User Inconvenience / User eXaspsration Design

Power supply part is about $99 CAD at an Apple shop plus labor to install. Absolute pain in the but to install though, as you have to completely disassemble the iMac to do it. Also, insist your technician wears the special issue microcotton gloves Apple specifically makes for servicing the iMac 5K when removing the screen.

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Does anyone know how to find or create mutually-compatible 2d or 2.5d graphic assets? Like for creating computer games, but without licenses restricting them to computer games?

I got Game Character Hub a couple years ago, but because it’s aimed at computer games, and their standards are increasing, the manual basically explains that they ditched a bunch of graphic tools, but hey, we have a command line tool instead to do that, and . I don’t even know if the command line tool will run on my computer.

I’ve searched itch for existing assets, but it doesn’t support exact match whole word search. Also searched Steam.

At the opposite end:

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Unfortunately, they haven’t released specs and it’s being made by a defense contractor with, I’m assuming, no transparency and high probability of corruption. Another millstone for Republicans to hang on the Post Office.

It does look like a good concept though.

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So I’ve long since stopped using Facebook, because of their “Realname” bullshit.

I got an email explaining that “We received a request to reset your Facebook password.” Not from me.

“If you didn’t request a new password, let us know.” How?

So I try to log in to sort this out. But I can’t log in because I haven’t done that in a long time. They want me to either pain-call 3 of my friends, or send a photo id. No, no, no, and NO!!! I can’t make pain calls, and I wouldn’t call that friendly.

P.S. Apparently 1. this is a scam, and 2. there supposedly is a clickable link next to “let us know,” which the scammers use. But with my email, it’s an invisible link.

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I hear you. I got hit by a scam recently, a “user alert” that said I needed to change my Google passwords. I’m usually pretty quick at recognizing those, but I’d just woken up (and they did an excellent job of hiding the email address trail so it wasn’t that obvious.) I immediately went to actual Google and reset my passwords, so I don’t think there’s too much damage done. (I even remembered to write the new passwords down, yay me!)

The scammers are getting scarily good at spoofing official emails.

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One of the easily-overlooked features of password managers - they store the URL along with your username and password, so it just becomes a habit that if you’re going to log in to something, you go through that; not links or URLs that look similar, but the actual URL that you signed up on. There’s nothing forcing that of course, but it becomes an easy habit pretty quick. Just little details like that can negate so many phishing and scam attacks.

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Please, online stores, if you don’t have any results for a search, please say so, please don’t substitute irrelevant results.

If I’m looking for a mini keyboard for another alphabet, I do not want an extra-large keyboard for the Roman alphabet. I already have one, but the labels have worn off, and the stickers keep coming loose.

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Trying Logitech keyboard instead. Since my new cheap mouse lacks page down, I need some way to page down.

The standard shortcut is function + down arrow.

The function key doesn’t work, with or without Sticky Keys. I installed the Logitech drivers and it still didn’t work. Karabiner was suggested as a solution. The function key isn’t compatible with Karabiner.

Tried the micro-keyboard for my tablet.

The function key does work, but not in combination with Sticky Keys, which is a pain because it’s at the opposite side of the keyboard, and I’d need to continually press it down with my left hand while paging down with my right.

It seems to be increasingly expensive to buy keyboards with actual page down buttons, because SHORTCUTS andc wo cares of the shirtcts dpo’t work, justg use thisx incompaytokble fx whicxh doesn’ woerk eitj, wl.l, juysatg use thed scrollwheel andc ambpouatatre oyte hand tol stop;l thed agoln omibf paiin thet the pain wherl iknb clicsa.

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I hear ya.

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There comes a point where inaccessibility looks like deliberately taunting people for their accessibility needs, instead of overlooking their needs.

Migraine warning for the link:

(Screen shot: A Census statement that “There are several ways that you can contact the U.S. Census Bureau for support. For general questions: Visit our Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page, or call 301-763-INFO (4636) or 800-923-8282. For information on services for people who are deaf or hard of hearing: Call the TTY number at 800-877-8339 to reach the Federal Relay Service.”)

