Click for jumbo graphic showing many odious features of Windows 10. [via] Can't vouch for the accuracy of all this but the marginal notes to the company happytalk amuse.
Microsoft isn't even pretending anymore that you have ultimate control over the PC you bought; it's essentially a little outpost or embassy of their company that sits in your home, gathering data and funneling it back to their HQ in Washington state.
Some of these spyware features are even being added to Windows 7 and 8 computers, under the guise of necessary security updates. PCMasterRace, a Reddit for gamers who favor PCs over consoles (because you have more say about how your programs are managed, updated, etc -- ha!) has a cheat sheet for how to remove "telemetry" from a Windows 7 or 8 PC (hat tip rene).
Microsoft apparently isn't embarrassed by the heavy handed tactics that are losing the "nerd" constituency. They just want to imitate Apple (closed environment, surveillance for your own good, treating users like simpletons) but are doing it with less finesse than the "computer for creatives" does.
If you are ready to make the switch to Linux but are concerned about "driver issues" for your hardware, [PLUG] ThinkPenguin sells Linux-loaded desktops and laptops that work with standard mice, keyboards, monitors, printers (HP, though, not Epson), and Wacom tablets. The sound cards and graphics cards on ThinkPenguin gear also come Linux-enabled. The Mint operating system somewhat resembles Windows XP; Thunderbird, Firefox and VLC come pre-installed in the OS (where they work better than on Windows).
August 2015
a fun and compelling way to communicate
One of the reasons I didn't sign up for Facebook back when everyone else did was its limitation on image formats.
For years Facebook's big innovation, which helped them "scale" this Ivy League college dating concept to world-dominating levels, was to take every image you uploaded and convert it to a jpeg. So if I was going to go on Facebook as an "artist working with animated GIFs" I would essentially have to say trust me, I know this frozen, mushy image doesn't look like much but if you click this link, over on my website you'll see it really animates in a cool way!
Years later, GIFs became a thing and Facebook had to deal with them. Initially they came up with a kind of fake GIF alternative, transcoding GIFs you uploaded to mp4 video files. If you had any variations in the frame rate that you built into your GIF, tough luck. More recently, Facebook partnered with a startup called Giphy (pronounced with a hard G -- just kidding -- they don't do that), allowing you to embed a GIF file hosted on Giphy. Either way, it's still treated like a frozen image until you click a "play" button. All this is ludicrous if you have a Tumblr account, or an "indie"-type blog, you just post a GIF and voila! -- it plays in anyone's browser without loading from elsewhere or requiring a plugin.
With all this as background, I read about Facebook's latest attempt to work GIFs into their formula, Facebook Testing GIFs on Page Post, Ads:
GIFs are slowly starting to creep into the Facebook News Feed. While GIFs have been supported (though not in auto-play fashion) for personal posts since May, the company is testing the feature on page posts. A Facebook spokesperson confirmed this to Facebook: "GIFs can be a fun and compelling way to communicate, so we’ve started testing GIF support in posts and boosted posts for a small percentage of Facebook Pages. We will evaluate whether it drives a great experience for people before rolling it out to more Pages."
Note the language, GIFs "creep" into the news feed. I had to do some research to understand that "personal posts" means content put up by you, the hapless "free" user, and "page posts" means "paid posts." GIFs aren't really supported in personal posts, for the reasons described above. And the GIFs creeping into ad pages are Giphy embeds.
Why does all this matter? It's funny to me that so much energy goes into taming an anarchic format, especially since we are being told by the art and technology websites that we must embrace the tamers because that's where The People are now.
sketch_k5
Drawn with Linux MyPaint.
I still haven't found a brush I like as much as the Chibi Paint "watercolor" brush.
There is a kind of a fine balance where a digital brush pulls the paint and where it is just smearing or blurring it.
The ideal brush for me would simultaneously be loading color and pulling it away from an adjacent mark, and actually looking like a brushstroke without obviously or self-consciously imitating physical media.
Most of the "blend" brushes in MyPaint just dissolve, so everything resembles the Photoshop smudge tool, an effect I dislike.
Here I am compensating by crosshatching, so a volume is built up with fine lines of gradually lightening or darkening color.
The Microsoft Paint brushes in the Windows 7+ versions don't have any dissolve function at all -- they are all very "scratchy." I ended up getting my best results with the "colored pencil," which had a softer, semi-transparent line.
It's hard being a primadonna in a world where the digital tools are conceived by engineers. "Hey ottist I made a brush for ya!"
random surfing
A friend asked recently if anyone still "surfs the web" now that all net-like activity takes place within one or two large gated communities. The question was related to the topic of Young People Not Having a Clue What the Surf Clubs of 2006-2010 Were Supposed to Be About.
Well, for an hour this morning, I did (surf the web).
Started with links to websites from my blog posts of two and three years ago (random link-rot checking), which led indirectly to:
* A PandaWhale "stash" telling us about lead and cadmium in Soylent (the powdered food that techie types are living on). Great clickbait but neither Panda nor its linkee Takepart say where the heavy metals are supposedly coming from! Isn't that the first question in anyone's mind? A press release from Soylent blames trace elements in the brown rice extract and an unusually stringent California labeling law.
* Another PandaWhale "stash" with a mind-shattering item on cutting soft cheese with dental floss. (Note that the name of the floss manufacturer is covered with white tape.) The source is a "life tip" from iPPINKA, a lifestyle accessory vendor that requires a login to browse its merchandise (see photo of keyboard brush at top).
*A list of companies that make bamboo bike frames. I can't find that link now but I remembered one of the company names, Bamboosero, pronounced BambooSERo. But is that SER as in sear or SER as in bear?
At this point it became too exhausting to continue web surfing.