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These are tech/gadget related posts. Archive for 2019.

Dark mode!

Last year Apple introduced dark mode in MacOS. This is really nice at night because your eyeballs aren't blasted with tons of white backgrounds in pretty much all windows. Unfortunately, most web pages still use a white background. Obviously you can redesign your website to conform to dark mode, but this looks rather stark on computers in light mode.

The solution would be to have your website render dark on a system in dark mode and light on a system in light mode. As of the new version of Safari included in MacOS 10.14.4 Mojave that was released just now, you can actually do that, as you can see here. Just switch your system between light and dark mode and you'll see this webpage switch over accordingly.

I like to use this terminal command to switch between light and dark mode:

sleep 2; osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to tell appearance preferences to set dark mode to not dark mode'

(Change the last "not dark mode" to "true" or "false" to enable or disable dark mode. The line above toggles back and forth.)

On your website you need to set up conditional CSS with media queries. This is what I use:

<style type="text/css" media="screen, print">
  body { background-color: #f0f0f0; }
  A { color: #c00000; text-decoration: underline; }
  A:visited { color: #700000; text-decoration: underline; }
  H1 { font-family: futura, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt; }
</style>
<style type="text/css" media="screen and (prefers-color-scheme: dark)">
  body { background-color: #202020; color: #d0d0d0; }
  A { color: #ff6734; }
  A:visited { color: #d82000; }
</style>

The first part between sets everything up for light mode, with a very light gray background.

Then the second style section (in bold) with (prefers-color-scheme: dark) overrides those earlier color settings. Note that all the font settings from the first style section are inherited by the second style section; no need to restate all of those.

That's it! Pretty cool, right?

Update: have a look here for more information, including how to use dark mode with javascript.

Permalink - posted 2019-03-26

4K TV part 1: what you need to know about the hardware

Although it says "4K TV", as far as I know, there's (virtually) no actual TV broadcast in 4K, so what I'm really talking about here is the state of home theater technology as of around 2018. This post is about the hardware and the formats. Part 2 will be about 4K content and whether the 4K thing is worth the money.

Read the article - posted 2019-08-22

4K TV part 2: 4K and Dolby Atmos content

So with all the technical details out of the way in part 1, let's have a look at where to get 4K content and whether it's worth the trouble and the expense. Where I've found 4K content...

Read the article - posted 2019-08-26

Airpods Pro

It's insane. I already spent nearly 800 euros on bluetooth headphones this year. And then Apple released the Airpods Pro, costing € 279 here in the Netherlands. And I couldn't help myself and bought a pair. So let's see how they compare...

Read the article - posted 2019-11-26

Fun with fonts!

After many years of using Century Gothic and its clone URW Gothic Book for my website muada.com, I felt it was time to reconsider that choice. So I went font hunting!

Over the course of my hunting expedition, found a nice new font, Muli, and I created a page that lets you compare different fonts and their weights interactively. Have a look.

Read the article - posted 2019-12-12

Bluesky: Twitter wants a federated Twitter

Twitter's Jack Dorsey, in (of course) a Twitter thread:

Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard.

This is interesting on several levels. I'll mostly talk about the protocol design part of this, but before I do that: when has a business that's pretty much in a monopolist position ever voluntarily given up that position? They must really be feeling the pushback against "content and conversation that sparks controversy and outrage", and see this as a way out.

Read the article - posted 2019-12-17

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