P.S. Yes, this could be a result of applying Section 508 standards without thinking about them, but still…

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This is a truly fascinating error message.

source

Oh, look, there’s an off switch for apple’s plans for the new ARM macs. (Rosetta translates x86 instructions into ARM code)

Luckily most app developers have updated their codebases to use ARM-- with the exception of

more than 90% of my steam games, most of which run incredibly smoothly on the M1’s gpu.
A pro OCR app.
An autoCAD clone that would cost hundreds of dollars to replace
The drivers for my book scanner (that would cost hundreds of dollars to replace)

But hey-- at least I saved money by not opting for a comparably performing intel machine.

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Apparently restarting the computer solved the problem.

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Probably just Apple planning for a dystopian future, and it accidentally got triggered. I do hope it’s safe from patent infringement lawsuits.

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“At least I saved money by buying a mac” is a really weird take on it. That just may be the first time that sentiment has ever been expressed. I do use a mac for work, but saving money is just so at the far opposite of what they’re known for. And for it to then be fixed after a “try turning it off and on again” - one must assume inebriation.

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My most often used software is mac only. I’m also very comfortable using a mac-- previous to my machine dying, I had not booted up my bootcamp in many months. So I was very strongly biased towards getting an apple machine of some sort.

The m1 is fast. There are intel macs that are faster on some things, but they are much more expensive.

There, is however, a degree of opacity when discussing macs that galls me. What if “rebooting the machine” had no effect?

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I bought the sequel to one of my favorite computer strategy games. But they redid the interface and replaced a top-down view with an angled view with zooming rotation, and a lot more animation.

One suggestion was to recode the relevant parameters, but … I can’t find appropriate explanations of each parameter online. For example:

camera:
fov_y: 20.0
initial_dir: 0.0
initial_zoom_level: 1
min_dist: 30.0
max_dist: 90.0
dist_to_lod: [67.5, 127.5]
rotate_speed: 0.0025 # radians per milisecond
rotate_ease_time: 300 # miliseconds
move_speed: 0.02 # world units per milisecond
move_ease_time: 300 # miliseconds
pan_to_ease_time: 300 # miliseconds
ct_zoom_levels: 5 # number of camera zoom levels
zoom_speed: 0.2 # world units per milisecond
zoom_ease_time: 350 # miliseconds
slide_friction: 0.0075 # world unit per milisecond squared
drag_rotate_speed: 0.004 # pixels to radians
d0: 10.0
a0: 20.0
d2: 50.0
a2: 40.0
ip: 0.5

Also:

units:
movement_speed: 20.0 # world units per second
rotation_speed: 210.0 # degrees per second
soldier_formation_scale: 0.22
inf_shooting_stance_angle: 80
rotation_ease_in: “quad”
rotation_ease_in_time: 240

Partial explanation here:

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Not sure if it helps, but generally, ‘ease time’ is the time that something lets an animation play for. So “rotate_ease_time: 300 # miliseconds” means it’ll animate one step of rotation over the course of about 1/3rd of a second.

I don’t know which might be better or worse for you, but you could try some relatively extreme values (5ms vs 5000ms) and see if either is better. 5ms should make it fast - near-instant, 5000ms should make it gradually occur over 5 seconds.

Speeds should be a little different and opposite - higher means faster. I don’t really know what they refer to though. So when it says “rotation_speed: 210.0 # degrees per second”, you could again try extreme values and see which is better: 360+°/s for a much faster rotation, or 30°/s for a much slower rotation.

I know that’s probably not much help but those all fall under ‘tinker with the number until it feels right’. And nobody knows what’s really right, they just pick something.

On an unrelated note, I thought of you recently when adding something that, normally, would flash a message for a couple of seconds and then it would disappear. I looked up accessibility rules on how long the message should show before disappearing, and they basically said “just don’t do that”. So I overrode the code and made it not do that. The message just shows until you do something else. That’s only one thing in one part of one program, but it’s a start.

One of my coworkers is also going through and fixing contrast issues and running things through a screenreader to make sure everything graphical has useful text. It’s a big slow process, but some of us are working on it and trying to be better about it.

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Most of my Steam library stopped working when Apple dropped 32-bit support with Catalina. Sigh.

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Bet most of them don’t work properly under CrossOver/Wine for Mac either

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