In my copious free time (that's an old college joke, I don't actually tend to ever have "copious" free time) I've managed to try some games really quickly care of free games on Epic Game Store, and then also from buying the Xbox PC Game Pass to see if I still kind of find Sturgeon's Modified Law (wherein the remaining % has Sturgeon's Law applied recursively) to apply... and, yes, yes I do. Oh and hey, the Xbox PC Game Pass app thing on Windows is, surprise, kinda broken terrible UX to boot.

A few things conspire to make it hard for me to enjoy video games any more: First, most games have just terribly broken UI and UX from they very first screen, through any and all menus, right on into the game itself. Not to mention the horrible UI and UX of all app stores or login-to-our-stupid-account-system-before-you-can-play systems. Second, I am actually pretty grossed out over doing nothing but shooting people as the main gameplay. (Although I still count the Bioshock series in my top favorite games ever.) Third, I just do not like anything that relies on darkness for any length of time. It is stupid and not a fun experience. Same thing goes for movies or TV shows in my opinion. Fourth, I do not like 3rd person console-pandering hell. Fifth, I get bored with slow stories. Sixth, I really do not like anything that has "double jump" unless it is an old school 2D side scroller. Seventh, I donated my fancy graphics card to another person so I am running things on a GTX 770 2GB nowadays which is probably "like a dog playing chess."

Some of these I played for 10 minutes then uninstalled them. Some I played for a sum total of a few days at most. Some are just from watching over the shoulder of somebody else playing them.

