Zimena

I've done quite a few things since the last time I posted anything here. Most, I don't have a confirmation or a response to yet, but it still counts as trying to do new things.

* My hometown will be one of the cities to host the Tall Ships Races this Summer. I've now applied to be one of the volunteers for the event, which most likely means being on the info stand, pointing out where things are in town, handing out info materials and such. It's just for three days, but it sounds very exciting, and also a great chance to practice my foreign languages, as there will be a lot of people from other countries there.

* Remember the Summer Camp I went on last year? I've applied for that again this year. There are more groups/activities to choose from this time around, but my first choice was to be on the group that will be learning Norwegian Sign Language for a week. I'm a complete beginner at it, but it sounds exciting to learn more about how sign language works, and how it differs from spoken language.

* The Manchester trip for the Tour Championship snooker is only nine days away. I'm very excited about it, but also starting to feel a little nervous. My nerves are mostly about the travelling, and managing to do everything I need to do prior to leaving. Once I'm actually there, and everything has gone according to plan with getting there, I'm sure it's going to be magical.

Snooker-wise, this event has only the 12 best players of the current season competing. That means I was nervous about Mark even qualifying for it for a while, but his qualification has looked safe since he won the Welsh Open in February. The last three qualifiers for the event were confirmed earlier this week.

Speaking of that... this week's snooker - the Players Championship in Telford - isn't much fun from my point of view. Mark lost vs Neil Robertson yesterday. I can't even be angry, because Neil was playing really well, and Mark wasn't taking his chances. But still, there's the fact that I'm annoyed with Neil this season, for winning against Mark twice, and for winning the English Open when Wu Yize almost managed an insane fightback, and I was very much rooting for Wu that day. So, I'm not really as happy about Neil doing well this season as I would have been in the past, when I used to like him more. As if it wasn't bad enough that Mark lost, a few other matches have also gone in the opposite way of what I had preferred, so this tournament is very welcome to just end now. The fallback joy for me would be if Judd Trump wins it, but really - it's a minor thing compared to many others.

I'm hoping for more joy for those I love in Manchester, when I'm going to be there in person!

* This is an election year here, and they're looking for people to be on the organisational team on election day. I've actually put in an application for that, but I have no expectations whatsoever about being picked for that. They said in the info about the position that they wanted people from all sorts of backgrounds, wanted to focus on diversity on the organisational team etc, but I think you have a higher chance of being picked if you're actually involved in politics locally, which I'm definitely not.

* Finally, something about my computer: I've set up the I3 window manager, which now works kind of how I want it to work. Of course there are always things to tweak, but most of the commonly used shortcuts now make sense to me, and I can use it without getting massively annoyed constantly.

There are still a couple of things I haven't managed to figure out, though. Like, why does the cursor suddenly go tiny in some apps? Unsure, but it seems to be specific to flatpak apps. Also, how do you set scaling in i3? None of the workarounds I've seen for this seem to do anything, and i3 just seems to inherit the 200% scaling that is set in the gnome desktop that I hardly ever use. In KDE, I've set the scale to 185%, which makes things work sensibly for my screen. But there's no setting like that in I3.

That's all for today!

I made another try with Firefox. Some of you might remember my problems with it from one of my recent posts. This time, I decided to wipe absolutely all Firefox-related files I could find on my computer - including whatever was in my profiles folder. Then I emptied the trash, restarted the computer, downloaded and installed the new version... and things seem to be back to normal. Even down to it letting me sync my settings/extensions, which effectively got me back everything in my profile.

And: things seem to work fine, still.

I don't really understand the difference between being on that same profile, or fetching the data anew via sync - it's still all the same stuff.

The only thing I can think of is that I had some minor tweaks in userChrome.css before, so I miiiight just have screwed up something there. I don't really feel like that's likely, though, as I think I had a good understanding of what each bit I had in there would do, and it was nothing wildly complex, anyway. That's the only explanation I can come up with, though.

Either way, I'm back on my favourite browser now. I hope it stays in a working condition from now on, because I missed it while I had my little affair with Vivaldi.

Well, actually, I still really like Vivaldi, too. But Firefox is normality for me, so I'm happy to be back.

So, I have a new... I dunno, I won't call it a project, but I've decided to try to make some better choices with what digital stuff I pay for. It seems a lot of things are unnecessarily expensive, and there are cheaper - sometimes even free - alternatives available. So far, I got rid of two things already, and it means saving some money each year - money which will undoubtedly go to OTHER digital stuff instead, but that's beside the point.

