See also: October 2021 and February 2022 (View all)
(Sorry, I was too busy with other stuff to do this column for Nov and Dec).
Last month I decided to buy the latest Paperwhite. I’m buying it mainly for testing purposes — though I hope to use it more than previous Paperwhites. I bought the 2020 Paperwhite and was underwhelmed.
(more…)See also: August 2021 and November 2021 (View all)
PC Mag has a table comparing different camera/camcorder options.
Michael Muchmore has a review of Vegas Pro. I’m debating upgrading to version 19. Apparently, based on googling, it appears that Davinci Resolve’s has a lot of mindshare; they have a free and premium version, but they also sell a lot of specific DaVinci specific equipment.
Vegas 19 tutorials: Making the Brady Bunch intro on Vegas 18. Long review of Vegas 19.
About 6 months ago I learned that my knowledge of CSS is really outdated. I took pride in being able to do media queries and responsive design with CSS 3, but I had really fallen behind on grids and flexboxes and even units of measurement. It doesn’t matter so much in the limited formatting world of ebooks, but a major deal if you’re doing static HTML or even some templates for content management systems. Una Kravets has some interesting and helpful overviews of new developments.
Even better, CSS-tricks has a list of CSS guides including: grids, flexbox, queries, HTML color, centering.
Wow, recently Google notified me that its Backup and Restore Windows program in its Google One service has been updated (i.e., it’s going to be retired). Fine, fine, fine. I’ll do it; I just need to configure it properly. And it’s a big deal because most of my personal content is saved onto Google Drive after Dropbox became prohibitively expensive. I pay $30 annually for 200 gigs of cloud storage. (Dropbox only has as 2 TB plan and manages versions for only 30 days — which is practically the same as Google One).
Basically you were confronted with two tasks: Do you want to mirror the G drive on your local machine or do you want to stream it? I actually create a lot of content on Google Docs, but I’ve also been using it for file backup. The answer turned out to be that I really wanted to stream my drive (which meant that most content resides on the cloud, except directories you specify). You do that by right-clicking on the local directory and selecting Offline Access –> Available Offline.
After thinking about it, I can appreciate the better features in this arrangement. Being able to keep mirrored directories on your local directory was unwieldy — particularly true if you’re using one of those Chromebook with limited local storage. Synchronization proceeds as it did before, but there are some scenarios I haven’t really contemplated: what happens if you need extra space on your laptop and want to delete content from a directory which you’ve arranged to be available for offline use. I’m assuming that changing it from Available offline to Online only will safely delete the local copy, but I’d have to test that out first.
During the migration, my local content appeared the same as before. Everything fine, right? Not so fast. It turns out I had two different local paths:
1local was a root level directory which I created to contain all stuff I wanted locally. G is a virtual drive which really doesn’t exist on the physical drive — but contains a listing of all directories and files (which are available even if you check the properties tab — the number of files and directory size is as before).
To my horror, I realize that I still had multiple files open in text editors which were stored on the C drive rather than the G drive. Also, I had pinned several Google directories from the C drive to my Quick Links.. Don’t want to do that!
Even though I didn’t quite remember when I did the software migration, but I searched all my files in my C drive Google Drive path for this week and last. Luckily, I hadn’t edited a lot of things and could manually verify which files were in my new virtual G drive. I caught a few recent saves which were not in my G drive, so I simply copied them over to G.
Now the big question. Google is asking: Do you want to remove your old Google Drive folder? Delete all my files?? I’m not confident to do it just yet. I need to test some things, and then I’ll let you know.
See also: July 2021 and October 2021 (View All)
I’ve been testing a drupal website this week. One of the hardest things about drupal is figuring out what to learn. I am no developer, but would regard myself as a site implementer or planner. Part of the challenge is just figuring out all the moving parts of drupal core. Then, it’s using the core features to develop a website that does what you want it to do. Then you have to figure out what external plugins you absolutely need and how to customize those things. Then you have to figure out look-and-feel issues, usability, security and maintainability.
When I installed wordpress for the first time in 2003, it was fairly straightforward: mysql + php. Frankly I’m amazed that this blog has remained on wordpress for as long as it did. I took a lot of things for granted about WordPress — that its upgrades were easy, that I didn’t need to learn many features and that I wouldn’t need to install many plugins. I’m using a mobile-friendly theme that I actually paid for, but frankly, it was a shock to learn a few years ago that a majority of my
One of the hardest challenges is figuring out what the current status of drupal is — not just the core, but the plugins.
In many ways a project like Drupal offers an abundance of documentation. But there’s one thing that web projects like Drupal just never seem to do.
It’s nice that Drupal has a lot of functionality, and I do appreciate the walkthroughs via screenshots and screencasts. What the docs never seem to do is explain why a feature is useful.
I can usually figure out the how, I just can’t figure out the why.
When using a CMS, you start out with business needs and try to figure out how you can solve these business needs using a tool like Drupal. Take for example taxonomies (which I basically understand, but not as a Drupal content type). How does creating a taxonomy help a site? Why would a user need this? (At this point, I still do not know, although that is not a super difficult task).
there are lots of documents
I’m just going to jot a few things down:
How to keep your drupal site secure.
From robertroose.com, When to choose drupal as a web designer or web designer. helpful tools for drupal web designers and site builders.
a big long thing about nomenclature for content entities and fields.
Making a custom theme for Drupal 9.
Theming in Drupal 8. (official docs)
When I started this blog in 2001 (over 20 years ago!), I used to link to a lot of geek articles — about 50% of my postings. Then I wandered into artsy fartsy stuff — although I still am learning about technology every day. At the moment, I’m immersed (embroiled?) in a lot of geeky things, so I guess I should do a monthly linkdump for that as well. Eventually I’ll stop doing that when I stop finding cool things.
As an aside, even though I’m committed to more blogging than previously, it is psychologically comforting to create these monthly “baskets of links” which I can dump stuff into. No more pressure to publish often; I just throw stuff into baskets (and occasionally comment on them).
10 modern 1 line layouts by Google Developer Una Kravets. (website, twitter). I watched this instructional video last year — and it utterly blew my mind! I always knew I was falling behind on web design — a fact made clear to me a few years ago when I tried to view this blog on a mobile device. I just didn’t realize how much and how much more efficient CSS has become.
Una Kravets has a blogpost showing the new way of thinking about web design and a YouTube series on Designing in the Browser. Way above my pay grade except for my special projects, and I certainly want to try a few things out in modern browsers. Just being able to test better or have a better understanding of how to evaluate themes or skins would be a win for me.
One frustrating thing about ebooks is how behind reading systems are when compared to browser CSS. There is a bad guy here -definitely Amazon, which never has felt the need to improve CSS support for epub3. This is actually 2 separate problems: the fact that epub3 hasn’t been updated and that Amazon’s support of epub3 is so shitty. Offtopic, but it really is mind-blowing at how much Amazon dominates the ebook space (Like about 98% of my ebook sales are on Amazon — even though I promote the other distributors).
I’m revamping my publishing website — trying to decide between a wordpress install vs. a drupal install. My default choice has been wordpress, but wordpress has grown a lot more fractured and proprietary, plus it doesn’t really do what I need without plugins. Drupal can do that out of the box, but it requires more maintenance and more complexity.
While researching FSF’s push for a free ebook reader, I see a web-based ebook reader as a javascript epub.js . This script has been around for more than 5 years and minimal documentation, but several implementation questions on StackOverflow
How to avoid ransomware. Here’s a general background of ransomware.