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Windows 10 and Productivity Risk

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While there are certainly plenty of arguments for and against Windows 10, for users who treat their desktops, notebooks or tablets like nothing more than large-display smartphones many of Windows 10’s new features make sense. If you’ve already thrown in the towel and become a co-dependent computer user, nothing Microsoft is doing with Windows 10 is any different than what Google, Amazon and others have been doing to you for years. Picking up on a subplot in the previous post, however, the rollout of Windows 10 should give anyone pause if they use their computer to create.

The problem with Windows 10 is that there’s a big difference between having badly-behaved or data raping apps on my computer and having a badly-behaved data-raping computer. The operating system on my machine isn’t just another program, it’s the most privileged program from an administrative standpoint, meaning it must be the most secure. Windows has always been full of holes, and its registry is a mess, but with some care it was possible to keep the bad guys out, whether the bad guys were hackers or high-gloss Silicon Valley corporations. Windows 10 changes all that, because Windows 10 is designed to serve Microsoft’s competitive needs first and user needs second.

I do not think of my computer as simply a large-display smartphone. My computer is used for productivity — meaning mostly writing, but also other tasks. From that perspective, whatever advantages Windows 10 offers, it also includes several serious drawbacks regarding productivity and security, and one feature in particular that is a deal breaker. Fortunately, I believe Microsoft will ultimately be compelled to change that feature, at which point Windows 10 might become a viable option.  [ Read more ]

Revisiting Hemingway’s Suicide

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Whatever you think you know about Ernest Hemingway, most of what you know or believe you know — and I mean 99% of it — has to do with his persona or celebrity or some facet of his life other than what he actually wrote. That’s true whether you’re a perspicacious academic, an inveterate reader or a militant blogger with an axe to grind for or against.

This post is not about any of that. It is also not about Ernest Hemingway the writer. It is, instead, a post about Ernest Hemingway as a physical being, and as such broaches a narrative that runs at cross purposes to the exploitation, condemnation or exultation of Hemingway as a consciousness. While this post is thus incidental to the objectives of almost anyone who has ever commented about Hemingway as an artist or entertainer, it may yet be central to understanding Hemingway as a man, as opposed to a man’s man.

Most people know that Ernest Hemingway killed himself. If you did not know that prior to stumbling on this post, you do now by virtue of both the headline and this sentence. Many people know that Hemingway shot himself in the head with a shotgun. Some people know that his father committed suicide with a revolver in the same way. That is all true. Because Ernest Hemingway was a celebrity, however, his suicide triggered an outsized desire — if not a cultural need — to frame that act in the context of his life and work, to say nothing of spawning the usual mindless attempts to ascribe a single motive to his decision.

Having thought about storytelling for a long time I have come of late to conclude that such deliberative efforts are not born of the rational mind, which purports to be the agent of concerns about motive, but the narrative mind. It is the intrinsic storyteller in each of us which seeks — if not needs — to make sense of events, particularly when the weight of evidence makes clear that chaos does exist, and that we, at times, are its embodiment. It is because of this instinct, whether you ever paid much attention to Hemingway or not, that today you still likely hold some belief — some plausible cause and effect in your own mind — which explains why Hemingway did what he did over fifty long years ago.  [ Read more ]

Trigger Warning: Trigger Warnings

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I don’t get trigger warnings, particularly as discussed in the context of higher education. I mean, I get them, but I don’t get them.

If the point is to let people know that they might have to read something potentially disturbing, why isn’t a blanket acknowledgement simply proffered? I.e., if you come to our school you may be asked to confront some scary ideas?

If the point is to prevent people who have been traumatized from being reminded of their trauma, why is that not properly the responsibility of the mental health professionals on campus? I wouldn’t want someone who had been raped to be compelled by a bureaucracy to read a work describing graphic rape, but where’s the line? If reading something simply makes you feel bad have you been violated? Do we all get to pick and choose which ideas do and do not get access to our pretty little heads?

It seems to me that the very idea of a trigger warning is a trigger warning. The more easily you are triggered, the more likely any warning will trigger you even if the specific warning doesn’t apply to whatever it was that traumatized you. And that’s assuming that you were traumatized to a medical-grade degree, and not just upset or frightened in the normal course of human events.

What about people who have been traumatized but not sought help? Are trigger warnings providing a service, or are they enabling people to avoid healing or confronting reality? It’s certainly understandable that someone would not want to revisit a trauma, but if that trauma has been dealt with to whatever degree possible, wouldn’t that either diminish the need for trigger warnings or make it possible for that particular individual to do other work — perhaps in part based on an actual note from their campus doctor?

In reading this post you may have intuited some snark or sarcasm, but I assure you that in writing it and revising it several times there is nothing but sincere confusion in these words. I’m even given to wonder if the smartphone — with its endless ability to control and throttle streams of communication — has not given rise to the assumption that all manner of information can be controlled, including information previously deemed important to a well-rounded education. (Which includes the ability to deal with bad news and disturbing ideas and confrontational subjects in an adult manner.)