First of all, my 1password subscription was ending a litte while ago. I've been semi-annoyed with how 1password works for some time already, because there are too many places where it just... doesn't work well, and I need to go into the app and copy the necessary info instead of having it fill it in automatically. And their phone app is quite pretty, but annoying in the same way. When they sent me a notification that my subscription would be renewed in a week, I went to look for alternatives. I found Bitwarden, which is free for the way I use it, or much cheaper than 1password even for a paid subscription. So far, I'm very satisfied with that - also because it works more seamlessly both from the desktop computer and the phone.

Secondly, I've been a Day One (Mac/iPhone diary app) user for several years. However, the last redesign of the app put me more and more off it, as it's simply too white for my liking nowadays. Only the background of some elements have some colour now, everything else is whiiiite and veeery boring. Also, let's not forget, they keep adding all sorts of features that I don't really use - all I need is an attractive and colourful diary/writing app with tags and calendar, and a way to list and find past entries. I don't really need it to register my tweets and IG posts (eh? no, thanks!), or be able to open it from the menu line - it's fine to click the app/shortcut whenever I need it. If I can have multiple journals, then that's a good thing, too, in order to avoid total chaos in there.

A little while ago, I decided to check out Penzu - when I did it, it was mostly to have a place for my Czech language notes/learning - but I liked it, and it's definitely much nicer than Day One. So, when my Day One subscription expires in a while, I'm not going to renew that. And in fact, I've already replaced it with Penzu everywhere, and I'm much happier as a result.

Just for fun, I made a spreadsheet to see how much money can be saved in this way in a year - as in, by replacing expensive/bloated software with free/cheaper alternatives. Could be interesting to see, I think!

I'm currently trying out Notion - some kind of personal wiki app. It's actually a bit hard to describe what the app does, because it can do various things depending on how you set it up. There's a task list, a space for notes, a space for your journal entries, and even a reading list / links list / reference materials list, including a web clipper so you can add stuff directly from your browser.

I've looked at this a few times over the past few months, but I only decided to try it out now. This is exactly the kind of thing that is fascinating and fun to me, also because you can tweak and beautify your pages in various ways. Another plus point is that it's free for personal use, including mobile sync.

On the other hand, I'm not sure I feel comfortable with adding a bunch of very personal stuff in an app where I cannot control where and how files are stored. A personal wiki - if it's something I end up using a lot - will potentially include a lot of files and different stuff. Sure, it's mostly my scribbles and tasks and random stuff, and of course it's not a space for a lot of real life info, but it still feels unnecessary to have all of that on a remote server, in an app that might or might not be there in two years' time.

I've had fun playing around with it, adding some pages, making some lists, thinking about some stuff that might be useful to have in a personal wiki, but I don't think it's something I'm going to keep using for a long time. Also, let's not forget: the mobile app is a massive battery drainer. Either that, or my phone battery decided to start showing signs of lasting less exactly while I've been on that app quite a bit.

I'm not sure what other apps exist in the same vein, though. I know Linux has Zim, which I've always found kind of fascinating, but I've never managed to make that work on Mac, despite the guide on the page. Installation always failed at some point, or I managed to run the program, but not save anything in it.

There's also Vimwiki, of course, but I've been reluctant to try out that, as I'm still learning basic stuff in Vim, and I'd like to be more comfortable with the environment before I add even more advanced features/plugins to it. (I have some plugins installed, but it's mostly necessary stuff, nothing with tons of own shortcuts etc).

As we all know, I’m always intrigued by new writing software. Or, well, sometimes I’m also intrigued by things I’ve seen and tried out already, especially if it’s been a while since I’ve last used that thing.

You know how I also love pretty stationery, pens, paper, etc? Writing software is just the extension of that. I guess you could argue that I’m sometimes more interested in the software than in the actual writing, though I am trying to change that.

Either way, my current interests are Ulysses and Nisus Writer. The main similarity between the two is that they’re both writing software. Other than that, they’re fundamentally different.

I had a subscription to Ulysses for a time some years ago, but I had abandoned it because it ended up being an endless time sink where I could play around with settings and filters and grouping of files endlessly, but I got little writing done, and it wasn’t a “fun” environment that helped motivate me to write more or more often. However, since that time, they’ve been sending me newsletters periodically, and I recently got interested again. I wanted to get a trial version again, to see whether there were enough changes to keep me interested.

However, before I got on to that, I stumbled over Nisus Writer again. Nisus comes in two versions - called Express and Pro, respectively - but for me there aren't many reasons to bother with the Pro features. As far as I've seen, Pro has more advanced styling with possibility for adding things like a Table Of Contents, possibility for seeing an Ease Of Reading score for your text, as well as support for more file formats. For the way I usually want to write, though, Express is more than enough. This text, for example, is written in Nisus, before I'm going to copy it and post it on DW. (No, this is not usually how I write DW posts, but it's part of the testing process, okay?).

