“When I eat a chocolate bunny I bop it on the head first, to show respect to field mice that lost family in the Little Bunny Foo Foo massacre.”
— unknown
Broken by design
The Touch Bar on Apple’s current MacBook Pro line was obviously a solution in search of a problem. Unfortunately, the designers were so in love with their hideous mutant child that they didn’t look at how people actually use the top row of keyboards. More likely, they simply assumed that everyone uses keyboards the same way they do, the same arrogance that leads to using low-contrast tinyfonts everywhere.
The Escape key has been annoying me all weekend as I’ve gotten my work stuff migrated to the new machine, and I finally sat down and carefully tested it to understand why:
the Touch Bar isn’t tied into the keyboard buffer
That is, if I type three keys in a row, they will be processed in that order. If I press a “key” on the Touch Bar and then type two keys, the Touch Bar “key” is often the second result. So instead of typing Esc-x, about a third of the time I’m typing x-Esc; more if I’m in a hurry.
And the only “solution” available is to convert one of the other modifier keys into a physical Escape key. And they’re all in the wrong place for muscle memory.
There is no reason other than prettiness (or pettiness) that the Touch Bar doesn’t have a physical Escape key at the left edge. It does have a tactile key on the right edge, even though it sits flush.
Enlightening searches...
In the App Store, I searched for “philips hue”. Under related searches, the first choice was “girly wallpapers” and the second was “girl wallpapers”. Not sure if they meant my naughty novel cover art desktop wallpaper or not…
Cheesecake Champloo 7
No theme this time, just the first batch of pictures out of the leftovers folder that caught my eye. Haven’t done one of these in six months, and I’ve got around 1,500 images I never used.
Dear Apple,
Next time you update the MacBook Pro line, could you add an option for a decent keyboard? Maybe call it the MacBook Dev, for use by people who do more than fingerpaint on the trackpad. I just finished migrating all my work stuff over to a new one, and while the completely-non-tactile (and mis-positioned) Escape key is the worst part, the physical keys aren’t that much better. At the office, I’ve got a CODE Keyboard hooked up, but at home I tend to use the built-in.
Well, I did, when I still had a laptop I could type on.
And this is going to sound odd coming from me, but it’s too damn loud. Mind you, I go out of my way to buy the clatteriest mechanical keyboards I can find, but this thing annoys me because it sounds hollow and cheap.
While I’m on the subject, if the only port you’re going to supply from now on is USB-C aka Thunderbolt 3, could you possibly produce adapters and accessories that aren’t ranked worst-in-class? The only ones you make that don’t have a terrible rep are the power brick (which no longer comes with a cable…) and the Thunderbolt 2 adapter.
Dear Amazon,
Recently, the following graphic has been showing up on a lot of products:
At first glance, it seems like it’s saying “we think this is the best product of this type”. But then you start to notice:
Doesn’t really mean much now, does it?
Bakuon!! OVA 2
Apparently there was an OVA followup to the series, released with a limited edition of manga volume 9. I don’t see a sub, but the 480p raw is available. It seems something’s amiss with Hayakawa…
Dear Amazon,
Because I bought 15 feet of strong velcro, I must need instant oatmeal. Right, that seems obvious.
