human : artist
Reviews, rants and academic polemics.
Things might be a bit funky as the new theme beds in and has fixes made. There’s going to be a move to a new webhost soon, so disruptions should be expected. Also, the design isn’t small-screen responsive yet. That’s a longer-term goal.
That said, Woot! This has been a long time coming.
150km round trip, two and a half hours on the road, with two stops along the way, and a little under $150 in total cost, I secured a box of vacuum tubes, a wheel from a plough, and a whole bunch of stainless steel fixings.
According to the guy selling the stainless steel (for $100), it was about $2k-$3k worth of material, which I believe. It was, again according to him, surplus from a job.
So these materials should prove interesting, both for making things, but also simple stuff, like if I need to make concrete plinths and bolt things down, I can embed these.
Mona, Mona, Mona. *sigh*
Mona is a client application for Mastodon servers. It allows you to do all the things you can do on Mastodon, in a much better UI than a web browser can provide.
In intent, in its radically wide scope for user customisation, in its support for old devices back to iOS 12, in its single purchase / perpetual licence pricing structure, Mona is a fantastic application, especially as the result of a single developer. It is, quite simply, the best Mastodon client for someone in the Apple ecosystem.
Mona is better than vanilla Mastodon, in much the same way that Tweetbot was better than vanilla Twitter. It also furnishes capabilities the standard Mastodon experience lacks; quote-posts, for example. It doesn’t matter if mastodon.social doesn’t have an official quote-post format, if everyone uses a client that presents links to posts as if they were being quoted, your experience of Mastodon becomes one in which quote-posts exist.
Mona is what made Mastodon usable for me, in the same way that Twitter killing third party clients, like Tweetbot, made Twitter unusable for me.
What is it that makes a social media platform “usable”, in my eyes?
It comes down to this; a social media platform, which features chronologically delivered content, needs to have:
What do we mean by native application?
I’m not interested in using a web browser to view a social media platform, or a web page packaged in an application frame. I’m not interested in Electron “apps”; I want a Mac application for when I’m on my Mac, an iPad application when I’m on my iPad, and an iPhone application when I’m on my iPhone. As a side issue – I’m not interested in native apps for social media networks that are made by the social media network itself. Your social network is only as good as the third party apps it supports.
What I especially don’t want, is some “sortof works everywhere” compatibility technology second-class application on all three. Unfortunately, that’s what Mona is. Mona is a Catalyst app.
Catalyst is Apple’s version of Electron; only instead of allowing web pages to impersonate native software, it allows iPad apps to pretend they’re real Mac apps. Apple have supplied plenty of them on your Mac already, and it’s no surprise they’re the ones that feel off. They’re the janky apps that don’t have proper contextual menus with all the expected entries (like text transformation options), where spell checking doesn’t work the same, where the keyboard shortcuts don’t work right, where text selection of a single character with your mouse is difficult, where window resizing doesn’t look the way it does on your proper Mac apps. Apple’s Messages, Music, Podcasts, Books, Weather – all of these janky, brittle-feeling applications are so, because they’re iPad apps masquerading as Mac apps.
Mona is one of these, and shares all those characteristics. It’s better than using Mastodon in a web browser, but it’s worse than a proper Mac app. This is not because the developer is a bad person, or that the ideas behind Mona are bad ideas; it comes down to Catalyst being a badly implemented technology, which at its absolute best can only produce second-class applications on macOS.
For example, sometimes the main timeline in Mona will just stop accepting clicks. All the other tabs in the UI will be fine, however the main timeline will be scrollable, but inert. You can call up a second instance of the main timeline, it will be fine, but the only way to clear the problem, is to quit and relaunch the app. Sometimes, the app will return your timeline to where it was, sometimes it will return to the newest post in your feed. Then, you just have to try to remember how many hours ago you were at, and scroll back to that location. Unfortunately, there’s no feed location bookmarking, which would be really useful, because…
…feed synchronisation simply doesn’t work. Put it this way:
What these images are showing is that I was reading my Mastodon feed in Mona for Mac, and I had reached a point where I was 5 hours in the past, in terms of the posts I was reading. I moved over to my iPad, unlocked its screen, opened Mona for iPad, and after it did it’s “restoring iCloud Position” dance, it synced to a point that was 7 hours in the past.
Later in the evening, I tried again, this time going from my Mac to my iPhone:
This time I went from 1 hour in the past, to 6 hours in the past upon unlocking my iPhone, opening Mona, and waiting for it to “restore iCloud position”.
Or another attempt:
…you get the idea.
To be clear, what is happening here is that Mona is saying it’s syncing my reading position on my iOS devices, to match where my Mac is at, and getting it wildly wrong.
