My problems with font size on ON1 softwareyesterday weren't limited to ON1. It seems that there is no software that takes the
display dimensions into account. Why? In the Bad Old Days display were uniform enough to
almost allow selection of font sizes by pixel, but even there there were issues. Now there
are display ranging from 20" to over 40" and with between 1280×720 and at least
3840×2160 pixels. That's a difference in pixel size of between 0.0272" (0.7 mm) and
0.0045" (0.114 mm). For a 7×9 character that's a width varying between 4.8 mm and 0.8
mm. And the latter is illegible. And yes, I'm using the old pre-metric units, since they
have established themselves everywhere in this context, even in France.
But modern monitors report their dimensions. Why go by the resolution? Quadrupling the
number of pixels on a monitor gives better resolution—I noticed that on my photo
processing—but it should result in halving the size of the text. Why doesn't software go by
the size of the display? If it can't access it, at least by the size of the window? Web
browsers like firefox and
Chromium allow you to set the text size, but I haven't found a way to get either to resize the
text in the frames. Why?
What is Colossus? I
had heard of it, of course, and knew that it came as close to being a computer as anything
of the time. But today I finished watching a rather long YouTubevideo by one of many Chris Shores. It's quite interesting from a number of points,
including the role of the British Military in keeping it secret. It gave a vague overviw of
how it worked, but somehow not enough. To my surprise, the Wikipedia page contains a lot of
detail.
And YouTube? There's so much stuff there, not only computing, and some of it is good.
Should I look at more of it?
We've had our new dishwasher for over four months. Right from the word “go” I had problems loading it. It's clever
and take up to 14 “places”, where the old one only took 10 or 12. The problem is that
it's their settings, made of things all a little bit smaller than what we have. The
result is not space savings: it's lot of wasted space.
As if that wasn't bad enough, the baskets are designed to be hard to fill, and the dishes
are very frequently dirty after “washing”, particularly the plates. My guess is that this
is the result of putting them too close together. I've tried to work around that by putting
dinner plates and side plates alternately:
I took the first photos of the dishwasher without flash at 3200/36° ISO , mainly because I
didn't expect it to be very effective there. But I was wrong, and to my surprise the photos
with flash looked marginally better. Here available light on the left, flash on the right:
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