• Doom Eternal Standard Edition: pretty, but pretty dumb and boring really quickly. I am not a fan of double jumping in almost any game, and 10x more not a fan for 3D FPS games. The scenery / architecture was ok, sorta well done, but then the fights to me were just mostly really annoying and I never had enough ammo.
• The Outer Worlds: pretty, but repetitive (visually and story-wise) and quickly boring. Has kinda slow loading, and all sorts of other bad UX things also found in other similar games like the Fallout series. Digital shoe leather. Very bad difficulty ramping, too, I feel.
• Alien Isolation: pretty, but stupid and boring very fast, with entirely too much shoe leather.
• Among Us: fun at first, but very quickly just meh. Maybe better in person? Definitely has helped us while away a few weekend nights with friends we'd not otherwise hang with during covid.
• Alan Wake: har-hah, one word: flashlight. I know this is a game from like 1972 or something, but still.
• Wolfenstein Youngblood: just a horrible, horrible UX right from startup. Terrible console menus. Terrible broken audio bugs. Terrible gameplay and world that is sorta pretty but it also randomly stupid in many ways, like oh I can't actually shoot that little portable radio there, it is indestructible. And then the difficulty ramp was stupid as well.
• WWZ: meh, just not my kind of game. Way too frustrating.
• We Happy Few: way too slow. Sorta funny and satirical but sorta not so wow. Was a bit lost at the start of what even to do.
• The Surge 2: I just don't like 3rd person games in the first place.
• Sunset Overdrive: dumber than a dumb stick. Additionally, I don't like 3rd person console style.
• Subnautica: Wanted to love it based on the reviews, but the physical movement and story progression was way too slow.
• Shadow Warrior 2: stupid, crass, dumb... but I mostly had fun playing it. Looking forward to the next installment.
• Rage 2: big fat meh. Sorta nifty world, but sorta frustrating driving, and really bad confusing mission UI UX and everything is very quickly way too repetitive.
• Observation: Wow! Utterly horrible! Just awful! Plain stupid obviously transparently bad! Wow! Yes, I was really hoping for something fun.
• No Man's Sky: a complete joke in terms of UX if you ask me. It took for ever to load, there was no useful progress indicator, and then the first 5 minutes of the game is some stupid boring confusing broken "you are going to die in 30, 29, 28... if you don't figure out how the stupid boring confusing broken ui works" type of setup. Just awful. 
• Minecraft Dungeons: meh. The UX was kind of not great, and the whole thing was - guess! - boring.
• Halo of any kind: the same drek over and over and over and over and... I've been playing it since the original Xbox and it never was actually all that.
• Gears of War of any kind: puerile glorification and gamification of violence. And, all in 3rd person bad console style. Also I really strongly dislike any kind of sticky mechanics like cover because inevitably I end up figting it.
• Void Bastards: fun for 1 ship. Then you see that yes, it is one of the most trite and repetitive games evar.
• Fallout 76 PC: just painful. Sloowww loading, and that was back on my GTX 1070. I'd rather stick to replaying Fallout 4 or New Vegas.
• Deep Rock Galactic: asinine. People can fly through space but they cannot bring a flashlight that works, instead they have flares that go out in 10 seconds? Why would I care about this?
• Deliver Us The Moon: oh, right! I also despise walking simulators.
• Crackdown 3: whatever.
• Comanche (game preview): just really not fun. Kinda terribly frustrating flight mechanics. Maybe it is "realistic" or something, but that was not fun for me at all.
• Fallout 3: wow, stab me in the eye with a broken hell impossibly confusing metro system why don't you. Ok, the final battle had some really funny lines, and there were a few interesting missions, but: meh. I've been attempting to play it for years now, originally on an old Xbox 360 and then more recently on PC. Utterly a living hell on console I'll say. 1/10th as hellacious when using keyboard + mouse on a PC.
• Fallout 4: sorta meh overall. Well done world. Terribly slow loading. Terribly bad confusing awful UI/UX for the settlement building stuff. But I did very much appreciate learning to re-appreciate what we have in terms of civilization right here, right now. As in, go have a soft drink, and really savor it!
• Fallout New Vegas, with all the extra DLC: has problems, but was engaging and sucked me in pretty well. Probably one of my favorite games ever, mostly because I started out with really low expectations.
• Warhammer 40K Space Marine: actually a pretty great ambiance, like the voice acting was great. But the gameplay was of course boring and stupid, and the compressed depth from whatever insane focal length they used made me want to claw my own eyes out.
• Titanfall 2: pretty dumb from the get-go. I don't like double jumping, it is just dumb. The whole wall running thig is like some old SNL skit from the 90s where they have 1 idea and then kill it dead over and over because that is all they could come up with. Also it has some sticky mechanics which, like cover, always inevitably makes me rage. There is so much potential in the engine and then the gameplay is just blah, either in the campaign or in the coop defense multiplayer. Also the overall UI/UX is pretty bad. Also it crashes a lot. Also it requires Origin no matter what. Also, also, also...
• Destiny 2: Ugh. Lots of the things I find broken about other FPSs here too. Things like lame story, and confusing broken bad dumb UI/UX for missions. And, you know, any ooh so spooky dark environment stupidity where I can't see jack. Flashlight == epic fail in my book. Overall it felt, surprise, like just another Halo. The enemies even moved around like Halo enemies. The speeder bikes even were as horrible to try to drive as hover things in Halo.
• Dishonored 2: I guess I just don't really buy into the world design, aesthetically. Things are sorta cool and steampunky but then also a little too weird and fragile looking to me. And the story is kinda meh overall, even while playing it.
• ReCore: just laughably bad, and with double jump in the first 60 seconds!?
• Borderlands (various): Too much shoe leather. Too much confusing bad UI UX. Too much "we're so cool look at us" design that gets boring fast (the cartoon style). Just kinda not fun.
• Elite Dangerous: Heck, I grew up on 8 and 16 bit Elite, so I do have a soft spot in my heart for the series, and I loved Frontier on the PC, even with all the bad bugs, and I loved Zarch on the Archimedes, but... this game is to my way of thinking just not good. The controls might be realistic on the one hand, but frankly I think the kind of suck right out of the gate. And then the actual quests were really confusing UI UX to me. So, yeah: no.
• Ghostbusters: What a complete joke of unusability. A completely classic failure to make something that is either usable or fun. So utterly full of itself thinking it should just force cut scenes about the original movie down my throat, etc. Should be taught in school.
• Watch Dogs (various): Painful. Just, painful.
• Fortnite / Overwatch / Valorant: so incredibly not my cup of tea, and I find their UI UX to be pretty outright confusing bad quite often.
• Just Cause 4: painful for all the usual reasons.
• Hitman: pretty, but boring.
• Tacoma: pretty, but too slow. I did very much like the way the holographic playbacks overlapped, but it really wasn't enough to keep me interested, and quickly became more annoying on balance.
• The Witness: boring, failed to make the environment captivating enough to make the puzzles interesting. (Whereas, for comparison's sake, things like Portal and Portal 2 did a great job at that, for the most part.)
• Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon: Fun for a while. Quickly peters out. But still, worth trying if you have any 80s nostalgia at all.

