solo completion with the second, but along the way I noticed some recurrent problems, particularly with regard to text, curves and anti-aliasing.

What I have learned over the past year or so is that all graphics software breaks down along two main lines: vector graphics and raster graphics. GIMP is commonly and accurately categorized as photo-editing software, but also belongs on the raster side of the graphics software divide. While photo-editing software can be incredibly powerful in its own right, because raster graphics are based on pixels, resizing raster graphics can also get you into serious trouble.

That’s not true for vector graphics, which are defined by mathematical relationships. Put together a snazzy logo in a vector program and you can scale that logo down to a business card or up to a billboard with no loss of detail. Yes, it is a miracle.

I have a few covers to design in the coming months — or years, at my current pace — and I plan on doing so, at least in part, using a vector graphics program called Inkscape. Like GIMP, Inkscape is open-source freeware and incredibly powerful. Also like GIMP, Inkscape is incredibly obtuse and difficult to learn, even if you’re otherwise comfortable with all things computer.

For example, suppose you want to combine two simple shapes as follows, using Inkscape:

After reading up on the program, following tutorials and learning about the power of nodes and paths, and playing with snazzy features like combine and union, to say nothing of delete segment, you might think the proper solution would be to overlap the two shapes, join them at nodes, then remove the line across the middle of the circle:

And you would be one hundred percent wrong. [ Read more ]

Valuing Yourself and Your Work

March 30, 2015 By Mark Leave a Comment

On the heels of the previous post about money junkies it’s worth taking a moment to think about self-worth. The reason it’s an important topic is that if you’re not willing to set the floor on your own value, you can assume everyone else will set it at zero. In fact, only a few years ago there was a theory being floated that the smart play in the internet age was to give yourself away in every respect, including work you created.

Called the freemium pricing strategy, the idea — much like the overriding ethos of web development in general — was that eyeballs, marketing and branding are more important than anything else. Gather enough attention and you can cash in by monetizing your online celebrity. Now, if your product is celebrity that might be true, just as it’s probably true if you’re a money junkie and have lots of cash and employees to burn through. Likewise, if you have no compunction about abusing your own customer base, and in particular children and young adults, making free-to-play games can be profitable. Like street-savvy drug dealers, the makers of free-to-play games give their products away until users are hooked, then stick them with carefully engineered pricing strategies and deceptive promises that all but compel players to pony up real cash if they want to stay competitive.

Unfortunately, if you are an unknown, do not have a round of funding you can torch in order to attract your next round of funding, or you have a conscience, giving yourself and your work away will always yield exactly no money, which is problematic if you also like to eat and don’t want to live under a bridge. If you aspire to make a living doing something you love, or even doing something you hate, you’re going to have to give some consideration to your worth as a worker and as a human being. Depending on the state of the economy it’s entirely possible that the world will laugh in your face, particularly if the money junkies on Wall St. have blown the earning power of the average consumer to to smithereens and unemployment is through the roof, but still — at some point you have to draw a line in the sand.

Speaking of which, when you’re just starting out in your chosen field — or playing around until you figure out what you want to be when you grow up — it’s probably a good thing to be humble. Nobody likes a know-it-all or someone who is overly confident. If you’ve written a book and you’re sure it’s going to sell a million copies at $100 a piece — well, you get points for valuing yourself, but many more points off for being an idiot. By the same token, however, if you have zero confidence, even if only in your ability to bounce back from what will almost certainly be setbacks, you’re probably going to fail. [ Read more ]

Money Junkies

March 22, 2015 By Mark 2 Comments

I’ve been reading a lot of posts and articles lately about people trying to get into this business or that, and about people being marginalized while trying to get into this business or that, and it struck me that while discrimination is never acceptable, the premise of having a boss also needs to be considered. Where it used to be the case that jobs were offered by companies that had been in business a while, in industries where get-rick-quick schemes were not common, let alone the main product, when it comes to working in tech the opposite is often true. In fact, if you take a job in tech, including interactive entertainment, it’s quite possible that the human beings cutting your checks will be money junkies posing as entrepreneurs.

What is a money junkie? Well, as the name suggests, a money junkie is someone who will do anything they can to make money. Unlike a normal businessperson who wants to do business, and more importantly keep doing business, a money junkie is determined to burn through as many resources as possible in pursuit of money, including those human resources called employees.

If you’re a money junkie yourself there might be some benefit in working for a money junkie, because they really do know how to squeeze the last drop of productivity from a human being before casting the desiccated corpse aside. If you’re not, however — and particularly if other human beings rely on your paycheck — the last thing you want to do is sign on to work for a money junkie. Yet that’s probably not what you’ve been told.