What’s really problematic about this is that there’s no way to get the correct timeline position from my Mac, with the iOS device. If I look in the settings on the iOS devices, I will see that the last upload of Mona sync data to iCloud from my Mac was after I stopped advancing the timeline, and yet, for no good reason I can figure, Mona is picking some random (and inconsistent) time as it’s sync timecode.
Where this becomes a data-loss class issue, is that any interaction with Mona on the iOS device at this point overwrites my Mac’s timeline location. If I do any scrolling on the iOS device, it will push that timeline to iCloud, and my Mac will then jump to that location, if it is still awake with Mona on the screen.
I lose the correct data, by interacting with the incorrect data in any way.
If I swipe quit Mona on the iOS devices, and relaunch it at this point, it will load with its timeline set to the current moment, and then overwrite my Mac’s timeline location.
The only way to get consistent timeline sync is to have both devices open in Mona next to each other, and then advance the timeline on the source device, until the destination device reflects those changes. At this point the timelines will do the party trick of moving their timelines in unison.
Obviously, this isn’t a tenable situation – the whole point of iCloud Sync is that you can do something on one device, switch to another device any amount of time later, even if the original device is asleep or shut down, and just pick up where you left off. As far as I can recall, Mona is the only application I use which makes use of iCloud Sync, and consistently fails to correctly sync.
Whatever the reason, the point is that the Sync function doesn’t work in the real world. As a gimmick, making the timeline on one device move in realtime sync with another device is fine, but that doesn’t solve the problem of maintaining continuity of reading location as you switch between devices.
The other thing that bugs me about Mona, is the timeline compression that occurs after not using the application overnight. You sit down to Mona in the morning, to catch up on what’s happened in your feed overnight, and some inconsistent way on from your current location, is a Load More Posts label; after which, your feed continues from only 4 hours ago.
What inevitably happens as I sit there scrolling un-caffeinated, is I find myself suddenly wondering why I’m already at only 2 hours, and realise somewhere in my scrollback is a clickable link to load between 6 and 8 hours worth of posts. So I have to manually scroll back, until I find an image I recognise from last night, and then carefully find the single line Load More Posts link.
This wasn’t the behaviour of the app when I purchased it. For whatever reason, no matter how many times I’ve made this suggestion, the developer won’t do anything to either make this a behaviour that can be disabled, or make the Load More Posts label more obvious; like giving it a bright contrasting background colour, or a skeuomorphic broken, saw-toothed edge, which contrasts against the dominant horizontals and verticals.
It’s maddening, and a great example of how self-sabotaging people can be with their own work.
So that’s Mona (as of 24, October, 2024), an app that showed great promise in its early days for its massive, industry-leading customisability, which really pointed to a better direction for software which every part of the UI being user-modifiable, but which is now drowning under its basic technology not being up to the task, and its core feature – the literal reason you would use it, and not a browser; feed syncing, no longer actually working with any reliability.
It really does seem that no one is capable of making truly great software any more. Whether it’s building on janky non-native libraries, or image editor apps that are restricted to a single window with no tear-off palettes, or photo library apps that can’t have the thumbnails in one window, and the viewer in another, or full-screen preview software that can’t cope with having more than one display, everything seems to be collapsing to a world premised on no one using anything other than a single-screen laptop.
What has gone wrong with the culture of software development?
I’ve been listening to podcasts for over 20 years. The entire time, my collection has been subscribed, and managed within Apple’s iTunes.
No longer.
Podcasting is a medium under threat from a number of assailants:
*Which excludes Overcast, because its entire basis is you rent space on Overcast’s servers, and store your collection there. However, I don’t build my archive plans on how long a single developer remains interested in continuing an app or business, nor on the volatility of server rental.
**I’ll note with some bitter irony that Mac OS X used to have human-readable plain text XML for all preference files, but they’ve been largely replaced with binary encoded versions that require a dedicated application to decode, and this regressive change was justified as saving disk space. Sure Apple, we’ll save a few megabytes so you can cheap out on the SSDs you put in machines, which you’ll fill to the brim with podcast files we used to keep on external drives.
So to hell with Apple.
Where to from here? Well, I’ve started by:
And there you have it – you are now effectively back to the way things were when Podcasts were subscribed to in iTunes, and synced to an iPod. You lose a couple of things, like play counts, and synced playhead positions. However, iMazing’s drag & drop podcast loading (for which you can use your super-handy Smart Folders as your source) is a better workflow than the original iTunes sync. You also gain the ability to edit your podcast files (so those 10 year old adds for Lootcrate…) without worrying about breaking feed continuity.
Over the past few months, the past year really, I’ve been rebuilding the production process for Surfing The Deathline.
The project is built in obsolete versions of Adobe Photoshop, and InDesign – versions that won’t run on a modern operating system. On the assumption that vintage hardware will be unable to run for ever, I made the long term plan to build a dedicated virtual machine with the necessary applications, and fonts, to be able to continue to fix the work, should errata be discovered.