Even though all games have big problems from what I can tell, there were a few that I nevertheless would say are worth trying: The Outer Worlds. Shadow Warrior 2. Fallout New Vegas. Fallout 4. Warhammer. My favorite "modern" games are probably the Bioshock series.

Seems like all home wifi routers are a lie. Either they don't work well, or they phone home too much, or they don't work well when flashed with DD-WRT. In other words, I can't win. 

Straight from the pages of Joseph Cambpell comes the classic story everybody loves to love:

• Boy meets Alienware epic laptop.
• Boy checks for driver updates on the official Dell/Alienware site, using the official system updater software from them.
• Boy is told to update driver, so he does.
• Upon reboot, the entire machine freaks out, making it look like the new driver utterly killed the machine.

The Mandalorian is not so much an epic Star Wars story told as a TV show. It strikes me more like an 80s/90s one-idea-pony (a la Quantum Leap) that has been given the veneer of Star Wars. 

I am sad that Mozilla is a Greek tragedy. I have always envied people who worked there. But, the bad parts of history rhyme with history all over again. How everybody has to spoil things that were at one time working fairly well. How they have to ruin it for various what I would call objectively bad, but understandably human nature driven, reasons. I still use Firefox preferentially over anything else as much as I can because it /seems/ like the least evil thing around, but it is really kind of a poopshow itself in all sorts of ways. The UI UX has of course over time just been a comedy of oh look i slipped on a banana peel made of dog excrement kind of horribleness. (I will say that I think that is a true statement about literally every web browser (let alone yes almost all software in general) I have ever used, but that doesn't really count in their defense in my opine.) And all along they've been pretty much only alive because of the revenue stream from Google, I guess. So nowadays we get all the sturm und drang about how they are laying folks off and cancelling projects. C'est la vie. There's a technological Nero somewhere trying to sell lyres online to anybody who will buy one.

To quote a more eloquent and pithy friend of mine, "MOZILLA REVEALS SECRET PLUTONIUM FLUORIDE SUPERCONDUCTOR PROPULSION EXPERIMENTS. Guys? The Browser? I used Firefox in the 2000s the way I voted for Ralph Nader in the 2000s, as a pitiful symbol of defiance. I used Firefox in the 2010s the way I voted for Democrats in the 2010s: as an absolute last resort with a gun to my head and no other choice."

now for something completely different: something i recommend. 

kvm switches are mostly a lie. sort of like how wifi extenders are mostly a lie. but i have to say that the TESmart HDMI 4k KVM switches i have bought and used at home have been actually rather very good. More often than not they actually work. This is with a crazy range of old and newer hardware, and almost every main OS under the sun (linux, windows, macos, sometimes even *bsd's).

last night i "discovered" that apple tv + roku + cbs + star trek discovery == epic train wreck utter fail end to end that is just yet another in a long string of proofs that all entertainment is very deeply ethically intellectually hyper dead to me.

(on the other hand, i do have to say that the roku channel's carousel horizontal scrolling is like a billion times smoother than anything i have ever seen from netflix or amazon or any other app.)

(By saying this here below, I don't mean to make light of micro-aggressions, I am sure somebody will decide that I am belittling the idea of micro-aggressions. But I'll continue with my train of thought anyway.)