What you’ve been told is that by allying yourself with a money junkie you can make heaping piles of money, and in some extremely rare instances that does happen. Not surprisingly, the people pushing that million-to-one-shot message are the money junkies, because they need all the eager, bushy-tailed employees they can get. It’s like that when you’re a money junkie, because the employees who were bushy-tailed six months ago will soon fail to demonstrate loyalty, initiative and drive by impertinently cracking apart at the seams.

You may be thinking you’re too smart to be exploited by a money junkie. You may be thinking you’ve got the right stuff to succeed no matter who you work for. You may believe you’ve got to take any job to get your foot in the door. No, no and no.

Your job, before you take a job, is to avoid working for people who are going to grind you down and have an unpaid intern sweep your shavings into the trash. Fortunately, particularly in the tech world, there’s a way to test the waters without naively exposing yourself to money junkie abuse. [ Read more ]

Social Networking as Entertainment

March 15, 2015 By Mark 3 Comments

Sturgeon’s Law states that ninety percent of everything is crap. Ninety percent of music is crap, ninety percent of food is crap (unless you’re starving, in which case it’s life-sustaining crap), ninety percent of television is crap, ninety percent of literature is crap, and so on.

Sturgeon’s Law is correct. Ninety percent of everything is crap, which means ninety percent of the social networking being done in the name of democratization and personal empowerment is also crap.

What’s interesting about social networking crap is that it breaks down into two symbiotic categories which are opposite sides of the same entertainment coin. On one side we have ridicule, which makes us laugh, and on the other side we have righteous indignation, which makes us cry.

Comedy. Drama.

It’s as if social networking is actually a medium of entertainment, and only incidentally concerned with socializing or networking.

Adding to the appeal of social networking as entertainment is the fact that ridicule tends to generate righteous indignation and righteous indignation tends to beget ridicule, meaning there’s no stopping them once they get started.

Looking for laughs? Log onto any social networking site and you’ll find someone making fun of someone, which you can then like or retweet or comment on. If anyone has the temerity to accuse you of ridicule you can respond with righteous indignation.

Looking for justice? Log onto any social networking site and you’ll find someone standing up to someone, which you can then like or retweet or comment on. If anyone has the effrontery to accuse you of righteous indignation you can respond with ridicule.

(If you were in third grade you might be accused of bullying or playing victim, but because you’re an adult using expensive information-age technology you don’t have to worry about that.)

Like every other medium of entertainment, the ninety percent of social networking that is crap would be harmless fun if it wasn’t also inherently dehumanizing. Unlike every other medium of entertainment, participating in the generation of all that crap diminishes our ability to appreciate the remaining ten percent.

— Mark Barrett

Little Scream — Black Cloud

March 3, 2015 By Mark 1 Comment

In late November of 2013, for the second year in a row, I found myself staggering to the end of a six-month battle with the same massive document. As had long become habit, largely to preserve some tenuous connection with life outside the confines of the virtual pages that were my waking reality, I spent much of my writing time listening to several custom stations on Pandora. While I enjoyed the great majority of the songs that played, most of them came and went without intruding on consciousness.

From time to time, however, a particular song would grate on me until I silenced it, and on even rarer occasions a song would seize and hold my attention. Among that small number of mesmerizing songs, before and since, none stands apart like Black Cloud by Laurel Sprengelmeyer, who goes by the stage name Little Scream. In the moment, sixteen months ago, it was arresting in its beauty and ability to transport, and I still feel that way today.

While looking up information on the artist back then I searched for a video but could only find uploads by others, and I didn’t want to link to something that wasn’t officially released. I did find additional songs and performances by Little Scream, but Black Cloud was not among them. Recently, however, I found this:

I listen to a lot of music and I know what I like. Give me the choice between a beat and a groove and I go groove every time. But there’s another thing music can do, and that’s take you on a trip, and that’s what happens each time I listen to Black Cloud. I’m not sure what the musical word for that would be, but my word would be storytelling.

If Black Cloud takes you somewhere, and you like the trip, tell someone when you get back. Musicians in particular have always had a tough time making a living doing what they love, and I don’t think anyone will ever solve that problem. One problem the internet can solve, however, is making sure musicians and other artists who touch us know that their voices matter and are being heard.

Lyrics here. Site here. Album here. Videos here. Another favorite here.

— Mark Barrett