Finally figured out a reason to like this thing.
I stopped using function keys for years, once it became necessary to hold FN to modify them so you weren’t, like, turning the volume down.
Sure, you could set it up so they would behave normally, but then you had to hold FN to, like, turn the volume down.
The new keyboard settings lets you have them switch automatically. If I’m in Adobe, editing code, or anywhere I use them heavily, they switch on by default. If I’m browsing or doing less work-productivity stuff, it switches back.
Now if I can only muscle-memory my pinking from accidentally resting on that ESC key all the time…
Blog
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New MacBook OLE Keyboard thing
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Lichess Patron Icon
I probably am on lichess.org more than any other single website, mostly losing chess games. It’s an absolutely perfect example of the best open-source software can be.
As an open-source project, the developers do not charge for membership. It’s totally free. There’s something extraordinarily humane and selfless about open-source, especially when it rises to the usage levels that Lichess and others (Linux, Blender, WordPress, e.g.,) have achieved.
Alternatively, closed-source projects usually offer a free membership, but include motetization strategies such as ads that only go away, or features that can only be accessed if you purchase a membership.
That’s not to say they don’t need money, but almost all of the revenue open-source make comes from donations.
One of the interesting ways Lichess monetizes is via the “patron” badge. If you donate at least $5, you get a little wingy icon next to your username:
That’s it–instead of a boring little circle, now you have a bit of “flair” that distinguishes you as someone who supports the hard work it takes to make an open-source project great. It’s a brilliant strategy to encourage donations. But I have to wonder, is it a feature? In other words, does paying for Lichess actually improve your chess skills and help you win more often? Does it help your rating improve?
I think this would be a great study. Lichess has a monumental open data set. One could conceivably analyse the data and determine that become a member does, in fact, make you a stronger player. At the very least, it would make you a stronger player on Lichess.
Symbolism and iconography have a powerful effect on us. They form our communication methodology and influence our decisions. When you play someone with a wingy badge, you may feel empathy toward them, and thus not play with your typical competitive drive. Or you may feel intimidation, or some other form of distraction that might throw you off your game, even if it’s just the tiniest bit. Placing the Lichess dataset under a microscope might reveal patterns that show that patreons are not only being supportive, they’re being tactical.
Here’s my hypothesis: becoming a Lichess patron makes you a better player. Time to get the abstract written.
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Notes from sabbatical
Been to the studio twice, have four plates ready to proof. Friday is working out to be the best day in terms of free time, so I should have some stuff ready by end of this week.
Built a bunch of icons in photoshop, just b/w now, will try to export to C4D and see how easy it is to 3dify them.
Got assigned as Nancy’s t-ball coach, don’t know how that happened but it should be fun. Need to get a book on coaching t-ball…
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Operating System developers should stick to developing operating systems.
Apple and Microsoft make some of the most popular OS’s in the world: iOS, macOS, and Windows.
As software goes, that’s about it. Everything else they force down the users’ throats is pure garbage. I’m talking about iTunes, Mail, MS Office, Photo software, and the list goes on.
I honestly don’t know why this is. Google Docs is so superior to Office in every possible way. Gmail absolutely blows Apple’s Mail off the planet. iTunes is so confused about what its purpose is, so filled with layers of disconnected functionality, but it’s stuck on us users because that’s just how it is. I don’t know.
I do know that on my Macbook, Mail and iTunes and Photos are always opening unexpectedly, for a variety of reasons, none of which make much sense. It’s a shame that I can’t just make them go away completely.
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On light
We see because of light reacting with our crazy eyes and ocular nerves and brains.
But there’s a lot to learn about where that light’s coming from. It’s either being emitted or reflected.
The primary point of emitted light, for most of our existence on this planet, has been very hard, even dangerous, to look at. I’m talking about the sun. Other points are intriguing and inspiring: fire, candles, fireflies, stars, lightning, but they’ve been fleeting. We’ve never stared at them for more than a few moments, dreaming of things.
Our eyes were always concerned with reflected light. Light that revealed the skin of those we loved and feared, the places we lived and travel to, the words that formed our literature. The light that reflected off gardens that enveloped us and blades that killed us.
Our eyes now focus on emissive sources. We’ve harnessed the power of the sun and stars and flames and can represent those things with a single binary point of light. We call those points pixels, and they can be as big or small, bright or dim, red or blue as we want. They can be wherever we want them to be, and change according to our magnificent instructions. They constitute our stories.
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WP Icon font
I made a font out of the icons I’m proposing for future versions of WordPress. Here’s how I did it:
Designed them in AI CS6. Preferences set like this:
Note the copy as settings; apparently you need this so you can copy/paste into fontlab…
Gridline every 10px, w/10 subdivisions. Icons are based on a 10×10 grid. I made the color black so they’re easy to see. 
Make sure snap to grid and snap to point are turned on, and that you can see the grid.
Note the extra strokeless/fill-less 20x20px box around the icons. You need this to copy/paste into fontlab and not have them get scaled up. Then I created a new font in Fontlab 5, with metrics set like this:
I copy/pasted each icon-the shape and the invisible bounding box- into a separate glyph in fontlab. I tried to make it intuitive; “a” is appearance, “d” for dashboard. “p” was problematic; posts, pages both have p.
After I generated the otf file, I used @font-face to embed it on a test page. I set a base size to 62.5% and set the icons to 2.0em; effectively rendering them at their native 20×20 pixels. The key thing is the -webkit-font-smoothing:antialiased property in the css. Without it, they look like garbage. They pretty much look like garbage anyway in firefox/opera, and I have no clue how to get them in IE. But in webkit it’s gold.
I’m trying to get the whole thing on github since I guess that’s what you’re supposed to do, so stay tuned…
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Perfection and lazy day
2 hockey games done with, now we’re reading counterpane fairy and playing perfection.