And boy, were errata discovered:
You can see the tag for the speech bubble doesn’t match the background colour of the bubble itself. They were supposed to be indistinguishable, and what I eventually realised was that I had switched the text box to an RGB-based black, while the tag end was still a CMYK black. The important point being that while they look the same at 100% opacity, as you apply transparency effects, the CMYK version takes on a grey tinge.
This error went live in an update of the books.
So back to the virtual machine; setting that up, learning to configure and run virtual machine software, acquiring an old version of MacOS 10.6 Snow Leopard Server, reinstalling old Adobe Creative Suite 5, migrating fonts – each step required re-learning old technology. Dealing then with the vagaries of migrated fonts; how some fonts that had been in my system for years wouldn’t work when re-added to a fresh system, and so necessitated finding replacement versions effectively meant manually checking, and adjusting every piece of text in the work.
Eventually it was all done, and I was able to start re-building Surfing The Deathline in the new environment. Along the way, I started to find issues – typos, and style items incorrectly applied. Some of them dated back to the first print publication in 2006, or the first pdf preview in 2004. So there was literally a couple of months of going through the book, page by page, massaging fixes, running output sets, proofreading, noting fixes, fixing, running output, proofreading, etc.
The biggest limiter was my inability to do more than one proofing run per day – the changes were so small and obscure that after reading the book once, I simply couldn’t see the next set of problems – fresh eyes were necessary.
And so, for weeks on end, I’ve been largely nocturnal, barely leaving the house. Groceries arrive, I cook, I read news, I work, I have occasional weekends off. This is me in work mode.
But the work has been done. For something I declared finished in 2021, now in 2024 it seems genuinely finished.
…or, How I Wrote A Letter, With A Fountain Pen, On Paper, And Mailed It To Someone Two Weeks In The Future, And Half A World Away.
I bought a new camera – a Nikon D850.
It’s new, as in it’s a current product made by Nikon, and still manufactured, and for sale fresh from the factory. It was also launched in 2017. Seven years old, and still arguably the finest 35mm DSLR ever produced. With Nikon seemingly all-in on mirrorless cameras, likely it will become the finest 35mm DSLR that will ever be produced.
Choosing to buy the last of an older paradigm was a real decision, but the simple truth is, I don’t like mirrorless cameras. I don’t want to look at a little television screen, and frame my shot on that. I want to look through the lens, at the real world, and capture that moment. If I was going to buy a mirrorless camera, I think I’d be tempted to go stranger, with something like a Hasselblad digital back, with a 500 series (or technical camera) body.
If I were to compare the D850 to its mirrorless replacement; the Z8, which is almost twice the price; the Z8 only has an sRGB viewfinder – you don’t even see the full colour gamut your sensor can resolve, let alone the true colour of the world through the lens. In the fourteen months since the Z8’s launch, Nikon has released a significantly cheaper, lower-end Z6 III, which has a P3 gamut viewfinder. Still not the full AdobeRGB most photography processes work within, but significantly better than the Z8.
And that’s the thing, isn’t it? When you’re in the early days of a new paradigm, the things you buy will likely become obsolesced by cheaper, newer versions. In all likelihood I will never have buyer’s remorse over my D850, because there will never be a better version of this camera. If I had bought the Z8, I’d already feel put out over having to compromise on viewfinder quality to get higher image quality, versus the cheaper, newer, lower-end camera.
Where is this going, and how does it relate to fountain pens?
So I decided to write a letter to someone I hope is still a friend, but with whom I lost contact perhaps six to eight years ago. I have an email address, and a Twitter handle for them, but those are either out of use, or I’m perhaps not friends with this person any more, because things I’ve sent in the intervening years have elicited no response.
I have a phone number for them, but given the aforementioned silence, I can only feel it would be an intrusion to call. When we were still talking, they gave me the address of a wonderful house they had bought, hence the letter.
I have not written any significant amount of text since I tore the sagittal band of my middle finger on my dominant hand several years ago. Despite the months of hand-traction, and therapy, and rehab, it never returned to pre-injury condition. It still feels weak, it still lacks some stability, and it still provokes debilitating psychological trauma responses at the memory of the injury itself when it twinges. Compounded with neurological damage which scrambles a lot of the sensation down the side of my hands and little fingers, the idea of writing with a pen and paper was something I approached with trepidation.
My art kit contained a tool for the job – an inexpensive clear plastic fountain pen. More for drawing than a fine writing implement, I suspect. it has a nifty archimedes-screw ink cartridge, which draws up ink when it needs refilling. Fountain pens can be problematic for left-handers. A left-to-right script requires the left hander to push the nib, rather than dragging it as for a right hander. Then we get to the text being obscured by one’s hand, and the smudging which can occur. Some hand-gymnastics can solve the former, but the latter was alleviated with some Mont Blanc waterproof permanent black ink. It dries super quickly, and doesn’t smudge from skin moisture. The downside is it dries in the nib, so requires frequent cleaning with glass-cleaner, which then takes time to work out of the nib so you’re back to writing with ink.