Then again, it seems equally clear these days that most institutions of higher learning are positioning themselves more as educational resorts than anything else, so it shouldn’t be surprising that their guests are particularly interested in personal comfort. And yet, in an age when actual campus rape seems to be emerging as an unacknowledged and perhaps even longstanding epidemic, the idea that those same guests are determined to avoid reading difficult or disturbing texts seems particularly incongruous.

Like I said, I don’t get trigger warnings. The more I try to figure out how they would actually work and who they would actually help, the more I end up thinking they’re primarily designed to facilitate happy thoughts and prevent unhappy thoughts. Which is fine if you can afford to pay the world to treat you that way, but has nothing to do with being educated or living in the real world.

— Mark Barrett

VR, Drones and Autonomous Vehicles

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As you are probably aware due to the unending stream of utopian press reports emanating from Silicon Valley, three new technologies bankrolled by three of the biggest names in tech are poised to change your life for the better. Just as the computer and internet have been nothing but a positive in the lives of all people everywhere, so too will virtual reality, drones and self-driving vehicles liberate human beings from the tedium of, respectively, sensing the real world, delivering packages, and driving.

Still, in the wee hours of the night, and admittedly afflicted by the kind of doubt that will forever keep human beings from reaching the computational certitude of computers, I find myself thinking that VR, drones and autonomous vehicles sound nice in the vacuum of public relations and venture-capital funding, but may experience or even provoke real-world problems upon deployment. In fact, I can’t keep my storytelling reflex from filling in all the utopian backdrops and can’t-miss financial windfalls with scenarios in which these technologies fail or are repurposed to darker intents.  [ Read more ]

Authors, Artists and the Internet

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Because it’s easy to become overwhelmed by tech minutia, particularly if you hail from the arts, I thought it might be useful to step back from the discussion of SEO in the previous post and consider the internet in broader context. If you’re not into technology most tech-speak probably sounds like gibberish, but you probably also have faith that it all makes sense to someone somewhere. If the internet is a mystery to you as an artist or author, you trust that the smart, wonderful, benevolent people who created the internet in order to help you reach both your intended audience and your creative potential really do understand what it’s all about.

The internet is an amazing creation, and has come to dominate our lives in an amazingly short amount of time. Backed by hundreds of billions of dollars in investment, infrastructure and advertising, the internet is clearly the place to be, at least according to the internet. Beyond making a lot of people rich, however, the internet as a method of communication has democratized conversations that were previously controlled by self-interested if not bigoted gatekeepers, meaning voices that were perpetually overlooked or muted can now be heard on issues of critical importance. In every way the internet imitates life, and at times even imitates art.

The problem with that feel-good appraisal is that it ignores another fundamental truth about the internet, which is that is completely insane. And in saying that I do not mean the internet is exasperating or wildly avante-garde, nor am I being hyperbolic or pejorative. Rather, I mean that as a cold, clinical appraisal. If you are an author or artist the maze of technologies driving the internet may make it hard to perceive the systemic dysfunction emanating from your screen (though the phrase virtual reality is itself a shrill clue), but you are in fact better positioned than most to understand it. All you need to do is recast your conception of the internet in familiar terms.

If you’re a writer, think of the internet as having been authored by Joseph Heller or Kurt Vonnegut. If you’re an artist, think of the internet as a work by Salvador Dali or René Magritte. Which is to say that the internet is not simply the sum of its technologies and techniques, but a construct, space, and experience informed and distorted by human perception and imagination.  [ Read more ]

Authors, Artists and SEO

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Over the past month or so I’ve been catching up on a lot of old to-do items, including a year’s worth of site maintenance that I kept putting off until I switched ISP’s, which, oddly enough, I kept putting off until a couple of months ago. Anyway, while researching something or other I ran across a truly useful article on the subject of search engine optimization (SEO), which had the refreshing candor to acknowledge that SEO advocates speak gibberish:

As you sit down with your new SEO consultant it starts out well, but soon he says “We’ll need to implement a good 301 redirect plan so that you don’t lose organic rankings and traffic.” Then he says something about title tags, which you’ve heard of although you’re not quite sure exactly what they are or what they do, or why it’s important to update them as your consultant is recommending, although it all sounds good. Then he starts using other jargon like “indexing,” “link equity,” and “canonicalization,” and with every word you feel your grasp on reality slipping and the need to take a nap.

The entire piece contains an excellent glossary of terms that come up again and again in SEO articles. Unfortunately, the very fact that SEO is such an enigma confuses the question of how sole-proprietors — including particularly independent artists and authors — might best make use of SEO without themselves becoming confused or lapsing into gibberish.

So here’s the truth about SEO if you’re an artist. For the most part SEO is not something you need to be concerned about. Whatever time you might put into SEO, or whatever time you might convert into money in order to pay someone else to worry about SEO, can usually be more profitably spent creating whatever it is that you create.  [ Read more ]

Google is the New Microsoft

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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

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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

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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

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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