So, the differences first. Ulysses is essentially an advanced markdown editor which keeps all of your writings in its own library. Inside Ulysses, you can move your texts around, group them however makes sense to you (and assign different icons to each group), filter the list of documents (called "sheets" in Ulysses-speak), and of course export the text to whatever format makes more sense to you if you need to do anything to it besides seeing it on screen. The whole Ulysses environment is infinitely customisable, with not only endless colour themes to download, but also a large number of export styles. On screen, though, it's all just text, with markdown formatting. There are a few cool perks, though - such as a word count goal tracker, and the possibility of adding your own notes field beside the actual text view. You can, of course, also use tags/keywords, if that's your thing.

This is all very different from Nisus Writer, which is more similar to a traditional word processor. Every document is in it's own file, and even though Nisus has its own (quite nice) document manager, it doesn't actually hide any of your files in some strange "library". everything is in files and folders, the way I'm used to. Oh, and another nice feature: Nisus saves your work in RTF files, unless you specifically want any of the other supported formats. So, no weird proprietary file formats there.

To me, Nisus feels like a much more familiar environment right out of the box. Ulysses might be modern and sleek and cool, but Nisus is "normality" without being too bloated and full of unnecessary, confusing bugs-disguised-as-features. Also, another important point for me: Nisus has excellent multilingual support. And if I indicate that a portion of the text should be in, say, Czech, it will automatically switch my keyboard to the Czech layout while I'm working in that part.

Oh, and if you think that Ulysses somehow "wins" because of the customisability, it doesn't. Nisus is also very much customisable - from moving elements around in the toolbox/palette dock, to changing the colour of everything, including the page background. It also distinguishes print options from display options, which means you can easily use light-on-dark colours on screen, and still get printouts that look how you would expect on regular white sheets of paper.

Some pros and cons about each, because I made this list while deciding which one was more interesting for me right now:

Ulysses pros:

• Elegant interface.
• Markdown can be interesting and sometimes useful for removing distractions.
• Indefinitely customisable.
• Active development team, constantly adding new features.
• Sync to mobile phone and/or iPad.
• Subscription fee includes usage of the app on all kinds of devices - computer, phone and iPad.

Ulysses cons:

• Stores files in its own, hidden library. Cannot easily get individual files from outside the program.
• Markdown editor, must export document to see page layout etc.
• Expensive over time, because of yearly subscription fee. Also, seemingly unfair exchange rate/pricing for Norwegian customers.
• Uses its own language for what is essentially the same concept as files and folders, calling them sheets and groups.
• Time sink. Endless settings, lots of reasons to fidget around with things in the app, but not actually that motivating to WRITE in.
• I've seen a number of users complaining about the mobile sync feature suddenly stopping to work. Risk of losing work this way.

Nisus pros:

• Express or Pro option, where the cheaper one seems to have all the necessary features for me.
• One time app purchase. Can get a discount for upgrades to new versions..
• Familiarity. Looks familiar, but can still be customised to my liking, with cooler colours and menus.
• Multi language support, including smart keyboard layout switch.
• Has a "special characters" palette, for easy access to special characters that you otherwise tend to wonder how to type: degree sign, copyright sign, special signs indicating some currencies, or even special diacritics from languages you don't type in often enough to have the keyboard layout installed.
• Files and folders are… files and folders. Also, the native Nisus file format is RTF. Standard names and formats all the way.
• WYSIWYG editor. It's actually nice to see your document grow as you write, see where page breaks are, see fonts and formatting that are nice to look at… these are all mostly good things to me, not distracting.
• Styles are available and easily configurable via a separate style editor. Also, can be exported or imported as you wish. Standard settings for new files are configured via template files.
• Sync between computers works seamlessly. Also, you can set your own preferred folder for storing synced settings and documents. Using iCloud is not required.

Nisus cons:

• No mobile sync or mobile app available. This is a mac-only software.
• Working with tables is… shit. Changing cell width can move everything out of place, and actually moving the table feels like it works completely randomly, suddenly landing outside the page margins - or partly outside the entire page, with no obvious way to fix the problem. Sometimes this results in what feels like an unfixable amount of problems, making it easier to start over with a blank document, and try to remake the table there. Also: no autofill option, no cell formatting rules etc.