However, when it all comes together, oh wow. I wrote draft, after draft, after draft of the aforementioned letter. When the pen played up because it needed cleaning, or I made an egregious typo, or my hand just ran away scribbling marks faster than I could supply control… Start again, re-write.
Handwriting takes practice, and I’m still not even remotely capable of neat, regular cursive. That will require slowing down, a lot to regain the muscle memory. For now, merely keeping my somewhat-joined chicken scrawl printing consistent and legible is a real challenge. Especially after so many years of thinking in comics terms, where everything is written in upper case.
I wrote the letter, over and over, like a monk illuminating a manuscript as an act of devotion. Eventually, it was as much the thing I wanted it to be, as I could make it, and I put it in an envelope, masked-up, and visited the Post Office.
From there, the letter began its transit to a destination two weeks in the future, and on the other side of the world.
I’ve only ever had one pen-friend – in the era before email. We wrote back and forth a number of times, I still have the letters. Artefacts of the hand of a person, moments of their life, spent and unrecoverable, distilled to a physical object.
I miss that connection – when someone’s thoughts were manifest in a unique object they sent you. I imagine it’s an intellectual and emotional Skin Hunger – made all the more terrible by a world in which people are simultaneously too busy to write letters, and yet often unwilling to use technology to do video calls.
A toast therefore, to the joy of using a fountain pen. Just like my new camera, there is an experiential quality to older methodologies – the real, the physical, the practical. Looking through the lens, making a mark with ink.
Hail to the Real.
There’s an issue I’ve encountered a couple of times lately, where the SMTP server for an account will report in Connection Doctor that it doesn’t need authentication (even though it does) and fail to send mail.
There appears to be no solution to this, as all the settings will be correct, the only option is to delete the account in mail.app, and recreate it from scratch. Deleting just the SMTP server profile does not appear to be sufficient to do the job.
I realised recently that in the changeover to my new workstation, and the change to new operating system versions, my entire workflow for producing a Surfing The Deathline page art errata fix was broken.
Worse still, I couldn’t fit the entire thing in my head at once, so there was nothing for it, but to start mapping the whole thing out.
The process:
A thought that occurs is to put the entire process into the Virtual Machine I’m using to run the Adobe apps, so that they’re sealed off against change.
Every four years, February 29th rolls around. It’s a day I remember an old buddy, a former partner, a fellow comrade in the trenches of the Sydney goth scene, and particularly in the audience participation cast of Rocky Horror Picture Show – Sharon Droscher (Née Hedley).
Not that I would ever expect any of the folks from Friday Insanity, or as it later became, Fun In The Dark to come across or read this, but for what its worth, Sharon and I were wrong, you were right. Trying to enforce a higher standard of “quality” onto a group “fun” activity, to chase a dream of a kind of professionalism that wasn’t a dream everyone on the cast shared, and trying to impose that dedication, was the wrong thing to do. In this, I allowed my loyalty to a person to supersede my loyalty to the group. That was my failing, and I’m sorry for that.
Anyway… like she was odd in so many ways, and seemed destined to be one of the weird who turn pro when the going gets weird, it was appropriate that Sharon’s birthday was February 29th.
We had a tumultuous relationship, a fairly acrimonious parting, and a sometime uneasy friendship afterwards – but she went on to be happy, I was chief bridesmaid at her wedding to Simon, with whom she moved to Canada, until cancer claimed her a little under nine years ago.
So every year I metaphorically light a candle on the 28th, and every fourth year on the 29th, light a bunch. I pour a drink, and try to remember to be gentle to the memory of who we all were when we were younger – full of fury, inarticulate and uncareful.
And then I remember when we all took acid, and walked from the warehouse in which we were living, under Glebe though a disused rail line tunnel with only cigarette lighters for illumination, then out along the viaduct crossing Wentworth Park, before making our way back to the warehouse (and peeling the stripes off a speedhump along the way). The night was ended with hours in the warehouse’s gallery, watching reflections from shattered pieces of mirror on the ends of springs dance about on the joists and floorboards of the level above, which formed our timber sky.
Happy 13th, Sharon.
The Long Death began about, it must have been around 2035. It’s funny in a grim way, we avoided the worst of climate change, by virtue of there being too few of us to outpace the planet’s carbon cycle. Too few of us…
It started everywhere, over about 5 years. The syndrome was like rapid ALS combined with mild Ebola, and was 100% fatal.
It was #Covid. It was the long-term effect of Covid, and it claimed every single person who was still alive 20 years after their infection.
All content © 1997 - 2024 Matt Godden, unless otherwise noted. Permission for use as AI training data is not granted.