China has a million unicode domains (慕田峪长城.网址 is the tourist site for the Great Wall), Japan has barely more than zero. That difference puzzled me until I saw the Japanese magazines below (posted by Derek Guy).
Clearly, the Japanese learn enough A-Z in primary school that ordinary magazines can use a lot of Latin letters, which implies that their readers are also comfortable with Latin domain names and email addresses.
I replaced my old Mikrotik hardware recently. The oldest AP was almost fifteen years old, and Mikrotik still delivered OS upgrades for it: Fantastic. I'm a fan.
But I replaced it. My new setup involves three APs (my home has a very difficult layout) and four SSIDs. Setting it up was a little too tricky, RouterOS 7.14 is substantially different from both of the older approaches (capsman
and interface wifiwave2
). Mikrotik's documentation mostly explains it, this posting explains it differently. […More…]
I backed the Jelly Max on Kickstarter as soon as it was announced. It's larger than the old Jelly phones, which I liked but ultimately stopped using.
I wrote about the Jelly 2 that it fits in every pocket I have, even in my tightest jeans, it runs the apps I need, and if it makes me spend less time on Twitter, that's fine.
Fine, all true, all correct. Why did I eventually switch back to my old Xperia XZ1 Compact?
Part of the story is that the nice guys who build LineageOS for the xz1c kept providing upgrades (here's Android 14), another part is that the bezels on the Jelly 2 ought to be narrower, a third part is that I couldn't find a good phone holder for my bike. I had to switch from the Jelly 2 to the xz1c before a weeklong bicycle trip and… never switched back. […More…]
Following an unfortunate sequence of events, my mail server is currently reachable only via IPv6. It took me a few days to even notice the lack of IPv4.
IPv4 connectivity should be back in a day or two. We fixed the root problem last night.
What I learned from this involuntary experiment: Lack of IPv4 access for a mail server is real problem in 2024, it's something that has to be fixed, but it's a surprisingly small problem.
Last week I had a set of cufflinks made. What luxury.
They were made out of four old Algerian coins. The silversmith (Geldschneider in Dresden) had used the outer parts of the coins to make rings, and what you see is the remaining inner parts, burnished and polished.
Note the two numbers on the coin in front: That coin was made in 1960 AD written with Latin digits, and in 1380 written with Arabic digits. If they look similar, that's because they are. The area from Morocco to Lebanon uses Arabic digits (that is, 0123). Further east they mostly use ٠١٢٣ instead of 0123, although it's mixed there as well.
Why is the epoch 580, though? EDIT: The epoch is 622AD, not 580. The coin was made 1380 lunar years after the Hijrah, or 1337/1338 solar years.
Opinionated artist unknown.
User interfaces change with the times. A 3½" diskette as an icon in apps may now be obscure because hardly anyone has seen the physical object in 25 years, and applications based on swiping have functional differences from older mouse- or keyboard-based ones. That isn't what I have in mind today. Apps that swipe may be fashionable, but the swiping is at least partly a matter of function. This post is about pure visual fashion — choosing particular kinds of shapes, sizes, fonts, colours, textures and animations instead of other kinds.
I'll discuss a modern, stylish photo from a web site that's 100% about popular fashion, and then a screenshot of a modern, stylish android app. By popular fashion I mean fashion that comes from the vox populi rather than from designers in Paris or the Vogue editors. Instagram's click-fuelled feedback loop produces that, I think, and the photo below is arch-instagram. The app is a high-quality app from a small company. They couldn't be more different, and what I'll describe is their similarity. […More…]