It's quite easy to see from the above that I much prefer Nisus, and most likely I'm going to buy the full (Express) version. I'm not a big fan of Pages (which comes included with macOS), and I only ever use it to edit some documents that I already have in its format, so a proper word processor that actually feels enjoyable to use is something I have missed - maybe even more than I realised until now.

Sometimes, there are lovely things to learn on Dreamwidth. The other day, cosmolinguist posted about the Atkinson Hyperlegible fonts. Because I'm easily intrigued when it comes to fonts, I decided to download these and try them out. Right now, I've made it the default font in Firefox, but I haven't had enough computer time to try it out in other apps, or while writing a longer text.

However, the first impression is that I like it. Some characters - like the small letter q, for example - are really unique looking, and I feel like the line spacing is slightly bigger than with other fonts I've tried. This is good, and I can imagine that it can be ideal for reading on a screen. But also, I have to admit that it doesn't feel like a massively different font to what I was already using, either. I had been using Ubuntu fonts as my browser defaults already, and the change to Atkinson Hyperlegible went smoothly - I haven't had many "what the %$# did I just do to my font settings?"-moments at all.

... the only one might be related to the number 0. The number has a line through it, in order to differentiate it from the letter O. Not unusual, as this is how it's done in coding fonts, for example, but the Atkinson Hyperlegible number zero is... somehow less beautiful than the rest of the font, to my eyes. It just feels differently designed and strange, but I guess I can get used to it, now that I know how it looks.

So, I've finally turned on the one month test period for Google Play Music. I've been a Spotify user for a long time, so I never really checked out other music streaming services. However, I'm intrigued by services that offer a way to make my own music collection available alongside the streaming catalog.

My first test of that was Apple Music, a few months back. That... didn't go well at all. In short, Apple Music matches my files against their own catalogue. If it finds a match, it replaces the info in my file with the info in the matched result - including cover photo and tags. This quickly makes a complete mess out of everything I've carefully built up over the last 18 months or so, and so it made me 1) fiercely angry and 2) not keen on Apple Music at all.

The Goole Play Music approach to making my own files available across devices seems to be letting me upload them (or, up to 50 000 songs - more than I'll have even when I'm done with the Colossal Music Ripping Project) to the cloud. This seems to also double as a backup, as the Music Manager app also has a way to download my songs - not just upload whatever isn't "matched", like with the idiotic service I mentioned above.

Other Google Music perks include ad-free Youtube and access to Youtube Music. I don't use Youtube enough that I would pay for these things separately, but they're definitely nice things to have if I decide to make the switch from Spotify when the test period is over.

For now, it seems most of my songs are getting uploaded without problems. Once the whole album is uploaded, the cover photo and tags also seem to be what I want them to be. I am seeing some unwanted cover art, as well as some albums completely missing any artwork whatsover, but all of them seem to be incomplete uploads so far, so I won't moan too much about them yet.

Let's see how this goes. For now I'm just looking around while waiting for more of my songs to upload.

First of all, the main room of our attic is now EMPTY! We actually managed to sort through everything that was in there. Some of it is still in our living room, but most of it is really done now. (There are still two small storage rooms up there, though, so the attic is not completely done yet, but the main part is, so yay!)

Among the last set of stuff that was taken down were my old computers. Yes, we somehow put them up there, instead of selling them off when I got new ones. Unfortunately I didn't have monitors or keyboards for them anymore, so I couldn't check if they would still be alive now... but it was strange to see them again.

I got my first computer in 1991 - it was one that used to belong to my uncle, and he just showed up at our house with it one day. Mom was Less Than Pleased about the idea of having a computer in the house, but uncle just ignored her and went inside and set it up. Officially, I was just supposed to "borrow" it from him for a time, but in effect this was his way of giving it to me. Besides, he was probably buying a new one by that point, because that computer was already ancient when I got it (I believe it was from around 1987 or so). That one? Was one of the things that came out of the attic now.

...I have to admit it was strange to see it again, and in some way it made me nostalgic as well. Sure, computers are miles better nowadays, but I learned so much on that computer, and I had so much fun with it... and there are things on it that just don't exist anymore. Word Perfect 5.1, for example, and of course some old games that I had a lot of fun with, too. (Most of them can be found from Archive.org or Abandonware sites nowadays, but somehow it's hard to recreate the FEELING they gave back when I used to play them all the time). It would have been so fun to be able to browse all those files there again, see what documents and stuff I made back in the day. Or better, just copy the entire disk onto a USB pendrive for browsing and archiving... but even that technology is years newer than this computer.

So, I had to let go off it, and I took it to the recycling station instead. It felt like pulling the plug on a whole part of my own life. Does that make sense, or does it sound too dramatic?

