Wednesday, October 14, 2026

wintel hell

windows & intel cannot even successfully update drivers on an old NUC 7 i3.

Monday, October 12, 2026

franz joseph

Now you've gone through the typical school training. In the high school I went to we covered in a half semester what are now full-year college courses. We either made the grade and covered it, or we flunked. There was no mollycoddling in my day. The schools were more than happy to flunk you and point out to your parents how much of an idiot you were. It's different now. I've seen three generations and I know that it's true.
Okay, so atomic power had scared us and there was no future. The hippies of the 60s showed that the young generation was completely disillusioned with our establishment. A young person could come out of high school all set up to beat the world, and after beating his head against the brick wall for ten years, by the time he's 25, he says, "Forget it! I'll drop into my niche and stay there for the rest of my life. We were promised a democratic society where everybody has life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness--only it doesn't appear. It's a pretty dirty world and it's a pretty lousy world."
Somewhere after World War II this country went on a crazy binge. We gave up all our morals, our ethics, and everything else that we spent 100,000 years developing. Why, I'll never know.
The magic Star Trek had was that it showed that Earth and civilization had survived to three centuries. It showed that people in this time got what they were promised: survival and fulfillment. That's what I think has got to be the Star Trek attraction. Regardless of bad filming, production, or anything else, it had stories of survival and promises come true. I think these are two ingredients that stand out in the original episodes and in the work that's being done on an amateur level.

some EVAR books

star trek star fleet technical manual

codex seraphinianus

any m. c. escher book

6502 assembly books (mike smith's?)

terran trade authority

Rifts

the dream machines

dark lego

hardwired


Tuesday, October 6, 2026

MSFINGT

it is "funny" how bad Microsoft office (including Teams of course) products really are. not just in big ways, but also death by a thousand cuts small ways.

(funnily enough, i think the iOS YouTube ux is a close second in terms of pure frustration.)

Monday, October 5, 2026

time keeping des ne

I was excited to get a Casio Wave Ceptr watch. But it turns out to be kind of a usability nightmare. And if you don't live within like 10 miles of Fort Collins, the radio sync feature is useless. Caveat emptor. 

Saturday, October 3, 2026

usability fails abound

The NLS Bard audiobook reader hardware is... at least for some use cases, completely terrible. Tragic, given how much content there could be made available. Fundamentally it needs to be updated to be an AI voice interactive chat bot, in this day and age.

aaaand OMFG google home speaker couce even with Gemini is dog shyte UX. 

Monday, September 28, 2026

fudging ux heck

how much of Apple services, web sites, do not work if iOS Lockdown is enabled, do ya think?