There is a big problem with usability and user experience that is a thread, a theme, a running train wreck, that goes through just about every computer/technical interaction I have with just about anything. That is: the nicks and cuts and bumps and scrapes and occasional razor-sharp rooster spurs of less that good user interfaces. This happens in everything pretty much in my experience. It happens in the context of mobile, desktop, web, embedded, consumer, industrial, commercial, medical, yadda etc., and it happens in their OSs, GUIs, and apps. Also in my experience 100% guaranteed in any and all programming languages & environments. Also in my experience 100% guaranteed with any kind of technology enabled/supported workflow like, say, telephone customer support, or, probably, say, voting machines (ha ha).

Anyway, I think when I try to describe the gestalt of these bad UX things as nicks and cuts, or slings and arrows, then it doesn't feel quite as accurately, forcefully descriptive as calling them micro-aggressions in the UI UX world. The point being that a single micro aggression maybe could be ignored or allowed to roll off your back (though that's not great, of course), but every additional one isn't just an additive insult+injury, it is more a multiplicative thing, even becoming exponential as you hit some threshold of pain and frustration.

Your individual "little" bug in your app is actually embedded in, swimming with, multiplying the impact of, all the other "little" bugs in the universe of technology. My nerves have already been rubbed raw by my stupid mobile or desktop environment, and then I also have to smack my face against the what now feels like brickwallminefield that is your bug.

So, yeah.

I find it... interesting, in the worst sense of the word, that all the communication software products cannot get "muting" ui ux right/wrong. Would it really be so hard to have a ui that just shows, "You are muted" or "You are audible"? Instead we have weird annoying evil toggle button switches. Or roundabout things like "Tap to unmute".

On occasion i piece together, or upgrade, desktop pc hardware. It is truly amazing how all the parts are pretty much just horrible through-and-through. Things like: Screws of different specifications; Power cables that go the wrong way (I guess some expect you to run them through the back of the motherboard tray and then come down from the top of the case, to be all cool and tidy, dunno); Power connectors that aren't symmetric (ie all of them) and the keyways are hard to see and don't really work just by feel; Power cables that have wiggly pins (ie molex); AM4 socket back brackets that fall completely off and down into the back side of the case when you are removing the cooler to redo the thermal paste; Mounting for various data drives (hdd, dvd, ssd, laptop hdd, etc.) being a nightmare of incompatibly placed screw holes, and easily lost or broken drive rails/caddies; all the stupid age-old fiddly bits of a zillion different connector types like the bloody front panel pinouts; pc cases that aren't perfectly flat on top because it just looks cooler i guess; etc. ad nauseam. Sure that's why people "just buy a dell" but a lot of these things are just painfully obviously bad physical design stuff that i feel like you'd have to explicitly go out of your way and spend R&D $$$ on to make it as bad as they make it. And this is from name brands in all the parts, not just some random producer nobody has ever heard of before.

For an epic good time in seeing how usability and security can both combine to make a living computer hell on earth for end users, go read up on the Microsoft Windows 10 "windows hello" PIN stuff. Especially things like trying to just not have a pin at all, but hitting the brick wall of the remove button being greyed out. The "solutions" include all sorts of horrible brain surgery on the permissions of hidden system folders and/or actual windows registry editing. Just, hilarious. It is almost as if microsoft has not been making operating systems or user interfaces for multiple decades now. Well, of course, this is microsoft (hey, i worked there, i can complain) so yeah they don't actually ever learn or improve. (If you want more evidence of how they shovel things out the door that are suboptimal, you should have had the pleasure of trying to use the pc xbox app.)

Nothing says, "we, your Government, deeply respect your civil rights, and we strive every day to maintain the highest ethical and moral standards anywhere on Earth" than when they do business with FasTrak.

All I can say is: the "accessibility" high contrast / reverse video mode of macOS is way better than that of Window 10. The latter doesn't seem to realize that the Clear Type hinting would now make my eyes bleed. So that's nice.