Another old computer also came out of the attic, btw - but getting rid of that one was less hard. Yes, I would have loved to browse that, too, but it didn't really matter that much that I couldn't do it. I guess that one might have had less "interesting" stuff on it, though, because I probably copied all the cool stuff from it onto CDs before throwing it away - and those CDs are still somewhere, and it's not that long since I had a look around some of them. So, only the first, really old computer truly hit my nostalgia buttons.

Also, while I'm already on about it... can I mention that I used to be quite an expert on Word Perfect, back in the day? I remember that I used to have a little paper that fit exactly around the F-keys (which were on the left side of the old-school keyboards - a layout that has sadly been lost with time). That paper had all the different shortcuts for WP on it. I used WP so much that I knew about 90% of them by heart. A few years later, we were supposed to learn WP in school (this was in the mid 90s or so, and you'd think it would have been better to teach us Word or some more modern software instead, but nope - WP was what was on the curriculum!). I was still a WP wizard then, and could do any task they threw at me in a few seconds. Even the teacher was looking up shortcuts and functionality as he went along with his lesson, but I still had WP in my muscle memory, and I even scored a couple of bonus points with that teacher by showing him "extra" functionality that he didn't know existed - such as how to change fonts! (WP had no way to show fonts or font effects on screen - the most it could do was display bold fonts as red text. However, you could choose from a few different printing fonts, so you actually had to print out your document to see what your choice of font looked like!)

Thanks for joining me on my trip down computer memory lane. I promise to be back in 2019 with my next post.

Have a happy Sunday, everyone!

Three things today:

1) I'm back from Denmark. We spent two days there. Eurovision meant that we had to postpone our traditional "escaping the May 17 celebrations"-trip by a week, so we did it this week instead. It was nice, but I'm happy to be home, too.

2) Came home to a keyboard that had magically swapped the ' and > keys around. I have no idea how that happened, but probably after the system update I did just before leaving. After some frustration and some fiddling around, I managed to swap them back via the keyboard software. Nope, not via any sensible system setting. That's third-party keyboards on an iMac for you. (Apple can't make keyboards, though - I've yet to see a decent keyboard from them, so third party ones are the norm rather than the exception for me).

3) Speaking of Eurovision again, I fell for a certain Duncan Laurence a bit too much. I still don't understand why, because he is absolutely not "my kind" of interesting. His song was so magical, though. And I like how he comes across in social media and interviews. I'm planning to go to one of his concerts during the year, and I already convinced the best friend to go with me, so let's see how this goes...

That's all for today.

So, I did my first professional task that involved a tiny bit of coding.

The task was to do subtitle styling for a movie, and to teach some other people how to do that task by themselves later. Only, I had to work out myself how the styling actually worked before I could do anything else. What they wanted was hard-coded subtitles that look like subtitles do on TV - as in, with two clearly separated lines of text on a semi-transparent background. Oh, and they had to be aligned to the centre, but with a straight left margin as well.

So, the big challenge here was to get the two separate lines of text, because there is no setting that indicates vertical space in the subtitle format I was supposed to use. I could easily put either a box around the subtitles, or draw a background across the whole width of the screen, but neither of those options were what I was after. I have to admit, it took me a lot of fiddling around to work out how to do this - even so much that I kind of gave up at one point... only I started working on it again the next day anyway.

The solution was to add a rotation code to every subtitle string that had two lines in it. If you move the rotation point very far off the screen, the end result is that the two lines get pushed apart without getting rotated at all. I don't understand maths or geometry, so I can't explain why that works, but it did. Only... it's not so fun to add the rotation code manually if you have hundreds, or even thousands, of lines of text, so I figured I needed a script for that. Now, my minimal coding skills are not nearly good enough to do that myself, so I was happy when I found someone who had uploaded a script that did kind of what I was after. His script pushed the text like 7cm apart, though, so I simply had to adjust some numbers to get a spacing that was more like what I was after. That, of course, involved figuring out where in the code to adjust that. So, nothing big, but it kind of looked impressive when I could send a mail and say "Look, I have a few scripts for you. This is how you can do subtitle spacing."

Once I had the spacing right, the rest of the task was just about finding the right settings for the background and the transparency levels. Finally, the center alignment with a straight left margin proved to be impossible in the preferred subtitling format - it even says in the documentation that "this is a format limitation", so I guess it's really not possible to do with a simple setting. What IS possible to do, however, is pushing the left margin further towards the middle, and that works well enough. It's not exactly the same as centered text, but the effect is similar enough.

So, task done, and I'm kind of pleased with myself for that.