Havn (en)

I recently saw a video from Louis Rossman about whether or not ad blocking is piracy. This isn't a response to the video (it's OK), but some thoughts I got from it.

This is not a post where I'm sure of my opinions! I'm think out loud, and hoping for other people's thoughts. It started as a thread on Mastodon. Here's a link to that, and I hope someone adds their thoughts there!

To me, more interesting than if it's piracy/illegal, is if it's ethical/right. And when evaluating something like that, I like to ask myself:

“Would it be ok if everyone did it?”

Norsk versjon 🔗 This is my favourite cap (and headgear in general) of all time. And this is also a good example of something I love in general: Simple products, made extremely well. These caps are made at the same factroy that does caps for the Japanese baseball league. Several brands have tried to get the factory to produce caps fro them, but without success. According to Self Edge, Hiro (the man behind Poten, who also has a huge baseball card collection) had to visit the factory several times, over three years, to show them that he cares enough about baseball to have them produce caps for him. Lucky for those of us who don't play in the NPB! But what's so good about these caps then?

(This post is “an email” to David Pierce of The Verge.)

Hey, David! With Neeva shutting down, have you (or anyone at The Verge) ever considered doing a review of Kagi? ? I’d love it if, for instance, a couple of staff members used it exclusively for a month, and then talked/wrote/made a video about it!

One of my favourite tech products!

I like to try things that are less “big tech”, so I tried DuckDuckGo for a while. But I kept having to go back to Google for searches here and there…. But I also love the idea of paying for things online instead of it being ad supported, so I tried Neeva and Kagi. The latter was much better on Norwegian searches, so I’ve been sticking with that over over a year. But as opposed to DDG, I never feel the need to go back to Google! Not only is it “not worse”, it’s “better”. For instance, I’ve ranked up Reddit in my searches. As their only incentive is to make results better for the user, you can do stuff like that…

Ok, so this is by far the most niche thing I've ever written. But after getting a great jacket (that I'll write about some other time!) that only had one problem, I wanted to gather my thoughts on this tiny subject. The “problem” was: It doesn't cuff perfectly.

What's the deal with cuffing anyway??

Cuffing is when you fold the sleeves of a shirt, jacket, sweater etc. It's also commonly used when you do the same to leg opening of pants or shorts. And I'm an avid cuffer! The three reasons are:

1. I'm 1.75 m tall, and my legs and arms aren't especially long – so clothes are usually too long.
2. Related, I like watches, bracelets, shoes and socks – and cuffing shows them off.
3. I often think it makes the clothes themselves look better.

Here's some examples of what I mean by nr. 2 and 3:

The cuffed shirt makes the watch more prominent - to myself and others.

Norsk versjon 🔗

Advice for students and non-techies

These things move up and down – but the fall of 2022 is an excellent time to buy a Mac. Apple’s new processors (the M1 family and the M2) makes the machines very fast, while being very efficient. The latter leading to great battery life and quiet operation (if you’ve ever had a computer that sounds like it wants to take off and fly into the horizon, you know that’s not always the case). This doesn’t mean there’s no great Windows PCs on the market! However, the days when you had to overpay to get an apple on your computer, is passed – so for most people I would recommend getting a Mac (especially if you own an iPhone). There are still several reasons to get a PC, among them:

• If you would rather not pay $800+ for a laptop
• Know that you use software not available for macOS
• Use the machine a lot for gaming
• Or you just know that you prefer Windows to macOS

But this isn’t a Mac vs. PC article – let’s get to the advice!

Storage and memory

Norsk versjon 🔗

Here's a remake of backgrounds from this thread that I made since the links were dead. These were inspired by u/rzalexander and made with free illustrations from illustrations.co. I've tried to adapt the illustrations to iOS 16's new home app, so that the text and icons are visible.

I've also made companion backgrounds for use with iPad and Mac. Since those windows resize all the time, using two tone and illustrations was a no-go. So they are just one colour backgrounds (I have one using the dark colour and one using the light one. I've used the latter). I've made backgrounds for 13 different rooms (3 versions for each room).