It is funny. (By which I mean, of course: It is not funny.) I load up Blogger and see my blog, and I hit "new post" at the top right and it doesn't actually start a new post. Instead it takes me to the blog dashboard and there I have to click "new post" again.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/44928-arthur-dent-what-happens-if-i-press-this-button-ford

Have I mentioned recently how using technology, and 1000x when it comes to anything involving computers, is death by a thousand cuts. For example, I am trying to copy a serial number from a photo over to a web form, and when I tab back to the form the text field has become fully selected so that when I start to type the remained of the serial number (you know how we have 7+/-2 short term memory?), of course that blows out what I already had in there. 

Just utter horrible in your face "i hate you, user" kind of user interface and user experience. Either, "i hate you, user," or the only other possibility is, "I am a freaking idiot who has never made a web browser or user interface before, nor have I ever happened to use my own product enough to hit these evil broken user experiences."

(Firefox, Windows 10)

"Baytrail" style machines with 32bit (U)EFI yet 64bit CPU's are, of course, really bloody annoying. Neither windows 10 nor any linux seems to work very well with such systems. Most variants of linux flat out do not support it. Fedora claimed/s to support it in some places, but then the manual explicitly denies it, and it did not work when I tried it. On my old MacPro I did somehow heaven only knows how get reFind to work and now have it all happy but I literally do not know what I did any more and could probably never get it ever working again there if I had to. On my cursed AIMB-270 i3 330M setup I once - once! - got Debian to install per https://wiki.debian.org/UEFI#Support_for_mixed-mode_systems:_64-bit_system_with_32-bit_UEFI but then it crapped out and won't boot right and now I can't get the setup to work again either. So overall it appears that getting the installer to even run is heavily non-deterministic. Yay. 

Email me if you want a free AIMB-270 i3 330M motherboard with 8GB RAM. Sheesh.

Linux is funny. Not funny "ha ha" but more along the lines of funny "pukey". To wit, it is amazing to me that, I guess in some very misguided attempt to make it "easy" to install Linux, they make it really hard to find any iso that isn't one of their 2 preferred versions. And if you can find them they are not very clearly earmarked so I am always like WTF and find out later that I have the wrong thing.

It isn't rocket science to make a better UI here, I feel.

Oh well, what can we really expect from the universe of people that brought us things like Apache configuration files, or sendmail configuration, or postfix configuration, or, well, anything related to anything about computers anywhere at all. What a freaking nightmare. I can't wait for us to have First Contact with aliens and either their software is this bad or they are just scared away from us because our software is so bad.

Of late (well, probably for ever and a day, but you know) I have been really pained by this thing that apparently all OS desktops do: I've seen it in macOS, Windows 10, and I am pretty sure in Linuxen as well.

(Oh and another weird thing: whenever I start a new post on Blogger, there's already a single whitespace space at the start, that I have to manually remove. What is up with that?)

Back, to wit: Dialog boxes that are lost. Lost behind other windows. Or lost in utterly other dimensions, like when the Windows 10 User Account Control UI. And by lost I don't just mean that I manually shoved them down into the stack so it is all my fault. No, I mean dialog boxes that never appeared on top of the stack. 

(Of course, there's the other excommunicable offense of having a dialog box show up in my face when I am doing something already and - oh, well, there's several different ways that can go horribly wrong, like when they immediately take focus and thus take whatever keystroke is next in the stream that I was busy typing in some other app; or they prevent me from doing something I was desperately trying to do and no I don't want to have to answer your modal dialog right effing now (iOS, you sod).)

The whole thing is just depressing.

I know this is a downer of a blog, a real buzz kill. Personally I prefer to think that I am doing a service of pointing out the whole "naked emperor"nessitude of this computing hellscape we have created for ourselves! Yes!

Consider something really basic: trying to actually open files in some app. On Windows, just as one example (as in, it is even worse on Linux, and the Mac situation isn't really all that much better than the Windows situation), I have seen the full gamut of utter broken UX every which way possible. Things like: drag'n'drop sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. Or it sometimes doesn't do what you'd want it to do. Things like: just the "open file" dialog UI is inconsistent across apps.

