ttj - Tom Jones

Several design patterns are conspiring to make it harder to switch things on, and off, and to take things up from standby.  This is probably best done by example. I recently tried switching on a current macbook air.  It had an empty battery and I had just connected power.  I didn't know where the power button was supposed to be.  I tried the fingerprint button in the corner, but nothing happened.  At some point, some indicator may have appeared on the screen that it was charging.  Later, I went back, and powering it on worked.  So it can't power on from the live power connection, it has some minimum in the batter?  Without any feedback from the device on what's happening, this is squidgy. Same with a thinkpad x1 carbon (8th gen) here.  Thinkpads used to last weeks powered off, but they now have some standby thing that drains the battery.  Power button is a bit more guessable here, but still not well marked.  That it's charging is in...

My favourite label printer is the Brother PT-7600.  Newer models seem engineered to waste tape, and to waste time. The PT-7600 is still pretty good at wasting tape.   The TZ tape cartridges are taken by many Brother label printers.  They come in widths from 6mm (or 3.5mm, sort of) to 24mm.  Some machines accept up to 18mm. In 2017, in Japan, I bought a couple of Brother TZ label printers.  They wasted tape in crazy ways, like reverting to annoying defaults of wasting tape at the slightest excuse.  I should have done a detailed look, but they were annoying enough that they had to go in the electronic waste box, and on and away from there.  Every so often I buy a second-hand PT-7600 on ebay. Small offcuts of wastage are produced by the feed thing, which seems to be a limitation of the cartridge format.  You can get your label now by feeding, but then an offcut is produced before the next print.  Or you can minimise label wastage, but you d...

Trying to have an optimistic take at the start of the pandemic, a friend remarked to me that at least people from now on may have some basic decency around coughing, sneezing, blowing their nose, having a cold, and so on.  No such fucking luck. Despite covid-papers-please Austria getting obsessed with papers-papers, and people threatening to call the police on non-mask-wearers well after Omicron exceeded 99% of new cases, sneezing out into the open on trains appears to be socially acceptable.  Guy a few seats away just spent a minute mega-sneezing out into the air.  During his performance, his hand moved around in proximity to his face, in a symbolic gesture that showed he felt like he should pretend to try and cover his face.  His being was in spasm.  Once he was done, he kindly got an FFP2 mask and put it on his face.  The only other person visibly disgusted by his behaviour was a Slav on the seats in front (update: later turned out to be a posh Ukrainian...