It is kind of mind boggling how bad everything really is.

The whole WSL thing where you are supposed to be able to run linux on windows is, every single time I have ever tried it, on every single different machine ever over the last few years, just a complete and utter failure disaster freaking joke poop show.

I cannot fathom why anybody would want to try to use anything non-Windows on Windows. Like, this is just the basic stuff, don't even get me started on the whole Docker on Windows debacle.

It really is - ha ha, I am holding my gut - funny when trying to run "wsl" just hangs like the halting problem with no feedback at all. The S.O. solution is to "super mega HARD reboot (using the power of the SHIFT key)" your machine... so I did that and sure enough it fixed the problem of "wsl" just hanging with no feedback until the heat death of the universe!

Because now what I get is such a vast improvement of user experience! Drum roll:

PS C:\Users\xyzpdq> wsl

Unspecified error

(and yes, there was like a 3 second pause between hitting Enter and getting the "result".)

If I were king of the digital camera universe, I would make one that really was programmable. It is hilarious how much of a lock-in the camera hardware manufacturers have. And they don't seem to be worried or understand that one of the reasons cell phone cameras are better is that you can get arbitrary software for them. (Yes, it must be a really weird and tricky business because so many things are contributing to killing off the entire non-smartphone camera market. So I can understand the companies getting ever more paranoid.)

To wit, a feature I haven't seen (?) on DSLRs or MILCs is: Whatever lens I attach, in Aperture Priority, default to choosing the widest-stopped-down-by-one F# for that lens. This is to try to have a simple default hack value for getting most bokeh but also not having the worst image sharpness.

Or, if Sony let folks push new menus to their cameras to replace the horrible badness they ship by default, maybe they'd sell some multiple more. Because people who value UI UX enough aren't going for Sony even though their CAF & tracking is purportedly by far the best.

I guess if I had the money and time and connections I would be working on an open source camera system that was super flexible like this. Maybe comes with some block scripting like Scratch. It wouldn't even have to be very high resolution, or super fast, it would just have to be like 16mp and heck it could even just use CDAF to start off with.

Because, I mean, almost nothing can be worse than the software that the major camera makers ship. The Olympus iPhone app is horrible. All the Canon Windows apps are horrible. Etc.

we don't know how to write good code. which means the things which ideally should be very robust are of course just as open to bugs as anything else. to wit, compilers.

typescript is great! in all seriousness, i pretty much would never want to do regular js ever again after using ts.

except for all the ways it isn't. kinda depressing how it comes across to me as being over advertised, over hyped, has lies by omission, leads people down garden paths into being painted into corners.

to wit: there is a lot of stuff online about how wonderful interfaces are in typescript, and i do like the idea of some of the pros about structural typing over nominal typing. but it turns out that if you choose to try to go with interfaces for the most part, you are not going to be able to do some things that you might at some point very desperately wish you could do, like instanceof since that only works with classes and their constructors. i mean sure it is ok for the two approaches to be different, but it would help if the actual "oh three weeks from now you are going to be kind of screwed and feel like you need to rewrite all your code" type gotchyas were more explicitly called out up front.

there's other things that are real sharp edges in the typescript system i suspect because they are (a) hampered by the hell that is javascript itself and (b) they have gone a little too bananas overboard with the cool things they could possibly do even though they apparently try to not do too many things. to wit see the problem i ran into with exhaustiveness checking of enums, code at the end of the post. (to be fair, enums are a broken living hell in almost every language, even the ones that aren't saddled with backwards compatibility.) also there's the problem where type aliases cannot be used everywhere a type can be used, which is really pretty horribly lame iuam.

...and then seems to have a rather broken discord system.

me writing to "Robert" who has set up the help cooldown and who says that if cooldown is broken to message him directly to fix it: "hi, apparently the help cooldown hasn't gone away for me although it[']s been like 20+ hours."

BOT replying to me: "Your message could not be delivered because you don't share a server with the recipient or you disabled direct messages on your shared server, recipient is only accepting direct messages from friends, or you were blocked by the recipient."

...so i am kind of dead in the water with tsc right now because of something that looks like this but worse where i cannot get the compiler to actually work correctly at all right now.

yay! so my 6667+ lines of code are now kinda like a dead albatross around my neck? would i have been much better off with Flow? can i easily strip all the typescript stuff from my ts code to get vanilla js? i think that was easy with flow back when i was uing it, but i dunno these days.

/* !!! update: the issue turned out to be that "_: never" is the wrong thing to write. the internet helped me find out (certainly the typescript compiler did not) that i should instead use "_: unknown" and then the hallowed exhaustiveness checking started working for me, yay !!! */

function unreachable(_: never): never {

throw new Error("unreachable");

}

const enum Facing {

left,

right,

}

function on_facing<R>(facing: Facing, left: R, right: R): R {

switch (facing) {

case Facing.left: return left;

case Facing.right: return right;

default: unreachable(facing);

}

}

const enum FacingMask {

left = 1 << 0,

right = 1 << 1,

}

function on_facingMask<R>(facing: FacingMask, left: R, right: R): R {

switch (facing) {

case FacingMask.left: return left;

case FacingMask.right: return right;

default: unreachable(facing);

}

}

it is "funny" (as in pukey, not ha ha) that what i would have hoped could be standard stuff isn't actually standard, in particular at the moment on my mind a lot are the home/end vs. pageup/pagedown keys on keyboards, and what they do in programs.

like, xcode seems to want to interpret home/end as being for the whole file rather than how i think it works in most other ide's where home/end is for the current line, and you have to use a modifier key to get it to be for the whole buffer. the latter behavior is better, i think. it certainly seems to be what my fingers are motor-memory expecting.

then there are things like the kinesis keyboard that has those keys vertically from top to bottom as: home, end, pg up, pg down, then the arrow keys. which feels again utterly wrong to me because home/end should really be on the line, not the whole buffer, so they should be closer to the arrow keys than the pg up/down that cause the cursor to jump way farther.

i just don't understand other people sometimes when it comes to (admittedly somewhat subjective) user interface and user experience and usability.

you cannot save (as in, redeem, rescue, fix, improve, ameliorate, etc.) javascript very much, is what i have learned from all the tools and languages i've used over the years that purport to do so (eg typescript and flow). they maybe help a little now and then but the abstraction is sooooo olestra leaky that it kinda ends up being such a big fat lie that it is almost worse in some regards. apparently, however, you can make the whole thing even worse by having tools that are apparently broken junk. why is "this" undefined, but "this.db" isn't? etc.

 FORGET ZEN!

I NEED TO LEARN PI!

 

Probably the last place to look for first-class Usability, User Interface, User Experience, etc., is in anything related to programming. The worst people on earth, empirically, to be responsible for how software is created are the programmers themselves. Just take a look at IDEs, one of the most fundamental tools used in software development. Pretty much they are all nightmares. Personally I think the IntelliJ stuff is the rare exception that proves the rule, and even that isn't free of bugs and weird bad unergonomic usability problems. 

Since both my day job and one of my hobbies is programming, I really am day in day out depressed about the whole situation. Is it because only money talks? Is it because we are all too stupid to do a better job? Is it because nobody is aware enough to realize that the emperor has no clothing? Is it because in reality getting such a complicated system to not suck is a super hard problem, both just technically but also because usability has a fair amount of subjective preference involved? Is it all of the above? Well, yes, probably, yes.

:-(

Even if you ditch the GUI kind of IDE and are just using VIM or Emacs or Notepad++ then you still have all the problems of how broken the UX is of the programming languages themselves, and all the other non-GUI-IDE ancillary tools.

Anyway, the idea of achieving any kind of "mental state of Flow" with programming has long since vanished in my life, really. There are a few times when I have maybe 10 minutes of it because I am noodling on one small thing, but even then I am usually constantly hitting horrible UX fails of the IDEs.

c’est soupirer

Since I type a lot and I have RSI, I try to use "ergonomic" keyboards. (Funny how often "ergonomic" turns up search results of horribly bog standard non-ergo keyboards - all those weasels out there trying to shove their products in your face when their products aren't all that, but I digress.)

The original Microsoft ergo keyboard with the proper inverted-T (I mean holy heck, of course! don't get me started!) and, unfortunately, the numeric keypad, was a decent start. A friend ended up sawing off the number pad to make it suck less back in the day. Since then I've tried various things.

I also at one point had a pretty super nice Acer Future keyboard care of Weird Stuff Warehouse. (Aw, man, now I am going to spend some time crying my eyes out over the changes in Silicon Valley from when I first got here. Weird Stuff, Halted, all those kinds of things dying off.) Unfortunately I couldn't get it working in the modern world with any of the PS/2-to-USB adapter dongles I have so I ended up donating it to Goodwill.

For a while I used the Microsoft BT 5000 keyboard which is too small but at least curves.

I am a long time lover of the old Acer curved keyboards on the old TravelMate series. Unfortunately my 8210 fan ball bearings became unbearable, but my small collection of T5730 type machines running linux off an SSD has helped keep my arms from utterly dying. Why nobody makes laptops with ergo keyboards, I dunno. Just a sad, sad world we live in.

The Microsoft Sculpt keyboard (tho the mouse it comes with really sucks, don't waste money on that) with scissor switches is pretty great and has been my go-to in more recent decades. Tho, there's the sorta sucky thing where each keyboard has a USB receiver that is paired and you can never get a replacement for it... I guess ostensibly for security, so nobody can listen in on your keystrokes? Whatever.

Most recently I broke down and spent my own bucks on a Kinesis Freestyle Edge RGB "gaming" keyboard. It mostly doesn't suck! It is so close to being greatly perfect that the things which aren't perfectly great about it really stick in my craw. I did converse over email with one of their support folks about all the things I think are suboptimal about it, but yeeeahhhh I don't think they are really taking any of it to heart. Bummer, drag. Currently the main thing that really really really kills me the most is how they implemented key remapping because of the fact that I think the Page Up / Page Down keys should really be physically swapped with the Home / End keys and the remapping UX really sucks because you can have more than one "profile" for your keyboard, but there's - as far as I know! - no way for the remapping to be done across all profiles.

Anyway, I do pretty much kinda sorta very super heartily recommend the keyboard! You should buy one and keep Kinesis in business! Especially since there's precious little in the way of mechanical ergo keyboards out there, let alone with brown MX, let alone with full RGB (whatever, not that big a deal, I do not drive a car that looks like Wingo from Cars, the only thing I want from my keyboard backlighting is for it not to be blue because that is not good for eyes in the dark, duh), let alone in a price range that feels (on the high end of) OK.

the end.

Representative Pelosi seems to have pushed some non-zero percent of the population more toward President Trump & the GOP what with the tearing up of the SotU address papers on top of everything else. So that's just great! I mean thus far I subjectively do feel, as a pessimist, that we have the "empire" falling apart every which way. I try to listen to a range of AM radio talk shows during my commute hours, from the super 'liberal' side all the way over to the super 'conservative' side (so a mixed up soup of KPFA, KGO, KQED, Real Talk 910, 860 AM The Answer, KFAX, KKSF, KSFO, etc.) I do actually sympathize with each 'side' sometimes, and super disagree with all of them other times. Taking the two sides of politics in the USA to what the radio stations less-or-more-hyperbolically tell me are the logical ends, we are going to be choosing between socialists-cum-communists & nationalists-cum-fascists. I guess the human species "gets the future it deserves," greed having been the winning strategy. The whole, "I know, let's come down from the trees and start farming!" thing has given the Earth a very bum deal in the end. Hm, maybe if I just got myself some Disney+ then everything would be la la la all right.

Could there be any bigger UI/UX faux pas than the thing where I enter my user id and password, and it fails, so then I click on "forgot password" and the stupid thing makes me typing in my user name again? Man, I hate it when that happens.